“ ‘Usheen to warm the heart,’ ” Matt quoted as he gave Loren his drink.
“Mine is cold tonight,” the tall mage said. He took a sip and made a wry face. “Bitter warmth.”
“It will do you good.” The Dwarf dropped into a low chair and began pulling off his boots.
“Should we reach for Teyrnon?”
“To say what?” Matt raised his head.
“The one thing we learned.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“The Black Swan told Metran that the cauldron was theirs and he was to go to the place of spiraling,” Jennifer had said, white and rigidly controlled as she went back in words to the woodcutter’s clearing where Avaia had come for her. This was the one thing.
“What will he do there with the dead?” Matt Sören asked now. Hatred deep as a cavern lay in the query.
The mage’s face was bleak. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything, it seems. Except that we cannot go after him until we break the winter, and we cannot break the winter.”
“We will,” said the Dwarf. “We will break it because we must. You will do this, there is no doubt in me.”
The mage smiled then, softening the harsh lines of his face. “Aren’t you tired,” he asked, “after forty years of supporting me like this?”
“No,” said Matt Sören simply. And after a moment, he smiled as well, the crooked twist of his mouth.
Loren drained the usheen, making a face again. “Very well,” he said. “I want to reach for Teyrnon before we sleep. He should know that Metran has the Cauldron of Khath Meigol and has gone with it… to Cader Sedat.”
He said it as prosaically as he could, but even in the speaking of the island’s name they both felt a chill, nor could any of their order not do so. Amairgen Whitebranch, first of the mages, had died in that place a thousand years ago.
Matt braced and Loren closed. They found Teyrnon through Barak, a day’s ride off with the soldiers in North Keep. They conveyed what had happened and shared among the four of them doubts that would not go outside the Council of the Mages.
Then they broke the link. “All right?” Silvercloak asked his source after a moment.
“Easy,” Matt replied. “It will help me sleep.”
At which point there came a heavy knocking at the door. It wouldn’t be Brock; he had the key. One glance, only, they exchanged, premonitory, for they were what they were, and had been so for a long time. Then they went, together, to open the front door.
In the night outside, with stars bright behind him and a half-moon, stood a bearded man, broad-shouldered, not tall, time spun far into his eyes, and a woman unconscious in his arms.
It was very still. Loren had a sense that the stars, too, were motionless, and the late-risen moon. Then the man said, in a voice rich and low, “She is only weary, I think. She named this house to me before she fainted away. Are you Loren Silvercloak? Matt Sören?”
They were proud men, the mage and his source, and numbered among the great of Fionavar. But it was with a humbled, grateful awe that they knelt then in their open doorway, both of them, before Arthur Pendragon and the one who had summoned him, and they were kneeling to the woman no less than to the man.
Another knock on another door. In her room in the palace, Jennifer was alone and not asleep. She turned from contemplating the fire; the long robe they had given her brushed the deep carpets of the floor. She had bathed and washed her hair, then combed it out before the mirror, staring at her own strange face, at the green eyes that had seen what they had seen. She had been standing before the fire a long time, how long she knew not, when the tapping came.
And with it, a voice: “Never fear me,” she heard through the door. “You have no greater friend.”
A voice like a chiming of bells, sound at the edge of song. She opened the door to see Brendel of the lios alfar. From a long way off she was moved to see his bright, slender grace.
“Come in,” she said. “But it is past time for tears.”
She closed the door behind him, marveling at how the flames of the fire, the candle by her bed, seemed to flicker and dance the more vividly with his presence in the room. The Children of Light, the lios were; their very name meant light, and it spoke to them and was answered in their being.
And the Darkest One hated them with a hate so absolute it made all else seem small beside. It was a measure of evil, she thought, who of all mortals needed no such measure, that it could so profoundly hate the creature that stood before her, eyes dry, now, and shading to amber even as she watched.
“There are graces in this King,” Brendel said. “Though one would not have thought so. He sent word to my chambers that you were here.”
She had been told, by Kevin, of what Brendel had done: how he had followed Galadan and his wolves, and sworn an oath in the Great Hall. She said, “You have no cause to reproach yourself for me. You did, I have heard, more than anyone could have done.”
“It was not enough. What can I say to you?”
She shook her head. “You gave me joy as well. My last memory of true delight is of falling asleep hearing the lios sing.”
“Can we not give you that once more, now that you are with us again?”
“I do not know if I can receive it, Brendel. I am not… whole.” It was easier, somehow, for her than for him. There was a long silence in which she suffered his eyes to hold hers. He did not probe within, although she knew he could, just as Loren had not used a Searching on her. None of them would intrude, and so she could hide Darien, and would.
”Will you unsay that?” he asked, the music in him deep and offering pain.
“Shall I lie to you?”
He turned and went to the window. Even the clothing he wore seemed woven of many colors that shifted as he moved. The starlight from outside lit his silvery hair and glinted within it. How could she so deny one who could have stars caught in his hair?
And how could she not? I will take all, Rakoth had said, and had come too near to doing so.
Brendel turned. His eyes were golden; it seemed his truest color. He said, “I have waited here a long time, by Ra-Tenniel’s desire and my own. His, that I might give our counsel to this young King and learn what the men of Brennin purpose; mine, to see you here and alive, that I might offer you and ask one thing.”
“Which is?” She was very tall, fairer even than she had been, marked by sorrow and shadow and given something thereby.
“That you come with me to Daniloth to be made whole again. If it can be done, it will be there.”
She looked at him as if from a great height or a great depth—it was distance either way. She said, “No,” and saw pain flare like fire in his eyes. She said, “I am better as I am. Paul brought me this far, he and another thing. Leave it rest. I am here, and not unhappy, and I am afraid to try for more light lest it mean more dark.”
There was no answer he could make; she had meant that to be so. He touched her cheek before he left, and she endured the touch, grieving that such a thing should not bring joy, but it did not, and what could she do or say?
The lios alfar spoke from the doorway, the music almost gone from his voice. “There is vengeance then,” said Brendel of the Kestrel Mark. “There is only that and always that.” He closed the door softly behind him.
Oaths, she thought, turning slowly to the fire again. Kevin, Brendel, she wondered who else would swear revenge for her. She wondered if it would ever mean anything to her.
Even as she stood thus, in the grey country of muting and shadow, Loren and Matt were opening their door to see two figures in the snow with the stars and moon behind.