on your hand. It is in my heart as well—an old woman’s heart, not a Seer’s vision—that there may be need of a Dreamer in your world, too, before what is to come is full-woven on the Loom.”
Kimberly opened her mouth, and closed it again, speechless. Because now it was too much: too many things, too quickly and too hard.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to gasp, and then, whirling, ran up the stone stairs and out the doorway of the cottage to where there was sunlight and a blue sky. Trees, too, and a path down which she could run to the edge of a lake. Alone, because no one was pursuing her, she could stand there throwing pebbles into the water, knowing that they were pebbles, only pebbles, and that no green spirit, water dripping from his hair, would rise in answer from the lake to change her life again.
In the chamber from which she had fled, the light continued to shine. Power and hope and loss were in the radiance that bathed Ysanne as she sat at the desk, stroking the cat in her lap, her eyes unfocused and blind.
“Ah, Malka,” she murmured at last, “I wish I were wiser. What is the use of living so long if one hasn’t grown wise?”
The cat pricked up her ears, but preferred to continue licking a paw rather than address herself to so thorny a question.
At length the Seer rose, lowering the affronted Malka to the floor, and she walked slowly to the cabinet wherein the Circlet shone. Opening the glass door, she reached in and took out an object half hidden on a lower shelf, then she stood there a long time, gazing at what lay in her hand.
The third thing of power: the one that Kimberly, throwing pebbles by the lake, had not seen.
“Ah, Malka,” the Seer said again, and drew the dagger from its sheath. A sound like a plucked harpstring ran through the room.
A thousand years before, in the days after the Bael Rangat, when all the free peoples of Fionavar had gathered before the Mountain to see Ginserat’s stones, the Dwarves of Banir Lok had shaped a crafting of their own as a gift for the new High King of Brennin.
With thieren had they wrought, rarest of metals, found only at the roots of their twin mountains, most precious gift of earth to them, blue-veined silver of Eridu.
And for Colan the Beloved they had taken thought and fashioned a blade, with runes upon the sheath to bind it, and an old, dark magic spun in their caverns to make a knife unlike any other in all the worlds, and they named it Lokdal.
Very low bowed Conary’s son when they handed it to him, and silently he listened, wiser than his years, as Seithr the Dwarf-King told him what had been laid upon the blade. Then he bowed again, lower yet, when Seithr, too, fell silent.
“I thank you,” Colan said, and his eyes flashed as he spoke. “Double-edged the knife, and double-edged the gift. Mörnir grant us the sight to use it truly.” And he placed Lokdal in his belt and bore it south away.
To the mages he had entrusted it, the blade and the magic locked within it like a blessing or a curse, and twice only in a thousand years had Colan’s dagger killed. From First Mage to First Mage it had passed, until the night Raederth died. In the middle of that night, the woman who loved him had had a dream that shook her to the hidden places of her soul. Rising in the darkness, she came to the place where Raederth guarded the blade, and she took it away and hid it from those who succeeded him. Not even Loren Silvercloak, whom she trusted with everything else, knew that Ysanne had Lokdal.
“Who strikes with this blade without love in his heart shall surely die,” had said Seithr of the Dwarves. “That is one thing.”
And then softly, so that only Colan heard, he had said the other thing.
In her hidden chamber, Ysanne the Seer, dreamer of the dream, turned the bright rippling blade over and over in her hands, so the light glinted from it like blue fire.
On the shore of the lake a young woman stood, power within her, power beneath her, throwing pebbles one by one.
It was cooler in the wood where the lios alfar led them. The food they were offered was delicate and wonderful: strange fruits, rich bread, and