“I see,” said Kevin, swallowing. “And are we allowed to know why we are subjecting ourselves to that unpleasant possibility?”
For the first time that morning Diarmuid’s smile flashed full-force. “Of course you are,” he said kindly. “You’re going to help me seduce a lady. Tell me, Carde,” he murmured, turning, “any news?”
There was none. The Prince drained his pint and was striding out the door. The others scrambled to their feet and followed. A number of the villagers came out of the inn to watch them ride off.
“Mörnir guard you, young Prince!” one farmer cried impulsively. “And in the name of the Summer Tree, may he take the old man and let you be our King!”
Diarmuid had raised a gracious hand at the first words, but the speaker’s last phrase brought him to wheel his horse hard. There was a brutal silence. The Prince’s face had gone cold. No one moved. Overhead Kevin heard a noisy flap of wings as a dense cluster of crows wheeled aloft, darkening the sun for an instant.
Diarmuid’s voice, when it came, was formal and imperious. “The words you have spoken are treason,” Ailell’s son said, and with a sideways nod spoke one word more: “Coll.”
The farmer may never have seen the arrow that killed him. Diarmuid did not. He was already pounding up the road without a backwards glance as Coll replaced his bow. By the time the shock had passed and the screaming had begun, all ten of them were around the bend that would carry them south.
Kevin’s hands were shaking with shock and fury as he galloped, the image of the dead man engulfing him, the screams still echoing in his mind. Coll, beside him, seemed impassive and unperturbed. Save that he carefully refused to meet the glance of Paul Schafer, who was staring fixedly at him as they rode, and to whom he had spoken a treasonous word of his own the night before.
In the early spring of 9 Dr. John Ford of Toronto had taken a fortnight’s leave from his residency at London’s St. Thomas Hospital. Hiking alone in the Lake District, north of Keswick, he came, at the end of a long day afoot, down the side of a hill and walked wearily up to a farmyard tucked into the shadow of the slope.
There was a girl in the yard, drawing water from a well. The westering sun slanted upon her dark hair. When she turned at the sound of his footstep, he saw that her eyes were grey. She smiled shyly when, hat in hand, he asked for a drink, and before she had finished drawing it for him, John Ford had fallen in love, simply and irrevocably, which was his nature in all things.
Deirdre Cowan, who was eighteen that spring, had been told long ago by her grandmother that she would love and marry a man from over the sea. Because her gran was known to have the Sight, Deirdre never doubted what she had been told. And this man, handsome and diffident, had eyes that called to her.
Ford spent that night in her father’s house, and in the quietest dark before dawn Deirdre rose from her bed. She was not surprised to see her gran in the hallway by her own bedroom door, nor to see the old woman make a gesture of blessing that went back a very long way. She went to Ford’s room, the gray eyes beguiling, her body sweet with trust.
They were married in the fall, and John Ford took his wife home just as the first snows of the winter came. And it was their daughter who walked, a Dwarf beside her, twenty-five springs after her parents had been brought together, towards the shores of a lake in another world, to meet her own destiny.
The path to the lake where Ysanne lived twisted north and west through a shallow valley flanked by gentle hills, a landscape that would have been lovely in any proper season. But Kim and Matt were walking through a country scorched and barren—and the thirst of the land seemed to knife into Kim, twisting like anguish inside her. Her face hurt, the bones seeming taut and difficult within her. Movement was becoming painful, and everywhere she looked, her eyes flinched away.