She was silent.
“Aren’t we two human beings first?” he went on. “With very great burdens, and support to share. You are Jaelle, surely, as well as her Priestess.”
“There you are wrong,” she said. “I am only her Priestess. There is no one else.”
“That seems to me very sad.”
“You are only a man,” Jaelle replied, and Paul was abashed by what blazed in her eyes before she turned and left the room.
Kim had lain awake for most of the night, alone in her room in the palace, achingly aware of the other, empty bed. Even inside, the Baelrath was responding to the moon, glowing brightly enough to cast shadows on the wall: a branch outside the window swaying in the rain wind, the outline of her own white hair, the shape of a candle by the bed, but no Jen, no shadow of her. Kim tried. Utterly unaware of what her power was, of how to use the stone, she closed her eyes and reached out in the wild night, north as far as she might, as clearly as she might, and found only the darkness of her own apprehensions.
When the stone grew dim again, only a red ring on her finger, she knew the moon had set. It was very late then, little left of the night. Kim lay back in weariness and dreamt of a desire she hadn’t known she had.
It is in your dreams that you must walk, Ysanne had said, was saying still, as she dropped far down into the dream again.
And this time she knew the place. She knew where lay those jumbled mighty arches of broken stone, and who was buried there for her to wake.
Not him, not the one she sought. Too easy, were it so. That path was darker even than it was now, and it led through the dead in the dreaming place. This she now knew. It was very sad, though she understood that the gods would not think it so. The sins of the sons, she thought in her dream, knowing the place, feeling the wind rising, and, her hair, oh, her white hair, blown back.
The way to the Warrior led through the grave and the risen bones of the father who had never seen him alive. What was she that she should know this?
But then she was somewhere else, with no space to wonder. She was in the room under the cottage where the Circlet of Lisen still shone, Colan’s dagger beside it, where Ysanne had died, and more than died. The Seer was with her, though, was within her, for she knew the book, the parchment page within the book where the invocation could be found to raise the father whole from his grave, and make him name the name of his son to the one who knew the place of summoning. There was no peace, no serenity anywhere. She carried none, had none to grant, she wore the Warstone on her hand. She would drag the dead from their rest, and the undead to their doom.
What was she that this should be so?
At the morning’s first light she made them take her back in the rain. An armed guard of thirty men went with her; troops from North Keep who had been Aileron’s before he was exiled. With cool efficiency they compassed her about on the ride to the lake. At the last curve the bodies of Aileron’s victims still lay on the path.
“Did he do that alone?” the leader of the guard asked when they were past. His voice was reverent.
“Yes,” she said.
“He will be our king?”
“Yes,” she said.
They waited by the lake while she went inside, and then down the now familiar stairs into the glow cast by Lisen’s Light. She left it where it lay, though; and, walking to the table, she opened one of the books. Oh, it was a glory and a terror that she knew where to look, but she did, and sitting there alone, she slowly read the words that she would have to speak.
But only when she knew the place that no one knew. The tumbled stones were only the starting point. There was a long way yet to walk along this path; a long way, but she was on it now. Preoccupied, tangled among interstices of time and place, the Seer of Brennin went back up the stairs. Aileron’s men awaited her, in disciplined alertness by the lake.