“The Summer Tree?” he said. “It’s in the wood west of the town. Sacred it is, to Mörnir of the Thunder.”
“Why is it important?”
“Because,” said Coll, lower yet, “that’s where the God would summon the High King in the old days, when the land had need.”
“Summon him for what?”
“To hang on the Summer Tree and die,” said Coll succinctly. “I’ve said too much already. Your friend is with the Lady Rheva tonight, I believe. I’ll be back to wake you in a little while; we’ve got a long ride today.” And he spun on his heel to walk off.
“Coll!”
The big man turned, slowly.
“Is it always the King who hangs?”
Coll’s broad, sunburnt face was etched with apprehension. The answer, when it came, seemed almost to be against his will. “Princes of the blood have been known to do it instead.”
“Which explains Diarmuid last night. Coll, I really don’t want to get you in trouble—but if I were to make a guess at what happened here, I’d guess that Ailell was called because of this drought, or maybe there’s a drought because he hasn’t gone, and I’d guess he is terrified of the whole thing, and Loren backs him because he doesn’t trust whatever happens on the Summer Tree.” After a moment Coll nodded stiffly, and Schafer continued.
“Then I’d go on to guess, and this is really a guess, that Diarmuid’s brother wanted to do it for the King, and Ailell forbade him—which is why he’s gone and Diarmuid is heir. Would that be a good guess?”
Coll had come very close as Schafer was speaking. He searched Paul’s eyes with his own honest brown ones. Then he shook his head, a kind of awe written into his features.
“This is deeper than I can go. It would be,” he said, “a very good guess. The High King must consent to his surrogate, and when he refused, the Prince cursed him, which is treason, and was exiled. It is now death to speak his name.”
In the silence that followed it seemed to Paul as if the whole weight of the night was pressing down upon the two of them.
“There is no power in me,” Coll said then, in his deep voice, “but if there was, I would have him cursed in the name of all the gods and goddesses there are.”
“Who?” Paul whispered.
“Why, the Prince, of course,” said Coll. “The exiled Prince, Diarmuid’s brother, Aileron.”
Chapter 6
Beyond the palace gates and the walls of the town, the depredations of drought came home. The impact of a rainless summer could be measured in the heavy dust of the road, in the thin grass peeling like brown paint on hills and tummocks, in stunted trees and dried-up village wells. In the fiftieth year of Ailell’s reign, the High Kingdom was suffering as no living man could remember.
For Kevin and Paul, riding south with Diarmuid and seven of his men in the morning, the way of things registered most brutally in the pinched, bitter features of the farmers they passed on the road. Already the heat of the sun was casting a shimmer of mirage on the landscape. There were no clouds in the sky.
Diarmuid was setting a hard pace, though, and Kevin, who was no horseman and who’d had a sleepless night, was exceedingly happy when they pulled up outside a tavern in the fourth village they came to.
They took a hasty meal of cold, sharply spiced meat, bread, and cheese, with pints of black ale to wash away the throat-clogging dust of the road. Kevin, eating voraciously, saw Diarmuid speak briefly to Carde, who quietly sought the innkeeper and withdrew into another room with him. Noticing Kevin’s glance, the Prince walked over to the long wooden table where he and Paul were sitting with the lean, dark man named Erron.
“We’re checking for your friend,” Diarmuid told them. “It’s one of the reasons we’re doing this. Loren went north to do the same, and I’ve sent word to the coast.”
“Who’s with the women?” Paul Schafer asked quickly.
Diarmuid smiled. “Trust me,” he said. “I do know what I’m doing. There are guards, and Matt stayed in the palace, too.”
“Loren went without him?” Paul queried sharply. “How…?”
Diarmuid’s expression was even more amused. “Even without magic our friend can handle himself. He has a sword, and knows how to use it. You worry a good deal, don’t you?”
“Does it surprise you?” Kevin cut in. “We don’t know where we are, we don’t know the rules here, Dave’s gone missing, God knows where—and we don’t even know where we’re going with you now.”
“That last,” said Diarmuid, “is easy enough. We’re crossing the river into Cathal, if we can. By night, and quietly, because there’s a very good chance we’ll be killed if found.”
“I see,” said Kevin, swallowing. “And are we allowed to know why we are subjecting ourselves to that unpleasant possibility?”
For the first time that morning Diarmuid’s smile flashed full-force. “Of course you are,” he said kindly. “You’re going to help me seduce a lady. Tell me, Carde,” he murmured, turning, “any news?”
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.