She had let him hold her, had simulated embarrassed dismay when the guards had come up to them, and had smiled and pouted mutely, as instructed, while Kevin launched into his frantic, incoherent explanation.
Then she had felt the gathering and the cold, as Kim took hold of them, and now they were in this room, their first room in Paras Derval, and it was night again.
The tapestry was the same and the torches were blazing this time, so they could make it out properly: the dazzlingly crafted depiction of Iorweth the Founder in the Godwood, before the Summer Tree. Jennifer, Kevin, and Dave glanced at it, then all three of them looked, instinctively, at Paul.
Scarcely pausing to acknowledge the tapestry, he moved quickly to the unguarded doorway. There had been a guard the last time, Jennifer remembered, and Matt Sören had thrown a knife.
This time, Paul stepped into the corridor and called softly. There was a noisy clatter of weaponry, and a moment later a terrified boy, in gear a size too large for him, came forward down the corridor with a bow drawn none too steadily.
“I know you,” said Paul, ignoring the bow. “You’re Tarn. You were the King’s page. Do you remember me?”
The bow was lowered. “I do, my lord. From the ta’bael game. You are …” There was awe in the boy’s face.
“I am Pwyll, yes,” Schafer said simply. “Are you a guard now, Tarn?”
“Yes, my lord. I am too old to be a page.”
“So I see. Is the High King in the palace tonight?”
“Yes, my lord. Shall I—”
“Why don’t you lead us to him,” Paul said. It was Kevin who heard, and remembered hearing before, the crisp tone in Schafer’s voice. There had been an undeniable tension between Paul and Aileron when last they had met. Apparently it still existed.
They followed the boy through a web of corridors and down one drafty flight of stone stairs before they came at length to a pair of doors that only Paul remembered.
Tarn knocked and withdrew; after a startled glance, a tall guard admitted them.
The room had changed, Paul saw. The gorgeous wall hangings had been taken down, and in their place had been hung a sequence of maps and charts. Gone, too, were the deep armchairs he remembered; in their place were a number of hard wooden seats and a long bench.
The chessboard with its exquisitely carved pieces was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a huge table stood in the middle of the room and on it lay an enormous map of Fionavar. Bent over the map, his back to the door, stood a man of average height, simply dressed in brown, with a fur vest over his shirt against the cold.
“Who is it, Shain?” the man said, not pausing in his scrutiny of the map.
“If you turn around you can see for yourself,” Paul Schafer said before the guard could make reply.
And, very fast, Aileron did turn, almost before Paul’s voice died away. His eyes above the beard blazed with an intensity three of them remembered.
“Mörnir be praised!” the High King exclaimed, taking a few quick steps towards them. Then he stopped and his face changed. He looked from one to another. “Where is she?” cried Aileron dan Ailell. “Where is my Seer?”
“She’s coming,” Kevin said, moving forward. “She’s bringing someone with her.”
“Who?” Aileron snapped.
Kevin looked at Paul, who shook his head. “She’ll tell you herself, if she succeeds. I think it is hers to tell, Aileron.”
The King glared at Paul as if minded to pursue it further, but then his face softened. “Very well,” he said “So long as she is coming. I have … very great need of her.” After a moment a wry tone came into his voice. “I am bad at this, am I not? You deserve a fairer greeting, all of you. And is this Jennifer?”
He came to stand before her. She remembered his brother and their first meeting. This one, austere and self-contained, did not call her a peach, nor did he bend to kiss her hand. Instead, he said awkwardly, “You have suffered in our cause, and I am sorry for it. Are you well now?”
“Well enough,” she said. “I’m here.”
His eyes searched hers. “Why?” Aileron asked.
A good question and one nobody had asked her, not even Kim. There was an answer, but she wasn’t about to give it now to this abrasive young King of Brennin. “I’ve come this far,” she said levelly, meeting his look with her own light green eyes. “I’ll stay the course.”
Men better versed in dealing with women had broken off a stare when faced with Jennifer’s gaze. Aileron turned away. “Good,” he said, walking back to the map on the table. “You can help. You will have to tell us everything you remember of Starkadh.”
“Hey!” Dave Martyniuk said. “That’s not fair. She was badly hurt there. She’s trying to forget!”
“We need to know,” Aileron said. Men, he could outface.
“And you don’t care how you find out?” Kevin asked, a dangerous quality in his voice.
“Not really,” the King replied. “Not in this war.”
The silence was broken by Jennifer. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll tell what I can remember. But not to you”—she indicated the King—”or any of the rest of you either, I’m afraid. I’ll talk about it to Loren and Matt. No one else.”
The mage had grown older since last they had seen him. There was more white among the grey of his beard and hair, deeper lines in his face. His eyes were the same as ever, though: commanding and compassionate at the same time. And Matt Sören hadn’t changed at all, not even the Dwarf’s twisted grimace that passed for a smile.
They all recognized it for what it was, though, and after the brittleness of Aileron the greeting they received from mage and source marked, for all of them, their true return to Fionavar. When Matt took her hand between his own two calloused ones, Jennifer cried.
“We never knew,” Loren Silvercloak said, a roughness in his voice. “We didn’t know if she pulled you out. And only Jaelle heard the last warning about Starkadh. It saved many lives. We would have attacked.”
“And then the winter came,” Aileron said. “And there was no hope of attack or anything. We’ve been unable to do anything at all.”
“We can offer wine to our guests,” the Dwarf said tartly.
“Shain, find some cups and serve anyone who wants it,” Aileron said absently. “We need Kim badly,” he went on. “We have to find out how Maugrim is controlling the winter—it was not a thing he could ever do before. The lios have confirmed that.”
“He’s making it worse?” Paul asked soberly.
There was a silence. Loren broke it. “You don’t understand,” he said softly. “He is making it. He has twisted the seasons utterly. These snows have been here for nine months, Pwyll. In six nights it will be Midsummer’s Eve.”
They looked out the window. There was ice on the glass. It was snowing again, and a bitter wind was howling about the walls. Even with two fires blazing in the room and torches everywhere, it was very cold.
“Oh, God!” said Dave abruptly. “What’s happening to the Dalrei?”
“They are gathered near the Latham,” Loren said. “The tribes and the eltor.”
“Just in that corner?” Dave exclaimed. “The whole Plain is theirs!”
“Not now,” Aileron said, and there was helpless anger in his voice. “Not while this winter lasts.”
“Can we stop it?” Kevin asked.
“Not until we know how he is doing it,” Loren replied.
“And so you want Kim?” Paul said. He had walked away from the others to stand by the window.
“And someone else. I want to bring Gereint here, Ivor’s shaman. To see if all of us together can break through the screen of ice and snow to find their source. If we do not,” the mage said, “we may lose this war before it begins. And we must not lose this war.”
Aileron said nothing. It was all in his eyes.
“All right,” said Jennifer carefully. “Kim’s on her way, I think. I hope. In the meantime, I guess I have some things t
o tell Loren and Matt.”
“Now?” Kevin asked.
“Why not?” She smiled, though not an easy smile. “I’ll just take some of that wine, Shain. If nobody minds.”
She and the mage and his source withdrew into an inner chamber. The others looked at each other.
“Where’s Diarmuid?” Kevin said suddenly.
“Where do you think?” Aileron replied.
About half an hour earlier, shortly after Matt and Loren had left for the palace, Zervan of Seresh had lain in his bed in the mages’ quarters, not sleeping.
He had no real duties left: he had built up the front-room fire to a level that should last the night, and he knew that if Brock returned before the other two, he’d build it up again for them.
It was never a hard life being servant to the mages. He had been with them now for twenty years, ever since they had told him he was not cut from mage cloth himself. It hadn’t been a surprise; he’d sensed it very early. But he had liked all three of them—even, though it was a bitter memory, Metran, who had been clever before he had been old, before he turned out to be a traitor. He had liked Paras Derval, too, the energy of the town, the nearness of the palace. It was nice being at the centre of things.
When Teyrnon had asked him, Zervan had been pleased to stay on and serve the mages.
Over twenty years the original liking had grown to something akin to love. The four of them who were left, Loren and Teyrnon, Matt and Barak, were the nearest to family that Zervan had, and he worried over them all with a fussy, compulsive eye for detail.
He had been briefly ruffled when Brock of Banir Tal had come to live with them a year before. But although the new Dwarf was obviously of high rank among his people, he was unobtrusive and undemanding, and Zervan quite approved of his manifest devotion to Matt Sören. Zervan had always thought Matt drove himself too hard, and it was good to have Brock around in support, sharing the same view.
It was from Brock that Zervan had come to understand the source of Matt’s occasional descents into deep moodiness and a silence that was marked even in one of taciturn nature. It was clear now to Zervan: Matt Sören, who had been King under Banir Lök, was silent and grim when he was fighting off the ceaseless pull of Calor Diman, the Crystal Lake. All Dwarf Kings, Brock had explained, spent a full moon night beside that lake between the twin mountains. If they survived what they saw, and were still sane, they could claim the Diamond Crown. And never, Brock said, never would they be free of the tidal pull of Calor Diman. It was this tide, Zervan understood, that so often pulled Loren’s source awake at night, around the time of the full moon, to pace his room with a measured tread, back and forth, unsleeping until dawn.
But tonight it was Zervan himself who could not sleep. Matt was in the palace with Loren. Brock, tactfully, had excused himself to go off to the Black Boar. He often did something like that, to leave mage and source alone. Zervan, alone in the house, was awake because, twice now, he had heard a sound from outside his window.
The third time Zervan swung out of bed, dressed himself, and went to take a look. Passing through the front room, he threw a few more pieces of wood on each of the fires and then took a stout stick to carry with him. Opening the door, he went out into the street.
It was bitterly cold. His breath frosted, and even through gloves he could feel his fingertips chilling. Only the wind greeted him, and the unnatural snow. He walked around the side of the house towards the back where the bedrooms were and from where he thought he’d heard a sound.
A cat, he thought, crunching through the snow between the house and the one next door. I probably heard a cat. There were no footprints in the snow ahead of him. Somewhat reassured, he rounded the corner at the back of the house.
He had time to see what it was, to feel his mind grapple with the impossibility, and to know why there were no footsteps in the snow.
He had no time to shout or scream or give any kind of warning at all.
A long finger reached out. It touched him and he died.
After the numbing wind and icy, treacherous streets, the heat of the Black Boar struck Kevin like an inferno. The tavern was packed with shouting, perspiring people. There were at least four huge fires blazing and a myriad of torches set high in the walls.
It was almost exactly as he remembered it: the dense, enveloping smoke, the smell of meat broiling over the cooking fires, and the steady, punishing level of noise. As the three of them pushed their way through the door, Kevin realized that the Boar seemed even more crowded than it was because most of the patrons were squeezed together in a wide circle around a cleared area in the middle of the tavern. The tables had been lifted from their trestles and overturned and benches had been stacked away to open a space.
With Dave serving as a massive battering ram, Kevin and Paul pushed through behind him towards the front of the crowd near the door. When they got there, amid jostling elbows and spilling beer, Kevin saw that there was a burly redheaded man in a ring formed by the crowd. The man was carrying a smaller figure seated on his shoulders.
Facing them, roaring belligerent defiance that somehow could be heard over the din, was that vast human mountain Tegid of Rhoden, and on his shoulders, laughing, was Diarmuid, Prince of Brennin.
Beginning to laugh himself, Kevin could see wagers flying all through the crowd as the two pairs warily circled each other. Even in wartime! he thought, looking at the Prince. People were standing on tables for a better view; others had gone upstairs to look down on the battle. Kevin spotted Carde and Erron, each with a fistful of wagers, standing on the bar. Beside them, after a second, he recognized Brock, the Dwarf who had brought them word of treachery in Eridu. He was older than Matt, with a lighter-coloured beard, and he was laughing aloud, which Matt Sören very seldom did. All eyes were on the combatants; not a soul had yet recognized the three of them.
“Yield, North Keep intruders!” Tegid roared. Abruptly, Kevin realized something.
“They’re Aileron’s men!” he shouted to Dave and Paul as Tegid launched himself in a stumbling, lurching run towards the other two.
The big man opposing him sidestepped neatly and Diarmuid, whooping with laughter, barely managed to dodge the grasp of the other rider, who was trying to pull him to the ground. Tegid terminated his run by crashing into a table on the far side of the ring, wreaking ruin among the spectators and almost unseating his rider.
Slowly he turned, breathing stertorously. Diarmuid lowered his head and spoke a series of instructions into the ear of his unstable mount. This time they advanced more cautiously, Tegid waddling wide-footed for balance on the rush-strewn floor.
“You drunken whale!” the opposing rider taunted him.
Tegid stopped his careful advance and eyed him with red-faced ire. Then, sucking air into the bellows of his lungs, he screamed, “Beer!” at a deafening volume. Immediately a girl dashed forward with two foaming pints and Diarmuid and Tegid each drained one in a long pull.
“Twelve!” Carde and Erron shouted together from the bar top. The match had obviously been going on for some time. Diarmuid tossed his tankard back to the serving girl while Tegid hurled his over his shoulder; a patron ducked quickly and tipped over the table on which he and four other men were standing. Had been standing. It was too much for Kevin Laine.
A moment later the North Keep duo were quite inexcusably thrown to the ground by an attack from behind. It hadn’t been subtle; they’d been simply run over. As the howls and screams rose to unprecedented levels, Kevin, mounted firmly on Dave’s broad shoulders, turned to the pair from the Boar.
“Have at you!” he cried.
But Tegid had other ideas. With a howl of joy, he rushed, open-armed, towards Dave, grabbed him in a titanic bear hug, and, quite unable to do anything so complex as stop, toppled the four of them to the floor in a tangled, sodden heap.
Once down, he commenced buffeting both of them with fierce blows intended to signify affection and pleasure, Kevin doubted not, but formidable en
ough to make the room spin for him. He was laughing breathlessly and trying to ward off Tegid’s exuberance when he heard Diarmuid whisper in his ear.
“Neatly done, friend Kevin.” The Prince was not even slightly impaired. “I would have hated to lose. But down here on the floor we have a problem.”
“What?” The tone had affected Kevin.
“I was keeping an eye on someone by the door for the last hour, perched up on Tegid. A stranger, I’m afraid. It wasn’t concerning me much because I rather hoped he’d report we were ill prepared for war.”
“What kind of stranger?”
“I was hoping to find out later. But if you’re here, it changes things. I don’t want him reporting that Kim and Paul are back.”
“Kim isn’t. Paul’s here.”
“Where?” said the Prince sharply.
“By the door.”
There were a lot of people surrounding them by then: Carde and Erron, Coll, quite a few women. By the time they fought through to the doorway it was too late to do anything.
Paul watched the fight with a certain bemusement. It seemed that nothing, really, could induce in Diarmuid a sense of responsibility. And yet the Prince was more than a wastrel; he had proved it too many times in the short while they’d been here in the spring for the issue to still be in doubt.
In the spring. Spring a year ago, actually, if midsummer was approaching; it was on that, and on the meaning of this savage, inflicted winter, that Paul was reflecting. In particular, on something he had noticed on the icy walk from palace to tavern.
So he was preoccupied with implications and abstractions even amid the pandemonium. With only half an eye he saw Kevin mount up on Dave’s shoulders and the two of them charge forward to down the North Keep pair from behind.
The roar that followed got his attention and he grinned, taking in the scene. Funny, manic Kevin Laine, in his own way quite as irrepressible as Diarmuid was, and as full of life.