In one way, Leila thought, listening to the last notes of the morning’s Lament for Liadon, it had been easier than she’d had any right to expect. She stood alone behind the altar, looking out upon all the others, closest to the axe but careful not to touch it, for that the High Priestess alone could do.
She stood closest, though. She was fifteen years old, only newly clad in the grey of the priestesses, yet Jaelle had named her to act in her stead while the High Priestess was away from Paras Derval. Dun to grey to red. She was of the Mormae now. Jaelle had warned her that there might be difficulties here in the Temple.
The fact that there hadn’t been, so far, had a great deal to do with fear.
They were all a little afraid of her, ever since the evening when, only four nights ago, she had seen Owein and the Wild Hunt arrive at the battle by Celidon and had served as a conduit for Ceinwen’s voice to resound in the sanctuary, so far from the river where the goddess was. In the supercharged atmosphere of war, that manifestation of her own unsettling powers was still reverberating in the Temple.
Unfortunately it didn’t help much with Gwen Ystrat. Audiart was another matter entirely. Three separate times in the day and a half following Jaelle’s departure, the Second of the Goddess had reached for Leila through the gathered Mormae in Morvran. And three times Audiart had graciously offered to make her way to Paras Derval to assist the poor beleaguered child, so unfairly taxed with such a heavy burden in such a terrible time.
It had taken all the clarity and firmness Leila could muster to hold her back. She knew the issues at stake as well as any of them: if Jaelle did not return, then Leila, named in a time of war to act as High Priestess, would become the High Priestess, notwithstanding all the normal peacetime rituals of succession. She also knew that Jaelle had been explicit about this one thing: Audiart was not to be allowed to come to the Temple.
During the last mindlink, the evening before, diplomacy hadn’t worked at all. Jaelle had warned her it might not and had told her what to do, but that didn’t make the doing any easier for a fifteen-year-old, confronting the most formidable figure of the Mormae.
Nonetheless, she had done it. Aided by the astonishing clarity—she even surprised herself with it—of her own mind voice during the linkings and speaking as acting High Priestess, invoking the Goddess by the nine names in sequence, she had formally ordered Audiart to remain precisely where she was, in Gwen Ystrat, and to initiate no further mindlinks. She, Leila, had far too much to do to tolerate any more of these avarlith-draining communications.
And then she had broken the link.
That had been last night. She hadn’t slept very well afterwards, troubled by dreams. One was of Audiart, mounted on some terrible six-legged steed, thundering over the roads from Morvran to seize and bind her with cold curses from millennia ago.
There had been other dreams, having nothing to do with the Mormae. Leila didn’t understand the way her own mind worked, where her swirling premonitions came from, but they had been with her all night long.
And most of them were about Finn, which, since she knew where he really was and with whom he rode, became the most unsettling thing of all.
Darien never even knew he’d been frozen in time over Daniloth. As far as he was concerned, he’d been flying north, the dagger in his mouth, all the while. It was evening and not morning when he left the Shadowland and came out over Andarien, but he didn’t know the geography here, so that didn’t concern him.
In any case, it was hard to think clearly in the owl shape, and he was very tired by now. He had flown from Brennin to the Anor Lisen, and then walked to the sacred grove, and flown again from there through an unsleeping night to Daniloth, and then through the whole of yet another day to where he now was, heading north to his father.
Through the growing darkness he flew, and his keen night sight registered the presence of an unimaginably vast army gathering beneath him on the barren desolation of this land. He knew who they were, but he didn’t descend or slow to take a closer look. He had a long way to go.
Below him, a lean scarred figure lifted his head suddenly to cast a keen glance at the darkening sky. There was nothing there, only a single owl, its plumage still white despite the changed season. Galadan watched it flying north. There was an old superstition about owls: they were good luck or bad, depending on which way they curved overhead.
This one did not swerve, arrowing straight north over the massing army of the Dark. The Wolflord watched it, troubled by a nameless disquiet, until it disappeared. It was the colour, he decided, the strange whiteness at sunset over this barren desolation. He put it out of his mind. With the snow gone, white was a vulnerable colour, and more of the swans were due to be coming back down from the north tonight. The owl was unlikely to survive.
It almost didn’t.
A few hours later Darien was even more tired than before, and fatigue made him careless. He became aware of danger only an instant before the unnatural claws of one of Avaia’s brood reached his flesh. He screeched, almost dropping the dagger, and veered sharply downwards and to his left. Even so, one claw claimed a half dozen feathers from his side.
Another black swan swooped hugely toward him, wings lashing the air. Darien wheeled desperately back to his right and forced his tired wings into a steep climb straight towards the last of the three black swans, which had been waiting patiently behind the other two for precisely this move. Owls, for all their vaunted intelligence, were fairly predictable in combat. With a carnivorous grin the third swan waited for the little white owl, keen to slake its continuous hunger for blood.
In Darien’s breast fear beat back tiredness, and following upon terror came a red surge of rage. He did not even try to dodge this last pursuing swan. Straight at it he flew, and an instant before they collided—a collision that would surely have killed him—he let his eyes burn as red as they could go. With the same blast of fire he had used to torch the tree, he incinerated the swan.
It didn’t even have time to scream. Darien wheeled again, fury pulsing within him, and he raked the other two swans with the same red fire and they died.
He watched them fall to the dark earth below. All around him the air was full of the smell of singed feathers and charred flesh. He felt dizzy, suddenly, and overwhelmingly weak. He let himself descend, in a slow, shallow glide, looking for a tree of any kind. There were none. This was Andarien, and nothing so tall as a tree grew here, not for a thousand years.
He came to rest, for want of a better place, on the slope of a low hill littered with boulders and sharp-edged stones. It was cold. The wind blew from the north and made a keening sound as it passed between the rocks. There were stars overhead; low in the east, the waning moon had just risen. It offered no comfort, casting only a chill, faint illumination over the stony landscape, the stunted grass.
Darien took his own shape again. He looked around. Nothing moved, as far as he could see in the wide night. He was completely alone. In a gesture that had become a reflex in the past two days, though he was unaware of that, he reached up to touch the stone set in the Circlet of Lisen. It was as cool and dark and distant as it had been from the moment he’d put it on. He remembered the way it had shone in the Seer’s hands. The memory was like a blade, or the wound made by a blade. Either, or both.
He lowered his hand and looked around again. About him, in every direction, stretched the desolation of Andarien. He was so far to the north that Rangat was almost east of him. It towered over the whole of the northlands, dominant and magnificent. He didn’t look at the Mountain for long.
Instead he turned his gaze due north. And because he was much more than mortal and his eyes were very good, he could discern, far off through the moonlit shadows, where the stony highlands reached the mountains and the ice, a cold greenish glow. And he knew that this was Starkadh, beyond the Valgrind Bridge, and that he could fly there by tomorrow.
He decided that he would not fly, though. Something about the owl shape felt wrong. He wanted to hold to his own form, he realized: to be Darien, whatever and whoever that might be, to regain the clarity of thought that came in his human shape, though at the price of loneliness. Even so, he would do it this way. He would not fly. He would go on foot over the stones and the barren soil, over the ruin of this wasteland. He would go, with an extinguished light upon his brow, bearing a blade in his hand as a gift for the Dark.
Not tonight, though. He was much too tired, and there was a pain in his side where the swan’s claw had caught him. He was probably bleeding but was too weary to even check. He lay down on the south side of the largest of the boulders—for such scant shelter as it might offer from the wind—and in time he did fall asleep, despite his fears and cares. He was young yet, and had come a long distance to a lonely place, and his soul was as much overtaxed as his body was.
As he passed over into the far countries of sleep, his mother was sailing in a ghostly ship down Linden Bay, just beyond the moonlit western ridges of the land, towards the river mouth of the Celyn.
He dreamt of Finn all night, just as Leila did in the Temple, a long way south. His dream was of the last afternoon, when he had still been small, playing in the yard behind the cottage with his brother, and they had seen riders passing on the snow-clad slopes east of them. He had waved a mittened hand, because Finn had told him to. And then Finn had gone away after the riders, and then much farther than they had gone, farther than anyone else, even Darien, even in dream, could go.
He did not know, huddled in the shadow of a leaning boulder on the cold ground of Andarien, that he was crying in his sleep. Nor did he know that all night long his hand kept returning to the lifeless gem bound about his brow, reaching, reaching out for something, finding no response.
“Do you know,” said Diarmuid, gazing east with an enigmatic expression, “this is almost enough to make one believe in fraternal instincts, after all.”
Beside him on the banks of the River Celyn, Paul remained silent. Across the northwestern spur of the lake the army was coming. They were too far off yet for him to make out individual details, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Diarmuid, for all the reflexive irony of his words, had indeed been right.
Aileron had not waited, for them or for anyone. He had carried this war to Maugrim. The army of the High King was in Andarien again, a thousand years after it had last swept through these wild, desolate highlands. And waiting for them in the late-afternoon light was his brother, with Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, with Sharra of Cathal, and Jaelle, the High Priestess, with the men of South Keep who had manned Prydwen, and with Pwyll Twiceborn, Lord of the Summer Tree.
For what, Paul thought, that last was worth. It didn’t, at the moment, feel like much. He should be used to this by now, he knew: this sense of latency without control. Of holding power without harnessing it. He remembered Jaelle’s words on the rocks, and he was acutely aware that she was right—aware of how much his difficulties were caused by his own overdeveloped need for controlling things. Particularly himself. All of this was true; it made sense; he even understood it. It didn’t make him feel any better, though. Not now, not so near to whatever ending lay in wait, whatever future towards which they were toiling.
“He has the Dwarves with him!” keen-eyed Brendel suddenly cried. “Now that,” said Diarmuid sharply, “is news!”
It was. “Matt succeeded, then!” Paul exclaimed. “Do you see him, Brendel?”
The silver-haired lios alfar scanned the distant army. “Not yet,” he murmured, “but … yes. It has to be her! The Seer is with the High King. No one else has her white hair.”
Paul looked quickly over at Jennifer. She returned his glance and smiled. It was strange, he thought, in some ways it was the strangest thing of all, how she could be at once so different, so remote, so much Guinevere of Camelot, Arthur’s Queen, Lancelot’s love, and then, a moment later, with the quickness of a smile, be Jennifer Lowell again, sharing his own flash of joy at Kimberly’s return.
“Should we walk around the lake to meet them?” Arthur asked.
Diarmuid shook his head with exaggerated decisiveness. “They have horses,” he said pointedly, “and we have been walking all day. If Brendel can see them, then the lios alfar in the army can see us. There are limits, I’m afraid, to how far I will stumble over those rocks in order to meet a brother who didn’t bother to wait for me!”
Lancelot laughed. Glancing over at him, Paul was hit with a renewed sense of awe and, predictably, by another wave of his own frustrated impotence.
Lancelot had been waiting for them here, sitting patiently under the trees, as they had walked up along the river two hours ago. In the gentle restraint of his greeting of Guinevere, and then of Arthur, Paul had glimpsed again the depths of the grief that bound these three. It was not an easy thing to watch.
And then Lancelot had told, sparely, without inflection, the tale of his night battle with the demon in the sacred grove for the life of Darien. He made it sound prosaic, almost a negligible event. But every man and the three women there could see the wounds and burns of that battle, the price he had paid.
For what? Paul didn’t know. None of them did, not even Jennifer. And there had been nothing at all to be read in her eyes as Lancelot told of freeing the owl in Daniloth and watching it fly north: the random thread in this weaving of war.
A war that seemed to be upon them now. The army had come closer; it was rounding the tip of Celyn Lake. Beneath Diarmuid’s acerbic flippancy Paul could read a febrile tension building: the reunion with his brother, the nearness of battle. They could make out figures now. Paul saw Aileron under the banner of the High Kingdom, and then he realized that the banner had changed: the tree was still there, the Summer Tree for which he himself was named, but the moon above it was no longer the silver crescent of before.
Instead, the moon above the tree was the red full moon Dana had caused to shine on a new moon night—the Goddess’s challenge to Maugrim and the challenge Aileron was carrying now, at the head of the army of Light.
And so that army rode up around the lake, and it came to pass that the sons of Ailell met again on the borders of Daniloth, north of the River Celyn among the broad-leafed aum trees and the silver and red flowers of sylvain on the riverbank.
Diarmuid, with Sharra holding him by the hand, walked a little forward from the others, and Aileron, too, stepped apart from the army he led. Paul saw Ivor watching, and a lios alfar who had to be Ra-Tenniel, and Matt was there, with Loren beside him. Kim was smiling at him, and next to her was Dave, a crooked, awkward grin on his face. They were all here, it seemed, here on the edge of Andarien for the beginning of the end. All of them. Or, not quite all. One was missing. One would always be missing.
Diarmuid was bowing formally to the High King. “What kept you so long?” he said brightly.
Aileron did not smile. “It took some doing to maneuver the chariots through the forest.”
“I see,” said Diarmuid, nodding gravely.
Aileron, his eyes unrevealing as ever, looked his brother carefully up and down, then said expressionlessly, “Your boots seem seriously in need of repair.”
It was Kim who laughed, letting all of them know that they could. Amid the release of tension, Diarmuid swore impressively, his colour suddenly high.
Aileron finally smiled. “Loren and Matt have told us what you did, on the island and at sea. I have seen Amairgen’s staff. You will know without my telling you how brightly woven a journey that was.”
“You might tell me anyhow,” Diarmuid murmured.
Aileron ignored that. “There is a man among you I would greet,” he said. They watched as Lancelot stepped quietly forward, limping very slightly.
Dave Martyniuk was remembering something: a wolf hunt in Leinanwood, where the High King had slain the last seven wolves himself. And Arthur Pendragon had said, a strangeness in his voice, Only one man I ever saw could do what you just did.
Now the one man was here, and kneeling before Aileron. And the High King bade him rise and, gently, with care for the other’s wounds, he clasped him about the shoulders as he had not clasped his brother. Who stood a little way behind, a slight smile on his face, holding the Princess of Cathal by the hand.
“My lord High King,” said Mabon of Rhoden, stepping forward from the ranks of the army, “the daylight wanes, and it has been a long day’s riding to this place. Would you make camp here? Shall I give the orders to do so?”
“I would not advise it,” said Ra-Tenniel of Daniloth quickly, turning from conversation with Brendel.
Aileron was already shaking his head. “Not here,” he said. “Not with the Shadowland so near. If the army of the Dark were to advance overnight we would have the worst possible ground for battle, with the river behind us, and no retreat beyond it into the mist. No, we will move on. It will not be dark for a few hours yet.”
Mabon nodded agreement and withdrew to alert the captains of the army. Ivor, Paul noted, already had the Dalrei mounted up again, waiting for the signal to ride.
Diarmuid coughed loudly. “May I,” he said plaintively, as his brother turned to him, “be so bold as to entreat the loan of horses for my company? Or did you want me to trundle along in your wake?”
“That,” Aileron said, laughing for the first time, “has more appeal than you know.” He turned to walk back to the army but over his shoulder, as if offhandedly, added, “We brought your own horse, Diar. I thought you would find a way to get back in time.”
They mounted up. Behind them, as they left the river for Andarien’s stony ground, a boat was drifting gently down the current of the Celyn. Within that craft Leyse of the Swan Mark was listening to the music of her song, even as she came out upon the waves, to follow the setting sun across the wideness of the sea.
Kim looked over at Dave for encouragement. She didn’t really have a right to any support, but the big man gave her an unexpectedly shrewd glance, and when she began picking her way forward and to the left, to where Jennifer was riding, he detached himself from Ivor’s side and followed her.
There was something she had to tell Jennifer, and she wasn’t happy about it at all. Especially not when she thought about the disastrous results of her sending Darien to the Anor two days ago. Still, there was really no avoiding this, and she wasn’t about to try.
“Hi,” she said brightly to her closest friend. “Are you still speaking to me?”
Jennifer smiled wearily and leaned across in her saddle to kiss Kim on the cheek. “Don’t be silly,” she said.
“It’s not that silly. You were pretty angry.”
Jennifer lowered her gaze. “I know. I’m sorry.” She paused. “I wish I could explain better why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
“You wanted him to be left alone. It isn’t that complicated.”
Jennifer looked up again. “We have to leave him alone,” she said quietly. “If I’d tried to bind him we’d never have known what he really was. He might have changed at any time. We’d never have been sure what he might do.”
“We aren’t very sure now,” Kim said, rather more sharply than she’d intended.
“I know that,” Jennifer replied. “But at least he’ll do it freely, whatever he does. By his own choice. I think that’s the whole point, Kim. I think it has to be.”
“Would it have been so terrible,” Kim asked, not wisely, but she couldn’t hold the question back, “if you had just told him you loved him?”
Jennifer didn’t flinch, nor did she flare into anger again. “I did,” she said mildly, a hint of surprise in her voice. “I did let him know. Surely you can see that. I left him free to make his choice. I … trusted him.”
“Fair enough,” said Paul Schafer. They hadn’t heard him ride up. “You were the only one of us who did,” he added. “Everyone else has been busy trying to cajole him or make him into something. Including me, I suppose, when I took him to the Godwood.”
“Do you know,” Jennifer asked Paul suddenly, “why the Weaver made the Wild Hunt? Do you know what Owein means?”
Paul shook his head.
“Remind me to tell you, if we ever have the time,” she said. “You, too,” she added, turning to Kim. “I think it might help you understand.”
Kim was silent. She really didn’t know how to respond. It was too hard, this whole question of Darien, and since what she’d done, or refused to do, last night by Calor Diman, she no longer trusted her own instincts about anything. Besides, this confrontation wasn’t why she’d come over.
She sighed. “You may hate me after all,” she said. “I interfered again, I’m afraid.”
Jen’s green eyes were calm, though. She said, “I can guess. You told Aileron and the others about Darien.”
Kim blinked. She must have looked comical, because Dave grinned suddenly, and Jennifer leaned across again to pat her hand.
“I thought you might have,” Jen explained. “And I can’t say you were wrong. By now he has to know. Arthur told me that on the ship last night. I would have talked to him myself if you hadn’t. It may affect his planning, though I can’t see how.” She paused and then, in a different voice, added, “Don’t you see? The secret doesn’t matter now, Kim. None of them can stop him from whatever he’s going to do—Lancelot freed him from Daniloth yesterday morning. He’s a long way north of us now.”
Involuntarily, Kim’s gaze went out over the land that stretched in front of them. She saw Dave Martyniuk do the same. Wild and empty in the late-afternoon light, Andarien rolled away, all stony hills and barren hollows, and she knew it was like this all the way to the Ungarch River. To the Valgrind Bridge across that river, to Starkadh on the other side.
As it happened, they did not have nearly so far to go, themselves.
They were very close to the front of the army, only a few paces behind Aileron and Ra-Tenniel, ascending a wide, lightly sloping ridge with yet another bleak depression beyond. The reddened sun was well over to the west and a breeze had come up, overture to twilight.
Then they saw the front-riding auberei suddenly reappear on the crest of the ridge. The High King reached the summit. He reined in his own black charger and froze, utterly still. They topped the rise themselves, the four of them riding together for the first and only time, and looked down onto a vast, stony plain and saw the army of the Dark.
The plain was huge, easily the largest expanse of level ground they’d yet reached in Andarien, and Paul knew this was no accident of chance. He also guessed, as he tried to control his accelerating heartbeat, that this would be the broadest such expanse in all the land between here and the Ice. It had to be. With subtleties of contour and land formation stripped away, less of Aileron’s training in war, little of his life’s studies, could be drawn into play. The ridge upon which they now were, looking down the gentle slope, was the only distinguishing feature in all the level land to east or west. This would be a battle of force on force, with nowhere to hide or seek advantage, where sheer numbers would tell the tale.
Between them and whatever lands lay beyond was an army so huge it numbed the mind. It could scarcely be registered. That was another reason why this plain had been chosen: nowhere else could such obliterating numbers have been assembled to move freely without hindering each other. Paul looked up and saw hundreds of swans, all black, circling ominously in the sky over Rakoth’s army.
“Well done, Teyrnon,” the High King said calmly. Paul realized with a shock that Aileron, as always, seemed to have been prepared, even for this. The mage had been using his powers to sense forward. Aileron had guessed the army was here; it was why he’d been so adamant about not camping overnight against the mist of the Shadowland.
Even as he looked down, heartsick, upon what lay waiting for them, Paul felt a quick pride in the young war king who was leading them. Completely unruffled, Aileron took the measure of the army he would have to somehow try to defeat. Without turning around, his eyes ceaselessly scanning the plain below, he began to issue a string of quiet instructions.
“They will not attack tonight,” he said confidently. “They will not want to come at us up this ridge, and at night they’ll lose the advantage of the swans’ eyes. We will have battle with the sunrise, my friends. I wish we had some way of fighting them for control of the air, but it can’t be helped. Teyrnon, you’ll have to be my eyes, for as long as you and Barak can do so.”
“We can do so for as long as you need us to,” the last mage in Brennin replied.
Paul noticed that Kim had gone pale at Aileron’s last words. He tried to catch her eye but she avoided his glance. He didn’t have time to find out why.
“The lios can help with that,” Ra-Tenniel murmured. There was music in his voice still, but there was nothing delicate about it anymore, nothing soothing. “I can post the most long-sighted among us up on this ridge to overlook the battle.”
“Good,” said Aileron crisply. “Do that. Place them tonight to keep watch. They will stay there tomorrow as well. Ivor, assign pairs of auberei to stay with each of the posted lios, to carry their messages back and forth.”
“I will,” said Ivor simply. “And my archers know what to do if the swans come too low.”
“I know they do,” said Aileron grimly. “For tonight, all of you bid your men divide into three watches and keep their weapons to hand when they rest. As for the morning—”
“Wait,” said Diarmuid, from beside Paul. “Look. We seem to have a guest.” His tone was as effortlessly light as it always was.
He was right, Paul saw. The red light of the sunset picked out a single huge white-clad figure that had detached itself from the heaving mass of the army on the plain. Riding one of the monstrous six-legged slaug, it picked its way over the stony ground to a position carefully out of bowshot from those watching on the ridge.
An unnatural stillness descended. Paul was acutely aware of the breeze, the angle of the sun, the clouds scudding overhead. He reached, a little desperately, for the place within himself that would mark the presence of Mörnir. It was there, but faint and hopelessly far. He shook his head.
“Uathach!” Dave Martyniuk said suddenly. It was a snarl.
“Who is he?” Aileron asked, very calm.
“He led them in the battle by the Adein,” Ivor replied, his voice thick with loathing. “He is an urgach, but much more than that. Rakoth has done something to him.”
Aileron nodded but said nothing more.
Instead, it was Uathach who spoke.
“Hear me!” he cried, his voice a viscous howl, so loud it seemed to bruise the air. “I bid you welcome, High King of Brennin, to Andarien. My friends behind me are hungry tonight, and I have promised them warrior meat tomorrow and more delicate fare after that, in Daniloth.” He laughed, huge and fell on the plain, the red sun tinting the mocking white of his robe.
Aileron made no reply, nor did anyone else on the ridge. In grim, repressive silence, stony as the land over which they rode, they looked down upon the leader of Rakoth’s army.
The slaug moved restlessly sideways. Uathach reined it viciously. Then he laughed a second time, and something in the sound chilled Paul.
Uathach said, “I have promised the svart alfar meat for tomorrow and offered them sport tonight. Tell me, warriors of Brennin, of Daniloth, of the Dalrei, treacherous Dwarves, tell me if there is one among you who will come down alone to me now. Or will you all hide as the frail lios do, in their shadows? I offer challenge in the presence of these armies! Is there one who will accept, or are you all craven before my sword?”
There was a stir along the ridge. Paul saw Dave, jaw clamped tight, turn quickly to look at the Aven’s son. Levon, his hand trembling, had half drawn his sword.
“No!” said Ivor dan Banor, and not only to his son. “I have seen this one in battle. We cannot fight him, and we cannot afford to lose any man here!”
Before anyone else could speak, Uathach’s coarse laughter spilled forth again, a slimy flood of sound. He had heard.
He said, “I thought as much! Then let me say one thing more to all the brave ones on that hill. I have a message from my lord.” The voice changed; it became colder, less rough, more frightening. “A year ago and a little more, Rakoth took pleasure in a woman of your company. He would do so again. She offered rare, willing sport. Black Avaia is with me now, to bear her back to Starkadh at his bidding. Is there one among you who will contest against my blade Rakoth’s claim to her naked flesh?”
A sickness rose within Paul, of revulsion and of premonition.
“My lord High King,” said Arthur Pendragon, as Uathach’s laughter, and the howls of the svart alfar behind him, rose and fell, “would you tell me the name of this place.”
Paul saw Aileron turn to the Warrior.
But it was Loren Silvercloak who answered, a knowing sorrow in his voice. “This plain was green and fertile a thousand years ago,” he said. “And in those days it was called Camlann.”
“I thought it might be,” Arthur replied very quietly. Without speaking again he began checking the fit of his sword belt and the tilt of the King Spear in his saddle rest.
Paul turned to Jennifer—to Guinevere. What he saw in her face then, as she looked at the Warrior’s quiet preparations, went straight to his heart.
“My lord Arthur,” said Aileron, “I must ask you to defer to me. The leader of their army should fight the leader of our own. This is my battle, and I lay claim to it.”
Arthur didn’t even look up from his preparations. “Not so,” he said, “and you know it is not. You are needed on the morrow more than any other man here. I told you all a long time ago, on the eve of the voyage to Cader Sedat, that I am never allowed to see the end of things when I am summoned. And the name Loren spoke has made things clear: there has been a Camlann waiting for me in every world. This is what I was brought here for, High King.”
Beside him, Cavall made a sound, more whimper than growl. The red sun was low, casting a strange light upon all their faces. Below them, the laughter had ended.
“Arthur, no!” said Kimberly, with passion. “You are here for more than this. You must not go down there. We need all of you too much. Can’t you see what he is? None of you can fight him! Jennifer, tell them it is foolishness. You must tell them!”
But Jennifer, looking at the Warrior, said nothing at all.
Arthur had finished his preparations. He looked up then, straight at Kimberly, who had summoned him. Who had brought him to this place by the binding of his name. And to her he made reply, in words Paul knew he would never forget.
“How can we not fight him, Seer? How can we claim to carry our swords in the name of Light, if we are cowards when we stand before the Dark? This challenge goes further back than any of us. Further back, even, than I. What are we if we deny the dance?”
Aileron was nodding slowly, and Levon, and Ra-Tenniel’s eyes were bright with his agreement. Within his own heart Paul felt some deep eons-old force behind the Warrior’s words, and as he accepted them, grieving, he felt another thing: the pulsebeat of the God. It was true. It was a dance that was not to be denied. And it seemed that it was Arthur’s, after all.
“No,” said Guinevere.
Every eye went to her. In the windswept silence of that desolate place her beauty seemed to burn like some evening star brought among men, almost too fierce to look upon.
Motionless astride her horse, her hands twisted in its mane, she said, “Arthur, I will not lose you again like this. I could not bear it. Single combat is not why you were summoned, my love, it cannot be why. Camlann or no, this must not be your battle.”
His face, under the greying hair, had gone still. He said, “We are caught in a woven doom of no escape. You know I must go down to him.”
There were tears welling in her eyes. She did not speak, but slowly she shook her head back and forth in denial.
“Whose place is it, then, if not mine?” he asked, scarcely more than a whisper.
She lowered her head. Her hands moved in a little helpless, trapped gesture of despair.
And then, without looking up, she said, with sudden, terrible formality, “In this place and before these many people my name has been besmirched. I have need of one who will take this challenge upon himself and unmake it with his sword.”
And now she lifted her head, and now she turned. To the one who had been sitting quietly upon his horse, not speaking, not moving, waiting patiently for what he seemed to have known was coming. And Guinevere said: “Wilt thou, who hast been my champion so many times before, be so yet again? Wilt thou take this challenge in my name, my lord Lancelot?”
“Lady, I will,” he said.
“You can’t!” Paul exclaimed, his voice crashing into the stillness, unable to stop himself. “Jennifer, he’s wounded! Look at his palm—he can’t even hold a sword!” Beside him someone made a curious, breathless sound.
The three figures in the centre of the circle ignored him. Completely. It was as if he hadn’t even spoken. There was another silence, laden with unsaid things, with so many layers of time. A stir of wind blew Jennifer’s hair back from her face.
Arthur said, “My lady, I have known too many things for too long to ever deny Lancelot’s claim to be your champion. Or that, healthy, he is far more worthy than I to face this foe. Even so, I will not allow it now. Not this time, my love. You have asked him, sorely wounded, to take this upon himself, not for your sake, or his, but for mine. You have not asked him in love.”
Guinevere’s head snapped back. Her green eyes went wide and then they blazed with a naked, dazzling anger. She shook her head, so fiercely that the tears flew off her face, and in the voice of a Queen, a voice that froze and bound them into the power of the grief it carried, she cried aloud, “Have I not, my lord? And shall you tell me so? Would you tear open my flesh that all men here might probe into my heart as Maugrim did?”
Arthur flinched, as if stunned by a blow, but she was not done. With icy, relentless fury she said, “What man, even you, my lord, dares in my presence to say whether I have spoken in love or no?”
“Guinevere—” Lancelot began, but quailed in his turn as her burning glance swung to him.
“Not a word!” she snapped. “Not from you or anyone else!”
Arthur had slipped down from his horse. He knelt before her, pain raw as a wound in his face. He opened his mouth to speak.
And in that moment, precisely then, Paul became aware of an absence and he remembered the slight, breathless sound at his elbow a moment before, a sound he’d ignored.
But there was no one beside him anymore.
He turned, his heart lurching, and looked north, along the downward-sloping path to where Uathach waited on the stony plain.
He saw. And then he heard, they all heard, as a ringing cry rose up, echoing in the twilight air between the armies of Light and Dark:
“For the Black Boar!” he heard. They all heard. “For the honour of the Black Boar!”
And thus did Diarmuid dan Ailell take Uathach’s challenge upon himself, riding forth alone on the horse his brother had brought for him, his sword uplifted high, his fair hair lit by the sunset, as he raced towards the dance his bright soul would not deny.
He was a master, Dave knew. Having fought beside Diarmuid at the winter skirmish by the Latham and then at the wolf hunt in Leinanwood, he had reason to know what Aileron’s brother could do. And Dave’s heart—halfway to his own battle fury—leaped to see Diarmuid’s first swiftly angled engagement of the urgach.
And then, an instant later, battle frenzy gave way to chilled grief. Because he remembered Uathach, too, from the bloody banks of the Adein in the first battle of Kevin’s spring. And in his mind, replayed more vividly than such a memory should ever have been, he saw Maugrim’s whiteclad urgach swing his colossal sword in one scything blow from the slaug’s saddle that had cleaved through Barth and Navon, both: the babies in the wood.
He remembered Uathach, and now he saw him again, and the memory, however grim, was less than the reality, far less. By the light of the setting sun, in that wasteland between armies, Diarmuid and his quick, clever horse, met, with a thunder of hooves and a grinding shock of blades, a foe that was too much more than mortal for a mortal man to face.
The urgach was too large, too uncannily swift despite his massive bulk. And he was shrewder than any such creature could ever have been had it not been altered in some way within the confines of Starkadh. Beyond all this, the slaug was a deadly terror in and of itself. Constantly ripping with its curved horn, seeking the flesh of Diarmuid’s horse, running on four legs and lashing out with the other two, it was too dangerous for Diarmuid to do much more than evade, for fear that his own mount would be gored or trampled, leaving him helpless on the barren ground. And because he couldn’t work in close, his slim blade could scarcely reach Uathach—though Diarmuid was a perilously easy target for the urgach’s huge black sword.
Beside Dave, Levon dan Ivor’s face was white with affliction as he watched the drama below. Dave knew how desperately Levon had wanted the death of this creature, and how adamant Torc—who feared nothing else that Dave knew—had been in binding Levon by oath not to fight Uathach alone.
Not to do what Diarmuid was doing now.
And doing, despite the horror of what he faced, with a seemingly effortless grace that somehow had, woven within its movements, the unpredictable, scintillant wit of the man. So sudden were his stops and starts, his reversals of direction—the horse seeming an extension of his mind—that twice, within moments of each other, he managed to veer around the slaug’s horn to launch brilliant slashing blows at Uathach.
Who parried with a brutal indifference that almost broke the heart to see. And each time, his pounding counterstroke sent Diarmuid reeling in the saddle with the jarring impact of parrying it. Dave knew about that: he remembered his own first urgach battle, in the dark of Faelinn Grove. He had barely been able to lift his arm for two days after blocking one of those blows. And the beast he’d faced had been to Uathach as sleep was to death.
But Diarmuid was still in the saddle, still probing for an opening with his sword, wheeling his gallant mount—so small beside the slaug—in arcs and half-circles, random and disorienting, calculated to the hairsbreadth edge of sword or destroying horn, seeking an angle, a way in, a gap to penetrate in the name of Light.
“Gods, he can ride!” Levon whispered, and Dave knew that there were no words of higher, more holy praise that a Dalrei could ever speak. And it was true, it was dazzlingly true; they were watching an exercise in glory as the sun sank into the west.
Then suddenly it became even more than that—for again Diarmuid scythed in on Uathach’s right side, and again he stabbed upwards for the heart of the beast. Once more the urgach blocked the reaching thrust, and once more, exactly as before, his counterstroke descended like an iron tree falling.
Diarmuid absorbed it on his blade. He rocked in the saddle. But this time, letting the momentum work for him, he reared his horse upwards and to the right, and sent his shining sword slashing downwards to sever the slaug’s nearest leg.
Dave began a startled, wordless cry of joy and then savagely bit it back. Uathach’s mocking laughter seemed to fill the world, and behind him the army of the Dark let loose a raucous, deafening roar of predatory anticipation.
Too great a price, Dave thought, hurting for the man below. For though the slaug had lost a leg, and so was much less of a danger than before, Diarmuid’s left shoulder had been torn through by a ripping thrust of the animal’s horn. In the waning light they could see his blood flowering darkly from a deep, raking wound.
It was too much, Dave thought, truly too inhuman a foe for a man to face. Torc had been right. Dave turned his head away from the terrible ritual being acted out before them, and as he did, he saw Paul Schafer, farther along the ridge, looking back at him.
Paul registered Dave’s glance, and the pain in the big man’s expression, but his own mind was a long way off, along the twisting paths of memory.
A memory of Diarmuid on the first night they’d arrived. A peach! he’d said of Jennifer, as he bent to kiss her hand And then said it, and did it again, a few moments later, swinging lazily through a high window to confound Gorlaes sardonically.
Another image, another extravagant phrase—I’ve plucked the fairest rose in Shalhassan’s garden—as he rejoined Kevin and Paul and the men of South Keep from within scented Larai Rigal. Extravagance always, the flamboyant gesture masking so many deeper truths. But the truths were there to be seen, if one only knew where to look. Hadn’t he shielded Sharra afterwards, the day she’d tried to kill him in Paras Derval? And then on the eve of the voyage to Cader Sedat he had asked her to be his wife.
Using Tegid as his Intercedent.
Always the gesture, the deflecting glitter of style, hiding what he was, at root, behind the last locked doorway of his soul.
Paul remembered, hurting on that windy rise of land, unwilling to look down again, how Diarmuid had relinquished his claim to the throne. How in the moment when fate seemed to have come full circle, when Jaelle had been about to speak for the Goddess and proclaim a High King in Dana’s name, Diarmuid had made the decision himself, flippantly speaking the words he knew to be right. Though Aileron had sworn he was prepared to kill him just moments before.
There was a grinding of metal on metal. Paul turned back. Diarmuid had somehow—the gods only knew what it must be costing him—managed to circle in again close to the monstrous urgach, and again he’d attacked, carrying the battle to his foe. To be beaten back once more with a bone-jarring force that Paul could feel, even up here.
He watched. It seemed necessary to watch: to bear witness and remember.
And one more set of memories came to him then, as Diarmuid’s brave horse pirouetted yet again, just out of reach of slaug horn and urgach sword. Images from Cader Sedat, that place of death at sea. An island in all worlds and none, where the soul lay open, without hiding place. Where Diar’s face, as he looked upon Metran, had shown the full unshielded passion of his hatred of the Dark. Where he had stood in the Chamber of the Dead beneath the sea, and where—yes, there was a truth in this, a kernel, a clue—he had said to the Warrior, as Arthur prepared to summon Lancelot and so bring the old, three-sided tragedy into the world again: You do not have to do this. It is neither written nor compelled.
And Paul glimpsed then, with a shiver of primal recognition, the thread that led from that moment to this. Because it was for Arthur and Lancelot, and for Guinevere, that Diarmuid, in all the wild anarchy of his nature, had claimed this dance as his own.
It was against the weaving of their long doom that he had defiantly rebelled, and had channelled that rebellion into an act of his own against the Dark. Taking Uathach unto himself, that Arthur and Lancelot, both, might go forward past this day.
The sun was almost gone. Only the last long rays slanted low and red across Andarien. In the twilight the battle seemed to have moved farther away, into a realm of shadows like the past. It was very quiet. Even the loosely spilling, triumphant cries of the svart alfar had ended. There were flecks of blood staining Uathach’s snowy robe. Paul couldn’t tell if they were Diarmuid’s or the urgach’s own. It didn’t seem to matter much: Diar’s horse, fiercely gallant but hopelessly overmatched, was visibly tiring even as they watched.
Diarmuid backed it off a few paces, to try to buy it a moment’s rest, but this was not to be allowed. Not in this battle, with this foe. Uathach, not laughing now, grim death in his black sword, came on, and Diarmuid was forced to cruelly spur his mount to motion again. Amid the silence along the ridge, a single voice spoke.
“There is one chance, only, left for him,” said Lancelot du Lac.
Only one man understood and made reply.
“If you call it a chance,” Aileron said, in a tone not one of them had ever heard him use before.
To the west, out beyond Linden Bay, the sun went down. Paul turned instinctively and saw its last dying light touch the face of the Princess of Cathal. He saw that Kim and Jaelle had moved to either side of her. After a moment he turned back to the figures on the plain. In time to see it end.
It was, on the whole, just a little bit ridiculous. This ugly, hairy monster, oversized even for an urgach, was as quick as he was himself. And it was swinging a sword that Diarmuid doubted he could even have lifted, let alone swung in those pounding, ceaseless blows. It was cunning, too, unnaturally, viciously intelligent. By Lisen’s river blood, urgach were supposed to be stupid! Where, the Prince thought, absorbing another blow like an avalanche on his sword, where was the sense of proportion in this thing?
He felt like asking the question aloud, but survival had become a matter of meticulous concentration these last few moments, and he had no breath to spare for even halfway witty remarks. A shame. He wondered, hilariously, what Uathach would say to a suggestion that this matter be settled with the gambling dice Diarmuid just happened to have in his—
Gods! Even with a leg gone, the slaug, twice the size of his own tiring horse, was death itself. With a movement of his sword as desperately swift as any he’d ever made, Diarmuid managed to block a thrust of the animal’s ripping horn that would have disemboweled his own mount. Unfortunately that meant—
He resurfaced in the saddle, having passed clean under his horse on one side and up again on the other, with Uathach’s annihilating slash a whistling sound in the darkening air where his own head had been an instant before. He wondered if Ivor of the Dalrei remembered teaching him how to do that so many years ago, when Diarmuid was a boy summering with his brother on the Plain. So many years, but for some reason it felt like yesterday, just now. Funny, how almost everything felt like yesterday.
The sweep of Uathach’s last stroke had swung the urgach grunting, sideways in his saddle and carried the slaug a few paces away with the shift of weight. Fresh, Diarmuid might have tried to use that to renew some kind of attack, but his horse was sucking air with desperate, heaving motions of its lathered flanks, and his own left arm was gradually growing cold, a weakness spreading from the deep tear of the wound, reaching across his chest.
He used the brief respite the only way he could, to buy time for the horse. A handful of seconds, no more than that, and it wasn’t enough. He thought of his mother then. And of the day his father had died. So much seemed to have happened yesterday. He thought of Aileron, and of all the things left unsaid in all the yesterdays.
And then, as Uathach turned the slaug again, Diarmuid dan Ailell whispered to his horse one last time and felt it steady bravely to the murmur of his voice. Within himself he let a calm take shape, and from within that calm he summoned up Sharra’s face, through whose dark eyes—doorways to a falcon’s soul—love had entered into him so unexpectedly, and had stayed.
To carry him to this moment, her image in his mind, and the certain, sustaining knowledge of her love. To carry him forward across the darkened ground of that plain in Andarien, towards the last thing he could do.
Straight at the slaug he rode, his horse gallantly reaching for a last flourish of speed, and at the final second he veered it sharply left and launched the sternest blow he could at Uathach’s side.
It was blocked. He knew it would be; they all had been. And now there came the huge, descending counterstroke of the urgach’s sword. The one, like all the others, that would drive him, shuddering, back, when he parried it. That would numb his arm, bringing the inevitable end that much nearer.
He didn’t parry it.
He wheeled his horse, hard, to gain just a little space, so Uathach’s blade would not sever his body entirely, and he took that terrible blow on his left side, just under the heart, knowing it was the end.
And then, as white pain exploded within him in the darkness, towering, indescribable, as his life’s blood fountained to fall among the stones, Diarmuid dan Ailell, with the last strength of his soul, almost the very last of his self-control, with Sharra’s face before him, not Uathach’s, did the final deed of his days. He rose up above his agony, and with his left hand he clutched the hairy arm that held that black sword, and with his right, pulling himself forward, as towards a long-sought dream of overwhelming Light, he thrust his own bright blade into the urgach’s face and out the back of its head, and he killed it in Andarien, just after the sun had set.
Sharra watched as though from very far away. At the descent of dark, through a blurring mist of tears, she saw him take his wound, saw him kill Uathach, saw the beautiful, rearing horse gored hideously from below by the ripping horn of the slaug. The urgach fell. She could hear screams of terror from the svart alfar, the scream of the dying horse. Saw Diar fall free as the horse rolled on the ground and thrashed in its death agony. Saw the enraged, blood-maddened slaug turn to rip the fallen man to shreds of flesh—
Saw a spear, its head gleaming blue-white, flash through the dark and plunge into the throat of the slaug, killing it instantly. Saw nothing after that but the man lying on the ground.
“Come, child,” said Arthur Pendragon, who had thrown the King Spear in a cast almost beyond belief, in this light and from so far. He laid a gentle hand upon her arm. “Let me lead you down to him.”
She let him lead her down, through the rainfall of her tears. She was aware, distantly, of utter confusion among the ranks of the Dark. Terror at the loss of their leader. She was conscious of people on horseback beside her, but not of who they were, save for Arthur, who was holding her arm.
She went down the slope and rode across the dark, stony ground and came to where he lay. There were torches, somehow, all around them. She drew a choking, desperate breath and wiped away her tears with the loose sleeve of the robe she wore.
Then she dismounted and walked over. His head was cradled in the lap of Coll of Taerlindel, blood pouring and pouring from the wound Uathach’s sword had made, soaking into the barren soil.
He was not yet dead. He breathed with quick, shallow motions of his chest, but every breath sent forth another torrent of his blood. His eyes were closed. There were other people there, but it seemed to her that she and he were all alone in a wide night world without stars.
She knelt on the ground beside him, and something, the intuitive awareness of her presence, caused him to open his eyes. By torchlight she met his blue gaze for the last time with her own. He tried to smile, to speak. But at the last there was too much pain she saw, he would not even be allowed this much, and so she lowered her mouth to his, and kissed him, and said, “Good night, my love. I will not say goodbye. Wait for me by the Weaver’s side. If the gods love us—”
She tried to go on, tried very hard, but the tears were blinding her and stopping her throat. His face was bloodless, bone white in the light of the torches. His eyes had closed again. She could feel his blood pouring from the wound, saturating the ground where she knelt. She knew he was leaving her. No power of magic, no voice of a god could bring him back from where this silent, terrible pain was taking him. It was too deep. It was final.
Then he opened his eyes, with a very great effort, for the last time, and she realized that words didn’t matter. That she knew everything he would ever want to say. She read the message in his eyes and knew what he was asking her. It was as if, here at the very last, they had moved beyond all need for anything but looking.
She lifted her head and saw Aileron kneeling at Diarmuid’s other side, his face laid open as if by a lash, distorted with grief. She understood something then, and could even find a place within herself to pity him. She swallowed and fought past the thickness in her throat to find words again: Diarmuid’s words, for he could not speak, and so she would have to be his voice for this last time.
She whispered, “He wants you to set him free. To send him home. That it will not have been done by the urgach’s sword.”
“Oh, Diar, no!” Aileron said.
But Diarmuid turned his head, slowly, fighting the pain of movement, his breathing so shallow it was hardly there, and he looked at his older brother and he nodded, once.
Aileron was still for a very long time, as the two sons of Ailell looked at each other by the flickering torchlight. Then the High King stretched forth a hand and laid it gently against his brother’s cheek. He held it there a moment, and then he looked at Sharra with a last question, asking dispensation with his own dark eyes.
And Sharra reached for all the courage that she had and granted it to him, saying, for herself and for Diar, “Let it be done with love.”
Then Aileron dan Ailell, the High King, drew forth his dagger from a sheath that hung down at his side, and he laid its point over his brother’s heart. And Diarmuid moved one hand, and found Sharra’s, and Aileron waited as he brought it to his lips one last time. He was holding it there, and holding her eyes with his own, when his brother’s knife, agent of love, set him free from his iron pain, and he died.
Aileron withdrew his blade and set it down. Then he buried his face in his hands. Sharra could hardly see, she was so blinded by her tears. It seemed to be raining everywhere, in that clear cool starry evening over Andarien.
“Come, my dear,” said Jaelle, the High Priestess, helping her rise. She was weeping. The Seer came up on the other side, and Sharra went where they took her.
Diarmuid dan Ailell was borne back in his brother’s arms from the place where he died, for the High King would suffer no man else to do so. Across the stony plain Aileron carried him, with torches buring on either side and all around. Up the long slope he went, the body cradled against his chest, and men turned away their heads so as not to have to look upon the face of the living brother as he bore away the dead.
They made a pyre that night in Andarien. They washed Diarmuid’s body and clothed it in white and gold, hiding his terrible wounds, and they combed his golden hair. Then the High King took him up again for the last time and bore him to where they had gathered the wood of the pyre, and he laid his brother down upon it, and kissed him upon the lips, and withdrew.
Then Teyrnon, the last mage of Brennin, stepped forward with Barak, his source, and with Loren Silvercloak and Matt Sören, and all of them were weeping in the darkness there. But Teyrnon thrust forth his hand and spoke a word of power, and a single shaft of light flew forward from his fingers, blazing white and gold like the robes of the dead Prince, and the pyre roared suddenly to flame, consuming the body laid upon it.
So passed Diarmuid dan Ailell. So did his untamed brightness come in the end to flame, and then ash, and, at the very last, in the clear voices of the lios alfar, into song under the stars.