Fionavar 1 (41 page)

He ate in silence, leaning back against the pillows when he was done. She made as if to get up, but then, with an expression of distaste, used the sleeve of her white gown to wipe the blood from his cheek.

She did rise then, to stand tall and queenly by his bed, her hair the color of the candlelight.

Looking up at her, he felt at a disadvantage suddenly.

"Why," he asked, "am I here?"

"I read the signs."

"You didn't expect to find me alive?"

She shook her head. "No, but it was the third night, and then the moon rose. . . ."

He nodded. "But why?" he asked. "Why bother?"

Her eyes flashed. "Don't be such a child. There is a war now. You will be needed."

He felt his heart skip. "What do you mean? What war?"

"You don't know?"

"I've been somewhat out of touch," he said sharply. "What has happened?"

It may have taken an effort, but her voice was controlled. "Rangat exploded yesterday. A hand of fire in the sky. The wardstone is shattered. Rakoth is free."

He was very still.

"The King is dead," she said.

"That I know," he said. "I heard the bells."

But for the first time now, her expression was strained; something difficult moved in her eyes.

"There is more," said Jaelle. "A party of lios alfar were ambushed here by svarts and wolves.

Your friend was with them. Jennifer. I am sorry, but she was captured and taken north. A black swan bore her away."

So. He closed his eyes again, feeling the burdens coming down. It seemed they could not be deferred after all. Arrow of the God. Spear of the God. Three nights and forever, the King had said.

The King was dead. And Jen.

He looked up again. "Now I know why he sent me back."

As if against her will, Jaelle nodded. "Twiceborn," she murmured.

Wordlessly, he asked with his eyes.

"There is a saying," she whispered, "a very old one: No man shall be Lord of the Summer Tree who has not twice been born."

And so by candlelight in the sanctuary, he heard the words for the first time.

"I didn't ask for this," Paul Schafer said.

She was very beautiful, very stern, a flame, as the candles were. "Are you asking me for pity?"

His mouth crooked wryly at that. "Hardly, at this point." He smiled a little. "Why is it so much easier for you to strike a defenseless man than to wipe the blood from his face?"

Her reply was formal, reflexive, but he had seen her eyes flinch away. "There is mercy in the Goddess sometimes," she said, "but not gentleness."

"Is that how you know her?" he asked. "What if I tell you that I had from her last night a compassion so tender there are no words to compass it?"

She was silent.

"Aren't we two human beings first?" he went on. "With very great burdens, and support to
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share.

You are Jaelle, surely, as well as her Priestess."

"There you are wrong," she said. "I am only her Priestess. There is no one else."

"That seems to me very sad."

"You are only a man," Jaelle replied, and Paul was abashed by what blazed in her eyes before she turned and left the room.

Kim had lain awake for most of the night, alone in her room in the palace, achingly aware of the other, empty bed. Even inside, the Baelrath was responding to the moon, glowing brightly enough to cast shadows on the wall: a branch outside the window swaying in the rain wind, the outline of her own white hair, the shape of a candle by the bed, but no Jen, no shadow of her.

Kim tried.

Utterly unaware of what her power was, of how to use the stone, she closed her eyes and reached out in the wild night, north as far as she might, as clearly as she might, and found only the darkness of her own apprehensions.

When the stone grew dim again, only a red ring on her finger, she knew the moon had set. It was very late then, little left of the night. Kim lay back in weariness and dreamt of a desire she hadn't known she had.

It is in your dreams that you must walk, Ysanne had said, was saying still, as she dropped far down into the dream again.

And this time she knew the place. She knew where lay those jumbled mighty arches of broken stone, and who was buried there for her to wake.

Not him, not the one she sought. Too easy, were it so. That path was darker even than it was now, and it led through the dead in the dreaming place. This she now knew. It was very sad, though she understood that the gods would not think it so. The sins of the sons, she thought in her dream, knowing the place, feeling the wind rising, and, her hair, oh, her white hair, blown back.

The way to the Warrior led through the grave and the risen bones of the father who had never seen him alive. What was she that she should know this?

But then she was somewhere else, with no space to wonder. She was in the room under the cottage where the Circlet of Lisen still shone, Colan's dagger beside it, where Ysanne had died, and more than died. The Seer was with her, though, was within her, for she knew the book, the parchment page within the book where the invocation could be found to raise the father whole from his grave, and make him name the name of his son to the one who knew the place of summoning. There was no peace, no serenity anywhere. She carried none, had none to grant, she wore the Warstone on her hand. She would drag the dead from their rest, and the undead to their doom.

What was she that this should be so?

At the morning's first light she made them take her back in the rain. An armed guard of thirty men went with her; troops from North Keep who had been Aileron's before he was exiled. With cool efficiency they compassed her about on the ride to the lake. At the last curve the bodies of Aileron's victims still lay on the path.

"Did he do that alone?" the leader of the guard asked when they were past. His voice was reverent.

"Yes," she said.

"He will be our king?"

"Yes," she said.

They waited by the lake while she went inside, and then down the now familiar stairs into the glow cast by Lisen's Light. She left it where it lay, though; and, walking to the table, she opened one of the books. Oh, it was a glory and a terror that she knew where to look, but she did, and
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sitting there alone, she slowly read the words that she would have to speak.

But only when she knew the place that no one knew. The tumbled stones were only the starting point. There was a long way yet to walk along this path; a long way, but she was on it now.

Preoccupied, tangled among interstices of time and place, the Seer of Brennin went back up the stairs. Aileron's men awaited her, in disciplined alertness by the lake.

It was time to go. There was a very great deal to be done. She lingered, though, in the cottage, seeing the fire, the hearth, the worn table, the herbs in jars along the wall. She read the labels, unstoppered one container to smell its contents. There was so much to be done, the Seer of Brennin knew, but still she lingered, tasting the aloneness.

It was bittersweet, and when she moved at last, Kimberly went out the back door, still alone, into the yard, away from where the soldiers were, and she saw three men picking their way on horseback down the slope north of her, and one of them she knew, oh, she knew. And it seemed that amid all the burdens and sorrows, joy could still flower like a bannion in the wood.

They buried Ailell dan Art in a time of rain. It fell upon the windows of Delevan high above the Great Hall where the King lay in state, robed in white and gold, his sword upon his breast, his great, gnarled hands closed upon the hilt; it fell softly upon the gorgeous woven covering of the bier when the nobility of Brennin, who had gathered for celebration and stayed for mourning and war, bore him out of the palace and to the doors of the Temple where the women took him; it fell, too, upon the dome of that sanctuary while Jaelle, the High Priestess, performed the rites of the

Mother, to send back home to her one of the Kings.

No man was in that place. Loren had taken Paul away. She'd had hopes of seeing Silvercloak shaken, but had been disappointed, for the mage had shown no surprise at all, and she had been forced to cloak her own discomfiture at that, and at his bowing to the Twiceborn.

No man was in that place, save for the dead King, when they lifted the great axe from its rest, and no man saw what they did then. Dana was not mocked nor denied when she took her child home, whom she had sent forth so long ago on the circling path that led ever back to her.

It was the place of the High Priestess to bury the High King, and so Jaelle led them forth when the rites were done. Into the rain she went, clad in white among all the black, and they bore Ailell shoulder-high behind her to the crypt wherein the Kings of Brennin were laid to rest.

East of the palace it lay, north of the Temple. Before the body went Jaelle with the key to the gates in her hands. Behind the bier, fair and solitary, walked Diarmuid, the King's Heir, and after him came all the lesser nobility of Brennin. Among them there walked, though with aid, a Prince of the lios alfar, and there were come as well two men of the Dalrei, from the Plain; and with these walked two men from another world, one very tall and dark, another fair, and between them was a

woman with white hair. The common folk lined the path, six deep in the rain, and they bowed their heads to see Ailell go by.

Then they came to the great gates of the burying place, and Jaelle saw that they were open already and that a man clad in black stood waiting there for them, and she saw who it was.

"Come," said Aileron, "let us lay my father by my mother, whom he loved."

And while she was trying to mask her shock, another voice spoke. "Welcome home, exile,"

Diarmuid said, his tone mild, unsurprised, and he moved lightly past her to kiss Aileron on the cheek. "Shall we lead him back to her?"

It was greatly wrong, for she had right of precedence here, but in spite of herself the High Priestess felt a strange emotion to see the two of them, the dark son and the bright, pass through the gates of the dead, side by side, while all the people of Brennin murmured behind them in the falling rain.

On a spur of hill high above that place, three men watched. One would be First Mage of Brennin
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before the sun had set, one had been made King of the Dwarves by a sunrise long ago, and the third had caused the rain and been sent back by the God.

"We are gathered," Gorlaes began, standing beside the throne but two careful steps below it, "in a time of sorrow and need."

They were in the Great Hall, Tomaz Lal's masterpiece, and there were gathered that afternoon all the mighty of Brennin, save one. The two Dalrei, and Dave as well, so fortuitously arrived, had been greeted with honor and shown to their chambers, and even Brendel of Daniloth was absent from this assemblage, for what Brennin had now to do was matter for Brennin alone.

"In any normal time our loss would demand space for mourning. But this is no such time. It is needful for us now," the Chancellor continued, seeing that Jaelle had not contested his right to speak first, "to take swift counsel amongst one another and go forth from this hall united, with a new King to lead us into-"

"Hold, Gorlaes. We will wait for Silvercloak. " It was Teyrnon, the mage, and he had risen to stand, with Barak, his source, and Matt Sören. Trouble already, and they had not even begun.

"Surely," Jaelle murmured, "it is rather his duty to be here when others are. We have waited long enough."

"We will wait longer," the Dwarf growled. "As we waited for you, yesterday." There was something in his tone that made Gorlaes glad it was Jaelle who'd raised objection, and not himself.

"Where is he?" Niavin of Seresh asked.

"He is coming. He had to go slowly."

"Why?" It was Diarmuid. He had stopped his feline pacing at the edges of the hall and come forward.

"Wait," was all the Dwarf replied.

Gorlaes was about to remonstrate, but someone else came in first.

"No," said Aileron. "For all the love I bear him, I will not wait on this. There is, in truth, little to discuss."

Kim Ford, in that room as the newest, the only, Seer of Brennin, watched him stride to stand by Gorlaes.

And a step above him, directly before the throne. He will always be like this, she thought. There is only the force of him.

And with force, cold, unyielding force, Aileron looked over them all and spoke again. "In time of council Loren's wisdom will be sorely needed, but this is not a time of council, whatever you may have thought."

Diarmuid was no longer pacing. He had moved, at Aileron's first words, to stand directly in front of his brother, an unruffled contrast to Aileron's coiled intensity.

"I came here," said Aileron dan Ailell flatly, "for the Crown, and to lead us into war. The Throne is mine"-he was looking directly at his brother-"and I will kill for it, or die for it before we leave this hall."

The rigid silence that followed this was broken a moment later by the jarring sound of one man clapping.

"Elegantly put, my dear," said Diarmuid as he continued to applaud. "So utterly succinct." Then he lowered his hands. The sons of Ailell faced each other as if alone in the vast hall.

"Mockery," said Aileron softly, "is easy. It was ever your retreat. Understand me, though, brother.

This, for once, is no idle sport. I want your fealty this hour, in this place, or there are six archers in the musicians' gallery who will kill you if I raise my hand."

"No!" Kim exclaimed, shocked out of silence.

"This is preposterous!" Teyrnon shouted at the same time, striding forward. "I forbid-"

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"You cannot forbid me!" Aileron rode over him. "Rakoth is free. What lies ahead is too large for me to trifle with."

Diarmuid had cocked his head quizzically to one side, as if considering an abstract proposition.

Then he spoke, his voice so soft they had to strain to hear. "You would truly do this thing?"

"I would," Aileron replied. With no hesitation at all.