They did not know of Darien.
At length they reached their quarters. Teyrnon and Barak were elsewhere and Brock was out, with Diarmuid, probably, so they had the large space to themselves. As a matter of deliberate policy they were sleeping in town each night, to reassure the people of Paras Derval that the high ones of the realm were not hiding behind palace walls. Zervan had built the fires up before he went to bed, so it was blessedly warm, and the mage walked over to stand before the largest hearth in the front room, as the Dwarf poured two glasses of an amber-colored liquor.
“ ‘Usheen to warm the heart,’ ” Matt quoted as he gave Loren his drink.
“Mine is cold tonight,” the tall mage said. He took a sip and made a wry face. “Bitter warmth.”
“It will do you good.” The Dwarf dropped into a low chair and began pulling off his boots.
“Should we reach for Teyrnon?”
“To say what?” Matt raised his head.
“The one thing we learned.”
They looked at each other in silence.
“The Black Swan told Metran that the cauldron was theirs and he was to go to the place of spiraling,” Jennifer had said, white and rigidly controlled as she went back in words to the woodcutter’s clearing where Avaia had come for her. This was the one thing.
“What will he do there with the dead?” Matt Sören asked now. Hatred deep as a cavern lay in the query.
The mage’s face was bleak. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anything, it seems. Except that we cannot go after him until we break the winter, and we cannot break the winter.”
“We will,” said the Dwarf. “We will break it because we must. You will do this, there is no doubt in me.”
The mage smiled then, softening the harsh lines of his face. “Aren’t you tired,” he asked, “after forty years of supporting me like this?”
“No,” said Matt Sören simply. And after a moment, he smiled as well, the crooked twist of his mouth.
Loren drained the usheen, making a face again. “Very well,” he said. “I want to reach for Teyrnon before we sleep. He should know that Metran has the Cauldron of Khath Meigol and has gone with it . . . to Cader Sedat.”
He said it as prosaically as he could, but even in the speaking of the island’s name they both felt a chill, nor could any of their order not do so. Amairgen Whitebranch, first of the mages, had died in that place a thousand years ago.
Matt braced and Loren closed. They found Teyrnon through Barak, a day’s ride off with the soldiers in North Keep. They conveyed what had happened and shared among the four of them doubts that would not go outside the Council of the Mages.
Then they broke the link. “All right?” Silvercloak asked his source after a moment.
“Easy,” Matt replied. “It will help me sleep.”
At which point there came a heavy knocking at the door. It wouldn’t be Brock; he had the key. One glance, only, they exchanged, premonitory, for they were what they were, and had been so for a long time. Then they went, together, to open the front door.
In the night outside, with stars bright behind him and a half-moon, stood a bearded man, broad-shouldered, not tall, time spun far into his eyes, and a woman unconscious in his arms.
It was very still. Loren had a sense that the stars, too, were motionless, and the late-risen moon. Then the man said, in a voice rich and low, “She is only weary, I think. She named this house to me before she fainted away. Are you Loren Silvercloak? Matt Sören?”
They were proud men, the mage and his source, and numbered among the great of Fionavar. But it was with a humbled, grateful awe that they knelt then in their open doorway, both of them, before Arthur Pendragon and the one who had summoned him, and they were kneeling to the woman no less than to the man.
Another knock on another door. In her room in the palace, Jennifer was alone and not asleep. She turned from contemplating the fire; the long robe they had given her brushed the deep carpets of the floor. She had bathed and washed her hair, then combed it out before the mirror, staring at her own strange face, at the green eyes that had seen what they had seen. She had been standing before the fire a long time, how long she knew not, when the tapping came.