The Summer Tree Read online

  “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.

  Chapter 2

  The girls shared a silent taxi west to the duplex they rented beside High Park. Jennifer, partly because she knew her room-mate 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 chilly. 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?

  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 pyjamas 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.

  “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 there, 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.

  Schafer went in, though, and unlocked his ground-floor apartment. Turning on a lamp in the living room, he poured himself a drink and carried the glass to a deep armchair. Again the pale face under the dark shock of hair was expressionless. And again, when his mouth and eyes did move, a long time later, it was to register only a kind of indecision, wiped away quickly this time by the tightening jaw.

  He leaned sideways then to the stereo and tape deck, turned them on, and inserted a cassette. In part because it was very late, but only in part, he adjusted the machine and put on the headphones. Then he turned out the only light in the room.

  It was a private tape, one he had made himself a year ago. On it, as he sat there motionless in the dark, sounds from the summer before took shape: a graduation recital in the Faculty of Music’s Edward Johnson Building, by a girl named Rachel Kincaid. A girl with dark hair like his own and dark eyes like no one else in this world.

  And Paul Schafer, who believed one should be able to endure anything, and who believed this of himself most of all, listened as long as he could, and failed again. When the second movement began, he shuddered through an indrawn breath and stabbed the machine to silence.

  It seemed that there were still things one could not do. So one did everything else as well as one possibly could and found new things to try, to will oneself to master, and always one realized, at the kernel and heart of things, that the ends of the earth would not be far enough away.

  Which was why, despite knowing very well that there were things they had not been told, Paul Schafer was glad, bleakly glad, to be going farther than the ends of the earth on the morrow. And the moon, moving then to shine unobstructed through the window, lit the room enough to reveal the serenity of his face.

  And in the place beyond the ends of earth, in Fionavar, which lay waiting for them like a lover, like a dream, another moon, larger than our own, rose to light the changing of the wardstone guard in the palace of Paras Derval. The priestess appointed came with the new guards, tended and banked the naal flame set before the stone, and withdrew, yawning, to her narrow bed.

  And the stone, Ginserat’s stone, set in its high obsidian pillar carved with a relief of Conary before the Mountain, shone still, as it had a thousand years, radiantly blue.

  Chapter 3

  Towards dawn a bank of clouds settled low over the city. Kimberly Ford stirred, surfaced almost to wakefulness, then slipped back down into a light sleep, and a dream unlike any she’d known before.

  There was a place of massive jumbled stones. A wind was blowing over wide grasslands. It was dusk. She almost knew the place, was so close to naming it that her inability tasted bitter in her mouth. The wind made a chill, keening sound as it blew between the stones. She had come to find one who was needed, but she knew he was not there. A ring was on her finger, with a stone that gleamed a dull red in the twilight, and this was her power and her burden both. The gathered stones demanded an invocation from her; the wind threatened to tear it from her mouth. She knew what she was here to say, and was broken-hearted, beyond all grief she’d ever known, at the price her speaking would exact from the man she’d come to summon. In the dream, she opened her mouth to say the words.

  She woke then, and was very still a long time. When she rose, it was to move to the window, where she drew the curtain back.

  The clouds were breaking up. Venus, rising in the east before the sun, shone silver-white and dazzling, like hope. The ring on her finger in the dream had shone as well: deep red and masterful, like Mars.

  The Dwarf dropped into a crouch, hands loosely clasped in front of him. They were all there; Kevin with his guitar, Dave Martyniuk defiantly clutching the promised Evidence notes. Loren remained out of sight in the bedroom. “Preparing,” the Dwarf had said. And now, without preamble, Matt Sören said more.

  “Ailell reigns in Brennin, the High Kingdom. Fifty years now, as you have heard. He is very old, much reduced. Metran heads the Council of the Mages, and Gorlaes, the Chancellor, is first of all advisers. You will meet them both. Ailell had two sons only, very late in life. The name of the elder,” Matt hesitated, “—is not to be spoken. The younger is Diarmuid, now heir to the throne.”

  Too many mysteries, Kevin Laine thought. He was nervous, and angry with himself for that. Beside him, Kim was concentrating fiercely, a single vertical line furrowing her forehead.

  “South of us,” the Dwarf continued, “the Saeren flows through its ravine, and beyond the river is Cathal, the Garden Country. There has been war with Shalhassan’s people in my lifetime. The river is patrolled on both sides. North of Brennin is the Plain where the Dalrei dwell, the Riders. The tribes follow the eltor herds as the seasons change. You are unlikely to see any of the Dalrei. They dislike walls and cities.”

  Kim’s frown, Kevin saw, had deepened.

  “Over the mountains, eastward, the land grows wilder and very beautiful. That country is called Eridu now, though it had another name long ago. It breeds a people once brutal, though quiet of late. Little is known of doings in Eridu, for the mountains are a stern barrier.” Matt Sören’s voice roughened. “Among the Eriduns dwell the Dwarves, unseen for the most part, in their chambers and halls under the mountains of Banir Lök and Banir Tal, beside Calor Diman, the Crystal Lake. A place more fair than any in all the worlds.”

  Kevin had questions again, but withheld them. He could see there was an old pain at work here.

  “North and west of Brennin is Pendaran Wood. It runs for miles to the north, between the Plain and the Sea. Beyond the forest is Daniloth, the Shadowland.” The Dwarf stopped, as abruptly as he’d begun, and turned to adjust his pack and gear. There was a silence.

  “Matt?” It was Kimberly. The Dwarf turned. “What about the mountain north of the Plain?”

  Matt made a swift, convulsive gesture with one hand, and stared at the slight, brown-haired girl.

  “So you were right, my friend, from the very first.”

  Kevin wheeled. In the doorway leading from the bedroom stood the tall figure of Loren, in a long robe of shifting silver hues.

  “What have you seen?” the mage asked Kim, very gently.

  She, too, had twisted to face him. The grey eyes were strange—inward and troubled. She shook her head, as if to clear it. “Nothing, really. Just … that I do see a mountain.”

  “And?” Loren pressed.

  “And …” she closed her eyes. “A hunger. Inside, somehow … I can’t explain it.”

  “It is written,” said Loren after a moment, “in our books of wisdom, that in each of the worlds there are those who have dreams or visions—one sage called them memories—of Fionavar, which is the First. Matt,
who has gifts of his own, named you as one such yesterday.” He paused; Kim didn’t move. “It is known,” Loren went on, “that to bring people back in a crossing, such a person must be found to stand at the heart of the circle.”

  “So that’s why you wanted us? Because of Kim?” It was Paul Schafer; the first words he’d spoken since arriving.

  “Yes,” said the mage, simply.

  “Damn!” cried Kevin softly. “And I thought it was my charm.”

  No one laughed. Kim stared at Loren, as if seeking answers in the lines of his face, or the shifting patterns of his robe.

  Finally she asked, “And the mountain?”

  Loren’s voice was almost matter-of-fact. “One thousand years ago someone was imprisoned there. At the deepest root of Rangat, which is the mountain you have seen.”

  Kim nodded, hesitated. “Someone … evil?” The word came awkwardly to her tongue.

  They might have been alone in the room. “Yes,” said the mage.

  “One thousand years ago?”

  He nodded again. In this moment of misdirection, of deceit, when everything stood in danger of falling apart, his eyes were more calm and compassionate than they had ever been.

  With one hand Kim tugged at a strand of brown hair. She drew a breath. “All right,” she said. “All right, then. How do I help you cross?”

  Dave was struggling to absorb all this when things began to move too quickly. He found himself part of a circle around Kim and the mage. He linked hands with Jennifer and Matt on either side. The Dwarf seemed to be concentrating very hard; his legs were wide apart, braced. Then Loren began to speak words in a tongue Dave didn’t know, his voice growing in power and resonance.

  And was interrupted, by Paul Schafer.

  “Loren—is the person under that mountain dead?”

  The mage gazed at the slim figure who’d asked the question he feared. “You, too?” he whispered. Then, “No,” he answered, telling the truth. “No, he isn’t.” And resumed speaking in his strange language.