The Darkest Road

Summary of Books One and Two

In The Summer Tree it was told how Loren Silvercloak and Matt Sören, a mage and his magical source from the High Kingdom of Brennin in the world of Fionavar, induced five people from our own world to “cross” with them to Fionavar. Their ostensible purpose was to have the five participate in the festivities attendant on the celebration of the fiftieth year of the reign of Ailell, the High King. In fact, there were darker premonitions underlying the mage’s actions.

In Brennin, a brutal drought was afflicting the kingdom. Ailell’s older son, Aileron, had already been exiled for cursing his father’s refusal to allow him to sacrifice himself on the Summer Tree in an effort to end the drought.

In Fionavar, the five strangers quickly found themselves drawn into the complex tapestry of events. Kim Ford was recognized by the aged Seer, Ysanne, as the successor she had prophetically dreamt. Kim was initiated into the knowledge of the Seers by the water spirit, Eilathen, and presented with the Baelrath, the “Warstone” that Ysanne had been guarding. Kim was also shown the Circlet of Lisen, a gem that shone with its own light. The beautiful Lisen, a power of Pendaran Wood, had been the magical source and the beloved companion of Amairgen Whitebranch, the first of the mages. She had killed herself, leaping into the sea from her Tower, upon learning that Amairgen had died. Ysanne told Kim the prophecy that accompanied the Circlet: “Who shall wear this next, after Lisen, shall have the darkest road to walk of any child of earth or stars.” Later, as a last gesture of ultimate sacrifice on the eve of war, Ysanne, knowing Kim would have need of the old Seer’s power in the days to come, used Lokdal, the magic dagger of the Dwarves, to kill herself—but not before tracing a symbol on the brow of the sleeping Kim, which action enabled her to make of her own soul a gift for Kimberly.

Meanwhile, Paul Schafer and Kevin Laine were initiated in quite a different way. Paul played—and lost—a night game of chess with the High King in the palace of Paras Derval, during which an unexpected bond of sympathy was forged between the two. The next morning he and Kevin joined the band of the reckless Prince Diarmuid, Ailell’s younger son, in a raid across the River Saeren to Cathal, the Garden Country. There, Diarmuid achieved his intended seduction of Sharra, the Princess of Cathal. After the company’s return to Brennin, they passed a wild night in the Black Boar tavern. Late at night a song Kevin sang reminded Paul too acutely of the death in a car accident of Rachel Kincaid, the woman he had loved. Paul, blaming himself for the accident, which had occurred moments after Rachel had announced she was going to wed someone else, took a drastic step: he approached the High King and received Ailell’s sanction to sacrifice himself in the King’s stead on the Summer Tree.

The next night, the glade of the Summer Tree in the Godwood saw an epic battle. As Paul, bound on the Tree, watched helplessly, Galadan the Wolflord, who had come to claim Paul’s life, was opposed and driven back by a mysterious grey dog. The following night—Paul’s third on the Tree—a red full moon shone in the sky on a new moon night, as Dana, the Mother Goddess, granted Paul release from his guilt, by showing that he had not, in fact, subconsciously willed the accident that had killed Rachel. As Paul wept, rain finally fell over Brennin. Paul, though, did not die. He was taken down from the Tree alive by Jaelle, the High Priestess of Dana. Henceforth Paul would carry another name: Pwyll Twiceborn, Lord of the Summer Tree.

By now it was clear that an epochal confrontation was at hand: Rakoth Maugrim, the Unraveller, defeated a thousand years before and bound under the great mountain, Rangat, had freed himself and had caused the mountain to explode with a hand of fire to proclaim that fact.

His freedom was to have immediate consequences for Jennifer Lowell, the fourth of the strangers. In Paras Derval she had witnessed an unsettling incident during a children’s counting game. A young girl, Leila, had “called” a boy named Finn to “take the Longest Road” for the third time that summer. No one, not even Jaelle, who had also been watching, knew exactly what that meant, though Jaelle was quick to enlist Leila as an acolyte in the Temple. The next day, riding outside the town walls, Jennifer met Brendel of the lios alfar—the Children of Light—and a party of his people. She spent the night in the woods with them, and in the darkness they were attacked. Concerned about the arrival of the five strangers, Rakoth Maugrim had Galadan and Metran—the traitorous First Mage of Brennin—abduct Jennifer. She was bound to the back of the black swan, Avaia, and borne north to Rakoth’s fortress of Starkadh.

Meanwhile, the terrifying explosion of the mountain had caused the death of the aged High King. This led to a tense confrontation between Diarmuid and his brother, Aileron—who had been disguised as Ysanne’s servant since his exile. The potentially violent situation was ended by Diarmuid’s voluntarily relinquishing his claim to the throne, but not before he’d received a knife in the shoulder, courtesy of Sharra of Cathal, who had come to Brennin to seek vengeance on him for the deception that had led to her seduction.

In the meantime, Dave Martyniuk, the last of the five strangers, had been separated from the others in the crossing to Fionavar. He ended up far to the north among the Dalrei, the “Riders,” on the Plain, and found himself drawn into the life of the third tribe, led by Ivor, their Chieftain.

Ivor’s young son, Tabor, fasting in the forest for a vision of his totem animal, dreamt a seemingly impossible creature: a winged, chestnut unicorn. Three nights later, at the edge of the Great Wood, Pendaran, he met and flew upon this creature of his fast, Imraith-Nimphais—a double-edged gift of the Goddess, born of the red full moon.

Meanwhile, Dave was escorted toward Brennin by a party of Dalrei led by Ivor’s older son, Levon. The company was ambushed by a great number of the evil svart alfar, and only Dave, Levon, and a third Dalrei, Tore, survived by riding into the darkness of Pendaran Wood. The trees and spirits of Pendaran, hating all men since the loss of the beautiful Lisen of the Wood a thousand years before, plotted the death of the three men, but they were saved by the intervention of Flidais, a diminutive forest power, who claimed, among other things, to know the answers to all the riddles in all the worlds, save one: the name by which the “Warrior” could be summoned. As it happened, the search for this name was one of the tasks Ysanne had left with Kimberly.

Flidais sent word to Ceinwen, the capricious, green-clad goddess of the Hunt, who had taken a special liking to Dave. The goddess arranged for the three friends to awaken safely on the southern edge of the Great Wood in the morning.

She did more. She also caused Dave to find a long-lost object of power: Owein’s Horn. Levon, who had been taught by wise old Gereint, the blind shaman of his tribe, then found the Cave of the Sleepers nearby—a cave wherein Owein and the kings of the Wild Hunt lay asleep.

The three friends rode south with this knowledge to Paras Derval, in time to arrive for the first council of Aileron’s reign. The council was interrupted twice. The first time, by the arrival of Brock, a Dwarf from Banir Tal who knelt before Matt Sören—once King of the Dwarves—and proffered the terrible tidings that the Dwarves, under the leadership of two brothers, Kaen and Blod, had helped the Unraveller to free himself by treacherously breaking the wardstone of Eridu, thus preventing any warning of Rakoth’s stirring under the mountain. They had also found and delivered to Rakoth the Cauldron of Khath Meigol, which had the power to raise the newly dead.

In the midst of this terrifying recitation, Kimberly suddenly saw—in a vision shaped by the Baelrath—Jennifer being raped and tortured by Rakoth in his fortress of Starkadh. She gathered Dave, Paul, and Kevin around her, reached out for Jennifer with the wild power of her ring, and drew the five of them out of Fionavar back to their own world. And so ended The Summer Tree.

The Wandering Fire picked up the story some six months later, in November and back in Toronto, with Kimberly waiting for the dream that would give her the Warrior’s summoning name. Jennifer, badly scarred in her soul and carrying the child of Rakoth Maugrim—having vowed to give birth to that child as her answer to the Dark—was brought early to her time by a sudden crossing back to Fionavar. The crossing was achieved by Paul when the two of them were threatened by Galadan, who had crossed to their world in pursuit of Paul.

In Fionavar, Jennifer’s child, Darien, was left to be secretly fostered in the house of Vae and Shahar, the parents of Finn—the boy called by the children’s counting game to “take the Longest Road.” The only persons informed of the secret were the priestesses of Dana, because Paul and Jennifer needed Jaelle’s magic to send them home.

The following spring Kim finally had the dream for which she had been waiting. As a result, the five traveled to Stonehenge where Kim raised the spirit of Uther Pendragon by the power of the Baelrath and compelled him to name his son’s resting place. Kim then went alone, by the magic she carried, to Glastonbury Tor and there—having first sent the others ahead to Fionavar—she drew the Warrior, Arthur, from his rest by the summoning name: Childslayer. The name was an echo of the sin Arthur had committed in his youth after discovering his inadvertent incest with his sister. Kim and the Warrior followed the others to Paras Derval.

An icy winter gripped Fionavar, even as midsummer approached—a winter so terrible that Fordaetha, the Ice Queen of Rük, was able to come as far south as Paras Derval. She almost killed Paul in the Black Boar tavern before he succeeded in driving her back north. It was decided in council that Jaelle and the mages and Kimberly would join with Gereint, the old shaman, in an attempt to magically probe the source of the killing winter—a necessary prelude to trying to end it.

In the meantime the dimensions of Arthur Pendragon’s tragedy were beginning to take shape as it became clear (to Brendel of the lios alfar, first of everyone) who Jennifer Lowell really was: Guinevere, beloved of Arthur and of Lancelot. Marred by her suffering in Starkadh, Jennifer withdrew to the sanctuary of Dana with Jaelle. It was Jaelle who explained that Vae and Finn had taken Darien (who was growing with the unnatural rapidity of all the andain—children of mortals and gods) to Ysanne’s cottage by the lake. There, Darien, seeming now to be a child of five years old, was growing up in the loving care of his foster mother and brother, who were troubled by two things: a power which caused his blue eyes to flash red, and an awareness that the child was drawn by voices in the storms of winter.

On the Plain the Dalrei were hard-pressed. The winter had rendered the graceful eltor—the creatures the Dalrei hunted and depended upon—awkward and ungainly in the snow, which made them easy prey for Galadan’s wolves. Ivor—now Aven, or “Father” of all the Dalrei— had herded the eltor down to the southeastern corner of the vast Plain, and there the gathered tribes guarded them as best they could. Until one attack included great numbers of the hideous urgach mounted upon six-legged monsters called slaug. Only the intervention of Diarmuid of Brennin, with Dave and Kevin in his company, saved the Dalrei from the first wave of the mounted urgach. And only the appearance of Ivor’s son Tabor, riding Imraith-Nimphais, his deadly, winged mount with the shining horn, saved them from the second, larger wave. Ivor was painfully aware of the effect such flight had on Tabor, drawing him ever farther from the world of men.

Shortly after, back in Brennin, another new strand entered the Tapestry. At the urging of Levon, Ivor’s older son—and having the reluctant agreement of Loren—Kim and Dave, the bearers of what Levon thought to be the elements of an ancient verse that spoke of the waking of the Wild Hunt, went with a number of companions to the place at the edge of Pendaran Wood where the Cave of the Sleepers lay. The Baelrath shattered the stone at the cave mouth and then Dave’s horn summoned forth Owein and the seven kings of the Hunt. With the shadowy sky kings wailing “Where is the child?” a child did, indeed, step forth to become one of the Wild Hunt: it was Finn, and this was the Longest Road to which he had been called.

Most of the company, including Shalhassan the Supreme Lord of Cathal, and Sharra, his daughter, who had arrived from the south with reinforcements, made their way the next morning to Gwen Ystrat, the province of the Goddess; partly to meet Gereint, the shaman, there, partly in response to a report from Audiart, Jaelle’s second in command, that the province was being beset by wolves. The company was led by the grey dog that had saved Paul on the Summer Tree, and who turned out to be Cavall, Arthur’s hunting dog. They passed into the province of the Mother amid ice and snow on the day before Maidaladan—Midsummer’s Eve—with all the ancient, erotic, blood magic such a night implied. That evening, with the aid of the other magic wielders, Kim descended into the designs of Maugrim and found a clue that enabled Loren to deduce that the winter was being shaped by Metran, the treacherous mage, using the Cauldron of Khath Meigol, and basing himself on the unholy island of Cader Sedat. Kim herself would have died in her quest, had she not been saved by an unexpected source: Ruana of the Paraiko, one of the Giants, the people who had shaped the Cauldron in the first place. They were a race long thought to be dead and haunting the mountain passes with their “blood curse.” Ruana reached Kim telepathically and told her that his people were alive but were slowly being put to death—bloodlessly—by the urgach and svart alfar.

The next day, during the wolf hunt, Kevin—who had been feeling useless through all the combats—had nearly fatal injury added to insult when he was gored by a white boar. He was saved by the healing magic of the mages, but this last symbolic portent finally brought home to him what his own fate and task were to be. Amid the unbridled eroticism of Midsummer’s Eve in Gwen Ystrat (on a night when Prince Diarmuid told Sharra of Cathal that he loved her), Kevin slipped away alone to the east and, guided by Cavall in the snow, came to the cave of Dun Maura where he sacrificed his life to the Goddess, that she might intercede and break the winter—thus enabling the others to sail to Cader Sedat and battle with Metran.

In the meantime, Paul had remained behind with Vae and Darien. Earlier that same day he had taken Darien to the Summer Tree. His plan was to summon Cernan, the stag-horned god of the forests (and Galadan’s father) to help accelerate Darien’s progression to his maturity— a maturity desperately needed, for the ambivalent child was growing steadily in power. As it happened, Darien needed no such aid in an oak grove on Midsummer’s Eve. He propelled himself forward in years to much the same age as his brother Finn had been before he left. Having overheard Cernan ask Paul why the child had even been allowed to live, Darien departed, vowing to seek out his father, Rakoth Maugrim.

Not long after, it was decided that Diarmuid’s men, with Loren and Arthur and Paul, would sail for Cader Sedat. Kimberly had remained in the east, with only Brock the Dwarf as her companion on a journey to the mountain pass where the Paraiko were being slain. The two of them had scarcely entered the mountains, however, when they were attacked and captured by a band of brigands.

With Kevin’s sacrifice ending the winter, war became a reality. From the borders of Daniloth, the Shadowland, where dwelt the lios alfar, an army of the Dark was seen sweeping south toward the Plain. Ra-Tenniel, Lord of the lios alfar, sent warning to the Dalrei. In response, Ivor led his whole army—save for Tabor, left behind to guard the camp—in a wild, full-tilt ride across half the length of the Plain to meet the enemy by the banks of the Adein River. The battle that followed was on the verge of being lost—despite the appearance of Ra-Tenniel and the lios alfar—when Dave Martyniuk sounded Owein’s Horn to summon the Wild Hunt. The kings of the Hunt, led by the child who had once been Finn, began slaughtering the forces of the Dark—and then, without discrimination, those of the Light as well. They were only diverted from their kill by the intercession of the goddess Ceinwen. Much later, Dave awoke in the darkness on the mount beneath which Ceinwen had gathered the dead, and she made love with him on the grass that night.

Back in Brennin, on the morning before the voyage to Cader Sedat, Jennifer emerged from the Temple at the urging of Matt Sören. For the space of a single day she was reunited with Arthur. Then, after the ship sailed she set out in turn, with only Brendel of the lios alfar to accompany her, to watch for its return from the Anor Lisen: the Tower at the westernmost edge of Pendaran Wood where Lisen, a thousand years ago, had waited for Amairgen.

At sea, the ship Prydwen was attacked by a monstrous creature, the Soulmonger of Maugrim. Amid the sound of unearthly music, Loren and Matt defended the ship while Paul desperately sought the power to summon Liranan, the god of the sea, to battle the monster. At the last instant he was reached by Gereint the shaman, who had sent his soul traveling out to sea in search of Paul to give him the aid that would make the summoning possible. Thus compelled, the sea god came and drove the monster into the deeps, killing it—but not before Diarmuid had leaped to the Soulmonger’s enormous head and plucked the white staff of Amairgen Whitebranch from where it was embedded between its eyes.

And so two tragic mysteries were made clear. Amairgen, who had disappeared after sailing for Cader Sedat a thousand years ago, had evidently been slain by this creature. Even worse, the music they had heard was the glorious singing of all the lios alfar who had set sail west toward the hidden island the Weaver had shaped for them alone. Not one of them had reached it in a thousand years; all had been slain in this place.

With Arthur’s guidance and Loren’s power the ship came to Cader Sedat. There they discovered that Metran had been using his mage’s power, augmented by the Cauldron, to shape a death rain over the eastern land of Eridu and was preparing to bring the rain westward over the mountains. On that island a titanic mages’ battle was fought by Loren and Matt against Metran, who was sourced in the power of a myriad of svart alfar who—drained to death by the power he sucked from them—were being revived by the Cauldron of Khath Meigol.

In the end Loren prevailed, killing Metran and shattering the Cauldron, but only by drawing upon a depth of power that also killed his source, Matt Sören.

In the aftermath of that duel, Paul and Diarmuid followed Arthur into the Chamber of the Dead beneath Cader Sedat. There they watched the Warrior wake Lancelot du Lac from his bed of stone to join in the war against the Dark. And so all three members of that triangle were now in Fionavar. Back in the shattered Hall of Cader Sedat, Lancelot’s first action was to use his own particular gifts (exercised once before, in Camelot) to bring Matt Sören back to life. Unfortunately, during the brief time that Matt had lain lifeless, the bond of mage and source had been irrevocably broken, and Loren Silvercloak had lost his magical powers. The Wandering Fire ended as the company prepared to leave the island and sail back to war.