She shook her head. “No, but it was the third night, and then the moon rose…”
He nodded. “But why?” he asked. “Why bother?”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t be such a child. There is a war now. You will be needed.”
He felt his heart skip. “What do you mean? What war?”
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve been somewhat out of touch,” he said sharply. “What has happened?”
It may have taken an effort, but her voice was controlled. “Rangat exploded yesterday. A hand of fire in the sky. The wardstone is shattered. Rakoth is free.”
He was very still.
“The King is dead,” she said.
“That I know,” he said. “I heard the bells.”
But for the first time now, her expression was strained; something difficult moved in her eyes. “There is more,” said Jaelle. “A party of lios alfar were ambushed here by svarts and wolves. Your friend was with them. Jennifer. I am sorry, but she was captured and taken north. A black swan bore her away.”
So. He closed his eyes again, feeling the burdens coming down. It seemed they could not be deferred after all. Arrow of the God. Spear of the God. Three nights and forever, the King had said. The King was dead. And Jen.
He looked up again. “Now I know why he sent me back.”
As if against her will, Jaelle nodded. “Twiceborn,” she murmured.
Wordlessly, he asked with his eyes.
“There is a saying,” she whispered, “a very old one: No man shall be Lord of the Summer Tree who has not twice been born.”
And so by candlelight in the sanctuary, he heard the words for the first time.
“I didn’t ask for this,” Paul Schafer said.
She was very beautiful, very stern, a flame, as the candles were. “Are you asking me for pity?”
His mouth crooked wryly at that. “Hardly, at this point.” He smiled a little. “Why is it so much easier for you to strike a defenseless man than to wipe the blood from his face?”
Her reply was formal, reflexive, but he had seen her eyes flinch away. “There is mercy in the Goddess sometimes,” she said, “but not gentleness.”
“Is that how you know her?” he asked. “What if I tell you that I had from her last night a compassion so tender there are no words to compass it?”
She was silent.
“Aren’t we two human beings first?” he went on. “With very great burdens, and support to share. You are Jaelle, surely, as well as her Priestess.”
“There you are wrong,” she said. “I am only her Priestess. There is no one else.”
“That seems to me very sad.”
“You are only a man,” Jaelle replied, and Paul was abashed by what blazed in her eyes before she turned and left the room.
Kim had lain awake for most of the night, alone in her room in the palace, achingly aware of the other, empty bed. Even inside, the Baelrath was responding to the moon, glowing brightly enough to cast shadows on the wall: a branch outside the window swaying in the rain wind, the outline of her own white hair, the shape of a candle by the bed, but no Jen, no shadow of her. Kim tried. Utterly unaware of what her power was, of how to use the stone, she closed her eyes and reached out in the wild night, north as far as she might, as clearly as she might, and found only the darkness of her own apprehensions.
When the stone grew dim again, only a red ring on her finger, she knew the moon had set. It was very late then, little left of the night. Kim lay back in weariness and dreamt of a desire she hadn’t known she had.
It is in your dreams that you must walk, Ysanne had said, was saying still, as she dropped far down into the dream again.
And this time she knew the place. She knew where lay those jumbled mighty arches of broken stone, and who was buried there for her to wake.
Not him, not the one she sought. Too easy, were it so. That path was darker even than it was now, and it led through the dead in the dreaming place. This she now knew. It was very sad, though she understood that the gods would not think it so. The sins of the sons, she thought in her dream, knowing the place, feeling the wind rising, and, her hair, oh, her white hair, blown back.