A Knight of the Word

The demon lifted its fingers from Andrew Wren's neck, slipped back out the door, and was gone.

CHAPTER 8

In the aftermath of San Sobel. John Ross decided to return to the Fairy Glen and the Lady.

1t took him a long time to reach his decision to do so. He was paralysed for weeks following the massacre, consumed with despair and guilt, replaying the events over and over in his mind in an effort to make sense of them. Even after he had reached his conclusion that the demon had subverted a member of the police rescue squad, he could not lay the matter to rest. To begin with, he could never know for certain if his conclusion was correct. There would always be some small doubt that he still didn't have it right and might have done something else to prevent what had happened- Besides, wasn't he just looking for a way to shift the blame from himself? Wasn't that what is all came down to? Whatever the answer, the fact remained that he had been responsible for preventing the slaughter of those children. and he had failed.

So, alter a lengthy deliberation on the matter, he decided he could no longer serve as a Knight of the Word.

But how was he to go about handing in his resignation? He aright have decided he was quitting, but how did he go about giving notice? He had already stopped trying to function as a Knight, had ceased thinking of himself as the Words champion. He had retreated so far from who and what he had been that even the nature of his dreams had begun to change. Although he still dreamed, the dreams had turned vague and purposeless. He still wandered a grim and desolate future in which his world had been destroyed and its people reduced to animals, but his part in that world was no longer clear. When he dreamed, he drifted from landscape to landscape, encountering no one, seeing nothing of value, discovering nothing of his past that he might use as a Knight of the Word. It was what he wanted, not to be burdened with knowledge of events he might influence, but it was vaguely troubling as well. He still carried the staff bequeathed to him by the Word, the talisman that gave him his power, but he no longer used it for its magic, only as a walking stick. He still felt the magic within, a small tingling, a brief surge of heat, but he felt removed and disconnected from it.

He no longer saw himself as a Knight of the Word, had quit thinking of himself as one, but he needed a way to sever his ties for good. He decided finally that to do this he must go back to where it had all begun.

To Wales, to the Fairy Glen, and to the Lady.

He had not been back in more than ten years., not since he had travelled to England in his late twenties, a graduate student permanently mired in his search for his life's purpose, not since he had drifted from postgraduate course to postgraduate course, a prisoner of his own indecision. He had gone to England to change the direction of his life, to travel and study and find a path that had meaning for him. In the course of that pursuit, he had journeyed into Wales to stay at the cottage of a friend's parents in the village of Betwys–y–Coed in Gwynedd in the heart of the Snowdonia wilderness. He had been studying the history of the English kings, particularly of Edward Longshanks who had built the iron ring of fortresses to subdue the Welsh in the Snowdonia region, and so was drawn to the opportunity to travel there. Once arrived, he began to fall under the spell of the country and its people, to become enmeshed in their history and folklore, and to sense that there was a purpose to his being there beyond what was immediately apparent.

Then he found the Fairy Glen and the ghost of Owain Glyndwr, the Welsh patriot, who appeared to him as a fisherman and persuaded him to come back at midnight so that he could see the fairies at play. Sceptical of the idea of fairies and a little frightened by the encounter, but captivated as well 6y the setting and the possibility that there was some truth to the fisherman's wards, he eventually did as he was asked. It was there, in the blackness of the new moon and the sweep of a thousand stars on a clear summer night, that the Lady appeared to him for the first and only time. She told him of her need for his services as a Knight of the Word. She revealed to him his blood link to Owain Glyndwr who had served her as a Knight in his lifetime. She showed to him a vision of the future that would be if her Knights failed to prevent it. She persuaded him to accept her, to accept the position she offered him, to accept a new direction in his life.

To accept the way of the Word.

Now, to abandon that way, to sever the ties that bound him to the Word's path, he decided he must return to her.

He bought a ticket, packed a single bag, and flew east. He arrived at Heathrow, boarded a train, and travelled west to Bristol and then across the border into Wales. He found the journey nostalgic and unsettling; his warm memories of the past competed with the harsh reality of his purpose in the present, and his emotions were left jumbled, his nerves on edge. It was late fall, and the countryside was beginning to take on a wintry cast as the colours of summer and autumn slowly drained away. The postage–stamp fields and meadows lay fallow, and the livestock huddled closer to the buildings and feeding troughs. Flowers had disappeared, and skies were clouded and grey with the changing weather.

He reached Betwys–y–Coed after expending several days and utilising various forms of transportation, and he booked himself at a small iron. It began to ram the day he arrived, and it kept raining afterward. He waited for the rain to stop, spending time in the public reams of the inn and exploring various shops he remembered from his visit before. A few of the residents remembered him. The village, he found, was substantially unchanged.

He spent time thinking about what he would say to the Lady when he carne face–to–face with her. It would not be easy to tell her lie could no longer be in her service. She was a powerful presence, and she would try to dissuade him from his purpose. Perhaps she would even hurt him. He still remembered how she had crippled him. After his return to his parents' home in Ohio, her emissary, O'olish Amaneh, had come to him with the staff, and he had sensed immediately that his life would change irrevocably if he accepted it. His determination and conviction had been eroding steadily since his return from England, but now there was no time left to equivocate. The staff was thrust upon him, and the moment his hands touched the polished wood, his foot and leg cramped and withered, the pain excruciating„ and he was bound to the talisman forever.

Would that change now? he wondered. If he was no longer a Knight of the Word„ would his leg be healed„ be made whole and strong again? Or would his decision to abandon his charge cost him even more?

He tried not to dwell on the matter, but the longer he waited, the harder it became to convince himself to carry through on his resolve. His imagination was working overtime .after a week of deliberation, stimulated by the rain and the gray and his own fears, turned gloomy and despairing of hope. This was a mistake, he began to believe. This was stupid. He should not have came here. He should have stayed where he was. It was sufficient that he refused to act as a Knight of the Word- His decision did not require the Lady's validation. He barely dreamed at all anymore, his dreams so indistinct by now that they lacked any recognizable purpose. They were closer to real dreams, to the ones normal people had that involved bits and pieces of events and places and people, all of it disjointed and meaningless. He was no longer being shown a usable future. He was no longer being given clues to a past he might act upon. Wasn't that sufficient proof that he was severed from his charge as, a Knight of the Word?