This is a post-FiN story.

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV

Turning the Wheel

by Mary Morgan

Part IV

It took three more days of travel to reach the centre of the blight, across land which was rising slowly but steadily. When the trail turned now, it was often to avoid outcrops of rock, dull grey, patched with lichen. Gabrielle camped by one on the second night, and walked round its base curiously while the girl clambered up it. One side seemed to have been sheered, revealing its grain. She ran her fingers over the cold, gritty surface. It looked like layers of dough being kneaded and stretched. What could treat the bones of the earth like this, like honey being stirred and swirled? Heat? Could it get hot enough inside the earth to turn stone to taffy? She smiled in wonder at the thought.

Though it looked calm enough now, a grey crag basking in the sunlight, like a whale in a grass green sea. Is that what happened? Are there oceans of fire at the heart of the earth? And did it escape and rise to the surface? The girl, she noticed, had scrambled to the top and was sitting there cross-legged, her face quietly lifted to the sun. Gabrielle stepped back and studied the rock face again, taking in the whole thing this time. Somehow, it looked different. Burnt out flames blown by a gale which won't ever extinguish them. Water turned to stone and trapped that way always. She shivered, uneasy.

She dreamed of the rock that night. She dreamed that she woke inside it, locked deep in the stone, which was locked deep in the earth. She felt its weight press the air from her lungs, its darkness weigh down her eyelids. She dreamed she pried them open anyway and stared into the solid darkness, and discovered that she was awake after all. Sweat drenched her and ran cold and she shuddered in terror, reaching out with her hands. When she touched stone, the terror nearly stopped her heart. With immense effort, she gathered herself together, turned her head. There were the last low embers of the fire, there was the outline of Plato, black against the grey reaches of the pre-dawn sky. And there was the girl, she realised suddenly, lying much closer to her tonight than ever before. Gabrielle smiled, slightly, in wonder, and felt her heart slow and steady as she lay watching the sun rise over the east, weeping silently in relief.

---

On this third day of the journey, the land folded and crumpled. Juniper grew here, and rowan, and a small leafed, ground hugging plant clustered with blue-black berries. They could not see far ahead at any point, for the track led round craggy hills and boulder-strewn valleys. At least Gabrielle knew where she was going. The parents had told her. They had roused that morning somehow much stronger. "Come with us," the mother had urged. "It's dangerous back there."

"Where?" Gabrielle had wanted to know.

"Torgaarten, to the west," she answered. "I don't know what it is. It was just there one morning, in the temple. Some new god or other. No one can deny him. The only thing to do is get away, if you can."

"We didn't want to leave our holding," the father had said then. "We sent our other children away, but we hung on, hoping things would get better."

Gabrielle had nodded. "So you have other children," she had prompted, and watched as purpose flared in their eyes.

Torgaarten was a substantial town, built of stone and wood, nestled in the crook of a river just as it emerged from a deep valley which cut into a range of high hills. She could not see their tops, nor what lay behind them. Heavy clouds sagged around them, grey and tumultuous. There must be mountains, though. The water sliding under the bridge as they crossed it was ice-melt, blue green and swift.

It must have just stopped raining, Gabrielle deduced as they entered the town. Water ran down the gutters at each side of the street Plato carried them along, and the sills and eaves above her head were beaded with sullen drops. She suspected, though, that this was not why the streets were deserted, that Torgaarten was mostly empty and that its remaining inhabitants rarely ventured outside.

The road they were on opened into a sizeable, stone-flagged square. There were shops around it, at least two inns, a building she guessed to be the temple, though its structure was strange to her. It looked a little like a fir cone, made from split logs of wood overlapped to form a tapering spire. The door stood open but she could see only darkness inside.

Gabrielle steered Plato towards the nearest inn. The bundle of branches hanging outside it must have been there since last midsummer, she judged. Birch boughs, a few brown leaves clinging to twigs in the heart of the bunch. She got down, waited for the girl to join her, tied Plato's reins to the hitching post.

The barkeep had fleshy features arranged in drooping folds. Those under his eyes pulled his lower lids down, revealing red rims. She had to work not to look at them, nor think of dogs she had known with faces like that. He was looking at her blankly. She repeated her request to see the owner. He opened his mouth, but nothing issued from it, and his stare grew unfocused. Gabrielle sighed, then leaned forwards and grabbed the front of his tunic, trying not to think of what might have stained it.

"Do you own this inn?"

He swallowed after a moment, and nodded.

"What happened?" she asked him, watching him closely. He looked through her and said nothing. She sighed, and turned round. There had been three people in the tap room when they came in. Those three were staring at her now, with just the same looks on their faces.

"He went into the temple, weeks ago now."

The words came from the doorway. Gabrielle saw a woman was standing there, a small, broad woman silhouetted against the light.

"My name's Solveig," she said, stepping into the inn. "I own the Two Tuns, over the square." She smiled wryly. "If you and the girl want a clean bed and something decent to eat, you'd best come with me later."

Gabrielle felt her eyebrow lift in response to the smile, and she nodded. "But you haven't been into the temple?" she asked, watching the woman closely.

"How did you guess?" Solveig walked behind the bar, moving the man out of the way to do so. She poured beer into two mugs, looked at the girl again, and poured water into a third.

"You're right to question everything," she continued, after she had carried the drinks over to a table and waited for Gabrielle and the girl to sit down opposite her. "This has been going on for nearly a year now. It's blighted everything. No crops grow, no animal gives birth, and no one who walks into that temple comes out in one piece. Not in the head, I mean. I'm no hero: I leave that for braver folk than me." Her face had darkened and her voice grew harsh. She caught her breath. Then she looked at Gabrielle steadily. "I'd think again," she said finally.

There was silence for a while. The girl sipped at her water and Gabrielle considered what the woman had told them. She had already known some of it, but the effects on the people were much stronger here, and she was fairly certain the clue to what had happened lay in their feelings, more than anything else.

"So all these men went into the temple?" Gabrielle avoided the woman's gaze and studied her hands instead, the pattern of fine white scars from the nicks and cuts she'd taken over the years.

Solveig sighed. "Not all of them. Osip did." She nodded at the barkeep. "So did two of the others. But Trygve? No, he just lives here. Being near the temple does that to some people." She occupied herself with her mug.

Gabrielle watched her closely. Solveig was no fool. The table she had selected was just the one Gabrielle would have chosen herself, against a wall, with a clear view of the doors and windows. The innkeeper sounded confident, alert. But her hands were shaking, just a little, and her face was wan. "What does it do to other people?" Gabrielle probed, gently.

Solveig shrugged. "Leaves you feeling tired," she started. Then she stopped. Her voice dropped lower. "Eats your heart out. Makes you feel disgusted with yourself. Makes you face the fact that you're a coward."

Gabrielle leaned forward. "What could you have done?"

"Gone in there. After my Per did, gone in there and made whatever monster it is give him back his mind."

"And if you had come out without yours?" Gabrielle kept her voice reassuring, but let a little sternness creep in. "Who would have looked after him then?"

Solveig sucked in a breath. "You haven't even got a sword," she said, wildly.

"I don't think you need one, do you? Not to face what's in there."

Solveig shook her head. "They took them in — swords, axes, whatever they could lay their hands on — but it never looked as though they'd used them."

Gabrielle nodded. "So, a sword wouldn't do me any good, would it?" She paused. "When I was a little girl, there was a house in our town I hated to walk past. You know how it is."

Solveig looked a little baffled by the change of subject, but she nodded.

"It was such a dark old place, and it loomed so. It looked as though, once you were in, it would never let you go." Gabrielle smiled suddenly. "We kids would dare one another to run up and knock on the door of course." She winked at the girl when she said this, but the child's autumn-tinted head was down, and she was rubbing at the grain in the table by her mug.

"Well," Gabrielle said, "One day, my mother came the kitchen all breathless with excitement. 'Emphidocles' house has collapsed. Just fallen down in a great puff of dust,' she told us."

Solveig nodded again. "Yes, that happens sometimes here, too."

"I wanted to know why it had happened, so I pestered my father till he told me," Gabrielle continued. "That's how I found out that a fungus causes it. A nasty black thing which spreads through timber. It eats the strength out of a building made of wood, until in the end it can't stand up any longer."

"You have to check the beams all the time, make sure they're sound." Solveig looked back at Gabrielle. "But you can't fight it. You have to cut out the diseased wood and replace it, if you catch it early enough. That's all you can do. And usually the stuff has already spread, and comes out somewhere else soon enough."

Gabrielle shrugged. She stood up. "Perhaps. Time to find out, anyway," she said. She turned to the girl who was staring at her blankly from under her shaggy fringe. "It'll be okay. You trust me, don't you?" She set her hands on the girl's shoulders, noting for the first time that they were nearly of a height, trying to read the girl's answer in her downcast face. "Well, I'll be back. You go with Solveig, she'll give you something to eat."

She felt it in her hands first. Then the girl's head shook. No! She didn't need to speak. Gabrielle sighed. "I will be back. I promise," she repeated, but the girl lunged forwards and grabbed her round the waist, hugging her close. "Look." Gabrielle reached behind her to unclasp the girl's hands, which hung on like claws. "Look, you promised. When I said you could come with me. You promised to do what I said. If you don't, you put yourself in danger. And that makes it dangerous for me."

Abruptly the girl let go and stepped back. "Good," Gabrielle said. "Good girl." She looked at Solveig, who seemed a little bemused. She didn't have time to explain. "You'll look after her?" she asked instead, and when the woman nodded, turned and left at once, before anyone could change their mind.

---

The temple should have been full of brightness. That was the first thing Gabrielle thought as she stepped inside its wide door. There were many openings in the upper slopes of its walls, cunningly slanted to keep out the rain but let in the daylight, and sconces in which candles burned. It occurred to her that her eyes could see perfectly well. Her eyes took in the oak-covered floor and the rows of pinewood pews and the colourful ikons hung everywhere, at the same time as her sense of smell responded to the musty, damp odour of the place, and, far beneath that, the faint traces of the beeswax polish which must have filled it once.

But she was not aware of any of this. What she was aware of, what she actually saw, was darkness. It filled her mind, a buzzing darkness that reminded her of something. A vague memory nagged at her. Angry wasps, perhaps, or the strange, silent thrumming that comes with the first chill, dull impact of shock. The darkness reminded her of this too, recalled the blood red blotches that float and crowd together and thicken into the stifling black of unconsciousness.

She made herself move forwards, into the buzzing. It vibrated in her teeth and her skull and along the length of her bones and made her feel as though her heart had forgotten the rhythm of its beat and as though she had no air in her lungs. The feeling which had overwhelmed her when she first entered the blight had returned, unimaginably stronger. Taking a breath seemed unthinkable. Who knew what else might enter into her, what might take root inside her, in the dark, warm, moist organs within. She imagined, helpless to control it, eggs turn into maggots which burrowed their way out of her, leaving a dry husk behind.

Then she clamped down on herself. Breathe. Breathe. You've felt this before. You've come through it. She had. Panic; powerlessness; despair. Coming down from a mountainside in Japa, wondering what she had done wrong, how she could have taught the person who was her life to choose death instead. She remembered losing her footing again and again on the rocky track because tears blinded her and she did not care about anything, whether she could see or not, whether she got to the bottom safe or not. She remembered, also, the anger which had seethed inside her, at herself mostly, the anger which had carried her along on its surge, which had saved her.

Use it, she reminded herself. She shook her head to clear it, and the humming in her ears subsided a little. She realised that she was cold, that she was damp with sweat. And with tears. She wiped at her face with her hands, then clenched them into fists. It wants to make people afraid. That's it! It's about fear.

"How can I be?" a voice asked in a reasonable, gentle tone.

Though she knew that nothing had spoken, that the words had left no throat, but had blossomed silently in her brain, she turned towards to the centre of the temple, of the darkness, as if she were facing the speaker, as if he were standing directly under the spire.

"Not fear," the voice went on, "because you aren't afraid, are you?"

Gabrielle tried to speak her answer, but nothing came out except a soft gasp of air. Something enormous was filling her chest, was swelling into her throat. She could barely force air by it.

No, she agreed silently, forming the sound with her thoughts, keeping it just as soft, just as reasonable. No, I'm not afraid. Nor had she been, for a long time now. The thought unsettled her. Fear was a normal reaction, a right reaction. She expected it in others, assumed it of herself. But she had not felt it, not since Japa. Not since...

"You have to have something to lose, to feel afraid, you see," the voice told her. The words pierced her, touched off reactions she had battled for so long, but which were still as powerful as the first time she had felt them. Her throat ached rawly round the dark mass which filled it, but she gathered herself, and swallowed it down.

Yes, I see, she replied at length. Because she did. I lost everything I was afraid to lose a long time ago, she told the darkness steadily.

Was there a moment's surprise? Was that why it did not answer her at once? A suspicion took shape at the edge of her mind, and she tucked it safely into hiding.

"I am not hatred either," the voice went on, still gently. "Though you are filled with hatred. You know that too, don't you?"

Gabrielle closed her eyes. Nothing changed. She still saw darkness, was still aware of the temple around her. She considered the words, and faced them as she always faced what was true. Yes, I know that.

"You think you hate yourself, though," the voice went on, prodding at her words, prying them apart. "For being alive."

Yes. Gabrielle felt her head nodding, stilled it with an effort. Nothing in that place could see her. For being alive. There was more to come, she could feel it.

"And if I said you were lying to yourself? If I said that you hate her more?" The voice was a softer than ever, a burring whisper which seemed to catch on the word "her," pulling and teasing at it insidiously, possessively. Gabrielle stiffened in outrage, but held her tongue. "What if I say that you hate her not just for being dead when she could be alive and with you, but for not thinking you were a good enough reason to live."

Her answer was immediate this time. She'd spent years coming to terms with this. I'd say you were wrong. Gabrielle opened her eyes again. She stared into the darkness. I hate her as much as I hate myself, not more, she told it steadily. I hate her for not being alive when she could be. For not knowing that neither of us could be truly ourselves without the other half of our soul. She paused for a moment, considering, remembering the dark nights spent enduring this truth, then went on. I hate her for making me let her stay dead, because she knew I would not stop her doing what she wanted to do. She had faced this long ago, on that godsbedamned ship as crawled back from Japa. Faced it and lived with it ever since.

She made herself continue, though the old bitterness was rising with withering force. And I hate myself just as much for that too, because I would not let myself force her to do what I wanted. Whatever she wanted. Gabrielle remembered nights spent by the dying embers of camp fires which never seemed to give out enough heat while her thoughts chased themselves round her head like rats trapped in a maze made of iron. What I knew was the right thing to do.

"No. You're merely justifying yourself." For the first time the voice hardened, raised. It battered her, and she reeled, but felt relief as well. The voice no longer trusted to the force of its reason to destroy her, she sensed. It was resorting to cruder weapons; it had been shaken. She readied herself. Suddenly it was no longer an omniscient presence which filled the world. It had shrunk. It was a threat, an obstacle, something she would not go round but would fight her way through. If she had the strength.

"You hate her for not loving you. You hate her for leaving you alone. For forsaking love, and you." The voice was thunder now. It drove Gabrielle to the floor. She found herself on her knees, her arms braced, her palms flat on the oaken planking. She was not sure if the words had hammered her down, or the weight of the darkness within her, which was growing again, getting denser. It drove the air out of her, and she heard herself moan as it forced itself through her throat.

In front of her, the darkness intensified and so did the buzzing. She had seen something like this once before, Gabrielle recalled, and then with horror remembered being lost, separated from her parents while they travelled to visit an old friend. She had been very young; this was almost her first memory. Heat, tiredness, fear, a long white path, something weird on it ahead, something which had a peculiar, shiny black shimmer and made a strange sound. It had scared her, but she had been fascinated too. She never had been able to resist something which appealed to her curiosity. So she had toddled right up to it, until the myriad blow flies rose from rotted carrion and swarmed furiously around her head instead.

"That's it," the voice suggested, quietly again. "That bloated, dead thing. That's your life without her in it. Your half life, without your heart and soul." And Gabrielle vomited dryly, unable to escape from the image, at the mercy of feelings she had repressed for too long.

Then someone came into the temple behind her. Gabrielle's eyes saw the long shadow cast within the slanting rectangle of sunlight which shone through its open doorway. The girl, of course. She was standing beside her now, her hand on her shoulder. Her mouth was open and with a jolt Gabrielle realised that the girl was screaming. No, shouting intelligible words, the first she had ever heard from her. "No!" she was shouting. "Leave her alone!" Gabrielle felt the darkness change its focus, bend itself towards the girl. Leave her alone, she yelled at it in her turn, struggling up with infinite effort, moving the girl behind her. We're talking about me. She straightened her back and lifted her chin. And yes, I hate her for that too. For never allowing herself redemption. For thinking that giving herself to her guilt and their vengeance would bring her peace. For not knowing I was her peace, if only she loved me enough.

"Ah." She had its attention back again, she could feel it. She had startled it somehow, unsettled it. Most people did anything rather than face it, she guessed. They would evade it, but not she. She would smash it apart or die trying. It was not used to such an assault; she had become a challenge it could not afford to ignore. "But you are still lying to yourself. Because it's you who did not love enough, and that's why you hate her, and why you hate yourself. Because you didn't love her enough to bring her back anyway, whatever she wanted."

Gabrielle could almost have laughed, if she could have made any sound at all. Now she was sure both that she knew what the voice was, and that it had made a mistake. She gathered herself and her words. Her weapons, weighted only with the truth, which it thought could destroy her. Some part of her took the time to appreciate the irony. She felt for the girl's hand and hung on tightly.

No, that's not it, she said quietly. Love isn't like that. You don't understand love at all. She reached inside herself for the strength she needed to say what needed to be said. The truth. I knew she didn't love me as I loved her. She had always known that, almost from the start. But that didn't matter, because I loved her. All of her. And so I knew her, and I knew this as well. And I knew I had to let her be who she was and do what she wanted. Gabrielle had to pause. She felt so tired, so heavy. The darkness inside her had swelled so much it seemed to be pressing her breast bone right out through her skin. She swayed again, and the girl tightened her grip on her hand.

Concentrating on that clasp, on the warm flesh she knew was about her fingers, Gabrielle steadied herself, fumbled for the words which had scattered in her head, reassembled them once more. I knew she loved me as much as she could, she continued at last. I know that still. We both loved each other as much as we could. And as much as I hate her, and myself, I love her more. I always will.

Gabrielle was not really aware of the silence that followed, so absorbed was she in containing whatever was rising within her. It wasn't over yet, she knew that. She had to stay sharp, to stay focused. Yet she could barely stay upright. And perhaps she had made a mistake as well. Perhaps she had not conquered her grief but suppressed it; perhaps it had conquered her instead.

"You're lying," the voice said, and dazed though she was, she could hear it was reaching. "You don't love her." It paused, seemed to calm itself. There was more confidence in its tone as it spoke its next words. "You can't forgive her, that's the truth of it. You can't even say her name.

Gabrielle knew it was time. The weight inside her could no longer be borne. It had swelled so much that there was no more room within her. She opened her mouth and felt it rise like a stone, scraping her throat with its roughness, felt it emerge in one huge, choking sob. "Xena!" She flung the word into the listening darkness, imagined its impact on the black, brooding thing. That night in Japa came back to her. She had lain by the fountain and battered her fists on the black granite around it till her flesh tore and shredded. The scars were still there. Now she used her words like her fists on a huge slab of rock she must batter her way through. This time, she swore, things would be different. This time she knew where the flaws lay, where it might be fractured and shivered to dust.

"Xena," she said once more, her fist striking out at the rock again. Against all reason, she sensed its recoil and its rage, knew it was gathering itself for one last assault upon her. It was desperate to smash her, but its desperation gave her hope. She turned her attention away from it, ignoring it deliberately as she marshalled more words, said them for herself and her own darkness. "I love you Xena," she breathed. "And I forgive us both."

---

When her senses returned, she thought she must be lying in a high mountain meadow in Hellas, so full of light did she sense the air around her to be. Perhaps I'm dead at last, she guessed dreamily, and was surprised not to feel happier at the thought. Someone said, "Take it easy, Gabrielle. You're okay." Solveig, she thought, remembering the name though nothing more. She tried to say it, but the sounds stuck to the inside of her mouth and she could only mumble. "Yes, Solveig," the other woman said, and Gabrielle guessed she was smiling. "You did it, Gabrielle. It's gone."

It's gone, Gabrielle repeated silently. She had the feeling that this was good, though she wasn't sure why. The voice, she prompted herself. The blight. She'd been right about it. It was like timber rot. It worked its way into life like poison spreading through veins in a body, and it attacked everything. The seasons, the crops, animals, nature itself. As for people, it struck at them most insidiously of all. It ate into their hearts and minds, sapped their souls, left them with nothing but the truth of their powerlessness and insignificance and futility.

How strange that she had spent so many years preparing to meet it, and never known till today what she was doing. Facing the truth. Never blinking it, not one bit of it. She had been so ruthless with herself that nothing the voice could say was able to match it. She had lived with her grief and her loss and her knowledge that nothing she was could have been enough to prevent them, and the voice had shattered itself on her indifference to it, on her acceptance of despair. Even that had a purpose, she mused. And then, wonderingly, another thought suggested itself. Perhaps there is hope after all.

This realisation filled Gabrielle with even more wonder. By challenging the voice, by defeating it, she had rediscovered another truth, a far more potent one. I was so busy coming to terms with my failure, I let myself forget this. Or perhaps she had made herself forget it, or her grief had, so that she could function in her life. It had been locked away, along with her storytelling and her memories of Xena, because these things were too painful to bear for a while. But we aren't worthless. We do have power, she told herself. Our power comes from the things we believe in, and from the things we love. They change everything.

She moved her head, and became aware that it was supported by something warm and soft. Solveig's lap. It was a comforting feeling, to be lying here quietly with Solveig's hand gently moving her hair off her brow. But there was something missing, something she needed to know. She felt the skin tighten on her forehead as she frowned, trying to think what that was. "What is it, Gabrielle?" Solveig asked, and when Gabrielle could not answer, she said, "She's all right. She's right beside you. Open your eyes, Gabrielle."

With that, relief washed through Gabrielle, and she took in a deep breath, surprised to find how easy it was, how free and clear she felt. I should open my eyes, she thought to herself, and she did. The air was indeed full of light. It poured around her in great, filmy swathes. For a moment she was distracted by the glittering patterns made by motes of dust as they passed through the shafts of brightness. Like the stars in the heavens, she thought dreamily. There's Xena's sword. There's her dipper. Then she shifted her gaze, passing over the shadowy forms of townsfolk gathered around her till she found the girl at last. She was kneeling just to Solveig's right, head down as always, her face covered by hanks of hair.

"Hey," Gabrielle said, finding it easier to speak now, and cautiously raised a hand, stretching it out to tug gently at the girl's sleeve. "Hey, it's okay. I'm good." She was, she realised; she was better than she had felt for a very long time. She tugged again. "See?" The brindled curtain moved a little and the girl looked up. For the first time, she met Gabrielle's gaze. The small woman felt her breath catch and her eyes smart with unshed tears. She blinked to clear them. I was right, she thought, recalling her initial, fleeting impression. She felt herself smile as she said, light-headed with unexpected joy, "Thank you, sweetheart. Thank you for being there for me."

---

It was midsummer's night. Solveig had said that if they were to keep going north, they would eventually come to a land where it was never dark in the summer and never light in the winter. Gabrielle had been tempted. The thought of a place so full of the sun had seemed very attractive after so many years haunted by darkness. But in the end she had decided to turn south after all. She wanted, more than she wanted to see the midnight sun, to see Hellas again. It was time to go home. Besides, a land without night would have no stars, and she found her old delight in them had returned as well.

Sighing with contentment, she stretched out on her bedroll and looked at the spangled swirls in the sky above her. She was teaching the girl to play the pattern game. Idly she scanned the heavens. There! she thought. Her hare. And there's her falcon. And, now where is it? Yes! That's her tortoise. Gabrielle smiled, remembering the girl's eagerness, her enthralled absorption as she played earlier that evening. She was speaking more each day, too, drawing on a wide stock of words she must have gathered through years of listening to what was said around her, even though she was silent herself. I'll have her telling stories by the time we get home, Gabrielle promised herself. That'll make two bards in the family.

Now when Gabrielle smiled, it was wider than she could remember smiling since she was a girl. I'm a bard again, she told herself, barely able to believe it. Just yesterday she had been telling stories, in the common room of a tavern where they had spent the night. She hadn't needed to; their room and board had been covered when she sorted out the tough who had been running the local protection racket. But suddenly she had wanted to, and on that impulse had asked the barkeep if she might.

She had told several of the old tales, mostly about Xena the Warrior Princess, glad to see the rapt faces of the inn's guests as she found words to bring the glory of her partner back to life. Then, at the end, another tale came into her mind and told itself to her at the same time as she told it to her audience. A simple, guileless tale about a princess who had been pricked by a poisoned spindle, but who had slept for a hundred years instead of dying and been awoken by a loving kiss. Gabrielle shook her head at the memory, baffled and charmed in equal measure. Where did that come from? she wondered. She had no idea, but she had spent most of the previous night perfecting the tale as she wrote it down.

She had missed this so much, she realised. Listening to the tales in her head, sharing them with others. There was nothing like it, that special relationship with an audience. The support their attention gave her, the way their involvement could carry her along. Stories create themselves for an audience, and words bask themselves in their sun, she thought, and grinned at herself. Save that till you apply to the Academy for a professorship, she teased herself. Now she had that relationship back, just as she had her relationship with Xena back. Just as she had Xena back, in her mind and her heart and her spirit. These things were connected. Of course they were. For by letting herself remember Xena, Gabrielle recovered the other half of her soul, and thus herself as well.

Which meant that she could go home as well. Home to Hellas, to Chalkidike. It was too far to rush it. Gabrielle had no intention of exposing the girl to a winter crossing of the southern mountains. But here, in the west, other routes offered themselves. There were great rivers to the south, she had heard, and much traffic along them. They could get to Massalia that way, and there take ship for Potaideia. She had been explaining this to the girl that very afternoon, loving the feel of the names in her mouth, the first time Greek had filled it for so long. "I'll have to teach you," she told her, and started straight away, pointing to things as they went, the girl repeating what she said almost perfectly, and asking, "More, more," every time Gabrielle stopped.

This had continued through the usual lesson Gabrielle gave her in self-defence as she worked through her own forms, and then through their supper, which had included a dessert produced with shy pride by the girl as a surprise. She had crammed a leaf packet to bursting with ripe, juicy blackberries. They had shared out the treat berry by berry. By then daylight was finally seeping from the pale northern skies and the stars began to appear in the darkening turquoise reaches of the sky. They had played the star game till the girl fell asleep. But Gabrielle stayed awake, keeping their small fire company, too happy to want to lose a minute of this long-forgotten contentment.

To her right, Plato shifted his weight and sighed. He had new shoes, courtesy of yesterday's racketeer who had also, it turned out, doubled as the village blacksmith. She'd figured he owed Plato something for calling him a jug-headed, sway-backed old screw. To her left, the girl muttered and turned over. Gabrielle propped herself on one elbow and reached out, twitching the blanket back to cover her shoulder. The girl muttered something again, then turned over once more and woke up. "Hi," she said, blinking sleepily. "Is it morning yet?"

"No," Gabrielle replied softly. "Not nearly. Go back to sleep."

"I had a dream," the girl said, sitting up instead.

"A bad one?" Gabrielle asked in swift concern.

"No, I don't think so. I don't remember it much." She rubbed her eyes and then looked at Gabrielle. "I do remember one thing though," she added.

"What?" Gabrielle, meeting her eyes, imagined she could still see their colour, even by firelight. Blue as hare bells. Serene as a calm sea. The words skipped over the surface of her mind and again she could not help smiling.

"A word. A name, really. I think it's mine."

The girl sounded a little afraid, Gabrielle thought, and she said firmly, "That's good. That's very good. Alse said you would know it when you were ready." When you find your soul, she added silently, remembering. Then she waited.

The girl swallowed, plainly hesitating. "Do you want to hear it?" she asked. "It's a bit weird. It doesn't sound like any name I've heard before."

"Of course I do." Gabrielle smiled her encouragement. The name wasn't important. She already knew who the girl was.

"Okay." But the girl hesitated again. Then she straightened herself and returned Gabrielle's smile bravely. "My name is Arminestra," she said.