The Door Into Fire by Diane Duane Page B

angriest—when She remembers Her own thoughtlessness at the Creation, and flings stars burning across the night in defiance of the great Death. Herewiss lay on his back gazing up at the sky, watching the distant firebrands trace their silent paths out of the heart of the Sword, the constellation that stands highest on those deep winter nights. Freelorn lay curled up in a tight bundle next to him, facing west.
    “Dusty—”
    Herewiss turned his head to him.
    “You want to share?”
    Within the memory, Herewiss, now sixteen, went both warm with surprise and pleasure, and cold with fear. It was a thought that had occurred to him more than once. But Freelorn was younger than he was inside, and easily frightened. He wouldn’t want to scare Lorn, ever—
    —yet no one in the world knew him as well as Lorn did, no one else cared as much about all the little things in Herewiss’s life and how he felt about them. He could share things with Lorn that he would never dare say to anyone else, and never be afraid of the consequences. And Lorn mattered so much to him. His loved. Yes. And he was beautiful outside, too, small and strong and fine to look at—
    I’ve paid off the Responsibility. I can love whom I please—
    “You want to?” he said aloud.
    “Yeah.”
    Herewiss felt at the knot of fear inside him, wondering what to do about it. If Lorn wanted to—
    But—
    “I had to think about it for a while before I could say it,” Freelorn said quietly, from inside the blankets. “If you don’t want to, it’s all right.”
    “No, it’s not that—”
    Freelorn chuckled , so adult a sound coming out of him that it startled Herewiss. He identified it as one of Ferrant’s laughs, which Freelorn had borrowed. “I should have asked,” Freelorn said. “Your first time?”
    “No! —I mean, yes. With a man.”
    They were quiet for a while. Freelorn turned over on his back and looked up at the sky, watching a particularly bright star blaze out of the Sword and clear across the night to the Moonsteed before it went out. “There’s not much difference,” he said, “except that, instead of being different, we’re alike. Some things are easier— some are harder—”
    The voice was still suspiciously adult, and Herewiss looked at Freelorn for a moment and then smiled. “Your first time too, huh?”
    Freelorn’s face went shocked, then irritated, and finally sheepishly smiling. “Yeah.”
    Herewiss laughed softly to himself, and reached out to hug Freelorn to him. “You twit!” he said, laughing into Freelorn’s blankets until the tears came.
    They held each other for a long time, and then drew closer. Outside the memory, Herewiss looked on with quiet amusement, and with reverence, feeling as if he was watching an enactment of some old legend being staged by well-meaning amateurs. In a way, of course, he was: the Goddess’s Lovers always discover each other after being initiated by Her—one of the things which makes for the tragedy of Opening Night, when the Lovers, male or female as the avatar dictates, destroy one another in Their rivalry. But this was an enactment of the birth of that new relationship, and the freshness and innocence of it easily compensated for whatever ineptitude there may have been as well.
    “Oops—”
    “Huh? Did it hurt?”
    “Yeah, a little.”
    “Well, let’s try this instead—”
    “Ohhh…”
    “Hmmm?”
    “No, no, don’t stop. It feels so good.”
    Silence, and further joinings: warm hands, warm mouths, growing comfort, trust flowing. A slow climb on smooth wings, easing into the upper reaches, then gliding into the updraft, soaring, daring, higher, higher—
    —sudden and not to be denied, the brilliance that is not light, the dissolution of barriers that cannot possibly break—
    —a brief silence.
    “Oh, Dark, I’m sorry. I hurried you.”
    “Oh, no, don’t be. It was—it was—oh, my…”
    “I saw your face.” A warm arm reaches around to pillow Herewiss’s