The three figures in the center of the circle ignored him. Completely. It was as if he hadn’t even spoken. There was another silence, laden with unsaid things, with so many layers of time. A stir of wind blew Jennifer’s hair back from her face.
Arthur said, “My lady, I have known too many things for too long to ever deny Lancelot’s claim to be your champion. Or that, healthy, he is far more worthy than I to face this foe. Even so, I will not allow it now. Not this time, my love. You have asked him, sorely wounded, to take this upon himself, not for your sake, or his, but for mine. You have not asked him in love.”
Guinevere’s head snapped back. Her green eyes went wide and then they blazed with a naked, dazzling anger. She shook her head, so fiercely that the tears flew off her face, and in the voice of a Queen, a voice that froze and bound them into the power of the grief it carried, she cried aloud, “Have I not, my lord? And shall you tell me so? Would you tear open my flesh that all men here might probe into my heart as Maugrim did?”
Arthur flinched, as if stunned by a blow, but she was not done. With icy, relentless fury she said, “What man, even you, my lord, dares in my presence to say whether I have spoken in love or no?”
“Guinevere—” Lancelot began, but quailed in his turn as her burning glance swung to him.
“Not a word!” she snapped. “Not from you or anyone else!”
Arthur had slipped down from his horse. He knelt before her, pain raw as a wound in his face. He opened his mouth to speak.
And in that moment, precisely then, Paul became aware of an absence and he remembered the slight, breathless sound at his elbow a moment before, a sound he’d ignored.
But there was no one beside him anymore. He turned, his heart lurching, and looked north, along the downward-sloping path to where Uathach waited on the stony plain.
He saw. And then he heard, they all heard, as a ringing cry rose up, echoing in the twilight air between the armies of Light and Dark:
“For the Black Boar!” he heard. They all heard. “For the honor of the Black Boar!”
And thus did Diarmuid dan Ailell take Uathach’s challenge upon himself, riding forth alone on the horse his brother had brought for him, his sword uplifted high, his fair hair lit by the sunset, as he raced toward the dance his bright soul would not deny.
He was a master, Dave knew. Having fought beside Diarmuid at the winter skirmish by the Latham and then at the wolf hunt in Leinanwood, he had reason to know what Aileron’s brother could do. And Dave’s heart—halfway to his own battle fury—leaped to see Diarmuid’s first swiftly angled engagement of the urgach.
And then, an instant later, battle frenzy gave way to chilled grief. Because he remembered Uathach too, from the bloody banks of the Adein in the first battle of Kevin’s spring. And in his mind, replayed more vividly than such a memory should ever have been, he saw Maugrim’s white-clad urgach swing his colossal sword in one scything blow from the slaug’s saddle that had cleaved through Barth and Navon, both: the babies in the wood.
He remembered Uathach, and now he saw him again, and the memory, however grim, was less than the reality, far less. By the light of the setting sun, in that wasteland between armies, Diarmuid and his quick, clever horse met, with a thunder of hooves and a grinding shock of blades, a foe that was too much more than mortal for a mortal man to face.
The urgach was too large, too uncannily swift despite his massive bulk. And he was shrewder than any such creature could ever have been had it not been altered in some way within the confines of Starkadh. Beyond all this, the slaug was a deadly terror in and of itself. Constantly ripping with its curved horn, seeking the flesh of Diarmuid’s horse, running on four legs and lashing out with the other two, it was too dangerous for Diarmuid to do much more than evade, for fear that his own mount would be gorged or trampled, leaving him helpless on the barren ground. And because he couldn’t work in close, his slim blade could scarcely reach Uathach—though Diarmuid was a perilously easy target for the urgach’s huge black sword.