“When was this?”
“Twenty-five years ago, now. A little more.”
“But—I wasn’t even born!”
“I know, child. I dreamt your parents first, the day they met. Then you with the Baelrath on your hand. Our gift as Seers is to walk the twists that lie in the weave of time and bring their secrets back. It is no easy power, and you know already that it cannot always be controlled.”
Kim pushed her brown hair back with both hands. Her forehead was creased with anxiety, the grey eyes were those of someone being pursued. “I do know that,” she said. “I’m trying to handle it. What I can’t. . . I don’t understand why you are showing me Lisen’s Light.”
“Not true,” the Seer replied. “If you stop to think, you will understand. You are being shown the Circlet because it may fall to you to dream who is to wear it next.”
There was a silence. Then, “Ysanne, I don’t live here.”
“There is a bridge between our worlds. Child, I am telling you that which you know already.”
“But that’s just it! I’m beginning to understand what I am. I saw what Eilathen spun. But I’m not of this world, it isn’t in my blood, I don’t know its roots the way you do, the way all the Seers must have known. How should . . . how could I ever presume to say who is to bear the Circlet of Lisen? I’m a stranger, Ysanne!”
She was breathing hard. The old woman looked at her a long time, then she smiled. “Now you are. You have just come. You are right about being incomplete, but be easy. It is only time.” Her voice, like her eyes, was gentle as she told her second lie, and shielded it.
“Time!” Kimberly burst out. “Don’t you understand? I’m only here two weeks. As soon as they find Dave, we’re going home.”
“Perhaps. There is still a bridge, and I did dream the Baelrath on your hand. It is in my heart as well—an old woman’s heart, not a Seer’s vision—that there may be need of a Dreamer in your world, too, before what is to come is full-woven on the Loom.”
Kimberly opened her mouth, and closed it again, speechless. Because now it was too much: too many things, too quickly and too hard.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to gasp, and then, whirling, ran up the stone stairs and out the doorway of the cottage to where there was sunlight and a blue sky. Trees, too, and a path down which she could run to the edge of a lake. Alone, because no one was pursuing her, she could stand there throwing pebbles into the water, knowing that they were pebbles, only pebbles, and that no green spirit, water dripping from his hair, would rise in answer from the lake to change her life again.
In the chamber from which she had fled, the light continued to shine. Power and hope and loss were in the radiance that bathed Ysanne as she sat at the desk, stroking the cat in her lap, her eyes unfocused and blind.
“Ah, Malka,” she murmured at last, “I wish I were wiser. What is the use of living so long if one hasn’t grown wise?”
The cat pricked up her ears, but preferred to continue licking a paw rather than address herself to so thorny a question.
At length the Seer rose, lowering the affronted Malka to the floor, and she walked slowly to the cabinet wherein the Circlet shone. Opening the glass door, she reached in and took out an object half hidden on a lower shelf, then she stood there a long time, gazing at what lay in her hand.
The third thing of power: the one that Kimberly, throwing pebbles by the lake, had not seen.
“Ah, Malka,” the Seer said again, and drew the dagger from its sheath. A sound like a plucked harpstring ran through the room.
A thousand years before, in the days after the Bael Rangat, when all the free peoples of Fionavar had gathered before the Mountain to see Ginserat’s stones, the Dwarves of Banir Lok had shaped a crafting of their own as a gift for the new High King of Brennin.