The Wandering Fire Read online

  It was Torc who answered. “Death,” he said clearly. “He is right, Levon.”

  Still on the ground with Coll, Kevin realized that Diarmuid, pupil, once, of Loren Silvercloak, had known exactly that. And after a moment he saw Levon nod his head.

  “I know he is,” he said. “I am my father’s son, though, and I cannot order a death so easily. Will you forgive me, my lord Prince?”

  For reply, Diarmuid swung down from his horse and walked over to Levon’s. With a formal gesture he served as footman to help the other dismount, and then the two of them, both young, both fair, embraced, as the Dalrei and the men of Brennin shouted their approval.

  “I feel like an idiot!” Kevin said to Coll. He helped the other man to his feet.

  “We all feel that way sometimes,” said the big man sympathetically. “Especially around Diar. Let’s go get drunk, friend. The Riders make a lethal drink!”

  They did. And there was a great deal of it. It didn’t really lift his mood, though, nor did Diarmuid’s indulgent response to his precipitate action earlier.

  “I didn’t know you liked Coll so much!” the Prince had said, triggering a round of laughter in the huge wooden house in which most of them had gathered.

  Kevin faked a laugh; he couldn’t think of a reply. He had never felt superfluous before, but more and more it was beginning to look as if he was. He noticed Dave—Davor they called him here—huddled with Levon, Torc, and a number of other Dalrei, including a teenage kid, all arms and legs and disordered hair who, he’d been given to understand, had ridden the unicorn that flew. He saw Diarmuid rise up and make his way through a giggling cluster of women to join the group. He thought about doing the same, knowing they would welcome him, but it seemed pointless somehow. He had nothing to contribute.

  “More sachen?” a soft voice said in his ear. He tilted his head to see a pretty brown-haired girl holding a stone beaker. Coll winked surreptitiously and shifted a little bit away on the bench, making room.

  Oh, well. “Okay,” Kevin said. He smiled. “Are you joining me?”

  Neatly she slipped in beside him. “For a little while,” she said. “I’m supposed to be serving. I’ll have to get up if my mother comes. My name is Liane dal Ivor.”

  He wasn’t really in the mood, but she was bright and sharp and carried the ball herself much of the time. With an effort, wanting at least to be polite, Kevin did a little half-hearted flirting.

  Later, her mother did appear, surveying the scene with a hostess’s eye, and Liane scrambled off with a surprising oath to serve some more beakers of sachen. A little later the conclave at the far end broke up and Dave came over.

  “We’re leaving early in the morning,” he said tersely “Levon wants to see Kim in Paras Derval.”

  “She wasn’t there yet,” Kevin protested.

  “Gereint says she will be,” the other replied, and without amplification strode off into the night, buttoning his coat against the cold.

  Kevin glanced at Coll. They shrugged. At least the sachen was good; saved the evening from being a total write-off.

  Much later, something else did as well. He hadn’t been in his bed very long, was just feeling the heavy covers warming up, when the door opened and a slim figure bearing a candle slipped inside.

  “If you ask me for a beaker of sachen,” Liane said, “I’ll break it over your head. I hope you’re warm in there.” She placed the flame on the low table beside the bed and undressed. He saw her for a moment in the light; then she was under the blankets beside him.

  “I like candles,” she said.

  It was the last thing either of them said for a long time. And again, despite everything, the curving act of love took him away with it, so far that the colours of the light seemed to change. Before the flame burnt out he saw her bend back above him like a bow, in her own transcending arc, and he would have spoken then if he could.

  Later it was dark and she said, “Fear not. We went so deep because we are near to Gwen Ystrat. The old stories are true after all.”

  He shook his head. He had to travel a long way back to do that much, and farther still to speak. “Everywhere,” he said. “This deep.”

  She stiffened. He hadn’t meant it to wound. How to explain? But Liane stroked his forehead and in a different voice whispered, “So you carry Dun Maura within yourself?” Then she called him, as he thought, drifting, by another name. He wanted to ask. There were questions, but the tide was going out and he was far along with it, much too far.

  In the morning when Erron woke him with a shake and a grin, she was, naturally, gone. Nor did he see her before they rode off, the thirty men of Diarmuid’s band, he and Dave, with Levon and Torc alongside.

  For Dave the journey northeast to the upper reaches of the Latham had promised reunion and in the end had offered both that and revenge. From the moment he’d understood that the man Diarmuid was to bring back was Gereint of the third tribe, his heart had begun racing with anticipation. There was no way they could have kept him from joining that party of the Prince’s men. Loren wanted Gereint for some reason having to do with figuring out the winter, he gathered. That didn’t matter so much to him; what mattered was that soon he would be among the Dalrei again.

  The roads had been cleared east as far as Lake Leinan, but the going became harder as they turned north the next morning. Diarmuid had hoped to make the camps before sundown, but it was slow going among the drifts and into the teeth of the bitter wind that blew unobstructed down from the Plain. They had given Dave and Kevin wonderfully warm woven coats in Paras Derval. Lightweight, too—they knew how to work with wool and cloth here, that much was obvious. Without the coats they would have frozen. Even with them, when the sun went down, the going became very bad, and Dave had no idea how far away they were from the camps.

  Then all thoughts of cold had disappeared, for they had seen torches moving in the night, heard the screams of dying animals and the shouts of men in battle.

  Dave hadn’t waited for anyone else. He’d kicked his big stallion forward and charged up over a mound of snow, to see a battlefield spread out before him, and, astride a horse between him and the melee, a fifteen-year-old boy he remembered.

  Diarmuid, the elegant Prince, had caught up with him as they galloped past Tabor down the slope, but Dave was scarcely aware of anyone else as he plunged into the closest pack of wolves, hewing on either side, aiming straight for the closest urgach, with a memory of deaths by Llewenmere to drive him on.

  He remembered little else, as battle fury overtook him. Kevin Laine had been beside him with a torch for light at one point and they told him afterwards that he had slain an urgach and its mount by himself. The six-legged horned beasts were called slaug, they told him. But that was after.

  After Tabor, astonishingly, had appeared in the sky overhead, riding a lethal winged creature with a horn of its own that shone and killed.

  After the moment when the wolves had fled and the slaug had borne the urgach away in flight, he had dismounted to stand facing his brothers again. A great deal had been made whole then as he felt Torc’s hard grip on his arm and then Levon’s embrace.

  There had been an interlude of some tension when Diarmuid had had a Dalrei slain for insubordination and then faced Levon down in a confrontation, but that, too, had ended all right. Kevin Laine, for no reason Dave could grasp, had tried to interfere, but no one else seemed to have taken much notice of it.

  Then they had ridden back to the camp and to Ivor, who had a new title now but was still the same stocky, greying man he remembered, with the same deep-set eyes in a weather-beaten face. Ivor said, to lift Dave even higher, “Welcome home, Davor. A bright thread in darkness spins you back.”

  There had been sachen after, and good food by the fires, and many remembered faces. Including Liane’s.

  “How many times am I going to have to dance an urgach kill of yours?” she asked, bright-eyed, pert, her mouth soft on his cheek where she’d kissed him on tiptoe befor
e moving off.

  Tabor had come in quite a while later, and he’d wanted to embrace the boy but something in Tabor’s face stopped him. It stopped all of them, even his father. It was then that Ivor had gestured Dave over to join a meeting around a smaller fire off to the side of the room.

  With Dave, there were seven people there, and Diarmuid, carrying his own beaker, made a slightly disheveled eighth a moment later. Dave wasn’t sure what he thought of this Prince; he’d been rather more impressed with Aileron, the older brother who was now High King. Diarmuid seemed altogether too suave for Dave’s taste; on the other hand, there had been nothing soft about the pace he’d set on the ride, or the control he’d asserted in the matter of the Dalrei he’d ordered killed. Ivor, Dave noticed, hadn’t brought the issue up either.

  And Diarmuid, despite the drinking, seemed very much in command as he concisely outlined the wish of the High King and his First Mage that Gereint the shaman ride back with him to Paras Derval. There to join with the mages in seeking the source of the winter that was slowly grinding them all down under its malevolent heel.

  “For it is malevolent,” the Prince added quietly from where he’d crouched in front of blind Gereint. “The lios have confirmed what we’ve all guessed. We would like to leave tomorrow—if it suits the shaman, and all of you.”

  Ivor nodded an acknowledgment of the corteous proviso. No one spoke, though; they waited for Gereint.

  Dave had still not gotten over the uneasiness he felt in the presence of this wrinkled ancient whose hollowed eye sockets seemed, nonetheless, to see into the souls of men and down the dark avenues of time. Cernan, god of the wild things, had spoken to Gereint, Dave remembered—and had called Tabor to his fast, to the animal they had seen in the sky. That thought led him to Ceinwen, and the stag in Faelin Grove. And this was his own dark avenue.

  He turned from it to hear Gereint say, “We are going to need the Seer as well.”

  “She hasn’t come yet,” Diarmuid said.

  Everyone looked at Dave. “She was bringing someone,” he said. “She sent us ahead.”

  “Who was she bringing?” the man called Tulger asked from beside Ivor.

  But a rare discretion led Dave to murmur, “I think that’s for her to say, not me.” Ivor, he saw, nodded his agreement.

  Gereint smiled thinly. “True,” the shaman said. “Although I know, and they have arrived by now. They were in Paras Derval before you left.” This was exactly what drove Dave crazy about Gereint.

  Diarmuid didn’t seem bothered. “With Loren, probably,” he murmured, smiling as if at a jest. Dave didn’t get the joke. “Will you come then?” the Prince continued, addressing the shaman.

  “Not to Paras Derval,” Gereint replied placidly. “It is too far for my old bones.”

  “Well, surely—” Diarmuid began.

  “I will meet you,” Gereint went on, ignoring him, “in Gwen Ystrat. I will leave tomorrow for the Temple in Morvran. You will all be coming there.”

  This time even Diarmuid looked discomfited. “Why?” he asked.

  “Which way did the wolves fly?” the shaman asked, turning unnervingly to where Torc sat.

  “South,” the dark man said, and they were silent. There was a burst of laughter from the largest fire. Dave glanced over involuntarily and saw, with a sudden chill, that Liane was sitting next to Kevin, and the two of them were whispering in each other’s ears. His vision blurred. Goddamn that flashy skirt-chaser! Why did the slick, carefree Kevin Laines always have to be around to spoil things? Inwardly seething, Dave forced himself to turn back to the conclave.

  “You will all be there,” Gereint was repeating. “And Gwen Ystrat is the best place for what we will have to do.”

  Diarmuid stared at the blind shaman for a long moment. Then: “All right,” he said. “I will tell my brother. Is there anything else?”

  “One thing.” It was Levon. “Dave, you have your horn.”

  The horn from Pendaran. With the note that was the sound of Light itself. “I do,” Dave said. It was looped across his body.

  “Good,” said Levon. “Then if the Seer is in Paras Derval I would like to ride back with you. There is something I’d like to try before we go to Gwen Ystrat.”

  Ivor stirred at that, and turned to his elder son. “It is rash,” he said slowly. “You know it is.”

  “I don’t know,” Levon replied. “I know we have been given Owein’s Horn. Why else if not to use?” This was reasonable enough on its own terms to silence his father. It happened, however, to be quite wrong.

  “What exactly are we talking about?” the Prince asked.

  “Owein,” Levon said tensely. There was a brightness in his face. “I want to wake the Sleepers and set free the Wild Hunt!”

  It held them, if only for a moment.

  “What fun!” said Diarmuid, but Dave could see a gleam in his eye, answering Levon’s.

  Only Gereint laughed, a low, unsettling sound. “What fun,” the shaman repeated, chuckling to himself as he rocked back and forth.

  It was just afterwards that they noticed that Tabor had fainted.

  He’d revived by morning and come out, pale but cheerful, to bid them goodbye. Dave would have stayed with the Dalrei if he could, but they needed him for the horn, it seemed, and Levon and Torc were coming with them, so it was all right. And they’d be meeting again soon in Gwen Ystrat. Morvran was the place Gereint had named.

  He was thinking about Gereint’s laughter as they set off south again to meet the road to Paras Derval where it began to the west of Lake Leinan. In any normal weather, Levon said, they would have cut across the grazing lands of north Brennin, but not with the ice and snow of this unnatural season.

  Kevin was riding, uncharacteristically subdued, with a couple of Diarmuid’s men, including the one he’d so asininely jumped the night before. That was fine by Dave; he wanted nothing to do with the other man. If people wanted to call it jealousy, let them. He didn’t care enough to explain. He wasn’t about to confide in anyone that he’d renounced the girl himself—to Green Ceinwen in the wood. Nor was he about to recount what the goddess had replied.

  She’s Torc’s, he’d said.

  Has she no other choice? Ceinwen had answered, and laughed before she disappeared.

  That part was Dave’s own business.

  For now, though, he had catching up to do with the men he called his brothers, ever since a ritual in Pendaran Wood. Eventually the catching up took them to the moment in the muddy fields around Stonehenge where Kevin had been explaining to the guards in French and mangled English what he and Jennifer were doing necking in forbidden territory. It had been a remarkably effective performance, and it had lasted precisely until the moment when the four of them had felt the sudden shock of power gathering them together and hurling them into the cold, dark crossing between worlds.

  Chapter 6

  It was, Jennifer realized, as the now-familiar cold of the crossing receded, the same room as the first time. Not the same as her second crossing, though, when she and Paul had come through so hard they had both fallen to their knees in the snow-drifted streets of the town.

  It had been there, while Paul, still dazed, had struggled to his feet under the swinging sign of the Black Boar, that she had felt the first pangs of premature labour. And with these, as she grasped where he had somehow taken them, she had had a sudden memory of a woman crying in the shop doorway by the green, and her way had seemed very clear.

  So they had come to Vae’s house and Darien had been born, after which a great deal seemed to change within her. Since Starkadh she had become a creature of jarring angles and dislocated responses. The world, her own world, was tinted balefully, and the possibility of ever one day crossing back to ordinary human interaction seemed a laughable, hopeless abstraction. She had been carved open by Maugrim; what healing was there anywhere for that?

  Then Paul had come and said what he had said, had opened with his tone, as much as anything, the gli
mmering of a path. However much Rakoth might be, he was not all, not everything; he had not been able to stop Kim from coming for her.

  And he could not stop her child from being born.

  Or so she thought until, with a lurch of terror, she had seen Galadan in their own world. And she had heard him say that she would die, which meant the child.

  So she had said to Paul that she would curse him if he failed. How had she said such a thing? From where had that come?

  It seemed another person, another woman entirely, and perhaps it was. For since the child had been born and named and sent out into the worlds of the Weaver to be her own response to what had been done to her, her one random weft of thread laid across the warp—since then, Jennifer had been astonished at how mild everything was.

  No angles or jarrings any more. Nothing seemed to hurt; it was all too far away. She had found herself capable of dealing with others, of surprising acts of gentleness. There were no storm winds any more; no sunshine either. She moved in slow motion, it sometimes seemed, through a landscape of grey, with grey clouds overhead; at times, but only at times, the memory of colour, of vibrancy, would come to her like the low surge of a distant sea.

  And all this was fine. It was not health; she was wise enough to understand that much, but it was infinitely better than what had been before. If she could not be happy and whole, at least she could be … mild.

  The gentleness was an unexpected gift, a compensation of sorts for love, which had been mangled in Starkadh, and for desire, which had died.

  Being touched was a difficult thing—not a sharp, hurting problem, but difficult, and when it happened she could feel herself twisting inwardly, a small fragile person who had once been Jennifer Lowell and golden. Even the dissembling at Stonehenge earlier that night, where she and Kevin had deceived the guards into believing that they were Gallic lovers seeking the pagan blessing of the stones—even then it had been difficult to feel his mouth on hers before the guards came. And impossible not to let him sense this, for it was hard to hide things from Kevin. But how, from this mild grey country in which she moved, did one tell a former lover, and the kindest of them all, that he had lain with her in Starkadh, obscene and distorted, black blood dripping from his severed hand to burn her flesh? How to explain that there was no going back past that, or forward from that place?