Uther drew himself to his fullest height, and he was very tall above his tomb. “Has he not proven great beyond all measure?”
And thus: “Even so,” said Kimberly, and there was a soreness in her now that no hardening could stay. “And I would call him by the name you guard.”
The dead King spread his hands to the watching stars. “Has he not suffered enough?” the father cried in a voice that overrode the wind.
To this there was no decent reply, and so she said, “I have no time, Uther, and he is needed. By the burning of my stone I compel you—what is the name?”
She could see the sternness of his face, and steeled her own that he might read no irresolution there. He was fighting her; she could feel the earth pulling him away, and down.
“Do you know the place?” Uther Pendragon asked.
“I know.”
And in his eyes, as if through mist or smoke, she saw that he knew this was so, and with the Baelrath would master him. Her very soul was turning over with the pain of it. So much steel she could not be, it seemed.
He said, “He was young when it happened, the incest, and the rest of it. He was afraid, because of the prophecy. Can they not have pity? Is there none?”
What was she that the proud Kings of the dead should beseech her so? “The name!” said Kimberly into the keening of the wind, and she raised the ring above her head to master him.
And, mastered, he told her, and it seemed as if stars were falling everywhere, and she had brought them tumbling down from heaven with what she was.
She was sheer red, she was wild, the night could not hold her. She could rise, even now, to come down as red moonlight might fall, but not here. In another place.
It was high. High enough to have once been an island in a lake like glass. Then the waters had receded all over Somerset, leaving a plain where waters had been, and a seven-ridged hill high above that plain. But when a place has been an island the memory of water lingers, and of water magic, no matter how far away the sea may be, or how long ago it fell away.
And so it was with Glastonbury Tor, which had been called Avalon in its day and had seen three queens row a dying king to its shore.
So much of the filtered legends had been close to true, but the rest was so far off it carried its own grief with it. Kim looked around the summit of the Tor and saw the thin moon rise in the east above the long plain. The Baelrath was beginning to fade even as she watched, and with it the power that had carried her here.
There was a thing to do while it yet burned, and raising the ring she turned, a beacon in the night, back to face Stonehenge, so many miles away. She reached out as she had done once before, though it was easier now, she was very strong tonight, and she found the four of them, gathered them together, Kevin and Paul, Jennifer and Dave, and before the Warstone faded, she sent them to Fionavar with the last red wildness Stonehenge had engendered.
Then the light she bore became only a ring on her finger, and it was dark on the windy summit of the Tor.
There was enough moonlight for her to make out the chapel that had been erected there some seven hundred years ago. She was shivering, now, and not only with cold. The burning ring had lifted her, given her resolution beyond her ordinary reach. Now she was Kimberly Ford only, or it seemed that way, and she felt daunted here on this ancient mound that yet gave scent of sea wind here in the midst of Somerset.
She was about to do something terrible, to set once more in motion the workings of a curse so old it made the wind seem young.
There had been a mountain though, in the northland of Fionavar, and once it had held a god prisoner. Then there had been a detonation so vast it could only mean one thing, and Rakoth the Unraveller had been no longer bound. There was so much power coming down on them, and if Fionavar was lost then all the worlds would fall to Maugrim, and the Tapestry be torn and twisted on the Worldloom past redress.