Be calm, he sent inwardly, though he was anything but calm himself. I will go down. I will deal with this.
To the others, to the lios alfar and the woman he’d known as Guinevere, he said grimly, “Someone has come, and Galadan is on his way to this place even now.”
He saw a look pass between the two of them, and he felt the tightening of tension in the room. He thought they were mirroring his own anxiety, knowing nothing of the memory they shared of the Wolflord in a wood east of Paras Derval a little more than a year ago.
“Are you expecting anyone?” he demanded. “Who would follow you here?”
“Who could follow us here?” Brendel replied quickly. There was suddenly a new brightness to the lios, as if he had shed a cloak and his true nature was shining through. “No one has come by sea; we would have seen them—and how could anyone pass through the forest?”
“Someone stronger than the Wood,” Flidais replied, vexed at the hint of apprehension that reached his voice.
Brendel was already by the stairwell. “Jennifer, wait here. We will go down and deal with this. Lock the door after us, and open only to one of our voices.” He loosened his short sword in its scabbard as he spoke, then turned to Flidais, “How long before Galadan arrives?”
The andain sent the query out to the Wood and relayed the answer back, “Half an hour, perhaps less. He is running very fast, in his wolf shape.”
“Will you help me?” Brendel asked him directly.
This was, of course, the question. The andain rarely cared for the affairs of mortals, and even more rarely intervened in them. But Flidais had a purpose here, his oldest, deepest purpose, and so he temporized. “I will go down with you. I told the forest I would see who this was.”
Jennifer had gone very pale again, Brendel saw, but her hands were steady and her head very high, and once more he marveled at her sheer, unwavering courage as she said, “I will come down. Whoever is here has come because of me; it may be a friend.”
“It may not be,” Brendel replied gravely.
“Then I should be no safer in this room,” she answered calmly, and paused at the head of the curving stairs waiting for him to lead her down. One more moment he hesitated, then his eyes went green, exactly the color of her own. He took her hand and brought it to his forehead and then his lips before turning to descend, sword drawn now, his tread quick and light on the stone stairs. She followed, and Flidais behind her, his mind racing with calculations, boiling over with considerations and possibilities and a frantically stifled excitement.
They saw Darien standing by the river as soon as they stepped out onto the beach.
The wind carried lashings of sea spray that stung when they struck, and the sky had grown darker even in the moments of their descent. It was purple now, shot through with streaks of red, and thunder was rolling out at sea beyond the rising waves.
But for Brendel of the lios alfar, who immediately recognized who had come, none of this even registered. Quickly he spun around, to fling some warning to Jennifer, to give her time to prepare herself. Then he saw from her expression that she didn’t need his warning. She knew, already, who this boy standing before them was. He looked at her face, wet now with ocean spray, and stepped aside as she moved forward toward the river where Darien stood.
Flidais came up beside him, droplets of spray glittering on his bald head, an avid curiosity in his face. Brendel became aware of the sword he carried, and he sheathed it silently. Then he and the andain watched mother and child come together for the first time since the night Darien was born.
An overwhelming awareness filled Brendel’s mind of how many things might lie in the balance here. He would never forget that afternoon by the Summer Tree, and the words of Cernan: Why was he allowed to live? He thought of that, he thought of Pwyll, far out at sea, and he was conscious every moment of Cernan’s son, running toward them even now, as fast as the gathering storm and more dangerous.