Most hated by the Dark, for their name was Light.
And it was in that moment, away to the north and east, that another solitary rider checked his own mount suddenly. A moment he was motionless, then with a terrible oath, and fear like a fist in his heart, Loren Silvercloak turned his horse and began desperately to thunder home.
In Paras Derval, the King did not attend the banquet, nor did any of the four visitors, which caused more than a little talk. Ailell kept to his chambers and played ta’bael with Gorlaes, the Chancellor. He won easily, as was customary, and with little pleasure, which was also customary. They played very late, and Tarn, the page, was asleep when the interruption came.
As they went through the open doorway of the Black Boar, the noise and smoke were like a wall into which they smashed.
One voice, however, made itself heard in a prodigious bellow that resounded over the pandemonium.
“Diarmuid!” roared Tegid, surging to his feet. Kevin winced at the decibel level engendered. “By the oak and the moon, it’s himself!” Tegid howled, as the tavern sounds briefly resolved themselves into shouted greetings.
Diarmuid, in fawn-colored breeches and a blue doublet, stood grinning sardonically in the doorway as the others fanned out into the dense haze of the room. Tegid wove his way unsteadily forward to stand swaying before his Prince.
And hurled the contents of a mug of ale full in Diarmuid’s face.
“Wretched Prince!” he screamed. “I shall tear your heart out! I shall send your liver to Gwen Ystrat! How dare you slip off and leave great Tegid behind with the women and the mewling babes?”
Kevin, beside the Prince, had a brief, hysterical vision of Tegid trying to go hand over hand across Saeren, before Diarmuid, dripping wet, reached to the nearest table, grabbed a silver tankard, and threw it violently at Tegid.
Someone screamed as the Prince followed up the throw, which bounced off the big man’s shoulder, with a short rush, at the end of which his lowered head intersected effectively with Tegid’s massive target of a girth.
Tegid staggered back, his face momentarily achieving a shade of green. He recovered quickly, though, seized the nearest table top, and with one mighty exertion lifted it whole from the trestles, spilling mugs and cutlery, and sending their erstwhile users scattering as raucous curses exploded around him. Wheeling for leverage, he swung the board in a wide, lethal sweep that bade fair to render Ailell heirless had it landed.
Diarmuid ducked, very neatly. So, too, less smoothly, did Kevin. Sprawling on the floor, he saw the board whistle over their heads and, at the spent end of its sweep, clip a red-doubleted man on the shoulder, catapulting him into the patron beside him. A remarkable human demonstration of the domino effect ensued. The noise level was horrific.
Someone elected to deposit his bowl of soup on the red-doubleted gentleman’s balding pate. Someone else regarded this as more than sufficient excuse to deck the soup-pourer from behind with a hoisted bench. The innkeeper prudently began removing bottles from the bar top. A barmaid, her skirts aswirl, slipped under a table. Kevin saw Carde dive to join her there.
In the meantime, Diarmuid, springing from his crouch, butted Tegid again before the mountainous one could ready a return scything of the table top. The first reaping had comprehensively cleared a wide space about the two of them.
This time Tegid held his ground; with a joyous bellow he dropped the board on someone’s head and enveloped Diarmuid in a bear-hug.
“Now I have you!” Tegid boomed, his face flushed with rapture. Diarmuid’s features were also shading towards scarlet as his captor tightened a bone-crushing grip. Watching, Kevin saw the Prince free his arms for a counter-blow.
He had no doubt Diarmuid could manage to free himself, but Tegid was squeezing in earnest, and Kevin saw that the Prince was going to have to use a crippling retort to break the other man’s hold. He saw Diarmuid shift his knee for leverage, and knew what would have to follow. With a futile shout, he rushed forward to intercede.
And stopped dead as a terrifying cry of outrage exploded from Tegid’s throat. Still screaming, he dropped the Prince like a discarded toy on the sandy floor.
There came a smell of burning flesh. Leaping spectacularly, Tegid upended another table, rescued a brimming pitcher of ale, and proceeded to pour its contents over his posterior.
The movement revealed, somewhat like the drawing of a curtain, Paul Schafer behind him, holding rather apologetically, a poker from the cooking fire.
There was a brief silence, an awe-stricken homage to the operatic force of Tegid’s scream, then Diarmuid, still on the floor, began to laugh in high, short, hysterical gasps, signaling a resumption of universal pandemonium. Crying with laughter, barely able to stand, Kevin made his way, with Erron staggering beside him, to embrace the crookedly grinning Schafer.
It was some time before order was restored, largely because no one was particularly intent on restoring it. The red-doubleted man appeared to have a number of friends, and so, too, it seemed, did the soup-pourer. Kevin, who knew neither, threw a token bench into the fray, then withdrew towards the bar with Erron.
Two serving women joined them there, and the press of events greatly facilitated a rapid acquaintance.
Going upstairs, hand in hand with Marna, the taller of the two, Kevin’s last glimpse of the tavern floor was of a surging mass of men disappearing in and out of the smoky haze. Diarmuid was standing atop the bar, lobbing whatever came to hand upon the heads of the combatants. He didn’t seem to be choosing sides. Kevin looked for Paul, didn’t see him; and then a door was opened and closed behind him, and in the rush of dark a woman was in his arms, her mouth turned up to his, and his soul began its familiar spiral downward into longing.
Much later, when he had not yet completed the journey back, he heard Marna ask in a timid whisper, “Is it always so?”
And a good few minutes yet from being capable of speech, he stroked her hair once with an effort and closed his eyes again. Because it was always so. The act of love a blind, convulsive reaching back into a falling dark. Every time. It took away his very name, the shape and movement of his bones; and between times he wondered if there would be a night when he would go so far that there was no returning.
Not this night, though. Soon he was able to smile at her, and then to give thanks and gentle words, and not without sincerity, for her sweetness ran deep, and he had needed badly to drink of such a thing. Slipping inside his arm, Marna laid her head on his shoulder beside his own bright hair, and, breathing deeply of her scent, Kevin let the exhaustion of two waking nights carry him to sleep.
He only had an hour, though, and so was vulnerable and unfocused when the presence of a third person in the room woke him. It was another girl, not Erron’s, and she was crying, her hair disordered about her shoulders.
“What is it, Tiene?” Marna asked sleepily.
“He sent me to you,” brown-haired Tiene sniffled, looking at Kevin.
“Who?” Kevin grunted, groping towards consciousness. “Diarmuid?”
“Oh, no. It was the other stranger, Pwyll.”
It took a moment.
“Paul! What did—what’s happened?”
His tone was evidently too sharp for already tender nerves. Tiene, casting a wide-eyed glance of reproach at him, sat down on the bed and started crying again. He shook her arm. “Tell me! What happened?”
“He left,” Tiene whispered, barely audible. “He came upstairs with me, but he left.”
Shaking his head, Kevin tried desperately to focus. “What? Did he… was he able to…?”