Free Warautumn by Tom Deitz

out for him was an early marriage to someone he liked but did not love, and who was carrying a child he had not begotten.
    Now, home was to all intents a cave. But at least it was a cave he shared with the people he loved best in the world. The
men
he loved best, he amended, for the tally of his beloved had always included his twin sister, Merryn; and lately had expanded to include Strynn and Div as well. It was odd, he reckoned, how so many of the people who presently filled his days were people he hadn’t known half a year gone by. Myx, Riff—even Zeff: all were new daubs on the canvas of his life. Veen, he had known but barely, and the same for Vorinn and Kylin.
    Well, he conceded, as he rolled over on the section of rug he and Rann had claimed, he supposed he would know some of those people much better before very long. As for the landscape: It was the new thing now, the same as yesterday to the casual eye, but full of mysteries unseen. Mysteries they would begin unraveling with the rising of the sun, which was still a few hands away.
    Movement beside him was Rann turning over as well. Avall let him nestle against his back, took the hand that snaked around his body and held it to his chest as he hadn’t done since they’d camped in the snow the previous winter. He’d had the gem, then, to draw strength from Rann, all unknowing. Now they had to draw strength solely from what they had to hand.
    As for the war—
That
was a damned hard call. Everything he had been taught cried out to him that he should not have rested even this one night; that he should have grabbed that handful of gem shards at once, and tried as hard as he’d ever tried anything in his life to jump back to Megon Vale. People were getting ready to
die
there, for Eight’s sakes—and, more to the point, die for him—for what he symbolized, at any rate. For good or ill he was King, and that meant doing what was best for the people no matter what the personal cost.
    But for one crucial, half-mad moment, that cost had been too high, and all the anguish of the last few eights had caught up with him and crystallized in the horrible injustice of the madness that Kylin had caught from his oh-so-brief encounter with the afflicted stone. And in that awful moment, he haddone the unthinkable: destroyed—tried to—the most powerful object in Eron. All for his own selfish reasons. True, he had been genuinely concerned that it had driven Kylin insane; but a dark, selfish part of his soul-of-souls suspected with too much certainty for close inspection that what he had really been doing was removing the gem from any future equations that might involve their mutual interaction.
    He was saner now, however, and knew that his fate lay back at Gem-Hold-Winter.
    Or did it?
Fate surely had a hand in this preposterously extravagant leap through space. So perhaps this
was
where he was supposed to be. Ultimately, he supposed, the best way to determine whether Fate wanted him to jump back was to
try
to jump back. And if he couldn’t, why, then he would still try to get back as quickly as he could by conventional means, for Strynn’s and Merryn’s sakes, if not his own. But in order to accomplish even that, he first had to get off the island. And the first step toward that had already been planned for shortly after sunrise.
    That notion made him feel oddly content—tired, sleepy, and apprehensive, but content.
    For a short while longer, he watched the fire die through slitted lids, and woke again to the sound of Bingg boiling water for cauf.
    Half a hand later, full of cauf, camp-sausage, and way-bread, all except Myx, who knew more than the rest of them together about healing and would therefore need to remain with the still-comatose Kylin, were splitting up for the first round of explorations. Avall and Rann would scout the shore, while Riff, Bingg, and Lykkon would investigate the heights. They would meet back at the cave at noon to share information and plot their