THE WANDERING FIRE by Guy Gavriel Kay

In the spring. Spring a year ago, actually, if midsummer was approaching; it was on that, and on the meaning of this savage, inflicted winter, that Paul was reflecting. In particular, on something he had noticed on the icy walk from palace to tavern.

So he was preoccupied with implications and abstractions even amid the pandemonium. With only half an eye he saw Kevin mount up on Dave’s shoulders and the two of them charge forward to down the North Keep pair from behind.

The roar that followed got his attention and he grinned, taking in the scene. Funny, manic Kevin Laine, in his own way quite as irrepressible as Diarmuid was, and as full of life.

His grin became a laugh as he saw Tegid rumble forward to gather Dave in a vast embrace, and then he winced as all four of them came crashing down.

Thus occupied, thus preoccupied, he didn’t even see the figure, cloaked and hooded—even in the broiling heat of the Boar—that was picking its way to his side.

Someone else did, though. Someone who had seen Kevin and Dave and had guessed Paul might be there. And just as the cloaked figure came abreast of him, someone interposed herself.

“Hold it, sister! This one is mine first,” said brown-haired Tiene. “You can have the others for your bed, wherever it is, but he is mine, upstairs, tonight.”

Paul turned to see the slight, pretty girl whose tears had driven him from lovemaking into the night a year ago and, from that starry night, after he’d heard a song he hadn’t been meant to hear, to the Summer Tree.

And it was because he’d been on the Tree and had survived, because the God had sent him back, that the one in the cloak—who was indeed a woman, though not sister to any mortal—had been coming to kill him where he stood.

Until the foolish, interfering girl had stepped between. A hand came out from within the cloak and touched Tiene with one long finger. No more than that, but the girl gasped as an icy, numbing pain shot into her arm where she’d been touched. She felt herself falling, and as she fell, she reached out with her other arm, where the cold had not yet penetrated, and pulled the hood from the other’s face.

It was a human face, but only just. Skin so white it was almost blue; one sensed it would be freezing to the touch. She had no hair at all and her eyes were the color of moon on ice, glacial ice, and cold enough to bring winter into the heart of those who looked at them.

But not Paul. He met her glance and saw her retreat momentarily before a thing she read in his own depths. Around them, unbelievably, no one seemed to have noticed anything, not even Tiene’s fall. People were falling all over the tavern that night.

But only one man heard a raven speak, and it was Paul. Thought, Memory. Those were the names, he knew, and they had been there, both of them, in the Tree at the end when the Goddess came and then the God.

And in the moment when the apparition before him recovered herself and moved to strike at him as she had Tiene, Paul heard the ravens and he chanted the words given to him, and they were these:

“White the mist that rose through me,

Whiter than land of your dwelling.

It is your name that will bind thee,

Your name is mine for the telling.”

He stopped. Around the two of them, powers of the first world and so of all worlds, the careening pandemonium continued. No one paid them the slightest mind. Paul’s voice had been pitched low, but he saw each word cut into her. Then, as low as before, but driving every syllable, for this was as old and as deep a magic as any there was, he said, “I am Lord of the Summer Tree, there is no secret to my name, no binding there.” She had time, she could have moved to touch him and her touch could freeze the heart, but his words held her. Her ice eyes locked on his, and she heard him say, “You are far from the Barrens and from your power. Curse him who sent you here and be gone, Ice Queen, for I name thee now by thy name, and call thee Fordaetha of Rük!”