There was none. The Prince drained his pint and was striding out the door. The others scrambled to their feet and followed. A number of the villagers came out of the inn to watch them ride off.
“Mörnir guard you, young Prince!” one farmer cried impulsively. “And in the name of the Summer Tree, may he take the old man and let you be our King!”
Diarmuid had raised a gracious hand at the first words, but the speaker’s last phrase brought him to wheel his horse hard. There was a brutal silence. The Prince’s face had gone cold. No one moved. Overhead Kevin heard a noisy flap of wings as a dense cluster of crows wheeled aloft, darkening the sun for an instant.
Diarmuid’s voice, when it came, was formal and imperious. “The words you have spoken are treason,” Ailell’s son said, and with a sideways nod spoke one word more: “Coll.”
The farmer may never have seen the arrow that killed him. Diarmuid did not. He was already pounding up the road without a backwards glance as Coll replaced his bow. By the time the shock had passed and the screaming had begun, all ten of them were around the bend that would carry them south.
Kevin’s hands were shaking with shock and fury as he galloped, the image of the dead man engulfing him, the screams still echoing in his mind. Coll, beside him, seemed impassive and unperturbed. Save that he carefully refused to meet the glance of Paul Schafer, who was staring fixedly at him as they rode, and to whom he had spoken a treasonous word of his own the night before.
In the early spring of 9 Dr. John Ford of Toronto had taken a fortnight’s leave from his residency at London’s St. Thomas Hospital. Hiking alone in the Lake District, north of Keswick, he came, at the end of a long day afoot, down the side of a hill and walked wearily up to a farmyard tucked into the shadow of the slope.
There was a girl in the yard, drawing water from a well. The westering sun slanted upon her dark hair. When she turned at the sound of his footstep, he saw that her eyes were grey. She smiled shyly when, hat in hand, he asked for a drink, and before she had finished drawing it for him, John Ford had fallen in love, simply and irrevocably, which was his nature in all things.
Deirdre Cowan, who was eighteen that spring, had been told long ago by her grandmother that she would love and marry a man from over the sea. Because her gran was known to have the Sight, Deirdre never doubted what she had been told. And this man, handsome and diffident, had eyes that called to her.
Ford spent that night in her father’s house, and in the quietest dark before dawn Deirdre rose from her bed. She was not surprised to see her gran in the hallway by her own bedroom door, nor to see the old woman make a gesture of blessing that went back a very long way. She went to Ford’s room, the gray eyes beguiling, her body sweet with trust.
They were married in the fall, and John Ford took his wife home just as the first snows of the winter came. And it was their daughter who walked, a Dwarf beside her, twenty-five springs after her parents had been brought together, towards the shores of a lake in another world, to meet her own destiny.
The path to the lake where Ysanne lived twisted north and west through a shallow valley flanked by gentle hills, a landscape that would have been lovely in any proper season. But Kim and Matt were walking through a country scorched and barren—and the thirst of the land seemed to knife into Kim, twisting like anguish inside her. Her face hurt, the bones seeming taut and difficult within her. Movement was becoming painful, and everywhere she looked, her eyes flinched away.
“It’s dying,” she said.
Matt looked at her with his one eye. “You feel it?”
She nodded stiflly. “I don’t understand.”
The Dwarf’s expression was grim. “The gift is not without its darkness. I do not envy you.”
“Envy me what, Matt?” Kim’s brow furrowed. “What do I have?”
Matt Sören’s voice was soft. “Power. Memory. Truly, I am not sure. If the hurt of the land reaches so deeply…”
“It’s easier in the palace. I’m blocked there from all this.”
“We can go back.”
For one moment, sharp and almost bitter, Kim did want to turn back—all the way back. Not just to Paras Derval, but home. Where the ruin of the grass and the dead stalks of flowers by the path did not burn her so. But then she remembered the eyes of the Seer as they had looked into hers, and she heard again the voice, drumming in her veins: I have awaited you.
“No,” she said. “How much farther?”
“Around the curve. We’ll see the lake soon. But hold, let me give you something—I should have thought of it sooner. ” And the Dwarf held out towards her a bracelet of silver workmanship, in which was set a green stone.
“What is it?”
“A vellin stone. It is very precious; there are few left, and the secret of fashioning them died with Ginserat. The stone is a shield from magic. Put it on.”
With wonder in her eyes, Kimberly placed it upon her wrist, and as she did, the pain was gone, the hurt, the ache, the burning, all were gone. She was aware of them, but distantly, for the vellin was her shield and she felt it guarding her. She cried out in wonder.
But the relief in her face was not mirrored in that of the Dwarf. “Ah,” said Matt Sören, grimly, “so I was right. There are dark threads shuttling on the Loom. The Weaver grant that Loren comes back soon.”
“Why?” Kim asked. “What does this mean?”
“If the vellin guards you from the land’s pain, then that pain is not natural. And if there is a power strong enough to do this to the whole of the High Kingdom, then there is a fear in me. I begin to wonder about the old tales of Mörnir’s Tree, and the pact the Founder made with the God. And if not that, then I dare not think what. Come,” said the Dwarf, “it is time I took you to Ysanne.”
And walking more swiftly, he led her around an out-thrust spur of hill slope, and as they cleared the spur she saw the lake: a gem of blue in a necklace of low hills. And somehow there was still green by the lake, and the profuse, scattered colors of wildflowers.
Kim stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh, Matt!”
The Dwarf was silent while she gazed down, enraptured, on the water. “It is fair,” he said finally. “But had you ever seen Calor Diman between the mountains, you would spare your heart’s praise somewhat, to have some left for the Queen of Waters.”
Kim, hearing the change in his voice, looked at him for a moment; then, drawing a deliberate breath, she closed her eyes and was wordless a long time. When she spoke, it was in a cadence not her own.
“Between the mountains,” she said. “Very high up, it is. The melting snow in summer falls into the lake. The air is thin and clear. There are eagles circling. The sunlight turns the lake into a golden fire. To drink of that water is to taste of whatever light is falling down upon it, whether of sun or moon or stars. And under the full moon, Calor Diman is deadly, for the vision never fades and never stops pulling. A tide in the heart. Only the true King of Dwarves may endure that night vigil without going mad, and he must do so for the Diamond Crown. He must wed the Queen of Waters, lying all night by her shores at full of the moon. He will be bound then, to the end of his days, as the King must be, to Calor Diman.”
And Kimberly opened her eyes to look full upon the former King of Dwarves. “Why, Matt?” she asked, in her own voice. “Why did you leave?”
He made no answer, but met her look unflinchingly. At length he turned, still silent, and led her down the winding path to Ysanne’s lake. She was waiting there for them, dreamer of the dream, knowledge in her eyes, and pity, and another nameless thing.