The Wandering Fire

Chapter 4

Ruana essayed the thin chant, having only Iraima to aid him. He had scant hope it would carry as far as it had to go, but there was nothing else he could think of to do. So he lay in the dark, listening to the others dying around him, and he chanted the warnsong and the savesong over and over again. Iraima helped when she could, but she was very weak.

In the morning their captors found that Taieri had died, and he was taken out and devoured. After, the ones outside burned his bones for warmth against the bitter cold. Ruana choked on the smoke that drifted from the pyre. It had been placed in front of the cave, to make breathing harder for them. He heard Iraima coughing. They would not be killed directly, he knew, for fear of the bloodcurse, but they had been without food in the caves a long time now, and breathing the smoke of their brothers and sisters. Ruana wondered, abstractly, what it would be like to feel hate or rage. Closing his eyes, he chanted the kanior once for Taieri, knowing it was not being done in proper accordance with the rites, and asking forgiveness for this. Then he began the other two again in cycle, the warnsong and the savesong, over and over. Iraima joined in with him awhile, and Ikatere as well, but mostly Ruana sang alone.

They climbed up to Atronel over the green grass, and the high ones of all three Marks were there before Ra-Tenniel.

Only Brendel was away south, in Paras Derval, so Heilyn represented the Kestrel. Galen and Lydan, the twins, stood forth for the Brein Mark, and fairest Leyse for the Swan, and she was clad in white as the Swan Mark always were, for memory of Lauriel. Enroth, who was eldest since Laien Spearchild had gone to his song, was there as well—Mark-less and of all Marks, as were the Eldest and the King alone.

Ra-Tenniel made the throne glow brightly blue, and fierce Galen smiled, though it could be seen that her brother frowned.

Leyse offered a flower to the King. “From by Celyn,” she murmured. “There is a fair grove there, of silver and red sylvain.”

“I would go with you to see them,” Ra-Tenniel replied.

Leyse smiled, elusive. “Are we to open the sky tonight, Brightest Lord?”

He accepted the deflection. This time Lydan smiled.

“We are,” said Ra-Tenniel. “Na-Enroth?”

“It is woven,” the Eldest affirmed. “We will try to draw him forth from Starkadh.”

“And if we do?” Lydan asked.

“Then we go to war,” Ra-Tenniel replied. “But if we wait, or if the Dark One waits as he seems purposed to do, then our allies may be dead of this winter before Maugrim comes after us.”

Heilyn spoke for the first time. “He has made the winter then? This is known?”

“It is known,” Enroth replied. “And another thing is known. The Baelrath blazed two nights ago. Not in Fionavar, but it was on fire.”

They stirred at that. “The Seer?” Lyse ventured. “In her world?”

“So it would seem,” Enroth said. “Something new is threading across the Loom.”

“Or something very old,” Ra-Tenniel amended, and the Eldest bowed his head.

“Then why do we wait?” Galen cried. Her rich singer’s voice carried to the others on the slopes of Atronel. A murmur like a note of music came to the six of them by the throne.

”We do not, once we are agreed,” Ra-Tenniel replied. “Is it not bitterest irony that we who are named for Light should have been forced to cloak our land in shadow for this thousand years? Why should Daniloth be named the Shadowland? Would you not see the stars bright over Atronel, and send forth our own light in answer back to them?”

The music of agreement and desire was all about them on the mound. It carried even careful Lydan, and he, too, let his eyes reach crystal as Ra-Tenniel made the throne shine full bright, and, speaking the words necessary, he undid the spell Lathen Mistweaver had woven after the Bael Rangat. And the lios alfar, the Children of Light, sang then with one voice of praise to see the stars undimmed overhead, and to know that all over the northland of Fionavar the shining of Daniloth would illuminate the night for the first time in a thousand years.

It exposed them, of course, which was the gallant purpose of what they did. They made themselves a lure, the most tantalizing lure there could ever be, to draw Rakoth Maugrim down from Starkadh.

All night they stayed awake. No one would sleep, not with the stars to see, and then the waxing moon. And not with their borders open to the north, where they knew the Unraveller would be upon his towers among the Ice, seeing their taunting, iridescent glow. They sang in praise of the light, that their clear voices might reach him, too, and clearest of them all sang Ra-Tenniel, Lord of the lios alfar.

In the morning they put back the Mistweaver’s shadowing. Those sent to keep watch by the borders returned to Atronel to report that a mighty storm was howling southward over the bleak, empty Plain.

Light is swifter than wind. In the country south of Rienna the Dalrei saw the glow above Daniloth as soon as it went up. The newest storm would take some time to reach them.

Which is not to say it wasn’t cold enough on watch by the gates where Navon of the third tribe took his turn on guard. Being a Rider among the Dalrei was still a glorious thing for one who had seen his animal so recently, but there were less pleasant aspects to it for a fourteen-year-old, staring out into the white night for wolves while the wind tore at his eltor cloak, seeking the thin bones underneath.

While word of the light far in the northwest ran wild through the clustered camps, Navon concentrated on his watch. He had slipped up on his first hunt as a Rider; his attempt at a flashy kill had been one of the failures that led Levon dan Ivor to risk his life trying Revor’s Kill. Trying and succeeding. And though the hunt leader of the third tribe had never said a word to him, Navon had striven ever since to erase the memory of his folly.

The more so, because every member of the third tribe felt an added pride and responsibility after what had happened at Celidon when the snows began and the wolves had begun to kill the eltor. Navon remembered his first sickening sight of slaughtered grace in the land between the Adein and Celidon itself, mockingly near to the mid-Plain stones. For whereas the Dalrei might kill fifteen or twenty of the flying beasts on one hunt and only by adherance to their stern Law, that day the joined Riders of the third and eighth tribes had ridden over a swell of rising land, to see two hundred eltor lying in the snow, their blood shockingly red on the white drifts of the Plain.

It was the snow that had undone them. For the eltor, so fast over the grass that men spoke of a swift of eltor, not a herd, had hooves ill-adapted to the deep piled snow. They foundered in it, their fluid grace turning to ungainly, awkward motion—and they had become easy prey for the wolves.

Always in autumn the eltor went south to leave the snow behind, always the Dalrei followed them to this milder country on the fringes of the grazing lands of Brennin. But this year the snow had come early, and savagely, trapping the animals in the north. And then the wolves had come.

The Dalrei cursed, turning faces of grief and rage to the north. But curses had done no good, nor had they stayed the next bad thing, for the winds had carried the killing snow all the way south to Brennin. Which meant there was no safe place for the eltor anywhere on the Plain.

And so Dhira of the first tribe had issued a Grand Summoning to Celidon of all nine chieftains and their shamans and advisers. And venerable Dhira had risen up—everyone knew the story by now—and asked, “Why does Cernan of the Beasts allow this slaughter?”

And only one man of that company had stood to make reply.

“Because,” Ivor of the third tribe had said, “he cannot stop it. Maugrim is stronger than he, and I will name him now by his name, and say Rakoth.”

His voice had grown stronger to quell the murmuring that came at the never-spoken name.

“We must name him and know him for what he is, for no longer is he a presence of nightmare or memory. He is real, he is here now, and we must go to war against him for our people and our land, ourselves and with our allies, or there will be no generations after us to ride with the eltor on the wide Plain. We will be slaves to Starkadh, toys for svart alfar. Each man in this Gathering must swear by the stones of Celidon, by this heart of our Plain, that he will not live to see that sunless day. There is no Revor here with us, but we are the sons of Revor, and the heirs to his pride and to the High King’s gift of the Plain. Men of the Dalrei, shall we prove worthy of that gift and that pride?”

Navon shivered in the dark as the remembered words ran through his mind. Everyone knew of the roar that had followed Ivor’s speech, exploding outward from Celidon as if it might run all the white leagues north, through Gwynir and Andarien, to shake the very walls of Starkadh.

And everyone knew what had followed when mild, wise Tulger of the eighth tribe had risen in his turn to say, simply, “Not since Revor have the nine tribes had one Lord, one Father. Should we have an Aven now?”

“Yes!” the Gathering had cried. (Everyone knew.)

“Who shall that be?”

And in this fashion had Ivor dan Banor of the third tribe become the first Aven of all the Plain in a thousand years, his name exploding in its turn from the holy place.

They all showed it, Navon thought, pulling his cloak more tightly about him against the keening wind. All of the third tribe partook of both the glory and the responsibility, and Ivor had made sure they had no special status in the distribution of labors.

Celidon would be safe, he’d decided. No wolves would enter there as yet, risking the deep, ancient power that bound the circle of the standing stones or the House that stood inside them.

The eltor were the first priority for now. The animals had finally made their way south to the country by the River Latham, and thither the tribes would follow them; the hunters would circle the gathered swifts—though the name was a mockery in snow—and the camps would be on constant alert against attack.

And so it had come to be. Twice had the wolves ventured to attack one of the protected swifts, and twice had the racing auberei gotten word to the nearest camp in time to beat back the marauders.

Even now, Navon thought, pacing from north to south along the wooden outer wall, even now Levon, the Aven’s son, was out there in the bitter cold on night duty around the large swift near the camp of the third tribe. And with him was the one who had become Navon’s own hero— though he would have blushed and denied it had the thought been attributed to him by anyone. Still, no man in any tribe, not even Levon himself, had killed as many wolves or ridden so many nights of guard as had Tore dan Sorcha. He had been called “the Outcast” once, Navon remembered, shaking his head in what he thought was an adult disbelief. Not any longer. The silent deadliness of Tore was a byword now among the tribes.

His tribe had more than its share of heroes these days, and Navon was determined not to let them down. He peered keenly into the dark south, a fourteen-year-old sentinel, and not the youngest either.

But youngest or not, he was first to see and hear the lone auberei come galloping up, and it was Navon who raised the alarm, while the auberei went on to the next camp without pausing to rest his horse.

It was, evidently, a major attack.

A very major attack, Tore realized, as he saw the dark, fluid shapes of the wolves bear down on the huge swift that the third and seventh tribes were guarding together. Or trying to guard, he amended inwardly, racing to Levon’s side for the hunt leader’s orders. This was going to be bad; the wolves were in force this time. In the growing chaos he rose up in his saddle and scanned the swift: the four lead eltor were still roped and held, an ugly thing but necessary, for if this enormous, mingled swift were to take flight then chaos would become hopelessness. As long as the leaders stayed, the swift would hold together, and the eltor were horned and could fight.

And they were fighting, he saw, as the lead edge of the wolf attack reached them. It was an unholy scene: wolf snarls, the high-pitched cries of the eltor, the lurid, weaving torches the Riders bore in the darkness, and then eltor blood on the snow again.

Rage threatened to choke Tore’s breathing. Forcing himself to stay calm, he saw that the right front edge of the swift was undermanned, and the wolves were racing around for it.

Levon saw it too. “Doraid!” he shouted to the hunt leader of the seventh. “Take half your men for the near flank!”

Doraid hesitated. “No,” he said, “I have another idea. Why don’t we—”

At which point he found himself pulled from his horse and hurtling into the snow. Tore didn’t stop to see where he fell. “Riders of the seventh,” he screamed over the noise of the battle, “follow me!”

Tabor dan Ivor, bearing a torch for his brother, saw that the hunters of the seventh did indeed follow. His heart swelled, even amid the carnage, to see how the reputation of Tore dan Sorcha enforced obedience. No man on the Plain had a more defiant hatred of the Dark than the black-clad Rider of the third tribe, whose only concession to the winter winds was an eltor vest over his bare chest. His aura was such now that the hunters of another tribe would follow him without a question asked.

Tore beat the wolves to the flank, barely. He and the Riders of the seventh smashed, swords scything, into the wolf pack. They cut it in two and wheeled swiftly to knife back the other way.

“Cechtar,” Levon said, cool as ever. “Take twenty men around the other way. Guard the lead eltor on that side.”

“Done!” Cechtar cried, flamboyant as always, and raced off over the powdered snow with a group of Riders at his heels.

Rising as high as he could in the saddle, Tabor almost fell, but he balanced himself and, turning to Levon, said, “The auberei got through. I see torches coming from the camp!”

“Good,” said Levon grimly, looking the other way. “We are going to need them all.”

Wheeling his horse to follow his brother’s glance, Tabor saw them too, and his heart clenched like a fist.

There were urgach coming up from the south.

The savage creatures were mounted on beasts such as Tabor had never seen—huge six-legged steeds, as monstrous as their riders, with a viciously curved horn protruding from their heads.

“We seem to have a fight here,” said Levon, almost to himself. And then, turning to Tabor with a smile, he said, “Come, my brother, it is our turn.”

And the two sons of Ivor, the one tall and fair, the other young yet, nut-brown and wiry, hurled their horses forward toward the advancing line of the urgach.

Try as he could, Tabor couldn’t keep up, and Levon soon outdistanced him. He did not ride alone though, for angling to intercept his path, low on his flying horse, came a Rider in black leggings and an eltor vest.

Together Levon and Tore raced directly toward the wide line of the urgach. There are too many, Tabor thought, trying furiously to catch up. He was closer than anyone else, and so saw what happened best of all. Thirty paces from the advancing urgach, Levon and Tore, without a word spoken, suddenly wheeled their horses at right angles, and racing across the line of the huge, six-legged steeds, fired three arrows each at dazzling speed.

Six of the urgach fell.

Tabor, however, was in no position to cheer. Churning fiercely forward in Tore and Levon’s wake he suddenly found himself galloping with only a torch in his hand right at the line of monsters.

He heard Levon scream his name, not very helpfully. Swallowing a fifteen-year-old’s yelp of apprehension, Tabor angled his horse for a gap in the onrushing line. An urgach, hairy and huge, changed course to intercept him.

“Cernan!” Tabor cried and hurled the torch even as he swung himself under the belly of his horse. He heard the whistle of a sword where his head had been, a guttural roar of pain as the flung torch struck hair and flesh, and then he was through the line and riding away from the fight over the wide sweeping beauty of the white Plain under a waxing moon and all the stars.

Not for long. He checked his horse and turned it, reaching for the small sword slung from his saddle. There was no need—none of the urgach had come after him. Instead they smashed viciously into the terrified eltor and then, hewing and carving the screaming animals like so much meat, they swung, en masse, and hit the left side contingent of Dalrei with a brutal force. There were reinforcements coming— Tabor could see the torches streaming toward them from the camps in the distance—but they were not going to be enough, he thought despairingly, not against the urgach.

Levon and Tore were speeding to attack again, he saw, but the urgach were deep within the mass of Riders, their gigantic swords wreaking havoc among the hunters while the wolves, unimpeded, ran wild through the eltor.

He heard hoofbeats behind him. Sword raised, he spun his horse frantically. And a glad cry escaped his throat.

“Come on, little brother!” someone shouted, and then Dave Martyniuk thundered by, an axe of Brennin held high, a golden Prince racing beside him and thirty men behind.

Thus did the warriors of Brennin come to the aid of the Dalrei, led by Prince Diarmuid and by the one called Davor, huge and fell, wrapped in battle fury like a red halo under the waxing moon.

Tabor saw them crash in their turn, these trained soldiers of Diarmuid’s band, into the nearest wolf pack, and he saw their swords descend in silver sweeps and rise again, dark with blood. Then they hit the massed phalanx of the urgach with Tore and Levon, and brave Cechtar beside, and over the squeals of the dying eltor, the snarl of wolves, Tabor heard, rising above the torchlit carnage, the voice of Davor cry, “Revor!” once and again, and he was young in the tidal wave of his relief and pride.

Then, suddenly, he was young no more, nor was he only a fifteen-year-old newly called Rider of the Dalrei.

From his vantage point behind the battle scene and on a slope above it Tabor saw, off to the east, a dark mass approaching very fast, and he realized that the Dalrei were not the only ones to be receiving reinforcements. And if he could see the urgach at such a distance, then there were very many, there were too many, and so.

And so it was time.

Beloved. He formed the thought in his mind.

I am here, he heard instantly. I am always here. Would you ride?

I think we must, Tabor sent reply. It is time for us, bright one.

We have ridden before.

He remembered, would always remember. But not to battle. We will have to kill.

A new note in the mind voice: I was made for war. And to fly. Summon me.

Made for war. It was true, and a grief, but the urgach were nearer now, and so.

And so in his mind Tabor spoke her name. Imraith-Nimphais, he called, on a cresting of love, and he dismounted from his horse, for on the words she was in the sky above him, more glorious than anything on earth, the creature of his dreaming.

She landed. Her horn was luminous, a silver such as the silver of the moon, though her coat was deep red as had been the moon that gave her life. And where she walked, the snow showed no imprint of her hooves, so lightly did she move.

It had been a long time. His heart full as with light, he raised a hand and she lowered her head, the single horn grazing him like a caress, that he might in turn caress her head.

Only each other, he heard, and he sent back affirmation and acceptance. Then: Shall we fly? she asked.

He could feel the straining desire run through her, and then through himself, and he said aloud, “Let us fly, and kill, my darling.”

And Tabor dan Ivor mounted himself upon the flying creature of his vigil, the double-edged gift of Dana that was to bear him, young as they both were, into the sky and away from the world of men. And Imraith-Nimphais did so. She left the ground for the cold wide heavens, carrying the Rider who alone of all creatures had dreamt her name, and to the men below they were as an unleashed comet between the stars and the Plain.

Then Tabor said within, You see?

And: I do, she replied.

He turned her to where the urgach were riding to the battlefield, and they came down upon them like a killing light. She charged as they sped down, and with her shining horn she killed once, and once more, and many, many times again under the guidance of his hand. And the urgach fled before them and they pursued, slaying, and the wolves broke and fled also, southward away, and the Dalrei and the men of Brennin cheered, amazed and exultant to see the shining thing from heaven come to their aid.

She heard them not, nor did he. They pursued, killing, until her horn was sticky and clotted with blood and there were no more of the loathsome creatures of the Dark to slay.

And finally, trembling with weariness and the shock of aftermath, they came down in a white place far from blood and Tabor cleaned her horn with snow. After, they stood close together in the wide silence of the night.

Only each other, she sent.

Only each other at the last, he replied. Then she flew off, glittering, and as dawn broke over the mountains he began the long walk back to the camps of men.

Chapter 5

“The first battle is always the worst,” Garde said, moving his horse toward Kevin so no one else would hear.

The words were meant to be reassuring, and Kevin managed a gesture of acknowledgment, but he was not prone to be dishonest with himself and he knew that the shock of battle, though real, was not his deepest problem.

Nor was it envy of Dave Martyniuk, though honesty compelled admission that this was also a part of his mood now, just after it had all ended, with the electrifying appearance of the winged, shining creature in the sky. Dave had been extraordinary, almost terrifying. Wielding the huge axe Matt Sören had found for him in the Paras Derval armory, he had roared into battle, outpacing even Diarmuid and wreaking violent havoc among the wolves while screaming at the top of his lungs. The big man had even gone one-on-one with one of the enormous, fanged brutes they called urgach. And he had killed it too; blocking a vicious sword thrust, he had launched a backhanded sweep of the axe that had half severed the creature’s head and sent it tumbling from the back of its giant steed. Then Dave had killed the six-legged horned beast as well.

And Kevin? Quick, sharp Kevin Laine had been his torchbearer at the time. Oh, they’d given him a sword to fight with, but what did he know about fighting wolves with a sword on horseback? Staying on the plunging horse was challenge enough in the screaming inferno of that fight. And when he had gained enough space to realize how utterly useless he was, Kevin had swallowed his pride, sheathed the sword, and grabbed a burning torch to give Dave light enough by which to kill. He hadn’t been too good at that, either, and twice had been nearly felled himself by Dave’s whirling axe.

They had won, though, this first real battle of the war, and something magnificent had been revealed in the sky. Kevin clung to the splendor of that image of the winged unicorn and tried to lift himself enough to share the triumph of the moment.

Yet it seemed that someone else wasn’t happy; there was a confrontation taking place. He and Garde edged their horses closer to the knot of men surrounding a husky brown-haired Rider and Tore, Dave’s friend, whom Kevin remembered from their last days in Paras Derval.

“And if you ever do so again,” the brown-haired man was saying loudly, “I will cripple you and stake you out in the Plain with honey on your eyes to draw the aigen!”

Tore, impassive on his dark grey horse, made no reply, and the other man’s blustered threat fell fatuously into the silence. Dave was grinning. He was sitting his horse between Tore and Levon, the other Rider Kevin remembered from their last time.

It was Levon who spoke, quietly but with immense authority. “Doraid, be done. And hear me: you were given a direct command in battle, and you chose that moment to discuss strategies. If Tore had not done what I asked you to do, the wolves would have turned the flank of the swift. Do you wish to explain your action here or before the Aven and the leader of your tribe?”

Doraid turned to him furiously. “Since when does the third tribe command the seventh?”

“It does not,” Levon replied with equanimity. “But I command this guard, and you were there when that command was given me.”

“Ah, yes!” Doraid sneered. “The precious son of the Aven. He is to be obeyed, and—”

“One moment!” a familiarly inflected voice snapped, and Doraid stopped in mid-word. “Do I understand what happened here?” Diarmuid continued, moving into the ring of Riders. “Did this man refuse a direct order? And is he complaining about it now?” The tone was acid.

”He did,” Tore spoke for the first time. “And he is. You do understand correctly, my lord Prince.”

Kevin had a blinding attack of déjà vú: an innyard to the south, a farmer crying, “Mórnir guard you, young Prince!” And then something else.

“Coll,” Diarmuid said.

“No!” Kevin screamed and launched himself in a flat dive from his horse. He hit his friend, Diarmuid’s big lieutenant, with a tackle that sent them both flying to land with a double crunch in the snow among the stamping horses of the Dalrei.

He was about a half second too late. There was another man lying in the snow, not far away: Doraid, with Coll’s arrow buried deep in his chest.

“Oh, hell,” Kevin said, sick at heart. “Oh, bloody hell.”

Nor was he eased to hear a chuckle beside him. “Nicely done,” Coll said softly, not at all discomfited. “You almost broke my nose again.”

“God. Coll, I’m sorry.”

“No matter.” He chuckled again. “I was half expecting you, in fact. I remember you don’t like his justice.”

No one was even looking at them. His wild leap seemed to have been utterly pointless. From where he lay on the ground, he saw two men face each other in the ring of torches.

“There were enough Dalrei dead tonight without adding another,” Levon said evenly.

Diarmuid’s voice was cool. “There will be enough dead in this war without our risking more by allowing what this man did.”

“It was a matter then for us, for the Aven, to decide.”

“Not so,” Diarmuid replied. For the first time he raised his voice. “Let me remind you all, and better now than later, of how things are. When Revor was given the Plain for himself and his heirs, he swore an oath of loyalty to Colan. Let it not be forgotten. Ivor dan Banor, Aven of the Dalrei, holds that title in the same way that Revor himself did: under the High King of Brennin, who is Aileron dan Ailell, and to whom you swore an oath of your own, Levon!”

Levon’s color was high, but his eyes never wavered. “I do not forget it,” he said. “Justice is still not served by arrows at night on a battlefield.”

“Not so,” Diarmuid said a second time. “There is seldom time in war to serve it any other way. What,” he asked softly, “does the Law of the Dalrei invoke for what Doraid did this night?”

It was Tore who answered. “Death,” he said clearly. “He is right, Levon.”

Still on the ground with Coll, Kevin realized that Diarmuid, pupil, once, of Loren Silvercloak, had known exactly that. And after a moment he saw Levon nod his head.

“I know he is,” he said. “I am my father’s son, though, and I cannot order a death so easily. Will you forgive me, my lord Prince?”

For reply, Diarmuid swung down from his horse and walked over to Levon’s. With a formal gesture he served as footman to help the other dismount, and then the two of them, both young, both fair, embraced, as the Dalrei and the men of Brennin shouted their approval.

“I feel like an idiot!” Kevin said to Coll. He helped the other man to his feet.

“We all feel that way sometimes,” said the big man sympathetically. “Especially around Diar. Let’s go get drunk, friend. The Riders make a lethal drink!”

They did. And there was a great deal of it. It didn’t really lift his mood, though, nor did Diarmuid’s indulgent response to his precipitate action earlier.

“I didn’t know you liked Coll so much!” the Prince had said, triggering a round of laughter in the huge wooden house in which most of them had gathered.

Kevin faked a laugh; he couldn’t think of a reply. He had never felt superfluous before, but more and more it was beginning to look as if he was. He noticed Dave—Davor they called him here—huddled with Levon, Tore, and a number of other Dalrei, including a teenage kid, all arms and legs and disordered hair who, he’d been given to understand, had ridden the unicorn that flew. He saw Diarmuid rise up and make his way through a giggling cluster of women to join the group. He thought about doing the same, knowing they would welcome him, but it seemed pointless somehow. He had nothing to contribute.

“More sachen?” a soft voice said in his ear. He tilted his head to see a pretty brown-haired girl holding a stone beaker. Coll winked surreptitiously and shifted a little bit away on the bench, making room.

Oh, well. “Okay,” Kevin said. He smiled. “Are you joining me?”

Neatly she slipped in beside him. “For a little while,” she said. “I’m supposed to be serving. I’ll have to get up if my mother comes. My name is Liane dal Ivor.”

He wasn’t really in the mood, but she was bright and sharp and carried the ball herself much of the time. With an effort, wanting at least to be polite, Kevin did a little halfhearted flirting.

Later, her mother did appear, surveying the scene with a hostess’s eye, and Liane scrambled off with a surprising oath to serve some more beakers of sachen. A little later the conclave at the far end broke up and Dave came over.

“We’re leaving early in the morning,” he said tersely. “Levon wants to see Kim in Paras Derval.”

“She wasn’t there yet,” Kevin protested.

“Gereint says she will be,” the other replied, and without amplification strode off into the night, buttoning his coat against the cold.

Kevin glanced at Coll. They shrugged. At least the sachen was good; saved the evening from being a total write-off.

Much later, something else did as well. He hadn’t been in his bed very long, was just feeling the heavy covers warming up, when the door opened and a slim figure bearing a candle slipped inside.

“If you ask me for a breaker of sachen,” Liane said, “I’ll break it over your head. I hope you’re warm in there.” She placed the flame on the low table beside the bed and undressed. He saw her for a moment in the light; then she was under the blankets beside him.

“I like candles,” she said.

It was the last thing either of them said for a long time.

And again, despite everything, the curving act of love took him away with it, so far that the colors of the light seemed to change. Before the flame burnt out he saw her bend back above him like a bow, in her own transcending arc, and he would have spoken then if he could.

Later it was dark and she said, “Fear not. We went so deep because we are near to Gwen Ystrat. The old stories are true after all.”

He shook his head. He had to travel a long way back to do that much, and farther still to speak. “Everywhere,” he said. “This deep.”

She stiffened. He hadn’t meant it to wound. How to explain? But Liane stroked his forehead and in a different voice whispered, “So you carry Dun Maura within yourself?” Then she called him, as he thought, drifting, by another name. He wanted to ask. There were questions, but the tide was going out and he was far along with it, much too far.

In the morning when Erron woke him with a shake and a grin, she was, naturally, gone. Nor did he see her before they rode off, the thirty men of Diarmuid’s band, he and Dave, with Levon and Tore alongside.

For Dave the journey northeast to the upper reaches of the Latham had promised reunion and in the end had offered both that and revenge. From the moment he’d understood that the man Diarmuid was to bring back was Gereint of the third tribe, his heart had begun racing with anticipation. There was no way they could have kept him from joining that party of the Prince’s men. Loren wanted Gereint for some reason having to do with figuring out the winter, he gathered. That didn’t matter so much to him; what mattered was that soon he would be among the Dalrei again.

The roads had been cleared east as far as Lake Leinan, but the going became harder as they turned north the next morning. Diarmuid had hoped to make the camps before sundown, but it was slow going among the drifts and into the teeth of the bitter wind that blew unobstructed down from the Plain. They had given Dave and Kevin wonderfully warm woven coats in Paras Derval. Lightweight, too—they knew how to work with wool and cloth here, that much was obvious. Without the coats they would have frozen. Even with them, when the sun went down, the going became very bad, and Dave had no idea how far away they were from the camps.

Then all thoughts of cold had disappeared, for they had seen torches moving in the night, heard the screams of dying animals and the shouts of men in battle.

Dave hadn’t waited for anyone else. He’d kicked his big stallion forward and charged up over a mound of snow, to see a battlefield spread out before him, and, astride a horse between him and the melee, a fifteen-year-old boy he remembered.

Diarmuid, the elegant Prince, had caught up with him as they galloped past Tabor down the slope, but Dave was scarcely aware of anyone else as he plunged into the closest pack of wolves, hewing on either side, aiming straight for the closest urgach, with a memory of deaths by Llewenmere to drive him on.

He remembered little else, as battle fury overtook him. Kevin Laine had been beside him with a torch for light at one point and they told him afterward that he had slain an urgach and its mount by himself. The six-legged horned beasts were called slaug, they told him. But that was after.

After Tabor, astonishingly, had appeared in the sky overhead, riding a lethal winged creature with a horn of its own that shone and killed.

After the moment when the wolves had fled and the slaug had borne the urgach away in flight, and he had dismounted to stand facing his brothers again. A great deal had been made whole then as he felt Tore’s hard grip on his arm and then Levon’s embrace.

There had been an interlude of some tension when Diarmuid had had a Dalrei slain for insubordination and then faced Levon down in a confrontation, but that, too, had ended all right. Kevin Laine, for no reason Dave could grasp, had tried to interfere, but no one else seemed to have taken much notice of it.

Then they had ridden back to the camp and to Ivor, who had a new title now but was still the same stocky, greying man he remembered, with the same deep-set eyes in a weather-beaten face. Ivor said, to lift Dave even higher, “Welcome home, Davor. A bright thread in darkness spins you back.”

There had been sachen after, and good food by the fires, and many remembered faces. Including Liane’s.

“How many times am I going to have to dance an urgach kill of yours?” she asked, bright-eyed, pert, her mouth soft on his cheek where she’d kissed him on tiptoe before moving off.

Tabor had come in quite a while later, and he’d wanted to embrace the boy but something in Tabor’s face stopped him. It stopped all of them, even his father. It was then that Ivor had gestured Dave over to join a meeting around a smaller fire off to the side of the room.

With Dave, there were seven people there, and Diarmuid, carrying his own beaker, made a slightly disheveled eighth a moment later. Dave wasn’t sure what he thought of this Prince; he’d been rather more impressed with Aileron, the older brother who was now High King. Diarmuid seemed altogether too suave for Dave’s taste; on the other hand, there had been nothing soft about the pace he’d set on the ride, or the control he’d asserted in the matter of the Dalrei he’d ordered killed. Ivor, Dave noticed, hadn’t brought the issue up either.

And Diarmuid, despite the drinking, seemed very much in command as he concisely outlined the wish of the High King and his First Mage that Gereint the shaman ride back with him to Paras Derval. There to join with the mages in seeking the source of the winter that was slowly grinding them all down under its malevolent heel.

“For it is malevolent,” the Prince added quietly from where he’d crouched in front of blind Gereint. “The lios have confirmed what we’ve all guessed. We would like to leave tomorrow—if it suits the shaman, and all of you.”

Ivor nodded an acknowledgment of the courteous proviso. No one spoke, though; they waited for Gereint.

Dave had still not gotten over the uneasiness he felt in the presence of this wrinkled ancient whose hollowed eye sockets seemed, nonetheless, to see into the souls of men and down the dark avenues of time. Cernan, god of the wild things, had spoken to Gereint, Dave remembered—and had called Tabor to his fast, to the animal they had seen in the sky. That thought led him to Ceinwen, and the stag in Faelin Grove. And this was his own dark avenue.

He turned from it to hear Gereint say, “We are going to need the Seer as well.”

“She hasn’t come yet,” Diarmuid said.

Everyone looked at Dave. “She was bringing someone,” he said. “She sent us ahead.”

“Who was she bringing?” the man called Tulger asked from beside Ivor.

But a rare discretion led Dave to murmur, “I think that’s for her to say, not me.” Ivor, he saw, nodded his agreement.

Gereint smiled thinly. “True,” the shaman said. “Although I know, and they have arrived by now. They were in Paras Derval before you left.” This was exactly what drove Dave crazy about Gereint.

Diarmuid didn’t seem bothered. “With Loren, probably,” he murmured, smiling as if at a jest. Dave didn’t get the joke. “Will you come then?” the Prince continued, addressing the shaman.

“Not to Paras Derval,” Gereint replied placidly. “It is too far for my old bones.”

“Well, surely—” Diarmuid began.

“I will meet you,” Gereint went on, ignoring him, “in Gwen Ystrat. I will leave tomorrow for the Temple in Morvran. You will all be coming there.”

This time even Diarmuid looked discomfited. “Why?” he asked.

“Which way did the wolves fly?” the shaman asked, turning unnervingly to where Tore sat.

“South,” the dark man said, and they were silent. There was a burst of laughter from the largest fire. Dave glanced over involuntarily and saw, with a sudden chill, that Liane was sitting next to Kevin, and the two of them were whispering in each other’s ears. His vision blurred. Goddamn that flashy skirt-chaser! Why did the slick, carefree Kevin Laines always have to be around to spoil things? Inwardly seething, Dave forced himself to turn back to the conclave.

“You will all be there,” Gereint was repeating. “And Gwen Ystrat is the best place for what we will have to do.”

Diarmuid stared at the blind shaman for a long moment. Then: “All right,” he said. “I will tell my brother. Is there anything else?”

“One thing.” It was Levon. “Dave, you have your horn.”

The horn from Pendaran. With the note that was the sound of Light itself. “I do,” Dave said. It was looped across his body.

“Good,” said Levon. “Then if the Seer is in Paras Derval I would like to ride back with you. There is something I’d like to try before we go to Gwen Ystrat.”

Ivor stirred at that, and turned to his elder son. “It is rash,” he said slowly. “You know it is.”

“I don’t know,” Levon replied. “I know we have been given Owein’s Horn. Why else if not to use?” This was reasonable enough on its own terms to silence his father. It happened, however, to be quite wrong.

“What exactly are we talking about?” the Prince asked.

“Owein,” Levon said tensely. There was a brightness in his face. “I want to wake the Sleepers and set free the Wild Hunt!”

It held them, if only for a moment.

“What fun!” said Diarmuid, but Dave could see a gleam in his eye, answering Levon’s.

Only Gereint laughed, a low, unsettling sound. “What fun,” the shaman repeated, chuckling to himself as he rocked back and forth.

It was just afterward that they noticed that Tabor had fainted.

He’d revived by morning and come out, pale but cheerful, to bid them good-bye. Dave would have stayed with the Dalrei if he could, but they needed him for the horn, it seemed, and Levon and Tore were coming with them, so it was all right. And they’d be meeting again soon in Gwen Ystrat. Morvran was the place Gereint had named.

He was thinking about Gereint’s laughter as they set off south again to meet the road to Paras Derval where it began to the west of Lake Leinan. In any normal weather, Levon said, they would have cut across the grazing lands of north Brennin, but not with the ice and snow of this unnatural season.

Kevin was riding, uncharacteristically subdued, with a couple of Diarmuid’s men, including the one he’d so asininely jumped the night before. That was fine by Dave; he wanted nothing to do with the other man. If people wanted to call it jealousy, let them. He didn’t care enough to explain. He wasn’t about to confide in anyone that he’d renounced the girl himself—to Green Ceinwen in the wood. Nor was he about to recount what the goddess had replied.

She’s Tore’s, he’d said.

Has she no other choice? Ceinwen had answered, and laughed before she disappeared.

That part was Dave’s own business.

For now, though, he had catching up to do with the men he called his brothers, ever since a ritual in Pendaran Wood. Eventually the catching up took them to the moment in the muddy fields around Stonehenge where Kevin had been explaining to the guards in French and mangled English what he and Jennifer were doing necking in forbidden territory. It had been a remarkably effective performance, and it had lasted precisely until the moment when the four of them had felt the sudden shock of power gathering them together and hurling them into the cold, dark crossing between worlds.

Chapter 6

It was, Jennifer realized, as the now-familiar cold of the crossing receded, the same room as the first time. Not the same as her second crossing, though, when she and Paul had come through so hard they had both fallen to their knees in the snow-drifted streets of the town.

It had been there, while Paul, still dazed, had struggled to his feet under the swinging sign of the Black Boar, that she had felt the first pangs of premature labor. And with these, as she grasped where he had somehow taken them, she had had a sudden memory of a woman crying in the shop doorway by the green, and her way had seemed very clear.

So they had come to Vae’s house and Darien had been born, after which a great deal seemed to change within her. Since Starkadh she had become a creature of jarring angles and dislocated responses. The world, her own world, was tinted balefully, and the possibility of ever one day crossing back to ordinary human interaction seemed a laughable, hopeless abstraction. She had been carved open by Maugrim; what healing was there anywhere for that?

Then Paul had come and said what he had said, had opened with his tone, as much as anything, the glimmering of a path. However much Rakoth might be, he was not all, not everything; he had not been able to stop Kim from coming for her.

And he could not stop her child from being born.

Or so she thought until, with a lurch of terror, she had seen Galadan in their own world. And she had heard him say that she would die, which meant the child.

So she had said to Paul that she would curse him if he failed. How had she said such a thing? From where had that come?

It seemed another person, another woman entirely, and perhaps it was. For since the child had been born and named and sent out into the worlds of the Weaver to be her own response to what had been done to her, her one random weft of thread laid across the warp—since then, Jennifer had been astonished at how mild everything was.

No angles or jarrings any more. Nothing seemed to hurt; it was all too far away. She had found herself capable of dealing with others, of surprising acts of gentleness. There were no storm winds any more; no sunshine either. She moved in slow motion, it sometimes seemed, through a landscape of grey, with grey clouds overhead; at times, but only at times, the memory of color, of vibrancy, would come to her like the low surge of a distant sea.

And all this was fine. It was not health; she was wise enough to understand that much, but it was infinitely better than what had been before. If she could not be happy and whole, at least she could be… mild.

The gentleness was an unexpected gift, a compensation of sorts for love, which had been mangled in Starkadh, and for desire, which had died.

Being touched was a difficult thing—not a sharp, hurting problem, but difficult, and when it happened she could feel herself twisting inwardly, a small fragile person who had once been Jennifer Lowell and golden. Even the dissembling at Stonehenge earlier that night, where she and Kevin had deceived the guards into believing that they were Gallic lovers seeking the pagan blessing of the stones—even then it had been difficult to feel his mouth on hers before the guards came. And impossible not to let him sense this, for it was hard to hide things from Kevin. But how, from this mild grey country in which she moved, did one tell a former lover, and the kindest of them all, that he had lain with her in Starkadh, obscene and distorted, black blood dripping from his severed hand to burn her flesh? How to explain that there was no going back past that, or forward from that place?

She had let him hold her, had simulated embarrassed dismay when the guards had come up to them, and had smiled and pouted mutely, as instructed, while Kevin launched into his frantic, incoherent explanation.

Then she had felt the gathering and the cold, as Kim took hold of them, and now they were in this room, their first room in Paras Derval, and it was night again.

The tapestry was the same and the torches were blazing this time, so they could make it out properly: the dazzlingly crafted depiction of Iorweth the Founder in the Godwood, before the Summer Tree. Jennifer, Kevin, and Dave glanced at it, then all three of them looked, instinctively, at Paul.

Scarcely pausing to acknowledge the tapestry, he moved quickly to the unguarded doorway. There had been a guard the last time, Jennifer remembered, and Matt Sören had thrown a knife.

This time, Paul stepped into the corridor and called softly. There was a noisy clatter of weaponry, and a moment later a terrified boy, in gear a size too large for him, came forward down the corridor with a bow drawn none too steadily.

“I know you,” said Paul, ignoring the bow. “You’re Tarn. You were the King’s page. Do you remember me?”

The bow was lowered. “I do, my lord. From the ta’bael game. You are…” There was awe in the boy’s face.

“I am Pwyll, yes,” Schafer said simply. “Are you a guard now, Tarn?”

“Yes, my lord. I am too old to be a page.”

“So I see. Is the High King in the palace tonight?”

“Yes, my lord. Shall I—”

“Why don’t you lead us to him,” Paul said. It was Kevin who heard, and remembered hearing before, the crisp tone in Schafer’s voice. There had been an undeniable tension between Paul and Aileron when last they had met. Apparently it still existed.

They followed the boy through a web of corridors and down one drafty flight of stone stairs before they came at length to a pair of doors that only Paul remembered.

Tarn knocked and withdrew; after a startled glance, a tall guard admitted them.

The room had changed, Paul saw. The gorgeous wall hangings had been taken down, and in their place had been hung a sequence of maps and charts. Gone too were the deep armchairs he remembered; in their place were a number of hard wooden seats and a long bench.

The chessboard with its exquisitely carved pieces was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a huge table stood in the middle of the room and on it lay an enormous map of Fionavar. Bent over the map, his back to the door, stood a man of average height, simply dressed in brown, with a fur vest over his shirt against the cold.

“Who is it, Shain?” the man said, not pausing in his scrutiny of the map.

“If you turn around you can see for yourself,” Paul Schafer said before the guard could make reply.

And, very fast, Aileron did turn, almost before Paul’s voice died away. His eyes above the beard blazed with an intensity three of them remembered.

“Mórnir be praised!” the High King exclaimed, taking a few quick steps toward them. Then he stopped and his face changed. He looked from one to another. “Where is she?” cried Aileron dan Ailell. “Where is my Seer?”

“She’s coming,” Kevin said, moving forward. “She’s bringing someone with her.”

“Who?” Aileron snapped.

Kevin looked at Paul, who shook his head. “She’ll tell you herself, if she succeeds. I think it is hers to tell, Aileron.”

The King glared at Paul as if minded to pursue it further, but then his face softened. “Very well,” he said. “So long as she is coming. I have… very great need of her.” After a moment a wry tone came into his voice. “I am bad at this, am I not? You deserve a fairer greeting, all of you. And is this Jennifer?”

He came to stand before her. She remembered his brother and their first meeting. This one, austere and self-contained, did not call her a peach, nor did he bend to kiss her hand. Instead, he said awkwardly, “You have suffered in our cause, and I am sorry for it. Are you well now?”

“Well enough,” she said. “I’m here.”

His eyes searched hers. “Why?” Aileron asked.

A good question and one nobody had asked her, not even Kim. There was an answer, but she wasn’t about to give it now to this abrasive young King of Brennin. “I’ve come this far,” she said levelly, meeting his look with her own light green eyes. “I’ll stay the course.”

Men better versed in dealing with women had broken off a stare when faced with Jennifer’s gaze. Aileron turned away. “Good,” he said, walking back to the map on the table. “You can help. You will have to tell us everything you remember of Starkadh.”

“Hey!” Dave Martyniuk said. “That’s not fair. She was badly hurt there. She’s trying to forget!”

“We need to know,” Aileron said. Men, he could outface.

“And you don’t care how you find out?” Kevin asked, a dangerous quality in his voice.

“Not really,” the King replied. “Not in this war.”

The silence was broken by Jennifer. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll tell what I can remember. But not to you”—she indicated the King—“or any of the rest of you either, I’m afraid. I’ll talk about it to Loren and Matt. No one else.”

The mage had grown older since last they had seen him. There was more white among the grey of his beard and hair, deeper lines in his face. His eyes were the same as ever, though: commanding and compassionate at the same time. And Matt Sören hadn’t changed at all, not even the Dwarf’s twisted grimace that passed for a smile.

They all recognized it for what it was, though, and after the brittleness of Aileron the greeting they received from mage and source marked, for all of them, their true return to Fionavar. When Matt took her hand between his own two calloused ones, Jennifer cried.

“We never knew,” Loren Silvercloak said, a roughness in his voice. “We didn’t know if she pulled you out. And only Jaelle heard the last warning about Starkadh. It saved many lives. We would have attacked.”

“And then the winter came,” Aileron said. “And there was no hope of attack or anything. We’ve been unable to do anything at all.”

“We can offer wine to our guests,” the Dwarf said tartly.

“Shain, find some cups and serve anyone who wants it,” Aileron said absently. “We need Kim badly,” he went on. “We have to find out how Maugrim is controlling the winter—it was not a thing he could ever do before. The lios have confirmed that.”

“He’s making it worse?” Paul asked soberly.

There was a silence. Loren broke it. “You don’t understand,” he said softly. “He is making it. He has twisted the seasons utterly. These snows have been here for nine months, Pwyll. In six nights it will be Midsummer’s Eve.”

They looked out the window. There was ice on the glass. It was snowing again, and a bitter wind was howling about the walls. Even with two fires blazing in the room and torches everywhere, it was very cold.

“Oh, God!” said Dave abruptly. “What’s happening to the Dalrei?”

“They are gathered near the Latham,” Loren said. “The tribes and the eltor.”

“Just in that corner?” Dave exclaimed. “The whole Plain is theirs!”

“Not now,” Aileron said, and there was helpless anger in his voice. “Not while this winter lasts.”

“Can we stop it?” Kevin asked.

“Not until we know how he is doing it,” Loren replied.

“And so you want Kim?” Paul said. He had walked away from the others to stand by the window.

“And someone else. I want to bring Gereint here, Ivor’s shaman. To see if all of us together can break through the screen of ice and snow to find their source. If we do not,” the mage said, “we may lose this war before it begins. And we must not lose this war.”

Aileron said nothing. It was all in his eyes.

“All right,” said Jennifer carefully. “Kim’s on her way, I think. I hope. In the meantime, I guess I have some things to tell Loren and Matt.”

“Now?” Kevin asked.

“Why not?” She smiled, though not an easy smile. “I’ll just take some of that wine, Shain. If nobody minds.”

She and the mage and his source withdrew into an inner chamber. The others looked at each other.

”Where’s Diarmuid?” Kevin said suddenly. “Where do you think?” Aileron replied.

About half an hour earlier, shortly after Matt and Loren had left for the palace, Zervan of Seresh had lain in his bed in the mages’ quarters, not sleeping.

He had no real duties left: he had built up the front-room fire to a level that should last the night, and he knew that if Brock returned before the other two, he’d build it up again for them.

It was never a hard life being servant to the mages. He had been with them now for twenty years, ever since they had told him he was not cut from mage cloth himself. It hadn’t been a surprise; he’d sensed it very early. But he had liked all three of them—even, though it was a bitter memory, Metran, who had been clever before he had been old, before he turned out to be a traitor. He had liked Paras Derval too, the energy of the town, the nearness of the palace. It was nice being at the center of things.

When Teyrnon had asked him, Zervan had been pleased to stay on and serve the mages.

Over twenty years the original liking had grown to something akin to love. The four of them who were left, Loren and Teyrnon, Matt and Barak, were the nearest to family that Zervan had, and he worried over them all with a fussy, compulsive eye for detail.

He had been briefly ruffled when Brock of Banir Tal had come to live with them a year before. But although the new Dwarf was obviously of high rank among his people, he was unobtrusive and undemanding, and Zervan quite approved of his manifest devotion to Matt Sören. Zervan had always thought Matt drove himself too hard, and it was good to have Brock around in support, sharing the same view.

It was from Brock that Zervan had come to understand the source of Matt’s occasional descents into deep moodiness and a silence that was marked even in one of taciturn nature. It was clear now to Zervan: Matt Sören, who had been King under Banir Lok, was silent and grim when he was fighting off the ceaseless pull of Calor Diman, the Crystal Lake. All Dwarf Kings, Brock had explained, spent a full moon night beside that lake between the twin mountains. If they survived what they saw, and were still sane, they could claim the Diamond Crown. And never, Brock said, never would they be free of the tidal pull of Calor Diman. It was this tide, Zervan understood, that so often pulled Loren’s source awake at night, around the time of the full moon, to pace his room with a measured tread, back and forth, unsleeping until dawn.

But tonight it was Zervan himself who could not sleep. Matt was in the palace with Loren. Brock, tactfully, had excused himself to go off to the Black Boar. He often did something like that, to leave mage and source alone. Zervan, alone in the house, was awake because, twice now, he had heard a sound from outside his window.

The third time Zervan swung out of bed, dressed himself, and went to take a look. Passing through the front room, he threw a few more pieces of wood on each of the fires and then took a stout stick to carry with him. Opening the door, he went out into the street.

It was bitterly cold. His breath frosted, and even through gloves he could feel his fingertips chilling. Only the wind greeted him, and the unnatural snow. He walked around the side of the house toward the back where the bedrooms were and from where he thought he’d heard a sound.

A cat, he thought, crunching through the snow between the house and the one next door. I probably heard a cat. There were no footprints in the snow ahead of him. Somewhat reassured, he rounded the corner at the back of the house.

He had time to see what it was, to feel his mind grapple with the impossibility, and to know why there were no footsteps in the snow.

He had no time to shout or scream or give any kind of warning at all.

A long finger reached out. It touched him and he died.

After the numbing wind and icy, treacherous streets, the heat of the Black Boar struck Kevin like an inferno. The tavern was packed with shouting, perspiring people. There were at least four huge fires blazing and a myriad of torches set high in the walls.

It was almost exactly as he remembered it: the dense, enveloping smoke, the smell of meat broiling over the cooking fires, and the steady, punishing level of noise. As the three of them pushed their way through the door, Kevin realized that the Boar seemed even more crowded than it was because most of the patrons were squeezed together in a wide circle around a cleared area in the middle of the tavern. The tables had been lifted from their trestles and overturned and benches had been stacked away to open a space.

With Dave serving as a massive battering ram, Kevin and Paul pushed through behind him toward the front of the crowd near the door. When they got there, amid jostling elbows and spilling beer, Kevin saw that there was a burly redheaded man in a ring formed by the crowd. The man was carrying a smaller figure seated on his shoulders.

Facing them, roaring belligerent defiance that somehow could be heard over the din, was that vast human mountain Tegid of Rhoden, and on his shoulders, laughing, was Diarmuid, Prince of Brennin.

Beginning to laugh himself, Kevin could see wagers flying all through the crowd as the two pairs warily circled each other. Even in wartime! he thought, looking at the Prince. People were standing on tables for a better view; others had gone upstairs to look down on the battle. Kevin spotted Garde and Erron, each with a fistful of wagers, standing on the bar. Beside them, after a second, he recognized Brock, the Dwarf who had brought them word of treachery in Eridu. He was older than Matt, with a lighter-colored beard, and he was laughing aloud, which Matt Sören very seldom did. All eyes were on the combatants; not a soul had yet recognized the three of them.

“Yield, North Keep intruders!” Tegid roared. Abruptly, Kevin realized something.

“They’re Aileron’s men!” he shouted to Dave and Paul as Tegid launched himself in a stumbling, lurching run toward the other two.

The big man opposing him sidestepped neatly and Diarmuid, whooping with laughter, barely managed to dodge the grasp of the other rider, who was trying to pull him to the ground. Tegid terminated his run by crashing into a table on the far side of the ring, wreaking ruin among the spectators and almost unseating his rider.

Slowly he turned, breathing stertorously. Diarmuid lowered his head and spoke a series of instructions into the ear of his unstable mount. This time they advanced more cautiously, Tegid waddling wide-footed for balance on the rush-strewn floor.

“You drunken whale!” the opposing rider taunted him.

Tegid stopped his careful advance and eyed him with red-faced ire. Then, sucking air into the bellows of his lungs, he screamed, “Beer!” at a deafening volume. Immediately a girl dashed forward with two foaming pints and Diarmuid and Tegid each drained one in a long pull.

“Twelve!” Garde and Erron shouted together from the bar top. The match had obviously been going on for some time. Diarmuid tossed his tankard back to the serving girl while Tegid hurled his over his shoulder; a patron ducked quickly and tipped over the table on which he and four other men were standing. Had been standing.

It was too much for Kevin Laine.

A moment later the North Keep duo were quite inexcusably thrown to the ground by an attack from behind. It hadn’t been subtle; they’d been simply run over. As the howls and screams rose to unprecedented levels, Kevin, mounted firmly on Dave’s broad shoulders, turned to the pair from the Boar.

“Have at you!” he cried.

But Tegid had other ideas. With a howl of joy, he rushed, open-armed, toward Dave, grabbed him in a titanic bear hug, and, quite unable to do anything so complex as stop, toppled the four of them to the floor in a tangled, sodden heap.

Once down, he commenced buffeting both of them with fierce blows intended to signify affection and pleasure, Kevin doubted not, but formidable enough to make the room spin for him. He was laughing breathlessly and trying to ward off Tegid’s exuberance when he heard Diarmuid whisper in his ear.

“Neatly done, friend Kevin.” The Prince was not even slightly impaired. “I would have hated to lose. But down here on the floor we have a problem.”

“What?” The tone had affected Kevin.

“I was keeping an eye on someone by the door for the last hour, perched up on Tegid. A stranger, I’m afraid. It wasn’t concerning me much because I rather hoped he’d report we were ill prepared for war.”

“What kind of stranger?”

“I was hoping to find out later. But if you’re here, it changes things. I don’t want him reporting that Kim and Paul are back.”

“Kim isn’t. Paul’s here.”

“Where?” said the Prince sharply.

“By the door.”

There were a lot of people surrounding them by then: Garde and Erron, Coll, quite a few women. By the time they fought through to the doorway it was too late to do anything.

Paul watched the fight with a certain bemusement. It seemed that nothing, really, could induce in Diarmuid a sense of responsibility. And yet the Prince was more than a wastrel; he had proved it too many times in the short while they’d been here in the spring for the issue to still be in doubt.

In the spring. Spring a year ago, actually, if midsummer was approaching; it was on that, and on the meaning of this savage, inflicted winter, that Paul was reflecting. In particular, on something he had noticed on the icy walk from palace to tavern.

So he was preoccupied with implications and abstractions even amid the pandemonium. With only half an eye he saw Kevin mount up on Dave’s shoulders and the two of them charge forward to down the North Keep pair from behind.

The roar that followed got his attention and he grinned, taking in the scene. Funny, manic Kevin Laine, in his own way quite as irrepressible as Diarmuid was, and as full of life.

His grin became a laugh as he saw Tegid rumble forward to gather Dave in a vast embrace, and then he winced as all four of them came crashing down.

Thus occupied, thus preoccupied, he didn’t even see the figure, cloaked and hooded—even in the broiling heat of the Boar—that was picking its way to his side.

Someone else did, though. Someone who had seen Kevin and Dave and had guessed Paul might be there. And just as the cloaked figure came abreast of him, someone interposed herself.

“Hold it, sister! This one is mine first,” said brown-haired Tiene. “You can have the others for your bed, wherever it is, but he is mine, upstairs, tonight.”

Paul turned to see the slight, pretty girl whose tears had driven him from lovemaking into the night a year ago and, from that starry night, after he’d heard a song he hadn’t been meant to hear, to the Summer Tree.

And it was because he’d been on the Tree and had survived, because the God had sent him back, that the one in the cloak—who was indeed a woman, though not sister to any mortal—had been coming to kill him where he stood.

Until the foolish, interfering girl had stepped between. A hand came out from within the cloak and touched Tiene with one long finger. No more than that, but the girl gasped as an icy, numbing pain shot into her arm where she’d been touched. She felt herself falling, and as she fell, she reached out with her other arm, where the cold had not yet penetrated, and pulled the hood from the other’s face.

It was a human face, but only just. Skin so white it was almost blue; one sensed it would be freezing to the touch. She had no hair at all and her eyes were the color of moon on ice, glacial ice, and cold enough to bring winter into the heart of those who looked at them.

But not Paul. He met her glance and saw her retreat momentarily before a thing she read in his own depths. Around them, unbelievably, no one seemed to have noticed anything, not even Tiene’s fall. People were falling all over the tavern that night.

But only one man heard a raven speak, and it was Paul. Thought, Memory. Those were the names, he knew, and they had been there, both of them, in the Tree at the end when the Goddess came and then the God.

And in the moment when the apparition before him recovered herself and moved to strike at him as she had Tiene, Paul heard the ravens and he chanted the words given to him, and they were these:

“White the mist that rose through me,

Whiter than land of your dwelling.

It is your name that will bind thee,

Your name is mine for the telling.”

He stopped. Around the two of them, powers of the first world and so of all worlds, the careening pandemonium continued. No one paid them the slightest mind. Paul’s voice had been pitched low, but he saw each word cut into her. Then, as low as before, but driving every syllable, for this was as old and as deep a magic as any there was, he said, “I am Lord of the Summer Tree, there is no secret to my name, no binding there.” She had time, she could have moved to touch him and her touch could freeze the heart, but his words held her. Her ice eyes locked on his, and she heard him say, “You are far from the Barrens and from your power. Curse him who sent you here and be gone, Ice Queen, for I name thee now by thy name, and call thee Fordaetha of Rük!”

There came a scream that was not a scream, from a throat human and yet not. It rose like a wounded thing, took monstrous flight of its own, and stopped all other sounds in the Black Boar quite utterly.

By the time the last wailing vibration had died away into the terrified stillness, there was only an empty cloak on the floor in front of Paul. His face was pale with strain and weariness, and his eyes gave testimony to having seen a great evil.

Kevin and Diarmuid, with Dave and the others close behind, came rushing up as the tavern exploded into frightened, questioning life. None of them spoke; they looked at Paul.

Who was crouched beside a girl on the floor. She was blue already from her head to her feet, in the grip of an icy death that had been meant for him.

At length he rose. The Prince’s men had cleared a space for them. Now, at a nod from Diarmuid, two of them lifted the dead girl and bore her out into the night, which was cold but not so cold as she.

Paul said, “Fruits of winter, my lord Prince. Have you heard tell of the Queen of Rük?”

Diarmuid’s face showed no trace of anything but concentration. “Fordaetha, yes. The legends have her the oldest force in Fionavar.”

“One of them.” They all turned to look at the grim face of the Dwarf, Brock. “One of the oldest powers,” the Dwarf continued. “Pwyll, how came Fordaetha down from the Barrens?”

“With the ice that came down,” Paul replied and said again, bitterly, “Fruits of winter.”

“You killed her, Paul?” It was Kevin and there was a difficult emotion vivid in his face.

Power, Paul was thinking, remembering the old King whose place he’d taken on the Tree. He said only, “Not killed. I named her with an invocation, and it drove her back. She will not take any shape for a long time now, nor leave the Barrens for longer yet, but she is not dead and she serves Maugrim. Had we been farther north, I couldn’t have dealt with her. I wouldn’t have had a chance.” He was very weary.

“Why do they serve him?” he heard Dave Martyniuk say, a longing to comprehend incarnate in his voice.

He knew the answer to this question, too; he had seen it in her eyes. “He promised her Ice. Ice this far south—so much of a winter world for her to rule.”

“Under him,” Brock said softly. “To rule under him.”

“Oh, yes,” Paul agreed. He thought of Kaen and Blod, the brothers who had led the Dwarves to serve Maugrim as well. He could see the same thought in Brock’s face. “It will all be under him, and for always. We cannot lose this war.”

Only Kevin, who knew him best, heard the desperation in Paul’s voice. He watched, they all did, as Schafer turned and walked to the doorway. He paused there, long enough to remove his coat and drop it on the floor. He had only an open-necked shirt on underneath.

“There’s another thing,” Paul said. “I don’t need a jacket. The winter doesn’t touch me. For what that’s worth.”

“Why?” It was Kevin who asked, for all of them.

Schafer stepped into the snow before turning to reply through the open door, “Because I tasted it on the Tree, along with all the other shapes of death.”

The door swung shut behind him, cutting off the wind and the blowing snow. They stood there in the bright, noisy tavern, and there was warmth all around them, and good companionship. Nor were there many things more dear in any world.

At about the time Paul was leaving the tavern, Loren Silvercloak and his source were making their way home to the mages’ quarters in the town. Neither of them was immune to the cold, and though the snow had stopped the wind had not and in places there were drifts piled as high as the Dwarf’s chest. Overhead the summer stars shone brightly down on a winter world, but neither of them looked up, nor did they speak.

They had heard the same story, so they shared the same emotions: rage at what had been done to the woman they had just left in the palace; pity for the hurt they could not heal; and love, in both of them, for beauty that had proven itself defiant in the darkest place. There was something beyond all these in Matt Sören as well, for it had been a Dwarf, Blod, who had marred her when Maugrim was done.

They did not know of Darien.

At length they reached their quarters. Teyrnon and Barak were elsewhere and Brock was out, with Diarmuid, probably, so they had the large space to themselves. As a matter of deliberate policy they were sleeping in town each night, to reassure the people of Paras Derval that the high ones of the realm were not hiding behind palace walls. Zervan had built the fires up before he went to bed, so it was blessedly warm, and the mage walked over to stand before the largest hearth in the front room, as the Dwarf poured two glasses of an amber-colored liquor.

“ ‘Usheen to warm the heart,’ ” Matt quoted as he gave Loren his drink.

“Mine is cold tonight,” the tall mage said. He took a sip and made a wry face. “Bitter warmth.”

“It will do you good.” The Dwarf dropped into a low chair and began pulling off his boots.

“Should we reach for Teyrnon?”

“To say what?” Matt raised his head.

“The one thing we learned.”

They looked at each other in silence.

“The Black Swan told Metran that the cauldron was theirs and he was to go to the place of spiraling,” Jennifer had said, white and rigidly controlled as she went back in words to the woodcutter’s clearing where Avaia had come for her. This was the one thing.

“What will he do there with the dead?” Matt Sören asked now. Hatred deep as a cavern lay in the query.

The mage’s face was bleak. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything, it seems. Except that we cannot go after him until we break the winter, and we cannot break the winter.”

“We will,” said the Dwarf. “We will break it because we must. You will do this, there is no doubt in me.”

The mage smiled then, softening the harsh lines of his face. “Aren’t you tired,” he asked, “after forty years of supporting me like this?”

“No,” said Matt Sören simply. And after a moment, he smiled as well, the crooked twist of his mouth.

Loren drained the usheen, making a face again. “Very well,” he said. “I want to reach for Teyrnon before we sleep. He should know that Metran has the Cauldron of Khath Meigol and has gone with it… to Cader Sedat.”

He said it as prosaically as he could, but even in the speaking of the island’s name they both felt a chill, nor could any of their order not do so. Amairgen Whitebranch, first of the mages, had died in that place a thousand years ago.

Matt braced and Loren closed. They found Teyrnon through Barak, a day’s ride off with the soldiers in North Keep. They conveyed what had happened and shared among the four of them doubts that would not go outside the Council of the Mages.

Then they broke the link. “All right?” Silvercloak asked his source after a moment.

“Easy,” Matt replied. “It will help me sleep.”

At which point there came a heavy knocking at the door. It wouldn’t be Brock; he had the key. One glance, only, they exchanged, premonitory, for they were what they were, and had been so for a long time. Then they went, together, to open the front door.

In the night outside, with stars bright behind him and a half-moon, stood a bearded man, broad-shouldered, not tall, time spun far into his eyes, and a woman unconscious in his arms.

It was very still. Loren had a sense that the stars, too, were motionless, and the late-risen moon. Then the man said, in a voice rich and low, “She is only weary, I think. She named this house to me before she fainted away. Are you Loren Silvercloak? Matt Sören?”

They were proud men, the mage and his source, and numbered among the great of Fionavar. But it was with a humbled, grateful awe that they knelt then in their open doorway, both of them, before Arthur Pendragon and the one who had summoned him, and they were kneeling to the woman no less than to the man.

Another knock on another door. In her room in the palace, Jennifer was alone and not asleep. She turned from contemplating the fire; the long robe they had given her brushed the deep carpets of the floor. She had bathed and washed her hair, then combed it out before the mirror, staring at her own strange face, at the green eyes that had seen what they had seen. She had been standing before the fire a long time, how long she knew not, when the tapping came.

And with it, a voice: “Never fear me,” she heard through the door. “You have no greater friend.”

A voice like a chiming of bells, sound at the edge of song. She opened the door to see Brendel of the lios alfar. From a long way off she was moved to see his bright, slender grace.

“Come in,” she said. “But it is past time for tears.”

She closed the door behind him, marveling at how the flames of the fire, the candle by her bed, seemed to flicker and dance the more vividly with his presence in the room. The Children of Light, the lios were; their very name meant light, and it spoke to them and was answered in their being.

And the Darkest One hated them with a hate so absolute it made all else seem small beside. It was a measure of evil, she thought, who of all mortals needed no such measure, that it could so profoundly hate the creature that stood before her, eyes dry, now, and shading to amber even as she watched.

“There are graces in this King,” Brendel said. “Though one would not have thought so. He sent word to my chambers that you were here.”

She had been told, by Kevin, of what Brendel had done: how he had followed Galadan and his wolves, and sworn an oath in the Great Hall. She said, “You have no cause to reproach yourself for me. You did, I have heard, more than anyone could have done.”

“It was not enough. What can I say to you?”

She shook her head. “You gave me joy as well. My last memory of true delight is of falling asleep hearing the lios sing.”

“Can we not give you that once more, now that you are with us again?”

“I do not know if I can receive it, Brendel. I am not… whole.” It was easier, somehow, for her than for him. There was a long silence in which she suffered his eyes to hold hers. He did not probe within, although she knew he could, just as Loren had not used a Searching on her. None of them would intrude, and so she could hide Darien, and would.

”Will you unsay that?” he asked, the music in him deep and offering pain.

“Shall I lie to you?”

He turned and went to the window. Even the clothing he wore seemed woven of many colors that shifted as he moved. The starlight from outside lit his silvery hair and glinted within it. How could she so deny one who could have stars caught in his hair?

And how could she not? I will take all, Rakoth had said, and had come too near to doing so.

Brendel turned. His eyes were golden; it seemed his truest color. He said, “I have waited here a long time, by Ra-Tenniel’s desire and my own. His, that I might give our counsel to this young King and learn what the men of Brennin purpose; mine, to see you here and alive, that I might offer you and ask one thing.”

“Which is?” She was very tall, fairer even than she had been, marked by sorrow and shadow and given something thereby.

“That you come with me to Daniloth to be made whole again. If it can be done, it will be there.”

She looked at him as if from a great height or a great depth—it was distance either way. She said, “No,” and saw pain flare like fire in his eyes. She said, “I am better as I am. Paul brought me this far, he and another thing. Leave it rest. I am here, and not unhappy, and I am afraid to try for more light lest it mean more dark.”

There was no answer he could make; she had meant that to be so. He touched her cheek before he left, and she endured the touch, grieving that such a thing should not bring joy, but it did not, and what could she do or say?

The lios alfar spoke from the doorway, the music almost gone from his voice. “There is vengeance then,” said Brendel of the Kestrel Mark. “There is only that and always that.” He closed the door softly behind him.

Oaths, she thought, turning slowly to the fire again. Kevin, Brendel, she wondered who else would swear revenge for her. She wondered if it would ever mean anything to her.

Even as she stood thus, in the grey country of muting and shadow, Loren and Matt were opening their door to see two figures in the snow with the stars and moon behind.

One last doorway, late of a bitter night. Few people left abroad in the icy streets. The Boar had long since closed, Kevin and Dave making their way to the South Keep barracks with Diarmuid and his men. In that pre-dawn hour when the north seemed closer and the wind wilder yet, the guards held close to their stations, bent over the small fires they were allowed. Nothing would attack, nothing could; it was clear to all of them that this wind and snow, this winter of malign intent, was attack enough. It was cold enough to kill, and it had; and it was growing colder yet.

Only one man felt it not. In shirt sleeves and blue jeans, Paul Schafer walked alone through the lanes and alleyways of the town. The wind moved his hair but did not trouble him, and his head was high when he faced the north.

He was walking almost aimlessly, more to be in the night than anything else, to confirm this strange immunity and to deal with the distance it imposed between him and everyone else. The very great distance.

How could it be otherwise for one who had tasted of death on the Summer Tree? Had he expected to be another one of the band? An equal friend to Garde and Coll, to Kevin even? He was the Twiceborn, he had seen the ravens, heard them speak, heard Dana in the wood, and felt Mórnir within him. He was the Arrow of the God, the Spear. He was Lord of the Summer Tree.

And he was achingly unaware of how to tap into whatever any of that meant. He had been forced to flee from Galadan, did not even understand how he had crossed with Jennifer. Had needed to beg Jaelle to send them back, and knew she would hold that over him in their scarcely begun colloquy of Goddess and God. Even tonight he had been blind to Fordaetha’s approach; Tiene’s death had been the only thing that gave him time to hear the ravens speak. And even that—he had not summoned them, knew not whence they came or how to bring them back.

He felt like a child. A defiant child walking in winter without his coat. And there was too much at stake, there was absolutely everything.

A child, he thought again, and gradually became aware that his steps had not been aimless after all. He was in the street leading to the green. He was standing before a door he remembered. The shop was on the ground level; the dwelling place above. He looked up. There were no lights, of course; it was very late. They would be asleep, Vae and Finn, and Darien.

He turned to go, then froze, cold for the first time that night, as moonlight showed him something.

Moving forward, he pushed on the open door of the shop. It swung wide, creaking on loose hinges. Inside, there were still the shelves of cloth and wool, and crafted fabrics across the way. But there was snow in the aisle and piled against the counters. There was ice on the stairs as he went up in the dark. The furniture was all in place, all as he remembered, but the house was deserted.

He heard a sound and wheeled, terror gripping him. He saw what had made the noise. In the wind that blew through a broken window, an empty cradle rocked slowly back and forth.

Chapter 7

Early the next morning, the army of Cathal crossed the River Saeren, into the High Kingdom. Their leader allowed himself a certain amount of satisfaction. It had been well planned, exquisitely timed, in fact. They had arrived at Cynan by night, quietly, and then sent word across the river in the morning only half an hour before the specially built barges had carried them across to Seresh.

He had counted on the main road to Paras Derval being kept clear of snow, and it was. In the biting cold and under a brilliant blue sky, they set off over a white landscape for the capital. The messenger to the new High King could only be a couple of hours ahead of them; Aileron was going to have no time to organize anything at all.

And this, of course, was the point. There had been word back and forth across Saeren, barges between Seresh and Cynan, coded lights across the river farther east—the court of Brennin knew that soldiers from Cathal were coming, but now how many or when.

They were going to look shabby and badly prepared when this glittering force, twenty-five hundred strong, galloped up from the southwest. And not just the horsemen, either. What would the northmen say when they saw two hundred of the legendary war chariots of Cathal sweep up to the gates of Paras Derval? And in the first of them, pulled by four magnificent stallions from Faille, would be not a war leader or mere captain of the eidolath, the honor guard, but Shalhassan himself, Supreme Lord of Sang Marlen, of Larai Rigal, of the nine provinces of the Garden Country.

Let young Aileron deal with that, if he could.

Nor was this trivial display. Shalhassan had ruled a country shaped by intrigue far too long to indulge in mere flamboyance. There was a cold will guiding every step of this maneuver, a controlling purpose to the speed he demanded from his charioteer, and a reason for the splendor of his own appearance, from the pleated, scented beard to the fur cloak he wore, artfully slit to allow access to his curved, bejeweled sword.

One thousand years ago Angirad had led men from the south to war against the Unraveller, and they had marched and ridden under the moon and oak banner of Brennin, under Conary and then Colan. But there had been no real Cathal then, no flag of flower and sword, just the nine fractious provinces. It was only on his return, covered with the glory of having been at Andarien and Gwynir, at the last desperate battle before the Valgrind Bridge, and then at the binding under Rangat, that Angirad was able to show forth the wardstone they had given him and make a realm, to build a fortress in the south and then the summer palace by the lake at Larai Rigal.

But he had done these things. No longer was the south a nest of feuding principalities. It was Cathal, the Garden Country, and it was no subservient realm to Brennin, however Iorweth’s heirs might style themselves. Four wars in as many hundred years had made that clear. If Brennin had its Tree, the boast went in the south, Larai Rigal had its ten thousand.

And it also had a real ruler, a man who had sat the Ivory Throne for twenty-five years now, subtle, inscrutable, imperious, no stranger to battle, for he had fought in the last war with Brennin thirty years ago—when this boy-king Aileron was not yet alive. To Ailell he might possibly have deferred, but not to the son, scarce one year out of exile to wear the Oak Crown.

Battles are won en route, Shalhassan of Cathal thought. A worthy thought: he raised his hand in a certain way, and a moment later Raziel galloped up, uneasy on a horse at speed, and the Supreme Lord of Cathal made him write it down. Ahead, the five members of the honor guard that had been thrown hastily together by the shocked Duke of Seresh whipped their horses to stay ahead of the chariots. He thought about passing them but decided otherwise. It would be more satisfying, to the certain degree he allowed such things to satisfy him, to arrive in Paras Derval nipping at the heels of their honor guard as if putting them to flight.

It was, he decided, well. In Sang Marlen, Galienth would monitor the decisions of his daughter. It was appropriate for her to begin to practice the statecraft she had been learning since her brother died. He was not going to have another heir. Escapades such as the one of the previous spring, when she had outraced his envoys to Paras Derval, could no longer be countenanced. He had never, in fact, received a wholly or even moderately satisfactory account of that affair. Not that he really expected one, given with whom he was dealing. Her mother had been exactly the same. He shook his head. It was time for Sharra to be wed, but every time he raised the point she evaded him. Until the last encounter, when she had smiled her falsely deferential smile (he knew it; it had been her mother’s once) and murmured into her dish of chilled m’rae that if he but raised the question one more time she would wed indeed… and choose Venassar of Gath for her mate.

Only decades of skill had kept him from rising from his couch to let the entire court and the eidolath view his discomfiture. Worse, even, than the prospect of that semi-sentient, gangling excuse for a man beside Sharra on the throne was the thought of vulpine Bragon of Gath, his father, standing behind them.

He had turned the subject to how she should deal with the taxes while he was away. The unprecedented winter, freezing even the lake at Larai Rigal and laying waste T’Varen’s gardens, had wreaked its toll everywhere, he explained, and she would have to walk a fine line of judgment between compassion and indulgence. She listened, all outward show of attentiveness, but he saw her smile behind downcast eyes. He never smiled; it gave too much away. On the other hand he had never been beautiful, and Sharra was, exceedingly. With her it was a tool, a weapon even, he knew, as he fought again to keep royal composure.

He had to work at it even now, racing to Paras Derval, remembering his impossible child’s superior smile. There was a thought here, he told himself, and in a moment he had made it abstract enough. He raised his half-closed palm again, and moment later Raziel bounced up alongside, gratifyingly unhappy, to record it. After which Shalhassan put his mind from his daughter, looked at the angle of the afternoon sun, and decided they were getting close. He drew himself up straight, shook loose his heavy cloak, combed out his forked beard, and prepared to sweep the horsemen and the war chariots of Cathal, dazzling and crisp of line, into the chaotic capital of his unprepared allies. Then they would see what they would see.

About a league from Paras Derval, everything started to go completely wrong.

First of all, the road was blocked. As the advance guard slowed and his charioteer gradually did the same, Shalhassan peered ahead, his eyes squinting in the glare of sun on snow. By the time they all stopped, the horses stamping and snorting in the cold, he was cursing inwardly with an intensity not even hinted at by his outer equanimity.

There were a score of soldiers mounted before them, clad neatly in brown and gold, weapons presented toward him with high ceremoniousness. A horn blew, sweet and clear, from behind their ranks, and the soldiers turned sharply to line the sides of the wide road, making way for six children, dressed alike in red, brilliant against the snow. Two of them approached past the Seresh honor guard and, unruffled by the movements of his horses, brought to Shalhassan of Cathal flowers of Brennin for welcome.

His face grave, he accepted them. How did they have flowers in this winter? Then he turned to see a tapestry being held high on poles by the other four children, and in front of him was raised high a work of sheerest art in a gesture befitting royalty: on this open road, exposed to the elements, they held up for him a woven scene from the Bael Rangat. In evanescent shades, a pinnacle of the weaver’s art, Shalhassen saw the battle of Valgrind Bridge. And not just any part of the battle, but the one moment, sung and celebrated in Cathal ever since, when Angirad, first of all men in that glittering host, had set foot on the bridge over Ungarch to lead the way across to Starkadh.

It was a double honor they were doing him. As he lowered his gaze, moved despite all his striving, Shalhassan saw a figure walk beneath the tapestry to stand in the road before him, and he knew that the honor was triple and that he had miscalculated badly.

In a cloak of purest white, falling in thickly furred splendor from shoulder to white boots, stood Diarmuid, the King’s brother and heir. The wastrel, Shalhassan thought, struggling to fight the immediate overwhelming impression of effortless elegance. Diarmuid wore white gloves as well, and a white fur hat on his golden hair, and the only color on this brilliant Prince of Snow was a red djena feather in his hat—and the red was exactly the shade the children wore.

It was a tableau of such studied magnificence that no man alive could miss the import, and no man present, of either country, would fail to tell of it.

The Prince moved a finger, no more, and there rang out over the wide snow-covered vista the exquisitely played, heart-stirring sounds of the renabael—the battle summons of the lios alfar, crafted so long ago by Ra-Termaine, greatest of their lords, greatest of their music weavers.

And then the white Prince gestured again, and again it was no more than a finger’s movement, and as the music stopped, its echoes falling away in the cold, still air, the player of that music came forward, more graceful even than the Prince, and for the first time in his days Shalhassan of Cathal, quite unbelieving, saw one of the lios alfar.

The Prince bowed. The lios bowed. Over their heads Angirad stood in blood up to his knees and claimed the Valgrind Bridge in the name of Light.

Shalhassan of Cathal stepped down into the road from his carriage and bowed in his turn.

The five guards from Seresh had gone on ahead, doubtless relieved to be thus superseded. For the last league of the approach to Paras Derval, the army of Cathal was led by an honor guard of the men of Prince Diarmuid, precise and formidable; on one side of Shalhassan’s chariot walked the Prince himself, and on the other was Na-Brendel, Highest of the Kestrel Mark from Daniloth.

Nor did they go faster than a walking pace, for as they drew nearer the capital, a huge crowd of cheering people lined the roadway, even among the drifted snow, and Shalhassan was forced to nod and wave in measured, dignified response.

Then, at the outskirts of the town itself, the soldiers were waiting. For the entire twisting, ascending route to the square before the palace, the foot soldiers, archers and horsemen of Paras Derval, each one turned smartly out in uniform, stood at equal intervals.

As they came into the square itself, densely packed around its outer edges with still more cheering people, the procession halted again and Prince Diarmuid presented to him, with flawless formality, the First Mage of Brennin and his source, with another Dwarf beside him whom the Prince named as Brock of Banir Tal; the High Priestess of Dana—and she, too, was dazzling in white and crowned in red as well, the thick red fall of her hair; and finally to one of whom he had heard tell, a young man, dark of hair, slim and not tall, whom the Prince named soberly as Pwyll Twiceborn, Lord of the Summer Tree.

And Shalhassan could hear the crowd’s response even as he met the blue-grey eyes of this young man from another world who was the chosen of the God.

Without another word spoken, these five joined the Prince and the lios alfar. Dismounting because there was no room to sweep up in a chariot, Shalhassan walked forward to the gates of the palace to meet Aileron the High King. Who had done this, all of this, on perhaps two hours’ warning.

He had been briefed by Sharra in Sang Marlen, given an idea of what to expect. But it was only an idea and not enough, for as Aileron stepped forward to meet him partway, Shalhassan, who had been shown what Brennin could do if it chose, saw what Brennin chose.

Under the unkempt dark hair, the eyes of the High King were fierce and appraising. His stern, bearded face—not so boyish as he’d thought it would be—was fully as impassive as Shalhassan’s own, and as unsmiling. He was clad in shades of brown and dun, and carelessly: his boots stained, his trousers well-worn. He wore a simple shirt and over it a short warm vest, quite unadorned. And at his side was no blade of ceremony but a long-hilted fighting sword.

Bareheaded he came forward, and the two Kings faced each other. Shalhassan could hear the roaring of the crowd and in it he heard something never offered him in twenty-five years on his own throne, and he understood then what the people of Brennin understood: the man standing before him was a warrior King, no more and certainly not less.

He had been manipulated, he knew, but he also knew how much control underlay such a thing. The dazzle of the younger brother was balanced here, and more, by the willed austerity of the older one who was King. And Shalhassan of Cathal realized in that moment, standing between the fair brother and the dark, that he was not going to lead this war after all.

Aileron had not spoken a word.

Kings did not bow to each other, but Shalhassan was not a small-minded man. There was a common enemy and an awesome one. What he had been shown had been meant not just to put him in his place but to reassure, and this, too, he grasped, and was reassured.

Abandoning on the instant every stratagem he’d envisaged for this day, Shalhassan said, “High King of Brennin, the army and chariots of Cathal are here, and yours. And so, too, is such counsel as you should seek of me. We are honored by the welcome you have offered us and stirred by your reminder of the deeds of our ancestors, both of Brennin and Cathal.”

He had not even the mild pleasure of reading relief or surprise in the other’s dark eyes. Only the most uninflected acceptance, as if there had been no doubt, ever, of what he would say.

What Aileron replied was, “I thank you. Eighteen of your chariots have unbalanced wheels, and we will need another thousand men, at least.”

He had seen the numbers at Seresh and here in Paras Derval, knew of the garrisons at Rhoden and North Keep. Without missing a beat, Shalhassan said, “There will be two thousand more before the moon is new.” Just under three weeks; it could be done, but Sharra would have to move. And the chariot master was going to be whipped.

Aileron smiled. “It is well.” He stepped forward, then, the younger King to the older, as was proper, and embraced Shalhassan with a soldier’s grip as the two armies and the populace thundered approval.

Aileron stepped back, his eyes now bright. He raised his arms for silence and, when he had it, lifted his clear dry voice into the frosty air. “People of Paras Derval! As you can see, Shalhassan of Cathal has come himself to us with twenty-five hundred men and has promised us two thousand more. Shall we make them welcome among us? Shall we house them and feed them?”

The shouted agreement that followed did not mask the real problem and, obscurely moved, Shalhassan decided it was time for a gesture of his own, that the northerners not mistake the true grandeur of Cathal. He raised one hand, his thumb ring glinting in the brilliant sunshine, and when he, too, had silence, said, “We thank you in our turn, High King. Shelter we will need, so far from our gardens, but the people of Cathal will feed the soldiers of Cathal and as many of the folk of Brennin as our winter granaries allow.”

Let the northern King find words to engender an ovation that equaled that, Shalhassan thought triumphantly from behind his expressionless face. He turned to Aileron. “My daughter will arrange for the provisions and the new soldiers, both.”

Aileron nodded; the roaring of the crowd had not yet stopped. Cutting through it, Shalhassan heard a lightly mocking voice.

“A wager?” said Diarmuid.

Shalhassan caught an unguarded flash of anger in the narrowed eyes of the young King before turning to face the Prince.

“Of what sort?” he asked repressively.

Diarmuid smiled. “I have no doubt at all that both provisions and soldiers will soon be among us, but I have no doubt either that it will be the formidable Galienth, perhaps Bragon of Gath, who arranges for them. It certainly not be your daughter.”

“And why,” Shalhassan said softly, concealing an inward wince at the mention of Bragon, “are you of this view?”

“Because Sharra’s with your army,” the Prince replied with easy certitude.

It was going to be a pleasure, and one he would allow himself, to tame this overconfident Prince. And he could; only because his own apprehensions of such a thing had him to have the army checked twice on the way from Seren to Paras Derval for a wayward Princess in disguise. He knew his daughter well enough to have watched for it. She was not in the army.

“What have you to wager?” the Supreme Lord of Sang Marlen asked, very softly so as not to frighten his prey.

“My cloak for yours,” the other replied promptly. His blue eyes were dancing with mischief. The white was the better cloak and they both knew it. Shalhassan said so. “Perhaps,” Diarmuid replied, “but I don’t expect to lose.”

A very great pleasure to tame him. “A wager,” said Shalhassan as the nobility about them murmured. “Bashrai,” he said and his new Captain of the Guard stepped sharply forward. He missed the old one, remembering how Devorsh had died. Well, Sharra, back, in Sang Marlen, would make some recompense for that now. “Order the men to step forward in groups of fifty,” he commanded.

“And to remove their headgear,” Diarmuid added.

“Yes, and that,” Shalhassan confirmed. Bashrai turned crisply again to execute orders.

“This is utter frivolity,” Aileron snapped, his eyes cold on his brother.

“We can use some,” a musical voice interposed. Brendel of the lios alfar smiled infectiously. His eyes were golden, Shalhassan noted with a thrill and, just in time, caught the corners of his mouth curving upward.

Word of the wager had spread through the crowd by now and a laughing, anticipatory sound filled the square. They could see scribbled wagers passing from hand to hand. Only the red-haired Priestess and the grim High King seemed impervious to the lifting mood.

It didn’t take long. Bashrai was pleasingly efficient, and in a short while the entire army of Cathal had stepped bareheaded past the palace gates where the two Kings stood. Diarmuid’s men were checking them, and carefully, but Shalhassan had checked as carefully himself.

Sharra was not in the ranks.

Shalhassan turned slowly to the white-clad Prince. Diarmuid had managed to maintain his smile. “The horses, I wonder?” he tried. Shalhassan merely raised his eyebrows in a movement his court knew very well, and Diarmuid, with a gracious gesture and a laugh, slipped out of his rich cloak in the cold. He was in red underneath to match his feather and the children.

“The hat too?” he offered, holding them both out to be claimed.

Shalhassan gestured to Bashrai, but as the Captain, smiling on behalf of his King, stepped forward, Shalhassan heard an all-too-familiar voice cry out, “Take it not, Bashrai! The people of Cathal claim only wagers they have fairly won!”

Rather too late it came clear to him. There had been an honor guard of five, hastily assembled at dawn in Seresh. One of them now walked forward from where they had gathered on the near side of the square. Walked forward and, pulling off a close-fitting cap, let tumble free to her waist the shining black hair for which she was renowned.

“Sorry, Father,” said Sharra, the Dark Rose of Cathal.

The crowd erupted in shouting and laughter at this unexpected twist. Even some of the Cathalian soldiers were cheering idiotically. Their King bestowed a wintry glance upon his sole remaining child. How, he thought, could she thus lightly bring him so much shame in a foreign land?

When she spoke again, though, it was not to him. “I thought I’d do it myself this time,” she said to Diarmuid, not with any degree of warmth. The Prince’s expression was hard to read. Without pausing, however, Sharra turned to his brother and said, “My lord King, I am sorry to have to report a certain laxity among your troops, both of Seresh and here. I should not have been able to join this guard, however chaotic the morning was. And I should certainly have been discovered as we came into Paras Derval. It is not my place to advise you, but I must report the facts.” Her voice was guileless and very clear; it reached every corner of the square.

In the stony heart of Shalhassan a bonfire burst into warming flame. Splendid woman! A Queen to be, and worthy of her realm! She had turned a moment of acute embarrassment for him into a worse one for Brennin and a triumph for herself and for Cathal.

He moved to consolidate the gain. “Alas!” cried Shalhassan. “My daughter, it seems has the advantage over us all. If a wager has been won today, it has been won by her.” And with Bashrai quick to aid, he doffed his own cloak, ignoring the bite of wind, and walked over to lay it at his daughter’s feet.

Precisely in step beside him, neither before nor behind, was Diarmuid of Brennin. Together they knelt, and when they rose the two great cloaks, the dark one and the white, lay in the snow before her and the thronged square echoed to her name.

Shalhassan made his eyes as kind as he could, that she might know he was, for the moment, pleased. She was not looking at him.

“I thought I had saved you a cloak,” she said to Diarmuid.

“You did. How should I better use it than as a gift?” There was something very strange in his eyes.

“Is gallantry adequate compensation for incompetence?” Sharra queried sweetly. “You are responsible for the south, are you not?”

“As my brother’s expression should tell you,” he agreed gravely.

“Has he not cause to be displeased?” Sharra asked, pressing her advantage.

“Perhaps,” the Prince replied, almost absently. There was a silence: something very strange. And then just before he spoke again it flashed maliciously in his blue eyes and, a pit yawning before them, father and daughter both saw a hilarity he could no longer hold in check.

“Averren,” said Diarmuid. All eyes turned to where another figure detached itself from the four remaining riders from Seresh. This one, too, removed a cap, revealing short copper-colored hair. “Report,” said Diarmuid, his voice carefully neutral.

“Yes, my lord. When word came that the army of Cathal was moving west, I sent word to you from South Keep, as instructed. Also as instructed, I went west myself to Seresh and crossed yesterday evening to Cynan. I waited there until the army arrived and then, in Cathalian colors, I sought out the Princess. I saw her bribe a bargeman to take her across that night and I did the same.”

“Wasting my money,” said the Prince. There was utter silence in the square. “Go on.”

Averren cleared his throat. “I wanted to find out the going rate, my lord. Er… in Seresh I picked up her trail without difficulty. I almost lost her this morning, but ah… followed your surmise, my lord Prince, and found her in the colors of Seresh waiting with the guards. I spoke with Duke Niavin and later with the other three guards, and we simply rode with her in front of the army all day, my lord. As instructed.”

After silence, sound. Sound of a name cried on rising note after rising note to reach a crescendo so high it bade fair to break through the vaults of sky above and earth below, that Mórnir and Dana both might hear how Brennin loved its brilliant laughing Prince.

Shalhassan, calculating furiously, salvaged one meager crumb of nurture from the ashes of the afternoon: they had known all along, but if that was bad it was a comprehensible thing and better that it had been done this way than in two hours, utterly without warning. That was—would have been—simply too formidable.

Then he chanced to see Aileron’s face, and even as he mentally added another score to Diarmuid’s tally for the day, he felt his one crumb turn to ash as well. It was abundantly clear from the High King’s expression—Aileron hadn’t known any of this.

Diarmuid was looking at Sharra, his own expression benign. “I told you the cloak was a gift, not a wager lost.”

Her color high, she asked, “Why did you do it that way? Why pretend not to know?”

And laughing suddenly, Diarmuid replied, “Utter frivolity,” in a passable imitation of his brother. Then, laughing still, he turned to face the black expression, very close to a killing look, in the High King’s eyes. It was perhaps more than he had expected. Slowly the laughter faded from his eyes. At least it was gone, Shalhassan thought wryly, though he himself had not wiped it away. The cheering was still going on.

Aileron said, “You knew all along.” It was not a question.

“Yes,” said Diarmuid simply. “We do things differently. You had your charts and plans.”

“You didn’t tell me, though.”

Diarmuid’s eyes were wide and there was a questing in them and, if one knew what to look for, a long desire. Of all the people in that square, only Kevin Laine, watching from among the crowd, had seen that look before, and he was too far away this time. The Prince’s voice was even, if very low, as he said, “How else would you have ever known? How else would you have been able to put your planning to the test? I expected you to succeed, brother. We had it both ways.”

A long silence. Too long, as Aileron’s heavy-lidded gaze remained bleakly on his brother’s face. The cheering had run itself down. A moment passed. Another. A stir of cold, cold wind.

“Brightly woven, Diar,” Aileron said. And then dazzled them all with the warmth of his smile.

They began to move inside. Both ways, Shalhassan was thinking bemusedly. They knew all along and they had prepared in two hours. What sort of men were these two sons of Ailell?

“Be grateful,” came a voice at his side. “They are ours.” He turned and received a golden wink from a lios alfar and a grin from Brock, the Dwarf next to him. Before he knew what he was doing, Shalhassan smiled.

Paul had wanted to waylay the Priestess immediately, but she was ahead of him in the procession and turned to the left as soon as she passed through the great doors of the palace, and he lost sight of her in the crowded entranceway. Then, as he fought to get free and follow, Kevin came up and he had to stop.

“He was brilliant, wasn’t he?” Kevin grinned.

“Diarmuid? Yes, very.” Paul rose on tiptoe to try to see over the people milling about them. There was a banquet being readied; servants and courtiers jostled each other as they crisscrossed the vestibule. He saw Gorlaes, the handsome Chancellor, taking charge of the party from Cathal, which now included, unexpectedly, a Princess.

“You’re not listening,” Kevin said.

“Oh. What?” Paul drew a breath. “Sorry. Try me again.” He managed a smile.

Kevin gave him a searching glance. “You okay? After last night?”

“I’m fine. I walked a lot. What were you saying?”

Again Kevin hesitated, though with a different, more vulnerable expression. “Just that Diarmuid’s riding off within the hour to fetch this shaman from the Dalrei. Dave’s going and I am too. Do you want to come?”

And how did one explain how dearly one wanted to come? To come and savor, even amid war, the richness of companionship and the laughter that the Prince and Kevin both knew how to engender. How explain, even if he had the time?

“Can’t, Kev. I’ve too much to do here.”

“Umm. Right. Can I help?”

“Not yet. Maybe later.”

“Fine,” Kevin said, feigning a casualness. “We’ll be back in three or four days.”

Paul saw red hair through an archway. “Good,” he said to his closest friend. “Take care.” There should have been more, he thought, but he couldn’t be everything; he wasn’t even sure what, exactly, he could be.

He squeezed Kevin on the shoulder and moved off quickly to intercept Jaelle, cutting through the eddying crowd. He didn’t look back; Kevin’s expression, he knew, would have forced him to stop and explain, and he didn’t feel up to explaining how deeply fear lay upon him.

Halfway across the floor he saw, with a shock, that Jennifer was with the Priestess. Schooling his features, he came up to them.

“I need you both,” he said.

Jaelle fixed him with her cool regard. “It will have to wait.”

Something in the voice. “No, it won’t,” Paul said. And gripping her right arm very hard and Jennifer’s more gently, he propelled them both, smiling fatuously for the crowd, across the entrance foyer, down a branching hallway, and then, almost without breaking stride, into the first room they came to.

It was, thankfully, empty of people. There were a number of musical instruments laid out on the two tables and on the window seat. A spinet stood in the middle of the room and, beside it, what appeared to be a harp laid on its side, mounted into brackets and with free-standing legs.

He closed the door.

Both women regarded him. At any other time he might have paused to appreciate the order of beauty in the room with him, but neither pair of green eyes was less than cold at the moment, and the darker ones flashed with anger. He had bruised Jaelle, he knew, but she wasn’t about to let him see that. Instead, she snapped, “You had best explain yourself.”

It was a bit much.

“Where is he?” said Paul, hurling the question like a blade.

And found himself nonplused and weaponless when, after a blank instant, both women smiled and exchanged an indulgent glance.

“You were frightened,” Jaelle said flatly.

He didn’t deny it. “Where?” he repeated.

It was Jennifer who answered. “He’s all right, Paul. Jaelle was just telling me. When did you find out?”

“Last night. I went to the house.” The cradle rocking in the icy wind… in the empty house.

“I would rather you checked with me or with Jaelle before doing that sort of thing,” Jennifer said mildly.

He felt the explosion coming, moved ruthlessly to curb it, and succeeded, barely. Neither woman appeared quite so smug as they looked at him. He said, paying out the words carefully, “There seems to be a misconception here. I don’t know if either of you are capable of grasping this trenchant point, but we are not talking about some cuddly infant with spittle on his chin; we are dealing with the son of Rakoth Maugnm and I must know where he is!” He felt his voice crack with the strain of keeping it from rising to a shout.

Jaelle had paled, but again it was Jennifer who answered, hardily. “There is no misconception, Paul. I am unlikely to forget who his father is.”

It was like cold water in the face; he felt his anger being sluiced away, leaving behind a residue of sorrow and deep pain.

“I know that,” he said after a difficult moment. “I’m sorry. I was frightened last night. The house was the second thing.”

“What was the first?” Jaelle asked, not harshly this time.

“Fordaetha of Rük.”

With some distant satisfaction he saw her hands begin to tremble. “Here?” she whispered. “So far south?” She put her hands in the pockets of her gown.

“She was,” he said quietly. “I drove her back. But not before she killed. I spoke to Loren this morning. Their servant is dead: Zervan. And so is a girl from the tavern.” He turned to Jennifer. “An ancient power of winter was in Paras Derval. She tried to kill me as well and… failed. But there is a great deal of evil about. I must know where Darien is, Jennifer.” She was shaking her head. He pushed on. “Listen to me, please! He cannot be only yours now, Jen. He can’t. There is too much at stake, and we don’t even know what he is!”

”He is to be random,” she replied calmly, standing very tall, golden among the instruments of music. “He is not to be used, Paul.”

So much dark in this, and where were his ravens now? It was a hard, a savage thing, but it had to be said, and so:

“That isn’t really the issue. The issue is whether or not he has to be stopped.”

In the silence that followed they could hear the tread of feet outside in the corridor and the continuing buzz of the crowd not far away. There was a window open. So as not to have to look any more at what his words had done to Jennifer, Paul walked over to it. Even on the main level of the palace they were quite high up. Below, to the south and east, a party of thirty men or so were just leaving Paras Derval. Diarmuid’s band. With Kevin, who might in fact have understood, if Paul had known clearly what he wanted to explain.

Behind him Jaelle cleared her throat and spoke with unwonted diffidence. “There is no sign yet of that last, Pwyll,” she said. “Both Vae and her son say so and we have been watching. I am not so foolish as you take me for.”

He turned. “I don’t take you for foolish at all,” he said. He held the look, longer perhaps than necessary, before turning reluctantly to the other woman.

Jennifer had been looking pale a long time, it was almost a year since she’d had a healthy tan, but never had he seen her as white as now she was. For a disoriented instant he thought of Fordaetha. But this was a mortal woman, and one to whom unimaginable damage had been done. Against the white of her skin, the high cheekbones stood out unnaturally. He wondered if she was going to faint. She closed her eyes; opened them. “He told the Dwarf I was to die. Told him there was a reason.” Her voice was an aching rasp.

“I know,” Paul said, as gently as he could. “You explained to me.”

“What reason could there be for killing me if… if not because of a child?” How did one comfort a soul to whom this had been done? “What reason, Paul? Could there be another?”

”I don’t know,” he whispered. “You’re probably right, Jen. Please stop.”

She tried; wiped at her tears with both hands. Jaelle walked forward with a square of silk and gave it to her awkwardly. Jennifer looked up again. “But if I’m right… if he was afraid of a child, then… shouldn’t Darien be good?”

So much yearning in the question, so much of her soul. Kevin would lie, Paul thought. Everyone he knew would lie.

Paul Schafer said, very low, “Good, or a rival, Jen. We can’t know which, and so I must know where he is.”

Somewhere on the road Diarmuid and his men were galloping. They would wield swords and axes in this war, shoot arrows, throw spears. They would be brave or cowardly, kill or die, bonded to each other and to all other men.

He would do otherwise. He would walk alone in darkness to find his own last battle. He who had come back would say the cold truths and the bitter, and make a wounded woman cry as though whatever was left of her heart was breaking even now.

Two women. There were bright, disregarded tears on Jaelle’s cheeks as well. She said, “They have gone to the lake. Ysanne’s lake. The cottage was empty, so we sent them there.”

“Why?”

“He is of the andain, Pwyll. I was telling Jennifer before you came: they do not age as we do. He is only seven months old, but he looks like a five-year-old child. And is growing faster now.”

Jennifer’s sobs were easing. He walked over to the bench where she was and sat down beside her. With a real hesitation, he took her hand and raised it to his lips.

He said, “There is no one I have known so fine as you. Any wound I deal to you is more deeply bestowed upon myself; you must believe this to be true. I did not choose to be what I have become. I am not even sure what that is.”

He could sense her listening.

He said, “You are weeping for fear you have done wrong, or set loose an evil. I will say only that we cannot know. It is just as possible that Darien will be our last, our deepest hope of light. And let us remember”—he looked up and saw that Jaelle had come nearer—“let all three of us remember that Kim dreamt his name and so he has a place. He is in the Tapestry.”

She had stopped crying. Her hand remained in his, and he did not let it go. She looked up after a moment. “Tell me,” she said to Jaelle, “how are you watching him?”

The Priestess looked uncomfortable. “Leila,” she said.

“The young one?” Paul asked, not comprehending. “The one who spied on us?”

Jaelle nodded. She walked over to the horizontally mounted harp and plucked two strings before answering. “She is tuned to the brother,” she whispered. “Exactly how, I don’t understand, but she sees Finn and he is almost always with Darien. We take them food once a week as well.”

His throat was dry again with fear. “What about an attack? Can’t they just take him?”

“Why should they be attacked,” Jaelle replied, lightly touching the instrument, “a mother and two children? Who knows they are even there?”

He drew a breath. It felt like such naked, undefended folly. “Wolves?” he pursued. “Galadan’s wolves?”

Jaelle shook her head. “They never go there,” she said. “They never have. There is a power by that lake warding them.”

“What power?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I truly don’t. No one in Gwen Ystrat knows.”

“Kim does, I’ll bet,” said Jennifer.

They were silent for a long time, listening to the Priestess at the harp. The notes followed one another at random, the way a child might play.

Eventually there came a knocking.

“Yes?” said Paul.

The door opened, and Brendel stepped inside. “I heard the music,” he said. “I was looking for you.” His gaze was on Jennifer. “Someone is here. I think you should come.” He said nothing more. His eyes were dark.

They all rose. Jennifer wiped her face; she pushed back her hair and straightened her shoulders. Very like a queen, she looked, to Paul. Side by side, he and Jaelle followed her from the room. The lios alfar came after and closed the door.

Kim was edgy and afraid. They had been planning to bring Arthur to Aileron in the morning, but then Brock had discovered Zervan’s frozen body in the snow. And before they could even react, let alone properly grieve, tidings had come of Shalhassan’s imminent arrival from Seresh, and palace and town both had exploded into frenzied activity.

Frenzied, but controlled. Loren and Matt and Brock, grim-faced, all three of them, hurried off, and so Kim and Arthur, alone in the mages’ quarters, went upstairs and watched the preparations from a second-floor window. It was clear, both to her untrained glance and to his profoundly expert one, that there was a guiding purpose to the chaos below. She saw people she recognized rushing or riding past: Gorlaes, Coll, Brock again; Kevin, racing around the corner with a banner in his hand; even the unmistakable figure of Brendel, the lios alfar. She pointed them out to the man beside her, keeping her tone as level and uninflected as she could manage.

It was hard, though. Hard because she had next to no idea what to expect when the Cathalians had been greeted and it came time to bring Arthur Pendragon to Aileron, the High King of Brennin. Through three seasons she had waited—fall, winter, and the winterlike spring—for the dream that would allow her to summon this man who stood, contained and observant, by her side. She had known in the deepest way she now knew things that it was a necessary summoning, or she would not have had the courage or the coldness to walk the path she’d trod the night before, through a darkness lit only by the flame she bore.

Ysanne had dreamt it too, she remembered, which was reassuring, but she remembered another thing that was not. It is to be my war, Aileron had said. At the very beginning, their first conversation, before he was King even, before she was his Seer. He had limped to the fire as Tyrth, the crippled servant, and walked back as a Prince who would kill to claim a crown. And what, she wondered anxiously, what would this young, proud, intolerant King do or say when faced with the Warrior she had brought? A Warrior who had been a King himself, who had fought in so many battles against so many different shapes of Darkness, who had come back from his island, from his stars, with his sword and his destiny, to fight in this war Aileron claimed as his own.

It was not going to be an easy thing. Past the summoning, she had not yet seen, nor could she do so now. Rakoth unchained in Fionavar demanded response; for this reason if for no other, she knew, had she been given fire to carry on her hand. It was the Warstone she bore, and the Warrior she had brought. For what, and to what end, she knew not. All she knew was that she had tapped a power from beyond the walls of Night, and that there was a grief at the heart of it.

“There is a woman in the first group,” he said in the resonant voice. She looked. The Cathalians had arrived. Diarmuid’s men, dressed formally for the first time she had ever seen, had replaced the guard from Seresh. Then she looked again. The first group was that guard from Seresh, and one of them, incredibly, she knew.

“Sharra!” she breathed. “Again! Oh, my God.” She turned from staring at the disguised Princess she had befriended a year ago to glancing with astonishment at the man beside her, who had noticed a disguise in one of so many riders in such a tumultuous throng.

He looked over at her, the wide-set dark eyes gentle. “It is my responsibility,” said Arthur Pendragon, “to see such things.”

Midafternoon, it was. The breath of men and horses showed as puffs of smoke in the cold. The sun, high in a clear blue sky, glittered on the snow. Midafternoon, and at the window Kimberly thought again, looking in his eyes, of stars.

She recognized the tall guard who opened the door: he had escorted her to Ysanne’s lake the last time she went. She saw, from his eyes, that he knew her as well. Then his face changed as he took in the man who stood quietly beside her.

“Hello, Shain,” she said, before he could speak. “Is Loren here?”

“Yes, and the lios alfar, my lady.”

“Good. Are you going to let me in?”

He jumped backward with an alacrity that would have been amusing were she in any state to be amused. They feared her, as once they had feared Ysanne. It wasn’t funny now, though, not even ironic; this was no place or time for such shadings.

Drawing a deep breath, Kim pushed back her hood and shook out her white hair, and they walked in. She saw Loren first and received a quick nod of encouragement—one that did not mask his own tension. She saw Brendel, the silver-haired lios alfar, and Matt, with Brock, the other Dwarf, and Gorlaes the Chancellor.

Then she turned to Aileron.

He hadn’t changed, unless it were simply to become more, in a year’s time, of what he had already been. He stood in front of a large table that was spread with a huge map of Fionavar. His hands were clasped behind his back, his feet balanced wide apart, and his deep-set, remembered eyes bored into her. She knew him, though: she was his Seer, his only one.

Now she read relief in his face.

“Hello,” she said calmly. “I’m told you got my last warning.”

“We did. Welcome back,” Aileron said. And then, after a pause, “They have been walking on tiptoe around me this past half hour, Loren and Matt. Will you tell me why this is and whom you have brought with you?”

Brendel knew already; she could see the wonder silver in his eyes. She said, raising her voice to make it clear and decisive, as a Seer’s should be, “I have used the Baelrath as Ysanne dreamt long ago. Aileron, High King, beside me stands Arthur Pendragon, the Warrior of the old tales, come to make one with our cause.”

The lofty words rose and then fell into silence, like waves breaking around the King’s rock-still face. Any of the others in this room would have done it better, she thought, painfully aware that the man beside her had not bowed. Nor could he be expected to, not to any living man, but Aileron was young and newly King, and—

“My grandfather,” said Aileron dan Ailell dan Art, “was named for you, and have I a son one day he too will be.” As the men in the room and the one woman gasped with astonishment, the High King’s face broke into a joyful smile. “No visitation, not even of Colan or Conary, could be more bright, my lord Arthur. Oh, brightly woven, Kimberly!” He squeezed her shoulder hard as he strode past and embraced fiercely, as a brother, the man she had brought.

Arthur returned the gesture, and when Aileron stepped back, the Warrior’s own eyes showed, for the first time, a glint of amusement. “They led me to understand,” he said, “that you might not entirely welcome my presence.”

“I am served,” said Aileron, with a heavy emphasis, “by advisers of limited capacities. It is a sad truth that—”

“Hold it!” Kim exclaimed. “That’s not fair, Aileron. That’s… not fair.” She stopped because she couldn’t think of what else to say, and because he was laughing at her.

“I know,” Aileron said. “I know it isn’t.” He controlled himself, then said in a very different voice, “I don’t even want to know what it is you had to go through to bring us this man, though I was taught as a boy by Loren and I think I can hazard a guess. You are both full welcome here. You could not be otherwise.”

“Truly spoken,” said Loren Silvercloak. “My lord Arthur, you have never fought in Fionavar before?”

“No,” the deep voice replied. “Nor against Rakoth himself, though I have seen the shadows of his shadow many times.”

“And defeated them,” Aileron said.

“I never know,” Arthur replied quietly.

“What do you mean?” Kim asked in a whisper.

“I die before the end.” He said it quite matter-of-factly. “I think it best you understand that now. I will not be here for the ending—it is a part of what has been laid upon me.”

There was silence, then Aileron spoke again. “All I have been taught tells me that if Fionavar falls then all other worlds fall as well, and not long after—to the shadows of the shadow, as you say.” Kim understood: he was moving away from emotion to something more abstract.

Arthur nodded gravely. “So it is told in Avalon,” he said, “and among the summer stars.”

“And so say the lios alfar,” Loren added. They turned to look at Brendel and noticed for the first time that he had gone. Something stirred in Kimberly, the faintest, barely discernible anticipation, far too late, of the one thing she could not have known.

Na-Brendel of the Kestrel Mark had the same sense of belated awareness, but more strongly, because the lios alfar had traditions and memories that went deeper and farther back then did those of the Seers. Ysanne once, and Kimberly now, might walk into the future, or dream some threads of it, but the lios lived long enough to know the past and were often wise enough to understand it. Nor was Brendel, Highest of the Kestrel, least among them in age or understanding. And once, a year ago in a wood east of Paras Derval, a sense of a chord half heard had come to him, as it came now again, more strongly. With sorrow and wonder both, he followed the sound of a harp to another door and, opening it, bade all three of them come back with him, one for the God, one for the Goddess, and one in the name of the children, and for bitterest love.

Nor was he wrong, nor Kimberly. And as he entered the King’s room with Pwyll and the women, Brendel saw from the mage’s suddenly rigid face that he, too, understood. Loren and his source and Brock of Banir Tal were standing with Kim by the window. Aileron and Arthur, with Gorlaes, stood over the spread-out map.

The King and the Chancellor turned as they came in. Arthur did not. But Brendel saw him lift his head quickly as if scenting or hearing a thing to which the rest were oblivious, and he saw that Arthur’s hands, resting on the tabletop, had gone suddenly white.

”We have been granted aid beyond measure,” he said to the three he had brought. “This is Arthur Pendragon, whom Kimberly has summoned for us. My lord Arthur, I would present to you—”

He got no further. Brendel had lived long and seen a very great deal in his days and had shared more through the memories of the Elders of Daniloth. But nothing, ever, could touch the thing he saw in the Warrior’s eyes as Arthur turned. Before that glance he felt his voice fail; there were no words one could say, no pity deep enough to touch, to even nearly touch.

Kim saw them too, the eyes of the one she’d summoned from a vanished island, from the summer stars. To war, she’d thought, because there was need. But understanding in that instant the fullness of the curse that had been laid on him, Kim felt her heart turn over and over as if tumbling down a chasm. A chasm of grief, of deepest love, deeply returned, most deeply betrayed, saddest story of all the long tales told. She turned to the second one. Oh, Jen, she thought. Oh, Jennifer.

“Oh, Guinevere,” said Arthur. “Oh, my very dear.”

All unexpecting had she walked the long corridors and up the stone stairwell. The stone of the walls in its muted shadings matched the serenity of grey she had built inside. It would be all right or, if not, it was not meant to be. There was a hope that Darien might be what she’d so deeply wanted him to be, back in the days when things reached deeply into her. There was a chance; there were people aware of it. She had done what she could, and it was as much as she could.

She entered the room and smiled to see Kim and to see that she seemed to have brought the one she’d waited for. Then Brendel spoke his name and Arthur slowly turned and she saw his eyes and heard him name her by the other name, and there was fire, light, memory, so much love, and desire: an explosion in her breast.

Then another memory, another explosion. Rangat’s fire climbing to block out her sight of heaven, and the hand, the severed hand, the blood black, as his fortress was, green light, and red his eyes had been, Rakoth’s, in Starkadh.

And here as well. They were. And, oh, too brutally between. She had only to cross to the table where Arthur stood. By whom she was loved, even still, and would be sheltered. But the Unraveller lay between.

She could not come, not ever, to such perfect love, nor had she, the first time, or in any of the after times. Not for this reason, though. It had never been Fionavar before. Shadows of the shadow there had been, and the other sword of Light, the other one, brightest, bitterest love. But never Rakoth before. She could not pass, not through that flame, not past the burning of that blood on her body, not over; oh, she could not rise over the Dark and what it had done to her.

Not even to the shore that Arthur was.

She needed grey. No fire or blood, no colors of desire, access to love. She said, and her voice was very clear, “I cannot cross. It is better so. I have been maimed but will not, at least, betray. He is not here. There is no third. The gods speed your blade in battle, and grant you final rest.”

There were so many falling stars in his eyes, so many fallen. She wondered if any were left in the sky.

“And you,” he said after a long time. “Grant you rest.”

So many fallen stars, so many falling still.

She turned and left the room.

Chapter 8

She had no one to blame but herself, of course; Shalhassan had made that very clear. If the heir to the throne of Cathal chose to come to a place of war, she would have to conduct herself in a manner befitting royalty. There was also the matter of saving face as best one could after the disaster of yesterday.

So all morning and into the afternoon Sharra found herself sitting around a table in the High King’s antechamber as the tedious business of planning the disposition and provisioning of troops was conducted. Her father was there, and Aileron, cool and efficient. Bashrai and Shain, the Captains of the Guard, stood by to register orders and relay them through runners stationed just outside the room.

The other man, the one she watched most closely, was a figure from the shadowy realm of childhood stories. She remembered Marlen her brother pretending to be the Warrior when he was ten years old, pretending to pull the King Spear from the mountainside. And now Marlen was five years dead and beside her stood Arthur Pendragon, giving counsel in a deep, clear voice, favoring her with a glance and a gentle smile now and again. But his eyes didn’t smile; she had never seen eyes like his, not even those of Brendel, the lios alfar.

It continued through the afternoon. They ate over the map and the innumerable charts Aileron had prepared. It was necessary, she understood, but it seemed pointless, somehow, at the same time. There was not going to be a true war while the winter lasted. Rakoth was making this winter-in-summer, but they didn’t know how and so they couldn’t do anything to stop it. The Unraveller didn’t need to risk battle, he wasn’t going to. He was going to freeze them to death, or starve them, when the stored food ran out. Already it had begun: the elderly and the children, first victims always, were starting to die in Cathal and Brennin and on the Plain.

Against that brutal reality, what good were abstract plans to use chariots as barricades if Paras Derval were attacked?

She didn’t say it, though. She was quiet and listened and, about midafternoon, had been silent so long they forgot about her, and she made her escape and went in search of Kim.

It was Gorlaes, the omniscient Chancellor, who directed her. She went to get a cloak from her chambers and noticed that the white one had already been trimmed to her size. Expressionlessly she put it on and, climbing all the stairs, came out on a turret, high above everything else. Kim was standing there, in furred cloak and gloves but unhooded, her startling white hair whipping into her eyes. To the north, a long line of clouds lay along the horizon and a north wind was blowing.

“Storm coming,” Sharra said, leaning on the parapet beside the other woman.

“Among other things.” Kim managed a smile but her eyes were red.

“Tell me,” Sharra said. And listened as it came out like a pent-up flood. The dream. The dead King and the undead son. The children slain and Jennifer shattered in Starkadh. The one thing unforeseen: Guinevere. Love betrayed. Grief at the heart of it, the heart of everything.

Cold in the high wind they stood when the story ended. Cold and silent, facing the bitter north. Neither wept; it was wind that laid freezing tears on their cheeks. The sun slid low in the west. Ahead of them the clouds were thick on the horizon.

“Is he here?” Sharra asked. “The other one? The third?”

“I don’t know. She said he wasn’t.”

“Where is she now?”

“In the Temple, with Jaelle.”

Silence again, save for the wind. As it happened, though for very different reasons, the thoughts of both of them were away to the east and north where a fair-haired Prince was riding at the head of thirty men.

A short while later the sun was lost in trees behind Mórnirwood and the cold became too great. They went inside.

Three hours later they were back on that tower with the King and half the court, it seemed. It was full dark and savagely cold, but no one noticed, now.

Away to the north, very, very far, a luminous pearly light was being cast into the sky.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“Daniloth,” Loren Silvercloak replied softly. Brendel was standing beside him, his eyes the color of the light.

“They are trying it,” the lios breathed. “Not for a thousand years has Daniloth been unsheathed. There are no shadows on the Land of Light tonight. They will be looking at the stars later when they fade the shining. There will be starlight above Atronel.”

It was almost a song, so beautiful was his voice, so laden with yearning. Every one of them looked at that cast glow and, wondering, understood that it had been like that every night before Maugrim had come, and the Bael Rangat, before Lathen had woven the mist to change Daniloth into the Shadowland.

“Why?” Sharra asked. “Why are they doing it?”

Again it was Loren who replied. “For us. They are trying to draw him down from Starkadh to divert his power from the winter’s shaping. The lios alfar are offering themselves so that we might have an end to the cold.”

“An ending to it for them as well, surely?” Gorlaes protested.

Never taking his eyes from the light in the north, Na-Brendel answered him. “There is no snow in Daniloth. The sylvain are blooming now as they do each midsummer, and there is green grass on Atronel.”

They watched, picturing it, heartened despite the knife of wind by that lifted glow that meant courage and gallantry, a play of light in heaven at the very door of the Dark.

Watching it, Kim was distracted by a sound, very thin, almost a drift of static in her mind. More that than music, and coming, so far as she could tell, from the east. She lifted her hand; the Baelrath was quiescent, which was a blessing. She was coming to fear its fire. She pushed the whisper of sound away from her—it was not hard—and turned her whole being to the light of Daniloth, trying to draw strength and some easing of guilt and sorrow. It was less than forty-eight hours since she had stood at Stonehenge and she was weary, through and through, with so much yet to be done.

Beginning, it seemed, immediately.

When they returned to the Great Hall, a woman in grey was there waiting for them. Grey, as in the grey robes of the priestesses, and it was Jaelle, striding past the Kings, who spoke to her.

“Aline, what is it?”

The woman in grey sank to the floor in a deep curtsy before Jaelle; then she offered a perfunctory version to Aileron. Turning back to the High Priestess, she spoke carefully, as from memory.

“I am to convey to you the obeisance on the Mormae and Audiart’s apologies. She sent this in person because it was thought the men here would greater appreciate urgency if we did not use the link.”

Jaelle remained very still. There was a forbidding chill in her face. “What urgency?” she asked, velvet danger sheathed in her voice.

Aline flushed. I wouldn’t be in her shoes for anything, Kim thought suddenly.

“Again, Audiart’s apologies, High One,” Aline murmured. “It is as Warden of Gwen Ystrat, not as Second of the Mormae, that she sent me. I was told to say this to you.”

Imperceptibly, almost, Jaelle relaxed. “Very well—” she began but was interrupted before she could finish.

“If you are sent by my Warden, you should be speaking to me,” Aileron said, and his own voice was fully as cold as Jaelle’s had been. The High Priestess stood immobile and impassive. No help there, Kim thought. She felt briefly sorry for Aline, a pawn in a complex game. Only briefly, though; in some ways pawns had it easy.

Aline decided; she sank down into a proper curtsy before the King. Rising, she said, “We have need of you, High King. Audiart requests you to remember how seldom we ask aid and that you therefore consider our plight with compassion.”

“To the point!” the High King growled. Shalhassan, just behind him, was taking it all in avidly. It was no time for anything but control.

Again Aline glanced at Jaelle and again found no assistance. She licked her lips. Then, “Wolves,” she said. “Larger than any of us have ever seen. There are thousands of them, High King, in the wood north of Lake Leinan, and they are raiding at night among the farms. The farms of your people, my lord King.”

“Morvran?” said Jaelle sharply. “What about us?”

Aline shook her head. “They have been seen near the town but not yet in the Temple grounds, High One. If they had been, I am to say, then—”

“Then the Mormae would have linked to tell me. Audiart,” Jaelle murmured, “is cleverness itself.” She tossed her head, and the red hair rippled down her back like a river.

Aileron’s eyes were bright in the torchlight. “She wants me to come and clean them out for her? What says the High Priestess?”

Jaelle didn’t even look at him. “This,” she said, “is your Warden, not my Second, Aileron.”

There was a silence, and then a polite cough and Paul Schafer walked forward toward Audiart’s messenger.

“One moment,” he said. “Aileron, you spoke of cleaning out the wolves. It may be more than that.” He paused. “Aline, is Galadan in Leinanwood?”

The priestess had fear in her eyes. “We never thought of that. I do not know.”

And so it was time. That was a cue for her, if anything was. Kim schooled her face and, as she did, Aileron’s glance swung over to find her.

Would she ever be used to this? Had Ysanne ever grown accustomed to this shuttling back and forth on the timeloom? Only last night, restless and heartsick for Jennifer, she had fallen into half sleep and a blurred, insubstantial dream of a hunt in a wood, in some wood, somewhere, and a rushing thunder over the ground.

She met the King’s glance. “Something is there,” she said, keeping her voice crisp. “Or someone. I have seen a hunt.”

Aileron smiled. He turned to Shalhassan and to Arthur beside him. “Shall we three hunt wolves of the Dark in Gwen Ystrat?”

The dour King of Cathal nodded.

“It will be good to have an enemy to kill just now,” Arthur said.

He meant more, Kim knew, than Aileron heard, but she had no space for sorrow because something else from her dream had slotted into place with the High King’s words.

“It will be more than a hunt,” she murmured. It was never necesssary for a Seer to speak loudly. “I’ll be coming, and Loren, and Jaelle, if she will.”

“Why?” It was Paul, challenging, bearing his own burdens.

“I dreamt the blind one,” she explained. “Gereint of the Dalrei will be going to Morvran tomorrow.”

There was a murmur at that. It was, she supposed, unsettling for people to hear such things. Not much she could do, or cared at the moment to do, about it. She was very weary, and it wasn’t about to get easier.

“We’ll leave tomorrow then, as well,” Aileron said decisively.

Loren was looking at her.

She shook her head, then pushed her hair back from her face. “No,” she said, too tired to be diplomatic. “Wait for Diarmuid.”

It wasn’t going to get any easier at all, not for a long time, maybe not ever.

It was passing away from him. He had seen it coming long ago, in some ways he had willed it to come, but it was still a hard thing for Loren Silvercloak to see his burdens passing to others. The harder, because he could read in them the toll exacted by their new responsibilities. It was manifest in Kim, just as her power was manifest: a Seer with the Baelrath and the gift of another’s soul, she must be staggering under the weight of it.

Today was a day of preparations. Five hundred men, half from Cathal and half from Brennin, were to ride for Gwen Ystrat as soon as Diarmuid returned. They were waiting because Kim had said to wait. Once it might have been the mages who offered such decisive counsel, but it was passing from them. He had set the thing in motion when he brought the five of them, and he was wise enough, for all Matt’s reproachful glances, to let it move without his interference, insofar as that was possible. And he was compassionate enough to pity them: Kim, and Paul who bore the weight of the name Twiceborn, with all such a thing implied, but who had not been able to tap into his power yet. It was there, any fool could see, it might be greater than any of them could fathom, but as of now it was latent only. Enough to set him painfully apart, not enough to give him compensation or direction.

And then there was Jennifer, and for her he could weep. No compensation, or even dream of it, for her, no chance to act, only the pain, so many shadings of it. He had seen it from the first—so long ago, it seemed—before they crossed, when he had read a message in her beauty and a dark future in her eyes. He had taken her anyhow, had told himself he had no choice; nor was that merely sophistry—such, at least, Rangat’s exploding had made clear.

Which did not take away the sorrow. He understood her beauty now, they all did, and they knew her oldest name. Oh, Guinevere, Arthur had said, and was any fate more harsh in any world than that of the two of them? And the third.

He passed the day alone in untranquil thought. Matt and Brock were at the armories, giving the benefit of their expertise in weapons to the two Captains of the Guard. Teyrnon, whose pragmatic good sense would have been of some help, was in North Keep. They would reach for him that night; he and Barak, too, would have their place in Gwen Ystrat.

If ever any mage, any worker in the skylore, could be said to have a place so near Dun Maura. The tall mage shook his head and threw another log on the fire. He was cold, and not just from the winter. How had it come to be that there were only two mages left in Brennin? There could never be more than seven; so Amairgen had decreed when first he formed the Council. But two, only two, and at such a time? It was passing from them, it seemed, in more ways than one.

Two mages only in Brennin to go to war against Maugrim; but there were three mages in Fionavar, and the third had put himself in league with the Dark. He was on Cader Sedat, that enchanted island, long since made unholy. He was there, and he had the Cauldron of Khath Meigol and so could bring the newly dead back to life.

Whatever else might pass from them, that one was his. His and Matt’s. We will have our battle in the end, he had said to the Dwarf.

If the winter ever ended. Metran.

Night came, and with it another storm worse than any yet. Wind howled and whistled down the Plain into the High Kingdom, carrying a wall of snow. It buried farms and farmhouses. It blanketed the woods. It hid the moon, and in the inhuman darkness figures of dread seemed to be moving within the storm and the howling of wind was the sound of their laughter.

Darien lay in bed listening to it. He’d thought at first it was another nightmare but then knew he was awake. Frightened, though. He pulled the covers up over his head to try and muffle the voices he heard in the wind.

They were calling. Calling him to come and play outside in the wild dark dancing of the storm. To join them in this battering of wind and snow. But he was only a little boy, and afraid, and he would die if he went outside. Even though the storm wasn’t so bad where they were.

Finn had explained about that. How even though Darien’s real mother couldn’t be there with them she was protecting him all the time, and she made the winter easier around his bed because she loved him. They all loved him; Vae his mother and even Shahar his father, who had been home from war only once before they had come to the lake. He had lifted Darien up in the air and made him laugh. Then he had said Dari would soon be bigger than Finn and laughed, himself, though not the funny laugh.

Finn was his brother and he loved Dari most of all and he was the most wonderful person in the world and knew everything besides.

It was Finn who had explained what Father had meant when Dari came crying to him after, because there was something wrong about him being bigger than Finn. Soon, Father had said.

Finn had dressed him in his coat and boots and carried him out for a walk. Dari liked it more than anything when they did that. Finn would throw Dari in the snow, but only where it was new and soft, and then fall in himself so they both got all white, rolling about, and Dari would laugh so hard he got the hiccups.

This time, though, Finn had been serious. Sometimes he was serious and made Dari listen to him. He said that Dari was different from other little boys. That he was special because his real mother was special, and so he was going to be bigger and stronger and smarter than all the other boys. Even Finn, Finn said. And what that meant, Finn said, was that Dari had to be better, too, he had to be kinder and gentler and braver, so he would deserve what his real mother had given him.

He had to try to love everything, Finn said, except the Dark.

The Dark was what was causing the storm outside, Dari knew. And most of the time he hated it like Finn said. He tried to do it all the time, to be just like Finn was, but sometimes he heard the voices, and though mostly they frightened him, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes he thought it might be nice to go with them.

Except that would mean leaving Finn, and he would never do that. He got out of bed and put on his.knitted slippers. He pulled back the curtain and paddled over, past where his mother slept, to the far wall where Finn’s bed was.

Finn was awake. “What took you so long?” he whispered. “Come in, little brother, we’ll keep each other warm.” With a sigh of pleasure, Dari kicked off the slippers and crawled in beside Finn, who moved over, leaving Dari the warm part where he’d lain.

“There are voices,” he said to Finn.

His brother didn’t say anything. Just put an arm around Dari and held him close. The voices weren’t as loud here, when he was beside Finn. As he drifted to sleep, Dari heard Finn murmur into his ear, “I love you, little one.”

Dari loved him back. When he fell asleep he dreamed again, and in his dream he was trying to tell that to the ghostly figures calling from the wind.

Chapter 9

In the afternoon after the storm—a day so clear and bright it was almost a mockery—came Diarmuid, Prince of Brennin, back to Paras Derval. With certain others he was brought to the High King’s antechamber, where a number of people waited for him, and in that place he was presented by Aileron, his brother, to Arthur Pendragon.

And nothing happened.

Paul Schafer, standing next to Kim, had seen her pale when Diarmuid came into the room. Now, as the Prince bowed formally to Arthur and the Warrior accepted it with an unruffled mien, he heard her draw a shaky breath and murmur, from the heart, “Oh, thank God.”

A look passed between her and Loren, who was on the far side of the room, and in the mage’s countenance Paul read the same relief. It took him a moment, but he put it together.

“You thought he was the third one?” he said. “Third angle of the triangle?”

She nodded, still pale. “I was afraid. Don’t know why now. Don’t know why I was so sure.”

“Is that why you wanted us to wait?”

She looked at him, grey eyes under white hair. “I thought it was. I knew we had to wait before going to the hunt. Now I don’t know why.”

“Because,” came a voice, “you are a true and loyal friend and didn’t want me to miss the fun.”

”Oh, Kev!” She wheeled and gave him a very un-Seerlike hug. “I missed you!”

“Good,” said Kevin brightly.

“Me too,” Paul added.

“Also good,” Kevin murmured, less flippantly.

Kim stepped back. “You feeling unappreciated, sailor?”

He gave her a half smile. “A bit superfluous. And now Dave’s fighting an urge to bisect me with his axe.”

“Nothing new there,” Paul said dryly.

“What now?” Kim asked.

“I slept with the wrong girl.”

Paul laughed. “Not the first time.”

“It isn’t funny,” Kevin said. “I had no idea he liked her, and anyhow, she came to me. The Dalrei women are like that. They call the shots with anyone they like until they decide to marry.”

“Have you explained to Dave?” Kim asked. She would have made a joke but Kevin did look unhappy. There was more to this, she decided.

“He’s a hard man to explain things to. Hard for me, anyway. I’ve asked Levon. It was his sister.” Kevin indicated someone with a sideways nod of his head.

And that, of course, was it.

Kim turned to the handsome, fair-haired Rider standing just behind them. There had been a reason for waiting for this party, and it wasn’t Diarmuid or Kevin. It was this man.

“I have explained,” Levon said. “And will do so again, as often as necessary.” He smiled; then his expression grew sober and he said to Kim, “Seer, I asked if we might talk, a long time ago.”

She remembered. The last morning, before the Baelrath had blazed and her head had exploded with Jennifer’s screams and she had taken them away.

She looked at her hand. The ring was pulsing; only a very little, but it was alive again.

“All right,” she said, almost curtly. “You too, Paul. Kev, will you bring Loren and Matt?”

“And Davor,” Levon said. “Diarmuid too. He knows.”

“My room. Let’s go.” She walked out, leaving them to follow her. Her and the Baelrath.

“The flame will wake from sleep,

The Kings the horn will call,

But though they answer from the deep,

You may never hold in thrall

Those who ride from Owein’s Keep

With a child before them all.”

Levon’s voice faded away. In the silence Kim became aware, annoyingly, of the same faint static she’d heard two nights ago; again it was from the east. Gwen Ystrat, she decided. She was getting herself tuned in to whatever sendings the priestesses were throwing back and forth out there. It was a nuisance and she pushed it from her mind. She had enough to worry about, starting with all these men in her bedroom. A frustrated woman’s dream, she thought, unable to find it amusing.

They were waiting for her. She kept silent and let them wait. After a moment it was Levon who resumed—it was his idea, after all. He said, “I learned that verse from Gereint as a boy. I remembered it last spring when Davor found the horn. Then we located the tree and the rock. And so we know where Owein and the Sleepers are.” He couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice. “We have the horn that calls them and… and it is my guess that the Baelrath roused is the flame that wakes them.”

“It would fit,” said Diarmuid. He had kicked off his boots and was lying on her bed. “The Warstone is wild, too. Loren?”

The mage, by exercise of seniority, had claimed the armchair by the window. He lit his pipe methodically and drew deeply upon it before answering.

“It fits,” he said at length. “I will be honest and say I do not know what it forms.”

The quiet admission sobered them. “Kim?” Diarmuid asked, taking charge from where he lay sprawled across her bed.

She was minded to give them a hard time, still, but was too proud to be petty. “I haven’t seen it,” she murmured. “Nothing of this at all.”

“Are you sure?” Paul Schafer asked from by the door, where he stood with Matt Sören. “You were waiting for Levon, weren’t you?”

He was awfully clever, that one. He was her friend, though, and he hadn’t given away her first apprehension about Diarmuid. Kim nodded, and half smiled. “I sensed he was coming. And I guessed, from before, what he wanted to ask. I don’t think we can conclude much from that.”

“Not much,” Diarmuid concurred. “We still have a decision to make.”

“We?” It was Kevin Laine. “Kim’s ring, Dave’s horn. Their choice, wouldn’t you say?”

Levon said, “They aren’t really theirs. Only—”

“Anyone planning to take them away and use them?” Kevin asked laconically. “Anyone going to force them?” he continued, driving the point home. There was a silence. Another friend, Kim thought.

There was an awkward cough. “Well,” said Dave, “I’m not about to go against what gets decided here, but I’d like to know a little more about what we’re dealing with. If I’ve got the horn that calls these… ah, Sleepers, I’d prefer to know who they are.”

He was looking self-consciously at Loren. They all turned to the mage. The sun was behind him, making it hard to see his face. When he spoke, it was almost as a disembodied voice.

“It would be altogether better,” he said, from between the setting sun and the smoke, “if I could give a fair answer to Dave’s question. I cannot. Owein and the Wild Hunt were laid to rest an infinitely long time ago. Hundreds and hundreds of years before Iorweth came from oversea, or the Dalrei crossed the mountains from the east, or even men pushed into green Cathal from the far lands in the southeast.

“Even the lios alfar were scarcely known in the land when the Hunt became the Sleepers. Brendel has told me, and Laien Spearchild before him, that the lios have only shadowy legends of what the Wild Hunt was before it slept.”

“Was there anyone here?” Kevin murmured.

“Indeed,” Loren replied. “For someone put them under that stone. Tell me, Levon, was it a very great rock?”

Levon nodded without a word.

Loren waited.

“The Paraiko!” Diarmuid said, who had been student to the mage when he was young. His voice was soft; there was wonder in it.

“The Paraiko,” Loren repeated. “The Giants. They were here, and the Wild Hunt rode the night sky. It was a very different world, or so the legends of the lios tell. Shadowy kings on shadowy horses that could ride between the stars and between the Weaver’s worlds.”

“And the child?” Kim asked this time. It was the question that was gnawing at her. A child before them all.

“I wish I knew,” Loren said. “No one does, I’m afraid.”

“What else do we know?” Diarmuid asked mildly.

“It is told,” came a deep voice from the door, “that they moved the moon.”

“What?” Levon exclaimed.

“So it is said,” Matt repeated, “Under Banir Lok and Banir Tal. It is our only legend of the Hunt. They wanted greater light by which to ride, and so they moved the moon.”

There was a silence.

“It is closer here,” Kevin said wonderingly. “We noticed it was larger.”

“It is,” Loren agreed soberly. “The tales may be true. Most of the Dwarf tales are.”

“How were they ever put under the stone?” Paul asked.

“That is the deepest question of all,” Loren murmured. “The lios say it was Connla, Lord of the Paraiko, and it is not impossible for one who made the Cauldron of Khath Meigol and so half mastered death to have done so.”

“It would have been a mighty clash,” Levon said softly.

“It would have been,” Loren agreed, “but the lios alfar say another thing in their legends.” He paused. His face was quite lost in the glare of the sun. “They say there was no clash. That Owein and the Hunt asked Connla to bind them, but they do not know why.”

Kim heard a sound, or thought she did, as of quick wings flying. She looked to the door.

And heard Paul Schafer say, in a voice that sounded scraped up from his heart, “I know.” His expression had gone distant and estranged but when he continued, his voice was clear. “They lost the child. The ninth one. They were eight kings and a child. Then they made a mistake and lost the child, and in grief and as penance they asked the Paraiko to bind them under the stone with whatsoever bonds they chose and whatsoever method of release.”

He stopped abruptly and passed a hand before his eyes. Then he leaned back for support against the wall.

“How do you know this?” Levon asked in amazement.

Paul fixed the Dalrei with those fathomless, almost inhuman eyes, “I know a fair bit about half-death,” he said.

No one dared break the silence. They waited for Paul. At length he said, in a tone more nearly his own, “I’m sorry. It… catches me unawares, and I’m thrown by it. Levon, I—”

The Dalrei shook his head. “No matter. Truly not. It is a wonder, and not a gift, I know, but earned. I am grateful beyond words that you are here, but I do not envy you.”

Which, Kim thought, was about it. She said, “Is there more, Paul? Do we wake them?”

He looked at her, more himself with each passing second. It was as if an earthquake had shaken the room and passed. Or a roll of very great thunder.

“There is no more,” he said, “if you mean do I know anything more. But, for what it’s worth, I did see something just before we left the other room.”

Too clever by half, she thought. But he had paused and was leaving it for her. “You don’t miss much, do you?” she murmured. He made no reply. She drew a breath and said, “It’s true. The Baelrath glowed for a moment when Levon came up to me. In the moment when I understood what he had come for. I can tell you that, for what, as Paul says, it’s worth.”

“Something, surely,” Levon said earnestly. “It is as I have been saying: why else have we been given the horn, shown the cave? Why, if not to wake them? And now the stone is telling us!”

“Wild to wild,” Loren murmured. “They may be calling each other, Levon, but not for any purpose of ours. This is the wildest magic. And it is in the verse: we will never hold them. Owein and the Hunt were powerful enough to move the moon and capricious enough to do it for their pleasure. Let us not think they will tamely serve our needs and as tamely go away.”

Another silence. Something was nagging at the back of Kim’s mind, something she knew she should be remembering, but this had become a chronic condition of late, and the thought could not be forced.

It was, surprisingly, Dave Martyniuk who broke the stillness. Awkward as ever in such a situation, the big man said, “This may be very dumb, I don’t know… but it occurred to me that if Kim’s ring is being called, then maybe Owein is ready to be released and we’ve been given the means to do it. Do we have the right to deny them, regardless of whether we know what they’ll do? I mean, doesn’t that make us jailers, or something?”

Loren Silvercloak rose as if pulled upward. Away from the angled light, they could see his eyes fixed on Dave. “That,” said the mage, “is not even remotely a foolish thing to say. It is the deepest truth yet spoken here.” Dave flushed bright red as the mage went on. “It is in the truest nature of things, at the very heart of the Tapestry: the wild magic is meant to be free, whether or not it serves any purpose of ours.”

“So we do it?” Kevin asked. And turned to Kim again.

In the end, as in the beginning, it came back to her because she wore the ring. Something nagging still, but they were waiting and what Dave had said was true. She knew that much.

“All right,” she said, and on the words the Baelrath blazed like a beacon with red desire.

“When?” Paul asked. In the tinted light they were all on their feet.

“Now, of course,” said Diarmuid. “Tonight. We’d best get moving, it’s a white ride.”

They had lost Matt and Loren and picked up the other Dalrei, Tore, and Diarmuid’s lieutenant, Coll.

The mage had volunteered to stay behind and inform the two Kings of what was happening. Tore, Kevin was given to understand, had been there when the horn and the cave were found; he had a place in this weaving. Kevin wasn’t about to question it, seeing as he himself had no real place at all. Coll was with Diarmuid because he always was.

Kevin rode beside Paul for the early going, as Diarmuid led them northeast through a gentle valley. It was curious, but the cold seemed milder here, the wind less chill. And when they came around a ridge of hills he saw a lake, small, like a jewel in a setting of white-clad slopes—and the water of the lake wasn’t frozen.

“A wind shelter, you think?” he said to Paul.

“More than that. That’s Ysanne’s lake. Where the water spirit is. The one Kim saw.”

“Think that’s doing it?”

“Maybe.” But by then Paul wasn’t really with him any more. He had slowed his mount and was looking down at a small cottage by the lake. They were skirting it, passing by on a high ridge, but Kevin could see two boys come out to gaze at the party of riders passing by. Impulsively, Kevin waved and the older one waved back. He seemed to bend, speaking to his brother, and after a moment the little fellow raised a hand to them.

Kevin grinned and turned to say something to Paul, but what he saw in Schafer’s rigid features erased the easy smile from his own. They resumed riding a moment later, moving quickly to catch the others. Paul was silent, his face clenched and rigid. He didn’t offer anything, and this time Kevin didn’t ask. He wasn’t sure if he could deal with another rejection.

He caught up to Coll and rode the rest of the way beside him. It was colder when they came to the north end of the valley, and dark by the time they crossed the High Road from Rhoden to North Keep. He was carrying a torch by then, something which seemed, of late, to be his lot. The main illumination, though, more even than the low moon shining through clouds on their right, was the increasing brilliance of the red light cast by the ring Kim wore. Wild to wild, Kevin remembered.

And so, led by the Baelrath, they came at length to Pendaran Wood. There were powers there, aware of them, drawn by their presence and by the power of the ring. There were powers beyond these as well: the goddess whose gift had come to more than she had meant, and her brother, god of beasts and the wood. Above these also, Mórnir waited, and Dana, too, knew why the Warstone burned. Very far to the north, in his seat amid the Ice, the Unraveller was still a moment and wondered, though not clearly knowing what, or why.

And far, far above all of this, outside of time, the shuttle of the Worldloom slowed and then was still, and the Weaver, too, watched to see what would come back into the Tapestry.

Kimberly went forward, then, to the edging of Pendaran Wood, led by the flame on her hand. The company waited behind her, silent and afraid. She went without guidance, as if it had all been done before, to the place where a giant tree had been split by lightning so long ago not even the lios alfar had known the night of that storm. And she stood in the fork of that tree, wild magic on her hand, and wilder magic asleep behind the great rock Connla of the Paraiko had put there, and now, at the time of doing it, there was no fear in her heart, not even any wonder. She was tuned to it, to the wildness, to the ancient power, and it was very great. She waited for the moon to clear a drift of cloud. There were stars overhead, summer stars above the snow. The Baelrath was brighter than any of them, brighter than the moon the Hunt had moved so long ago. She drew a breath of gathering, felt the heart of things come over into her. She raised her hand, that the wandering fire might shine through the broken tree. She said:

“Owein, wake! It is a night to ride. Will you not wake to hunt among the stars?”

They had to close their eyes, all of them, at the pulse of red the words unleashed. They heard a sound like a hillside falling, and then there was stillness.

“It’s all right,” Kim said. “Come, Dave. Your turn now.” And they opened their eyes to see a gaping cave where Connla’s rock had been, and moonlight shining on the grass before the cave. The Baelrath was muted; it gleamed softly, a red against the snow, but not a flame.

It was by moonlight, silver and known, that they saw Dave stride, with long slow steps, more graceful than he knew in that moment, to stand by Kim and then, as she stepped back, to stand alone in the fork of the tree.

“The fire wakes them,” they heard her say. “The horn calls, Dave. You must set them free.”

Without a word the big man tilted back his head. He spread his legs wide for balance in the snow. Then, lifting Owein’s Horn so that it glinted under the moon, he set it to his lips and with all the power of his lungs he sent forth the sound of Light.

No man there, nor the woman, ever forgot that sound for the length of their days. It was night, and so the sound they heard was that of moonlight and starlight falling on new snow by a deep wood. On and on it went, as Dave hurled the notes aloft to claim the earth and sky and be his own challenge to the Dark. On and on he blew, until it seemed his lungs must crack, his braced legs buckle, his heart break for the beauty vouchsafed him, and the great fragility of it.

When the sound stopped, the world was a different place, all of the worlds were, and the Weaver’s hands moved to reclaim a long-still weft of thread for the web of the Tapestry.

In the space before the cave were seven shadowy figures, and each of them bore a crown and rode a shadowy horse, and the outline of each was blurred as through smoke.

And then there was an eighth as the seven kings made way, and from the Cave of the Sleepers came Owein at last after so long a sleep. And where the hue of the kings and of their shadowy horses was a dark grey hue, that of Owein was light grey shading to silver, and the color of his shadowy horse was black, and he was taller than any of them and his crown gleamed more brightly. And set in it were stones red like the red of the Baelrath, and a red stone was set as well in the hilt of his drawn sword.

He came forward, past the seven kings, and his horse did not touch the ground as it moved, nor did the grey horses of the kings. And Owein raised his sword in salute to Dave and again to Kim, who wore the fire. Then he lifted his head to look beyond those two, and he scanned the company behind them. A moment he did so, and they saw his brow grow dark, and then the great black horse reared high on its legs, and Owein cried in a voice that was the voice of the storm winds, “Where is the child?”

And the grey horses of the kings reared high as well, and the kings lifted their own voices and cried, “The child! The child!” in a chorus like moaning winds; and the company was afraid.

It was Kimberly who spoke while in her heart she was naming herself a fool: for this, this was the thing she had been trying to think of all afternoon and through the ride to this place of power.

“Owein,” she said, “we came here to free you. We did not know what more you needed done.”

He whipped his horse, and with a cry it rose into the air above her, its teeth bared, its hooves striking toward her head. She fell to the ground. He loomed above her, wrathful and wild, and she heard him cry a second time, “Where is the child?”

And then the world shifted again. It shifted in a way none of them, not one, neither mortal nor forest power nor watching god, had foreknown.

From the fringe of trees not far from her a figure walked calmly forward.

“Do not frighten her. I am here,” said Finn.

And so he came to the Longest Road.

From first waking in the morning after the storm he had been uneasy. His heart would begin to race inexplicably, and there would be a dampness on his palms. He wondered if he was ill.

Restless, he dressed Dari in his boots and coat and the hat their mother had made in a blue that came near to the blue of Dari’s eyes. Then he took his little brother for a walk in the wood around the lake.

Snow was everywhere, soft and clear, weighing the branches of the bare trees, piling in the paths. Dari loved it. Finn lifted him high, and the little one shook down a white powder from the branches he could reach. He laughed aloud and Finn lifted him up to do it again. Usually Dari’s laughter picked up his own mood, but not today. He was too unsettled. Perhaps it was the memory of the night before: Dari seemed to have forgotten the voices calling him, but Finn could not. It was happening more often of late. He had told their mother, the first time. She had trembled and turned pale and then had wept all night. He had not told her of any of the other times Dari had come into his bed to whisper, “There are voices.”

With his long strides he carried Dari farther into the grove, farther than they usually went—close to the place where their copse of trees thickened and then merged with the dark of Mórnirwood. It began to feel colder, and he knew they were leaving the valley. He wondered if Dari’s voices would be louder and more alluring away from the lake.

They turned back. He began to play with his brother, tossing Dari into snowbanks and piling in after him. Dari was not as light or as easy to throw around as he used to be. But his whoops of delight were still those of a child and infectious, and Finn began to enjoy himself after all.

They had tumbled and rolled a good distance from the path when they came to one of the strange places. Amid the piled snow that lay deep on the forest floor, Finn spotted a flash of color; so he took Dari by the hand and clumped over through the snow.

In a tiny patch of improbably green grass there were a score of flowers growing. Looking up, Finn saw a clear space overhead where the sun could shine through the trees. And looking back at the flowers he saw they were all known to him—narcissus and corandiel—except for one. They had seen these green places before, he and Dari, and had gathered flowers to bring home to Vae, though never all of them. Now Dari went to pluck a few, knowing how much his mother liked receiving gifts.

“Not that one,” Finn said. “Leave that one.” He wasn’t sure why, but something told him it should be left, and Dari, as always, obeyed. They took a handful of corandiel, with a yellow narcissus for color, and went back home. Vae put the flowers in water on the table and then tucked Dari into bed for his nap.

They left behind them in the wood, growing in the strange place, that one blue-green flower with red at its center like blood.

He was still restless, very much on edge. In the afternoon he went walking again, this time toward the lake. The grey waters chopped frigidly against the flat stone where he always stood. They were cold, the waters of the lake, but not frozen. All the other lakes, he knew, were frozen. This was a protected place. He liked to think the story he told Dari was true: that Dari’s mother was guarding them. She had been, he remembered, like a queen, even with her pain. And after Dari was born and they came to carry her away, she had made them put her down beside Finn. He would never forget. She had stroked Finn’s hair with her long fingers; then, pulling his head close, had whispered, so no one else would hear, “Take care of him for me. As long as you can.”

As long as you can. And on the thought, as if she had been waiting, annoyingly, for her cue, Leila was in his mind.

What do you want? he sent, letting her see he was irritated. In the beginning, after the last ta’kiena, when they discovered that she could do this, it had been a secret pleasure to communicate in silence and across the distances. But lately, Leila had changed. It had to do, Finn knew, with her passage from girl to woman; but knowing this didn’t make him any more comfortable with the images she sent him from the Temple. They kept him awake at night; it was almost as if Leila enjoyed doing so. She was younger than he by more than a year, but never, ever, had he felt older than Leila.

All he could do was let her know when he was displeased, and not answer back when she began to send thoughts of greater intimacy than he could deal with. After a while, if he did this, she would always go away. He’d feel sorry, then.

He was in a bad mood today, though, and so, when he became aware of her, the question he sent was sharp and unaccommodating.

Do you feel it? Leila asked, and his heart skipped a beat, because for the first time ever he sensed a fear in her.

Fear in others made him strong, so as to reassure. He sent, I’m uneasy, a little. What is it?

And then his life began to end. For Leila sent, Oh, Finn, Finn, Finn, and with it an image.

Of the ta’kiena on the green, when she had chosen him.

So that was it. For a moment he quailed and could not hide it from her, but the moment passed. Looking out at the lake, he drew a deep breath and realized that his uneasiness had gone. He was deeply calm. He had had a long time to accept this thing and had been a long time waiting.

It’s all right, he sent to Leila, a little surprised to realize that she was crying. We knew this was going to come.

I’m not ready, Leila said in his mind.

That was a bit funny: she wasn’t being asked to do anything. But she went on, I’m not ready to say good-bye, Finn. I’m going to be all alone when you go.

You’ll have everyone in the sanctuary.

She sent nothing back. He supposed he’d missed something, or not understood. No help for it now. And there was someone else who was going to miss him more.

Leila, he sent. Take care of Darien.

How? she whispered in his mind.

I don’t know. But he’s going to be frightened when I go, and… he hears voices in the storms, Leila.

She was silent, in a different way. The sun slipped behind a cloud and he felt the wind. It was time to move. He didn’t know how he knew that, or even where he was to go, but it was the day, and coming on toward the hour.

Good-bye, he sent.

The Weaver grant you Light, he heard her say in his mind.

And she was gone. Walking back to the cottage, he already had enough of a sense of where he was about to go to know that her last wish was unlikely to be granted.

Long ago he had decided he would not tell his mother when the time came. It would smash her as a hammer smashes a lock, and there was no need for any of them to live through that. He went back in and kissed her lightly on the cheek where she sat weaving by the fire.

She smiled up at him. “Another vest for you, my growing son. And brown to match your hair this time.”

“Thank you,” he said. There was a catch in his throat. She was small and would be alone, with his father away at war. What could he do, though; what was in him to deny what had been laid down? These were dark times, maybe the very darkest times of all. He had been marked. His legs would walk even if his heart and courage stayed behind. It was better, he knew, to have the heart and soul go too, to make the offering run deeper and be true. He was beginning to know a number of unexpected things. He was already traveling.

“Where’s Dari?” he asked. A silly question. “Can I wake him?”

Vae smiled indulgently. “You want to play? All right, he’s slept enough, I suppose.”

“I’m not asleep,” Dari said drowsily, from behind his curtain. “I heard you come in.”

This, Finn knew, was going to be the hardest thing. He could not weep. He had to leave Dari an image of strength, clean and unblurred. It was the last guarding he could do.

He drew the curtains, saw his little brother’s sleepy eyes. “Come,” he said. “Let’s dress you quick and go weave a pattern in the snow.”

“A flower?” Dari said. “Like the one we saw?”

“Like the one we saw.”

They hadn’t been outside for very long. A part of him cried inwardly that it wasn’t enough, he needed more time. Dari needed more. But the horsemen were there, eight of them, and the part of him that was traveling knew that this was the beginning, and even that the number was right.

Even as he looked, Dari holding him tightly by the hand, one of the riders lifted an arm and waved to him. Slowly Finn raised his free hand and signaled an acceptance. Dari was looking up at him, an uncertainty in his face. Finn knelt down beside him.

“Wave, little one. Those are men of the High King, and they’re saying hello to us.”

Still shy, Dari lifted a small mittened hand in a tentative wave. Finn had to look away for a moment.

Then, to the brother who was all his joy, he said calmly, “I want to run and catch up with them a moment, little one. I have a thing to ask. You wait and see if you can start the flower by yourself.”

He rose then and began to walk away so his brother wouldn’t see his face because the tears were falling now. He couldn’t even say “I love you” at the end, because Dari was old enough to sense something wrong. He had said it so often, though, had meant it so much. Surely it had been enough in the little time he’d had. Surely it would be enough?

When Vae looked out a while later she saw that her older son was gone. Dari had done a thing of wonder, though: he had traced a perfect flower in the snow, all alone.

She had her own courage, and she knew what had come. She tried to do all her weeping first before going out in the yard to tell her little one how beautiful his newest flower was, and that it was time to come in and eat.

What broke her in the end was to see that Dari, moving quietly in the snow, was tracing his flower neatly with a thin branch in the growing dark while tears were pouring down his face without surcease.

In the twilight he followed them, and then by moonlight and their torches. He even got a little ahead, at first, cutting through the valley, while they took the higher ridges. Even when they passed him, torches, and a red flame on his right, they did not hurry; he was not far behind. Somehow he knew he could have kept up, even if they had been making speed. He was traveling. It was the day, the night, and nearly, now, the hour.

And then it was all three. There was no fear in him; as he’d moved farther and farther from the cottage his sorrow, too, had faded. He was passing from the circles of men into another place. It was only with an effort, as they neared the Wood, that he remembered to ask the Weaver to hold fast on the Loom to the thread of the woman, Vae, and the child, Darien. An effort, but he did it, and then, with that as the last thing, he felt himself cut loose as the fire blazed to let the horn sound and he saw and knew the kings.

He heard Owein cry out for him, “Where is the child?” He saw the woman of the flame fall down before Cargail’s hooves. He remembered Owein’s voice, and knew his tone to be fear and unease. They had been so long asleep in their cave. Who would lead them back into the starlit sky?

Who, indeed?

“Do not frighten her,” he said. “I am here.” And walking forward from the trees he came past Owein, into the circle of the seven mounted kings. He heard them cry out for joy and then begin to chant Connla’s verse that had become the ta’kiena, the children’s game, so long afterward. He felt his body changing, his eyes. He knew he looked like smoke. Turning to the cave, he spoke in a voice he knew would sound like wind. “Iselen,” he said, and saw his white, white horse come forth. He mounted and, without a backward glance, he led Owein and the Hunt back into the sky.

It came together, Paul thought, still twisting inside with the dazzle and the hurt. The two verses had come to the same place: the children’s game and the one about Owein. He looked around and saw, by the moonlight, that Kim was still on her knees in the snow, so he went and, kneeling, gathered her to his chest.

“He was only a boy,” she wept. “Why do I cause so much sorrow?”

“Not you,” he murmured, stroking her white hair. “He was called long ago. We couldn’t know.”

“I should have known. There had to be a child. It was in the verse.”

He never stopped stroking her hair. “Oh, Kim, we can reproach ourselves fairly for so many things. Be easy on the ones that are not fair. I don’t think we were meant to know.” What long premeditating will, Paul thought, down all the years, had been farseeing enough to shape this night? Softly he spoke, to frame it:

“When the wandering fire

Strikes the heart of stone

Will you follow?

Will you leave your home?

Will you leave your life?

Will you take the Longest Road?”

The ta’kiena had become skewed over the long years. It wasn’t four different children to four different fates. The wandering fire was the ring Kim wore. The stone was the rock it had smashed. And all questions led to the Road that Finn had taken now.

Kim lifted her head and regarded him with grey eyes, so like his own. “And you?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

To anyone else he might have dissembled, but she was kindred in some way, set apart as he was, though not for the same thing.

“No,” said Paul. “I’m too frightened to even weep.”

She read it in him. He saw her face change, to mirror his own. “Oh,” she said. “Darien.”

Even Diarmuid was silent on the long ride home. The sky had cleared and the moon, nearing full, was very bright, and high. They didn’t need the torches. Kevin rode next to Kim, with Paul on her other side.

Glancing at her, and then at Paul, Kevin felt his own sense of grievance slipping away. It was true that he had less to offer here, demonstrably less than his marked, troubled friends, but neither did he have to carry what, so manifestly, they did. Kim’s ring was no light, transfiguring gift. It could be no easy thing to have set in motion what had happened to that boy. How could a human child have become, even as they watched, a thing of mist, diffused enough to take to the night sky and disappear among the stars? The verses, he understood, something to do with both verses coming together. He wasn’t sure, for once, if he wanted to know more.

Paul, though, Paul didn’t have a choice. He did know more, and he couldn’t hide the fact, nor the strain of wrestling with it. No, Kevin decided, he wouldn’t begrudge them their roles this once, or regret his own insignificance in what had happened.

The wind was behind them, which made things easier, and then, when they dipped down toward the valley around the lake again, he felt it grow milder and less chill.

They were skirting the farmhouse again, retracing their path. Looking down, he saw there was a light, still, in the window, though it was very late, and then he heard Paul call his name.

The two of them stopped on the trail. Ahead, the others kept moving and then disappeared around a bend in the hill slope.

They looked at each other a moment, then Paul said, “I should have told you before. Jennifer’s child is down there. He’s the young one we saw earlier. It was his older brother… so to speak… whom we just watched go with the Hunt.”

Kevin kept his voice level. “What do we know about the child?”

“Very little. He’s growing very fast. Obviously. All the andain do, Jaelle says. No sign yet of any… tendencies.” Paul drew a breath and let it out. “Finn, the older one, was watching over him, and so were the priestesses, through a girl who was mind-linked to Finn. Now he’s gone and there is only the mother, and it’ll be a bad night down there.”

Kevin nodded. “You’re going down?”

“I think I’d better. I need you to lie, though. Say I’ve gone to Mórnirwood, back to the Tree, for reasons of my own. You can tell Jaelle and Jennifer the truth—in fact, you’d better, because they’ll know from the girl that Finn’s gone.”

“You’re not coming east, then? To the hunt?”

Paul shook his head. “I’d better stay. I don’t know what I can do, but I’d better stay.”

Kevin was silent. Then, “I’d say be careful, but that doesn’t mean much here, I’m afraid.”

“Not much,” Paul agreed. “But I’ll try.”

They looked at each other. “I’ll take care of what you wanted,” Kevin said. He hesitated. “Thanks for telling me.”

Paul smiled thinly. He said, “Who else?” After a moment, leaning sideways on their horses, the two men embraced.

“Adios, amigo,” said Kevin and, turning, kicked his mount to a trot that carried him around the bend.

Paul watched him go. He remained motionless for a long time after, his eyes fixed on the curve in the trail past which Kevin had disappeared. The road was not only bending now, it was forking, and very sharply. He wondered when he’d see his friend again. Gwen Ystrat was a long way. Among many other things, it might be that Galadan was there. Galadan, who he’d sworn would be his when they met for the third time. If they did.

But he had another task now, less filled with menace but as dark, notwithstanding that. He turned his thoughts from bright Kevin and from the Lord of the andain to one who was also of the andain and might yet prove greater than their Lord, for good or ill.

Picking his way carefully down the slope, he circled the farmyard by the light of the moon and the glow of the lamp in the window. There was a path leading up to the gate.

And there was something blocking the path.

Anyone else might have been paralyzed with fear, but Paul felt a different thing, though not any the less intense. How many twists for the heart, he thought, are gathered in this one night? And thinking so, he dismounted and stood on the path facing the grey dog.

A year and more had passed, but the moon was bright and he could see the scars. Scars earned under the Summer Tree while Paul lay bound and helpless before Galadan, who had come to claim his life. And had been denied by the dog who stood now in the path that led to Darien.

There was a difficulty in Paul’s throat. He took a step forward. “Bright the hour,” he said and sank to his knees in the snow.

For a moment he wasn’t sure, but then the great dog came forward and suffered him to place his arms about its neck. Low in its throat it growled, and Paul heard an acceptance, as of like to like.

He leaned back to look. The eyes were the same as they had been when first he’d seen them on the wall, but he was equal to them now; he was deep enough to absorb their sorrow, and then he saw something more.

“You have been guarding him,” he said. “I might have known you would.”

Again the dog rumbled, deep in its chest, but it was in the bright eyes that Paul read a meaning. He nodded. “You must go,” he said, “Your place is with the hunt. It was more than happenstance that drew me here. I will stay tonight and deal with tomorrow when it comes.”

A moment longer the grey dog stayed facing him; then, with another low growl, it moved past, leaving the path to the cottage open. As the dog went by, Paul saw the number of its scars again, more clearly, and his heart was sore.

He turned. The dog had done the same. He remembered their last farewell, and the howl that had gone forth from the heart of the Godwood.

He said, “What can I say to you? I have sworn to kill the wolf when next we meet.”

The dog lifted its head.

Paul whispered, “It may have been a rash promise, but if I am dead, who can tax me with it? You drove him back. He is mine to kill, if I can.”

The grey dog came back toward him to where he still crouched, on the path. The dog, who was the Companion in every world, licked him gently on his face before it turned again to go.

Paul was crying, whose dry eyes had sent him to the Summer Tree. “Farewell,” he said, but softly. “And go lightly. There is some brightness allowed. Even for you. The morning will offer light.”

He watched the dog go up the slope down which he had come and then disappear past the curve around which Kevin, too, had gone.

At length he rose and, taking the reins of the horse, unlatched the gate and walked over to the barn. He put his horse in an empty stall.

Closing the barn and then the gate, he walked through the yard to the back door of the cottage and stepped up on the porch. Before knocking he looked up: stars and moon overhead, a few fast-moving wisps of cloud scudding southward with the wind. Nothing else to be seen. They were up there, he knew, nine horsemen in the sky. Eight of them were kings, but the one on the white horse was a child.

He knocked and, so as not to frighten her, called softly, “It is a friend. You will know me.”

She opened it quickly this time, surprising him. Her eyes were hollowed. She clutched a robe about herself. She said, “I thought someone might come. I left a light.”

“Thank you,” said Paul.

“Come in. He is asleep, finally. Please be quiet.”

Paul stepped inside. She moved to take his coat and saw he wasn’t wearing one. Her eyes widened.

“I have some power,” he said. “If you will let me, I thought I’d stay the night.”

She said, “He is gone, then?” A voice far past tears. It was worse, somehow.

Paul nodded. “What can I say? Do you want to know?”

She had courage; she did want to know. He told her, softly, so as not to wake the child. After he had done, she said only, “It is a cold fate for one with so warm a heart.”

Paul tried. “He will ride now through all the worlds of the Tapestry. He may never die.”

She was a young woman still, but not her eyes that night. “A cold fate,” she repeated, rocking in the chair before the fire.

In the silence he heard the child turn in its bed behind the drawn curtain. He looked over.

“He was up very late,” Vae murmured. “Waiting. He did a thing this afternoon—he traced a flower in the snow. They used to do it together, as children will, but this one Dari did alone, after Finn left. And… he colored it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. I don’t know how, but he tinted the snow to color his flower. You’ll see in the morning.”

”I probably marred it just now, crossing the yard.”

“Probably,” she said. “There is little left of the night, but I think I will try to sleep. You look very tired, too.”

He shrugged.

“There is only Finn’s bed,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He rose. “That will suit me very well.”

A short while later, in the dark, he heard two things. The first was the sound of a mother crying for her child, and the second was the wind outside growing in strength in the hours before dawn.

The calling came. It woke Dari, as it always did. At first it felt like a dream again but he rubbed his eyes and knew he was awake, though very tired. He listened, and it seemed to him that there was something new this time. They were crying for him to come out with them, as they always did, but the voices in the wind were naming him by another name.

He was cold, though, and if he was cold in his bed, he would die outside in the wind. Little boys couldn’t go out into that wind. He was very cold. Rubbing his eyes drowsily, he slid into his slippers and voyaged across the floor to crawl into bed with Finn.

But it wasn’t Finn who was there. A dark figure rose up in Finn’s own bed and said to him, “Yes, Darien, what can I do?”

Dari was frightened but he didn’t want to wake his mother so he didn’t cry. He padded back to his own bed, which was even colder now, and lay wide awake, wanting Finn, not understanding how Finn, who was supposed to love him, could have left him all alone. After a while he felt his eyes change color; he could always feel it inside. They had changed when he did the flower, and now they did so again, and he lay there hearing the wind voices more clearly than he ever had before.