“Seer of Brennin,” Gereint said, “we are gathered to do your bidding.”
So it came back to her. Even in this place it came back, as had so much else of late. Once, and not a long time ago, she would have doubted it, wondered why. Asked within, if not aloud, who she was that these gathered powers should defer to her. What was she, the inner voice would have cried, that this should be so?
Not any more. With only a faint, far corner of her mind to mourn the loss of innocence, Kim accepted Gereint’s deference as being properly due to the only true Seer in the room. She would have taken control if he had not offered it. They were in Gwen Ystrat, which was the Goddess’s, and so Jaelle’s, but the journey they were now to take fell within Kimberly’s province, not any of the others’, and if there was danger it was hers to face for them.
Deeply conscious of Ysanne and of her own white hair, she said, “Once before, I had Loren and Jaelle with me—when I pulled Jennifer out from Starkadh.” It seemed to her the candles on the altar shifted at the naming of that place. “We will do the same thing again, with Teyrnon and Gereint besides. I am going to lock on an image of the winter and try to go behind it, into the mind of the Unraveller, with the vellin stone to shield me, I hope. I will need your support when I do.”
“What about the Baelrath?”
It was Jaelle, intense and focused, no bitterness to her now. Not for this. Kim said, “This is a Seer’s art and purely so. I do not think the stone will flame.”
Jaelle nodded. Teyrnon said, “If you do get behind the image, what then?”
“Can you stay with me?” she asked the two mages.
Loren nodded. “I think so. To shape an artifice, you mean?”
“Yes. Like the castle you showed us before we first came.” She turned to the Kings. There were three of them, and a fourth who had been and would always be, but it was to Aileron she spoke. “My lord High King, it will be hard for you to see, but we may all be sightless under the power. If there is anything shaped by the mages, you must mark what it is.”
“I will,” he said in his steady, uninflected voice. She looked to the shaman.
“Is there more, Gereint?”
“There is always more,” he replied. “But I do not know what it is. We may need the ring, though, after all.”
”We may,” she said curtly. “I cannot compel it.” The very memory of its burning gave her pain.
“Of course not,” the blind shaman replied. “Lead us. I will not be far behind.”
She composed herself. Looked at the others ringed about her. Matt and Barak had their legs braced wide apart, Jaelle had closed her eyes, and now she saw Teyrnon do the same. Her glance met that of Loren Silvercloak.
“We are lost if this fails,” he said. “Take us through, Seer.”
“Come, then!” she cried and, closing her eyes, began to drop down, and down, through the layers of consciousness. One by one she felt them come into her: Jaelle, tapping the avarlith; the two mages, Loren fierce and passionate, Teyrnon clear and bright; then Gereint, and with him he brought his totem animal, the night-flying keia of the Plain, and this was a gift to her, to all of them—a gift of his secret name.
Thank you, she sent; then, encompassing them all, she went forward, as if in a long flat dive, into the waking dream.
It was very dark and cold. Kim fought back fear. She might be lost down here; it could happen. But they were all lost if she failed. Loren had spoken true. In her heart a brilliant anger burned then, a hatred of the Dark so bright she used it to shape an image in the deep, still place to which they had come, the bottom of the pool.
She had not prepared it beforehand, choosing to let the dream render its own truest shape. And so it did. She felt the others registering it, in all their shadings of grief, anger, and hurting love for the thing marred, seeing that clear image of Daniloth defiantly alight, open and undefended amid an alien landscape of ice and snow.