Leaning back against the railing of the afterdeck, Paul watched Lancelot duelling with his shadow. It had been going on for most of yesterday, from the time they sailed from Cader Sedat, and had continued for much of this second morning and into the afternoon. The sun was behind them now. Lancelot stood with his back to it and advanced and retreated along the deck, his feet sliding and turning intricately, his sword a blur of thrusts and parries, too fast to follow properly.
Almost every man on Prydwen had spent some time watching him, either covertly or, as Paul was, with open admiration. He had finally begun to pick out some of the disciplined patterns in what Lancelot was doing. And as he watched it go on and on, Paul understood something else.
This was more than merely training on the part of someone newly wakened from the Chamber of the Dead. In these relentless, driven repetitions Paul had finally begun to see that Lancelot was masking, as best he could, the emotions rising within himself.
He watched the dark-haired man go through his systematic drills without fuss or wasted motion of any kind. Now and always there was a quiet to Lancelot, a sense of a still pool wherein the ripples of turbulent life were effortlessly absorbed. On one level it was deeply reassuring and that reassurance had been present from the moment he had come among them, rising from his bed of stone to bring Matt Sören back from the dead, as well.
Paul Schafer was too wise, though, for that to be the only level on which he perceived what was happening. He was Pwyll Twiceborn, had spoken to gods and summoned them, had lived three nights on the Summer Tree, and the ravens of Mörnir were never far from him. Prydwen was sailing back to war, and Lancelot’s training was apt and fit for the role he would play when they landed again.
They were also sailing back to something else, to someone else: to Guinevere.
In Lancelot’s compulsive physical action, however disciplined it might be, Paul read that truth as clearly as in a book, and the themes of the book were absolute love and absolute betrayal, and a sadness that could bind the heart.
Arthur Pendragon, at the prow with Cavall, gazing east, was the only man on the ship who had not taken a moment to watch Lancelot duel his shadow’s sword. The two men had not spoken since walking from the wreckage of Cader Sedat. There was no hatred between them, or even anger, or manifest rivalry that Paul could see. He saw, instead, a guarding, a shielding of the self, a tight rein kept on the heart.
Paul remembered—knew he would never forget—the few words they had spoken to each other on the island: Lancelot, newly wakened, asking with utmost courtesy, Why have you done this, my lord, to the three of us?
And Arthur, at the very end, the last doorway of that shattered, bloody hall: Oh, Lance, come. She will be waiting for you.
No hatred or rivalry there but something worse, more hurtful: love, and defences thrown up against it, in the sure foreknowledge of what was to come. Of the story to be played out again, as it had been so many times, when Prydwen came again to land.
Paul took his eyes from that fluid, mesmerizing form moving up and down the deck, repeating and repeating the same flawless rituals of the blade. He turned away, looking out to sea over the port railing. He would have to defend his own heart, he realized. He could not afford to lose himself in the woven sorrow of those three. He had his own burdens and his own destiny waiting, his own role to play, his own terrible unspoken anxiety. Which had a name, the name of a child who was no longer a child, of the boy who had taken himself, in the Godwood just a week ago, most of the way to his adulthood and most of the way to his power. Jennifer’s son. And Rakoth Maugrim’s.
Darien. He was not Dari anymore, not since that afternoon by the Summer Tree. He had walked into that place as a little boy who had just learned to skip pebbles across a lake and had gone forth as someone very different, someone older, wilder, wielding fire, changing shape, confused, alienated, unimaginably powerful. Son of the darkest god. The wild card in the deck of war.
Random, his mother had called him, knowing more, perhaps, than any of them. Not that there was reassurance in that. For if Darien was random, truly so, he could do anything. He could go either way. Never, Brendel of the lios alfar had said, never had there been any living creature in any of the worlds so poised between Light and Dark. Never anyone to compare with this boy on the brink of manhood, who was graceful and handsome, and whose eyes were blue except when they were red.
Dark thoughts. And there was no light, or approach to it, at the memory of Brendel, either: Brendel, to whom he was going to have to tell, or stand by while others told the story of the Soulmonger and the fate of all the lios alfar who had sailed west in answer to their song since the Bael Rangat. Paul sighed, looking out at the sea curling away from the motion of the ship. Liranan was down there, he knew, the elusive sea god moving through his element. Paul had a longing to summon him again, questions to ask, comfort, even, to seek, in the knowledge of sea stars shining again in the place where the Soulmonger had been slain. Wishful thinking, that. He was far too distant from the source of whatever power he had, and far too unsure of how to channel that power, even when it was ready to hand.
Really, when it came down to it, there was only one thing he knew for certain. There was a meeting in his future, a third meeting, and it drifted through his sleep and his daytime reveries. Along the very tracings of his blood, Paul knew that he would meet Galadan one more time, and not again. His fate and the Wolflord’s were warp and weft to each other, and the Weaver alone knew whose thread was marked to be cut when they crossed.
Footsteps crossed the deck behind him, cutting against the rhythm of Lancelot’s steady advance and retreat. Then a light, utterly distinctive voice spoke clearly.
“My lord Lancelot, if it would please you, I think I might test you somewhat better than your shadow,” said Diarmuid dan Ailell.
Paul turned. Lancelot, perspiring slightly, regarded Diarmuid with grave courtesy in his face and bearing. “I should be grateful for it,” he said, with a gentle smile. “It has been a long time since I faced someone with a sword. Have you wooden ones then, training swords aboard ship?”
It was Diarmuid’s turn to smile, eyes dancing under the fair hair bleached even paler by the sun overhead. It was an expression most of the men aboard knew very well. “Unfortunately not,” he murmured, “but I would hazard that we are both skilled enough to use our blades without doing harm.” He paused. “Serious harm,” he amended.
There was a little silence, broken by a third voice, from farther up the deck. “Diarmuid, this is hardly the time for games, let alone dangerous ones.”
The tone of command in Loren Silvercloak’s voice was, if anything, even stronger since the mage had ceased to be a mage. He looked and spoke with undiminished authority, with, it seemed, a clearer sense of purpose, ever since the moment Matt had been brought back from his death and Loren had vowed himself to the service of his old friend who had been King under Banir Lök before he was source to a mage in Paras Derval.
At the same time, the ambit of his authority—of anyone’s, for that matter—seemed always to come to a sharp terminus at the point where Diarmuid’s own wishes began. Especially this kind of wish. Against his will, Paul’s mouth crooked upward as he gazed at the Prince. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Erron and Rothe handing slips of paper to Carde. Wagers. He shook his head bemusedly.
Diarmuid drew his sword. “We are at sea,” he said to Loren with exaggerated reasonableness, “and at least a day’s sailing, perhaps more, depending on the winds and our marginally competent captain”—a fleeting glance spared for Coll, shirtless at the helm—”from reaching land. There may never be a more felicitous occasion for play. My lord?”
The last question was directed at Lancelot, with a salute of the sword, angled in such a way that the sun glinted from it into Lancelot’s eyes—who laughed unaffectedly, returned the salute, and moved neatly to the side, his own blade extended.
“For the sacred honour of the Black Boar!” Diarmuid said loudly, to whistles and cheers. He flourished his steel with a motion of wrist and shoulder.
“For my lady, the Queen,” said Lancelot automatically.
It shaped an immediate stillness. Paul looked instinctively towards the prow. Arthur stood gazing outward towards where land would be, quite oblivious to all of them. After a moment, Paul turned back, for the blades had touched, ritually, and were dancing now.
He’d never seen Diarmuid with a sword. He’d heard the stories about both of Ailell’s sons, but this was his initial encounter at first hand and, watching, he learned something else about why the men of South Keep followed their Prince with such unwavering loyalty. It was more than just the imagination and zest that could conjure moments like this out of a grim ship on a wide sea. It was the uncomplicated truth—in a decidedly complex man—that he was unnervingly good at everything he did. Including swordplay, Paul now saw, with no surprise at all.
The surprise, though thinking about it later Paul would wonder at his unpreparedness, was how urgently the Prince was struggling, from the first touch of blades, to hold his own.
For this was Lancelot du Lac, and no one, ever, had been as good.
With the same economic, almost abstract precision with which he had duelled his shadow, the man who had lain in a chamber undersea among the mightiest dead in all the worlds showed the men of Prydwen why.
They were using naked blades and moving very fast on a swaying ship. To Paul’s untutored eye there was real danger in the thrusts and cuts they levelled at each other. Looking past the shouting men, he glanced at Loren and then at Coll and read the same concern in both of them.
He thought about interceding, knew they would stop for him, but even with the thought he became aware of his own racing pulse, of the degree to which Diarmuid had just lifted him—all of them—into a mood completely opposite to the hollow silence of fifteen minutes before. He stayed where he was. The Prince, he realized, knew exactly what he was doing.
In more ways than one. Diarmuid, retreating before Lancelot’s blurred attack, managed to angle himself towards a coil of rope looped on the deck. Timing it perfectly, he quick-stepped backward, spun around the coil, and, bending low, scythed a cut at Lancelot’s knees, a full, crippling cut.
It was blocked by a withdrawn blade, a very quickly withdrawn blade. Lancelot stood up, stepped back, and with a bright joy in his dark eyes cried, “Bravely done!”
Diarmuid, wiping sweat from his own eyes with a billowing sleeve, grinned ferociously. Then he leaped to attack, without warning. For a few quick paces Lancelot gave ground but then, again, his sword began to blur with the speed of its motion, and he was advancing, forcing Diarmuid back towards the hatchway leading belowdeck.
Engrossed, utterly forgetful of everything else, Paul watched the Prince give ground. He saw something else, as well: even as he retreated, parrying, Diarmuid’s eyes were darting away from Lancelot to where Paul stood at the rail—or past him, actually—beyond his shoulder, out to sea. Just as Paul was turning to see what it was, he heard the Prince scream, “Paul! Look out!”
The whole company spun to look, including Lancelot. Which enabled Diarmuid effortlessly to thrust his blade forward, following up on his transparent deception—
—and have it knocked flying from his hand, as Lancelot extended his spin into a full pirouette, bringing him back to face Diarmuid but down on one knee, his sword sweeping with the power of that full, lightning-quick arc to crash into Diarmuid’s and send it flying, almost off the deck.
It was over. There was a moment’s stunned silence, then Diarmuid burst into full-throated laughter and, stepping forward, embraced Lancelot vigorously as the men of South Keep roared their approval.
“Unfair, Lance,” came a deep voice, richly amused. “You’ve seen that move before. He didn’t have a chance.” Arthur Pendragon was standing halfway up the deck.
Paul hadn’t seen him come. None of them had. With a lifting heart, he saw the smile on the Warrior’s face and the answering gleam in Lancelot’s eyes, and again he saluted Diarmuid inwardly.
The Prince was still laughing. “A chance?” he gasped breathlessly. “I would have had to tie him down to have a chance!”
Lancelot smiled, still composed, self-contained, but not repressively so. He looked at Arthur. “You remember?” he asked. “I’d almost forgotten. Gawain tried that once, didn’t he?”
“He did,” Arthur said, still amused.
“It almost worked.”
“Almost,” Arthur agreed. “But it didn’t. Gawain could never beat you, Lance. He tried all his life.”
And with those words, a cloud, though the sky was still as blue, the afternoon sun as bright as before. Arthur’s brief smile faded, then Lancelot’s. The two men looked at each other, their expressions suddenly unreadable, laden with a weight of history. Amid the sudden stillness of Prydwen Arthur turned again, Cavall to heel, and went back to the prow.
His heart aching, Paul looked at Diarmuid, who returned the gaze with an expression devoid of mirth. He would explain later, Paul decided. The Prince could not know: none of the others except, perhaps, Loren could know what Paul knew.
Knowledge not born of the ravens or the Tree but from the lore of his own world: the knowledge that Gawain of the Round Table had, indeed, tried all his life to defeat Lancelot in battle. They were friendly battles, all of them, until the very end—which had come for him at Lancelot’s own hand in a combat that was part of a war. A war that Arthur was forced to fight after Lancelot had saved Guinevere from burning at the stake in Camelot.
Diarmuid had tried, Paul thought sadly. It was a gallant attempt. But the doom of these two men and the woman waiting for them was far too intricately shaped to be lifted, even briefly, by access to laughter or joy.
“Look sharp, you laggards!” Coll’s prosaic, carrying voice broke into his reverie. “We’ve a ship to sail, and it may need some sailing yet. Wind’s shifting, Diar!”
Paul looked back, south and west to where Coll’s extended arm was pointing. The breeze was now very strong, he realized. It had come up during the swordplay. As he looked back he could discern, straining, a line of darkness at the horizon.
And in that moment he felt the stillness within his blood that marked the presence of Mörnir.
Younger brothers were not supposed to ride creatures of such unbridled power. Or to sound or look as had Tabor last night, before he took flight towards the mountains. True she’d overheard her parents talking about it many times (she managed to overhear a great deal), and she’d been present three nights ago when her father had entrusted the guarding of the women and children to Tabor alone.
But she’d never seen the creature of his fast until last night, and so it was only then that Liane had truly begun to understand what had happened to her younger brother. She was more like her mother than her father: she didn’t cry often or easily. But she’d understood that it was dangerous for Tabor to fly, and then she’d heard the strangeness in his voice when he mounted up, and so she had wept when he flew away.
She had remained awake all night, sitting in the doorway of the house she shared with her mother and brother, until, a little before dawn, there had been a falling star in the sky just west of them, near the river.
A short time later Tabor had walked back into the camp, raising a hand to the astonished women on guard. He touched his sister lightly on the shoulder before he passed inside, unspeaking, and fell into bed.
It was more than weariness, she knew, but there was nothing she could do. So she had gone to bed herself, to a fitful sleep and dreams of Gwen Ystrat, and of the fair-haired man from another world who had become Liadon, and the spring.
She was up with the sunrise, before her mother even, which was unusual. She dressed and walked out, after checking to see that Tabor still slept. Aside from those on guard at the gates, the camp was quiet. She looked east to the foothills and the mountains, and then west to see the sparkle of the Latham, and the Plain unrolling beyond. As a little girl she’d thought the Plain went on forever; in some ways she still did.
It was a beautiful morning, and for all her cares and the shallow sleep she’d had, her heart lifted a little to hear the birds and smell the freshness of the morning air.
She went to check on Gereint.
Entering the shaman’s house, she paused a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. They had been checking on him several times a day, she and Tabor: a duty, and a labour of love. But the aged shaman had not moved at all from the moment they had carried him here, and his expression had spoken of such terrible anguish that Liane could hardly bear to look at him.
She did, though, every time, searching for clues, for ways of aiding him. How did one offer aid to someone whose soul was journeying so far away? She didn’t know. She had her father’s love of their people, her mother’s calm stability, her own headstrong nature, and not a little courage. But where Gereint had gone, none of these seemed to matter. She came anyhow, and so did Tabor: just to be present, to share, in however small a way.
So she stood on his threshold again, waiting for the darkness to clear a little, and then she heard a voice she’d known all her life say, in a tone she’d also known all her life, “How long does an old man have to wait for breakfast these days?”
She screamed a little, a girlish habit she was still trying to outgrow. Then she seemed to have covered the distance into the room very fast, for she was on her knees beside Gereint, and hugging him, and crying just as her father would have and, for this, perhaps even her mother, too.
“I know,” he said patiently, patting her back. “I know. You are deeply sorry. It will never happen again. I know all that. But Liane, a hug in the morning, however nice, is not breakfast.”
She was laughing and crying at the same time, and trying to hold him as close as she could without hurting his brittle bones. “Oh Gereint,” she whispered, “I’m so glad you’re back. So much has happened.”
“I’m sure,” he said, in a different voice entirely. “Now be still a moment and let me read it in you. It will be quicker than the telling.”
She did. It had happened so many times before that it no longer felt strange. This power was at the heart of what the shamans were; it came with their blinding. In a very little time Gereint sighed and leaned back a little, deep in thought.
After a moment, she asked, “Did you do what you went to do?”
He nodded.
“Was it very difficult?”
Another nod. Nothing more, but she had known him a long time, and she was her father’s daughter. She had also seen his face as he journeyed. She felt an inner stirring of pride. Gereint was theirs, and whatever he had done, it was something very great.
There was another question in her, but this one she was afraid to ask. “I’ll get you some food,” she said, preparing to rise.
With Gereint, though, you seldom had to ask. “Liane,” he murmured, “I can’t tell you for certain, because I am not yet strong enough to reach as far as Celidon. But I think I would know already if something very bad had happened there. They are all right, child. We will have fuller tidings later, but you can tell your mother that they are all right.”
Relief burst within her like another sunrise. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him again.
Gruffly he said, “This is still not breakfast! And I should warn you that in my day any woman who did that had to be prepared to do a good deal more!”
She laughed breathlessly. “Oh, Gereint, I would lie down with you in gladness any time you asked.”
For once, he seemed taken aback. “No one has said that particular thing to me for a very long time,” he said after a moment. “Thank you, child. But see to breakfast, and bring your brother to me instead.” She was who she was, and irrepressible.
“Gereint!” she exclaimed, in mock astonishment.
“I knew you would say that!” he growled. “Your father never did teach his children proper manners. That is not amusing, Liane dal Ivor. Now go get your brother. He has just awakened.”
She left still giggling. “And breakfast!” he shouted after her.
Only when he was quite sure she was out of earshot did he allow himself to laugh. He laughed a long time, for he was deeply pleased. He was back on the Plain where he’d never thought to be again, once having ventured out over the waves. But he had, indeed, done what he’d set out to do, and his soul had survived. And whatever had happened at Celidon, it was not too bad, it could not be, or, even weakened as he was, he would have known from the moment of his return.
So he laughed for several moments and allowed himself—it wasn’t hard—to look forward to his meal.
Everything changed when Tabor came. He entered the mind of the boy and saw what was happening to him, and then read the tale of what the Seer had done in Khath Meigol. After that his food was tasteless in his mouth, and there were ashes in his heart.
She walked in the garden behind the domed Temple with the High Priestess—if, Sharra thought to herself, this tiny enclosure could properly be said to constitute a garden. For one raised in Larai Rigal and familiar with every pathway, waterfall, and spreading tree within its walls, the question almost answered itself.
Still, there were unexpected treasures here. She paused beside a bed of sylvain, silver and dusty rose. She hadn’t known they grew so far south. There were none in Cathal; sylvain was said to flourish only on the banks of Celyn Lake, by Daniloth. They were the flower of the lios alfar. She said as much to Jaelle.
The Priestess glanced at the flowers with only mild attention. “They were a gift,” she murmured. “A long time ago, when Ra-Lathen wove the mist over Daniloth and the lios began the long withdrawal. They sent us sylvain by which to remember them. They grow here, and in the palace gardens as well. Not many, the soil is wrong or some such thing—but there are always some of them, and these seem to have survived the winter and the drought.”
Sharra looked at her. “It means nothing to you, does it?” she said. “Does anything, I wonder?”
“In flowers?” Jaelle raised her eyebrows. Then, after a pause, she said, “Actually, there were flowers that mattered: the ones outside Dun Maura when the snow began to melt.”
Sharra remembered. They had been red, blood red for the sacrifice. Again she glanced at her companion. It was a warm morning, but in her white robe Jaelle looked icily cool, and there was a keen, cutting edge to her beauty. There was very little mildness or placidity about Sharra herself, and the man she was to wed would carry all his life the scar of a knife she’d thown at him, but with Jaelle it was different, and provoking.
“Of course,” the Princess of Cathal murmured. “Those flowers would matter. Does anything else, though? Or does absolutely everything have to circle back to the Goddess in order to reach through to you?”
“Everything does circle back to her,” Jaelle said automatically. But then, after a pause, she went on, impatiently. “Why does everyone ask me things like that? What, exactly, do you all expect from the High Priestess of Dana?” Her eyes, green as the grass in sunlight, held Sharra’s and challenged her.
In the face of that challenge, Sharra began to regret having brought it up. She was still too impetuous; it often took her out beyond her depth. She was, after all, a guest in the Temple. “Well—” she began apologetically.
And got no further. “Really!” Jaelle exclaimed. “I have no idea what people want of me. I am High Priestess. I have power to channel, a Mormae to control—and Dana knows, with Audiart that takes doing. I have rituals to preserve, counsel to give. With the High King away I have a realm to govern with the Chancellor. How should I be other than I am? What do you all want from me?”
Astonishingly, she had to turn away towards the flowers, to hide her face. Sharra was bemused, and momentarily moved, but she was from a country where subtlety of mind was a necessity for survival, and she was the daughter and heir of the Supreme Lord of Cathal.
“It isn’t really me you’re talking to, is it?” she asked quietly. “Who were the others?”
After a moment Jaelle, who had, it seemed, courage to go with everything else, turned back to look at her. The green eyes were dry, but there was a question in their depths.
They heard a footstep on the path.
“Yes, Leila?” Jaelle said, almost before she turned. “What is it? And why do you continue to enter places where you should not be?” The words were stern, but not, surprisingly, the tone.
Sharra looked at the thin girl with the straight, fair hair who had screamed in real pain when the Wild Hunt flew. There was some diffidence in Leila’s expression, but not a great deal.
“I am sorry,” she said. “But I thought you would want to know. The Seer is in the cottage where Finn and his mother stayed with the little one.”
Jaelle’s expression changed swiftly. “Kim? Truly? You are tuned to the place itself, Leila?”
“I seem to be,” the girl replied gravely, as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable.
Jaelle looked at her for a long time, and Sharra, only half understanding, saw pity in the eyes of the High Priestess. “Tell me,” Jaelle asked the girl gently, “do you see Finn now? Where he is riding?”
Leila shook her head. “Only when they were summoned I saw him then, though I could not speak to him. He was … too cold. And where they are now it is too cold for me to follow.”
“Don’t try, Leila,” Jaelle said earnestly. “Don’t even try.”
“It has nothing to do with trying,” the girl said simply, and something in the words, the calm acceptance, stirred pity in Sharra as well.
But it was to Jaelle that she spoke. “If Kim is nearby,” she said, “can we go to her?”
Jaelle nodded. “I have things to discuss with her.”
“Are there horses here? Let’s go.”
The High Priestess smiled thinly. “As easily as that? There is,” she murmured with delicate precision, “a distinction between independence and irresponsibility, my dear. You are your father’s heir, and betrothed—or did you forget?—to the heir of Brennin. And I am charged with half the governance of this realm. And—or did you forget that too?—we are at war. There were svart alfar slain on that path a year ago. We will have to arrange an escort for you if you intend to join me, Princess of Cathal. Excuse me, if you will, while I tend to the details.”
And she brushed smoothly past Sharra on the pebbled walkway.
Revenge, the Princess thought ruefully. She had trespassed on very private terrain and had just paid the price. Nor, she knew, was Jaelle wrong. Which only made the rebuke more galling. Deep in thought, she turned and followed the High Priestess back into the Temple.
In the end, it took a fair bit of time to get the short expedition untracked and on the road to the lake, largely because the preposterous fat man, Tegid, whom Diarmuid had elected as his Intercedent in the matter of their marriage, refused to allow her to ride forth without him, even in the care of the Priestess and a guard from both Brennin and Cathal. And since there was only one horse in the capital large enough to survive martyrdom under Tegid’s bulk, and that horse was quartered in the South Keep barracks on the other side of Paras Derval …
It was almost noon before they got under way, and as a consequence they were too late to do anything at all about what happened.
In the small hours of that morning, Kimberly, asleep in the cottage by the lake, crossed a narrow bridge over a chasm filled with nameless, shapeless horrors, and when she stood on the other side a figure approached her in the dream, and terror rose in her like a mutant shape in that lonely, blighted place.
On her pallet in the cottage, never waking, she tossed violently from side to side, one hand raised unconsciously in rejection and denial. For the first and only time she fought her Seer’s vision, struggling to change the image of the figure that stood there with her on the farther side. To alter—not merely foresee—the loops spun into time on the Loom. To no avail.
It was to dream this dream that Ysanne had made Kim a Seer, had relinquished her own soul to do so. She had said as much. There were no surprises here, only terror and renunciation, helpless in the face of this vast inevitability.
In the cottage the sleeping figure ceased her struggling; the uplifted, warding hand fell back. In the dream she stood quietly on the far side of the chasm, facing what had come. This meeting had been waiting for her from the beginning. It was as true as anything had ever been true. And so now, with the dreaming of it, with the crossing of that bridge, the ending had begun.
It was late in the morning when she finally woke. After the dream she had fallen back into the deeper, healing sleep her exhausted body so desperately needed. Now she lay in bed a little while, looking at the sunlight that streamed in through the open windows, deeply grateful for the small grace of rest in this place. There were birds singing outside, and the breeze carried the scent of flowers. She could hear the lake slapping against the rocks along the shore.
She rose and went out into the brightness of the day. Down the familiar path she walked, to the broad flat rock overhanging the lake where she had knelt when Ysanne threw a bannion into the moonlit waters and summoned Eilathen to spin for her.
He was down there now, she knew, deep in his halls of seaweed and stone, free of the binding flowerfire, uncaring of what happened above the surface of his lake. She knelt and washed her face in the cool, clean waters. She sat back on her heels and let the sunlight dry the drops of water glistening on her cheeks. It was very quiet. Far out over the lake a fishing bird swooped and then rose, caught by the light, flashing away south.
She had stood on this shore once, most of a lifetime ago, it seemed, throwing pebbles into the water, having fled from the words Ysanne had spoken in the cottage. Under the cottage.
Her hair had still been brown then. She had been an intern from Toronto, a stranger in another world. She was white-haired now, and the Seer of Brennin, and on the far side of a chasm in her dream she had seen a road stretching away, and someone had stood before her on that road. Sparkling brilliantly, a speckled fish leaped from the lake. The sun was high, too high; the Loom was shuttling even as she lingered by this shore.
Kimberly rose and went back into the cottage. She moved the table a little to one side. She laid her hand on the floor and spoke a word of power.
There were ten steps leading down. The walls were damp. There were no torches, but from below the well-remembered pearly light still shone. On her finger the Baelrath began to glow in answer. Then she reached the bottom and stood in the chamber again, with its woven carpet, single desk, bed, chair, ancient books.
And the glass-doored cabinet on the farther wall wherein lay the Circlet of Lisen, from which the shining came.
She walked over and opened the cabinet doors. For a long time she stood motionless, looking down at the gold of the Circlet band and the glowing stone set within: fairest creation of the lios alfar, crafted by the Children of Light in love and sorrow for the fairest child of all the Weaver’s worlds.
The Light against the Dark, Ysanne had named it. It had changed, Kim remembered her saying: the colour of hope when it was made, since Lisen’s death it shone more softly, and with loss. Thinking of Ysanne, Kim felt her as a palpable presence; she had the illusion that if she hugged herself, she’d be putting her arms about the frail body of the old Seer.
It was an illusion, nothing more, but she remembered something else that was more than illusory: words of Raederth, the mage Ysanne had loved and been loved by, the man who had found the Circlet again, notwithstanding all the long years it had lain lost.
Who wears this next, after Lisen, Raederth had said, shall have the darkest road to walk of any child of earth or stars.
The words she had heard in her dream. Kim reached out a hand and with infinite care lifted the Circlet from where it lay.
She heard a sound from the room above.
Terror burst inside her, sharper even than in the dream. For what had been only foreknowing then, and so removed a little, was present, now, and above her. And the time had come.
She turned to face the stairway. Keeping her voice as level as she could, knowing how dangerous it would be to show fear, she said, “You can come down if you like. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Silence. Her heart was thunder, a drum. For a moment she saw the chasm again, the bridge, the road. Then there were footsteps on the stairs.
She had never seen him. She endured a moment of terrible dislocation, over and above everything else. She knew nothing of what happened in the glade of the Summer Tree. He was supposed to be a child, even though a part of her had known he wasn’t, and couldn’t be. In the dream he had been only a shadowed presence, ill defined, and a name she’d learned in Toronto even before he was born. By the aura of the name she had known him, and by another thing, which had been the deepest source of her terror: his eyes had been red.
They were blue now and he seemed very young, though he should have been even younger. So much younger. But Jennifer’s child, born less than a year ago, stood before her, his eyes uneasy, darting about the chamber, and he looked like any fifteen-year-old boy might look—if any boy could be as beautiful as this one was, and carry as much power within himself.
“How did you know I was here?” he said abruptly. His voice was awkward, underused.
She tried to will her heartbeat to slow; she needed to be calm, needed all her wits about her for this. “I heard you,” she said.
“I thought I was being quiet.”
She managed to smile. “You were, Darien. I have very good ears. Your mother used to wake me when she came in late at night, however quiet she was.”
His eyes came to rest on hers for a moment. “You know my mother?”
“I know her very well. I love her dearly.”
He moved a couple of paces into the room but stayed between her and the stairway. She wasn’t sure if it was to keep an exit for himself or block it from her. He was looking around again.
“I never knew this room was here.”
The muscles of her back were corded with tension. “It belonged to the woman who lived here before you,” she said.
“Why?” he challenged. “Who was she? Why is it underground?” He was wearing a sweater and trousers and fawn-coloured boots. The sweater was brown, too warm for summer, and too large for him. It would have been Finn’s, she realized. All the clothing was. Her mouth was dry. She wet her lips with her tongue.
“She was a very wise woman, and she had many things she loved in this room, so she kept it hidden to guard them.” The Circlet lay in her hand; it was slender and delicate, almost no weight at all, yet she felt as if she carried the weight of worlds.
“What things?” said Darien.
And so the time, truly, was upon them.
“This,” said Kim, holding it out to him. “And it is for you, Darien. It was meant for you. It is the Circlet of Lisen.” Her voice trembled a little. She paused. He was silent, watching her, waiting. She said, “It is the Light against the Dark.”
Her voice failed her. The high, heroic words went forth into the little chamber and fell away into silence.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Darien. His hands had closed at his side. He took another step towards her. “Do you know who my father is?”
So much terror. But she had dreamt this. It was his. She nodded. “I do,” she whispered. And because she thought she had heard a diffidence in his voice, not a challenge, she said, “And I know your mother was stronger than him.” She didn’t, really, but that was the prayer, the hope, the gleam of light she held. “He wanted her to die, so you wouldn’t be born.”
He withdrew the one step he had advanced. Then he laughed a little, a lonely, terrible laugh. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “Cernan asked why I was allowed to live. I heard him. Everyone seems to agree.” His hands were opening and closing spasmodically.
“Not everyone,” she said. “Not everyone, Darien. Your mother wanted you to be born. Desperately.” She had to be so careful. It mattered so much. “Paul—Pwyll, the one who stayed with you here—he risked his life guarding her and bringing her to Vae’s house the night you were born.”
Darien’s expression changed, as if his face had slammed shut against her. “He slept in Finn’s bed,” he said flatly. Accusingly.
She said nothing. What could she say?
“Give it to me,” he said.
What could she do? It all seemed so inevitable, now that the time had come. Who but this child should walk the Darkest Road? He was already on it. No other’s loneliness would ever run so deep, no other’s dangerousness be so absolute.
Wordlessly, for no words could be adequate to the moment, she stepped forward, the Circlet in her hands. Instinctively he retreated, a hand raised to strike her. But then he lowered his arm, and stood very still, and suffered her to place it about his brow.
He was not even as tall as she. She didn’t have to reach up. It was easy to fit the golden band over his golden hair and close the delicate clasp. It was easy; it had been dreamt; it was done.
And the moment the clasp was fitted the light of the Circlet went out.
A sound escaped him; a torn, wordless cry. The room was suddenly dark, lit only by the red glow of the Baelrath, which yet burned, and the thin light that streamed down the stairs from the room above.
Then Darien made another sound, and this time it was laughter. Not the lost laugh of before, this was harsh, strident, uncontrolled. “Mine?” he cried. “The Light against the Dark? Oh, you fool! How should the son of Rakoth Maugrim carry such a light? How should it ever shine for me?”
Kim’s hands were against her mouth. There was so much unbridled torment in his voice. Then he moved, and her fear exploded. It doubled, redoubled itself, outstripped any measure she’d ever had, for by the light of the Warstone she saw his eyes flash red. He gestured, nothing more than that, but she felt it as a blow that drove her to the ground. Thrusting past her, he strode to the cabinet against the wall.
In which lay the last object of power. The last thing Ysanne had seen in her life. And lying on the ground, helpless at his feet, Kim saw Rakoth’s son take Lökdal, the dagger of the Dwarves, and claim it for his own.
“No!” she gasped. “Darien, the Circlet is yours, but not the dagger. It is not for you to take. You know not what it is.”
He laughed again and drew the blade from its jewelled sheath. A sound like a plucked harpstring filled the room. He looked at the gleaming blue thieren running along the blade and said, “I do not need to know. My father will. How should I go to him without a gift, and what sort of gift would this dead stone of Lisen’s make? If the very light turns away from me, at least I now know where I belong.”
He was past her then, and by the stairs; he was climbing them and leaving, with the Circlet lifeless upon his brow and Colan’s dagger in his hand.
“Darien!” Kim cried with the voice of her heart’s pain. “He wanted you dead. It was your mother who fought to let you be born!”
No response. Footsteps across the floor above. A door opening, and closing. With the Circlet gone the Baelrath slowly grew dim, so it was quite dark in the chamber below the cottage, and in the darkness Kim wept for the loss of light.
When they came an hour later, she was by the lake again, very deep in thought. The sound of the horses startled her, and she rose quickly to her feet, but then she saw long red hair and midnight black, and she knew who had come and was glad.
She walked forward along the curve of the shore to meet them. Sharra, who was a friend and had been from the first day they’d met, dismounted the instant her horse came to a stop, and enfolded Kim in a fierce embrace.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Did you do it?”
The events of the morning were so vivid that for a moment Kim didn’t realize it was Khath Meigol that Sharra was talking about. The last time the Princess of Cathal had seen her, Kim had been preparing to leave for the mountains.
She managed a nod and a small smile, though it was difficult. “I did,” she said. “I did what I went to do.”
She left it at that for the moment. Jaelle had dismounted as well and stood a little way apart, waiting. She looked as she always did, cool and withdrawn, formidable. But Kim had shared a moment with her in the Temple in Gwen Ystrat on the eve of Maidaladan, so, walking over, she gave the Priestess a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek. Jaelle stood rigid for an instant; then, awkwardly, her arms went around Kim in a brief, transient gesture that nonetheless conveyed a great deal.
Kim stepped back. She knew her eyes were red from weeping, but there was no point in dissembling, not with Jaelle. She was going to need help, not least of all in deciding what to do.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said quietly. “How did you know?”
“Leila,” Jaelle said. “She’s still tuned to this cottage, where Finn was. She told us you were here.”
Kim nodded. “Anything else? Did she say anything else?”
“Not this morning. Did something happen?”
“Yes,” Kim whispered. “Something happened. We’ve a lot to catch each other up on. Where’s Jennifer?”
The other two women exchanged glances. It was Sharra who answered. “She went with Brendel to the Anor Lisen when the ship sailed.”
Kim closed her eyes. So many dimensions to sorrow. Would there ever be an ending?
“Do you want to go into the cottage?” Jaelle asked.
She shook her head quickly. “No. Not inside. Let’s stay out here.” Jaelle gave her a searching look and then, without fuss, gathered her white robe and sat down on the stony beach. Kim and Sharra followed suit. A little distance away the men of Cathal and Brennin were watchfully arrayed. Tegid of Rhoden, prodigious in brown and gold, walked towards the three of them.
“My lady,” he said, with a deep bow to Sharra, “how may I serve you on behalf of my Prince?”
“Food,” she answered crisply. “A clean cloth, and a lunch to spread upon it.”
“Instantly!” he exclaimed and bowed again, not entirely steady on the loose stones of the shoreline. He wheeled, and scrunched his way over the beach to find them provisions. Sharra looked sideways at Kim, who had an eyebrow raised in frank curiosity.
“A new conquest?” Kim asked with some of her old teasing, the tone she sometimes thought she’d lost forever.
Sharra, surprisingly, blushed. “Well, yes, I suppose. But not him. Um … Diarmuid proposed marriage to me before Prydwen sailed. Tegid is his Intercedent. He’s looking after me, and so—”
She got no further, having been comprehensively enveloped in a second embrace. “Oh, Sharra!” Kim exclaimed “That’s the nicest news I’ve heard in I don’t know how long!”
“I suppose,” Jaelle murmured dryly. “But I thought we had more pressing matters to discuss than matrimonial tidings. And we still don’t have any news of the ship.”
“Yes, we do,” said Kim quickly. “We know they got there, and we know they won a battle.”
“Oh, Dana be praised!” Jaelle said, suddenly sounding very young, all cynicism stripped away. Sharra was speechless. “Tell us,” the High Priestess said. “How do you know?”
Kim began the story with her capture in the mountains: with Ceriog and Faebur and Dalreidan and the death rain over Eridu. Then she told them of seeing that dread rain come to an end the morning before, of seeing sunshine to the east and so knowing that Metran on Cader Sedat had been stopped.
She paused a moment, for Tegid had returned with two soldiers in his wake, carrying armloads of food and drink. It took a few minutes for things to be arranged in a fashion that, to his critical eye, was worthy of the Princess of Cathal. When the three men had withdrawn, Kim took a deep breath and spoke of Khath Meigol, of Tabor and Imraith-Nimphais, of the rescue of the Paraiko and the last kanior, and then, at the end, very softly, of what she and her ring had done to the Giants.
When she finished it was quiet on the shore again. Neither of the other women spoke. They were both familiar with power, Kim knew, in a great many of its shadings, but what she had just told them, what she had done, had to be alien and almost impossible to grasp.
She felt very alone. Paul, she thought, might have understood, for his, too, was a lonely path. Then, almost as if reading her thoughts, Sharra reached out and squeezed her hand. Kim squeezed back and said, “Tabor told me that the Aven and all the Dalrei rode to Celidon three nights ago to meet an army of the Dark. I have no idea what happened. Neither did Tabor.”
And in her turn she told of what had happened two evenings before, when Leila had screamed in anguish at the summoning of the Wild Hunt, and through her link every priestess in the sanctuary had heard Green Ceinwen’s voice as she mastered Owein and drew him from his kill.
It was Kim’s turn to be silent, absorbing this. There was still one thing left to be told, though, and so at length she said, “I’m afraid something else has happened.”
“Who was here this morning?” Jaelle asked with unnerving anticipation.
It was beautiful where they were sitting. The summer air was mild and clean, the sky and lake were a brilliant blue. There were birds and flowers, and a soft breeze off the water. There was a glass of cool wine in her hand.
“Darien,” she said. “I gave him the Circlet of Lisen. Ysanne had it hidden here. The light went out when he put it on, and he stole Colan’s dagger, Lökdal, which she’d also had in the cottage. Then he left. He said he was going to his father.”
It was unfair of her, she knew, to put it so baldly. Jaelle’s face had gone bone white with the impact of what she’d just said, but Kim knew that it wouldn’t have mattered how she’d told it. How could she cushion the impact of the morning’s terror? What shelter could there be?
The breeze was still blowing. There were flowers, green grass, the lake, the summer sun. And fear, densely woven, at the very root of everything, threatening to take it all away: across a chasm, along a shadowed road, north to the heart of evil.
“Who,” asked Sharra of Cathal, “is Darien? And who is his father?”
Amazingly, Kim had forgotten. Paul and Dave knew about Jennifer’s child, and Jaelle and the Mormae of Gwen Ystrat. Vae, of course, and Finn, though he, too, was gone now. Leila, probably, who seemed to know everything connected in any way to Finn. No one else knew: not Loren or Aileron, Arthur or Ivor, or even Gereint.
She looked at Jaelle and received a look back, equally doubtful, equally anxious. Then she nodded, and after a moment the High Priestess did as well. And so they told Sharra the whole story, sitting on the shore of Eilathen’s lake.
And when it was done, when Kim had spoken of the rape and the premature birth, of Vae and Finn, when Jaelle had told them both Paul’s story of what had happened in the glade of the Summer Tree, and Kim had ended the telling with the red flash of Darien’s eyes that morning and the effortless power that had knocked her sprawling, Sharra of Cathal rose to her feet. She walked a few quick steps away and stood a moment, gazing out over the water. Then she wheeled to face Kim and Jaelle again. Looking down on the two of them, at the bleak apprehension in their faces, Sharra, whose dreams since she was a girl had been of herself as a falcon flying alone, cried aloud, “But this is terrible! That poor child! No one else in any world can be so lonely.”
It carried. Kim saw the soldiers glance over at them from farther along the shore. Jaelle made a queer sound, between a gasp and a breathless laugh. “Really,” she began. “Poor child? I don’t think you’ve quite understood—”
“No,” Kim interrupted, laying an urgent hand on Jaelle’s arm. “No, wait. She isn’t wrong.” Even as she spoke, she was reliving the scene under the cottage, scanning it again, trying to see past her terrified awareness of who this child’s father was. And as she looked back, straining to remember, she heard again the sound that had escaped him when Lisen’s Light had gone out.
And this time, removed from it, with Sharra’s words to guide her, Kim heard clearly what she’d missed before: the loneliness, the terrible sense of rejection in that bewildered cry wrung from the soul of this boy—only a boy, they had to remember that—who had no one and nothing, and nowhere to turn. And from whom the very light had turned away, as if in denial and abhorrence.
He’d actually said that, she remembered now. He’d said as much to her, but in her fear she’d registered only the terrible threat that followed: he was going to his father bearing gifts. Gifts of entreaty, she now realized, of supplication, of longing for a place, from the most solitary soul there was.
From Darien, on the Darkest Road.
Kim stood up. Sharra’s words had crystallized things for her, finally, and she had thought of the one tiny thing she could do. A desperate hope it was, but it was all they had. For although it might still be proven true that it was the armies and a battlefield that would end things one way or the other, Kim knew that there were too many other powers arrayed for that to be a certainty.
And she was one of the powers, and another was the boy she’d seen that morning. She glanced over at the soldiers, concerned for a moment, but only for a moment; it was too late for absolute secrecy, the game was too far along, and too much was riding on what would follow. So she stepped forward a little, off the stony shoreline onto the grass running up to the front door of the cottage.
Then she lifted her voice and cried, “Darien, I know you can hear me! Before you go where you said you would go, let me tell you this: your mother is standing now in a tower west of Pendaran Wood.” That was all. It was all she had left: a scrap of information given to the wind.
After the shouting, a very great silence, made deeper, not broken, by the waves on the shore. She felt a little ridiculous, knowing how it must appear to the soldiers. But dignity meant less than nothing now; only the reaching out mattered, the casting of her voice with her heart behind it, with the one thing that might get through to him.
But there was only silence. From the trees east of the cottage a white owl, roused from daytime slumber, rose briefly at her cry, then settled again deeper in the woods. Still, she was fairly certain, and she trusted her instincts by now, having had so little else to guide her for so long; Darien was still there. He was drawn to this place, and held by it, and if he was nearby he could hear her. And if he heard?
She didn’t know what he would do. She only knew that if anyone, anywhere, could hold him from that journey to his father, it was Jennifer in her Tower. With her burdens and her griefs, and her insistence, from the start, that her child was to be random. But he couldn’t be left so anymore, Kim told herself. Surely Jennifer would see that? He was on his way to Starkadh, comfortless and lonely. Surely his mother would forgive Kim this act of intervention?
Kim turned back to the others. Jaelle was on her feet, as well, standing very tall, composed, very much aware of what had just been done. She said, “Should we warn her? What will she do if he goes to her?”
Kim felt suddenly weary and fragile. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know if he’ll go there. He might. I think Sharra’s right, though, he’s looking for a place. As to warning her—I have no idea how. I’m sorry.”
Jaelle drew a careful breath. “I can take us there.”
“How?” said Sharra. “How can you do that?”
“With the avarlith and blood,” the High Priestess of Dana replied in a quieter, different tone of voice. “A great deal of each.”
Kim looked at her searchingly. “Should you, though? Shouldn’t you stay in the Temple?”
Jaelle shook her head. “I’ve been uneasy there these past few days, which has never happened before. I think the Goddess has been preparing me for this.”
Kim looked down at the Baelrath on her finger, at its quiescent, powerless flickering. No help there. Sometimes she hated the ring with a frightening intensity. She looked up at the other women.
“She’s right,” Sharra said calmly. “Jennifer will need warning, if he is going to her.”
“Or comfort, afterwards, if nothing else,” Jaelle said, surprisingly. “Seer, decide quickly! We will have to ride back to the Temple to do this, and time is the one thing we do not have.”
“There are a lot of things we don’t have,” Kim amended, almost absently. But she was nodding her head, even as she spoke.
They had brought an extra horse for her. Later that afternoon, under the Dome of the Temple, before the altar with the axe, Jaelle spoke words of power and of invocation. She drew blood from herself—a great deal in fact, as she had warned—then she linked to the Mormae in Gwen Ystrat, and in concert the inner circle of the priestesses of Dana reached down into the earthroot for power of the Mother great enough to send three women a long way off, to a stony shore by an ocean, not a lake.
It didn’t take very long by any measure of such things, but even so, by the time they arrived the gathering storm was very nearly upon them all, and the wind and the waves were wild.
Even in the owl shape the Circlet fitted about his head. He had to hold the dagger in his mouth, though, and that was tiring. He let it drop into the grass at the base of his tree. Nothing would come to take it. All the other animals in the copse of trees were afraid of him by now. He could kill with his eyes.
He had learned that just two nights before, when a field mouse he was hunting had been on the verge of escaping under the rotted wood of the barn. He had been hungry and enraged. His eyes had flashed—he always knew when they did, even though he couldn’t entirely control them—and the mouse had sizzled and died.
He’d done it three times more that night, even though he was no longer hungry. There was some pleasure in the power, and a certain compulsion, too. That part he didn’t really understand. He supposed it came from his father.
Late the next night he’d been falling asleep in his own form, or the form he’d taken for himself a week ago, and as he drifted off a memory had come back, halfway to a dream. He recalled the winter that had passed, and the voices in the storm that had called him every night. He’d felt the same compulsion then, he remembered. A desire to go outside in the cold and play with the wild voices amid the blowing snow.
He didn’t hear the voices anymore. They weren’t calling him. He wondered—it was a difficult thought—if they had stopped calling because he had already come to them. As a boy, so little time ago, when the voices were calling he used to try to fight them. Finn had helped. He used to pad across the cold floor of the cottage and crawl into bed with Finn, and that had made everything right. There was no one to make anything right anymore. He could kill with his eyes, and Finn was gone.
He had fallen asleep on that thought, in the cave high up in the hills north of the cottage. And in the morning he’d seen the white-haired woman walk down the path to stand by the lake. Then, when she’d gone back in, he’d followed her, and she’d called him, and he’d gone down the stairs he’d never known were there.
She’d been afraid of him, too. Everyone was. He could kill with his eyes. But she’d spoken quietly to him and smiled, once. He hadn’t had anyone smile at him for a long time. Not since he’d left the glade of the Summer Tree in this new, older shape he couldn’t get used to.
And she knew his mother, his real mother. The one Finn had told him had been like a queen, and had loved him, even though she’d had to go away. She’d made him special, Finn had said, and he’d said something else … about having to be good, so Darien would deserve the being special. Something like that. It was becoming harder to remember. He wondered, though, why she had made him able to kill so easily, and to want to kill sometimes.
He’d thought about asking the white-haired woman about that, but he was uncomfortable now in the enclosed spaces of the cottage, and he was afraid to tell her about the killing. He was afraid she would hate him and go.
Then she’d showed him the Light and she’d said it was meant for him. Hardly daring to believe it, because it was so very beautiful, he’d let her put it on his brow. The Light against the Dark, she called it, and as she spoke Darien remembered another thing Finn had told him, about having to hate the Dark and the voices in the storm that came from the Dark. And now, astonishingly, it seemed that even though he was the son of Rakoth Maugrim he was being given a jewel of Light.
And then it went out.
Only Finn’s going away had ever hurt as much. He felt the same emptiness, the same hollow sense of loss. And then, in the midst of it, because of it, he’d felt his eyes readying themselves to go red, and then they did. He didn’t kill her. He could have, easily, but he only knocked her down and went to take the other shining thing he’d seen in that room. He didn’t know why he took it or what it was. He just took it.
Only when he was turning to go and she tried to stop him did it come to him how he could hurt her as much as she’d hurt him, and so, in that moment, he’d decided he was going to take the dagger to his father. His voice had sounded cold and strong to his own ears, and he’d seen her face go white just before he left the room and went outside and made himself into an owl again.
Later in the day other people had come, and he’d watched them from his tree in the woods east of the cottage. He’d seen the three women talking by the lake, though he couldn’t hear what they said, and he was too afraid, in the owl shape, to go nearer.
But then one of them, the one with dark hair, had stood up and had cried, loudly enough for him to hear, “That poor child! No one else in any world can be so lonely!” and he knew that she was speaking of him. He wanted to go down then, but he was still afraid. He was afraid that his eyes would want to turn red, and he wouldn’t know how to stop them. Or to stop what he did when they were that way.
So he waited, and a moment later the one with white hair walked forward a little, towards him, and she called out to him by name.
The part of him that was an owl was so startled that he flew a few wingbeats, out of sheer reflex, before he was able to control himself again. And then he heard her tell him where his mother was.
That was all. A moment later they went away. He was alone again. He stayed in the tree, in the owl form, trying to decide what to do.
She had been like a queen, Finn had said. She had loved him.
He flew down and took hold of the dagger again in his mouth, and then he started to fly. The part of him that was an owl didn’t want to fly in the day, but he was more than an owl, much more. It was hard to carry the dagger, but he managed it.
He flew north, but only for a little way. West of Pendaran Wood, the white-haired one had said. He knew where that was, though he didn’t know how he knew. Gradually he began to angle his flight northwest.
He went very fast. A storm was coming.