She thought of Jennifer in Starkadh.
She thought of Ysanne.
With the ring quiescent on her hand, no power in her but the name she knew, terrible and merciless, she drew upon her need for strength in that high dark place and spoke in her own voice the one word that the Warrior needs must answer to:
“Childslayer!”
Then she closed her eyes, for the Tor, the whole Somerset Plain, seemed to be shaking with an agonized convulsion. There was a sound: wind, sorrow, lost music. He had been young and afraid, the dead father had said—and the dead spoke truth or lay silent—Merlin’s prophecy had tolled a knell for the shining of the dream, and so he had ordered the children slain. Oh, how could one not weep? All the children, so that his incestuous, marring, foretold seed might not live to break the bright dream. Little more than a child himself he had been, but a thread had been entrusted to his name, and thus a world, and when the babies died . . .
When the babies died the Weaver had marked him down for a long unwinding doom. A cycle of war and expiation under many names, and in many worlds, that redress be made for the children and for love.
Kim opened her eyes and saw the low, thin moon. She saw the stars of spring hang brightly overhead, and she was not wrong in thinking they were brighter than they had been before.
Then she turned and, in the celestial light, saw that she was not alone in that high enchanted place.
He was no longer young. How could he have been young after so many wars? His beard was dark, though flecked with grey, and his eyes not yet fixed in time. She thought she saw stars in them. He leaned upon a sword, his hands wrapped around the hilt as if it were the only certain thing in the wide night, and then he said in a voice so gentle and so weary it found her heart, “I was Arthur here, my lady, was I not?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I have carried other names elsewhere.”
“I know.” She swallowed. “This is your true name, though, your first.”
“Not the other?”
Oh, what was she? “Not that. I will never tell it, or speak it again. I give you an oath.”
Slowly he straightened. “Others will, though, as others have before.”
“I cannot do anything to alter that. I only summoned because of our need.”
He nodded. “There is war here?”
“In Fionavar.”
At that he drew himself up: not so tall as his father had been, yet majesty lay about him like a cloak, and he lifted his head into the rising wind as if hearing a distant horn.
“Is this the last battle, then?”
“If we lose, it will be.”
On the words, he seemed to coalesce, as if acceptance ended his passage from wherever he had been. There were no longer stars in the depths of his eyes; they were brown, and kind, and of the broad, tilled earth.
“Very well,” said Arthur.
And that mild affirmation was what, finally, broke Kimberly. She dropped to her knees and lowered her face to weep.
A moment later she felt herself lifted, effortlessly, and wrapped in an embrace so encompassing she felt, on that lonely elevation, as if she had come home after long voyaging. She laid her head on his broad chest, felt the strong beating of his heart, and took comfort even as she grieved.
After a time he stepped back. She wiped away her tears and saw, without surprise, that the Baelrath was aglow again. She was aware, for the first time, of how weary she felt, with so much power channeling itself through her. She shook her head: no time, none at all, to be weak. She looked at him.
“Have I your forgiveness?”
“You never needed it,” Arthur said. “Not half as much as I need all of yours.”
“You were young.”
“They were babies,” he said quietly. And then, after a pause, “Are they there yet, the two of them?”
And the hurting in his voice laid bare for her, for the first time, the true nature of how he had been cursed. She should have known, it had been there to see. For the children and for love.