of to my however-many-times-great-grandfather." He strode to stand over the wizard, shadowing him like a blighted tree, the single lamp flinging the great distorted shape of him to blend with the crowding dimness of the room. "And he remembers, too." His hand moved toward the crib, the vast shadow-hand on the wall its dark echo, toward the child asleep within. "Deep in his baby mind those memories are buried. He's barely six months old-six months, yet he'll wake up screaming, rigid with fear. What can a child that young dream of, Ingold? He dreams of the Dark. I know."
"Yes," the wizard agreed, "you dreamed of it, too. Your father never did-in fact, I doubt your father ever feared or imagined anything in his life. Those memories were buried too deep in him-or perhaps there was simply no need for him to remember. But you dreamed of them and feared them, although you did not know what they were."
Standing in the cool draft of the window, Gil felt that bond between them, palpable as a word or a touch: the memory of a gawky, dark-haired boy waked screaming from nameless nightmares, and the comfort given him by a vagabond wizard. Some of the harshness left Eldor's face, and the grimness faded from his voice, leaving it only sad.
"Would I had remained ignorant," he said. "We of our line are never entirely young, you know. The memories that we carry are the curse of our race."
"They may be the saving of it," Ingold replied. "And of us all."
Eldor sighed and moved back to the crib in reflective silence, his slim, strong hands clasped lightly behind his back. But he was not now looking down at the child asleep. His eyes, brooding away into the shadows, lost their sharpness, focusing on times beyond his lifetime, on experience beyond his own.
After a while he said, "Will you do me one last service, Ingold?"
The old man's eyes slid sharply over to him. "There is no last."
The lines of Eldor's face creased briefly deeper with his tired smile. He was evidently long familiar with the wizard's stubbornness. "In the end," he said, "there is always a last. I know," he went on, "that your power cannot touch the Dark Ones. But it can elude them. I've seen you do it. When the night comes that they rise again, your power will allow you to escape, when the rest of us must die fighting. No-" He raised his hand to forestall the wizard's next words. "I know what you're going to say. But I want you to leave. If it comes to that, as your King, I order you to. When they come-and they will-I want you to take my son Altir. Take him and flee."
The wizard sat silent, but his beard bristled with the set of his jaw. At last he said, "For one thing, you are not my King."
"Then as your friend, I ask it," the King said, and his voice was very low. "You couldn't save us. Not all of us. You're a great swordsman, Ingold, perhaps the greatest alive, but the touch of the Dark is death, to a wizard as well as to any other. Our doom is surely upon us here, for they will come again, as sure as the ice in the north, and there can be no escape. But you can save Tir. He's the last of my line, the last of Dare of Renweth's line-the last of the lineage of the Kings of Darwath. He's the only one in the Realm now who will remember the Time of the Dark. History itself has all but forgotten; no record at all exists of that time, bar a mention in the oldest of chronicles. My father remembered nothing of it-my own memories are sketchy. But the need is greater now. Maybe that has something to do with it-I don't know.
"But I know, and you know, that three thousand years ago the Dark Ones came and virtually wiped humankind from the face of the earth. And they departed away again. Why, Ingold, did they depart?"
The wizard shook his head.
"He knows," Eldor said softly. "He knows. My memories are incomplete. You know that; I've told you a dozen times. He's a promise, Ingold. I'm only a failed hope, a guttered candle. Somewhere in his memory, the heritage of the line of Dare, is the clue that all the rest of us have forgotten, that will lead to the undoing of the Dark.