Kim began to feel the first pulsings of a migraine behind her eyes. Blocking it as best she could, she focused hard on what Matt was saying.
“When March, to whom I was sister-son, died, I gathered what courage I had—a youthful courage it was, I confess—and according to the ritual, I shaped a crystal of my own devising and dropped it as a token of intention in Crystal Lake on new moon night.
“Two weeks later the door from Banir Tal, which is the one entrance to the meadow by Calor Diman, was opened for me and then bolted behind my back.”
Matt’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. “I saw the full moon rise above that lake,” he said. “I saw many things besides. I … did not go mad. In the end I offered and was bound to the waters. They crowned me King two days after.”
It was building up to a grandfather of a headache, Kim realized. She sat down on the steps before the throne and put her head in her hands, listening, straining to concentrate.
“I did not fail by the lake,” Matt said, and they could all hear the bitterness, “but in every other way I did fail, for the Dwarves were not what once we had been.”
“Not your fault,” Brock murmured, looking up. “Oh, my lord, truly not your fault.”
Matt was silent a moment, then shook his head in rejection. “I was King,” he said shortly. Just like that, Kevin thought. He looked at Aileron.
But Matt was continuing. “Two things the Dwarves have always had,” he said. “A knowledge of secret things in the earth, and a lust to know more.
“In the last days of King March, a faction formed within our halls around two brothers, foremost of our artisans. Their desire, which became a passion and then, in the first weeks of my reign, a crusade, was to find and unlock the secrets of a dark thing: the Cauldron of Khath Meigol.”
A murmur rose in the hall at that. Kim had her eyes closed; there was a lot of pain, and the light was hurting now, lancing against her eyeballs. She bent all her will to Matt. What he was saying was too important to lose because of a headache.
“I ordered them to stop,” the Dwarf said. “They did, or so I thought. But then I found Kaen, the older, combing the oldest books again, and his brother had gone away without my leave. I grew wrathful then, and in my folly and pride I called a gathering of all Dwarves in the Moot Hall and demanded they choose between Kaen’s desires and my own, which were to let the black thing lie where it was lost, while we moved from spells and powers of the old ways and sought the Light I had been shown by the lake.
“Kaen spoke after me. He said many things. I do not care to repeat them before—”
“He lied!” Brock exclaimed fiercely. “He lied and he lied again!”
Matt shrugged. “He did it well, though. In the end the Dwarfmoot chose that he be allowed to go on with his search, and they voted as well that all our energies should be bent to his aid. I threw down my sceptre,” Matt Sören said. “I left the Moot Hall, and the twin mountains, and I vowed I would not come back. They might search for the key to this dark thing, but not while I was King under Banir Lök.”
God, it was hurting. Her skin felt too tight. Her mouth was dry. She pressed her hands to her eyes and held her head as motionless as she could.
“Wandering in the mountains and the wooded slopes that summer,” Matt continued, “I met Loren, who was not yet Silvercloak, nor yet a mage, though his training was done. What passed between us is still matter for we two alone, but in the end I told the one lie of my life to him, because it involved a pain I had resolved to bear alone.
“I told Loren that I was free to become his source, that I wanted nothing more. And indeed, there was already something woven into our coming together. A night by Calor Diman had taught me to see that. But it had given me something else—something I lied about. Loren could not have known it. Indeed, until I met Kimberly, I thought no one who was not a Dwarf could know this thing.”
Kim lifted her head, feeling the movement like a knife. They would be looking at her, though, so she opened her eyes for a moment, trying to mask the nausea flooding over her. When she thought no one was watching, she closed her eyes again. It was very bad, and getting worse.
“When the King is bound to Crystal Lake,” Matt was explaining softly, “he is forever bound. There is no breaking it. He may leave but he is not free. The lake is in him like another heartbeat and it never stops calling. I lie down at night fighting this and rise up in the morning fighting it, and it is with me through the day and the evening and will be until I die. This is my burden, and it is mine alone, and I would have you know, else I would not have spoken before you, that it was freely chosen and is not regretted.”
The Great Hall was silent as Matt Sören fixed each of them in challenge with his one dark eye. All but Kim, who couldn’t even look up now. She was seriously wondering if she was going to pass out.
“Brock,” said Matt at length, “you have tidings for us. Are you able to tell them now?”
The other Dwarf looked at him, and, noting the regained composure in his eyes, Kevin realized that there had been a second reason why Matt had spoken first and at length.
Within himself, he still felt the deep hurting of Sören’s tale, and it was as an echo of his own thought that he heard Brock murmur, “My King, will you not come back to us? It has been forty years.”
But Matt was ready for it this time; once only would he expose his soul. “I am,” he said, “source to Loren Silvercloak, First Mage to the High King of Brennin. Kaen is King of the Dwarves. Tell us your news, Brock.”
Brock looked at him. Then said, “I would not add to your burdens, but I must tell you that what you say is untrue. Kaen reigns in Banir Lök, but he is not King.”
Matt raised a hand. “Do you tell me he has not slept by Calor Diman?”
“I do. We have a ruler, but not a King, unless it be you, my lord.”
“Oh, by Seithr’s memory!” Matt Sören cried. “How far have we fallen from what we were?”
“Very far,” Brock said in a harsh whisper. “They found the Cauldron at the last. They found it and restored it.”
There was something in his voice; something terrible.
“Yes?” Matt said.
“There was a price,” Brock whispered. “Kaen needed help in the end.”
“Yes?” Matt said again.
“A man came. Metran was his name, a mage from Brennin, and together he and Kaen unlocked the power of the Cauldron. Kaen’s soul, I think, had been twisted utterly by then. There was a price and he paid it.”
“What price?” asked Matt Sören.
Kim knew. Pain was splintering her mind.
“He broke the wardstone of Eridu,” said Brock, “and delivered the Cauldron to Rakoth Maugrim. We did it, my King. The Dwarves have freed the Unraveller!” And casting his cloak over his face, Brock wept as if his heart would break.
In the uproar that followed, the terror and the fury, Matt Sören turned slowly, very slowly, as if the world were a calm, still place, and looked at Loren Silvercloak, who was looking back at him.
We will have our battle, Loren had said the night before. Never fear. And now, most terribly, it was clear what that battle would be.
Her head was being torn apart. There were white detonations within her brain. She was going to scream.
“What is it?” a voice whispered urgently at her side.
A woman, but not Sharra. It was Jaelle who knelt beside her. She was too agonized to feel surprise. Leaning on the other woman, she whispered on a thin-stretched note, “Don’t know. My head. As if—something’s crashing in—I don’t—”
“Open your eyes,” Jaelle commanded. “Look at the Baelrath!”
She did. The pain was almost blinding. But she could see the stone on her hand throbbing with red fire, pulsing to the rhythm of the explosions behind her eyes, and looking into it, her hand held close to her face, Kim saw something else then, a face, a name written in fire, a room, a crescendo of dark, of Dark, and—
“Jennifer!” she screamed. “Oh, Jen, no!”
She was on her feet. The ring was a wild, burning, uncontrollable thing. She staggered, but Jaelle supported her. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she screamed again, “Loren! I need you!”
Kevin was there. “Kim? What?”
She shook her head, tore away from his touch. She was blind with agony; she could scarcely speak. “Dave,” she scraped. “Paul. Come on … the circle. Now!” There was so much urgency. They seemed to move so slowly, and Jen, Jen, oh, Jen. “Come on!” she screamed again.
Then they were around her, the three of them, and Loren and Matt, unquestioning, were beside them. And she held up the ring again, instinctively, and opening herself, her mind, cutting through the claws of pain she found Loren and linked to him and then—oh, a gift—Jaelle was there as well, tapping into the avarlith for her, and with the two of them as ballast, as bedrock, she cast her mind, her soul, to its farthest, most impossible compassing. Oh, far, and there was so much Dark between, so much hate, and oh, so very great a power in Starkadh to stay her.
But there was also a spar of light. A dying spar, so nearly gone, but it was there, and Kim reached with everything she had, with all she was, to the lost island of that light and she found Jennifer.
“Oh, love,” she said, inside and aloud, “Oh, love, I’m here. Come!”
The Baelrath was unleashed, it was so bright they had to close their eyes against the blazing of that wildest magic as Kimberly pulled them out, and out, all the way out, with Jennifer held to the circle only by her mind, the spar, pride, last dying light, and love.
Then as the shimmering grew in the Great Hall, and the humming before the crossing time, as they started to go, and the cold of the space between worlds entered the five of them, Kim drew one breath again and cried the last desperate warning, not knowing, oh not, if she was heard:
“Aileron, don’t attack! He’s waiting in Starkadh!”
And then it was cold, cold, and completely dark, as she took them through alone.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In a labour of daunting scope an equally daunting accumulation of debts seems to have evolved. Not all can be recorded here, but there are some people who should be given their place at the beginning of the Tapestry. I would like to thank Sue Reynolds for the rendered image of Fionavar, and my agents, John Duff, who first represented the book, and Linda McKnight, who followed him as both agent and friend. Alberto Manguel and Barbara Czarnecki lent their editorial skills, and Daniel Shapiro found me a Brahms sonata and helped shape a song. Finally, and most profoundly, I must name here my parents, my brothers, and Laura. With love.
About the Author
GUY GAVRIEL KAY is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost fantasy authors. His most recent novels include Ysabel, winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and Under Heaven, named by the American Library Association as the best fantasy novel of 2010 and winner of Canada’s Sunburst Award. He is a two-time Aurora Award winner and the recipient of the International Goliardos Prize. His works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, with millions of copies sold around the world. Kay lives in Toronto with his family.
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Praise
Acclaim for Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry
“I can’t praise it enough. The Fionavar Tapestry is a work that will be read for many years to come. It is a book that makes one proud to be working in the same genre as its author.”
—Charles de Lint
“As fine a piece of fantasy as has been published for some time.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The only fantasy work … which does not suffer by comparison to The Lord of the Rings.”
—Interzone (UK)
“A highly literate, lovingly detailed work of fantasy.”
—Fantasy Review
“Kay’s intricate Celtic background will please fantasy buffs … in the manner of The Silmarillion, the posthumous Tolkien work that Kay helped edit.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A grand galloping narrative…. Reverberates with centuries of mythic and incantatory implications.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Excellent fantasy reading…. The Fionavar Tapestry will deserve a place among the best of fantasy.”
—Regina Leader-Post
“A richly imagined tale.”
—The Hamilton Spectator
“A story so intricately satisfying that I half believe it was written before history began.”
—Alberto Manguel
“A remarkable achievement…. The essence of high fantasy.”
—Locus
“Kay is a genius. I’ve read him all of my life and am always inspired by his work.”
—Brandon Sanderson
“One of those rare books that change your perception of the world forever afterward.”
—Marion Zimmer Bradley
“Kay’s bestselling—and stunning—fantasy trilogy finds its power not in its feats of imagination or world-building (though there are dazzling heapings of both) but from its rootedness in the reality of human emotions and relationships.”
—The Globe and Mail
“As captivating as any classic of the fantasy field.”
—Maclean’s
“Can be compared only with Tolkien’s masterpiece. This is a series to cherish and reread…. It delights the spirit.”
—The Star-Phoenix
Credits
www.harpercollins.ca
www.authortracker.ca
Cover art by Janny Wurts and Don Maitz
Copyright
The Summer Tree
Copyright © 1984 by Guy Gavriel Kay.
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EPub Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-41604-7
Published by Harper Weekend, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
First published in hardcover by McClelland & Stewart Limited: 1984. First published in paperback by Collins Publishers: 1986. First HarperCollins Publishers Ltd paperback edition: 1992. Omnibus paperback edition: 1995. 20th Anniversary paperback edition: 2004. This Harper Weekend paperback edition: 2012.
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Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree
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