and he would die with her, unless he cleared out in time. In five years it would all end at the Change, and Arienrhod would die. He had only five years before he would have to leave this world forever-or die. And he wouldn’t have one hundred and fifty years of youth and pleasure, one hundred and fifty years to work at unraveling her mysteries, even if he wanted to.

She had made him an unwilling believer in his own vulnerability and that had made him half-willing to believe in the power of strange gods, too. She was not so much a woman as an elemental her magnetism was created of all the things he found desirable. īut he had never experienced anything like Arienrhod.

Only weaklings and losers believed in love or gods. Nothing had given him any evidence that love was anything but a four-letter word. He’d lost count long ago of the women he’d known, from highborn tech to slave he’d hated some of them and used most of them and respected one or two, but he’d never loved even one of them.

What would it be like just to be alive for that long to have seen the return of the off worlders and the rebirth of Winter-to watch civilization reborn, and to have your pick of its pleasures? He would like to know how a man-or a woman-would feel after all that and he wondered whether if he’d lived that long he might have begun to understand the involutions of Arienhrod’s mind. He wondered what it would be like to hold power for one hundred and fifty years, as Arienrhod had. He started across it, and his passage did nothing to disturb the stillness. It was empty now, vast and still, as though it held its breath.

Joan d vinge ladyhawke