The Summer Tree

“It was time, I think,” said Diarmuid. They, too, embraced, and as they did so, the stillness of the hall was shattered by a great noise over their heads as Diarmuid’s men roared and clattered their swords. Paul raised a hand to salute them back.

  Then the mood changed, the interlude was over, for Aileron had come forward, too, to stand in front of Paul as Diarmuid stepped aside.

  For what seemed like forever, the two men gazed at each other, their expressions equally unreadable. No one there could know what had passed between them in the Godwood two nights before, but what lay in the room was palpable, and a thing very deep.

  “Mörnir be praised,” Aileron said, and dropped to his knees before Paul.

  A moment later, everyone in the room but Kevin Laine and the three women had done the same. His heart tight with emotion, Kevin suddenly understood a truth about Aileron. This, this was how he led, by pure force of example and conviction. Even Diarmuid, he saw, had followed his brother’s lead.

  His eyes met Kim’s across the heads of the kneeling brothers. Not clearly knowing what it was he was acquiescing to, he nodded, and was moved to see the relief that showed in her face. She wasn’t, it seemed, such a stranger after all, white hair notwithstanding.

  Aileron rose again, and so did all the others. Paul had not moved or spoken. He seemed to be conserving his strength. Quietly the Prince said, “We are grateful beyond measure for what you have woven.”

  Schafer’s mouth moved in what was only half a smile. “I didn’t take your death after all,” he said.

  Aileron stiffened; without responding, he spun and walked back to the throne. Ascending the steps, he turned again to face them all, his eyes compelling. “Rakoth is free,” he said. “The stones are broken and we are at war with the Dark. I say to all of you, to you, my brother”—a sudden rawness in the voice—”I tell you that this conflict is what I was born for. I have sensed it all my life without knowing. Now I know. It is my destiny. It is,” cried Aileron, passion blazing in his face, “my war!”

  The power of it was overwhelming, a cry of conviction torn whole from the heart. Even Jaelle’s bitter eyes held a kind of acceptance, and there was no mockery at all in Diarmuid’s face.

  “You arrogant bastard,” Paul Schafer said.

  It was like a kick in the teeth. Even Kevin felt it. He saw Aileron’s head snap back, his eyes go wide with shock.

  “How presumptuous can you get?” Paul went on, stepping forward to stand before Aileron. “Your death. Your crown. Your destiny. Your war. Your war?” His voice skirled upwards. He put a hand on the table for support.

  “Pwyll,” said Loren. “Paul, wait.”

  “No!” Schafer snapped. “I hate this, and I hate giving in to it.” He turned back to Aileron. “What about the lios alfar?” he demanded. “Loren tells me twenty of them have died already. What about Cathal? Isn’t it their war, too?” He pointed to Sharra. “And Eridu? And the Dwarves? Isn’t this Matt Sören’s war? And what about the Dalrei? There are two of them here now, and seventeen of them have died. Seventeen of the Dalrei are dead. Dead! Isn’t it their war, Prince Aileron? And look at us. Look at Kim—look at her, at what she’s taken on for you. And”—his voice roughened—”think about Jen, if you will, just for a second, before you lay sole claim to this.”

  There was a difficult silence. Aileron’s eyes had never left Paul’s while he spoke, nor did they now. When he began to speak, his tone was very different, a plea almost. “I understand,” he said stiffly. “I understand all of what you are saying, but I cannot change what else I know. Pwyll, I was born into the world to fight this war.”

  With a strange light-headedness, Kim Ford spoke then for the first time in public as Seer of Brennin. “Paul,” she said, “everyone, I have to tell you that I’ve seen this. So did Ysanne. That’s why she sheltered him. Paul, what he’s saying is true.”

  Schafer looked at her, and the crusading anger she remembered from what he had been before Rachel died faded in the face of her own certitude. Oh, Ysanne, she thought, seeing it happen, how did you stand up under so much weight?

  “If you tell me, I will believe it,” Paul said, obviously drained. “But you know it remains his war even if he is not High King of Brennin. He’s still going to fight it. It seems a wrong way to choose a King.”

  “Do you have a suggestion?” Loren asked, surprising them all.

  “Yes, I do,” Paul said. He let them wait, then, “I suggest you let the Goddess decide. She who sent the moon. Let her Priestess speak her will,” said the Arrow of the God, looking at Jaelle.

  They all turned with him. It seemed, in the end, to have a kind of inevitability to it: the Goddess taking back one King and sending forth another in his stead.

  She had been waiting, amid the tense dialogue back and forth, for the moment to stop them all and say this thing. Now he had done it for her.

  She gazed at him a moment before she rose, tall and beautiful, to let them know the will of Dana and Gwen Ystrat, as had been done long ago in the naming of the Kings. In a room dense with power, hers was not the least, and it was the oldest, by far.

  “It is a matter for sorrow,” she began, blistering them with a glance, “that it should take a stranger to Fionavar to remind you of the true order of things. But howsoever that may be, know ye the will of the Goddess—”

  “No,” said Diarmuid. And it appeared that there was nothing inevitable after all. “Sorry, sweetling. With all deference to the dazzle of your smile, I don’t want to know ye the will of the Goddess.”

  “Fool!” she exclaimed. “Do you want to be cursed?”

  “I have been cursed,” Diarmuid said with some feeling. “Rather a good deal lately. I have had quite a lot happen to me today and I need a pint of ale very badly. It has only just occurred to me that as High King I couldn’t very easily drop in to the Boar at night, which is what I propose to do as soon as we’ve crowned my brother and I get this dagger out of my arm.”

  Even Paul Schafer was humbled by the relief that flashed in that moment across the bearded face of Aileron dan Ailell, whose mother was Marrien of the Garantae, and who would be crowned later that day by Jaelle, the Priestess, as High King of Brennin to lead that realm and its allies into war against Rakoth Maugrim and all the legions of the Dark.

  There was no banquet or celebration; it was a time of mourning and of war. And so at sundown Loren gathered the four of them, with the two young Dalrei Dave refused to be parted from, in the mages’ quarters in the town. One of the Dalrei had a leg wound. That, at least, his magic had been able to deal with. A small consolation, given how much seemed to be beyond him of late.

  Looking at his guests, Loren counted it off inwardly. Eight days; only eight days since he had brought them here, yet so much had overtaken them. He could read changes in Dave Martyniuk’s face, and in the tacit bonds that united him to the two Riders. Then, when the big man told his story, Loren began to understand, and he marvelled. Ceinwen. Flidais in Pendaran. And Owein’s Horn hanging at Dave’s side.

  Whatever power had been flowing through him when he chose to bring these five had been a true one, and deep.

  There had been five, though, not four; there were only four in the room, however, and absence resonated among them like a chord.

  And then was given voice. “Time to start thinking about how to get her back,” Kevin Laine said soberly. It was interesting, Loren noted, that it was still Kevin who could speak, instinctively, for all of them.

  It was a hard thing, but it had to be said. “We will do everything we can,” Loren stated flatly. “But you must be told that if the black swan bore her north, she has been taken by Rakoth himself.”

  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 answ
er 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 Torc, 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 grey eyebrows, were tranquil, but there was power in them still. “I have,” he said. “There is a force flowing through all of them, 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 odour was of decay and corrupting flesh, even among the cold, and the only lights gleamed a baleful 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.

  It wasn’t dark in the room now, though. There was a bright fire blazing on the opposite wall, and in the middle of the room she saw a wide bed standing, and with a constriction of the heart she recognized her parents’ bed. A foreboding came upon her, complete and very clear: she was here to be broken, and there was no mercy in this place. There was a god.

  And in that moment he was there, he ha
d come, and she felt her mind shockingly peeled open like a fruit. For an instant she fought it, and then was enveloped, stricken by the ease with which she was exposed. She was in his fortress. She was his, it was made known to her. She would be smashed on the anvil of his hate.

  It ended, as suddenly as it had begun. Her sight returned, slowly, blurred; her whole body trembled violently, she had no control over it. She turned her head and saw Rakoth.

  She had vowed not to cry out, but all vows in this place were as nothing before what he was.

  From out of time he had come, from beyond the Weaver’s Halls, and into the pattern of the Tapestry. A presence in all the worlds he was, but incarnate here in Fionavar, which was the First, the one that mattered.

  Here he had set his feet upon the Ice, and so made the northland the place of his power, and here he had raised up jagged Starkadh. And when it was full-wrought, a claw, a cancer in the north, he had risen to the topmost tower and screamed his name that the wind might bear it to the tamed gods whom he feared not, being stronger by far than any one of them.

  Rakoth Maugrim, the Unraveller.

  It was Cernan, the stag-horned forest god, who set the trees whispering in mockery of that claim, and in mockery they named him otherwise: Sathain, the Hooded One, and Mörnir of the Thunder sent lightning down to drive him from the tower.

  And all the while the lios alfar, newly wakened, sang in Daniloth of Light, and Light was in their eyes, their name, and he hated them with an undying hate.

  Too soon had he attacked, though the years may have seemed long to mortal men. And indeed there were men in Fionavar then, for Iorweth had come from oversea, in answer to a dream sent by Mörnir with sanction of the Mother, to found Paras Derval in Brennin by the Summer Tree, and his son had ruled, and his son’s son, and then Conary had ascended to the throne.

  And in that time had Rakoth come down in fury from the Ice.

  And after bitter war been beaten back. Not by the gods—for in the waiting time, the Weaver had spoken, the first and only time he had done so. He said that the worlds had not been woven to be a battleground for powers outside of time, and that if Maugrim were to be mastered, it would be by the Children, with only mildest intercession of the gods. And it had been so. They had bound him under the Mountain, though he could not die, and they had shaped the wardstones to burn red if he but assayed the smallest trial of his powers.