men and lios alfar and the powers of the Wood came together to do this for her out of love. Then she placed upon her brow the Circlet of Lisen, Amairgen’s parting gift. The Light against the Dark, it was called, for it shone of its own self, and with that light upon her brow—so great a beauty never else having been in any world—Lisen turned her back on the war and the Wood and, climbing to the summit of the tower, she set her face westward to the sea, that the Light she bore might show Amairgen the way home.
“No man knows what happened to him or those who sailed in that ship. Only that one night Lisen saw, and those who stood guard beside the Anor saw as well, a dark ship sailing slowly along the coast in the moonlight. And it is told that the moon setting west in that hour shone through its tattered sails with a ghostly light, and it could be seen that the ship was Amairgen’s, and it was empty. Then, when the moon sank into the sea, that ship disappeared forever.
“Lisen took the Circlet from her brow and laid it down; then she unbound her hair that it might be as it was when first they had come together in the grove. Having done these things, she leaped into the darkness of the sea and so died.”
The sun was high in the sky, Dave noticed. It seemed wrong, somehow, that this should be so, that the day should be so bright. “I think,” Levon whispered, “that I will go ride up front for a time.” He kicked his horse to a gallop. Dave and Tore looked at each other. Neither spoke a word. The Plain was east, the Wood west, the Sun was high in the sky.
Levon took a double shift up front. Late in the day Dave went forward himself to relieve him. Towards sunset they saw a black swan flying north almost directly overhead, very high. The sight filled them all with a vague, inexplicable sense of disquiet. Without a word being spoken, they picked up speed.
As they continued south, Pendaran gradually began to fell away westward. Dave knew it was there, but by the time darkness fell, the Wood could no longer be seen. When they stopped for the night, there was only grassland stretching away in every direction under the profligate dazzle of the summer stars, scarcely dimmed by the last thin crescent of the moon.
Later that night a dog and a wolf would battle in Mörnirwood, and Colan’s dagger, later still, would be unsheathed with a sound like a harpstring in a stone chamber underground beside Eilathen’s lake.
At dawn the sun rose red, and a dry, prickly heat came with it. From first mounting, the company was going faster than before. Levon increased the point men to four and pulled them back a little closer, so both parties could see each other all the time.
Late in the morning the Mountain exploded behind them.
With the deepest terror of his life, Dave turned with the Dalrei to see the tongue of flame rising to master the sky. They saw it divide to shape the taloned hand, and then they heard the laughter of Maugrim.
“The gods grant he be always bound,” Levon had said, only yesterday.
No dice, it seemed.
There was nothing within Dave that could surmount the brutal sound of that laughter on the wind. They were small, exposed, they were open to him and he was free. In a kind of trance, Dave saw the point men galloping frantically back to join them.
“Levon! Levon! We must go home!” one of them was shouting as he came nearer. Dave turned to Ivor’s son and, looking at him, his heart slowed towards normality, and he marveled again. There was no expression on Levon’s face, his profile seemed chiseled from stone as he gazed at the towering fire above Rangat.
But in that very calm, that impassive acceptance, Dave found a steadfastness of his own. Without moving a muscle, Levon seemed to be growing, to be willing himself to grow large enough to match, to overmatch the terror in the sky and on the wind. And somehow in that moment Dave had a flashing image of Ivor doing the selfsame thing, two days’ ride back north, under the very shadow of that grasping hand. He looked for Tore and found the dark man gazing back at him, and in Tore’s eyes Dave saw