saw him reach out and pick up the sculpted dragon lying beside him, the one, Kim now realized—seeing what Loren had grasped from the first—that he had shaped forty years ago, when the Lake had made him King. Slowly Matt rose to stand facing the Dragon of Calor Diman. It seemed to Kim that there was a tinted brightness to the air.
Then the Dragon spoke. “You should not have gone away,” it said with an ancient sorrow.
So deep a sadness after so wild a blaze of power. Matt lowered his head.
“I accepted your gift that night,” the Dragon said, in a voice like a mountain wind, cold and clear and lonely. “I accepted it, because of the courage that lay beneath the pride of what you offered me. I made you King under Banir Lok. You should not have gone away.”
Matt looked up, accepting the weight of the Dragon’s crystal gaze. Still he said nothing. Beside her, Kim became aware that Loren was weeping quietly.
“Nevertheless,” said the Dragon of the Lake, and there was a new timbre in its voice, “nevertheless, you have changed since you went from here, Matt Sören. You have lost an eye in wars not properly those of your people, but you have shown tonight, with this second gift, that with one eye only you still see more deeply into my waters than any of the Kings of the Dwarves have ever done before.”
Kimberly bit her lip. She slipped her hand into Loren’s. There was a brightness in her heart.
“You should not have gone away,” she heard the Dragon say to Matt, “but from what you have done tonight, I will accept that a part of you never did. Be welcome back, Matt Sören, and hear me as I name you now truest of all Kings ever to reign under Banir Lok and Banir Tal.”
There was light, there seemed to be so much light: a tinted, rosy hue of fiercest illumination.
“Oh, Kim, no!” Loren suddenly cried in a choked, desperate voice. “Not this. Oh, surely not this!”
Light burned to ash in the wake of knowledge, of bitter, bitterest, recurring understanding. Of course there was light in the meadow, of course there was. She was here.
With the Baelrath blazing in wildest summons on her hand.
Matt had wheeled at Loren’s cry. Kim saw him look at the ring he had only just returned to her, and she read the brutal anguish in his face as this moment of heart-deep triumph, the moment of his return, was transformed into something terrible beyond words.
She wanted desperately not to be here, not to understand what this imperative blazing meant. She was here, though, and she did know. And she had not knelt to the Dragon because, somehow, a part of her must have been aware of what was to come.
What had come now. She carried the Warstone again, the summons to war. And it was on fire to summon. To compel the Crystal Dragon from its mountain bowl. Kim had no illusions, none at all—and the sight of Matt’s stricken face would have stripped them away from her, if she’d had any.
The Dragon could not leave the Lake, not if it was to be what it had always been: ancient guardian, key to the soul, heart-deep symbol of what the Dwarves were. What she was about to do would shatter the people of the twin mountains as much and more as she had smashed the Paraiko in Khath Meigol.
This crystal power of Calor Diman, which had endured the death rain of Maugrim, would not be able to resist the fire she carried. Nothing could.
Matt turned away. Loren released her hand.
I don’t have a choice! she cried. Within her heart, not aloud. She knew why the stone was burning. There was tremendous power here in this creature of the Lake, and its very shining made it a part of the army of Light. They were at war with the Dark, with the unnumbered legions of Rakoth. She had carried the ring here for a reason, and this was it.
She stepped forward, toward the now-still waters of Calor Diman. She looked up and saw the clear eyes of the Dragon resting upon her, accepting and unafraid, though infinitely sorrowful. As deeply rooted in power as anything in Fionavar and knowing that Kim’s was a force that would bind it and change it forever.
On her hand the Baelrath was pulsing now so wildly that the whole of the meadow and all the mountain crags