The Wandering Fire Read online

  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 backwards 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 amus
ement. “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 colours 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, favouring 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-summ
er, 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.