The Darkest Road Read online

  “Look sharp, you laggards!” Coll’s prosaic, carrying voice broke into his reverie. “We’ve a ship to sail, and it may need some sailing yet. Wind’s shifting, Diar!”

  Paul looked back, south and west to where Coll’s extended arm was pointing. The breeze was now very strong, he realized. It had come up during the swordplay. As he looked back he could discern, straining, a line of darkness at the horizon.

  And in that moment he felt the stillness within his blood that marked the presence of Mórnir.

  * * *

  Younger brothers were not supposed to ride creatures of such unbridled power. Or to sound or look as had Tabor last night, before he took flight toward the mountains. True, she’d overheard her parents talking about it many times (she managed to overhear a great deal), and she’d been present three nights ago when her father had entrusted the guarding of the women and children to Tabor alone.

  But she’d never seen the creature of his fast until last night, and so it was only then that Liane had truly begun to understand what had happened to her younger brother. She was more like her mother than her father: she didn’t cry often or easily. But she’d understood that it was dangerous for Tabor to fly, and then she’d heard the strangeness in his voice when he mounted up, and so she had wept when he flew away.

  She had remained awake all night, sitting in the doorway of the house she shared with her mother and brother, until, a little before dawn, there had been a falling star in the sky just west of them, near the river.

  A short time later Tabor had walked back into the camp, raising a hand to the astonished women on guard. He touched his sister lightly on the shoulder before he passed inside, unspeaking, and fell into bed.

  It was more than weariness, she knew, but there was nothing she could do. So she had gone to bed herself, to a fitful sleep and dreams of Gwen Ystrat, and of the fair-haired man from another world who had become Liadon, and the spring.

  She was up with the sunrise, before her mother even, which was unusual. She dressed and walked out, after checking to see that Tabor still slept. Aside from those on guard at the gates, the camp was quiet. She looked east to the foothills and the mountains, and then west to see the sparkle of the Latham and the Plain unrolling beyond. As a little girl she’d thought the Plain went on forever; in some ways she still did.

  It was a beautiful morning, and for all her cares and the shallow sleep she’d had, her heart lifted a little to hear the birds and smell the freshness of the morning air.

  She went to check on Gereint.

  Entering the shaman’s house, she paused a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. They had been checking on him several times a day, she and Tabor: a duty, and a labor of love. But the aged shaman had not moved at all from the moment they had carried him here, and his expression had spoken of such terrible anguish that Liane could hardly bear to look at him.

  She did though, every time, searching for clues, for ways of aiding him. How did one offer aid to someone whose soul was journeying so far away? She didn’t know. She had her father’s love of their people, her mother’s calm stability, her own headstrong nature, and not a little courage. But where Gereint had gone, none of these seemed to matter. She came anyhow, and so did Tabor: just to be present, to share, in however small a way.

  So she stood on his threshold again, waiting for the darkness to clear a little, and then she heard a voice she’d known all her life say, in a tone she’d also known all her life, “How long does an old man have to wait for breakfast these days?”

  She screamed a little, a girlish habit she was still trying to outgrow. Then she seemed to have covered the distance into the room very fast, for she was on her knees beside Gereint, and hugging him, and crying just as her father would have and, for this, perhaps even her mother too.

  “I know,” he said patiently, patting her back. “I know. You are deeply sorry. It will never happen again. I know all that. But Liane, a hug in the morning, however nice, is not breakfast.”

  She was laughing and crying at the same time, and trying to hold him as close as she could without hurting his brittle bones. “Oh Gereint,” she whispered, “I’m so glad you’re back. So much has happened.”

  “I’m sure,” he said, in a different voice entirely. “Now be still a moment and let me read it in you. It will be quicker than the telling.”

  She did. It had happened so many times before that it no longer felt strange. This power was at the heart of what the shamans were; it came with their blinding. In a very little time Gereint sighed and leaned back a little, deep in thought.

  After a moment, she asked, “Did you do what you went to do?” He nodded.

  “Was it very difficult?”

  Another nod. Nothing more, but she had known him a long time, and she was her father’s daughter. She had also seen his face as he journeyed. She felt an inner stirring of pride. Gereint was theirs, and whatever he had done, it was something very great.

  There was another question in her, but this one she was afraid to ask. “I’ll get you some food,” she said, preparing to rise.

  With Gereint, though, you seldom had to ask. “Liane,” he murmured, “I can’t tell you for certain, because I am not yet strong enough to reach as far as Celidon. But I think I would know already if something very bad had happened there. They are all right, child. We will have fuller tidings later, but you can tell your mother that they are all right.”

  Relief burst within her like another sunrise. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him again.

  Gruffly he said, “This is still not breakfast! And I should warn you that in my day any woman who did that had to be prepared to do a good deal more!”

  She laughed breathlessly. “Oh, Gereint, I would lie down with you in gladness any time you asked.”

  For once, he seemed taken aback. “No one has said that particular thing to me for a very long time,” he said after a moment. “Thank you, child. But see to breakfast, and bring your brother to me instead.”

  She was who she was, and irrepressible.

  “Gereint!” she exclaimed, in mock astonishment.

  “I knew you would say that!” he growled. “Your father never did teach his children proper manners. That is not amusing, Liane dal Ivor. Now go get your brother. He has just awakened.”

  She left still giggling. “And breakfast!” he shouted after her.

  Only when he was quite sure she was out of earshot did he allow himself to laugh. He laughed a long time, for he was deeply pleased. He was back on the Plain where he’d never thought to be again, once having ventured out over the waves. But he had, indeed, done what he’d set out to do, and his soul had survived. And whatever had happened at Celidon, it was not too bad, it could not be, or, even weakened as he was, he would have known from the moment of his return.

  So he laughed for several moments and allowed himself—it wasn’t hard—to look forward to his meal.

  Everything changed when Tabor came. He entered the mind of the boy and saw what was happening to him, and then read the tale of what the Seer had done in Khath Meigol. After that his food was tasteless in his mouth, and there were ashes in his heart.

  * * *

  She walked in the garden behind the domed Temple with the High Priestess—if, Sharra thought to herself, this tiny enclosure could properly be said to constitute a garden. For one raised in Larai Rigal and familiar with every pathway, waterfall, and spreading tree within its walls, the question almost answered itself.

  Still, there were unexpected treasures here. She paused beside a bed of sylvain, silver and dusty rose. She hadn’t known they grew so far south. There were none in Cathal; sylvain was said to flourish only on the banks of Celyn Lake, by Daniloth. They were the flower of the lios alfar. She said as much to Jaelle.

  The Priestess glanced at the flowers with only mild attention. “They were a gift,” she murmured. “A long time ago, when Ra-Lathen wove the mist over Daniloth and the lios began the long withdraw
al. They sent us sylvain by which to remember them. They grow here, and in the palace gardens as well. Not many, the soil is wrong or some such thing—but there are always some of them, and these seem to have survived the winter and the drought.”

  Sharra looked at her. “It means nothing to you, does it?” she said. “Does anything, I wonder?”

  “In flowers?” Jaelle raised her eyebrows. Then, after a pause, she said, “Actually, there were flowers that mattered: the ones outside Dun Maura when the snow began to melt.”

  Sharra remembered. They had been red, bloodred for the sacrifice. Again she glanced at her companion. It was a warm morning, but in her white robe Jaelle looked icily cool, and there was a keen, cutting edge to her beauty. There was very little mildness or placidity about Sharra herself, and the man she was to wed would carry all his life the scar of a knife she’d thrown at him, but with Jaelle it was different, and provoking.

  “Of course,” the Princess of Cathal murmured. “Those flowers would matter. Does anything else, though? Or does absolutely everything have to circle back to the Goddess in order to reach through to you?”

  “Everything does circle back to her,” Jaelle said automatically. But then, after a pause, she went on, impatiently. “Why does everyone ask me things like that? What, exactly, do you all expect from the High Priestess of Dana?” Her eyes, green as the grass in sunlight, held Sharra’s and challenged her.

  In the face of that challenge, Sharra began to regret having brought it up. She was still too impetuous; it often took her out beyond her depth. She was, after all, a guest in the Temple. “Well—” she began apologetically.

  And got no further. “Really!” Jaelle exclaimed. “I have no idea what people want of me. I am High Priestess. I have power to channel, a Mormae to control—and Dana knows, with Audiart that takes doing. I have rituals to preserve, counsel to give. With the High King away I have a realm to govern with the Chancellor. How should I be other than I am? What do you all want from me?”

  Astonishingly, she had to turn away toward the flowers, to hide her face. Sharra was bemused, and momentarily moved, but she was from a country where subtlety of mind was a necessity for survival, and she was the daughter and heir of the Supreme Lord of Cathal.

  “It isn’t really me you’re talking to, is it?” she asked quietly. “Who were the others?”

  After a moment Jaelle, who had, it seemed, courage to go with everything else, turned back to look at her. The green eyes were dry, but there was a question in their depths.

  They heard a footstep on the path.

  “Yes, Leila?” Jaelle said, almost before she turned. “What is it? And why do you continue to enter places where you should not be?” The words were stern, but not, surprisingly, the tone.

  Sharra looked at the thin girl with the straight, fair hair who had screamed in real pain when the Wild Hunt flew. There was some diffidence in Leila’s expression, but not a great deal.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “But I thought you would want to know. The Seer is in the cottage where Finn and his mother stayed with the little one.”

  Jaelle’s expression changed swiftly. “Kim? Truly? You are tuned to the place itself, Leila?”

  “I seem to be,” the girl replied gravely, as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable.

  Jaelle looked at her for a long time, and Sharra, only half understanding, saw pity in the eyes of the High Priestess. “Tell me,” Jaelle asked the girl gently, “do you see Finn now? Where he is riding?”

  Leila shook her head. “Only when they were summoned. I saw him then, though I could not speak to him. He was… too cold. And where they are now it is too cold for me to follow.”

  “Don’t try, Leila,” Jaelle said earnestly. “Don’t even try.”

  “It has nothing to do with trying,” the girl said simply, and something in the words, the calm acceptance, stirred pity in Sharra as well.

  But it was to Jaelle that she spoke. “If Kim is nearby,” she said, “can we go to her?”

  Jaelle nodded. “I have things to discuss with her.”

  “Are there horses here? Let’s go.”

  The High Priestess smiled thinly. “As easily as that? There is,” she murmured with delicate precision, “a distinction between independence and irresponsibility, my dear. You are your father’s heir, and betrothed—or did you forget?—to the heir of Brennin. And I am charged with half the governance of this realm. And—or did you forget that too?—we are at war. There were svart alfar slain on that path a year ago. We will have to arrange an escort for you if you intend to join me, Princess of Cathal. Excuse me, if you will, while I tend to the details.”

  And she brushed smoothly past Sharra on the pebbled walkway.

  Revenge, the Princess thought ruefully. She had trespassed on very private terrain and had just paid the price. Nor, she knew, was Jaelle wrong. Which only made the rebuke more galling. Deep in thought, she turned and followed the High Priestess back into the Temple.

  In the end, it took a fair bit of time to get the short expedition untracked and on the road to the lake, largely because the preposterous fat man, Tegid, whom Diarmuid had elected as his Intercedent in the matter of their marriage, refused to allow her to ride forth without him, even in the care of the Priestess and a guard from both Brennin and Cathal. And since there was only one horse in the capital large enough to survive martyrdom under Tegid’s bulk, and that horse was quartered in the South Keep barracks on the other side of Paras Derval…

  It was almost noon before they got under way, and as a consequence they were too late to do anything at all about what happened.

  * * *

  In the small hours of that morning, Kimberly, asleep in the cottage by the lake, crossed a narrow bridge over a chasm filled with nameless, shapeless horrors, and when she stood on the other side a figure approached her in the dream, and terror rose in her like a mutant shape in that lonely, blighted place.

  On her pallet in the cottage, never waking, she tossed violently from side to side, one hand raised unconsciously in rejection and denial. For the first and only time she fought her Seer’s vision, struggling to change the image of the figure that stood there with her on the farther side. To alter—not merely foresee—the loops spun into time on the Loom. To no avail.

  It was to dream this dream that Ysanne had made Kim a Seer, had relinquished her own soul to do so. She had said as much. There were no surprises here, only terror and renunciation, helpless in the face of this vast inevitability.

  In the cottage the sleeping figure ceased her struggling; the uplifted, warding hand fell back. In the dream she stood quietly on the far side of the chasm, facing what had come. This meeting had been waiting for her from the beginning. It was as true as anything had ever been true. And so now, with the dreaming of it, with the crossing of that bridge, the ending had begun.

  It was late in the morning when she finally woke. After the dream she had fallen back into the deeper, healing sleep her exhausted body so desperately needed. Now she lay in bed a little while, looking at the sunlight that streamed in through the open windows, deeply grateful for the small grace of rest in this place. There were birds singing outside, and the breeze carried the scent of flowers. She could hear the lake slapping against the rocks along the shore.

  She rose and went out into the brightness of the day. Down the familiar path she walked, to the broad flat rock overhanging the lake where she had knelt when Ysanne threw a bannion into the moonlit waters and summoned Eilathen to spin for her.

  He was down there now, she knew, deep in his halls of seaweed and stone, free of the binding flowerfire, uncaring of what happened above the surface of his lake. She knelt and washed her face in the cool, clean waters. She sat back on her heels and let the sunlight dry the drops of water glistening on her cheeks. It was very quiet. Far out over the lake a fishing bird swooped and then rose, caught by the light, flashing away south.

  She had stood on this shore once, most of a lifeti
me ago, it seemed, throwing pebbles into the water, having fled from the words Ysanne had spoken in the cottage. Under the cottage.

  Her hair had still been brown then. She had been an intern from Toronto, a stranger in another world. She was white-haired now, and the Seer of Brennin, and on the far side of a chasm in her dream she had seen a road stretching away, and someone had stood before her on that road. Sparkling brilliantly, a speckled fish leaped from the lake. The sun was high, too high; the Loom was shuttling even as she lingered by this shore.

  Kimberly rose and went back into the cottage. She moved the table a little to one side. She laid her hand on the floor and spoke a word of power.

  There were ten steps leading down. The walls were damp. There were no torches, but from below the well-remembered pearly light still shone. On her finger the Baelrath began to glow in answer. Then she reached the bottom and stood in the chamber again, with its woven carpet, single desk, bed, chair, ancient books.

  And the glass-doored cabinet on the farther wall wherein lay the Circlet of Lisen, from which the shining came.

  She walked over and opened the cabinet doors. For a long time she stood motionless, looking down at the gold of the Circlet band and the glowing stone set within: fairest creation of the lios alfar, crafted by the Children of Light in love and sorrow for the fairest child of all the Weaver’s worlds.

  The Light against the Dark, Ysanne had named it. It had changed, Kim remembered her saying: the color of hope when it was made, since Lisen’s death it shone more softly, and with loss. Thinking of Ysanne, Kim felt her as a palpable presence; she had the illusion that if she hugged herself, she’d be putting her arms about the frail body of the old Seer.

  It was an illusion, nothing more, but she remembered something else that was more than illusory: words of Raederth, the mage Ysanne had loved and been loved by, the man who had found the Circlet again, notwithstanding all the long years it had lain lost.