She looked at Jen and saw the same thought in her face. Then she looked down at the Baelrath again and said, “You will not get there in time. ”
Even now, even after so much had happened, it was with a deep humility that she registered the instant silence that descended over those gathered there when the Seer within her spoke. When she looked up, it was to meet the single eye of Matt Sören.
“I must try,” he said simply.
“I know,” she replied. “And Loren is right as well, I think. It does matter, somehow, that you try. But I can tell you you will not get there in time from this place.”
“What are you saying?” It was Diarmuid who asked, his voice stripped of nuance as Jaelle’s had been, pared clean to the simple question.
Kim held up her hand, so they could all see the flame. “I’m saying I’ll have to go there too. That the Baelrath will have to take us there. And I think all of us know by now that the Warstone is a mixed blessing, at the very best.” She tried hard to keep the bitterness from her voice.
She almost succeeded, too. But in the stillness that followed, someone asked, “Kim, what happened in the mountains?”
She turned to Paul Schafer, who had asked the question, who always seemed to ask the questions that went below the surface. She looked at him, and then at Loren, beside Paul, gazing at her with the mix of gentleness and strength that she remembered from the beginning, and then, most vividly, from the night they’d shared in the Temple, before Kevin had died. Before she went to Khath Meigol.
So it was to the two of them, so different yet so much alike in some inexplicable way, that she told the story of the rescue of the Paraiko and what had followed. Everyone heard, everyone had to know, but it was to Loren and Paul that she spoke. And it was to Matt that she turned, at the end, to repeat, “And so you see what I mean: whatever blessing I carry will not be unmixed.” For a moment he looked at her, as if considering the point. Then his expression changed; she saw his mouth move in the grimace that she knew to be his smile and heard him say wryly, “No blade I have ever known to be worth anything at all has had only a single edge.” That was all, but she knew those quiet words were all the reassurance she had any right to seek.
Inclination matched training in the High Priestess of Dana. And so Jaelle, cold in the falling rain, chilled by what had happened with Darien and what was happening now, since the shipwreck, showed nothing at all of her apprehension to anyone on the strand.
She knew, being what she was, that it had been the voice of Mórnir that had thundered to still the waves, and so her gaze was on Pwyll first, of all of them, when he came ashore. She remembered him standing on another beach, far to the south, speaking with Liranan in a perilous light that came not from the moon. He was alive, though, and had come back. She supposed she was pleased about that.
They had all come back, it seemed, and there was someone new with them, and it was not hard to tell, from Jennifer’s face, who this was.
She had made herself cold and hard, but she was not stone, however she might try to be. Pity and wonder had moved her equally to see Guinevere and Lancelot stand together in the rain, as the setting sun slanted through disappearing clouds low in the west.
She had not heard what they said to each other, but the language of gesture was plain, and, at the end, when the man walked away alone into the Wood, Jaelle found herself unexpectedly grieved. She watched him go, knowing the history, not finding it hard at all to guess what distancing quest Guinevere had now imposed upon her second love. What was hard was to preserve her own necessary image of detachment—in the presence of so many men, and in the turbulent wake of what had happened in the Temple before she had taken Kim and Sharra away, with blood and the earthroot tapped.