Last of them all, riderless, Iselen flew, her white tail streaming behind her like a comet, visible even after the horses of the kings were lost to sight.
Dazed by the intensity of what had just happened, Kim saw Jaelle going swiftly along the ridge to where Finn lay. Paul Schafer said something crisply to Aileron and then set out after the High Priestess.
Kim turned away from them and looked up, a long way up, at Ruana’s face. His eyes were as she remembered: deeply, quietly compassionate. He gazed down upon her, waiting.
She said, “Ruana, how did you come in time? So narrowly in time?”
He shook his head slowly. “I have been here since the Dragon came. I have been watching from behind—I would not come nearer to war than that. But when Starkadh fell, when the war was over and the Wolflord blew the horn, I realized what had drawn me here.”
“What, Ruana? What drew you here?”
“Seer, what you did in Khath Meigol changed us forever. As I watched my people set out for Eridu, it came to me that the Baelrath is a power of war, a summons to battle—and that we would not have been undone by it as we had been only to journey east, away from war, to the cleansing of the raindead, necessary as that might be. I did not think it was enough.”
Kim said nothing. There was a tightness in her throat. Ruana said, “And so I took it upon myself to come west instead of east. To journey to wherever the war might be and so to see if there was a truer part the Paraiko should play in what was to come. Something drove me from within. There was anger in me, Seer, and there was hatred of Maugrim, and neither of those had I ever felt before.”
“I know that,” Kim said. “I grieve for it, Ruana.” Again he shook his head. “Grieve not. The price of our sanctity would have been the Wild Hunt riding free, and the deaths of all living peoples gathered here. It was time, Seer of Brennin, past tune, for the Paraiko to be truly numbered among the army of Light.” “I am forgiven, then?” she asked in a small voice. “You were forgiven in the kanior.” She remembered: the ghostly images of Kevin and Ysanne moving among all the thronging dead of the Paraiko, honored among them, reclaimed with them by the deep spell of Ruana’s song. She nodded. “I know,” she said. Around the two of them there was silence. Kim looked up at the grave, white-haired Giant. “You will have to go now? To follow them to the cave?”
“Soon,” he replied. “But there is something yet to happen here, I think, and I will stay to see.”
And with his words a dormant awareness came back to life within Kimberly as well. She looked past Ruana and saw Galadan on the plain, ringed about by a great many men, most of whom she knew. They had swords drawn, and arrows trained on the Wolflord’s heart, but not one of them moved or spoke, nor did Galadan. Near to the circle, Arthur stood, with Guinevere and Lancelot. Off to the east, Paul Schafer, for whom they were waiting, at the High King’s command, knelt by the body of Finn dan Shahar.
When Leila lifted the axe, Jaelle knew it. How could the High Priestess not know? It was the deepest sacrilege there was. And somehow it didn’t surprise her at all.
She heard—every priestess in Fionavar heard—when Leila slammed the axe down on the altar stone and ringingly commanded Finn to come to her, a command sourced in the blood power of Dana’s axe. And Jaelle had seen the shadowy figure of the boy on his pale horse in the sky begin to ride away, and she saw him fall.
Then the lone Paraiko came among them, and he put the binding of Connla’s spell upon the Hunt, and Jaelle saw them flash away to the south.
Only when they were gone did she let herself go west to where Finn lay. She walked at first, but then began to run, wanting, for Leila’s sake, to be in time. She felt the circlet that held back her hair slip off; she didn’t stop to pick it up. And as she ran, her hair blowing free, she was remembering the last time this link had been forged, when Leila in the Temple had heard Green Ceinwen turn back the Hunt by the bloodied banks of the Adein.
Jaelle remembered the words she herself had spoken then, spoken in the voice of the Goddess: There is a death in it, she had said, knowing it was true.
She came to the place where he lay. His father was there already. She remembered Shahar, from when he had been home from war in the months after Darien was born, while the priestesses of Dana, privy to the secret, had helped Vae care for her new child.
He was sitting on the ground with his son’s head in his lap. Over and over, his callused hands were stroking the boy’s forehead. He looked up without speaking at Jaelle’s approach. Finn lay motionless, his eyes closed.
He was mortal again, she saw. He looked as he had back in the days of the children’s game, the ta’kiena on the green at the end of Anvil Lane. When Leila, blindfolded, had called him to the Longest Road.
Someone else came. Jaelle looked over her shoulder and saw that it was Pwyll.
He handed her the silver circlet. Neither of them spoke. They looked down at father and son and then knelt on the stony ground beside the fallen boy.
He was dying. His breath was shallow and difficult, and there was blood at the corners of his mouth. Jaelle lifted an edge of her sleeve and wiped the blood away.
Finn opened his eyes at the touch. She saw that he knew her. She saw him ask a question without words.
Very carefully, speaking as clearly as she could, Jaelle said, “The Hunt has gone. One of the Paraiko came, and he bound them back to the cave by the spell that laid them there.”
She saw him nod. It seemed that he understood. He would understand, Jaelle realized. He had been one with the Wild Hunt. But now he was only a boy again, with his head in his father’s lap, and dying where he lay.
His eyes were still open, though. He said, so softly, she had to bend close to hear, “What I did was all right, then?”
She heard Shahar make a small sound deep in his chest. Through her own tears, she said, “It was more than all right, Finn. You did everything right. Every single thing, from the very beginning.”
She saw him smile. There was blood again, and once more she wiped it away with the sleeve of her robe. He coughed, and said, “She didn’t mean to throw me, you know.” It took Jaelle a moment to realize that he was talking about his horse. “She was afraid,” Finn said. “She wasn’t used to flying so far from the others. She was only afraid.”
“Oh, child,” Shahar said huskily. “Spare your strength.”
Finn reached up for his father’s hand. His eyes closed and his breathing slowed. Jaelle’s tears followed one another down her cheeks. Then Finn opened his eyes again.
Looking directly at her, he whispered, “Will you tell Leila I heard her? That I was coming?”
Jaelle nodded, half blind. “I think she knows. But I will tell her, Finn.”
He smiled at that. There was a great deal of pain in his brown eyes, but there was also a quiet peace. He was silent for a long time, having little strength left in him, but then he had one more question, and the High Priestess knew it was the last, because he meant it to be.
“Dari?” he asked.
She found that this time she couldn’t even answer. Her throat had closed completely around this grief.
It was Pwyll who spoke. He said, with infinite compassion, “He too did everything right, Finn. Everything. He is gone, but he killed Rakoth Maugrim before he died.”
Finn’s eyes widened at that, for the last time. There was joy in them, and a grieving pain, but at the end there was peace again, without border or limitation, just before the dark.
“Oh, little one,” he said. And then he died, holding his father’s hand.
There was a legend that took shape in after days, a tale that grew, perhaps, because so many of those who lived through that time wanted it to be true. A tale of how Darien’s soul, which had taken flight some time before his brother’s, was allowed by intercession to pause in the timelessness between the stars and wait for Finn to catch up to him.