“Bravely done!” he said with bitter sarcasm. “A striving to remember! Never have I seen the rules so flouted in a challenge. Matt Sören, not even forty years away can justify the ignorance involved in your bringing an object into a striving! You knew the rules governing such things before you had seen ten summers. And you, Kaen! A ‘minor transgression’? How dare you speak a second time in a word-striving! What have we become that not even the oldest rules of our people are remembered and observed? Even to the extent”—he swung around to glare at Kimberly—“of having a guest speak in Seithr’s Hall during a challenge.”
This, she decided, was too much! Feeling her own pent-up fury, rising, she began a stinging retort and felt Loren’s punishing grip on her arm. She closed her mouth without saying a word, though her hands inside the pockets of her gown clenched into white fists.
Then she relaxed them, for Miach’s rage seemed to have spent itself with that brief, impassioned flurry. He seemed to shrink back again, no longer an infuriated patriarch but only an old man in troubled times, faced now with a very great responsibility.
He said, in a quieter, almost an apologetic voice, “It may be that the rules that were clear and important enough for all our Kings, from before Seithr down to March himself, are no longer paramount. It may be that none of the Dwarves have had to live through times so cloudy and confused as these. That a longing for clarity is only an old man’s wistfulness.”
Kim saw Matt shaking his head in denial. Miach did not notice. He was looking up at the lofty half-filled Hall. “It may be,” he repeated vaguely. “But even if it is, this striving is ended, and it is now for the Moot to judge. We will withdraw. You will all remain here”—the voice grew stronger again, with words of ritual—“until we have returned to declare the will of the Dwarfmoot. We give thanks for the counsel of your silence. It was heard and shall be given voice.”
He turned, and the others of the black-garbed Moot rose, and together they all withdrew from the stage, leaving Matt and Kaen standing there on either side of a table which held a shining Crown, and a shining Scepter, and a black sharp-edged fragment of the Cauldron of Khath Meigol.
Kim became aware that Loren’s hand was still squeezing her arm, very hard. He seemed to realize it in the same moment.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, easing but not releasing his grasp.
She shook her head. “I was about to say something stupid.”
This time the guards were careful not to test Loren’s patience by intervening again. Indeed, all about the Hall there was a rising swell of sound as the Dwarves, released from the bond of silence that had held them during the striving, began animatedly to discuss what had taken place. Only Matt and Kaen, motionless on the stage, not looking at each other, remained silent.
“Not stupid at all,” said Loren quietly. “You took a chance by speaking, but they needed to hear what you could do.”
Kim looked over at him with sudden dismay. His eyes narrowed at the sight of her consternation.
“What is it?” he whispered, careful not to be overheard.
Kim said nothing. Only withdrew her right hand slowly from its pocket, so that he could see what, clearly, he hadn’t seen before—the terrible absence of fire, the Baelrath gone.
He looked, and then he closed his eyes. She put her hand back in her pocket.
“When?” Loren asked, his voice thin and stretched.
“When we were ambushed. I felt it being taken. I woke this morning without it.”
Loren opened his eyes and looked at the stage, at Kaen. “I wonder,” he murmured. “I wonder how he knew.”
Kim shrugged. It hardly seemed to matter at this point. What mattered was that, as things stood, Kaen had been quite accurate in what he’d told the Dwarves. If the army was west of the mountains, there was nothing they could do to stop them now from fighting among the legions of the Dark.