Fionavar 1 (43 page)

"Now," said Coll, grinning again.

Now, thought Sharra. Whatever happens, I will not live with this shame.

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Diarmuid said, "I stole a flower from Larai Rigal four nights ago in such a way that the Princess would know. It was an irresponsible thing, for those gardens, as we all know, are sacred to them.

It seems that Sharra of Cathal valued the honor of her country above her own life-for which we in turn must honor her."

Sharra's world spun for a dizzy instant, then righted itself. She felt herself flushing; tried to control it. He was giving her an out, setting her free. But, she asked herself, even then, with a racing heart, of what worth was freedom if it came only as his gift?

She had no time to pursue it, for Aileron's voice cut abrasively through his brother's spell, just as Diarmuid's applause had destroyed his own, moments before: "You are lying," the older Prince said tersely. "Even you would not go through Seresh and Cynan as King's Heir, risking so much exposure for a flower. Do not toy with us!"

Diarmuid, eyebrows raised, turned to his brother. "Should I," he said in a voice like velvet, "kill you instead?"

Score one, Kevin thought, seeing, even high as he was, how Aileron paled at that. And a neat diversion, too.

"As it happens," Diarmuid went on, "I didn't go near the river fortresses."

"You flew, I suppose?" Jaelle interjected acidly.

Diarmuid bestowed his most benign smile upon her. "No. We crossed Saeren below the Dael Slope, and climbed up the handholds carved in the rock on the other side."

"This is disgraceful!" Aileron snapped, recovering. "How can you lie at such a time?" There was a murmur among the gathering.

"As it happens," Kevin Laine called down, moving forward to be seen, "he's telling the truth."

They all looked up. "The absolute truth," Kevin went on, pushing it. "There were nine of us."

"Do you remember," Diarmuid asked his brother, "the book of Nygath that we read as boys?"

Reluctantly, Aileron nodded.

"I broke the code," Diarmuid said cheerfully. "The one we could never solve. It told of steps carved into the cliff in Cathal five hundred years ago by Alon, before he was King. We crossed the river and climbed them. It isn't quite as foolish as it sounds-it was a useful training expedition. And something more."

She kept her head high, her eyes fixed on the windows. But every timbre of his voice registered within her. Something more. Is a falcon not a falcon if it does not fly alone?

"How did you cross the river?" Duke Niavin of Seresh asked, with no little interest. He had them all now, Kevin saw; the first great lie now covered with successive layers of truth.

"With Loren's arrows, actually, and a taut rope across. But don't tell him," Diarmuid grinned easily, despite a dagger in his arm, "or I'll never, ever hear the end of it."

"Too late!" someone said from behind them, halfway down the hall.

They all turned. Loren was there, clad for the first time since the crossing in his cloak of power, shot through with many colors that shaded into silver. And beside him was the one who had spoken.

"Behold," said Loren Silvercloak, "I bring you the Twiceborn of the prophecy. Here is Pwyll the Stranger who has come back to us, Lord of the Summer Tree." He had time to finish, barely, before there came an utterly undecorous scream from the Seer of Brennin, and a second figure hurtled over the balcony of the overhead gallery, shouting with relief and joy as he fell.

Kim got there first, to envelop Paul in a fierce, strangling embrace that was returned, as hard, by him. There were tears of happiness in her eyes as she stepped aside to let Kevin and Paul stand face to face. She was grinning, she knew, like a fool. "Amigo," said Paul, and smiled. "Welcome back,"

said Kevin simply, and then all the nobility of Brennin watched in respectful silence as the two of them embraced.

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Kevin stepped back, his eyes bright. "You did it," he said flatly. "You're clear now, aren't you?"

And Paul smiled again. "I am," he said.

Sharra, watching, not understanding anything beyond the intensity, saw Diarmuid walk forward then to the two of them, and she marked the pleasure in his eyes, which was unfeigned and absolute.

"Paul," he said, "this is a bright thread unlooked-for. We were mourning you." Schafer nodded.

"I'm sorry about your father." "It was time, I think," said Diarmuid. They, too, embraced, and as they did so, the stillness of the hall was shattered by a great noise over their heads as Diarmuid's men roared and clattered their swords. Paul raised a hand to salute them back.

Then the mood changed, the interlude was over, for Aileron had come forward, too, to stand in front of Paul as Diarmuid stepped aside.

For what seemed like forever, the two men gazed at each other, their expressions equally unreadable. No one there could know what had passed between them in the Godwood two nights before, but what lay in the room was palpable, and a thing very deep.

"Mörnir be praised," Aileron said, and dropped to his knees before Paul.

A moment later, everyone in the room but Kevin Laine and the three women had done the same.

His heart tight with emotion, Kevin suddenly understood a truth about Aileron. This, this was how he led, by pure force of example and conviction. Even Diarmuid, he saw, had followed his brother's lead.

His eyes met Kim's across the heads of the kneeling brothers. Not clearly knowing what it was he was acquiescing to, he nodded, and was moved to see the relief that showed in her face. She wasn't, it seemed, such a stranger after all, white hair notwithstanding.

Aileron rose again, and so did all the others. Paul had not moved or spoken. He seemed to be conserving his strength. Quietly the Prince said, "We are grateful beyond measure for what you have woven."

Schafer's mouth moved in what was only half a smile. "I didn't take your death after all," he said.

Aileron stiffened; without responding, he spun and walked back to the throne. Ascending the steps, he turned again to face them all, his eyes compelling. "Rakoth is free," he said. "The stones are broken and we are at war with the Dark. I say to all of you, to you, my brother"-a sudden rawness in the voice-"I tell you that this conflict is what I was born for. I have sensed it all my life without knowing. Now I know. It is my destiny. It is," cried Aileron, passion blazing in his face,

"my war!"

The power of it was overwhelming, a cry of conviction torn whole from the heart. Even Jaelle's bitter eyes held a kind of acceptance, and there was no mockery at all in Diarmuid's face.

"You arrogant bastard," Paul Schafer said.

It was like a kick in the teeth. Even Kevin felt it. He saw Aileron's head snap back, his eyes go wide with shock.

"How presumptuous can you get?" Paul went on, stepping forward to stand before Aileron.

"Your death. Your crown. Your destiny. Your war. Your war?" His voice skirled upward. He put a hand on the table for support.

"Pwyll," said Loren. "Paul, wait."

"No!" Schafer snapped. "I hate this, and I hate giving in to it." He turned back to Aileron. "What about the lios alfar?" he demanded. "Loren tells me twenty of them have died already. What about

Cathal? Isn't it their war, too?" He pointed to Sharra. "And Eridu? And the Dwarves? Isn't this Matt

Sören's war? And what about the Dalrei? There are two of them here now, and seventeen of them have died. Seventeen of the Dalrei are dead. Dead! Isn't it their war, Prince Aileron? And
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look at us. Look at Kim-look at her, at what she's taken on for you. And"-his voice roughened-"think about

Jen, if you will, just for a second, before you lay sole claim to this."

There was a difficult silence. Aileron's eyes had never left Paul's while he spoke, nor did they now.

When he began to speak, his tone was very different, a plea almost. "I understand," he said stiffly.

"I understand all of what you are saying, but I cannot change what else I know. Pwyll, I was born into the world to fight this war."

With a strange light-headedness, Kim Ford spoke then for the first time in public as Seer of Brennin. "Paul," she said, "everyone, I have to tell you that I've seen this. So did Ysanne. That's why she sheltered him. Paul, what he's saying is true."

Schafer looked at her, and the crusading anger she remembered from what he had been before Rachel died faded in the face of her own certitude. Oh, Ysanne, she thought, seeing it happen, how did you stand up under so much weight?

"If you tell me, I will believe it," Paul said, obviously drained. "But you know it remains his war even if he is not High King of Brennin. He's still going to fight it. It seems a wrong way to choose a

King."

"Do you have a suggestion?" Loren asked, surprising them all.

"Yes, I do," Paul said. He let them wait, then, "I suggest you let the Goddess decide. She who sent the moon. Let her Priestess speak her will," said the Arrow of the God, looking at Jaelle.

They all turned with him. It seemed, in the end, to have a kind of inevitability to it: the Goddess taking back one King and sending forth another in his stead.

She had been waiting, amid the tense dialogue back and forth, for the moment to stop them all and say this thing. Now he had done it for her.

She gazed at him a moment before she rose, tall and beautiful, to let them know the will of Dana and Gwen Ystrat, as had been done long ago in the naming of the Kings. In a room dense with power, hers was not the least, and it was the oldest, by far.

"It is a matter for sorrow," she began, blistering them with a glance, "that it should take a stranger to Fionavar to remind you of the true order of things. But howsoever that may be, know ye the will of the Goddess-"

"No," said Diarmuid. And it appeared that there was nothing inevitable after all. "Sorry, sweetling.

With all deference to the dazzle of your smile, I don't want to know ye the will of the Goddess."

"Fool!" she exclaimed. "Do you want to be cursed?"

"I have been cursed," Diarmuid said with some feeling. "Rather a good deal lately. I have had quite a lot happen to me today and I need a pint of ale very badly. It has only just occurred to me that as

High King I couldn't very easily drop in to the Boar at night, which is what I propose to do as soon as we've crowned my brother and I get this dagger out of my arm."

Even Paul Schafer was humbled by the relief that flashed in that moment across the bearded face of

Aileron dan Ailell, whose mother was Marrien of the Garantae, and who would be crowned later that day by Jaelle, the Priestess, as High King of Brennin to lead that realm and its allies into war against Rakoth Maugrim and all the legions of the Dark.

There was no banquet or celebration; it was a time of mourning and of war. And so at sundown Loren gathered the four of them, with the two young Dalrei Dave refused to be parted from, in the mages' quarters in the town. One of the Dalrei had a leg wound. That, at least, his magic had
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been able to deal with. A small consolation, given how much seemed to be beyond him of late.

Looking at his guests, Loren counted it off inwardly. Eight days; only eight days since he had brought them here, yet so much had overtaken them, he could read changes in Dave Martyniuk's face, and in the tacit bonds that united him to the two Riders. Then, when the big man told his story, Loren began to understand, and he marveled. Ceinwen. Flidais in Pendaran. And Owein's Horn hanging at Dave's side.

Whatever power had been flowing through him when he chose to bring these five had been a true one, and deep.

There had been five, though, not four; there were only four in the room, however, and absence resonated among them like a chord.

And then was given voice. "Time to start thinking about how to get her back," Kevin Laine said soberly. It was interesting, Loren noted, that it was still Kevin who could speak, instinctively, for all of them.

It was a hard thing, but it had to be said. "We will do everything we can," Loren stated flatly.

"But you must be told that if the black swan bore her north, she has been taken by Rakoth himself."

There was a pain in the mage's heart. Despite his premonitions, he had deceived her into coming, given her over to the svart alfar, bound her beauty as if with his own hands to the putrescence of

Avaia, and consigned her to Maugrim. If there was a judgement waiting for him in the Weaver's Halls, Jennifer would be someone he had to answer for.

"Did you say a swan?" the fair-haired Rider asked. Levon. Ivor's son, whom he remembered from fully ten years ago as a boy on the eve of his fast. A man now, though young, and bearing the always difficult weight of the first men killed under his command. They were all so young, he realized suddenly, even Aileron. We are going to war against a god, he thought, and tasted a terrible doubt.

He masked it. "Yes," he said, "a swan. Avaia the Black she was named, long ago. Why do you ask?"

"We saw her," Levon said. "The evening before the Mountain's fire." For no good reason, that seemed to make it hurt even more.

Kimberly stirred a little, and they turned to her. The white hair above the young eyes was still disturbing. "I dreamt her," she said. "So did Ysanne."

And with that, there was another lost woman in the room for Loren, another ghost. You and I will not meet again on this side of the Night, Ysanne had told Ailell.

On this side, or on the other now, it seemed. She had gone so far it could not be compassed. He thought about Lokdal. Colan's dagger, Seithr's gift. Oh, the Dwarves did dark things with power under their mountains.

Kevin, straining a little, punctured the grimness of the silence. "Ye gods and little fishes!" he exclaimed. "This is some reunion. We've got to do better than this!"

A good try, Dave Martyniuk thought, surprising himself with how well he understood what Kevin was trying to do. It wasn't going to get more than a smile, though. It wasn't-Access to inspiration came then with blinding suddenness.