Glory's eyes opened wide in apprehension. "Oh, no, Bel, I don't reckon—"
But Belegir was strong enough now to argue. "Leave us," he told Tavara firmly.
The young healer bobbed an unwilling curtsey and walked away toward the others.
"It cannot harm you now," Belegir said to Glory. "You have done what you came to do, have you not?"
"I . . . yes," Glory admitted. Still holding his hand, she moved from her knees to a cross-legged seat that was a little less uncomfortable. She had the woozy, light-headed feeling of too many hours awake on too little food, and hoped to be able to sleep soon. But she owed it to Belegir to listen to what he had to say.
"That night when the Oracle came to me, it said that you would bring to the Allimir such sorrow and disaster as our people had not known for a thousand years. I did not know what to think. I thought then that Erchane meant you must fail in your task . . . but She did not, did She?"
"No," Glory said reluctantly. But you're all still alive! You've got a chance now! she wanted to protest. "You know what Cinnas did, don't you?"
"He bound the Warmother upon the peak of Elboroth-Haden of the Hilvorn, then called Grey Arlinn," Belegir said. "He bound her by binding her into mortal form."
Glory squeezed his hand gently with her fingertips—it hardly hurt at all—and then released him. She rubbed at her eyes. "She was all of you, first. He took her out of all of you—the spirit of War—and gave her a single form. His daughter, Charane. That was what—that was who—he chained to a rock up there. I had a chance . . ." She stopped, staring off into nothing. "I could have killed Ivradan, and he would have taken Charane's place, and everything would have been just like it was. But I couldn't do that."
Couldn't kill Ivradan to save the rest of the Allimir, but she could drag him into mortal danger without a backward glance, couldn't she? And found it easy enough to try to kill anyone else that looked at her cross-eyed, didn't she? She knew she'd done the right thing—but it didn't seem very logical, somehow.
She shook her head wearily.
And what, she suddenly wondered, would have happened to all those mercenaries the Warmother had imported if she had taken the easy way out, and chained War up again? Would they have all gone back to their own places and times just as if She hadn't summoned them up in the first place? Or would they still have been here, with the Allimir as helpless as before against them?
Did I make the right choice after all?
"So I guess I undid Cinnas' original spell," she said, after a long silence. "You're back where you started. Back in the Time of Legend."
And now the tears she'd been expecting did come. Only they were hers.
She scrubbed at her eyes angrily with the tips of her fingers—if anybody here ought to be grizzling, it was Belegir. "Sorry," she whispered. "Sorry."
Belegir patted her knee. "Do not weep for us, Slayer. It is Erchane's will, and a problem to be faced another day. Now you must rest, and have your own wounds seen to. Tavara, attend us!"
The healer came hurrying back as if she'd just been waiting to be called—as she undoubtedly had been.
"See to the Slayer's injuries, taken in honorable battle," Belegir said decisively, "then let her sleep undisturbed."
Too exhausted to resist—or even think straight—Glory allowed herself to be led off.
The Allimir rescue party had packed in quite a lot of gear on their string of ponies, or else had gone out shopping while Glory's back was turned. One corner of the cavern had been set up as a combination surgery and supply dump, concealed behind a standing screen that must have come from somewhere inside the Temple complex, as it was far too large to have been packed in.
Tavara took Glory behind it and seated her on a makeshift stool, then disappeared again. When she returned a few moments later, she was carrying Glory's other clothes—the jeans and T-shirt she'd left behind.
"If you will remove your armor, Slayer . . ."
"Easier said than done," Glory muttered. She managed to unlatch the clasps down the right side of her corset, but could not manage to twist around to get at the ones on the left. Tavara came forward and helped her, peeling away the filthy, clammy leather shell that was glued to her with an accretion of sweat, mud, blood, and other things best left unremembered. Fortunately, a girlhood spent in gymnastics had pretty much erased any trace of body-shyness Glory might have been born with. Tavara draped a blanket around Glory's shoulders, and waited.
Glory looked down at her boots, up at Tavara, and shrugged.
"Sorry," she said simply. Between her hands and her back, there was no way she could get those boots off.