The Door into Sunset Read Online Free PDF

smile, didn’t move otherwise. He casually looked over the people standing behind and around Wyn, wondering why their glances were bothering him so today, trying to conceal it. Just a crowd of city people, dressed for holiday: broad ladies in bright dresses, men in breeches and embroidered shirts, here and there a surcoat of some son or daughter of hedge-nobility; the flash of silver, the glitter of eyes; whispers, murmurs, chatter, the happy shouting of a little girl near the front waving a toasted sausage and getting its grease all over herself and her smock and the skirt of the lady next to her, who turned and—
    You go first.
    No, you.
    He refused to turn around. “Kings don’t turn to overhear things,” his father had told him in that same severe session so long ago, which had ended with Freelorn arguing the point and having his bottom warmed. “Kings wait till the speaker comes round to face them in courtesy.” But it was hard not to turn, especially when the voices seemed so close behind him that they were nearly in his own head. And truly only the slightest difference in tone kept them from seeming as if they were in his own voice: one of them quicker, lighter than his own tone, with faint, odd harmonies weaving around it; the other with the touch of drawl that he almost knew better than his own voice anyway. That voice he had heard before, this way... though not realizing it at the time. But never before in broad daylight, in a crowd like this. Only in the dark, in the silence, and only a few times lately—only in moments when outer voices failed, and words ran out, and his heart heard the other’s overflowing heart whispering My loved, my own, O my loved .... until the urgency of their bodies built to strike the sweetness through with lightning, and left them both gasping and blind. This was not that slow, deep warmth, but something brisker, more businesslike... though in its own way just as personal, just as fierce—
    Freelorn swallowed. Underhearing. It was the commonest of the othersenses... and something he had never had a problem with until recently, until Herewiss’s Fire burst free. Lorn gripped Súthan’s hilt and began to understand the piercing of eyes, the threatening pressure of minds he wasn’t sensitive enough to hear. But all his reading on the subject had never hinted that the sensitivity might be catching — Well, never mind it now! They’re about to do something. Be ready for it.
    I’m not ready, I can’t feel who—
    — Neither can I. No use waiting. Go!
    Is she ready?
    Yes. A third voice, drier. Let’s play out our hand.
    All this in a second’s flicker. And because Freelorn had not turned around, he saw the darkness draw itself together on the far side of the courtyard, by the postern door; saw day slide back defeated from a growing patch of night, in which darker shapes moved, and voices chanted slow warning in a choir of muted thunders, while many eyes gazed out, glowing like those coals of which gems were said in lore to be the burnt-out cinders. People backed away hurriedly from that darkness, all but the smallest children, who stared at it in calm fascination and had to be pulled back.
    Out of that dark came walking a slight slim form in black, wearing a long formal surcoat, tenné-brown, the arms on it the undifferenced arms of a Head of one of the Forty Houses: lioncelle passant regardant in blood and gold, holding a sword. Unsheathed in her hand the woman held a three-foot splinter of pure night, black enough to have been broken off death’s own Door. And so it had been, for this was Skádhwë out of legend, the sword Shadow, won and lost in the ancient days by Efmaer Queen of Darthen, and newly recovered from Glasscastle beyond the world’s bourne. For a thousand years and more that sword had not seen the light of day. Now the midsummer sun fell in vain on its blackness, and around the length of it blue Fire wreathed, curling upward in quick fierce flames the color