A Brightness Long Ago

by Guy Gavriel Kay

One giant of a man she would love, and he would father her only child, though she never told him he’d done that and they would never live together. It would never occur to her to tell him of the child—or her love. They could have placed a burden on him, and she would not be indebted or a burden to any man—or woman—in the world.

“You will destroy me,” she hears him say, and she is inexpressibly pleased with the world just then, even given the awareness of what is hovering—always—beyond them, like a shape, a shadowing where the light does not reach.

She asked him, as an act of courtesy and grace, to leave her to her life and the memory of their time together. She called it an interlude, and wished him good fortune. Antenami Sardi, in the greatest exercise of self-restraint in his life to that point, accepted this.

A year had passed, but some things aren’t changed by a year.

And within his head—or it might have been his heart—her name began tolling, very much like a bell.

Time was strange when distance became a part of it. You learned of something, it destroyed you on a day when spring was ripening in the world—and it had happened long since.