Just past midday they came to the same inn where they had stopped before. Diarmuid called a halt for lunch and a quick beer, which became, given the prevailing mood, several slow beers. Coll, Kevin noticed, had disappeared.
The extended break meant that they were going to miss the banquet in the Great Hall that night. Diarmuid didn’t seem to care.
“It’s the Black Boar tonight, my friends,” he announced, glittering and exhilarated at the head of the table. “I’m in no mood for court manners. Tonight I celebrate with you and let the manners look after themselves. Tonight we take our pleasure. Will you drink with me to the Dark Rose of Cathal?”
Kevin cheered with the others, drank with the others.
Kimberly had dreamt again. The same one at first: the stones, the ring, the wind—and the same grief in her heart. And again she woke just as the words of power reached her lips.
This time, though, she had fallen asleep again, to find another dream waiting, as if at the bottom of a pool.
She was in the room of Ailell the King. She saw him tossing restlessly on his bed, saw the young page asleep on his pallet. Even as she watched, Ailell woke in the dark of his chamber. A long time he lay still, breathing raggedly, then she saw him rise painfully, as if against his own desire. He lit a candle and carried it to an inner doorway in the room, through which he passed. Invisible, insubstantial, she followed the King down a corridor lit only by the weaving candle he bore, and she paused with him before another door, into which was set a sliding view-hole.
When Ailell put his eyes to the aperture, somehow she was looking with him, seeing what he saw, and Kimberly saw with the High King the white naal fire and the deep blue shining of Ginserat’s stone, set into the top of its pillar.
Only after a long time did Ailell withdraw, and in the dream Kim saw herself move to look again, standing on tiptoe to gaze with her own eyes into the room of the stone.
And looking in, she saw no stone at all, and the room was dark.
Wheeling in terror, she saw the High King walking back towards his chamber, and waiting there for him in the doorway was a shadowed figure that she knew.
His face rigid as if it were stone, Paul Schafer stood before Ailell, and he was holding a chess piece in his outstretched hand, and coming nearer to them, Kim saw that it was the white king, and it was broken. There was a music all about them that she couldn’t recognize, although she knew she should. Ailell spoke words she could not hear because the music was too loud, and then Paul spoke, and she needed desperately to hear, but the music… And then the King held high his candle and began to speak again, and she could not, could not, could not.
Then everything was blasted to nothingness by the howling of a dog, so loud it filled the universe.
And she awoke to the morning sunlight and the smell of food frying over the cooking fire.
“Good morning,” said Ysanne. “Come and eat, before Malka steals it all. Then I have something to show you.”
Coll rejoined them on the road north of the town. Paul Schafer eased his horse over to the roan stallion the big man rode.
“Being discreet?” he asked.
Above his broken nose Coil’s eyes were guarded. “Not exactly. But he wanted to do something.”
“Which means?”
“The man had to die, but his wife and children can be helped.”
“So you’ve paid them. Is that why he delayed just now in the tavern? To give you time? It wasn’t just because he felt like drinking, was it?”
Coll nodded. “He often feels like drinking,” he said wryly, “but he very rarely acts without reason. Tell me,” he went on, as Schafer remained silent, “Do you think he did wrong?”
Paul’s expression was unreadable.
“Gorlaes would have hanged him,” Coll pressed, “and had the body torn apart. His family would have been dispossessed of their land. Now his eldest son is going to South Keep to be trained as one of us. Do you really think he did wrong?”
“No,” said Schafer slowly, “I’m just thinking that with everyone else starving, that farmer’s treason was probably the best way he could find to take care of his family. Do you have a family, Coll?”
To which Diarmuid’s lieutenant, who didn’t, and who was still trying to like this strange visitor, had no reply at all. They rode north through the heat of the afternoon, the dry fields baking on either side, the far hills shimmering like mirages, or the hope of rain.
The trap door under the table had been invisible until Ysanne, kneeling, had laid her hand on the floor and spoken a word of power. There were ten stairs leading down; on either side the rough stone walls were damp to the touch. There were brackets set into the walls, but no torches, because from the bottom of the stairs came a pale glow of light. Wondering, Kim followed the Seer and Malka, the cat, as they went down.
The chamber was small, more a cave than a room. Another bed, a desk, a chair, a woven carpet on the stone floor. Some parchments and books, very old by the look of them, on the desk. Only one thing more: against the far wall was set a cabinet with glass doors, and within the cabinet, like a captured star, lay the source of light.
There was awe in the Seer’s voice when she broke the silence. “Every time I see this…” Ysanne murmured. “It is the Circlet of Lisen,” she said, walking forward. “It was made for her by the lios alfar in the days when Pendaran Wood was not yet a place of dread. She bound it on her brow after they built the Anor for her, and she stood in that tower by the sea, a light like a star on her brow, to show Amairgen the way home from Cader Sedat.”
“And he never came.” Kim’s voice, though she whispered, felt harsh to her own ears. “Eilathen showed me. I saw her die.” The Circlet, she saw, was purest gold, but the light set within it was gentler than moonfall.
“She died, and Pendaran does not forgive. It is one of the deep sorrows of the world. So much changed… even the light. It was brighter once, the color of hope, they said when it was made. Then Lisen died, and the Wood changed, and the world changed, and now it seems to shine with loss. It is the most fair thing I know in all the world. It is the Light against the Dark.”
Kim looked at the white-haired figure beside her. “Why is it here?” she asked. “Why hidden underground?”
“Raederth brought it to me the year before he died. Where he went to find it, I know not—for it was lost when Lisen fell. Lost long years, and he never told me the tale of where he went to bring it back. It aged him, though. Something happened on the journey of which he could never speak. He asked me to guard it here, with the two other things of power, until their place should be dreamt. ‘Who shall wear this next,’ he said, ‘after Lisen, shall have the darkest road to walk of any child of earth or stars.’ And he said nothing more. It waits here, for the dreaming.”
Kimberly shivered, for something new within her, a singing in the blood, told her that the words of the dead mage were true prophecy. She felt weighted, burdened. This was getting to be too much. She tore her eyes away from the Circlet. “What are the other two things?” she asked.
“The Baelrath, of course. The stone on your finger.”
Kim looked down. The Warstone had grown brighter as they spoke, the dull, blood-dark lustre giving way to a pulsating sheen.
“I think the Circlet speaks to it,” Ysanne went on. “It always shone so in this room. I kept it here beside the other, until the night I dreamt you wearing it. From that time I knew its hour was coming, and I feared the wakening power would call forces I could not ward. So I summoned Eilathen again, and bound him to guard the stone by the red at the heart of the bannion.”