Llessur Atner neither heard the break of the waves on the shore far below her feet nor saw the tiny fishboats plying their path back to harbor nor felt the seaspray carried on the wind to dampen her cheeks nor smelt the salty air and the sweet greenness of the trees growing near the cliffs. Clenching her arms about her own waist, she walked slowly, heedlessly, the path along the cliff's edge. Unfeeling of sight, sound, smell or touch, yet she tasted the bitterness of the tears running down her cheeks.
She had passed a sleepless night after Thayer's departure, for every time she tried to sleep, the dream came again: Enad, beloved husband, vivid as life, dead no more. She gathered her skirts to run to him--but how frowningly he looked upon her!
She could not reach him, however she ran. He was as still as the unmoved mover, and she orbited him despairingly, falling farther away the faster she flew, coming closer only to shrink from him again.
He spoke only once to her, and every time it was the speaking that broke the dream and left her gasping in her bed:
"Let us go, or lose all!"
His words echoed in her mind now as she walked along the promontory. And her eyes, not seeing where she walked, saw more clear than day the dream's last moment, brief as life and unyielding as the grave: In the split second after Enad spoke and before she woke, as her eyes locked with his, so bright, it was not her husband she saw, but her son.
The dream words continued to cycle in her memory, but she ceased to hear them as she reached the highest point of the cliff and looked down to the sea below. For the first time she noted the crash of the waves against the rocky cliff.
She spoke quietly, a voice not even she could hear beneath the roar of the sea; but the wind might carry the words where she knew not. "I have already lost all," she declared. "Enad his brother took from me; and since then there's been nothing I could keep. Brangaine's off to school; well for her, but ill for me; and how many of Mendellia's noble ladies have come and gone in my service this year? None of them stay long anymore, none of them bear faith to me. And Thayer . . . I've lost even my son, now, to his own passions; he won't be ruled by me anymore." An involuntary shiver went unnoticed as the wind cooled her tear-streaked cheeks. "There's nothing left worth keeping." She stared transfixed at the rocks below, murmured: "Oh, Enad, let me come to you--" and moved forward, toward the teeming water, toward the white infinity--
Strong hands caught her around the waist and pulled her back from the cliff's edge, startling the breath out of her. She twisted in alarmed wildness, forgetting herself, forgetting where she was and what had brought her there.
"If she's going to fuss this much, Reth, I'd be tempted to just let her go," a dry voice off to the side fell on her ear.
"There now, highness," a man's voice spoke next, kind and bearing a hint of amusement. "Mind you, I'm tempted too, but a promise's a promise, and I don't think Thayer'd like it much if I let you throw yourself into the sea on a whim."
"Come on, Lady Atner," the dry voice spoke again, more gently now. "We must get you back to the Palace."
"What . . ." Llessur began weakly.
"People will wonder, after all, once your absence is noted. As you know it will be. Come along, enough of this."
Dazed, she relented at last and let them lead her away, retracing her steps from the Palace. But sight and sound and touch and smell were numbed again as she walked between them, not recognizing either one of them, and the image of Enad, accusing her with his eyes, held all her thought.
Until she came to herself again on a narrow cot, and saw from the clouds outside her window that she was high up in the Palace, and finally recognized the five-sided room, the tower room, the pleasant dungeon. Its barred door was locked against her, and the two who had interfered to keep her from her husband yet a while were nowhere in sight.