Matt Sören had risen to stand beside the mage, eyeing his friend with a grimly worried expression. Loren’s weariness was palpable, but he seemed to gather his resources, and turned among all that company to look at Kevin.
“I am sorry,” he said simply. “I am deeply sorry.”
Kevin nodded jerkily. “I know,” he whispered. That was all; they both turned to the King.
“Since when need the High King explain himself?” Ailell said, but his brief assertion of control seemed to have drained him; his tone was querulous, not commanding.
“He need not, my lord. But if he does, his subjects and advisers may sometimes be of greater aid.” The mage had come several steps into the room.
“Sometimes,” the King replied. “But at other times there are things they do not and should not know.” Kevin saw Gorlaes shift in his seat. He took a chance.
“But the Chancellor knows, my lord. Should not your other counsellors? Forgive my presumption, but a woman I love is gone, High King.”
Ailell regarded him for a long time without speaking. Then he gave a small nod. “Well spoken,” he said. “Indeed, the only person here who truly has a right to be told is you, but I will do as you ask.”
“My lord!” Gorlaes began urgently.
Ailell raised a hand, quelling him.
In the ensuing silence there came a distant roll of thunder.
“Can you not hear it?” the High King whispered on a rising note. “Listen! The God is coming. If the offering holds, he comes tonight. This will be the third night. How can we act before we know?”
They were all on their feet.
“Someone is on the Tree,” Loren said flatly.
The King nodded.
“My brother?” asked Diarmuid, his face ashen.
“No,” said Ailell, and turned to Kevin.
It took a moment, then everything fell into place. “Oh, God,” Kevin cried. “It’s Paul!” and he lowered his face into his hands.
Kimberly woke knowing.
Who kills without love shall surely die, Seithr the Dwarf-King had said to Colan the Beloved long ago. And then, lowering his voice, he had added for only the son of Conary to hear, “Who dies with love may make of his soul a gift to the one marked with the pattern on the dagger’s haft.”
“A rich gift,” had murmured Colan.
“Richer than you know. Once given, the soul is gone. It is lost to time. There can be no passage beyond the walls of Night to find light at the Weaver’s side.”
Conary ‘s son had bowed very low. “I thank you,” he said. “Double-edged the knife, and double-edged the gift. Mörnir grant us the sight to use it truly.”
Even before she looked, Kim knew that her hair was white. Lying in bed that first morning she cried, though silently and not for long. There was much to be done. Even with the vellin on her wrist, she felt the day like a fever. She would be unworthy of the gift if she were undone by mourning.
So she rose up, Seer of Brennin, newest dreamer of the dream, to begin what Ysanne had died to allow her to do.
More than died.
There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.
This, Kim thought, is what Ysanne had done. With an act of love so great—and not just for her—it could scarcely be assimilated, she had stripped her soul of any place it held in time. She was gone, utterly. Not just from life, but more, much more, as Kim now knew—from death as well; from what lay after in the patterns of the Weaver for his children.
Instead, the Seer had given all she could to Kim, had given all. No longer could Kim say she was not of Fionavar, for within her now pulsed an intuitive understanding of this world more deep even than the knowledge of her own. Looking now at a bannion, she would know what it was; she understood the vellin on her wrist, something of the wild Baelrath on her finger; and one day she would know who was to bear the Circlet of Lisen and tread the darkest path of all. Raederth’s words; Raederth whom Ysanne had lost again, that Kim might have this.
Which was so unfair. What right, what possible right had the Seer had to make such a sacrifice? To impose with this impossible gift, such a burden? How had she presumed to decide for Kim?
The answer, though, was easy enough after a while: she hadn’t. Kim could go, leave, deny. She could cross home as planed and dye her hair, or leave it as it was and go New Wave if she preferred. Nothing had changed.
Except, of course, that everything had. How can you tell the dancer from the dance? she had read somewhere. Or the dreamer from the dream, she amended, feeling a little lost. Because the answer to that was easiest of all.
You can’t.
Some time later she laid her hand, in the way she now knew, upon the slab below the table, and saw the door appear.
Down the worn stone stairs she went, in her turn. Lisen’s Light showed her the way. The dagger would be there, she knew, with red blood on the silver-blue thieren of the blade. There would be no body, though, for Ysanne the Seer, having died with love and by that blade, had taken herself beyond the walls of time, where she could not be followed. Lost and forever. It was final, absolute. It was ended.
And she was left here in the first world of them all, bearing the burden of that.
She cleaned Lokdal and sheathed it to a sound like a harpstring. She put it back in the cabinet. Then she went up the stairs again towards the world that needed her, all the worlds that needed what it seemed she was.
“Oh, God,” Kevin said. “It’s Paul!”
A stunned silence descended, overwhelming in its import. This was something for which none of them could have prepared. I should have known, Kevin was thinking, though. I should have figured it out when he first told me about the Tree. A bitterness scaling towards rage pulled his head up…
“That must have been some chess game,” he said savagely to the King.
“It was,” Ailell said simply. Then, “He came to me and offered. I would never have asked, or even thought to ask. Will you believe this?”
And of course he did. It fit too well. The attack was unfair, because Paul would have done what he wanted to, exactly what he wanted to, and this was a better way to die than falling from a rope down a cliff. As such things were measured, and he supposed they could be measured. It hurt, though, it really hurt, and—
“No!” said Loren decisively. “It must be stopped. This we cannot do. He is not even one of us, my lord. We cannot lay our griefs upon him in this way. He must be taken down. This is a guest of your House, Ailell. Of our world. What were you thinking of?”
“Of our world. Of my House. Of my people. He came to me, Silvercloak.”
“And should have been refused!”
“Loren, it was a true offering.” The speaker was Gorlaes, his voice unwontedly diffident.
“You were there?” the mage bristled.
“I bound him. He walked past us to the Tree. It was as if he were alone. I know not how, and I am afraid here speaking of it, as I was in the Godwood, but I swear it is a proper offering.”
“No,” Loren said again, his face sharp with emotion. “He cannot possibly understand what he is doing. My lord, he must be taken down before he dies.”
“It is his own death, Loren. His chosen gift. Would you presume to strip it from him?” Ailell’s eyes were so old, so weary.
“I would,” the mage replied. “He was not brought here to die for us.”
It was time to speak.
“Maybe not,” Kevin said, forcing the words out, stumbling and in pain. “But I think that is why he came.” He was losing them both. Jennifer. Now Paul, too. His heart was sore. “If he went, he went knowing, and because he wanted to. Let him die for you, if he can’t live for himself. Leave him, Loren. Let him go.”