Read Online The Door into Sunset by Diane Duane - Free Book Online

scornful, and overly preoccupied with turnip fields: a “prince” living in an oversized log cabin, with a tree growing through its roof. What Herewiss had thought of him, with his fancy horse and his fancy sword and his fancy father, Freelorn had fortunately not found out until much later. There probably would have been bloodshed.
    As it was, Lorn looked back at the memory in astonishment and wondered how he could ever have felt that way about Herewiss. He had been no prize himself. His princehood had just begun to mean something to him— “and too damned much of something!”, he could still hear his father growling, at the end of one memorable dressing-down. Lorn had succeeded in alienating just about everyone in the Brightwood on that first trip, including the one girl whose attention he had desperately been trying to attract. Crushed by a very public rejection, which had ended with pretty little Elen picking him up and dumping him headfirst into a watering trough, Lorn had bolted into the Brightwood, looking for a place to cry his heart out. Around nightfall he found a place, a clearing with a nice smooth slab of stone, and sat down there and wept because no one liked him.
    Now he looked back for the hundredth time in calm astonishment at the circumstances that had brought Herewiss to find him, rather than the Chief Wardress of the Silent Precincts... for of course that was the spot he had picked to cry on: the holiest of altars to the Goddess in perhaps the whole world, at the heart of those Precincts where no word is ever spoken by the Rodmistresses who train there, so that Her speech will be easier to hear. There Herewiss found him, and befriended him, almost more out of embarrassment than anything else, and got him out of there before they both got caught. And the friendship took, and grew fast.
    Look at him, the thought came, in a rush of affection, sorrow, unease and desire, all run together in a bittersweet dissonance of emotion. And that second set of vision came upon Lorn again, so that he saw himself from behind, through Herewiss’s eyes as he came out on the tower’s roof. It was uncanny and disturbing. For what Herewiss saw wasn’t just a dark shape leaning on a parapet, but a much-loved embodiment of intent, and old pain, and warmth, and strife that would lead to triumph: a figure incomplete and annoying in some ways, but also heroic and sorrowfully noble—
    The underhearing slipped off, leaving Lorn uncertain whether to laugh in affectionate scorn or cry with frustration. That’s not me!! he thought. Nevertheless he said nothing, and held still until his loved had joined him. They leaned on the wall together, shoulders touching, looking out southward to where the fields melted into silver-black sky.
    “When I first met you that time,” Lorn said, “were you trying to grow a mustache?”
    Herewiss began to laugh. “After fifteen years, you ask me that now?”
    “Well, I was just remembering, and all of a sudden I remembered this thing on your lip.”
    Herewiss laughed harder. “Oh, Goddess. Yes, I was. I’d been working on it for months. But then you arrived, and you had one, so I shaved mine right off.”
    Lorn chuckled. “And then Elen told me to grow it back or she’d have nothing to do with me,” Herewiss said. “So I did. I doubt there was much of it there when I found you, though.”
    “There wasn’t. It looked like dirt. In fact, I thought it was dirt.”
    Herewiss grinned wryly. “Wonderful.”
    “Well, you and dirt were never far apart,” Freelorn said. “Farm boy.”
    “City brat,” Herewiss said in a poor imitation of a thirteen year-old’s scorn. “You might like dirt too if you touched it occasionally.”
    They both burst out laughing, and Lorn slipped an arm around Herewiss’s waist as Herewiss dropped one about his shoulders and hugged him. “I was packing,” Herewiss said. “What do I do with this?”
    He nodded off to his right. Lorn glanced over. Sitting on