More unsettled by the strangeness of everything than she liked to admit, she had spent yesterday quietly with Laesha. In Jennifer’s room the two new friends had traded accounts of their lives. It was somehow easier, Jennifer had reflected, to approach Fionavar in this way than to step out into the heat and confront things such as the children’s chanting on the green, the axe swaying in the Temple, or Jaelle’s cold hostility.
There had been dancing after the banquet that night. She had expected some difficulty in dealing with the men, but against her will she’d ended up being amused at the careful, almost apprehensive propriety of those who danced with her. Women claimed by Prince Diarmuid were very clearly off limits to anyone else. She’d excused herself early and had gone to bed.
To be awakened by Matt Sören knocking at her door. The Dwarf devoted the morning to her, an attentive guide through the vastness of the palace. Roughly garbed, with an axe swinging at his side, he was a harshly anomalous figure in the hallways and chambers of the castle. He showed her rooms with paintings on the walls, and inlaid patterns on the floor. Everywhere there were tapestries. She was beginning to see that they had a deeper significance here. They climbed to the highest tower, where the guards greeted Matt with unexpected deference, and, looking out, she saw the High Kingdom baking in the rigor of its summer. Then he led her back to the Great Hall, empty now, where she could gaze undisturbed at the windows of Delevan.
As they circled the room, she told him about her meeting with Jaelle two days ago. The Dwarf blinked when she explained how she was made guest-friend, and again when she described Jaelle’s questions about Loren. But once more he reassured her.
“She is all malice, Jaelle, all bright, bitter malice. But she is not evil, only ambitious.”
“She hates Ysanne. She hates Diarmuid.”
“Ysanne, she would hate. Diarmuid… arouses strong feelings in most people.” The Dwarf’s mouth twisted in his difficult smile. “She seeks to know every secret there is. Jaelle may suspect we had a fifth person, but even if she were certain, she would never tell Gorlaes—who is someone to be wary of.”
“We’ve hardly seen him.”
“He is with Ailell, almost all the time. Which is why he is to be feared. It was a dark day for Brennin,” Matt Sören said, “when the elder Prince was sent away.”
“The King turned to Gorlaes?” Jennifer guessed.
The Dwarf’s glance at her was keen. “You are clever,” he said. “That is exactly what happened.”
“What about Diarmuid?”
“What about Diarmuid?” Matt repeated, in a tone so unexpectedly exasperated, she laughed aloud. After a moment, the Dwarf chuckled, too, low in his chest.
Jennifer smiled. There was a solid strength to Matt Sören, a feeling of deeply rooted common sense. Jennifer Lowell had come into adulthood trusting few people entirely, especially men, but, she realized in that moment, the Dwarf was now one of them. In a curious way, it made her feel better about herself.
“Matt,” she said, as a thought struck her, “Loren left without you. Did you stay here for us?”
“Just to keep an eye on things.” With a gesture at the patch over his right eye, he turned it into a kind of joke.
She smiled, but then looked at him a long moment, her green eyes sober. “How did you get that?”
“The last war with Cathal,” he said simply. “Thirty years ago.”
“You’ve been here that long?”
“Longer, Loren has been a mage for over forty years now.”
“So?” She didn’t get the connection. He told her. There was an easiness to the mood they shared that morning, and Jennifer’s beauty had been known to make taciturn men talkative before.
She listened, taking in, as Paul had three nights before, the story of Amairgen’s discovery of the skylore, and the secret forging that would bind mage and source for life in a union more complete than any in all the worlds.
When Matt finished, Jennifer rose and walked a few steps. Trying to absorb the impact of what she had been told. This was more than marriage, this went to the very essence of being. The mage, from what Matt had just said, was nothing without his source, only a repository of knowledge, utterly powerless. And the source…
“You’ve surrendered all of your independence!” she said, turning back to the Dwarf, hurling it almost as a challenge.
“Not all,” he said mildly. “You give some up any time you share your life with someone. The bonding just goes deeper, and there are compensations.”
“You were a king, though. You gave up—”
“That was before,” Matt interrupted. “Before I met Loren. I… prefer not to talk about it.”
She was abashed. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was prying.”
The Dwarf grimaced, but by now she knew it for his smile. “Not really,” he said. “And no matter. It is a very old wound.”
“It’s just so strange,” she explained. “I can’t even grasp what it must mean.”
“I know. Even here they do not understand the six of us. Or the Law that governs the Council of the Mages. We are feared, respected, very seldom loved.”
“What Law?” she asked.
At that he hesitated, then rose. “Let us walk,” Matt said. “I will tell you a story, though I warn you, you would do better with one of the cyngael, for I am a poor tale-spinner.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Jennifer said with a smile.
As they started to walk the outer edges of the hall, he began. “Four hundred years ago, the High King went mad. Vailerth was his name, the only son of Lernath, who was the last King of Brennin to die on the Summer Tree.”
She had questions about that, too, but held her peace. “Vailerth was brilliant as a child,” Matt continued, “or so the records from that time say, but it seems something bent in him after his father died and he came to the throne. A dark flower blossomed in his brain, the Dwarves say when such a thing occurs.
“First Mage to Vailerth was a man called Nilsom, whose source was a woman. Aideen was her name, and she had loved Nilsom all her life, or so the records tell.”
Matt walked a few strides in silence. Jennifer had the feeling he was sorry to have begun the story, but after a moment he resumed. “It was rare for a mage to have a woman for source, in part because in Gwen Ystrat, where the Priestesses of Dana are, they would curse any woman who did so. It was always rare; it is rarer still since Aideen.”
She looked over at him, but the Dwarf’s features were quite impassive.
“Many dark things fell out because of Vailerth’s madness. At length there came talk of civil war in the land, because he began taking children, boys and girls both, from their homes and bringing them into the palace by night. They would never be seen again, and the rumors of what the High King did to them were very bad. And in these deeds, in all of these deeds of darkness, Nilsom was with the King, and some say it was he who goaded Vailerth into them. Theirs was a dark weaving, and Nilsom, with Aideen by his side, had power so great none dared openly gainsay them. It is my own thought,” the Dwarf added, turning his head for the first time, “that he, too, was mad, but in a cooler, more dangerous fashion. It was a long time ago, however, and the records are incomplete, because many of our most precious books were destroyed in the war. There was war at the last, for one day Vailerth and Nilsom went too far: they proposed to go into the Godwood and cut down the Summer Tree.
“The whole of Brennin rose up then, save for the army Vailerth had raised. But that army was loyal and strong, and Nilsom was very strong, more so than the five other mages in Brennin all together. And then on the eve of war there was only one other mage, for four of them were found dead, and their sources, too.