Then the mind seized hold of the beam he threw and sent back, effortlessly, the sound of laughter, and Ruana plummeted past black, for he knew whom he had found.
Fool! he heard, and lancets cut within him. Did you think I would not blanket you? Where do you think your feeble sounds have gone?
He was glad he had been chanting alone, that the others need not endure this. He reached inside, wishing again that he had access to hate or rage, though he would have to atone for such a wish. He sent, along the beam the chant had made, You are Rakoth Maugrim. I name you.
And was battered in his mind by laughter. I named myself a long time ago. What power would you find in naming me, fool of a race of fools? Unworthy to be slaves.
Cannot be slaves, Ruana sent. And then: Sathain. The mocking name.
Fire bloomed in his mind. Redblack. He wondered if he could have the other kill him. Then he could—
There was laughter again. You shall have no bloodcurse to send. You shall be lost. Every one of you. And no one will chant kanior for the last. Had you done what I asked, you would have been mighty in Fionavar again. Now I will rip your thread from the Tapestry and wear it about my throat.
Not slaves, Ruana sent, but faintly.
There was laughter. Then the chantbeam snapped.
For a long time Ruana lay in the dark, choking on the smoke of Ciroa’s burning, assailed by the smell of flesh and the sounds the unclean ones made as they feasted.
Then, because he had nothing else to offer, no access to more, and because he would not end in silence, Ruana began the chants again, and Iraima was with him, and much-loved Ikatere. Then his heart came from past black toward gold again to hear Tamure’s voice. With four they essayed the wide chant. Not in hope it would go as far as it had to go, for they were blanketed by the Unraveller and were very weak. Not to get through to anyone, but so as not to die in silence, not servants, never slaves, though their thread be torn from the Loom and lost forever in the Dark.
Hers, Jennifer understood, was a different fate from Arthur’s, though interwoven endlessly. She remembered now. From first sight of his face she had remembered all of it, nor were the stars in his eyes new for her—she had seen them before.
No curse so dark as his had been given her, for no destiny so high, no thread of the Tapestry, had ever been consigned to her name. She was, instead, the agent of his fate, the working out of his bitter grief. She had died; in the abbey at Amesbury she had died—she wondered, now, how she had failed to recognize it by Stonehenge. She had had her rest, her gift of death, and she knew not how many times she had come back to tear him apart, for the children and for love.
She had no idea, remembering only that first life of all, when she had been Guinevere, daughter of Leodegrance, and had ridden to wed in Camelot, now lost and thought to be a dream.
A dream it had been, but more than that, as well. She had come to Camelot from her father’s halls, and there she had done what she had done, and loved as she had loved, and broken a dream and died.
She had only fallen in love twice in her life, with the two shining men of her world. Nor was the second less golden than the first. He was not, whatever might have been said afterward. And the two men had loved each other, too, making all the angles equal, shaped most perfectly for grief.
Saddest story of all the long tales told.
But, she told herself, it would not unfold again this time, not in Fionavar. He is not here, she had said, and known, for in this if nowhere else she had knowledge. There was no third one walking here, with the easy, envied stride, the hands she had loved. I have been maimed but will not, at least, betray, she had said, while a shower of starlight fell.