Storm answered. "Me and her is man and wife."
"Whom God hath joined," said the King, "no man can possibly sunder."
"Till death us part?" Rain whispered.
The Fairy King leaned forward on his throne, his hands clasped. "Death," he reflected, "Time, and Space are only three impostors. They are shadows, glamour, not realities like Faith or Hope or Love. A Spirit told me once that a man and a woman who love, whom death cannot set asunder, may in the end be parts of one, one Angel.
"How I do envy you two children! And have you been parted in this life you are living now down on the Earth?"
"We've never met," said Rain. "Storm is an English sailor; I live with my mother Thunder Feather, the sacred woman of the Blackfoot nation. We have our tipi in a lonely valley of the mountains, and pilgrims come to Thunder Feather to be healed when they are sick in soul or body. But she is dying, so I take up her work. And always I call my man, so that he has come on a voyage of six moons, to the mouth of my river. Still I call him to come up my river, then over the mountains to the sacred lodge. He brings the Christ Faith with him for our Indian peoples."
"I'm a prisoner," said Storm, "at Fort Vancouver, and they want to send me to England because they say I murdered mother. I didn't, so I don't want to be hanged for that. I did murder Christ. I want to die for that."
"A Roman legionary," said the King, "a brave man among the Vikings, a Crusader, a pioneer of the United States, a seaman of England—how I envy you the least of these achievements! And you, my daughter, loving and heroic, how poor my fate compared with yours! But I see ahead of you the greatest of all adventures, the most splendid, the most tremendous, the most triumphant. May God bless you both!"
"Good-by, sir." Storm kissed his hand. "My body is calling me, dragging me back to earth—to prison at Vancouver."
"And," said Rain, "my mother calls me home. Farewell, Great Chief."