“Feel!” he commanded his heart. “Why can you not feel anything?”

Three hours later, he began to feel a slight flutter of longing in his heart. Seven hours, he thought, and only this. It was enough to make him scream in frustration. For the sake of Lebía, he remained silent. The wedding is tomorrow, he reminded himself, you are just nervous. Everything will be well.

Otar Svetlomír raised them up, taking Mirnían’s right hand and Lebía’s left. He placed a ring of clear quartz on Mirnían’s right ring finger. A single pine needle ran the length of the ring. Mirnían realized someone had crafted the ring around the needle. The artistry amazed him. Lebía’s ring was smaller, of pink quartz, flecked with pine seeds within like insects captured in amber. It was even more wondrous to behold than his ring.

“The promise of fidelity,” said Svetlomír, quiet enough for it to be intended only for the two of them. “Though the temptation be strong, let this night be the pledge of your future faithfulness, for you must wait to perform your duties until after the wedding service.”

Lebía blushed, and even Mirnían could not stop a slight smile. Then his sore throbbed, as though the hag stood invisible by his side and prodded him with a white-hot poker.

“Careful around the sore,” he said to the boy assigned to help him into the ceremonial wedding garb—an absurdly heavy red-gold kaftan whose tall collar chafed his neck even before he put it on. Mirnían suspected the embroidered sunbursts were sewn with actual gold thread on the doubly layered red velvet.

“What sore?” asked the boy, looking directly at it, but apparently not seeing it.

“Never mind,” said Mirnían, fumbling for the boy’s name. The boy had already repeated it three times, but Mirnían forgot it every time. It bothered him even more than the boy’s apparent blindness or idiocy.

As the boy helped him haul the massive garment onto his shoulders, Mirnían almost screamed with pain. The boy had pushed upward onto the open sore, making fire run up and down Mirnían’s side.

“I told you to watch the sore, you idiot!”

The boy looked not at all upset at being called an idiot, but he did regard Mirnían with a look that doubted his sanity. Could the boy really not see it?

Confused by the long vigil and the subsequent lack of sleep, and exhausted by his battle with the kaftan, Mirnían sat down on the long bench against the wall of the main room and closed his eyes. Just for a minute.

He opened his eyes, and saw a vision. Some creature of legend stood before him. Her dress also had a high collar and was also red with gold embroidery of crescent moons and stars. It looked even heavier than his kaftan. Her long sleeves opened at the elbow and trailed to the ground. Her hair was intertwined with a latticework of gold wire and gems that looked like the sun rising over a peak.

“Lebía?” He could do little more than whisper.

She smiled, and the sun itself could hardly compare with the light of joy in her eyes.

In a half-dream state, he stood and took her hand, leading her out through the door into the midwinter sun. A carpet lay before them, made of cut flowers. Where had the villagers found flowers in winter?

The air was still, as though all of created Nature took a long breath before the opening chord to a festal hymn. Villagers stood here and there in loose clumps, every face a red sun surrounded by furs like clouds. Mirnían and Lebía walked by the houses of Ghavan, their road a river of red amid white. The gentle ascents and descents of the village brought the aspens ever closer.

They spoke no word to each other, though Mirnían could not tear his eyes from her, and almost fell on his face several times. Every time she looked at him, the rosebuds on her cheeks blossomed. Only when they stood before the trees did she meet his gaze, stopping him with a gentle squeeze of her fingers on his hand.

“Mirnían,” she whispered, “whatever Voran may have done to you, forgive him for my sake. That is the only gift I ask of my husband on our wedding day.”

Mirnían’s chest constricted, his breath rasping with difficulty. The sore prickled, taunting.

“Yes,” he whispered and smiled. His face felt like deer-hide being stretched on a rack for the tanning.

She had not seen it.

The lambswool blanket was like butter on his skin. The hearth crackled and smelled pleasantly of apples. A drowsy inactivity suffused through his body slowly, groping toward his fingertips, as though he had drunk just the right amount of Otchigen’s famous wine. At the heart of his contentment was a lightness in his chest that he had imagined gone from his life forever. And yet…

She had not seen it.

Lebía slept. In his own bed. In their own bed. There was a wonderful dreaminess about seeing her there, a kind of mystery to her sleep that warmed him more than any fire or blanket. He could sit here staring at her sleep for countless ages, and not feel the need to move. And yet…

She had not seen it.

Their lovemaking had been awkward and—he had never expected it—absurdly comical. He smiled at the memories, embarrassing and warm. No one knew, no one would ever know—though every lover in history were to write a paean to first love—the strange madness of the wedding night, not without experiencing it firsthand. And yet…

She had not seen it.

Was the sore even there? The pain of it, underlying all his thoughts and emotions, seemed all too real. But how was it possible that only he could see it? He had to remind himself that for all the normality of daily life in Ghavan, the boundary between real and legendary was translucent. That left him with the uncomfortable suggestion that no amount of medicine would heal this last sore. No physical medicine, that is.

A Sirin-song sounded outside the house, urging itself on his attention. He dressed quietly and wrapped himself in his thickest furs. He suspected this conversation would be a long one.

Lebía had told him of the soul-bond with Aína on the same day that she had healed him, but he had not fully believed her until Aína herself appeared, her rebuke evident in her hard eyes. He had never imagined eyes could cut so deeply into his very essence.

Now Aína waited for him by the house, looking over the slight descent toward the middle of the village. The houses were all dark, though the paths between them were still visible in the light of the torches kept alight throughout the night. Each of the braziers holding the torches had been made by a member of the village, and even after so many weeks here, the whimsy of each design—a fish, a horse with wings, a many-headed serpent, a six-winged giant with coals for eyes—continued to amaze Mirnían.

“Did you know that the aspen sapling in Vasyllia is no longer on fire?” Aína said, her voice wafting in from some unspeakable depth of antiquity. He never felt fully there when she spoke to him. His wife—how extraordinary to think of her as “wife”—tried to explain it by saying that Aína was only really present for her. For all others, it was like speaking through a transparent door.

“Is there no hope that this place can be a rebirth of Old Vasyllia?” he asked her.

“There is a very great hope of that, Mirnían. You stand in the way.”

Mirnían laughed dourly. “It’s always my fault.”

“Mirnían, self-pity is the refuge of the weak. You are not weak.”

“Tell me then.”

She nodded, her eyes half-lidded, assessing him as she spoke. “Among our sisterhood there is one who is apart from us. She is named Gamayun, the Black Sirin. She alone has never felt the fire of soul-bond, for she is set apart, an oracle. Gamayun sings all possible futures, and Gamayun sings invariably of one thing concerning your future. You will meet Voran again, and soon.”

“I can’t trust myself not to kill him.”

“That is why you still have the leprosy on you, though it slumbers, and that is why you alone prevent Ghavan from becoming the hope of Vasyllia.”

He knew it, had known it for a long time, but hearing it from a Sirin gave it the kind of finality that a man condemned to death is sure to feel in the long agony of the blade’s descent to his exposed neck.

“Mirnían, your father is dead.”

He heard the words, and his body involuntarily tensed in anticipation of the inevitable shock, but nothing came.

“Vasyllia?” He asked, his voice hoarse, his throat bone-dry from the cold.

“She still stands, but is besieged. Her fate is no longer yours. At least not for now.”

No. His fate was rooted here, in the fertile earth of Ghavan. The remnant of Vasyllia must flourish. He must find a way to forget Voran. Forgive him? He could not.

“Aína, there is some measure of protection against the Raven here, on this island, is there not?”