He did not know, huddled in the shadow of a leaning boulder on the cold ground of Andarien, that he was crying in his sleep. Nor did he know that all night long his hand kept returning to the lifeless gem bound about his brow, reaching, reaching out for something, finding no response.
“Do you know,” said Diarmuid, gazing east with an enigmatic expression, “this is almost enough to make one believe in fraternal instincts, after all.”
Beside him on the banks of the River Celyn, Paul remained silent. Across the northwestern spur of the lake the army was coming. They were too far off yet for him to make out individual details, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Diarmuid, for all the reflexive irony of his words, had indeed been right.
Aileron had not waited, for them or for anyone. He had carried this war to Maugrim. The army of the High King was in Andarien again, a thousand years after it had last swept through these wild, desolate highlands. And waiting for them in the late-afternoon light was his brother, with Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, with Sharra of Cathal, and Jaelle, the High Priestess, with the men of South Keep who had manned Prydwen, and with Pwyll Twiceborn, Lord of the Summer Tree.
For what, Paul thought, that last was worth. It didn’t, at the moment, feel like much. He should be used to this by now, he knew: this sense of latency without control. Of holding power without harnessing it. He remembered Jaelle’s words on the rocks, and he was acutely aware that she was right—aware of how much his difficulties were caused by his own overdeveloped need for controlling things. Particularly himself. All of this was true; it made sense; he even understood it. It didn’t make him feel any better, though. Not now, not so near to whatever ending lay in wait, whatever future toward which they were toiling.
“He has the Dwarves with him!” keen-eyed Brendel suddenly cried.
“Now that,” said Diannuid sharply, “is news!”
It was. “Matt succeeded, then!” Paul exclaimed. “Do you see him, Brendel?”
The silver-haired lios alfar scanned the distant army. “Not yet,” he murmured, “but . . . yes. It has to be her! The Seer is with the High King. No one else has her white hair.”
Paul looked quickly over at Jennifer. She returned his glance and smiled. It was strange, he thought, in some ways it was the strangest thing of all, how she could be at once so different, so remote, so much Guinevere of Camelot, Arthur’s Queen, Lancelot’s love, and then, a moment later, with the quickness of a smile, be Jennifer Lowell again, sharing his own flash of joy at Kimberly’s return.
“Should we walk around the lake to meet them?” Arthur asked.
Diarmuid shook his head with exaggerated decisiveness. “They have horses,” he said pointedly, “and we have been walking all day. If Brendel can see them, then the lios alfar in the army can see us. There are limits, I’m afraid, to how far I will stumble over those rocks in order to meet a brother who didn’t bother to wait for me!”
Lancelot laughed. Glancing over at him, Paul was hit with a renewed sense of awe and, predictably, by another wave of his own frustrated impotence.
Lancelot had been waiting for them here, sitting patiently under the trees, as they had walked up along the river two hours ago. In the gentle restraint of his greeting of Guinevere, and then of Arthur, Paul had glimpsed again the depths of the grief that bound these three. It was not an easy thing to watch.
And then Lancelot had told, sparely, without inflection, the tale of his night battle with the demon in the sacred grove for the life of Darien. He made it sound prosaic, almost a negligible event. But every man and the three women there could see the wounds and burns of that battle, the price he had paid.
For what? Paul didn’t know. None of them did, not even Jennifer. And there had been nothing at all to be read in her eyes as Lancelot told of freeing the owl in Daniloth and watching it fly north: the random thread in this weaving of war.