It had grown dark outside as they talked. “Why have you given it to me?” Kim asked in a small voice.
“Because I dreamt it on your finger, too.” Which, somehow, she had known would be the answer. The ring pulsed balefully, inimically, and she feared it.
“What was I doing?” she asked.
“Raising the dead,” Ysanne replied, and stood to light the candles in the room.
Kim closed her eyes. The images were waiting for her: the jumbled stones, the wide grasslands rolling away in the dark, the ring on her hand burning like a fire in the dream, and the wind rising over the grass, whistling between the stones—
“Oh, God!” she cried aloud. “What is it, Ysanne?”
The Seer returned to her seat beside the bed and gravely regarded the girl who lay there wrestling with what lay upon her.
“I am not sure of this,” she said, “so I must be careful, but there is a pattern shaping here. You see, he died in your world the first time.”
“Who died?” Kim whispered.
”The Warrior. Who always dies, and is not allowed to rest. It is his doom.”
Kim’s hands were clenched. “Why?”
“There was a great wrong done at the very beginning of his days, and for that he may not have rest. It is told and sung and written in every world where he has fought.”
“Fought?” Her heart was pounding.
“Of course,” Ysanne replied, though gently still. “He is the Warrior. Who may be called only at darkest need, and only by magic and only when summoned by name.” Her voice was like wind in the room.
“And his name?”
“The secret one, no man knows, or even where it is to be sought, but there is another, by which he is always spoken.”
“And that is?” Though now she knew. And a star was in the window.
Ysanne spoke the name.
He was probably wrong to be lingering, but the commands had not been explicit, and he was not overly prone to let it disturb him. It intoxicated them all to be abroad in the open spaces, using forgotten arts of concealment to observe the festival traffic on the roads to and from Paras Derval, and though by day the charred land dismayed them, at night they sang the oldest songs under the unclouded glitter of the stars.
He himself had a further reason for waiting, though he knew the delay could not be prolonged indefinitely. One more day he had promised himself, and felt extravagantly gratified when the two women and the man crested the ridge above the thicket.
Matt was quietly reassuring. Kim was in good hands, and though he didn’t know where Diarmuid’s band had gone—and preferred it that way, he added with a grimace—they were expected back that night. Loren, he confirmed, had indeed gone in search of Dave. For the first time since her encounter with the High Priestess two days before, Jennifer relaxed a little.
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.”