The sun had set and so the glow of the walls had faded. Torches flickered in the brackets now. They burned without smoke; Kim didn’t know how. She stood with the others at the foot of the ninety-nine stairs that led to the Crystal Lake, and a feeling of dread was in her heart.
There were eight of them there. Kaen had brought two Dwarves she didn’t know; she and Loren had come with Matt; and Miach and Ingen were present for the Dwarfmoot, to bear witness to the judgement of Calor Diman. Loren carried an object wrapped in a heavy cloth, and so did one of Kaen’s companions. The crystals—fruits of an afternoon’s crafting. Gifts for the Lake.
Kaen had donned a heavy black cloak clasped at the throat with a single brooch worked in gold, with a vein of blue thieren that flashed in the torchlight. Matt was dressed as he always was, in brown with a wide leather belt, and boots, and no adornment at all. Kim looked at his face. It was expressionless, but he seemed strangely vivid, flushed, almost as if he were glowing. No one spoke. At a gesture from Miach, they began to climb.
The stairs were very old, the stone crumbling in places, worn smooth and slippery in others, an inescapable contrast to the polished, highly worked architecture everywhere else. The walls were rough, unfinished, with sharp edges that might cut if not avoided. It was hard to see clearly. The torches cast shadows as much as light.
The primitive stairway seemed to Kim to be carrying her back in time more than anything else. She was profoundly aware of being within a mountain. There was a growing consciousness of raw power massed all about her, a power of rock and stone, of earth upthrust to challenge sky. An image came into her mind: titanic forces battling, with mountains for boulders to hurl at each other. She felt the absence of the Baelrath with an intensity that bordered on despair.
They came to the door at the top of the stairs.
It was not like the ones she had seen—entranceways of consummate artistry that could slide into and out of the surrounding walls, or high carved arches with their perfectly measured proportions. She had known, halfway up, that this door wouldn’t be like any of the others.
It was of stone, not particularly large, with a heavy, blackened iron lock. They waited on the threshold as Miach walked up to it, leaning upon his staff. He drew an iron key from within his robe and turned it slowly, with some effort in the lock. Then he grasped the handle and pulled. The door swung open, revealing the dark night sky beyond, with a handful of stars framed in the opening.
They walked out in silence to the meadow of Calor Diman.
She had seen it before, in a vision on the road to Ysanne’s lake. She’d thought that might have prepared her. It had not. There was no preparing for this place. The blue-green meadow lay in the bowl of the mountains like a hidden, fragile thing of infinite worth. And cradled within the meadow, as the meadow lay within the circle of the peaks, were the motionless waters of the Crystal Lake.
The water was dark, almost black. Kim had a swift apprehension of how deep and cold it would be. Here and there, though, along the silent surface of the water she could see a gleam of light, as the Lake gave back the light of the early stars. The thinning moon had not yet risen; she knew Calor Diman would shine when the moon came up over Banir Lök.
And she suddenly had a sense—only a sense, but that was a good deal more than enough—of how utterly alien, how terrifying this place would be when a full moon shone down on it, and Calor Diman shone back upon the sky, casting an inhuman light over the meadow and the mountainsides. This would be no place for mortals on such a night. Madness would lie in the sky and in the deep waters, in every gleaming blade of grass, in the ancient, watchful, shining crags.
Even now, by starlight, it was not easy to bear. She had never realized how sharp a danger lay in beauty. And there was something more, as well, something deeper and colder, as the Lake itself was deep and cold. Each passing second, while the night gathered and the stars grew brighter, made her more and more conscious of magic here, waiting to be unleashed. She was grateful beyond words for the green shielding of the vellin stone: Matt’s gift, she remembered.
She looked at him, who had been here on a night of the full moon, and had survived and been made King by that. She looked, with a newer, deeper understanding, and saw that he was gazing back at her, his face still vivid with that strange, glowing intensity. He had come home, she realized. The tide of the Lake in his heart had drawn him back. There was no longer any need to fight its pull.
No need to fight. Only judgement to be endured. With so very much at risk here in this mountain bowl, most of the way, it seemed, to the stars. She thought of the army of the Dwarves across the dividing range of the mountains. She had no idea of what to do, none at all.
Matt came over to her. With a gesture of his head, not speaking, he motioned her to walk a little way apart. She went with him from the others. She put up the hood of her robe and plunged her hands in the pockets. It was very cold. She looked down at Matt and said nothing, waiting.
He said, very softly, “I asked you, a long time ago, to save some of your words of praise for Ysanne’s lake against the time when you might see this place.”
“It is past beauty,” she replied. “Beyond any words I might offer. But I am very much afraid, Matt.”
“I know. I am, as well. If I do not show it, it is because I have made my peace with whatever judgement is to come. What I did forty years ago I did in the name of Light. It may still have been an act of evil. Such things have happened before and will happen again. I will abide the judging.”
She had never seen him like this. She felt humbled in his presence. Behind Matt, Miach was whispering something to Ingen, and then he motioned Loren to approach, and Kaen’s companion, carrying their crystals wrapped in cloth.
Matt said, “It is time now, I think. And it may be an ending to my time. I have something for you, first.”
He lowered his head and brought a hand up to the patch over his lost eye. She saw him lift the patch and, for the first time, she caught a glimpse of the ruined socket behind. Then something white fell out, and he caught it in the palm of his hand. It was a tiny square of soft cloth. Matt opened it—to show her the Baelrath gleaming softly in his hand.
Kim let out a wordless cry.
“I am sorry,” Matt said. “I know you will have been tormented by fear of who had it, but I have had no chance to speak with you. I took it from your hand when we were first attacked by the doorway to Banir Lök. I thought it would be best if I … kept an eye on it until we knew what was happening. Forgive me.”
She swallowed, took the Warstone, put it on. It flared on her finger, then subsided again. She said, reaching for the tone that used to come so easily to her, “I will forgive you anything and everything from now until the Loom’s last thread is woven, except that wretched pun.”
His mouth crooked sideways. She wanted to say more, but there really wasn’t time. It seemed that there had never been enough time. Miach was calling to them. Kim sank to her knees in the deep, cold grass and Matt embraced her with infinite gentleness. Then he kissed her once, on the lips, and turned away.
She followed him back to where the others stood. There was power on her hand now, and she could feel it responding to the magic of this place. Slowly, gradually, but there was no mistaking it. And suddenly, now that it was hers again, she remembered some of the things the Baelrath had caused her to do. There was a price to power. She had been paying it all along, and others had been paying it with her: Arthur, Finn, Ruana and the Paraiko. Tabor.
Not a new grief but sterner, now, and sharper. She had no chance to think about it. She came up to stand beside Loren, in time to hear Miach speak, with a hushed gravity. “You will not need to be told that there is no history for this. We are living through days that have no patterns to draw upon. Even so, the Dwarfmoot has taken counsel, and this is what shall be done, with six of us to witness a judgement between two.”
He paused to draw breath. There was no stir of wind in the mountain bowl. The cold night air was still, as if waiting, and still, too, were the starry waters of the Lake.
Miach said, “You will each unveil your crystal fashionings that we may take note of them and what they might mean, and then you will cast them together into the waters and we will wait for a sign from the Lake. If there is fault found with this, speak to it now.” He looked at Kaen.
Who shook his head. “No fault,” he said, in the resonant, beautiful voice. “Let he who turned away from his people and from Calor Diman seek to avoid this hour.” He looked handsome and proud in his black cloak, with the golden and blue brooch holding it about him.
Miach looked to Matt.
“No fault,” said Matt Sören.
Nothing more. When, Kim thought, a lump in her throat, had he ever wasted a word in all the time she’d known him? Legs spread wide, hands on his hips, he seemed to be as one with the rocks all around them, as enduring and as steadfast.
And yet he had left these mountains. She thought of Arthur in that moment, and the children slain. She grieved in her heart for the sins of good men, caught in a dark world, longing for light.
The question at issue, Miach had said in Seithr’s Hall, is whether the King can surrender the Lake.
She didn’t know. None of them did. They were here to find out.
Miach turned back to Kaen and nodded. Kaen walked over to his companion, who held up his hands, the covered crystal within them, and with a sweeping, graceful motion Kaen drew the cloth away.
Kim felt as if she’d been punched in the chest. Tears sprang to her eyes. Her breath was torn away and she had to fight for some time before it came back. And all the while she was inwardly cursing the terrible unfairness, the corruscating, ultimate irony of this—that someone so twisted with evil, with deeds so very black laid down at the door of his heart, should have so much beauty at his command.
He had shaped, out of crystal, in miniature, the Cauldron of Khath Meigol.
It was exactly as she had seen it, in her long, dark mind journey from the Temple in Gwen Ystrat. When she had ventured so far into the blackness of Rakoth’s designs that she could never have come back without Ruana’s chanting to shield her and give her a reason to return.
It was exactly the same, but with everything reversed, somehow. The black Cauldron she had seen, the source of the killing winter in midsummer and then the death rain that had unpeopled Eridu, was now a glittering, delicate, ineffable glorious thing of crystalline light, even to the runic lettering around the rim and the symmetrical design at the base. Kaen had taken the image of that dark, shattered Cauldron and made of it a thing that caught the starlight as brightly as did the Lake.
It was a thing to be longed for, to be heartachingly desired by every single one of the Weaver’s mortal children in all the worlds of time. Both for itself, and for what it symbolized: the return from death, from beyond the walls of Night, the passionate yearning of all those fated to die that there might be a coming back or a going on. That the ending not be an ending.
Kim looked at the Dwarf who had done this, saw him gaze at his own creation, and understood in that moment how he could have come to release Maugrim and surrender the Cauldron into his hand. Kaen’s, she realized, was the soul of an artist carried too far. The search, the yearning for knowledge and creation taken to the point where madness began.
Using the Cauldron would have meant nothing to such a one: it was the finding that mattered, the knowledge of where it was. It was all abstract, internalized, and so all-consuming that nothing could be allowed to stand between the searcher and his long desire. Not a thousand deaths or tens of thousands, not a world given over to the Dark or all the worlds given over.
He was a genius, and mad. He was self-absorbed to the point where that could no longer be separated from evil, and yet he held this beauty within himself, pitched to a level Kim had never thought to see or ever imagined could be seen.
She didn’t know how long they stood transfixed by that shining thing. At length Miach gave a small, almost an apologetic cough. He said, “Kaen’s gift has been considered.” His voice was husky, diffident. Kim couldn’t even blame him. Had she been able to speak, that, too, would have been her tone, even with all she knew.
“Matt Sören?” Miach said.
Matt walked over to Loren. For a moment he paused before the man for whom he had forsaken these mountains and this Lake. A look passed between the two of them that made Kimberly turn away for a moment, it was so deeply private, speaking to so many things that no one else had a right to share. Then Matt quietly drew the cloth from his own fashioning.
Loren was holding a dragon in his hands.
It bore the same relationship to Kaen’s dazzling artistry that the stone door at the top of the stairs did to the magnificent archways that led into Seithr’s Hall. It was roughly worked, all planes and sharp angles, not polished. Where Kaen’s cauldron glittered brilliantly in the starlight, Matt’s crafted dragon seemed dull beside it. It had two great, gouged eyes, and its head was turned upwards at an awkward, straining angle.
And yet Kim couldn’t take her eyes off it. Nor, she was aware, had any of the others there, not even Kaen, whose quick chuckle of derision had given way to silence.
Looking more closely, Kim saw that the roughness was entirely deliberate, a matter of decision, not inability or haste. The line of the dragon’s shoulder, she saw, would have been a matter of moments to smooth down, and the same was true of the sharp edge of the averted neck. Matt had wanted it this way.
And slowly she began to understand. She shivered then, uncontrollably, for there was power in this beyond words, rising from the soul and the heart, from an awareness not sourced in the conscious mind. For whereas Kaen had sought—and found—a form to give expression to the beauty of this place, to catch and transmute the stars, Matt had reached for something else. He had shaped an approach—no more than that—to the ancient, primitive power Kim had sensed as they mounted the stairs and had been overwhelmingly conscious of from the moment they had come into the meadow.
Calor Diman was infinitely more than a place of glory, however much it was that. It was hearthstone, bedrock, root. It encompassed the roughness of rock and the age of earth and the cold depths of mountain waters. It was very dangerous. It was the heart of the Dwarves, and the power of them, and Matt Sören, who had been made King by a night in this high meadow, knew that better than anyone alive, and his crafting for the Lake bore witness to it.
None of them there could know it, and the one man who might have told them had died in Gwen Ystrat to end the winter, but there was a cracked stone bowl of enormous antiquity lying, even then, beside a chasm in Dana’s cave at Dun Maura. And that bowl embodied the same unthinking awareness of the nature of ancient power that Matt Sören’s dragon did.
“You did this before,” said Miach quietly. “Forty years ago.”
“You remember?” Matt asked.
“I do. It was not the same.”
“I was young then. I thought I might strive to equal in crystal the truth of what I was shaping. I am older now, and some few things I have learned. I am glad of a chance to set matters right before the end.” There was a grudging respect in Miach’s eyes, and in Ingen’s, as well, Kim saw. In Loren’s face was something else: an expression that combined somehow a father’s pride, and a brother’s, and a son’s.
“Very well,” Miach said, straightening as much as his bent years would allow. “We have considered both of your craftings. Take them and cast them forth, and may the Queen of Waters grant her guidance to us now.”
Matt Sören took his dragon then, and Kaen his shining crystal cauldron, and the two of them went, side by side, away from the six who would watch. And they came, in the silence of that night, under the stars but not yet the late-rising moon, to the shore of Calor Diman, and there they stopped.
There were stars mirrored in the Lake, and high overhead, and then a moment later there were two more shining things above the water, as both Dwarves who had come to be judged threw their crystal gifts in arcs out over the Lake. And they fell, both of them, with splashes that echoed in the brooding stillness, and disappeared in the depths of Calor Diman.
There were, Kim saw with a shiver, no ripples at all to ruffle the water and so mark the place where they fell.
Then came a time of waiting, a time outside of time, so charged with the resonances of that place it seemed to go on forever, to have been going on since first Fionavar was spun onto the Loom. Kimberly, for all her dreaming, all her Seer’s gifts, had no hint of what they were waiting to see, what form the Lake’s answer was to take. Never taking her eyes from the two Dwarves by the water, she reached within and found her own twin soul, searching for a reply to the question she could not answer. But neither, it seemed, could the part of her that was Ysanne. Not even the old Seer’s dreams or her own vast store of knowledge were equal to this: the Dwarves had guarded their secret far too well. And then, even as Kim was thinking this, she saw that Calor Diman was moving. Whitecaps began to take shape in the centre of the Lake, and with them there suddenly came a sound, high and shrill, a wailing, haunted cry unlike anything she’d ever heard. Loren, beside her, murmured something that must have been a prayer. The white-caps became waves and the wailing sound grew higher and higher, and then so, too, did the waves, and suddenly they were rushing hugely from the agitated heart of the dark water towards the shore, as if Calor Diman were emptying her centre.
Or rising from it.
And in that moment the Crystal Dragon came.
Understanding burst in Kimberly then, and with it a sense, after the fact, as so many times before, that it should have been obvious all along. She had seen the enormous sculpture of a dragon dominating the entrance to Seithr’s Hall. She had seen Matt’s crafting and heard what he and Miach had said to each other. She had known there was more than beauty in this place. She had been aware of magic, ancient and deep.
This was it. This crystalline, shimmering Dragon of the Lake was the power of Calor Diman. It was the heart of the Dwarves, their soul and their secret, which she and Loren had now been allowed to see. A fact, she was grimly aware, that made their deaths doubly certain if Kaen should prevail in what was coming.
She forced her mind from that thought. All around her everyone else, including Loren, had knelt. She did not. Not clearly understanding the impulse that kept her on her feet—pride, but more than that—she met the shining eyes of the Crystal Dragon as they fell upon her, and she met them with respect but as an equal.
It was hard, though. The Dragon was unimaginably beautiful. Creature of mountain meadow and the icy depths of mountain waters, it glittered, almost translucent in the starlight, rising from the agitated waves high above the kneeling figures of the two Dwarves on the banks of Calor Diman.
Then it spread its wings, and Kimberly cried aloud in wonder and awe, for the wings of the Dragon dazzled and shone with a myriad of colours like gems in infinite variety, a play of light in the meadow bowl of night. She almost did sink to her knees then, but again something kept her on her feet, watching, her heart aching.
The Dragon did not fly. It held itself suspended, half within the water, half rising from it. Then it opened its mouth, and flame burst forth, flame without smoke, like the torches on the walls within the mountain; blue-white flame, through which the stars could still be seen.
The fire died. The Dragon’s wings were still. A silence cold and absolute, like the silence that might have lain at the very beginning of time, wrapped the meadow. Kim saw one of the Dragon’s claws slowly emerge, glittering, from the water. There was something clutched in its grasp. Something the Crystal Dragon suddenly tossed, with what seemed to her to be contemptuous disdain, on the grass by the Lake.
She saw what it was.
“No,” she breathed, the sound torn from her like flesh from a wound. Discarded on the grass, glinting, lay a miniature crafting of a crystal dragon.
“Wait!” Loren whispered sharply, rising to his feet. He touched her hand. “Look.”
Even as she watched, she saw the Dragon of Calor Diman raise a second claw, holding a second object. And this was a cauldron, of shining, scintillant beauty, and this object, too, the Dragon threw away, to lie sparkling on the blue-green grass.
She didn’t understand. She looked at Loren. There was a curious light in his eyes.
He said, “Look again, Kim. Look closely.” She turned back. Saw Matt and Kaen kneeling by the Lake. Saw the Dragon shining above them. Saw stars, subsiding waves, dark mountain crags. Saw a crystal cauldron tumbled on the grass and a small crafted dragon lying beside it.
Saw that the dragon discarded there was not the one Matt had just offered to the Lake.
And in that moment, as hope blazed in her like the Dragon’s blue-white fire, Kim saw something else come up from Calor Diman. A tiny creature exploded from the water, furiously beating wings holding it aloft. A creature that now shone more brilliantly than it ever had before, with eyes that dazzled in the night, no longer dark and lifeless.
It was the heart’s crafting Matt had offered, given life by the Lake. Which had accepted his gift.
There was a flurry of motion. Kaen scrambled forward on his knees. He reclaimed his cauldron. Rose to his feet holding it outstretched beseechingly. “No!” he pleaded. “Wait!”
He had time for nothing more. Time ended for him. In that high place of beauty which was so much more than that, power suddenly made manifest its presence for a moment only, but a moment was enough. The Dragon of the Lake, the guardian of the Dwarves, opened its mouth, and flame roared forth a second time.
Not up into the mountain air, not for warning or display. The Dragonfire struck Kaen of Banir Lök where he stood, arms extended, offering his rejected gift again, and it incinerated him, consumed him utterly. For one horrifying instant Kim saw his body writhing within the translucent flame, and then he was gone. There was nothing left at all, not even the cauldron he had made. The blue-white fire died, and when it did Matt Sören was kneeling alone, in the stunned silence of aftermath, by the shore of the Lake.
She saw him reach out and pick up the sculpted dragon lying beside him, the one, Kim now realized—seeing what Loren had grasped from the first—that he had shaped forty years ago, when the Lake had made him King. Slowly Matt rose to stand facing the Dragon of Calor Diman. It seemed to Kim that there was a tinted brightness to the air. Then the Dragon spoke.
“You should not have gone away,” it said with an ancient sorrow.
So deep a sadness after so wild a blaze of power. Matt lowered his head.
“I accepted your gift that night,” the Dragon said, in a voice like a mountain wind, cold and clear and lonely. “I accepted it, because of the courage that lay beneath the pride of what you offered me. I made you King under Banir Lök. You should not have gone away.”
Matt looked up, accepting the weight of the Dragon’s crystal gaze. Still he said nothing. Beside her, Kim became aware that Loren was weeping quietly.
“Nevertheless,” said the Dragon of the Lake, and there was a new timbre in its voice, “nevertheless, you have changed since you went from here, Matt Sören. You have lost an eye in wars not properly those of your people, but you have shown tonight, with this second gift, that with one eye only you still see more deeply into my waters than any of the Kings of the Dwarves have ever done before.”
Kimberly bit her lip. She slipped her hand into Loren’s. There was a brightness in her heart.
“You should not have gone away,” she heard the Dragon say to Matt, “but from what you have done tonight, I will accept that a part of you never did. Be welcome back, Matt Sören, and hear me as I name you now truest of all Kings ever to reign under Banir Lök and Banir Tal.”
There was light, there seemed to be so much light: a tinted, rosy hue of fiercest illumination.
“Oh, Kim, no!” Loren suddenly cried in a choked, desperate voice. “Not this. Oh, surely not this!”
Light burned to ash in the wake of knowledge, of bitter, bitterest, recurring understanding. Of course there was light in the meadow, of course there was. She was here.
With the Baelrath blazing in wildest summons on her hand. Matt had wheeled at Loren’s cry. Kim saw him look at the ring he had only just returned to her, and she read the brutal anguish in his face as this moment of heart-deep triumph, the moment of his return, was transformed into something terrible beyond words.
She wanted desperately not to be here, not to understand what this imperative blazing meant. She was here, though, and she did know. And she had not knelt to the Dragon because, somehow, a part of her must have been aware of what was to come.
What had come now. She carried the Warstone again, the summons to war. And it was on fire to summon. To compel the Crystal Dragon from its mountain bowl. Kim had no illusions, none at all—and the sight of Matt’s stricken face would have stripped them away from her, if she’d had any.
The Dragon could not leave the Lake, not if it was to be what it had always been: ancient guardian, key to the soul, heart-deep symbol of what the Dwarves were. What she was about to do would shatter the people of the twin mountains as much and more as she had smashed the Paraiko in Khath Meigol.
This crystal power of Calor Diman, which had endured the death rain of Maugrim, would not be able to resist the fire she carried. Nothing could.
Matt turned away. Loren released her hand.
I don’t have a choice! she cried. Within her heart, not aloud. She knew why the stone was burning. There was tremendous power here in this creature of the Lake, and its very shining made it a part of the army of Light. They were at war with the Dark, with the unnumbered legions of Rakoth. She had carried the ring here for a reason, and this was it.
She stepped forward, towards the now-still waters of Calor Diman. She looked up and saw the clear eyes of the Dragon resting upon her, accepting and unafraid, though infinitely sorrowful. As deeply rooted in power as anything in Fionavar and knowing that Kim’s was a force that would bind it and change it forever.
On her hand the Baelrath was pulsing now so wildly that the whole of the meadow and all the mountain crags were lit by its glow. Kim lifted her hand. She thought of Macha and Nemain, the goddesses of war. She thought of Ruana and the Paraiko, remembered the kanior: the last kanior. Because of her. She thought of Arthur, and of Matt Sören, who stood, not far away, not looking at her, lest his expression plead.
She thought upon the evil that good men had done in the name of Light, remembered Jennifer in Starkadh. War was upon them, it was all around them, threatening those living now, and all who might come after, with the terrible dominion of the Dark.
“No,” said Kimberly Ford quietly, with absolute finality. “I have come this far and have done this much. I will go no farther on this path. There is a point beyond which the quest for Light becomes a serving of the Dark.”
“Kim—” Matt began. His face was working strangely.
“Be silent!” she said, stern because she would break if she heard him speak. She knew him, and knew what he would say. “Come here beside me! Loren! And Miach, too, I’ll need you!” Her mind was racing as fast as it ever had.
They moved towards her, drawn by the power in her voice her—Seer’s voice—as much as by the burning on her hand. She knew exactly what she was doing and what it might mean, knew the implications as deeply as she had ever known anything at all. And she would shoulder them. If it made her name a curse from now to the end of time, then so be it. She would not destroy what she had seen tonight.
There was understanding in the Dragon’s crystal eyes. Slowly it spread its wings, like a curtain of benison, many-coloured, glittering with light. Kim had no illusions about that, none at all.
The two Dwarves and the man were beside her now. The flame on her hand was still driving her to summon. It was demanding that she do so. There was war. There was need! She met the eyes of the Dragon for the very last time.
“No,” she said again with all the conviction of her soul—both her souls.
And then she used the incandescent, overwhelming blazing of the ring, not to bind the Dragon of the Dwarves but to take herself away across the mountains, herself and three others with her, far from that hidden place of starlight and enchantment, though not so far as she had gone in coming there.
The Baelrath’s power was rampant within her, flaming with the fire of war. She entered into it, saw where it was she had to go, gathered and channelled what she carried, and took them there.
They came down, in what seemed to all of them to be a corona of crimson light. They were in a clearing. A clearing in the forest of Gwynir, not far from Daniloth.
“Someone’s here!” a voice screamed in strident warning. Another echoed it: voices of Dwarves from the army Blöd commanded. They had come in time!
Kim was driven to her knees by the impact of landing. She looked quickly around. And saw Dave Martyniuk standing not ten feet away from her with an axe in his hand. Behind him she recognized, with an incredulity that bordered on stupefaction, Faebur and Brock, swords drawn. There was no time to think.
“Miach!” she screamed. “Stop them!”
And the aged leader of the Dwarfmoot did not fail her. Moving more swiftly than she had ever thought he could, he stepped between Dave and the trio of Dwarves menacing him, and he cried, “Hold arrows and blades, people of the mountains! Miach of the Moot commands you, in the name of the King of the Dwarves!”
There was thunder in him for that one moment, a ringing peal of command. The Dwarves froze. Slowly Dave lowered his axe, Faebur his bow.
In the brittle silence of the forest clearing, Miach said, very clearly, “Hear me. There has been judgement tonight by the shores of Calor Diman. Matt Sören returned to our mountains yesterday, and it was the decision of the Moot, after a word-striving in Seithr’s Hall between him and Kaen, that their dispute be left to the Lake. So did it come to pass tonight. I must tell you that Kaen is dead, destroyed by the fire of the Lake. The spirit of Calor Diman came forth tonight, and I saw it with my eyes and heard it name Matt Sören to be our King again, and more: I heard it name him as truest of all Kings ever to reign under the mountains.”
“You are lying!” A harsh voice intruded. “None of this is true. Rinn, Nemed—seize him!” Blöd pointed a shaking finger at Miach.
No one moved.
“I am First of the Moot,” Miach said calmly. “I cannot lie. You know this is true.”
“I know you are an old fool,” Blöd snarled in response. “Why should we let ourselves be deceived by that children’s fable? You can lie as well as any of us, Miach! Better than any of—”
“Blöd,” said the King of the Dwarves, “have done. It is over.”
Matt stepped forward from the darkness of the trees. He said nothing more, and his voice had not been loud, but the tone of command was complete and not to be mistaken.
Blöd’s face worked spasmodically, but he did not speak. Behind him a swelling murmur of sound rushed backwards through the army to the ends of the clearing and beyond, where Dwarves had been sleeping among the evergreens. They were sleeping no longer.
“Oh my King!” a voice cried. Brock of Banir Tal stumbled forward, throwing down his axe, to kneel at Matt’s feet.
“Bright the hour of our meeting,” Matt said to him formally. He laid a hand on Brock’s shoulder. “But stand back now, old friend, there is a thing yet to be done.”
There was something in his voice that evoked an abrupt image, for Kim, of the iron lock on the door to the meadow of Calor Diman.
Brock withdrew. Gradually the murmur and the cries of the army subsided. A watchful silence descended. Occasionally someone coughed or a twig crackled underfoot.
In that stillness, Matt Sören confronted the Dwarf who had served in Starkadh, who had done what he had done to Jennifer, who had been leading the Dwarves even now in the army of the Dark. Blöd’s eyes darted back and forth, but he did not try to run or plead. Kim had thought he would be a coward, but she was wrong. None of the Dwarves lacked courage, it seemed, even those who had surrendered themselves to evil.
“Blöd of Banir Lök,” Matt said, “your brother has died tonight, and your Dragon waits for you now as well in judgement, astride the wall of Night. In the presence of our people I will grant you what you do not deserve: a right to combat, and life in exile if you survive. As atonement for my own wrongs, which are many, I will fight you in this wood until one of us is dead.”
“Matt, no!” Loren exclaimed.
Matt held up one hand. He did not turn around. “First, though,” he said, “I would ask leave of those assembled here, to take this battle upon myself. There are a very great many here who have a claim upon your death.”
He did turn, then, and of all of them it was to Faebur that he looked first. “I see one here whose face marks him as an Eridun. Have I leave to take this death for you and in the name of your people, stranger of Eridu?”
Kim saw the young man step forward a single pace. “I am Faebur, once of Larak,” he said. “King of the Dwarves, you have leave to do this for me and for all the raindead of Eridu. And in the name of a girl called Arrian, whom I loved, and who is gone. The Weaver guide your hand.” He withdrew, with a dignity that belied his years.
Again Matt turned. “Dave Martyniuk, you, too, have a claim to this, for the sufferings of a woman of your own world, and the death of a man. Will you surrender that claim to me?”
“I will surrender it,” Dave said solemnly.
“Mabon of Rhoden?” Matt asked.
And Mabon said gravely, “In the name of the High King of Brennin, I ask you to act for the army of Brennin and Cathal.”
“Levon dan Ivor?”
“This hour knows his name,” Levon said. “Strike for the Dalrei, Matt Sören, for the living and the dead.”
“Miach?”
“Strike for the Dwarves, King of the Dwarves.”
Only then did Matt draw forth his axe from where it hung by his side and turn again, his face grim as mountain stone, to Blöd, who was waiting contemptuously.
“Have I your word,” Blöd asked now, in the sharp, edgy voice so unlike his brother’s, “that I will walk safely from this place if I leave you dead?”
“You have,” said Matt clearly, “and I declare this in the presence of the First of the Dwarfmoot and—”
Blöd had not waited. Even as Matt was speaking, the other Dwarf had thrown himself sideways into the shadows and hurled a cunning dagger straight at Matt’s heart.
Matt did not even bother to dodge. With an unhurried movement, as if he had all the time in the world, he blocked the flung blade with the head of his axe. It fell harmlessly to the grass. Blöd swore and scrambled to his feet, reaching for his own weapon.
He never touched it.
Matt Sören’s axe, thrown then with all the strength of his arm and all the passion of his heart, flew through the firelit clearing like an instrument of the watching gods, a power of ultimate justice never to be denied, and it smote Blöd between the eyes and buried itself in his brain, killing him where he stood.
There were no shouts, no cheering. A collective sigh seemed to rise and fall, within the clearing and beyond it, to where Dwarves stood watching among the trees. Kim had a sudden image in that moment of a spirit, bat-winged, malevolent, rising to fly away. There was a Dragon waiting for him, Matt had said. Let it be so, she thought. She looked at the body of the Dwarf who had savaged Jennifer, and it seemed to her that vengeance should mean more, somehow. It should be more of a reply, something beyond this bloodied, torchlit body in Gwynir.
Oh, Jen, she thought. He’s dead now. I’ll be able to tell you that he’s dead. It didn’t mean as much as she’d once thought it would. It was only a step, a stage in this terrible journey. There was too far yet to go.
She had no more time for thoughts, which was a blessing and not a small one. Brock came rushing up to her, and Faebur, and she was embracing them both with joy. Amid the steadily growing noise all around, there was time for a quick question and answer about Dalreidan, and for delighted wonder as she learned who he really was.
Then, finally, she was standing in front of Dave, who had, of course, been hanging back, letting the others approach her first. Pushing her hair from her eyes, she looked up at him. “Well—” she began.
And got no further.
She was gathered in an embrace that lifted her completely off the ground and threatened to squeeze every trace of air out of her lungs. “I have never,” he said, holding her close, his mouth to her ear, “been so happy to see anyone in all my life!”
He let her go. She dropped to the ground and stumbled, gasping frantically for breath. She heard Mabon of Rhoden chuckle. She was grinning like an idiot, she knew.
“Me neither,” she said, aware, abruptly, of how true that was. “Me neither!”
“Ahem!” said Levon dan Ivor, with the broadest stage cough she’d ever heard. They turned, to find him grinning as much as they were. “I hate to intrude with petty matters of concern,” the Aven’s son said, striving to sound sardonic, “but we do have a report to make to the High King on tonight’s events, and if we’re to get back before Torc and Sorcha raise a false alarm, we’d best get moving.”
Aileron. She’d be seeing Aileron again, too. So much was happening so fast. She drew a breath and turned, to see that Matt had come over to her.
Her smile faded. In her mind, even as she stood among the evergreens of Gwynir, she was seeing a Crystal Lake and a Dragon rising from it, glittering wings spread wide. A place where she would never walk again, under stars or sun or moon. She was a Seer; she knew that this was so. She and Matt looked at each other for a long time.
At length, he said, “The ring is dark.”
“It is,” she said. She didn’t even have to look. She knew. She knew something else, too, but that was her own burden, not his. She said nothing about it.
“Seer,” Matt began. He stopped. “Kim. You were supposed to bind it, weren’t you? To bring it to war?” Only Loren and Miach, standing behind Matt, would know what he was talking about.
Picking her words carefully, she said, “We have a choice, Matt. We are not slaves, even to our gifts. I chose to use the ring another way.” She said nothing more. She was thinking about Darien, even as she spoke about choices, remembering him running into Pendaran, past a burning tree.
Matt drew a breath, and then he nodded slowly. “May I thank you?” he asked. This was hard. Everything was hard, now.
“Not yet,” she said. “Wait and see. You may not want to. I don’t think we’ll have long to wait.”
And that last thing was said in her Seer’s voice, and so she knew it was true.
“Very well,” Matt said. He turned to Levon. “You say you must carry word to the High King. We will join you tomorrow. The Dwarves have gone through a time worse than any in all our days. We shall remain by ourselves in these woods tonight and try to deal with what has happened to us. Tell Aileron we will meet him here when he comes, and that Matt Sören, King of the Dwarves, will bring his people into the army of the Light at that time.”
“I will tell him,” said Levon simply. “Come, Davor. Mabon. Faebur.” He glanced at Kim, and she nodded. With Loren and Dave on either side, she began to follow Levon south, out of the clearing.
“Wait!” Matt cried suddenly. To her astonishment, Kim heard real fear in his voice. “Loren, where are you going?”
Loren turned, an awkward expression investing his lined face. “You asked us to leave,” he protested. “To leave the Dwarves alone for tonight.”
Matt’s grim face seemed to change in the firelight. “Not you,” he whispered softly. “Never you, my friend. Surely you will not leave me now?”
The two of them looked at each other in that way they had of seeming to be alone in the midst of a great many people. And then, very slowly, Loren smiled.
As they followed Levon out of the clearing into the darkness of the evergreens, Kim and Dave paused for a moment to look back. They saw Matt Sören standing with Brock on one side and Loren Silvercloak on the other. Matt had placed his fingertips together in front of his chest, with his palms held a little way apart—as if to form a mountain peak with his hands. And one by one the Dwarves of the twin mountains were filing up to him, and kneeling, and placing their own hands between his, inside the sheltering mountain the Dwarf King formed.