"I'll have you," she whispered, her ruined voice soft as gravel crushing against itself. "You've destroyed me, but I'll see you undone before me. I'll have your heart, your eyes. Little sorceress, I'll have your soul!"
She reached out one dagger-nailed hand as Aeriel screamed, trying frantically to pull free. Above her in the air, a long way off, she heard Irrylath cry out as well. The White Witch's hand darted toward her.
Aeriel shrank, straining, leaned desperately away. She felt Oriencor's talons barely brush her closed eyelids—not enough even to break the skin, but enough to send their cold through her like a knife.
All the light in the world went out. Setting Solstar vanished. Then Aeriel felt the Witch's hand, still holding hers to the broken pearl, fall away into ashes, into dust—just as the palace shuddered for the final time and plunged inexorably down, down toward the roiling Mere below.
Winterock was falling, but it was no longer made of stone. All Oriencor's enchantments must have unraveled at her death, Aeriel thought, almost calmly, as she fell. Water thundered all around her. She could not see, could not breathe, heard only the water's roaring. The pearl-stuff in her blood told her a little of what was happening around her. She wondered when she would reach the hard end of her fall and die.
But no end came. The rushing and buffeting went on and on. After an eternity, she realized that though she was falling still, she was no longer plunging straight downward. The palace has collapsed into the lake: the knowledge came to her with eerie clarity. You are being borne along beneath the surface now.
She had no air left in her lungs. The cage of her ribs ached, burning, bursting. Just a while longer, she told herself. Hold out a little longer— though there hardly seemed any point. She could not swim.
Deep below the surface of the Mere, water all around, she was keenly aware that as soon as she opened her mouth and drew breath, she would perish.
Perhaps she would faint first and know nothing of dying. Drowning was not such a terrible end after all, she told herself. She'd always feared it, ever since slipping into a cave pool as a child and being pulled, sick and sputtering, onto the bank by her mistress Eoduin. But there was no bank here and no companion to rescue her.
Her head pounded with the lack of air. Presently she would stop fighting, open her mouth and breathe deep of the pummeling torrent. Then she would be dead. At least the White Witch is dead, too, she thought drowsily, and the world is free of her. The pearlstuff in her blood gave her the certain knowledge of it but could bring her no comfort.
She felt only a crushing sense of failure. She had not fulfilled Ravenna's charge, had not succeeded in converting Oriencor to good. The world would know a brief respite now. But without Ravenna's sorcery, could it ever heal? The pearl was broken, its contents scattered, lost. Still she clung to life, continued to resist the flood. Her own tenacity surprised her. Stop fighting, she told herself, preparing to die. You've failed.
Someone caught her by the hair, pulled her close across the current. The tremendous buffeting all around them had lessened now. It had become a fierce undertow, no longer any downward motion to it.
Her companion guided her face to his, put his mouth to hers and gave her breath. Aeriel clutched at his shirt and clung there, drinking in the sweet, magnificent air.
Her head cleared, and suddenly she was fighting again, struggling for breath. The other did not let her break away, did not let her breathe in the white waters of the Mere, much as she wanted to. Air! She needed air. Darkness was everywhere. The icy touch of the Witch's fingers had banished her sight. Her eyes felt useless, frozen, like orbs of winterock.
She could not see who it was that held her. But she felt the strength of his arm around her, his legs stroking for the surface. She was being borne upward against the current's tow by someone. Someone who swam like a fish. Someone who had been raised by a lorelei. Someone who had swum the Mere every day of his life for ten long years: Irrylath.
It seemed an age before they broke the surface. She gasped the sweet air, but weakly now, half-swooned. Hardly any strength remained in her limbs. She was content to lie unresisting in her husband's arms and let the torrent bear them along. Miles and miles, she thought dreamily: the flood must be taking them leagues from where the Witch's palace had once stood. Were the others— those in the barges and upon the shore—safe? She could only hope, wrapped in a darkness devoid of Solstarlight, or Oceanuslight, or stars. Head pillowed on Irrylath's breast, she slept.
Awareness returned to her just as gradually. Water no longer surrounded them. She no longer felt the rush bearing her along. They had stopped moving. Bruised and waterlogged, she felt herself lying on firm ground, stable and solid, if very soggy. Her garment was sopping, and half her hair—she could feel by the gentle give and tug—lay in water. Someone was speaking her name.
She opened her eyes, though without hope of seeing anything. They ached, painfully cold. Then something struck one of them, a hot, stinging drop. Another fell upon her brow, then ran burning and salt into her other eye. She flinched, blinking, and became aware of stars overhead, a blaze of them.
Someone was bending over her.
"Aeriel, Aeriel," he said.
She moaned and, moving, realized how stiff she was. The pearlstuff in her blood made her feel hazy and strange.
"Irrylath," she muttered, reaching for him. "I was drowning, and you came for me."
To have rescued her, she realized, he must have dived from Avarclon's back. Her dream returned to her, clear at last: Irrylath plunging headlong from high above into the roiling confusion of the flood below.
The starhorse had been trying to bear him to safety, carry him up and away, but he had refused to be saved without her, had come after her instead. Not fallen. Dived. Irrylath clasped her to him.
"Oriencor is dead," he whispered. "You killed her, and the palace fell."
She felt him shudder. His tears ran onto her cheek and forehead. Blinking the burning drops from her eyes, she saw mud flats stretching all around, black soil fanning out on every hand. Water lay in sheets, a cool misty smoke rising from it in wraithlike clouds. Broken bits of furniture, tapestry, devices lay scattered about them like a shipwreck.
Her wedding sari, yellow and immune to any moisture, tangled in a patch of scrub nearby. The mist, full of colored sparks still, swirled and drifted, at times obscuring the sky. Oceanus hung canted in heaven amid a fiery swirl of stars.
Strangely, the night did not feel cold. At last, Irrylath drew back from her.
"Not I," he said. "Not I, but you—you killed her."
She had never been so close to him before. Even by starlight, she saw the four long scars that raked one side of his face, and the fifth that trailed just below the jaw. The scars Pendarlon had given him, an age—no, only two years—ago, when he had been a half-darkangel in Avaric. She laid her hand along those scars.
"In Winterock," she said, "while the palace stood, the pearl gave me a glimpse of what the White Witch did to you."
She saw him flinch, felt the shock that passed through him. He gazed at her. "I thought you knew all along," he whispered. "I thought your green eyes saw everything."
She shook her head. Was that why he had stayed away—shunning not her, but the things he feared she knew?
"It's why I thought I wanted Sabr," he said, "because she knows nothing of that, and even if she ever learns, she'll not believe it. She'll insist on thinking I was brave."
"You were brave," said Aeriel. She remembered him leading the battle from Avarclon's back, swooping to rescue Sabr, confronting his own and his brothers' darkangels. "You are the bravest one I know."
Irrylath shook his head. "I wasn't. I'm not. Oriencor found my every flaw. In the end, she broke me like a toy."
"And you imagined I might do the same?" Aeriel mused, stung, full of wonder at her own stupidity.
Blind! Until this moment, she had been blind. "So you turned to Sabr, who adores you— lonely for someone who did not know your past, longing only to escape that painful memory."
She saw the prince's jaw set, as he nodded, thinking of the Witch. His eyes were like two lampflames burning.
"But Oriencor is dead now," he whispered fiercely. "I will never dream of her or feel her touch or hear her voice again. My rescuer. You have delivered me."
She wanted to contradict him, to protest: he had turned away from Oriencor of his own volition, striking her seventh son from the air long before Aeriel had handed her the pearl. But all she did was put her lips to his to make him still. The night was a blaze of Oceanuslight and stars. The mist swirled around them in whispers, like wraiths.
Scattered sparks still drifted randomly, alighting in Irrylath's hair. Her husband put his arms about her, drew her to him like a man so long dying of thirst he almost feared to drink.
Then something with a human shape but made all of golden light glided past them and vanished into the mist. Aeriel started back from the prince with a cry. The first apparition was gone, but a moment later, from another quarter, a different figure strode by—again of golden light—this one a young man, garbed in a style she did not recognize. He might have glanced at them before disappearing into the fog.
Aeriel felt Irrylath's arms about her tighten.
"What are they?" she gasped.
"Souls," he whispered. "All the souls Oriencor or her darkangels ever captured or drank. All those she kept prisoner in the walls of Winterock. Delivered now. Look. The air is full of them."
Aeriel gazed upward, following the line of his arm. The sky above shimmered with revenants of golden light, ascending toward deep heaven. They seemed to add to the number of the stars. The mist and the night were lit by them. The air felt heavy and electrified. The hair on Aeriel's arms and along the nape of her neck stood on end. She held on to Irrylath.
"They mean us no harm," he murmured, then stopped himself, shivering. "At least, they mean you no harm. You freed them."