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She heard no one approach her vantage, so when something soft, warm and
velvety nudged the back of her neck, she leaped up. "Gustave!" she squealed.
The donkey, cautiously assuming her sudden move as rejection, skittered away,
then turned his back on her as if insulted but nonetheless rolled one large,
brown eye in her direction, on principle. When she knelt and encircled his
neck with her arms, kissed his forehead and scratched his ears, he relented
slightly, and his nuzzling almost pushed her over.
"How did you find me?" she asked. Of course, he might not have told her, even
if he had suddenly acquired the gift of speech. Donkeys had few advantages
over people else they would hold reins and ride, and people would bear
donkeys' burdens for them so those few tricks of their equine trade were best
left unmentioned.
Even without halter or lead (Gustave had rid himself of those early on) she
had no difficulty getting him to follow her to the boat, or to climb awkwardly
aboard, where he stood expectantly by the sternmost thwart, beneath which were
his bags of tender, sweet, and flavorful grain.
By the time Pierrette reached her boat several hours after the terrible events
of the day, or so it felt a vast swath of ashy darkness lay across several
hills and fields. By the time she had raised sail and pushed off, it seemed no
larger. In truth it was not, for there had not been much evil in her even by
King Minho's severe definition, except the blind pride she had exhibited when
she instructed Bellagos to seek not a mythic death, but a long life, in the
Fortunate Isles.
Part Four A New Day
Pierette's Journal
Now I have most of the answers I need to decide, and to act. I cannot discover
the others except through the consequences of my action. The clues were there
all along. Minho pulled his kingdom out of the stream of time, but not
(entirely) from the realm of causality, of consequence, and as long as the
Isles remain accessible from and to the mundane realm, they cannot be entirely
free of its constraints. Thus
Minho's strict prohibitions against change, innovation, and above all,
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consumption, are not results of his spell they are the spell, or are at least
an essential axiom within it.
I only require to discover just what those constraints are. What are the bonds
Minho has been afraid to break, that keep his kingdom from drifting entirely
away, but also threaten to pull it back to its point of origin, and its
destruction at the very moment it was saved. This much I now understand: every
change, as when I ate the baker's bread or defecated beneath a bush, has
weakened Minho's spell. How has he dared allow me the freedom of his kingdom?
Surely he has felt the ripples and snags I have caused in the fabric of his
creation. There can be only one conclusion: that while I have been dawdling
about, temporizing, unable to decide, he has been working to make final and
complete the separation of his kingdom while I am still in it.
Once entirely outside the frame of reality that encompasses both worlds I know
and have experienced, Minho's spell will be unrestrained by consequences:
consumption and change, defecation and innovation, will not affect it. Minho's
power will be absolute, and mine, based in an Otherworld no longer accessible
to me, will be gone. I will be bride or slave, at his wish, but the
consequence to me will be as nothing when weighed against the suffering the
world has endured, and will forever endure.
The terrible initial spell that caused the Black Time did not truly break the
Wheel. It weakened it, and made the route from past to future along its rim
impassible, but the Wheel of Time is not broken. It has stretched. Just as the
universe expands to fill the ken of questing eyes and hearts, so time
stretches backward and forward to the limits of speculation, for the circle
unbroken is not, as the ancients had it, infinitely recursive, a constraint
upon time, but is infinite.
I surmised that the event that caused the Black Time would not be found within
its devastation, but I
underestimated the stretching of the wheel. No primitive shaman of the hunter
Aam's era uttered that spell, for Aam's remote past did not yet exist. The
originator of that cold and final Hell is here, in these so-called Fortunate
Isles, and his name is . . . Minho.
Chapter 32 The Fall of the
Kingdom
Pierrette carefully wrapped her journal in oiled cloth and returned it to her
small watertight chest. She was a day short of her exile's end, but there was
nothing left for her to see. The central island lay ahead, and she was
approaching it opposite her original landing place. Was there somewhere she
could go ashore unseen?
She could not dismiss that last sight of Kraton's island, that vision of black
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