Kim shifted her glance and saw the ghost of a smile tracing the edges of Jennifer’s mouth. She swallowed. “She knows me pretty well,” she said ruefully.
“And me,” he answered calmly. “She knows me very well, and the dispensation she gave you was also mine. The one you know as Flidais was Taliesin once—we both knew him a very long time ago. He is clearly part of the story, though I am not certain how. Seer, do not despair of brightness flowering from what you had to do.”
There was so much comfort in his voice, in the calm, accepting eyes. In the face of this it would be hubris, mere vanity, to hold to her self-condemnation. She said, diffidently, “He said it was his heart’s desire. The last riddle he did not know. He said . . . he said he would make light from the darkness of what he had done or die trying to do so.”
There was a little silence, as the other two absorbed this. Kim listened to the surf coming in, so gentle now after the wildness of the storm. Then they sensed rather than heard someone approaching, and the three of them glanced up at Brendel.
He seemed more ethereal than ever in the starlight, less tied to the earth, to the pull of gravity. In the dark they could not see the color of his eyes, but they were not shining. He said, in a voice like the whisper of the breeze. “My lady Guinevere, with your permission, I must leave you now for a time. It is . . . it is now my task, over and above all else I am afraid, to carry the tidings I have just heard to my King in Daniloth.”
Jennifer opened her mouth to reply, but another voice made answer to the lios alfar.
“He is not there,” said Jaelle, from behind them. Her hard voice, usually so imperious, was muted now, more mild than Kim had thought it could be. “There was a battle two nights ago by the banks of the Adein, near Celidon. The Dalrei and the men of Rhoden met an army of the Dark, and Ra-Tenniel led the lios alfar out of the Shadow land, Na-Brendel. He led them to war on the Plain.”
“And?” It was Loren Silvercloak.
Kimberly listened as Jaelle, stripped of her usual arrogance, told the tale of how Leila had heard the blowing of Owein’s Horn, and seen the battlefield through Finn’s presence there, and then how all of them in the Temple had heard Ceinwen intercede. “The High King rode north in response to the summonglass the night Prydwen set sail,” she concluded. “They will all be on the Plain by now, though what they will do I know not. Perhaps Loren can reach for Teyrnon and answer that for us.”
It was the first time Kim could remember that High Priestess speaking so to the mage.
Then, a moment later, she learned that Loren wasn’t a mage any longer. And even as the tale was being told the ring on her finger began to glow with returning life. She looked down upon it, fighting hard against the now-instinctive aversion she felt, and within her mind, as Loren and then Diarmuid spoke of Cader Sedat, an image began to coalesce.
It was an image she remembered, the first vision she’d ever had in Fionavar, on the path to Ysanne’s Lake: a vision of another lake, high among mountains, with eagles flying over it.
Loren said quietly, “The circles, it seems, have been made complete. It is now my task to go with Matt to Banir Lok, to help him regain the Crown that he never truly lost, so that the Dwarves may be brought back from the edge of the Dark.”
“We have a long way to go,” Matt Sören said, “and not a great deal of time. We will have to set out tonight.” He sounded exactly as he always had. Kim had a sense that nothing, absolutely nothing, would ever make him other than he was: the rock upon which all of them, it seemed, had rested at one time or another.