To the east, at Celidon, the sun was low in a sky unmarred by clouds or the hint of any storm as the army of Brennin came at last to the mid-Plain. Galloping beside Niavin, Duke of Seresh, at the front of the host, Teyrnon the mage, weary to the bone after three days of riding, nonetheless managed to pull his chunky body erect in the saddle at his first glimpse of the standing stones.
Beside him, his source chuckled softly and murmured, “I was about to suggest you do that.”
Teyrnon glanced over, amused, at Barak, the tall, handsome boyhood friend who was the source of his power, and his good-natured face slipped easily into a self-deprecating grin. “I’ve lost more weight on this ride than I care to think about,” the mage said, slapping his still-comfortable girth.
“Do you good,” said Niavin of Seresh, on the other side.
“How,” Teyrnon replied indignantly, over Barak’s laughter, “can a complete scrambling of my bones possibly do me good? I’m afraid if I try to scratch my nose I’ll end up rubbing my knee instead, if you know what I mean.”
Niavin snorted, then gave way to laughter of his own. It was hard to stay grim and warlike in the company of the genial, unprepossessing mage. On the other hand, he had known Teyrnon and Barak since they were children in Seresh, in the early days of Ailell’s reign, when Niavin’s own father was the newly appointed Duke of Seresh, and he had little concern about their capabilities. They would be very serious indeed when the time called for it.
And the time, it seemed, was upon them now. Riding toward them from between the massive stones were three figures. Niavin raised a hand, unnecessarily, to point for the mage’s benefit.
“I see them,” said Teyrnon quietly. Niavin glanced over sharply, but the other man’s face had lost its open ingenuousness and was unreadable.
It was probably just as well that Niavin could not discern the mage’s thoughts. They would have worried him deeply, as deeply as Teyrnon himself was troubled, by self-doubts and diffidence and by one other thing.
Formally the two of them greeted Aileron the High King, and formally they returned to him the command of his army, in the presence of his two companions, Ra-Tenniel of the lios alfar, and the Aven of the Plain, who had ridden out to greet the host of Brennin. As formally, Aileron returned their salutations. Then, with the brusque efficiency of the war king he was, he asked Teyrnon, “Have you been contacted, mage?”
Slowly Teyrnon shook his round head. He had expected the question. “I have reached out, my lord High King. Nothing from Loren at all. There is something else, though.” He hesitated, then went on. “A storm, Aileron. Out at sea. We found it while we were reaching. A southwest gale, bringing a storm.”
“That should not happen,” Ra-Tenniel said quickly.
Aileron nodded, not speaking, his bearded features grim.
“Southwest will not be Maugrim,” Ivor murmured. “You have seen nothing of the ship?” he asked Teyrnon.
“I am not a Seer,” the mage explained patiently. “I can sense, to some degree, an assertion of magic such as this storm, and I can reach out to another mage across a fair distance. If the ship had returned I would have found or been reached by Loren before now.”
“And so,” Aileron said heavily, “it has not returned, or else Silvercloak has not returned with it.” His dark eyes met those of Teyrnon for a long moment, as a late-afternoon breeze stirred the grasses of the Plain all around them.
No one else spoke; they waited for the High King. Still looking at Teyrnon, Aileron said, “We cannot wait. We will push north towards Gwynir now, not in the morning as planned. We have at least three hours of light by which to ride.”
Swiftly he explained to Niavin and the mage what had happened in the battle two nights before. “We have been handed an advantage,” he said grimly, “one not of our own doing, but by virtue of Owein’s sword and Ceinwen’s intercession. We must turn that advantage to good effect, while the army of Maugrim is disorganized and fearful. Weaver knows what I would give to have Loren and the Seer with us now, but we cannot wait. Teyrnon of Seresh, will you act as my First Mage in the battles that lie before us?”
He had never been so ambitious, never aimed half so high. It had been derided as a flaw when he was younger, then gradually accepted and indulged as the years passed: Teyrnon was what he was, everyone said, and smiled as they said it. He was clever and reliable; very often he had useful insights into matters of concern. But the paunchy, easy-smiling mage had never been seen—or seen himself, for that matter—as being of real importance in any scheme of things, even in time of peace. Metran and Loren were the mages who mattered.
He’d been content to let that be the case. He’d had his books and his studies, which mattered a great deal. He’d had the comfort of the mages’ quarters in the capital: servants, good food and drink, companionship. He’d enjoyed the privileges of rank, the satisfactions of his power, and, indeed, the prestige that went with both. Not a few ladies of Ailell’s court had found their way to his bedroom or invited him to their own scented chambers, when they would have scorned to look twice at a chubby scholar from Seresh. He’d taken his duties as a mage seriously, for all his genial good nature. He and Barak had performed their peacetime tasks quietly and without fuss and had served unobtrusively as buffers between the other two members of the Council of the Mages. He hadn’t begrudged that, either. Had he been asked, in the last years of Ailell’s rein, before the drought had come, he would have numbered his own thread on the Loom as one of those that shone most brightly with the glow of the Weaver’s benevolence.
But the drought had come, and Rangat had flamed, and Metran, who’d had wisdom once, as well as cleverness, had proven himself a traitor. So now they found themselves at war against the unleashed power of Rakoth Maugrim, and suddenly he, Teyrnon, was acting First Mage to the High King of Brennin.
He was also, or so the nagging, unspoken premonition at the remotest turning of his mind had been telling him since yesterday morning, the only mage in Fionavar.
Since yesterday morning, when the Cauldron of Khath Meigol had been destroyed. He knew nothing specific about that, nothing about any of the consequences of that destruction, only this distant premonition, so vague and terrifying he refused to speak it or give it a tangible name in his mind.
What he felt, though, was lonely.
The sun had gone down. The rain had stopped, and the clouds were scudding away to the north and east. The sky in the west still held to its last hues of sunset shading. But on the beach by the Anor Lisen it was growing dark, as Loren Silvercloak finished telling the truth that had to be told.
When he was done, when his quiet, sorrowful voice had come to an end, those gathered on the beach listened as Brendel of the lios alfar wept for the souls of his people slain as they sailed to their song. Sitting on the sand with Arthur’s head cradled in her lap, Jennifer saw Diarmuid, his expressive features twisted with pain, turn away from the kneeling figure of the lios and enfold Sharra of Cathal in his arms, not with passion or desire but in an unexpectedly vulnerable seeking of comfort.
There were tears on her own cheeks; they kept falling, even as she wiped them away, grieving for her friend and his people. Then, looking down, she saw that Arthur was awake and was gazing back at her, and suddenly she saw herself reflected in his eyes. A single star, very bright, fell across her reflectlon as she watched.
Slowly he raised a hand and touched the cheek where Lancelot’s hand had lain.
“Welcome home, my love,” she said, listening to the brokenhearted grief of the lios alfar who had guided her to this place, hearing all the while, within her mind, the patient, inexorable shuttling of the Loom. “I have sent him away,” she said, feeling the words as warp to the weft of the storm that had passed. The story playing itself out again. Crossings and recrossings.
Arthur closed his eyes. “Why?” he asked, only shaping the word, not quite a sound.
“For the same reason you brought him back,” she answered. And then, as he looked up at her again, she hurt him, as she had hurt Lancelot: to do it and have it over and done, because he, too, had a right to know.
So Guinevere, who had been childless in Camelot, told Arthur about Darien, as the western sky gave up its light and the first stars came out overhead. When she was done, Brendel’s quiet weeping came also to an end.
There was a star in the west, low down over the sea, brighter than all the others in the sky, and the company on the beach watched as the lios alfar rose to his feet and faced that star. For a long time he stood silent; then he raised both hands and spread them wide, before lifting his voice in the invocation of song.
Rough at first with the burden of his grief, but growing more crystalline with each word, each offering, Na-Brendel of the Kestrel Mark of Daniloth took the leaden weight of his sorrow and alchemized it into the achingly beautiful, timeless notes of Ra-Termaine’s Lament for the Lost, sung as it had never been sung in a thousand years, not even by the one who had created it. And so on that strand at the edge of the sea, under all the shining stars, he made a silver shining thing of his own out of what evil had done to the Children of Light.
Alone of those on the beach below the Anor, Kimberly took no comfort, no easing of pain, from the clear distillation of the lament that Brendel sang. She heard the beauty of it, understood, and was humbled by the grandeur of what the lios alfar was doing, and she knew the power such music had to heal—she could see it working in the faces of those beside her. Even in Jennifer, in Arthur, in stern cold Jaelle, as they listened to Brendel’s soul in his voice, lifted to the watching, wheeling stars, to the dark forest and the wide sea.
But she was too far gone in guilt and self-laceration for any of that easing to reach through to her. Was everything she touched, every single thing that came within the glowering ambit of the ring she bore, to be twisted and torn by her presence? She was a healer herself, in her own world! Was she to carry nothing at all but pain to those she loved? To those who needed her?
Nothing but sorrow. From the summoning of Tabor and the corruption of the Paraiko last night to her brutal mishandling of Darien, this morning and then again this evening—when she hadn’t even arrived in time to warn Jennifer of what was coming. And then, most bitterly of all, the breaking of the oath she had sworn on Glastonbury Tor. Was the Warrior’s portion of grief not great enough, she asked herself savagely, that she’d had to add to it by bandying about the terrible name he was cursed to answer to?
No matter, she swore, lashing herself, that Guinevere had said what she had said, giving dispensation. No matter how desperately they’d needed Flidais to aid them, to hold the secret of Darien. They would not have needed that aid, or anything at all from him, had she not presumed to send Darien to this place. She pushed her wet hair back from her eyes. She looked, she knew, like a half-drowned water rat. She could feel the single vertical crease in her forehead. It might, she thought derisively, fool someone into thinking she was wise and experienced: that, and her white hair. Well, she decided, trembling, if anyone was still fooled after tonight, it was their own lookout!
A last long wavering note rose up and then faded away as Brendel’s song came to an end. He lowered his arms and stood silent on the strand. Kim looked over at Jennifer, sitting on the wet sand with Arthur’s head cradled in her lap, and saw her friend, who was so much more than that, motion for her to come over.
She took an unsteady breath and walked across the sand to kneel beside them. “How is he?” she asked quietly.
“He is fine,” Arthur replied himself, fixing her with that gaze that seemed to have no ending and to be filled, so much of the time, with stars. “I have just paid a fairly mild price for being a too-stubborn helmsman.”
He smiled at her, and she had to smile back.
“Guinevere has told me what you had to do. She says she gave you leave, and explained why, but that you will still be hating yourself. Is this true?”
Kim shifted her glance and saw the ghost of a smile tracing the edges of Jennifer’s mouth. She swallowed. “She knows me pretty well,” she said ruefully.
“And me,” he answered calmly. “She knows me very well, and the dispensation she gave you was also mine. The one you know as Flidais was Taliesin once—we both knew him a very long time ago. He is clearly part of the story, though I am not certain how. Seer, do not despair of brightness flowing from what you had to do.”
There was so much comfort in his voice, in the calm, accepting eyes. In the face of this it would be hubris, mere vanity, to hold to her self-condemnation. She said, diffidently, “He said it was his heart’s desire. The last riddle he did not know. He said … he said he would make light from the darkness of what he had done or die trying to do so.”
There was a little silence, as the other two absorbed this. Kim listened to the surf coming in, so gentle now after the wildness of the storm. Then they sensed rather than heard someone approaching, and the three of them glanced up at Brendel.
He seemed more ethereal than ever in the starlight, less tied to the earth, to the pull of gravity. In the dark they could not see the colour of his eyes, but they were not shining. He said, in a voice like the whisper of the breeze, “My lady Guinevere, with your permission, I must leave you now for a time. It is … it is now my task, over and above all else I am afraid, to carry the tidings I have just heard to my King in Daniloth.”
Jennifer opened her mouth to reply, but another voice made answer to the lios alfar.
“He is not there,” said Jaelle, from behind them. Her hard voice, usually so imperious, was muted now, more mild than Kim had thought it could be. “There was a battle two nights ago by the banks of the Adein, near Celidon. The Dalrei and the men of Rhoden met an army of the Dark, and Ra-Tenniel led the lios alfar out of the Shadowland, Na-Brendel. He led them to war on the Plain.”
“And?” It was Loren Silvercloak.
Kimberly listened as Jaelle, stripped of her usual arrogance, told the tale of how Leila had heard the blowing of Owein’s Horn, and seen the battlefield through Finn’s presence there, and then how all of them in the Temple had heard Ceinwen intercede. “The High King rode north in response to the summonglass the night Prydwen set sail,” she concluded. “They will all be on the Plain by now, though what they will do I know not. Perhaps Loren can reach for Teyrnon and answer that for us.”
It was the first time Kim could remember that High Priestess speaking so to the mage.
Then, a moment later, she learned that Loren wasn’t a mage any longer. And even as the tale was being told the ring on her finger began to glow with returning life. She looked down upon it, fighting hard against the now-instinctive aversion she felt, and within her mind, as Loren and then Diarmuid spoke of Cader Sedat, an image began to coalesce.
It was an image she remembered, the first vision she’d ever had in Fionavar, on the path to Ysanne’s Lake: a vision of another lake, high among mountains, with eagles flying over it.
Loren said quietly, “The circles, it seems, have been made complete. It is now my task to go with Matt to Banir Lök, to help him regain the Crown that he never truly lost, so that the Dwarves may be brought back from the edge of the Dark.”
“We have a long way to go,” Matt Sören said, “and not a great deal of time. We will have to set out tonight.” He sounded exactly as he always had. Kim had a sense that nothing, absolutely nothing, would ever make him other than he was: the rock upon which all of them, it seemed, had rested at one time or another.
She looked at Jen and saw the same thought in her face. Then she looked down at the Baelrath again and said, “You will not get there in time.”
Even now, even after so much had happened, it was with a deep humility that she registered the instant silence that descended over those gathered there when the Seer within her spoke. When she looked up, it was to meet the single eye of Matt Sören.
“I must try,” he said simply.
“I know,” she replied. “And Loren is right as well, I think. It does matter, somehow, that you try. But I can tell you you will not get there in time from this place.”
“What are you saying?” It was Diarmuid who asked, his voice stripped of nuance as Jaelle’s had been, pared clean to the simple question.
Kim held up her hand, so they could all see the flame. “I’m saying I’ll have to go there, too. That the Baelrath will have to take us there. And I think all of us know by now that the Warstone is a mixed blessing, at the very best.” She tried hard to keep the bitterness from her voice.
She almost succeeded, too. But in the stillness that followed, someone asked, “Kim, what happened in the mountains?”
She turned to Paul Schafer, who had asked the question, who always seemed to ask the questions that went below the surface. She looked at him, and then at Loren, beside Paul, gazing at her with the mix of gentleness and strength that she remembered from the beginning, and then, most vividly, from the night they’d shared in the Temple, before Kevin had died. Before she went to Khath Meigol.
So it was to the two of them, so different yet so much alike in some inexplicable way, that she told the story of the rescue of the Paraiko and what had followed. Everyone heard, everyone had to know, but it was to Loren and Paul that she spoke. And it was to Matt that she turned, at the end, to repeat, “And so you see what I mean: whatever blessing I carry will not be unmixed.”
For a moment he looked at her, as if considering the point. Then his expression changed; she saw his mouth move in the grimace that she knew to be his smile and heard him say wryly, “No blade I have ever known to be worth anything at all has had only a single edge.”
That was all, but she knew those quiet words were all the reassurance she had any right to seek.
Inclination matched training in the High Priestess of Dana. And so Jaelle, cold in the falling rain, chilled by what had happened with Darien and what was happening now, since the shipwreck, showed nothing at all of her apprehension to anyone on the strand.
She knew, being what she was, that it had been the voice of Mörnir that had thundered to still the waves, and so her gaze was on Pwyll first, of all of them, when he came ashore. She remembered him standing on another beach, far to the south, speaking with Liranan in a perilous light that came not from the moon. He was alive, though, and had come back. She supposed she was pleased about that.
They had all come back, it seemed, and there was someone new with them, and it was not hard to tell, from Jennifer’s face, who this was.
She had made herself cold and hard, but she was not stone, however she might try to be. Pity and wonder had moved her equally to see Guinevere and Lancelot stand together in the rain, as the setting sun slanted through disappearing clouds low in the west.
She had not heard what they said to each other, but the language of gesture was plain, and, at the end, when the man walked away alone into the Wood, Jaelle found herself unexpectedly grieved. She watched him go, knowing the history, not finding it hard at all to guess what distancing quest Guinevere had now imposed upon her second love. What was hard was to preserve her own necessary image of detachment—in the presence of so many men, and in the turbulent wake of what had happened in the Temple before she had taken Kim and Sharra away, with blood and the earthroot tapped.
She had needed the Mormae in Gwen Ystrat to wield such a potent magic, and that meant dealing with Audiart, which was never pleasant. Most of the time she could manage it without real trouble, but that afternoon’s exchange was different.
She had been on dubious ground, and she’d known it, and so had Audiart. It was beyond the irregular, bordering on a real transgression for the High Priestess to be leaving the Temple—and the Kingdom—even at a time like this. It was her sacred duty, Audiart reminded her, along the mindlink the Mormae shared, to remain in the sanctuary, ready and able to deal with the needs of the Mother. Furthermore, her second-in-command did not scruple to point out, had not the High King charged her to remain in Paras Derval and govern the country with the Chancellor? Was it not her further duty to exploit this unexpected opportunity as best she could in the service of their unwavering quest for Dana’s return to primacy in the High Kingdom?
All of this, unfortunately, was true.
In response, all she could really do was pull rank, and not for the first time. Not actually dissembling, she had drawn upon the unease and restlessness she’d been feeling in the Temple and told the Mormae, without amplification, that it was her judgement, as High Priestess, that for her to leave at this time was according to the will of Dana—superseding any traditions or opportunities for gain.
There was also, she had sent along the mindlink, a very real urgency—which was true, as she had seen from Kim’s white face and clenched hands as she waited tensely with Sharra under the dome, oblivious to the closed exchange of the priestesses.
She had made that sending white-hot with her anger, and she was, still, stronger than any of the others. Very well, Audiart had replied. If you must do this, you must. I will leave for Paras Derval immediately to act as best I can in your absence.
This was when the real clash had come, making what had gone before seem like a minor skirmish in a children’s game.
No, she’d sent back, absolute firmness masking her inner anxiety. It is my command, and so Dana’s, that you stay where you are. It is only a week since the sacrifice of Liadon, and the rites of response are not complete.
Are you mad? Audiart had replied, more nakedly rebellious than ever before. Which of those chattering idiots, those insipid nonentities, do you propose to have act in your stead in a time of war?
A mistake. Audiart always let her contempt and ambition show through too clearly. Sensing the response of the Mormae, Jaelle drew a breath of relief. She was going to get away with it. Every established pattern of precedent would have demanded that the Second of the Mother come to Paras Derval to take charge in her absence. Had Audiart said so quietly, with even the most cursorily assumed humility, Jaelle might have lost this battle. As it was, she sprang to the attack.
Would you like to be cursed and cast out, Second of Dana? she sent, with the silken clarity she alone could command over the mind-link. She felt the Mormae’s collectively indrawn breath at the unveiled threat. Dare you speak so to your High Priestess? Dare you so denigrate your sisters? Have a care, Audiart, lest you lose everything your scheming has won you thus far!
Strong words, almost too strong, but she’d needed to throw them all off balance for what she had to say next.
I have chosen my surrogate, and the Chancellor has been informed on behalf of the High King. I have this afternoon named the newest member of the Mormae, and she stands beside me, robed in red and opened new to the mindlink.
Greetings, sisters of the Mother, Leila sent, on cue.
And even Jaelle, half prepared for it, had been stunned by the vividness of her words.
On the strand beneath the Anor Lisen, as the rain slowly came to an end and the sunset tinted the western sky, Jaelle was remembering that vividness. It offered a confirmation of sorts for her own instinctive actions and had served to still, quite effectively, whatever opposition to her peremptory behaviour might have been mounted in Gwen Ystrat. Even so, there was something profoundly unsettling about the mixture of child and woman in Leila, and her link to the Wild Hunt. Dana had not yet chosen to reveal to her High Priestess any indication of what all this might mean.
The voice of Loren Silvercloak, the mage she had hated and feared all her life, brought her fully back to the strand. She heard him reveal what had happened to him, and the triumph she might once have felt at such a revelation of weakness was quite lost in a wave of fear. They had need of Silvercloak’s power, and they were not going to have it.
She’d hoped he might be able to send her home. So far from the Temple she had no magic of her own, no way to get back by herself—and, it now appeared, no one to help her. She saw the Baelrath come to life on the Seer’s hand; then she heard where Kim was going with that power.
She listened to Pwyll’s question—his first words spoken since Prydwen had run aground and they’d come ashore. She wondered about him, how one who could speak with the thundered voice of the God could be so quiet and self-contained and then surface, when his presence had almost been forgotten, with words that cut through to the heart of what was happening. She was, she realized, a little afraid of him, and her attempts to channel that fear into hatred or contempt were not really working.
Once more she forced her mind back to the beach. It was growing darker by the minute. In the shadows Diarmuid’s fair hair was still bright, catching the last colour of the western sky. It was the Prince who spoke now.
“Very well,” he said. “It seems that what we have been told is all we are going to learn. Let us be grateful to our charming Priestess for such information as we do have. Now, Loren can’t reach Teyrnon anymore. Kim, I gather, has had a vision of Calor Diman but nothing of the armies. And Jaelle has exhausted her store of useful tidings.” The gibe seemed reflexive, half-hearted; she didn’t bother to respond. Diarmuid didn’t wait. “Which leaves us dependent,” he murmured, with what seemed to be a genuinely rueful shake of his head, “upon my own less than exhaustive store of knowledge about what my beloved brother is likely to do.”
In some inexplicable way, the glib flow of words had a calming effect. Once more, Jaelle realized, the one she used to dismiss as the “princeling” knew exactly what he was doing. He had already decided, and now he was making the decision sound effortless and of little consequence. Jaelle looked at Sharra, standing beside the Prince. She wasn’t sure whether or not to pity her, which was another change: once she would have had no trouble doing so.
“At a time like this,” Diarmuid continued, “I can do no better than go back to my precocious childhood memories. Some of you may have known patient, supportive older brothers. I have been blighted sadly by the lack of such a one. Loren will remember. From the time I was able to take my first stumbling steps in my brother’s wake, one thing was manifestly clear: Aileron never, ever, waited for me.”
He paused and glanced at Loren, as if seeking his confirmation, but then continued in a voice from which the flippancy was suddenly gone. “He will not wait now, nor could he, given where we went. If he is on the Plain with the army and the lios with him, Aileron will push for battle; I would stake my life on that. In fact, with your leave, I will stake my life on it, and all of yours. Aileron will take the fight to Starkadh as swiftly as he can, which to my mind means one thing only.”
“Andarien,” said Loren Silvercloak, who, Jaelle suddenly recalled, had taught both Diarmuid and his brother.
“Andarien,” the Prince echoed quietly. “He will go through Gwynir to Andarien.”
There was a silence. Jaelle was aware of the sea, and of the forest to the east, and, acutely now, of the dark shape of Lisen’s Tower looming above them in the darkness.
“I suggest,” Diarmuid went on, “that we skirt the western edge of Pendaran, going north from here, angle up through Sennett across the River Celyn to meet, if childhood memories have any merit at all, with the army of Brennin and Daniloth and the Dalrei on the borders of Andarien. If I am wrong,” he concluded, with a generous smile at her, “then at least we will have Jaelle with us, to terrify whatever the fifty of us find there.”
She favoured him with nothing more than a wintry glance. His smile grew broader, as if her expression had only confirmed his statement, but then, in one of his mercurial changes of mood, he turned and looked at Arthur, who had risen to stand.
“My lord,” said the Prince, with no levity at all, “such is my counsel at this time. I will attend to any suggestion you might make, but I know the geography here, and I think I know my brother. Unless there is something you know or sense, Andarien is where I think we must go.”
Slowly the Warrior shook his head. “I have never been in this world before,” Arthur said in his deep, carrying voice, “and I never had a brother in any world. These are your men, Prince Diarmuid. Number me as one of them and lead us to war.”
“We will have to take the women,” Diarmuid murmured.
She was about to make a stinging retort, but in that moment something very bright caught her eye, and she turned to see the Baelrath on Kim’s finger burst into even more imperative flame.
She looked at the Seer as if seeing her for the first time: the small slim figure with tangled hair, so improbably white, the sudden appearance of the vertical crease on her forehead. Again she had a sense that there seemed to be burdens here greater than her own.
She remembered the moment she had shared with Kim in Gwen Ystrat, and she wished, a little surprised at herself, that there were something she could do, some comfort she might offer that was more than merely words. But Jennifer had been right in what she’d said when Darien had gone: none of them had any real shelter to offer each other.
She watched as Kim walked over to Pwyll and put her arms around him, gripping him very hard; Jaelle saw her kiss him on the mouth. He stroked her hair.
“Till next,” the Seer said, an echo, clearly, of the world the two of them had left behind. “Try hard to be careful, Paul.”
“And you,” was all he said.
The Priestess saw her walk over to Jennifer then, and saw the two women speak, though she could not hear what they said. Then the Seer turned. She seemed to Jaelle to grow more remote, even as she watched. Kim gestured Loren and Matt to either side of her. She bade them join hands, and she laid her own left hand over both of theirs. Then she lifted her other hand high in the darkness and closed her eyes. In that instant, as if a connection had been made, the Warstone blazed so brightly it could not be looked upon, and when the blinding light was gone, so were the three of them.
When he woke it was quite dark in the Wood. Putting a hand to his head, Flidais could feel that his wound had healed. The pain seemed to be gone. So, too, however, was his right ear. He sat up slowly and looked around. His father was there.
Cernan had crouched down on his haunches, not very far away, and was regarding him gravely, the horned head held motionless. Flidais met the gaze for a long moment in silence.
“Thank you,” he said at length, speaking aloud.
The antlers dipped briefly in acknowledgment. Then Cernan said, also aloud, “He was not trying to kill you.”
Nothing has changed, Flidais thought. Nothing at all. It was too old a pattern, laid down far too long ago, when both he and Galadan were young, for the anger or the hurt to be strong. He said mildly, “He wasn’t trying not to, either.”
Cernan said nothing. It was dark in the forest, the moon not yet high enough to lend silver to the place where they were. Both of them, though, could see very well in the dark, and Flidais, looking at his father, read sorrow and guilt both, in the eyes of the god. It was the latter that disarmed him; it always had.
He said, with a shrug, “It could have been worse, I suppose.”
The antlers moved again. “I healed the wound,” his father said defensively.
“I know.” He felt the ragged edge of tissue where his ear had been. “Tell me,” he asked, “am I very ugly?”
Cernan tilted his magnificent head in appraisal. “No more than before,” he said judiciously.
Flidais laughed. And so, too, after a moment, did the god—a deep, rumbling, sensuous sound that reverberated through the Wood.
When the laughter subsided, it seemed very quiet among the trees, but only for those not tuned to Pendaran as were both of these, the forest god and his son. Even with only one ear, Flidais could hear the whispering of the Wood, the messages running back and forth like fire. It was why they were talking out loud: there was too much happening on the silent link. And there were other powers in Pendaran that night.
He was suddenly reminded of something. Of fire, to be precise. He said, “It really could have gone worse for me. I lied to him.”
His father’s eyes narrowed. “How so?”
“He wanted to know who had been in the Anor. He was aware that someone had. You know why. I said: only myself, which was not true.” He paused, then said softly, “Guinevere was, as well.”
Cernan of the Beasts rose to his feet with a swift animal-lithe motion. “That,” he said, “explains something.”
“What?”
In response, Flidais was offered an image. It was his father who was offering, and Cernan had never done him actual harm, although, until just now, little good, either. And so, in uncharacteristic trust, he opened his mind and received the image: a man walking swiftly through the forest with an utterly distinctive grace, not stumbling, even with the darkness and the entangling roots.
It was not the one he’d expected to see. But he knew, quite well, who this was, and so he knew what must have happened while he lay unconscious on the forest floor.
“Lancelot,” he breathed, an unexpected note, most of the way to awe, in his voice. His mind raced. “He will have been in Cader Sedat. Of course. The Warrior will have awakened him. And she has sent him away again.”
He had been in Camelot. Had seen those three in their first life, and seen them again, without their knowing him, in many of the returnings they had been forced to make. He knew the story. He was a part of it.
And now, he remembered with a flash of joy, like light in the darkness of the Wood, he knew the summoning name. That, however, brought back the memory of his oath. He said, “The child is in the Wood as well … Guinevere’s child.” And, urgently, “Where is my brother now?”
“He is running north,” Cernan replied. For an instant he hesitated. “he passed by the child, not a hundred yards away … some time ago, while you slept. He did not see or sense him. You have friends in the Wood angry for your shed blood: he was offered no messages. No one is speaking to him.”
Flidais closed his eyes and drew a ragged breath. So close. He had a vision of the wolf and the boy passing by each other in the blackness of the Wood in the hour before moonrise, passing by so near and not knowing, not ever to know. Or did they? he wondered. Was there a part of the soul that reached out, somehow, towards possibilities barely missed, futures that would never be, because of such a little distance in a forest at night? He felt a stir of air just then. Wind, with a hint—only imagined, perhaps—of something more.
He opened his eyes. He felt alert, sharpened, exalted still, by what had come to pass. There was no pain. He said, “I need you to do one thing for me. To help me keep an oath.”
The dark eyes of Cernan flashed with anger. “You, too?” he said softly, like a hunting cat. “I have done what I will. I have healed the damage my son did. How many of the Weaver’s bonds would you have me break?”
“I, too, am your son,” Flidais said, greatly daring, for he could feel the wrath of the god.
“I have not forgotten. I have done what I will do.”
Flidais stood up. “I cannot bind the forest in a matter such as this. I am not strong enough. But I do not want the child killed, even though he burned the tree. I swore an oath. You are god of the Wood as well as the Beasts. I need your help.”
Slowly, Cernan’s anger seemed to fade away. Flidais had to look up a long way to see his father’s face. “You are wrong. You do not need my help in this,” the god said, from the majesty of his great height. “You have forgotten something, wise child. For reasons I will never accept, Rakoth’s son has been given the Circlet of Lisen. The powers and spirits of the Wood will not harm him directly, not while he wears it. They will do something else, and you should know what that is, littlest one.”
He did know. “The grove,” he whispered. “He is being guided to the sacred grove.”
“And against what will meet him there,” said Cernan, “what will meet him and kill him, I have no power at all. Nor would I desire such power. Even could I do so, I would not intervene. He should never have been allowed to live. It is time for him to die, before he reaches his father and all hope ends.”
He was turning to go, having said all he intended to say, having done the one thing he felt bound to do, when his son replied, in a voice deep as tree roots, “Perhaps, but I think not. I think there is more to this weaving. You, too, have forgotten something.”
Cernan looked back. There was a first hint of silver in the space where they stood. It touched and moulded his naked form. He had a place where he wanted to be when the moon rose, and the very thought of what would be waiting for him there stirred his desire. He stayed, though, for one more moment, waiting.
“Lancelot,” said Flidais.
And turned, himself, to run with that always unexpected speed towards the grove where Lisen had been born so long ago in the presence of all the goddesses and gods.
In his anger and confusion, the bitterness of rejection, Darien had run a long way into the forest before realizing that it was not the wisest thing to have done.
He hadn’t intended to burn the tree, but events, the flow of what happened, never seemed to go the way he expected them to, they never seemed to go right. And when that happened, something else took place inside of him, and his power, the change in his eyes, came back and trees burned.
Even then, he’d only wanted the illusion—the same illusion of fire he’d shaped in the glade of the Summer Tree—but he’d been stronger this time, and uneasy in the presence of so many people, and his mother had been beautiful and cold and had sent him away. He hadn’t been able to control what he did, and so the fire had been real.
And he’d run into the shadows of the Wood from what seemed to be the colder, more hurtful shadows on the beach.
It was quite dark by now, the moon had not yet risen, and gradually, as his rage receded, Darien became increasingly aware that he was in danger. He knew nothing of the history of the Great Wood, but he was of the andain himself and so could half understand the messages running through Pendaran, messages about him, and what he had done, and what he wore about his brow.
As the sense of danger increased, so, too, grew his awareness that he was being forced in a particular direction. He thought about taking his owl shape to fly over and out of the forest, but with the thought he became overwhelmingly conscious of weariness. He had flown a long way very fast in that form, and he didn’t know if he could sustain it again. He was strong, but not infinitely so, and he usually needed a cresting tide of emotion to source his power: fear, hunger, longing, rage. Now he had none of them. He was aware of danger but couldn’t summon any response to it.
Numbed, indifferent, alone, he stayed in his own shape, wearing the clothes Finn had worn, and followed, unresisting, the subtly shifting paths of Pendaran Wood, letting the powers of the forest guide him where they would, to whatever was waiting for him there. He heard their anger, and the anticipation of revenge, but he offered no response to it. He walked, not really caring about anything, thinking about his mother’s imperious, cold face, her words: What are you doing here? What do you want, Darien?
What did he want? What could he be allowed to want, to hope for, dream of, desire? He had only been born less than a year ago. How could he know what he wanted? He knew only that his eyes could turn red like his father’s, and when they did trees burned and everyone turned away from him. Even the Light turned away. It had been beautiful and serene and sorrowful, and the Seer had put it on his brow, and it had gone out as soon as it was clasped to him.
He walked, did not weep. His eyes were blue. The half-moon was rising; soon it would shine down through spaces in the trees. The Wood whispered triumphantly, malice in the leaves. He was guided, unresisting, the Circlet of Lisen on his brow, into the sacred grove of Pendaran Wood to be slain.
Numberless were the years that grove had lain steeped in its power. Nor was there any place in any world with roots so deeply woven into the Tapestry. Against the antiquity of this place even Mörnir’s claiming of the Summer Tree in the Godwood of the High Kingdom had been but a blink of time ago—in the days when Iorweth had been summoned to Brennin from over the wide sea.
For thousands upon thousands of years before that day, Pendaran Wood had seen summers and winters in Fionavar, and through all the turnings and returnings of the seasons this grove and the glade within it had been the heart of the Wood. There was magic here. Ancient powers slumbered beneath the forest floor.
Here, more than a thousand years ago (a blink of time, no more), Lisen had been born in the rapt, silent presence of all the powers of the Wood and the shining company of the goddesses whose beauty had been hers from the beginning of her days. Here, too, had come Amairgen Whitebranch, first mortal, first child of the Weaver not born of the Wood, to dare a night in that grove, seeking a power for men that did not find its source in the blood magic of the priestesses. And here had he found that power, and more, as Lisen, wild and glorious, had returned to the violated glade of her birth to slay him in the morning and had fallen in love instead, and so left the Wood.
After that a great deal had changed. For the powers of the grove, for all of Pendaran, time ran up to the moment she had died, leaping from the balcony of the Anor, and then it moved forward more slowly, as if weighted down, from that day.
Since then, since those war-shattered days of the first coming of Rakoth Maugrim, only one other mortal had ever come into this place, and he, too, was a mage, a follower of Amairgen, and he was a thief. With guile and a cunning use of lore, Raederth the mage had known exactly when it might be safe to enter Pendaran in search of the thing he sought.
There was one day and one day only in every year when the Wood was vulnerable, when it grieved and could not guard itself. When the seasons came around to the day of Lisen’s leap, the river running past the Anor ran red into the killing sea with the memory of her blood, and all the spirits of the forest that could do so gathered at the foot of the Tower to mourn, and all those that could not travel projected their awareness towards that place, to see the river and the Anor through the eyes of those assembled there.
And one year on the morning of that day Raederth came. Without his source, casting no aura of power, he had entered the sacred grove and knelt in the glade by the birthing place, and he had taken the Circlet of Lisen that lay shining on the grass.
By the time the sun went down and the river ran clear again into the sea, he had been running himself, for a whole day without pause, and was very near to the eastern fringes of the forest.
Pendaran had become aware of him then, and of what he had done, but all the mightiest powers of the Wood were gathered by the sea and there was agonizingly little they could do. They made the forest paths change for him, the trees shift and close menacingly about the fleeing man, but he was too near the Plain, he could see the tall grass in the light of the setting sun, and his will and courage were very strong, greater than those of any ordinary thief, and he made his way—though they hurt him, they hurt him badly—out of the forest and away south again with a shining thing held in his hands that only Lisen had ever worn.
So now it was with exultation, with a fierce collective joy, that Pendaran became aware that the Circlet had come home. Home and in pain, the spirits whispered to each other. It had to be in agony, with its light extinguished on the brow of one who had torched a tree. He would go mad and be flayed, mind and body both, before they released him to death. So they vowed, one to another: the deiena to the leaves of the sentient trees; the leaves to the silent powers and the singing ones; the dark, shapeless things of dread to the old, unmoving, deep-rooted forces that had once been trees and were now something more and intimately versed in hate.
For a moment the whispering stopped. In that instant they heard Cernan, their lord. They heard him say aloud that it was past time for this one to die, and they gloried in what he said. There would be no staying them, no god’s voice to cry them off the kill.
The sacrifice was led to the grove: delicately he was guided, the forest paths made smooth and even for his tread; and as he walked his doom was decreed, and it was decided who would effect it. All the powers of the Wood were agreed: however bitter his sacrilege, however sharp the desire to kill lay upon them, they would not themselves act against one who wore Lisen’s Circlet about his head.
There was another power, though, the mightiest of all. A power of earth, not of forest, not bound by the griefs and constraints of the Wood. Even as Darien was being guided, unresisting, to the sacred grove, the spirits of Pendaran sent down their summons to the guardian who slept below that place. They woke the Oldest One.
It was very dark in the forest, but even when he wasn’t in his owl shape he could see very well at night. In some ways, in fact, the darkness was easier, which was another source of unease. It reminded him, this affinity, of the night voices calling from the winter of his boyhood and of how he had been drawn to them.
And that reminded him of Finn, who had held him back, and told him he had to hate the Dark, and then had left him alone. He remembered the day, he would always remember: the day of his first betrayal. He had made a flower in the snow and coloured it with the power of his eyes.
It was quiet in the grove. Now that he was here, the whisper of the leaves had died down to a gentle rustle in the night. There was a scent in the air he did not recognize. The grass of the glade was even and smooth and soft under his feet. He could not see the moon. Overhead, the stars shone down from the narrow circle of sky framed by the looming trees.
They hated him. Trees, leaves, the soft grass, the spirits present behind the trunks of trees, the deiena peeking through the leaves—all of them hated him, he knew. He should be terrified, a part of him acknowledged. He should be wielding his own power to break free of this place, to make them all pay in flame and smoke for their hate.
He couldn’t seem to do it. He was tired and alone, and he hurt in ways he could never have expressed. He was ready for an ending.
Near the northern edge of the glade there was a mound, grass-covered, and upon it there were night flowers open in the darkness. He walked over. The flowers were very beautiful; the scent of the grove came from them. Carefully, so as to give no further injury or offence, Darien sat down on the grass of the mound between two clusters of dark flowers.
Immediately there came a surging, thrashing sound of fury from the Wood. He leaped to his feet, an involuntary cry of protest escaping his throat. He’d been careful! He’d harmed nothing! He’d only wanted to sit awhile in the starlit silence before he died. His arms went out, openhanded, in a hopeless gesture of appeasement.
Gradually the sound faded, though there remained, after it was gone, a kind of drumming, a rumbling, scarcely audible, beneath the grass of the grove. Darien drew a breath and looked around again.
Nothing moved, save the leaves rustling slightly in the breeze. On the lowest branch of one of the trees of the grove a small geiala perched, its soft furry tail held inquisitively high. It regarded him with a preternatural gravity. Had he been in his owl shape, Darien knew, the geiala would have fled frantically at first sight of him. But he appeared harmless now, he supposed. A curiosity. Only a boy at the mercy of the Wood—which was merciless.
It was all right, he decided, with a kind of desperate acceptance. It was even easier this way. Everyone, from the time of his first memories, had spoken to him of choice. Of Light and Dark, and choosing between the two. But they hadn’t even been able to choose or decide about him among themselves: Pwyll, who’d taken him to the Summer Tree, had wanted Dari to be older, to come into this shape so he could come to greater knowledge. Cernan of the Beasts had wanted to know why he’d even been allowed to live. The white-haired Seer, fear in her eyes, had given him a shining object of Light and had watched with him as it went out. Then she’d sent him to his mother, who’d driven him away. Finn, even Finn, who’d told him to love the Light, had gone away without a farewell to find a kind of darkness of his own, in the wide spaces between the stars.
They spoke of choice, of his being balanced between his mother and his father. He was too finely balanced, he decided. It was too hard for all of them and, at the last, for him. It was easier this way, easier to surrender that need to decide, to give himself over to the Wood in this place of ancient power. To accept his dying, which would make things better for everyone. Dead, you couldn’t be lonely, Darien thought. You couldn’t be this hurt. They were all afraid of him, afraid of what he might do with the freedom to choose, of what he might become. They wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.
He remembered the face of the lios alfar that last cold morning of winter by the Summer Tree—how beautiful and shining he had been. And how afraid. He remembered the Seer with her white hair. She’d given him a gift, which no stranger had ever done, but he’d seen her eyes, the doubt and apprehension, even before the Light went out. It was true: they were all afraid of what he would choose.
Except his mother.
The thought found him totally unprepared. It hit with the force of revelation. She wasn’t afraid of what he might do. She was the only one who hadn’t tried to lure him, like the storm voices, or persuade him like the Seer. She had not tried to bind him to her, or even suggest a path to him. She had sent him away because the choice was his own, and she was the only one willing to allow that to be so. Maybe, he thought suddenly, maybe she trusted him.
In the grove, in the darkness, he saw the flowers on the mound where Lisen had been born, and he saw them clearly with the night vision of his father, thinking of his mother as he did.
For some reason, then, he remembered Vae and Shahar, the first mother and father he’d known. He thought about his two fathers: the one, a helpless minor soldier in the army of Brennin, obedient to the impersonal orders of the High King, unable to stay by his wife and sons in the winter cold, unable to keep them warm; the other, a god, and the strongest god, shaper of winter and war. Feared, as he, Darien, was feared for being his son.
He was supposed to choose between them.
Looked at one way, there was no choice at all to be made. His sight in the darkness, the fear he aroused, the dying of the Light on his brow, all spoke to that. It was as if the choice had already been made. On the other hand—
He never finished the thought.
“It would please me if you pleaded for your life.”
If the rocks of the earth’s crust could speak, they would have sounded like that. The words were a rumbling, a sliding, as of gigantic stones lurching into motion, a prelude to avalanche and earthquake.
Darien wheeled. There was a shape darker than darkness in the glade, and there was a huge hole in the ground, jagged and irregular, beside the creature that had spoken with the voice of the earth. Fear leaped in Darien, primeval, instinctive, despite all his resignation of the moments before. He felt his eyes explode to red; he lifted his hands, fingers spread, pointing—
And nothing happened.
There came a laugh, deep and low, like a shifting of boulders long at rest. “Not here,” said the shape. “Not in this grove, and not untutored as you are. I have your name, and your father’s. It is clear what you might become; enough, even, to test me somewhat had we met long after this. But tonight you are nothing in this place. You do not go nearly deep enough. It would please me,” it said again, “to hear you plead.”
Darien lowered his arms. He felt his eyes return to the blue he had from neither father nor mother, the blue that was his own; perhaps the only thing that was. He was silent, and in that silence he regarded what had come under the half-moon that rose at last above the eastern trees to shine palely down.
It held to no fixed shape or hue. Even as he watched, the creature oscillated ceaselessly through amorphous forms. It had four arms, then three, then none. Its head was a man’s, then a hideous mutant shape covered with slugs and maggots, then a boulder, featureless, as the maggots fell back into the grass and the gaping hole beside it. It was grey, and mottled brown, and black; it was huge. In all the blurred shiftings of its shape it had two legs, always, and one of them, Darien saw, was deformed. In one hand it carried a hammer that was the grey-black colour of wet clay and was almost as large as Darien himself.
Again it spoke, amid the suddenly absolute, fearful silence of the forest, and again it said, “Will you not plead, Circlet-bearer? Give me a voice to carry back to my sleep under stone. They have asked me to leave you alive, tree-burner. They want your flesh and your mind to flay when the Circlet is gone from your brow. I will offer you an easier, quicker release, if you but ask for it. Ask, grove-defiler. Only ask; there is nothing else you can do.”
The face was almost human now, but huge and grey, and there were worms crawling over it, in and out of the nose and mouth. The voice was the thickened voice of earth and stone. It said, “It is night in the sacred grove, son of Maugrim. You are nothing beside me, and less than that. You do not go nearly deep enough even to make me swing my hammer.”
“I do,” said another voice, and Lancelot du Lac entered the moonlit grove.
They were sleeping on the beach just south of the Anor. Brendel had disobeyed Flidais’s instructions to the extent of going inside alone and bringing out blankets and bedding from the lower rooms where Lisen’s guards had slept. He did not go upstairs again, for fear of once more stirring Galadan’s awareness of that place.
On a pallet beside Arthur, a little apart from the others, Jennifer lay in the motionless sleep of utter exhaustion. Her head was on his shoulder, one hand rested on his broad chest, and her golden hair was loose on the pillow they shared. Wide awake, the Warrior listened to her breathing and felt the beat of the heart he loved.
Then the heartbeat changed. She hurtled bolt upright, instantly awake, her gaze riveted on the high, watching moon. Her face was so white it made her hair look dark. He saw her draw a shuddering, afflicted breath. He felt it as a pain within himself.
He said, “He is in danger, Guinevere?”
She said nothing at all, her gaze never leaving the face of the moon. One hand was over her mouth. He took the other, as gently as he could. It trembled like an aspen leaf in an autumn wind. It was colder than it should ever have been in the mild midsummer night.
He said, “What do you see? Is he in danger, Guinevere?”
“They both are,” she whispered, eyes on the moon. “They both are, my love. And I sent them both away.”
He was silent. He looked up at the moon, and he thought of Lancelot. He held one of Guinevere’s hands clasped between both of his own broad, square ones, and he wished her peace and heart’s ease with longing fiercer and more passionate than any he had ever felt for his own release from doom.
“I go as deep as you,” said the tall man quietly as he entered the glade. He had a drawn sword in his hand; it shimmered faintly, catching the silver of the moon. “I know who you are,” he went on, speaking softly and without haste. “I know you, Curdardh, and whence you come. I am here as champion of this child. If you wish his death, you will have first to accomplish my own.”
“Who are you?” the demon rumbled. The trees were loud again all around them, Darien realized. He looked at the man who had come and he wondered.
“I am Lancelot,” he heard. A memory stirred at the back of his mind, a memory of games-playing with Finn in the winter snow. A game of the Warrior, with his King Spear and his friend, his tanist, Finn had said. First of the Warrior’s company, whose name was Lancelot. Who had loved the Warrior’s Queen, whose name, whose name …
The demon, Curdardh, shifted position, with a sound of granite dragging over grass. It hefted its hammer and said, “I had not thought to see you here, but I am not surprised.” It laughed softly, gravel rolling down a slope. It shifted shape again. It had two heads now, and both were demon heads. It said, “I will claim no quarrel with you, Lancelot, and Pendaran knows that you lived a winter in a forest and did no evil there. You will come to no harm if you leave here now, but I must kill you if you stay.”
With an absolutely focused inner quietude, Lancelot said, “You must try to kill me. It is not an easy task, Curdardh, even for you.”
“I am deep as the earth’s core, swordsman. My hammer was forged in a pit so deep the fire burns downwards.” It was said as a fact, without bravado. “I have been here since Pendaran was here,” said Curdardh, the Oldest One. “For all that time I held this grove sacrosanct, waking only when it was violated. You have a blade and unmatched skill with it. It will not be enough. I am not without mercy. Leave!”
With the last rumbled command, the trees at the edge of the grove shook and the earth rocked. Darien fought to keep his balance. Then, as the tremor came to an end, Lancelot said, with a courtesy strangely, eerily befitting to the place, “I have more than you think, though I thank you for the kindness of your praise. You should know, before we begin, for we are going to do battle here, Curdardh, that I have lain dead in Caer Sidi, which is Cader Sedat, which is the Corona Borealis of the Kings among the stars. You will know that that castle lies at the axle-tree of all the worlds, with the sea pounding at its walls and all the stars of heaven turning about it.”
Darien’s heart was racing, though he understood only a fragment of what he had heard. He had remembered something else: Finn, who in those days had seemed to know everything there was in the world to know, had told him that his mother had been a Queen. The knowledge made everything even more confusing than it had been already. He swallowed. He felt like a child.
“Even so,” Curdardh was saying to Lancelot. “Even with where you have lain, you are mortal, swordsman. Would you die for the son of Rakoth Maugrim?”
“I am here,” said Lancelot simply, and the battle began.