There was a pain in the mage’s heart. Despite his premonitions, he had deceived her into coming, given her over to the svart alfar, bound her beauty as if with his own hands to the putrescence of Avaia, and consigned her to Maugrim. If there was a judgement waiting for him in the Weaver’s Halls, Jennifer would be someone he had to answer for.
“Did you say a swan?” the fair-haired Rider asked. Levon. Ivor’s son, whom he remembered from fully ten years ago as a boy on the eve of his fast. A man now, though young, and bearing the always difficult weight of the first men killed under his command. They were all so young, he realized suddenly, even Aileron. We are going to war against a god, he thought, and tasted a terrible doubt.
He masked it. “Yes,” he said, “a swan. Avaia the Black she was named, long ago. Why do you ask?”
“We saw her,” Levon said. “The evening before the Mountain’s fire.” For no good reason, that seemed to make it hurt even more.
Kimberly stirred a little, and they turned to her. The white hair above the young eyes was still disturbing. “I dreamt her,” she said. “So did Ysanne.”
And with that, there was another lost woman in the room for Loren, another ghost. You and I will not meet again on this side of the Night, Ysanne had told Ailell.
On this side, or on the other now, it seemed. She had gone so far it could not be compassed. He thought about Lokdal. Colan’s dagger, Seithr’s gift. Oh, the Dwarves did dark things with power under their mountains.
Kevin, straining a little, punctured the grimness of the silence. “Ye gods and little fishes!” he exclaimed. “This is some reunion. We’ve got to do better than this!”
A good try, Dave Martyniuk thought, surprising himself with how well he understood what Kevin was trying to do. It wasn’t going to get more than a smile, though. It wasn’t—
Access to inspiration came then with blinding suddenness.
“Uh-uh,” he said slowly, choosing his words. “Can’t do it, Kevin. We’ve got another problem here.” He paused, enjoying a new sensation, as their concerned eyes swung to him.
Then, reaching into the pocket of his saddle-bag on the floor beside him, he withdrew something he’d carried a long way. “I think you’ve misinterpreted the judgement in the McKay case,” he told Kevin, and tossed the travel-stained Evidence notes down on the table.
Hell, Dave thought, watching them all, even Levon, even Tore, give way to hilarity and relief. There’s nothing to this! A wide grin, he knew, was splashed across his face.
“Funny, funny man,” Kevin Laine said, with unstinted approval. He was still laughing. “I need a drink,” Kevin exclaimed. “We all do. And you,” he pointed to Dave, “haven’t met Diarmuid yet. I think you’ll like him even more than you like me.”
Which was a funny kind of dig, Dave thought as they rose to go, and one he’d have to think about. He had a feeling, though, that this, at least, would turn out to be all right.
The five young men departed for the Black Boar. Kim, however, following an instinct that had been building since the coronation, begged off and returned to the palace. Once there, she knocked at a door down the corridor from her own. She made a suggestion, which was accepted. A short while later, in her own room, it emerged that her intuitions on this sort of thing had not been affected at all by anything in Fionavar.
Matt Sören closed the door behind them. He and Loren looked at each other, alone for the first time that day.
“Owein’s Horn now,” the mage said finally, as if concluding a lengthy exchange.
The Dwarf shook his head. “That is deep,” he said. “Will you try to wake them?”
Loren rose and crossed to the window. It was raining again. He put out his hand to feel it like a gift on his palm.
“I won’t,” he said at last. “But they might.”
The Dwarf said softly, “You have been holding yourself back, haven’t you?”
Loren turned. His eyes, deep-set under the thick gray eyebrows, were tranquil, but there was power in them still. “I have,” he said. “There is a force flowing through all of diem, I think, the strangers and our own. We have to give them room.”
“They are very young,” Matt Sören said.
“I know they are.”
“You are sure of this? You are going to let them carry it?”
“I am sure of nothing,” the mage said. “But yes, I am going to let them carry it.”
“We will be there?”
Silvercloak smiled then. “Oh, my friend,” he said, “we will have our battle, never fear. We must let the young ones carry it, but before the end, you and I may have to fight the greatest battle of them all.”
“You and I,” the Dwarf growled in his deep tones. By which the mage understood a number of things, not least of which was love.
In the end, the Prince had had a great many pints of ale. There were an infinity of reasons, all good.
He had been named Aileron’s heir in the ceremony that afternoon. “This,” he’d said, “is getting to be a habit.” The obvious line. They were quoting it all over the Black Boar, though. He drained another pint. Oh, an infinity of reasons, he had.
Eventually it seemed that he was alone, and in his own chambers in the palace, the chambers of Prince Diarmuid dan Ailell, the King’s Heir in Brennin. Indeed.
It was far too late to bother going to sleep. Using the outer walls, though with difficulty because of his arm, he made his way to Sharra’s balcony.
Her room was empty.
On a hunch, he looped two rooms along to where Kim Ford was sleeping. It was hard work, with the wound. When he finally climbed up over the balustrade, having to use the tree for awkward leverage, he was greeted by two pitchers of icy water in the face. No one deflected them either, or the laughter of Shalhassan’s daughter and the Seer of Brennin, who were a long way down the road to an unexpected friendship.
Mourning his fate somewhat, the heir to the throne finally slipped back into the palace and made his way, dripping, to the room of the Lady Rheva.
One took comfort where one could, at times like this.
He did, in fact, eventually fall asleep. Looking complacently down on him, Rheva heard him murmur as in a dream, “Both of them.” She didn’t really understand, but he had praised her breasts earlier, and she was not displeased.
Kevin Laine, who might have been able to explain it to her, was awake as well, hearing a very long, very private story from Paul. Who could talk again, it seemed, and who wanted to. When Schafer was done, Kevin spoke himself, also for a long time.
At the end of it, they looked at each other. Dawn was breaking. Eventually, they had to smile, despite Rachel, despite Jen, despite everything.
Chapter 16
He came for her in the morning.
She thought she had sounded the depths of despair the night before, when the swan had set down before the iron gates of Starkadh. From the air she had seen it a long way off, a brutally superimposed black upon the white plateaus of the glaciers. Then as they flew nearer, she had felt herself almost physically battered by the nature of it: the huge, piled slabs of windowless stone, lightless, unyielding. Fortress of a god.
In the darkness and the cold his servants had unbound her from the swan. With grasping hands she had been dragged—for her legs were numb—into the bowels of Starkadh, where the odor was of decay and corrupting flesh, even among the cold, and the only lights gleamed a baneful green. They had thrown her into a room alone, and filthy, exhausted, she had fallen onto the one stained pallet on the icy floor. It smelt of svart alfar.
She lay awake, though, shivering with the bitter cold for a long time. When she did sleep, it was fitfully, and the swan flew through her dreams crying in cold triumph.
When she woke, it was to the certitude that the terrors she had endured were but a shelf on the long way down, and the bottom was invisible yet in the darkness, but waiting. She was going there.