Through the growing darkness he flew, and his keen night sight registered the presence of an unimaginably vast army gathering beneath him on the barren desolation of this land. He knew who they were, but he didn’t descend or slow to take a closer look. He had a long way to go.
Below him, a lean scarred figure lifted his head suddenly to cast a keen glance at the darkening sky. There was nothing there, only a single owl, its plumage still white despite the changed season. Galadan watched it flying north. There was an old superstition about owls: they were good luck or bad, depending on which way they curved overhead.
This one did not swerve, arrowing straight north over the massing army of the Dark. The Wolflord watched it, troubled by a nameless disquiet, until it disappeared. It was the color, he decided, the strange whiteness at sunset over this barren desolation. He put it out of his mind. With the snow gone, white was a vulnerable color, and more of the swans were due to be coming back down from the north tonight. The owl was unlikely to survive.
It almost didn’t.
A few hours later Darien was even more tired than before, and fatigue made him careless. He became aware of danger only an instant before the unnatural claws of one of Avaia’s brood reached his flesh. He screeched, almost dropping the dagger, and veered sharply downward and to his left. Even so, one claw claimed a half dozen feathers from his side.
Another black swan swooped hugely toward him, wings lashing the air. Darien wheeled desperately back to his right and forced his tired wings into a steep climb— straight toward the last of the three black swans, which had been waiting patiently behind the other two for precisely this move. Owls, for all their vaunted intelligence, were fairly predictable in combat. With a carnivorous grin the third swan waited for the little white owl, keen to slake its continuous hunger for blood.
In Darien’s breast fear beat back tiredness, and following upon terror came a red surge of rage. He did not even try to dodge this last pursuing swan. Straight at it he flew, and an instant before they collided—a collision that would surely have killed him—he let his eyes burn as red as they could go. With the same blast of fire he had used to torch the tree, he incinerated the swan.
It didn’t even have time to scream. Darien wheeled again, fury pulsing within him, and he raked the other two swans with the same red fire and they died.
He watched them fall to the dark earth below. All around him the air was full of the smell of singed feathers and charred flesh. He felt dizzy, suddenly, and overwhelmingly weak. He let himself descend, in a slow, shallow glide, looking for a tree of any kind. There were none. This was Andarien, and nothing so tall as a tree grew here, not for a thousand years.
He came to rest, for want of a better place, on the slope of a low hill littered with boulders and sharp-edged stones. It was cold. The wind blew from the north and made a keening sound as it passed between the rocks. There were stars overhead; low in the east, the waning moon had just risen. It offered no comfort, casting only a chill, faint illumination over the stony landscape, the stunted grass.
Darien took his own shape again. He looked around. Nothing moved, as far as he could see in the wide night. He was completely alone. In a gesture that had become a reflex in the past two days, though he was unaware of that, he reached up to touch the stone set in the Circlet of Lisen. It was as cool and dark and distant as it had been from the moment he’d put it on. He remembered the way it had shone in the Seer’s hands. The memory was like a blade, or the wound made by a blade. Either, or both.
He lowered his hand and looked around again. About him, in every direction, stretched the desolation of Andarien. He was so far to the north that Rangat was almost east of him. It towered over the whole of the northlands, dominant and magnificent. He didn’t look at the Mountain for long.
Instead he turned his gaze due north. And because he was much more than mortal and his eyes were very good, he could discern, far off through the moonlit shadows, where the stony highlands reached the mountains and the ice, a cold greenish glow. And he knew that this was Starkadh, beyond the Valgrind Bridge, and that he could fly there by tomorrow.
He decided that he would not fly, though. Something about the owl shape felt wrong. He wanted to hold to his own form, he realized: to be Darien, whatever and whoever that might be, to regain the clarity of thought that came in his human shape, though at the price of loneliness. Even so, he would do it this way. He would not fly. He would go on foot over the stones and the barren soil, over the ruin of this wasteland. He would go, with an extinguished light upon his brow, bearing a blade in his hand as a gift for the Dark.
Not tonight, though. He was much too tired, and there was a pain in his side where the swan’s claw had caught him. He was probably bleeding but was too weary to even check. He lay down on the south side of the largest of the boulders—for such scant shelter as it might offer from the wind—and in time he did fall asleep, despite his fears and cares. He was young yet, and had come a long distance to a lonely place, and his soul was as much overtaxed as his body was.
As he passed over into the far countries of sleep, his mother was sailing in a ghostly ship down Linden Bay, just beyond the moonlit western ridges of the land, toward the river mouth of the Celyn.
He dreamt of Finn all night, just as Leila did in the Temple, a long way south. His dream was of the last afternoon, when he had still been small, playing in the yard behind the cottage with his brother, and they had seen riders passing on the snow-clad slopes east of them. He had waved a mittened hand, because Finn had told him to. And then Finn had gone away after the riders, and then much farther than they had gone, farther than anyone else, even Darien, even in dream, could go.
He did not know, huddled in the shadow of a leaning boulder on the cold ground of Andarien, that he was crying in his sleep. Nor did he know that all night long his hand kept returning to the lifeless gem bound about his brow, reaching, reaching out for something, finding no response.
“Do you know,” said Diarmuid, gazing east with an enigmatic expression, “this is almost enough to make one believe in fraternal instincts, after all.”
Beside him on the banks of the River Celyn, Paul remained silent. Across the northwestern spur of the lake the army was coming. They were too far off yet for him to make out individual details, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Diarmuid, for all the reflexive irony of his words, had indeed been right.
Aileron had not waited, for them or for anyone. He had carried this war to Maugrim. The army of the High King was in Andarien again, a thousand years after it had last swept through these wild, desolate highlands. And waiting for them in the late-afternoon light was his brother, with Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, with Sharra of Cathal, and Jaelle, the High Priestess, with the men of South Keep who had manned Prydwen, and with Pwyll Twiceborn, Lord of the Summer Tree.
For what, Paul thought, that last was worth. It didn’t, at the moment, feel like much. He should be used to this by now, he knew: this sense of latency without control. Of holding power without harnessing it. He remembered Jaelle’s words on the rocks, and he was acutely aware that she was right—aware of how much his difficulties were caused by his own overdeveloped need for controlling things. Particularly himself. All of this was true; it made sense; he even understood it. It didn’t make him feel any better, though. Not now, not so near to whatever ending lay in wait, whatever future toward which they were toiling.