Fionavar 1 (3 page)

"What about you? What if we don't come?" Kim's forehead was creased with the vertical line that always showed when she was under stress.

Loren seemed disconcerted by the question. "If that happens, I fail. It has happened before.

Don't worry about me . . . niece." It was remarkable what a smile did to his face. "Shall we leave it at that?" he went on, as Kim's eyes still registered an unresolved concern. "If you decide to come, be here tomorrow. I will be waiting."

"One thing." It was Paul again. "I'm sorry to keep asking the unpleasant questions, but we still don't know what that thing was on Philosophers' Walk."

Dave had forgotten. Jennifer hadn't. They both looked at Loren. At length he answered, speaking directly to Paul. "There is magic in Fionavar. I have shown you something of it, even here. There are also creatures, of good and evil, who co-exist with humankind. Your own world, too, was once like this, though it has been drifting from the pattern for a long time now. The legends of which I

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spoke in the auditorium tonight are echoes, scarcely understood, of mornings when man did not walk alone, and other beings, both friend and foe, moved in the forests and the hills." He paused.

"What followed us was one of the svart alfar, I think. Am I right, Matt?"

The Dwarf nodded, without speaking.

"The svarts," Loren went on, "are a malicious race, and have done great evil in their time. There are few of them left. This one, braver than most, it would seem, somehow followed Matt and me through on our crossing. They are ugly creatures, and sometimes dangerous, though usually only in numbers. This one, I suspect, is dead." He looked to Matt again.

Once more the Dwarf nodded from where he stood by the door.

"I wish you hadn't told me that," Jennifer said.

The mage's eyes, deep-set, were again curiously tender as he looked at her. "I'm sorry you have been frightened this evening. Will you accept my assurance that, unsettling as they may sound, the svarts need not be of concern to you?" He paused, his gaze holding hers. "I would not have you do anything that goes against your nature. I have extended to you an invitation, no more.

You may find it easier to decide after leaving us." He rose to his feet.

Another kind of power. A man accustomed to command, Kevin thought a few moments later, as the five of them found themselves outside the door of the room. They made their way down the hall to the elevator.

Matt Sören closed the door behind them.

"How bad is it?" Loren asked sharply.

The Dwarf grimaced, "Not very. I was careless."

"A knife?" The mage was quickly helping his friend to remove the scaled-down jacket he wore.

"I wish. Teeth, actually." Loren cursed in sudden anger when the jacket finally slipped off to reveal the dark, heavily clotted blood staining the shirt on the Dwarf's left shoulder. He began gently tearing the cloth away from around the wound, swearing under his breath the whole time.

"It isn't so bad, Loren. Be easy. And you must admit I was clever to take the jacket off before going after him."

"Very clever, yes. Which is just as well, because my own stupidity of late is terrifying me! How in the name of Conall Cernach could I let a svart alfar come through with us?" He left the room with swift strides and returned a moment later with towels soaked in hot water.

The Dwarf endured the cleansing of his wound in silence. When the dried blood was washed away, the teeth marks could be seen, purple and very deep.

Loren examined it closely. "This is bad, my friend. Are you strong enough to help me heal it?

We could have Metran or Teyrnon do it tomorrow, but I'd rather not wait."

"Go ahead." Matt closed his eyes.

The mage paused a moment, then carefully placed a hand above the wound. He spoke a word softly, then another. And beneath his long fingers the swelling on the Dwarf's shoulder began slowly to recede. When he finished, though, the face of Matt Sören was bathed in a sheen of perspiration. With his good arm Matt reached for a towel and wiped his forehead.

"All right?" Loren asked.

"Just fine."

"Just fine!" the mage mimicked angrily. "It would help, you know, if you didn't always play the silent hero! How am I supposed to know when you're really hurting if you always give me the same answer?"

The Dwarf fixed Loren with his one dark eye, and there was a trace of amusement in his face.

"You aren't," he said. "You aren't supposed to know."

Loren made a gesture of ultimate exasperation, and left the room again, returning with a shirt of his own, which he began cutting into strips.

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"Loren, don't blame yourself for letting the svart come through. You couldn't have done anything."

"Don't be a fool! I should have been aware of its presence as soon as it tried to come within the circle."

"I'm very seldom foolish, my friend." The Dwarf's tone was mild. "You couldn't have known, because it was wearing this when I killed it." Sören reached into his right trouser pocket and pulled out an object that he held up in his palm. It was a bracelet, of delicate silver workmanship, and set within it was a gem, green like an emerald.

"A vellin stone!" Loren Silvercloak whispered in dismay. "So it would have been shielded from me. Matt, someone gave a vellin to a svart alfar."

"So it would seem," the Dwarf agreed.

The mage was silent; he attended to the bandaging of Matt's shoulder with quick, skilled hands.

When that was finished he walked, still wordless, to the window. He opened it, and a late-night breeze fluttered the white curtains. Loren gazed down at the few cars moving along the street far below.

"These five people," he said at last, still looking down. "What am I taking them back to? Do I have any right?"

The Dwarf didn't answer.

After a moment, Loren spoke again, almost to himself. "I left so much out."

"You did."

"Did I do wrong?"

"Perhaps. But you are seldom wrong in these things. Nor is Ysanne. If you feel they are needed-"

"But I don't know what for! I don't know how. It is only her dreams, my premonitions. . . ."

"Then trust yourself. Trust your premonitions. The girl is a hook, and the other one, Paul-"

"He is another thing. I don't know what."

"But something. You've been troubled for a long time, my friend. And I don't think needlessly."

The mage turned from the window to look at the other man. "I'm afraid you may be right. Matt, who would have us followed here?"

"Someone who wants you to fail in this. Which should tell us something."

Loren nodded abstractedly. "But who," he went on, looking at the green-stoned bracelet that the Dwarf still held, "who would ever give such a treasure into the hands of a svart alfar?"

The Dwarf looked down at the stone for a very long time as well before answering.

"Someone who wants you dead," Matt Sören said.

The girls shared a silent taxi west to the duplex they rented beside High Park. Jennifer, partly because she knew her roommate very well, decided that she wouldn't be the first to bring up what

had happened that night, what they both seemed to have heard under the surface of the old man's words.

But she was dealing with complex emotions of her own, as they turned down Parkside Drive and she watched the dark shadows of the park slide past on their right. When they got out of the cab the late-night breeze seemed unseasonably chill. She looked across the road for a moment, at the softly rustling trees.

Inside they had a conversation about choices, about doing or not doing things, that either one of them could have predicted.

Dave Martyniuk refused Kim's offer to share a cab and walked the mile west to his flat on Palmerston. He walked quickly, the athlete's stride overlaid by anger and tension. You are too quick to renounce friendship, the old man had said. Dave scowled, moving faster. What did he know about it?

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The telephone began ringing as he unlocked the door of his basement apartment.

"Yeah?" He caught it on the sixth ring.

"You are pleased with yourself, I am sure?"

"Jesus, Dad. What is it this time?"

"Don't swear at me. It would kill you, wouldn't it, to do something that would bring us pleasure."

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about." "Such language. Such respect." "Dad, I don't have time for this any more." "Yes, hide from me. You went tonight as Vincent's guest to this lecture.

And then you went off after with the man he most wanted to speak with. And you couldn't even think of asking your brother?"

Dave took a careful breath. His reflexive anger giving way to the old sorrow. "Dad, please believe me-it didn't happen that way. Marcus went with these people I know because he didn't feel like talking to the academics like Vince. I just tagged along."

"You just tagged along," his father mimicked in his heavy Ukrainian accent. "You are a liar. Your jealousy is so much that you-"

Dave hung up. And unplugged the telephone. With a fierce and bitter pain he stared at it, watching how, over and over again, it didn't ring.

They said good-night to the girls and watched Martyniuk stalk off into the darkness.

"Coffee time, amigo," Kevin Laine said brightly. "Much to talk about we have, yes?"

Paul hesitated, and in the moment of that hesitation Kevin's mood shattered like glass.

"Not tonight, I think. I've got some things to do, Kev."

The hurt in Kevin Laine moved to the surface, threatened to break through. "Okay," was all he said, though. "Good night. Maybe I'll see you tomorrow." And he turned abruptly and jogged across

Bloor against the light to where he'd parked his car. He drove home, a little too fast, through the quiet streets.

It was after one o'clock when he pulled into the driveway, so he entered the house as silently as he could, sliding the bolt gently home.

"I am awake, Kevin. It is all right."

"What are you doing up? It's very late, Abba." He used the Hebrew word for father, as he always did.

Sol Laine, in pajamas and robe at the kitchen table, raised a quizzical eyebrow as Kevin walked in.

"I need permission from my son to stay up late?"

"Who else's?" Kevin dropped into one of the other chairs.

"A good answer," his father approved. "Would you like some tea?"

"Sounds good."

"How was this talk?" Sol asked as he attended to the boiling kettle.

"Fine. Very good, actually. We had a drink with the speaker afterwards." Kevin briefly considered telling his father about what had happened, but only briefly. Father and son had a long habit of protecting each other, and Kevin knew that this was something Sol would be unable to handle. He wished it were otherwise; it would have been good, he thought, a little bitterly, to have someone to talk to.

"Jennifer is well? And her friend?"

Kevin's bitterness broke in a wave of love for the old man who'd raised him alone. Sol had never been able to reconcile his orthodoxy with his son's relationship with Catholic Jennifer-and had resented himself for not being able to. So through their short time together, and after, Kevin's father had treated Jen like a jewel of great worth.

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"She's fine. Says hello. Kim's fine, too."

"But Paul isn't?"

Kevin blinked. "Oh, Abba, you're too sharp for me. Why do you say that?"

"Because if he was, you would have gone out with him afterwards. The way you always used to.

You would still be out. I would be drinking my tea alone, all alone." The twinkle in his eyes belied the lugubrious sentiments.

Kevin laughed aloud, then stopped when he heard the bitter note creeping in.

"No, he's not all right. But I seem to be the only one who questions it. I think I'm becoming a pain in the ass to him. I hate it."

"Sometimes," his father said, filling the glass cups in their Russian-style metal holders, "a friend has to be that."

"No one else seems to think there's anything wrong, though. They just talk about how it takes time." "It does take time, Kevin." Kevin made an impatient gesture. "I know it does. I'm not that stupid. But I know him, too, I know him very well, and he's. . . . There's something else here, and I

don't know what it is."

His father didn't speak for a moment. "How long is it now?" he asked, finally.

"Ten months," Kevin replied flatly. "Last summer."

"Ach!" Sol shook his heavy, still-handsome head. "Such a terrible thing."

Kevin leaned forward. "Abba, he's been closing himself off. To everyone. I don't . . . I'm afraid for what might happen. And I can't seem to get through."

"Are you trying too hard?" Sol Laine asked gently.

His son slumped back in his chair. "Maybe," he said, and the old man could see the effort the answer took. "But it hurts, Abba, he's all twisted up."

Sol Laine, who had married late, had lost his wife to cancer when Kevin, their only child, was five years old. He looked now at his handsome, fair son with a twisting in his own heart.

"Kevin," he said, "you will have to learn-and for you it will be hard-that sometimes you can't do anything.

Sometimes you simply can't."

Kevin finished his tea. He kissed his father on the forehead and went up to bed in the grip of a sadness that was new to him, and a sense of yearning that was not.

He woke once in the night, a few hours before Kimberly would. Reaching for a note pad he kept by the bed, he scribbled a line and fell back into sleep. We are the total of our longings, he had written.

But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.

Paul Schafer walked home as well that night, north up Avenue Road and two blocks over at Bernard. His pace was slower than Dave's, though, and you could not have told his thoughts or mood from his movements. His hands were in his pockets, and two or three times, where the streetlights thinned, he looked up at the ragged pattern of cloud that now hid and now revealed the moon.

Only at his doorway did his face show an expression-and this was only a transitory irresolution, as of someone weighing sleep against a walk around the block, perhaps.