Cassandra and the Sisterhood

Hope Triumphant IV: KEEPER

by Parda (February 2015)

Prologue - THE END

So you speak to me of sadness

Starday, Spring 3, Year 555 PE
Sunearth School, Terra

"MacLeod is dead."

The words dropped from Methos's lips and echoed in the chamber at the top of the stone tower, ripples of sound vanishing to silence, leaving nothing. Cassandra had heard those same three words from Methos before, more than six centuries ago, in another chamber, on another continent, in another life.

He had been wrong then. But this time the words were inescapably true, for he went on, "I buried Dunc—"

"Stop," she said to the vidscreen. Methos's face froze, his mouth slightly open, his neatly braided hair lying over his left shoulder and showing dark against the aqua of his embroidered tunic. His gold-flecked eyes were immensely weary, sad, and old. For once his expression was unguarded, stripped bare by pain and haunted by memory. She looked at his image until it dissolved into blackness.

Cassandra stared at the vacant screen and felt nothing, only a frozen aching sorrow. The first time she had heard those words, she had lain on the floor in anguish and despair, and she had wept. This time, she could not even cry. She had no tears left to give.

Cassandra rose from her desk and went to look out the east window at the garden of remembrance and the grove of flame-trees just beyond. She had helped to plant that garden and that grove five hundred years ago, when the Sisterhood had started this school in eastern Africa.

The trees were beautiful, now at the beginning of spring, but it did not matter.

Duncan MacLeod was dead.

Connor came to see her, as she had known he would. His hair was long now, as it had been when she had first met him, though he wore it in a simple braid down his back instead of loose. He was dressed in the style of the planet Caledonia—a shimmering blue and gray sleeveless vest over dark gray trousers, supple leather boots trimmed with whale-fur, a cape that fell in a swirls of blue and white from shoulder to hip, his sword at his side. The style and the colors suited him, but he looked tired, and somehow older.

She did not speak, but led him directly to her bed. The joining was fierce and desperate, a futile effort to fill the emptiness. Afterwards, she held him in her arms and wept the tears he would not shed, wept the tears that had come back to her. The sorrow had thawed now, flooding through her, drowning her.

It was four days before Connor spoke of Duncan, and even then, Connor did not mention his dead kinsman's name.

"I always thought I would die first." Connor's voice was hoarse, an unused voice. His back was straight and his head unbowed as he stared into the courtyard below. His eyes were haunted. It was the thought of every parent, every teacher—the elder dies first.

With Immortals, the difference in ages might be centuries or millennia. With Connor and Duncan, the difference had been only seventy-four years, but Connor had found Duncan as an abandoned infant and held him in his arms. Connor had loved Duncan as a student and a son, a brother and a friend, for over a thousand years. Now Duncan was dead, and Connor was alive—and alone.

Cassandra was more than four thousand years old, and she had long ceased wondering, or even thinking, about the order of death. She and Methos were the oldest Immortals left now. Fewer than a hundred remained. So many had fallen in the Game, their quickenings stripped from their headless bodies and consumed by their killers, all in an effort to win the ultimate Prize. For it was said that the last immortal alive would have the power of all the quickenings of all the immortals down through the ages, enough power to rule the universe forever. And that was a Prize worth killing for.

So it was said.

Cassandra joined Connor at the western window. The summer sun rode high in the sky, and the dew collectors had folded themselves until nightfall. Grids of solar collectors glinted on rooftops and in distant fields, like shining coins sewn on a garment of many colors. The gongs were struck, and the central courtyard below filled with chattering, laughing girls, dismissed from morning classes and on their way to the mid-day meal.

"Quite a crowd," Connor observed.

"Nearly six hundred," she told him then followed up on his rare show of interest by adding, "We have nearly two thousand schools. Most are on Earth, but we're committed to having at least one school on each of the twenty-two inhabited worlds, and that effort is going well." Cassandra thought that her first teacher and mentor, the Lady of the Temple, would have been pleased.

Connor didn't respond.

Cassandra decided to move from numerical to personal. "That girl with dark hair, who's hanging from the tree branch near the fountain, is your wife Alex's descendant, about twenty-five generations removed. Her name is Mikil."

Connor peered more closely at the girl on the tree. "Descended from Colin or Sara?"

"Both, in several different lines. Mikil's also descended from all three of Colin and Sara's half-siblings." A man named Edgerton had fathered those five ancestors of Mikil, since Connor, like all immortals, was sterile. When he and Alex had used artificial insemination to have children, they hadn't realized that the anonymous sperm donor's family had a history of psychic abilities.

When Colin and Sara had begun having prophetic dreams as teenagers, Cassandra had sought out their kin. With the Edgerton line and other genetic lines from around the world, she had begun the slow revitalization of humanity's innate gifts, trying to restore what Roland had nearly eradicated during millennia of pogroms and persecutions and witch-killings. Most of the billion people on Earth carried the talent now, though it was often latent or minimal.

"Mikil's talent will be dormant until puberty, right?" Connor asked. "That gene fix worked?"

"Yes," Cassandra confirmed. "The delay has bred true for fifteen generations."

"Good."

She waited, but he didn't ask what talents Mikil's parents or grandparents had shown or reminisce about the different talents of Colin and Sara and their children and grandchildren. Connor was back to staring out the window, silent once again.

A gong was struck, and then the girls were gone.

Three more days, and then just before daybreak Connor spoke of the death again. "Amanda told me. She—" He left the bed abruptly and went to stand in front of the window, staring into the pearl-gray fog.

Cassandra went to stand beside him, pulling her fur-lined robe close about her. The chamber was chilly, for nights were always cold in the highlands. From outside came the distant yet still-piercing warble of a barbican, welcoming the dawn. "How did Amanda hear?" Cassandra asked.

"She said Methos came and told her."

Cassandra knew, without being told, that Amanda and Methos had gone to bed together and tried to console each other, in the same way as she herself and Connor had done. And she knew that it had not worked for them, either. There could be no consolation. Duncan was dead.

"But the duel hadn't been registered with the Tribunal," Connor continued, "and so they didn't know who, just that…" He cleared his throat then shook his head impatiently. "How did you hear?"

"Methos sent me a message." Cassandra did not want to mention this next item, but she would not hide anything from Connor. Never again. "Last month, he also sent a report for the Chronicles."

Connor seized on that, as she had known he would, a starving wolf anxious to kill. "What does it say?"

"I don't know. I didn't open it."

Connor stared in disbelief. "You didn't—?"

Cassandra shrugged. What difference did it make, really, who had killed Duncan? He was dead.

It made a difference to Connor. The wolf was intent on the hunt. "Where's the report?" Connor demanded.

She did not want to watch. She handed the vidchip to Connor and left the chamber.

He came to her an hour later in the garden, as she was harvesting new leaves from the nettles. She knew Connor had merely been biding his time with her, letting the grief subside to a manageable level before he began the hunt.

Now he was ready to kill. "Ever hear of Lis na Trag, from Marsopolis?" he demanded.

Cassandra nodded. "Of course. The hero of the Mars Revolution, four hundred years ago." She dropped another handful of leaves into her gathering sack.

"He's not a hero anymore," Connor nearly snarled.

"I know," she said. She received copies of all the reports from both the Watchers and the Tribunal, and she added them to the Chronicles that spanned nearly four thousand years. Trag had followed a common trajectory for soldiers without a country of their own, going from heroic revolutionary to freedom fighter to mercenary for hire. He'd smuggled guns, first from necessity and then for profit. He'd dealt in black-market goods and drugs and—this last century—slaves.

He also liked to play the Game: the ultimate test for a warrior. He and Duncan had fought to the death, and Trag had won. It was the luck of the draw. The roll of the dice. The fall of a head. The Game.

It did not matter. Duncan was dead.

Cassandra moved to another plant. The cordate leaves marched up the stalk in alternating pairs, a fragile ladder of dark green hearts. She grasped a leaf firmly, flattening its spiny under-hairs into harmlessness.

"I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon, on the first ship off-planet," Connor told her.

Cassandra paused, the leaf cool with morning dew under her fingers. She did not let go. She'd indulged in avoidance and denial long enough. She pulled the leaf with a quick tug, set it in her sack, then turned to face Connor. "Killing Trag won't bring Duncan back."

"Nothing will bring Duncan back." Connor's voice was rough with grief and rage. "Nothing."

Exactly her point. "Then why fight?" she asked him.

"To finish what Duncan started. Trag can't be permitted to win the Prize."

"If Trag is that evil, report him to the Tribunal. Let them—"

"You know the Tribunal will do nothing without overwhelming evidence," Connor broke in. "And Trag is careful."

"And you want his head."

"Yes, I do," Connor agreed instantly, and his eyes were those of a killer: flat, deadly, and cold … a man she knew much better than she wanted to. He turned on his heel and walked away.

Cassandra finished gathering the nettles then took the leaves to the cooks in the kitchen. "We'll have nettle soup today," one of them said happily. Cassandra nodded, but she did not stay for the meal.

Late in the afternoon, in the garden of remembrance, she tried again, but Connor didn't look up from sharpening his sword. "Just because you don't believe in the Prize," he said, looking down the length of the straight blade, "doesn't mean that it's not real."

And just because he did believe in the Prize, didn't mean that it was. Cassandra didn't say that; she knew it wouldn't help. They'd had this conversation before. She sat down near him on the stone bench.

He tilted the weapon, its golden surface gleaming in the sun, then sent to work polishing away a scratch invisible to her eyes. He'd forged this sword as a replacement for the Japanese katana he'd lost in a Scottish loch six hundred years ago, and it had served him well. He'd killed more than a hundred people with it, all according to the rules of the Game.

"Neither of us has proof of the Prize either way," she pointed out. "You're taking its existence on faith."

"As did my teacher," Connor replied evenly. "Ramirez believed."

"Because his teacher told him." She tried not to sigh. "As his teacher had told him, no doubt."

"No," Connor corrected. "Ramirez told me his teacher found out about the Game when someone tried to take his head."

Cassandra had first heard about the Game from a Wurusemu, a terrified Hittite woman who'd pleaded with Cassandra to leave her alone. Cassandra had soothed Wurusemu then listened incredulously to her tales of being hounded by a man who wanted her head instead of her body, all in pursuit of some "prize." Cassandra had befriended Wurusemu, and they'd traveled together for a time. Until the night Cassandra woke to find Wurusemu trying to kill her in order to win the Prize for herself.

There had been no escape from the Game since then, thirty-six hundred years ago. Whether the Prize existed or not, the Game was all too real, and it would go on as long as immortals continued to play.

Cassandra did not want to argue with Connor, not now. She sat with him while he sharpened his blade, then together they watched the sun set and darkness settle over the land. That night, she sang to Connor in bed, as she always did before he left, a song of words and hands, of touches and music, of love.

That dawn, she woke to the warbling call of the barbican, and the warmth of Connor close behind her. His legs were intertwined with hers; his arm between her breasts held her tight to him, and their hands was clasped together. She nestled closer and kissed his hand, and Connor murmured and pulled her to him, caught and floating between asleep and awake.

Cassandra lay on her side and watched the sunrise, the black etched line of the horizon, the shredded clouds of pink and orange and crimson in the sky, and then – suddenly – a crescent of silvered molten fire engulfing one black hill.

"What do you see?" Connor asked quietly, awake now, his voice soft at the back of her neck. "There, in the sky?"

She shook her head, not wanting to answer, knowing she could not lie. "I see—you," she said finally. The visions came to her less frequently now, but fire still brought images of blood … and death.

A silence, and a sigh, then he said, "Should I ask?"

"No." Cassandra did not wish him to know. Her visions were often misleading, and she had been wrong before.

She turned in his arms and kissed him, long and hard, fierce and desperate. "Make love to me, Connor," she asked, tracing the edge of his cheek with her fingertips, the stubble there rough beneath her hand. "Before you go."

"Aye, love," he answered in the Gaelic, the language of the land of his birth. "I will." He took her hand to his lips and kissed it. "I want to." Then he kissed her, just as fierce, just as desperate. "I need to."

And he did.

"Connor," she said, later that morning, when the sun was high and the girls were chattering on their way to class, "Don't do this."

He did not turn from the window. "I don't have a choice."

He did have a choice, but it was not a choice he was willing to make. She knew she could not persuade him otherwise. She kissed him again, soft and sweet, but she did not watch him go.

One year later, just after the Midsummer celebrations and while the flame-trees were once again heavy with fruit, Methos arrived.

He had traveled on the space-freighter from Vega IV, a regular run in the sector. Methos wore a simple black jumpsuit of some shiny synthetic material. His face was calm now, the pain hidden behind one of his many masks, but the stark color of his clothing left his eyes gray and flat. They were still weary, still old, but no sadder. They could not possibly become sadder.

She knew why he had come, and she did not want to know. Yet there was no escape from the truth.

Nor could she send him away, given what she had learned just this last year. Methos was the key to it all, both the beginning and the end.

She would make certain of that.

Cassandra offered him coffee, a welcome-home drink, for he had been away from Earth for centuries, and coffee carried the taste of the land in which it grew. They sat upon cushions at a low table, sipping the coffee in her stone chamber, silent while her harp sang in the wind. It was as much a ceremony as the Japanese tea ceremony, and for this last brief moment of peace she was willing to wait, to savor the taste of the beverage, to listen to the wind, to simply be.

Methos finally set down his cup, and then he spoke, three simple words. The last time she had heard those words, her heart had frozen. This time, her heart broke.

"MacLeod is dead."

- continued in chapter 2 "The Game"

Connor's children Sara and Colin appear in my stories Goddess Child, The Only Game in Town, Hope Triumphant II-Sister, and Hope Triumphant III-Anamchara.