In the place where they were going—all of them, the Wolflord running in his wolf shape, Darien flying as an owl with a blade in his mouth, the three women sent from the Temple by the power of Dana—Jennifer stood on Lisen’s balcony gazing out to sea, her hair blown back by the freshening wind.
So still was she that save for the eyes restlessly scanning the white-capped waves, she might have been the figurehead at the prow of a ship and not a living woman waiting at the edge of land for that ship to come home. They were a long way north from Taerlindel, she knew, and a part of her wondered about that. But it was here that Lisen had waited for a ship to return from Cader Sedat, and deep within herself Jennifer felt an awareness, a certainty, that this was where she should be. And embedded within that certainty, as a weed in a garden, was a growing sense of foreboding.
The wind was southwest, and ever since the morning had turned to afternoon it had been getting stronger. Never taking her eyes from the sea, she moved back from the low parapet and sat down in the chair they had brought out for her. She ran her fingers along the polished wood. It had been made, Brendel had said, by craftsmen of the Brein Mark in Daniloth, long before even the Anor was built.
Brendel was here with her, and Flidais as well, familiar spirits never far from her side, never speaking unless she spoke to them. The part of her that was still Jennifer Lowell, and had taken pleasure in riding horses and teasing her roommate, and had loved Kevin Laine for his wit as well as his tenderness, rebelled against this weighty solemnity. But she had been kidnapped after riding a horse a year ago, and Kim was white-haired now and a Seer with her own weight to carry, and Kevin was dead.
And she herself was Guinevere, and Arthur was here, drawn back again to war against the Dark, and he was everything he had ever been. He had broken through the walls she had raised about herself since Starkadh, and had set her free in the bright arc of an afternoon, and then had sailed away to a place of death.
She knew too much about his destiny and her own bitter role in that to ever truly be lighthearted again. She was the lady of the sorrows and the instrument of punishment, and there was little she could do, it seemed, about either of them. Her foreboding grew, and the silence began to oppress her. She turned to Flidais. As she did, her child was just then flying across the Wyth Llewen River in the heart of the Wood, coming to her.
“Will you tell me a story?” she asked. “While I watch?”
The one she’d known as Taliesin at Arthur’s court, and who was now beside her in his truer, older shape, drew a curved pipe from his mouth, blew a circle of smoke along the wind, and smiled.
“What story?” he asked. “What would you hear, Lady?”
She shook her head. She didn’t want to have to think. “Anything.” She shrugged. Then, after a pause, “Tell me about the Hunt. Kim and Dave set them free, I know that much. How were they bound? Who were they, Flidais?”
Again he smiled, and there was more than a little pride in his voice, “I will tell you, all of what you ask. And I doubt there is a living creature in Fionavar, now that the Paraiko are dead and haunting Khath Meigol, who would know the story rightly.”
She gave him an ironic, sidelong glance. “You did know all the stories, didn’t you? All of them, vain child.”
“I know the stories, and the answers to all the riddles in all the worlds save—” He broke off abruptly.
Brendel, watching with interest, saw the andain of the forest flush a deep, surprising red. When Flidais resumed it was in a different tone, and as he spoke Jennifer turned back to the waves, listening and watching, a figurehead again.
“I had this from Ceinwen and Cernan a very long time ago,” Flidais said, his deep voice cutting through the sound of the wind. “Not even the andain were in Fionavar when this world was spun into time, first of the Weaver’s worlds. The lios alfar were not yet on the Loom, nor the Dwarves, nor the tall men from oversea, nor those east of the mountains or in the sunburnt lands south of Cathal.
“The gods and the goddesses, given their names and powers by grace of the Weaver’s hands, were here. There were animals in the woods, and the woods were vast then; there were fish in the lakes and rivers and the wide sea, and birds in the wider sky. And in the sky as well there flew the Wild Hunt, and in the forests and the valleys and across rivers and up the mountain slopes there walked the Paraiko in the young years of the world, naming what they saw.
“By day the Paraiko walked and the Hunt were at rest, but at night, when the moon rose, Owein and the seven kings and the child who rode Iselen, palest of the shadow horses, mounted up into the starry sky, and they hunted the beasts of woods and open spaces until dawn, filling the night with the wild terrible beauty of their cries and their hunting horns.”
“Why?” Brendel could not forebear to ask. “Do you know why, forest one? Do you know why the Weaver spun their killing into the Tapestry?”
“Who shall know the design on the Loom?” Flidais said soberly. “But this much I had from Cernan of the Beasts: the Hunt was placed in the Tapestry to be wild in the truest sense, to lay down an uncontrolled thread for the freedom of the Children who came after. And so did the Weaver lay a constraint upon himself, that not even he, shuttling at the Loom of Worlds, may preordain and shape exactly what is to be. We who came after, the andain who are the children of gods, the lios alfar, the Dwarves, and all the races of men, we have such choices as we have, some freedom to shape our own destinies, because of that wild thread of Owein and the Hunt slipping across the Loom, warp and then weft, in turn and at times. They are there, Cernan told me one night long ago, precisely to be wild, to cut across the Weaver’s measured will. To be random, and so enable us to be.”
He stopped, because the green eyes of Guinevere had turned back to him from the sea, and there was that within them which stilled his tongue.
“Was that Cernan’s word?” she asked. “Random?”
He thought back carefully, for the look on her face demanded care, and it had been a very long time ago. “It was,” he said at length, understanding that it mattered, but not why. “He said it exactly so, Lady. The Weaver wove the Hunt and set them free on the Loom, that we, in our turn, might have a freedom of our own because of them. Good and evil, Light and Dark, they are in all the worlds of the Tapestry because Owein and the kings are here, following the child on Iselen, threading across the sky.”
She had turned fully away from the sea to face him now. He could not read her eyes; he had never been able to read her eyes. She said, “And so, because of the Hunt, Rakoth was made possible.”
It was not a question. She had seen through to the deepest, bitterest part of the story. He answered with what Cernan and Ceinwen had said to him, the only thing that could be said. “He is the price we pay.”
After a pause, and a little more loudly because of the wind, he added, “He is not in the Tapestry. Because of the randomness of the Hunt, the Loom itself was no longer sacrosanct; it was no longer all. So Maugrim was able to come from outside of it, from outside of time and the walls of Night that bind all the rest of us, even the gods, and enter into Fionavar and so into all the worlds. He is here but he is not part of the Tapestry; he has never done anything that would bind him into it and so he cannot die, even if everything on the Loom should unravel and all our threads be lost.”
This part Brendel had known, though never before how it had come to pass. Sick at heart, he looked at the woman sitting beside them, and as he gazed, he read a thought in her. He was not wiser than Flidais, nor had he even known her so long, but he had tuned his soul to her service since the night she’d been stolen from his care, and he said, “Jennifer, if all this is true, if the Weaver put a check on his own shaping of our destinies, it would follow—surely it would follow—that the Warrior’s doom is not irrevocable.”
It was her own burgeoning thought, a hint, a kernel of brightness in the darkness that surrounded her. She looked at him, not smiling, not venturing so much; but with a softening of the lines of her face and a catch in her voice that made him ache, she said, “I know. I have been thinking that. Oh, my friend, could it be? I felt a difference when I first saw him—I did! There was no one here who was Lancelot in the way that I was Guinevere, waiting to remember my story. I told him so. There are only the two of us this time.”
He saw a brightness in her face, a hint of colour absent since Prydwen had set sail, and it seemed to bring her back, in all her beauty, from the realm of statues and icons to that of living women who could love, and dared hope.
Better, far better, the lios alfar would think bitterly, later that night, unsleeping by the Anor, that she had never allowed herself that unsheathing of her heart.
“Shall I go on?” Flidais said, with a hint of the asperity proper to an upstaged storyteller.
“Please,” she murmured kindly, turning back to him. But then, as he began the tale again, she fixed her gaze once more out to sea. Sitting so, she listened to him tell of how the Hunt had lost the young one, Iselen’s rider, on the night they moved the moon. She tried to pay attention as his deep cadences rode over the wind to recount how Connla, mightiest of the Paraiko, had agreed to shape the spells that would lay the Hunt to rest until another one was born who could take the Longest Road with them—the Road that ran between the worlds and the stars.
However hard she tried, though, she could not entirely school her thoughts, for the andain’s earlier explanation had reached into her heart, and not just in the way Brendel had discerned. The question of randomness, of the Weaver’s gift of choice to his Children, touched Arthur’s woven doom with a possibility of expiation she’d never really allowed herself to dream about before. But there was something else in what Flidais had said. Something that went beyond their own long tragedy in all its returnings, and this the lios alfar had not seen, and Flidais knew nothing at all of it.
Jennifer did, though, and she held it close to her rapidly beating heart. Random, Cernan of the Beasts had said of the Wild Hunt and the choice they embodied. It was her own word. Her own instinctive word for her response to Maugrim. For her child, and his choice.
She looked out to sea, searching. The wind was very strong now, and there were storm clouds coming up fast. She forced herself to keep her features calm as she gazed, but inwardly she was as open, as exposed, as she had ever been.
And in that moment Darien landed near the river, at the edge of the trees, and took his human form again.
The sound of thunder was distant yet and the clouds were still far out at sea. But it was a southwest wind that was carrying the storm, and when the light began to change the weather-wise lios alfar grew uneasy. He took Jennifer’s hand, and the three of them withdrew into the high chamber. Flidais rolled the curved glass windows shut along their tracks. They sealed tightly, and in the abrupt silence Brendel saw the andain suddenly tilt his head, as if hearing something.
He was. The howl of wind on the balcony had screened from him the alarms running through the Great Wood. There was an intruder. There were two: one was here, even now, and the other was coming and would arrive very soon.
The one who was coming he knew, and feared, for it was his own lord, lord of all the andain and mightiest of them, but the other one, the one standing below them at this moment, he knew not, nor did the powers of the Wood, and it frightened them. In their fear they grew enraged, and he could feel that rage now as a buffeting greater than the wind on the balcony.
Be calm, he sent inwardly, though he was anything but calm himself. I will go down. I will deal with this.
To the others, to the lios alfar and the woman he’d known as Guinevere, he said grimly, “Someone has come, and Galadan is on his way to this place even now.”
He saw a look pass between the two of them, and he felt the tightening of tension in the room. He thought they were mirroring his own anxiety, knowing nothing of the memory they shared of the Wolflord in a wood east of Paras Derval a little more than a year ago.
“Are you expecting anyone?” he demanded. “Who would follow you here?”
“Who could follow us here?” Brendel replied quickly.
There was suddenly a new brightness to the lios, as if he had shed a cloak and his true nature was shining through. “No one has come by sea; we would have seen them—and how could anyone pass through the forest?”
“Someone stronger than the Wood,” Flidais replied, vexed at the hint of apprehension that reached his voice.
Brendel was already by the stairwell. “Jennifer, wait here. We will go down and deal with this. Lock the door after us, and open only to one of our voices.” He loosened his short sword in its scabbard as he spoke, then turned to Flidais, “How long before Galadan arrives?”
The andain sent the query out to the Wood and relayed the answer back, “Half an hour, perhaps less. He is running very fast, in his wolf shape.”
“Will you help me?” Brendel asked him directly.
This was, of course, the question. The andain rarely cared for the affairs of mortals, and even more rarely intervened in them. But Flidais had a purpose here, his oldest, deepest purpose, and so he temporized. “I will go down with you. I told the forest I would see who this was.”
Jennifer had gone very pale again, Brendel saw, but her hands were steady and her head very high, and once more he marvelled at her sheer, unwavering courage as she said, “I will come down. Whoever is here has come because of me; it may be a friend.”
“It may not be,” Brendel replied gravely.
“Then I should be no safer in this room,” she answered calmly, and paused at the head of the curving stairs waiting for him to lead her down. One more moment he hesitated, then his eyes went green, exactly the colour of her own. He took her hand and brought it to his forehead and then his lips before turning to descend, sword drawn now, his tread quick and light on the stone stairs. She followed, and Flidais behind her, his mind racing with calculations, boiling over with considerations and possibilities and a frantically stifled excitement.
They saw Darien standing by the river as soon as they stepped out onto the beach.
The wind carried lashings of sea spray that stung when they struck, and the sky had grown darker even in the moments of their descent. It was purple now, shot through with streaks of red, and thunder was rolling out at sea beyond the rising waves.
But for Brendel of the lios alfar, who immediately recognized who had come, none of this even registered. Quickly he spun around, to fling some warning to Jennifer, to give her time to prepare herself. Then he saw from her expression that she didn’t need his warning. She knew, already, who this boy standing before them was. He looked at her face, wet now with ocean spray, and stepped aside as she moved forward towards the river where Darien stood.
Flidais came up beside him, droplets of spray glittering on his bald head, an avid curiosity in his face. Brendel became aware of the sword he carried, and he sheathed it silently. Then he and the andain watched mother and child come together for the first time since the night Darien was born.
An overwhelming awareness filled Brendel’s mind of how many things might lie in the balance here. He would never forget that afternoon by the Summer Tree, and the words of Cernan: Why was he allowed to live? He thought of that, he thought of Pwyll, far out at sea, and he was conscious every moment of Cernan’s son, running towards them even now, as fast as the gathering storm and more dangerous.
He looked down at the andain beside him, not trusting the vivid, inquisitive brightness in Flidais’s eyes. But what, after all, could he do? He could stand by, apprehensive and ready; he could die in Jennifer’s defence, if it came to that; he could watch.
And, watching, he saw Darien step cautiously forward away from the riverbank. As the boy came nearer, Brendel saw some sort of circlet about his brow, with a dark gem enclosed within it, and deep in his mind a chime sounded, crystal on crystal, a warning from memories not his own. He reached back towards them, but even as he did he saw the boy hold out a sheathed dagger towards his mother, and as Darien spoke, Brendel’s memories were wiped away by the urgent demands of the present.
“Will you … will you take a gift?” he heard. It seemed to him as if the boy were poised to take sudden flight at a breath, at the fall of a leaf. He held himself very still and, disbelieving, heard Jennifer’s reply.
“Is it yours to give?” There was ice in her voice, and steel. Hard and cold and carrying, her tone knifed through the wind, sharp as the dagger her son was offering her.
Confused, unprepared, Darien stumbled back. The blade fell from his fingers. Aching for him, for both of them, Brendel kept silence though his whole being was crying out to Jennifer to be careful, to be gentle, to do whatever she had to do to hold the boy and claim him.
There was a sound from behind him. Quickly he glanced back, his hand gliding to his sword. The Seer of Brennin, her white hair whipping across her eyes, was standing at the edge of the forest east of the Anor. A moment later, his shocked eyes discerned the High Priestess, and then Sharra of Cathal’s unmistakable beauty, and the mystery cleared and deepened, both. They must have come from the Temple, by using the earthroot and Jaelle’s power. But why? What was happening?
Flidais, too, had heard them come, but not Jennifer or Darien, who were too intent on each other. Brendel turned back to them. He was behind Jennifer, could not see her face, but her back was straight and her head imperiously high as she faced her son.
Who said, small and seeming frail in the wild wind, “I thought it might … please you. I took it. I thought …”
Surely now, Brendel thought. Surely she would ease the path for him now?
“It does not,” Jennifer replied. “Why should I welcome a blade that does not belong to you?”
Brendel clenched his hands. There seemed to be a fist squeezing his heart. Oh, careful, he thought. Oh, please take care.
“What,” he heard Darien’s mother say, “are you doing here?”
The boy’s head jerked as if she’d struck him. “I—she told me. The one with white hair. She said you were …” His words failed him. Whatever else he said was lost in the tearing wind.
“She said I was here,” his mother said coldly, very clearly. “Very well. She was right, of course. What of it? What do you want, Darien? You are no longer a baby—you arranged for that yourself. Would you have me treat you like one?”
Of course he would, Brendel wanted to say. Couldn’t she see that? Was it so hard for her?
Darien straightened. His hands thrust forward, almost of themselves. He threw his head back, and Brendel thought he saw a flash. Then the boy cried, from the center of his heart, “Don’t you want me?”
From his extended hands two bolts of power flew, to left and right of his mother. One hurtled into the bay, struck the small boat tied up to the dock, and blasted it into shards and fragments of wood. The other sizzled just past his mother’s face and torched a tree at the edge of the Wood.
“Weaver at the Loom!” Brendel gasped. At his side, Flidais made a strangled sound and then ran, as fast as his short legs could carry him, to stand beneath the burning tree. The andain raised his arms towards the blaze, he spoke words too rapid and low to follow, and the fire went out.
A real fire this time, Brendel thought numbly. It had been only illusion the last time, by the Summer Tree. Weaver alone knew where this child’s power ended or where it would go.
As if in answer to his thoughts, his unspoken fears, Darien spoke again, clearly this time, in a voice that mastered the wind and the thunder out at sea and the drumming, rising now from the forest floor.
“Shall I go to Starkadh?” he challenged his mother. “Shall I see if my father gives me a fairer welcome? I doubt Rakoth will scruple to take a stolen dagger! Do you leave me any choice—Mother?”
He’s not a child, Brendel thought. It was not the words or the voice of a child.
Jennifer had not moved or flinched, even when the bolts of power flew by her. Only her fingers, spread-eagled at her sides, gave any hint of tension. And again, amid his doubt and fear and numbing imcomprehension, Brendel of the lios alfar was awed by what he saw in her.
She said, “Darien, I leave you the only choice there is. I will say this much and nothing more: you live, though your father wanted me dead so that you would never come into the Tapestry. I cannot hold you in my arms or seek shelter and love for you as I did in Vae’s house when you were born. We are past the time for that. There is a choice for you to make, and everything I know tells me that you must make it freely and unconstrained, or it will never have been made at all. If I bind you to me now, or even try, I strip you of what you are.”
“What if I don’t want to make that choice?”
Struggling to understand, Brendel heard Darien’s voice suspended, halfway, it seemed, between the explosion of his power and the supplication of his longing.
His mother laughed, but not harshly. “Oh, my child,” she said. “None of us want to make it, and all of us must. Yours is only the hardest, and the one that matters most.”
The wind died a little, a lull, a hesitation. Darien said, “Finn told me … before … that my mother loved me and that she had made me special.”
And now, as if involuntarily, Jennifer’s hands did move, up from her sides, to clutch her elbows tightly in front of her.
“Acushla machree,” she said—or so Brendel thought. She started to go on, then seemed to pull herself up short, as on a tight, harsh rein.
After a moment she added, in a different voice, “He was wrong … about making you special. You know that now. Your power comes from Rakoth when your eyes go red. What you have of me is only freedom and the right to choose, to make your own choice between Light and Dark. Nothing more than that.”
“No, Jen!” the Seer of Brennin screamed, into the wind.
Too late. Darien’s eyes changed again as the last words were spoken, and from the bitterness of his laughter Brendel knew they had lost him. The wind rose again, wilder than before; over it, over the deep drumming of Pendaran Wood, Darien cried, “Wrong, Mother! You have it all wrong. I am not here to choose but to be chosen!”
He gestured towards his forehead. “Do you not see what I wear on my brow? Do you not recognize it?” There was another peal of thunder, louder than any yet, and rain began to fall. Through it, over it, Darien’s voice soared. “This is the Circlet of Lisen! The Light against the Dark—and it went out when I put it on!”
A sheet of lightning seared the sky west of them. Then thunder again. Then Darien: “Don’t you see? The Light has turned away, and now you have as well. Choice? I have none! I am of the Dark that extinguishes the Light—and I know where to go!”
With those words he reclaimed the dagger from the strand before his feet; then he was running, heedless, contemptuous of the ominous drumming in the Wood, straight into Pendaran through the slashing, driving rain, leaving the six of them exposed on the shore to both the storm which had come and the rawness of their terror.
Jennifer turned. The rain was sheeting down; Brendel had no way to tell if there were tears or raindrops on her face.
“Come,” he said, “we must go inside. It is dangerous out here in this!”
Jennifer ignored him. The other three women had come up. She turned to Kim, waiting, expecting something.
And it came. “What in the name of all that is holy have you done?” the Seer of Brennin screamed into the gale. It was hard to stand upright; they were all drenched to the bone. “I sent him here as a last chance to keep him from Starkadh, and you drove him straight there! All he wanted was comfort, Jen!”
But it was Guinevere who answered, colder, sterner than the elements. “Comfort? Have I comfort to give, Kimberly? Have you? Or any of us, today, now? You had no right to send him here, and you know it! I meant him to be random, free to choose, and I will not back away from that! Jaelle, what did you think you were doing? You were there in the music room at Paras Derval when I told that to Paul. I meant everything I said! If we bind him, or try, he is lost to us!”
There was another thing inside her, at the very deepest place in her heart, but she did not say it. It was her own, too naked for the telling: He is my Wild Hunt, she whispered over and over in her soul. My Owein, my shadow kings, my child on Iselen. All of them. She was not blind to the resonances. She knew that they killed, with joy and without discrimination. She knew what they were. She also knew, since Flidais’s tale on the balcony, what they meant.
She glared at Kimberly through the slashing rain, daring her to speak again. But the Seer was silent, and in her eyes Jennifer saw no more anger or fear, only sadness and wisdom and a love she remembered as never varying. There was a queer constriction in her throat.
“Excuse me.” The women looked down at the one who had spoken. “Excuse me,” Flidais repeated, fighting hard against the surging in his heart, straining to keep his voice calm. “I take it you are the Seer of Brennin?”
“I am,” Kim said.
“I am Flidais,” he said, unconscionably quick with even this casually chosen name. But he had no patience left; he was near now, so near. He was afraid he would go mad with excitement. “I should tell you that Galadan is very close to this place—minutes away, I think.”
Jennifer brought her hands to her mouth. She had forgotten, in the total absorption of the last few minutes. But it all came back now: the night in the wood and the wolf who had taken her away for Maugrim and then had become a man who said, She is still to go north. If it were not so, I might take her for myself. Just before he gave her to the swan.
She shuddered. She could not help herself. She heard Flidais say, still for some reason addressing Kim, “I can be of aid, I believe. I think I could divert him from this place, if I go fast enough.”
“Well then, go!” Kim exclaimed. “If he’s only a few minutes—”
“Or,” Flidais went on, unable now to keep the rising note from finally reaching his voice, “I could do nothing, as the andain usually do. Or, if I choose, I could tell him exactly who just left the glade, and who is here.”
“I would kill you first!” Brendel burst out, his eyes gleaming through the rain. A bolt of lightning knifed into the roiling sea. There came another peal of thunder.
“You could try,” Flidais said, with equanimity. “You would fail. And then Galadan would come.”
He paused, waiting, looking at Kim, who said, slowly, “All right. What is it you want?”
Amid the howling of the storm Flidais was conscious of a great, cresting illumination in his heart. Tenderly, with a delicate ineffable joy, he said, “Only one thing. A small thing. So small. Only a name. The summoning name of the Warrior.” His soul was singing. He did a little dance on the wet strand; he couldn’t help himself. It was here. It was in his hands.
His jaw dropped into the soaked mat of his beard.
“No,” she repeated. “I swore an oath when he came to me, and I will not break it.”
“Seer—” Jaelle began.
“You must!” Flidais moaned. “You must tell me! It is the only riddle. The last one! I know all the other answers. I would never tell. Never! The Weaver and all the gods know I would never tell—but I must know it, Seer! It is the wish of my heart!”
Strange, fateful phrase crossing the worlds with her. Kim remembered those words from all the years that had gone by, remembered thinking of them again on the mountain plateau with Brock unconscious at her side. She looked down at the gnomelike andain, his hands writhing over and about each other in frantic, pleading desperation. She remembered Arthur, in the moment he had answered her summons on Glastonbury Tor, the bowed weight of his shoulders, the weariness, the stars falling and falling through his eyes. She looked at Jennifer, who was Guinevere.
And who said, softly, but near enough so as to be heard over the wind and rain, “Give it to him. Even so is the name handed down. It is part of the woven doom. Broken oaths and grief lie at the heart of it, Kim. I’m sorry, truly.”
It was the apology at the end that reached through to her, as much as anything else. Wordlessly she turned and strode a little way apart. She looked back and nodded to the andain. Stumbling, almost falling in his eagerness and haste, he trotted to her side. She looked down on him, not bothering to mask her contempt. “You will go from here with this name, and I charge you with two things. To never repeat it to a soul in any world, and to deal with Galadan now, doing whatever must be done to keep him from this Tower, and to shield the knowledge of Darien from him. Will you do so?”
“By every power in Fionavar I swear it,” he said. He could scarcely control his voice so as to speak. He rose up, on tiptoe so as to be nearer to her. Despite herself she was moved by the helpless longing, the yearning in his face.
“Childslayer,” she said, and broke her oath.
He closed his eyes. A radiant ecstasy suffused his face. “Ah!” he moaned, transfigured. “Ah!” He said no more, staying thus, eyes closed, head lifted to the falling rain as if to a benediction.
Then he opened his eyes and fixed her with a level gaze. With dignity she hadn’t expected, so soon after his exaltation, he said, “You hate me now. And not without cause. But hear me, Seer: I shall do everything I swore to do, and more. You have freed me from desire. When the soul has what it needs it is without longing, and so it is with me now. From the darkness of what I have done to you there shall be light, or I shall die trying to make it so.” He reached up and took her hand between both of his own. “Do not enter the Tower; he will know if there are people there. Endure the rain and wait for me. I shall not fail you.”
Then he was gone, running on stubby, bowed legs, but fleet and blurred as soon as he entered the forest, a power of Pendaran, moving into his element.
She turned back to the others, waiting west of her, farther down the strand. They stood gathered together under this fury of the elements. Something, an instinct, made her glance down at her hand. Not at the Baelrath, which was utterly subdued, but at the vellin stone about her wrist. And she saw it twisting slowly back and forth.
There was power here. Magic in the storm. She should have known it from the first rising of the wind. But there had been no time to absorb or think about anything but Darien from the moment Jaelle had brought them here. Now there was. Now there was a moment, a still space amid the wild fury of the elements. She lifted her eyes past the three other women and the lios alfar and, looking out to sea, she saw the ship running helplessly before the wind into the bay.