“I will not go within,” Flidais said, turning away from the mist. He looked up at the man standing beside him. “Not even the andain are proof against wandering lost in Ra-Lathen’s woven shadows. Had I any words left that might prevail upon you, I would urge you again not to go there.”
Lancelot listened with that always grave courtesy that was so much a part of him, the patience that seemed virtually inexhaustible. He made one ashamed, Flidais thought, to be importunate or demanding, to fall too far short of the mark set by that gentleness.
And yet he was not without humour. Even now there was a glint of amusement in his eyes as he looked down on the diminutive andain.
“I was wondering,” he said mildly, “if it were actually possible that you might run out of words. I was beginning to doubt it, Taliesin.”
Flidais felt himself beginning to flush, but there was no malice in Lancelot’s teasing, only a laughter they could share. And a moment later they did.
“I am bereft neither of words nor yet of arguments of dappled, confusing inconsequentiality,” Flidais protested. “Only of time am I now run short, given where we stand. I am not about to try to restrain you physically here on the borders of Daniloth. I am somewhat wiser than that, at least.”
“At least,” Lancelot agreed. Then, after a pause, “Would you really want to restrain me now, even if you could? Knowing what you know?”
An unfairly difficult question. But Flidais, who had been the wisest, most precocious child of all in his day, was a child no longer. Not without sorrow, he said, “I would not. Knowing the three of you, I would not constrain you from doing a thing she asked. I fear the child, though, Lancelot. I fear him deeply.” And to this the man made no reply.
The first hint of grey appeared in the sky, overture to morning and all that the day might bring. To the west, Amairgen’s ghostly ship was just then sailing north along Sennett Strand, its passengers looking out upon a town given to the fire long ago, long since turned to ashes and to shards of pottery.
A bird lifted its voice in song behind them from some hidden place among the trees of the dark forest. They stood between wood and mist and looked at each other for what, Flidais knew, might be the last time.
“I am grateful for your guidance to this place,” said Lancelot. “And for the tending of my wounds.”
Flidais snorted brusquely and turned away. “Couldn’t have done the one without the other,” he growled. “Couldn’t have guided you anywhere, let alone through the whole of a night, unless I’d first done something about those wounds.”
Lancelot smiled. “Should I unsay my thanks, then? Or is this some of your dappled inconsequentiality?”
He was, Flidais decided, altogether too clever, always had been. It was the key to his mastery in battle: Lancelot had always been more intelligent than anyone he fought. The andain found himself smiling back and nodding a reluctant agreement.
“How is your hand?” he asked. It had been by far the worst of the wounds: the palm savagely scored by the burning of Curdardh’s hammer.
Lancelot didn’t even spare it a glance. “It will do. I shall make it do, I suppose.” He looked north towards the mists of Daniloth looming in front of them. Something changed in his eyes. It was almost as if he heard a horn, or a call of another kind. “I must go, I think, or there will have been no point in our having come so far. I hope we meet again, old friend, in a time of greater light.”
Flidais found himself blinking rapidly. He managed a shrug. “It is in the Weaver’s hands,” he said. He hoped it sounded casual.
Lancelot said gravely, “Half a truth, little one. It is in our own hands, as well, however maimed they are. Our own choices matter, or I would not be here. She would not have asked me to follow the child. Fare kindly, Taliesin. Flidais. I hope you find what you want.”
He touched the andain lightly on the shoulder, and then he turned and after a dozen strides was swallowed up by the mists of the Shadowland. But I have, Flidais was thinking. I have found what I want! The summoning name was singing in his head, reverberating in the chambers of his heart. He had sought it so long, and now it was his. He had what he wanted.
Which did not do anything to explain why he stood rooted to that spot for so long afterwards, gazing north into the dense, impenetrable shadows.
It was only afterwards, thinking about it, that she consciously understood that this was something of which she must have always been inwardly aware: the terrible danger that lay in wait for her if she ever fell in love.
How else explain why Leyse of the Swan Mark, fairest and most desired of all the women in Daniloth—long sought by Ra-Tenniel himself, in vain—had chosen to abjure each and every such overture, however sweetly sung, these long, long years?
How else indeed?
The Swan Mark, alone of the lios alfar, had not gone to war. Dedicated in memory of Lauriel, for whom they were named, to serenity and peace, they lingered, few in number, in the Shadowland, wandering alone and in pairs through the days and nights since Ra-Tenniel had led the brothers and sisters of the other two Marks to war on the Plain.
Leyse was one of those who wandered alone. She had come, early of this mild summer’s dawning, to glimpse the muted light of sunrise—all light was muted here—through the waters of the upward-rushing waterfall of Fiathal, her favourite place within the Shadowland.
Though truly her favourite place of all lay beyond the borders, north, on the banks of Celyn Lake, where the sylvain could be gathered in spring by one who was careful not to be seen. That place was closed to her now. It was a time of war outside the protection of the mist and what it did to time.
So she had come south instead, to the waterfall, and she was waiting for the sunrise, sitting quietly, clad as ever in white, beside the rushing waters.
And so it was that she saw, just before the sun came up, a mortal man walk into Daniloth.
She had a momentary spasm of fear—this had not happened for a very long time—but then she relaxed, knowing the mists would take him, momentarily, and leave him lost to time, no threat to anyone.
She had an instant to look at him. The graceful, slightly stiff gait, the high carriage of his head, dark hair. His clothes were nondescript. There was blood on them. He carried a sword, buckled about his waist. He saw her, from across the green, green glade.
That did not matter. The mist would have him, long before he could cross to where she sat.
It did not. She raised a hand almost without thought. She spoke the words of warding to shield him, to leave him safe in time. And, speaking them, she shaped her own doom, the doom her inward self had tried to avoid, all these long years, and had instead prepared, as a feast upon the grass.
The sun came up. Light sparkled gently, mildly, in the splash of the upward-running falls. It was very beautiful. It always was.
She hardly saw. He walked towards her over the carpet of the grass, and she rose, so as to be standing, drops of water in her hair, on her face, when he came to where she was. Her eyes, she knew, had come to crystal. His were dark.
She thought, afterwards, that she might have known who he was before he even spoke his name. It was possible. The mind had as many loops as did time itself, even here in Daniloth. She forgot who had told her that.
The tall man came up to her. He stopped. He said, with deepest, gravest courtesy, “Good morning, my lady. I am come in peace and trespass only by reason of utmost need. I must ask of you your aid. My name is Lancelot.”
She had already given her aid, she might have said, else he would not have walked this far, not be seeing her now. He would be locked in a soundless, sightless world of his own. Forever. Until the Loom was stilled.
She might have said that, were her eyes not crystal—past that, even—brighter, clearer than she had thought they could go. She might have, had her heart not already been given and lost even before she heard the name, before she knew who he was.
There were droplets of water in her hair. The grass was very green. The sun shone down gently through the shadows, as it always did. She looked into his eyes, knowing who he was, and already, even in that first moment, she sensed what her own destiny was now to be.
She heard it: the first high, distant, impossibly beautiful notes.
She said, “I am Leyse of the Swan Mark. Be welcome to Daniloth.”
She could see him drinking in her beauty, the delicate music of her voice. She let her eyes slide into a shade of green and then return to crystal again. She offered a hand and let him take it and bring it to his lips.
Ra-Tenniel would have passed a sleepless night, walking through fields of flowers, shaping another song, had she done as much for him.
She looked into Lancelot’s eyes. So dark. She saw kindness there, and admiration. Gratitude. But behind everything else, and above it all, shaping the worlds he knew and woven through them all, over and over, endlessly, she saw Guinevere. And the irrevocable finality, the fact of his absolute love.
What she was spared—a dimension of his kindness—was seeing in his calm gaze even a hint of how many, many times this meeting had come to pass. In how many forests, meadows, worlds; beside how many liquescent waterfalls, making sweet summer music for a maiden’s heartbreak.
She was shielded by him, even as she shaped her own warding, from knowing how much a part of the long threefold doom this was. How easily and entirely her sudden transfigured blazing could be gathered within the telling, one more note of an oft-repeated theme, a thread of a colour already in the Tapestry.
Her beauty deserved more, the incandescent, crystalline flourishing of it. So, also, did the centuries-long simplicity of her waiting. That, too, by any measure, deserved more.
And he knew this, knew it as intimately as he knew his name, as deeply as he named his own transgression within his heart. He stood in that place of sheerest beauty within the Shadowland and he shouldered her sorrow, as he had done so many others, and took the guilt and the burden of it for his own.
And all this happened in the space of time it might take a man to cross a grassy sward and stand before a lady in the morning light.
It was by an act of will, of consummate nobility, that Leyse kept the shading of her eyes as bright as before. She held them to crystal—fragile, breakable crystal, she was thinking—and she said, with music in her voice, “How may I be of aid to thee?”
Only the last word betrayed her. He gave no hint that he had heard the caress in it, the longing she let slip into that one word. He said formally, “I am on a quest set me by my lady. There will have been another who came within the borders of your land last night, flying in the shape of an owl, though not truly so. He is on a journey of his own, a very dark road, and I fear he may have been caught within the shadows over Daniloth, unknowing in the night. It is my charge to keep him safe to take that road.”
There was nothing she wanted more than to lie down again beside the rising, rushing waters of the falls of Fiathal with this man beside her until the sun had gone and the stars and the Loom had spun its course.
“Come, then,” was all she said, and led him from that place of gentlest beauty and enchantment, in search of Darien.
Along the southern margins of Daniloth they walked side by side, a little distance between, but not a great deal, for he was deeply aware of what had happened to her. They did not speak. All around them the muted, serene spaces of grass and hillocks stretched. There were flowing rivers, and flowers in pale, delicate hues growing along their banks. Once he knelt, to drink from a stream, but she shook her head quickly, and he did not.
She had seen his palm, though, as he cupped it to drink, and when he stood she took it between both her own and looked upon his wound. He felt the pain of it then, seeing it in her eyes, more keenly than he had when he’d lifted the black hammer in the sacred grove.
She did not ask. Slowly she released his hand—did so as if surrendering it to everything in the world that was not her touch—and they went on. It was very quiet. They passed no one else walking as they went.
Once, only, they came upon a man clad in armour, carrying a sword, his face contorted with rage and fear. He seemed to Lancelot to be frozen in place, motionless, his foot thrust forward in a long stride he would never complete.
Lancelot looked at Leyse, clad in white beside him, but he said nothing.
Another time it seemed to him that he heard the sound of horses rushing towards them, very near. He spun, shielding her reflexively, but he saw no one at all riding past, whether friend or foe. He could tell, though, from the turning of her gaze, that she did see a company riding there, riding right through the two of them perhaps, lost, as well, in a different way, amid the mists of Daniloth.
He released his grip on her arm. He apologized. She shook her head, with a sadness that went into him like a blade.
She said, “This land was always dangerous to anyone other than our kind, even before Lathen Mistweaver’s time, when these shadows came down. Those men were horsemen from before the Bael Rangat, and they are lost. There is nothing we can do for them. They are in no time we know, to be spoken to or saved. Had we space for the telling, I might spin you the tale of Revor, who risked that fate in the service of Light a thousand years ago.”
“Had we space for the telling,” he said, “I would take pleasure in that.”
She seemed about to say something more, but then her eyes—they were a pale, quiet blue now, much like the last of the flowers they had passed—looked beyond his face, and he turned.
West of them lay a thicket of trees. The leaves of the trees were of many colours even in midsummer, and the woods were very beautiful, offering a promise of peace, of quiet shade, of a place where the sunlight might slant down through the leaves, with a brook murmuring not far away.
Above the southernmost of the trees of that small wood, at the very edge of Daniloth, an owl hung suspended, wings spread wide and motionless in the clear morning air.
Lancelot looked, and he saw the sheath of a dagger held in the owl’s mouth glint with a streak of blue in the mild light. He turned back to the woman beside him. Her eyes had changed colour. They were dark, looking upon the owl that hung in the air before them.
“Not this one,” she said, before he could speak. He heard the fear, the denial in her voice, “Oh, my lord, surely not this one?”
He said, “This is the child I have been sent to follow and to guard.”
“Can you not see the evil within him?” Leyse cried. Her voice was loud in the quiet of that place. There was music in it still, but strained now, and overlaid by many things.
“I know it is there,” he said. “I know also that there is a yearning after light. Both are part of his road.”
“Then let the road end here,” she said. It was a plea. She turned to him. “My lord, there is too much darkness in this one. I can feel it even from where we stand.”
She was a Child of Light, and she stood in Daniloth. Her certainty planted a momentary doubt in his own heart. It never took root; he had his own certainties.
He said, “There is darkness everywhere now. We cannot avoid it; only break through, and not easily. In the danger of this might lie our hope of passage.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “Who is he?” she asked finally.
He had been hoping she would not ask, for many reasons. But when the question came, he did not turn away. “Guinevere’s child,” he said levelly, though it cost him something. “And Rakoth Maugrim’s. He took her by force in Starkadh. And therein lies the evil you see, and the hope of light beyond.”
There was pain now, overlying the fear in her eyes. And under both of those things, at bedrock, was love. He had seen it before, too many times.
She said, “And you think she will prove stronger?” Music in her voice again, distant but very clear.
“It is a hope,” he replied, gravely honest. “No more than that.”
“And you would act and have me act upon that hope?” Music still.
“She has asked me to guard him,” he said quietly. “To see him through to the choice he has to make. I can do no more than ask you. I have only the request.”
She shook her head. “You have more than that,” she said.
And with the words she turned away from him, leaving her heart. She looked at the motionless bird, child of Dark and Light. Then she gestured with her long graceful hands and sang a word of power to shape a space through which he could fly over the Shadowland. She made a corridor for Darien, a rift in the mists of time that coiled through Daniloth, and she watched with an inner, brilliant sight, as he flew north along that corridor, over the mound of Atronel and beyond, coming out at length above the River Celyn, where she lost him.
It took a long time. Lancelot waited beside her, silent all the while. He had seen Darien’s flight begin, but when the owl had gone some distance north over the many-coloured leaves of the forest, it was lost to his mortal sight. He continued to wait, knowing, among many other things, that this was as far as he would be able to follow Guinevere’s child, the last service he could offer. It was a sorrow.
He was conscious, as he stood beside Leyse and the pale sun climbed higher in the sky, of a great weariness and not a little pain. There was a fragrance in the meadow, and birdsong in the woods nearby. He could hear the sound of water. Without actually being aware of having done so, he found himself sitting upon the grass at the woman’s feet. And then, in a trance half shaped by Daniloth and half by marrow-deep exhaustion, he lay down and fell asleep.
When the owl had passed beyond the northernmost borders of her land and she had lost him beyond the mist, Leyse let her mind come back to where she stood. It was early in the afternoon, and the light was as bright as it ever became. Even so, she, too, was very tired. What she had done was not an easy thing, made harder for one of the Swan Mark by the inescapable resonance of evil she had sensed.
She looked down upon the man, fast asleep beside her. There was a quiet now in her heart, an acceptance of what had come to her beside the waters of Fiathal. She knew he would not stay unless she bound him by magic to this place, and she would not do that.
One thing, only, she would allow herself. She looked at his sleeping face for a very long time, committing it to the memory of her soul. Then she lay down beside him on the soft, scented grass and slipped her hand into his wounded one. No more than that, for in her pride she would go no further. And linked in that fashion for a too-brief summer’s afternoon, joined only by their interwoven fingers, she fell asleep for one time and the only time beside Lancelot, whom she loved.
Through the afternoon they slept, and in the quiet peace of Daniloth nothing came, not so much as a dream, to cause either of them to stir. Far to the east, across the looming barrier of the mountains, the Dwarves of Banir Lök and Banir Tal waited for sunset and the judgement of their Crystal Lake. Nearer, on the wide Plain, a Dwarf and an Eridun and an exile of the Dalrei reached the camp of the High King and were made welcome there, before the army set out for the last hours of the ride to Gwynir and the eastern borders of this Shadowland.
And north of them, as they slept, Darien was flying to his father.
They woke at the same time, as the sun went down. In the twilight Lancelot gazed at her, and he saw her hair and eyes gleam in the dusk beside him, beautiful and strange. He looked down at her long fingers, laced through his own. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the last of that deep peace wash over him like a tide. A withdrawing tide.
Very gently, then, he disengaged his hand. Neither of them spoke. He rose. There was a faint phosphorescence to the grass and to the leaves of the wood nearby, as if the growing things of Daniloth were reluctant to yield the light. It was the same gleaming he saw in her eyes and in the halo of her hair. There were echoes of many things in his mind, memories. He was careful not to let her see.
He helped her rise. Slowly the glow of light faded—from the leaves and the grass and then, last of all, from Leyse. She turned to the west and pointed. He followed the line of her arm and saw a star.
“Lauriel’s,” she said. “We have named the evening star for her.” And then she sang. He listened, and partway through he wept, for many reasons.
When her song was done she turned and saw his tears. She said nothing more, nor did he speak. She led him north through Daniloth, sheltered from the mist and the loops of time by her presence. All the night they walked. She led him up the mound of Atronel, past the Crystal Throne, and then down the other side, and Lancelot du Lac was the first mortal man ever to ascend that place.
In time they came to the southern bay of Celyn Lake, the arm that dipped down into Daniloth, and they went along its banks to the north, not because it was quickest or easiest but because she loved this place and wanted him to see. There were night flowers in bloom along the shore, giving off their scent, and out over the water he saw strange, elusive figures dancing on the waves and he heard music all the while.
At length they came to the edge of a river, where it left the waters of the lake, and they turned to the west as the first hint of dawn touched the sky behind them. And a very little while later Leyse stopped, and turned to Lancelot.
“The river is quiet here,” she said, “and there are stepping stones along which you may cross. I can go no farther. On the other side of Celyn you will be in Andarien.”
He looked upon the beauty of her for a long time in silence. When he opened his mouth to speak he was stopped, for she placed her fingers over his lips.
“Say nothing,” she whispered. “There is nothing you can say.”
It was true. A moment longer he stood there; then very slowly she drew her hand away from his mouth, and he turned and crossed the river over the smooth round stones and so left Daniloth.
He didn’t go far. Whether it was an instinct of war, or of love, or of the two bound into each other, he went only as far as a small copse of trees on the banks of the river near the lake. There were willows growing in the Celyn, and beautiful flowers, silver and red. He didn’t know their name. He sat down in that place of beauty as the dawn broke—dazzling after the muted light of the Shadowland—and he gazed out upon the ruined desolation of Andarien. He looped his hands over his knees, placed his sword where he could reach it, and composed himself to wait, facing west towards the sea.
She waited as well, though she had told herself all through the long night’s silent walking that she would not linger. She had not expected him to stay so near, though, and her resolution faltered as soon as he was not there.
She saw him walk towards the aum trees and then sit down amid the sylvain she loved in her most cherished place of any in this one world she knew. She knew he could not see her standing here, and it was not easy for her to see clearly, either, beyond the encircling billows of the mist.
She waited, nonetheless, and towards the middle of the afternoon a company of some fifty people approached from the west, along the riverbank.
She saw him rise. She saw the company stop not far away from him. Leading them was Brendel of the Kestrel Mark, and she knew that if he looked to the south he would see her. He did not.
He remained with the others and watched with the others as a woman, fair-haired, very tall, walked towards Lancelot. It seemed to Leyse that the mists parted a little for her then—a blessing or a curse, she could not say—and she saw Lancelot’s face clearly as Guinevere came up to him.
She saw him kneel, and take her hand in his good one, and bring it to his lips, the same as he had done with hers when he had first approached her over the grass by Fiathal.
Yet not the same. Not the same.
And it came to pass that in that moment Leyse of the Swan Mark heard her song.
She went away from that place, walking alone, hidden by the screening of the shadows, and within her a song was building all the time, a last song.
Along the riverbank farther west she found, amid the willows and corandiel, a small craft of aum wood with a single sail white as her own white robe. She had walked past this place a thousand times before and never seen that boat. It had not been there, she realized. The music of her song had called it forth. She’d always thought that she would have to build her boat, when the time came, and had wondered how she would.
Now she knew. The song was within her, rising all the while, shaping a sweeter and sweeter sadness and a promise of peace to come beyond the waves.
She stepped down into the boat and pushed off from the restraining shallows and the willows. As she drifted close to the northern bank of the Celyn she plucked one red flower of sylvain and one of silver to carry with her, as the music carried her and the river carried her to the sea.
She did not know, and it was a granting of grace that she was spared the knowing, how very much an echo this, too, was of the story she had been brought into, how deeply woven it was into that saddest story of all the long tales told. She drifted with the current with her flowers in her hand, and at length she reached the sea.
And that craft, shaped by magic, brought into being by a longing that was of the very essence of the lios alfar, did not founder among the waves of the wide sea. Westward it went, and farther westward still, and farther yet, until at length it had gone far enough and had reached the place where everything changed, including the world.
And in this fashion did Leyse of the Swan Mark sail past the waters where the Soulmonger had lain in wait, and so became the first of her people for past a thousand years to reach the world the Weaver had shaped for the Children of Light alone.