loosely spilling, triumphant cries of the svart alfar had ended. There were flecks of blood staining Uathach’s snowy robe. Paul couldn’t tell if they were Diarmuid’s or the urgach’s own. It didn’t seem to matter much: Diar’s horse, fiercely gallant but hopelessly overmatched, was visibly tiring even as they watched.
Diarmuid backed it off a few paces, to try to buy it a moment’s rest, but this was not to be allowed. Not in this battle, with this foe. Uathach, not laughing now, grim death in his black sword, came on, and Diarmuid was forced to cruelly spur his mount to motion again. Amid the silence along the ridge, a single voice spoke.
“There is one chance, only, left for him,” said Lancelot du Lac.
Only one man understood and made reply.
“If you call it a chance,” Aileron said, in a tone not one of them had ever heard him use before.
To the west, out beyond Linden Bay, the sun went down. Paul turned instinctively and saw its last dying light touch the face of the Princess of Cathal. He saw that Kim and Jaelle had moved to either side of her. After a moment he turned back to the figures on the plain. In time to see it end.
It was, on the whole, just a little bit ridiculous. This ugly, hairy monster, oversized even for an urgach, was as quick as he was himself. And it was swinging a sword that Diarmuid doubted he could even have lifted, let along swung in those pounding, ceaseless blows. It was cunning too, unnaturally, viciously intelligent. By Lisen’s river blood, urgach were supposed to be stupid! Where, the Prince thought, absorbing another blow like an avalanche on his sword, where was the sense of proportion in this thing?
He felt like asking the question aloud, but survival had become a matter of meticulous concentration these last few moments, and he had not breath to spare for even halfway witty remarks. A shame. He wondered, hilariously, what Uathach would say to a suggestion that this matter be settled with the gambling dice Diarmuid just happened to have in his—
Gods! Even with a leg gone, the slaug, twice the size of his own tiring horse, was death itself. With a movement of his sword as desperately swift as any he’d ever made, Diarmuid managed to block a thrust of the animal’s ripping horn that would have disemboweled his own mount. Unfortunately that meant—
He resurfaced in the saddle, having passed clean under his horse on one side and up again on the other, with Uathach’s annihilating slash a whistling sound in the darkening air where his own head had been an instant before. He wondered if Ivor of the Dalrei remembered teaching him how to do that so many years ago, when Diarmuid was a boy summering with his brother on the Plain. So many years, but for some reason it felt like yesterday, just now. Funny, how almost everything felt like yesterday.
The sweep of Uathach’s last stroke had swung the urgach, grunting, sideways in his saddle and carried the slaug a few paces away with the shift of weight. Fresh, Diarmuid might have tried to use that to renew some kind of attack, but his horse was sucking air with desperate, heaving motions of its lathered flanks, and his own left arm was gradually growing cold, a weakness spreading from the deep tear of the wound, reaching across his chest.
He used the brief respite the only way he could, to buy time for the horse. A handful of seconds, no more than that, and it wasn’t enough. He thought of his mother then. And of the day his father had died. So much seemed to have happened yesterday. He thought of Aileron, and of all the things left unsaid in all the yesterdays.
And then, as Uathach turned the slaug again, Diarmuid dan Ailell whispered to his horse one last time and felt it steady bravely to the murmur of his voice. Within himself he let a calm take shape, and from within that calm he summoned up Sharra’s face, through whose dark eyes—doorways to a falcon’s soul—love had entered into him so unexpectedly, and had stayed.
To carry him to this moment, her image in his mind, and the certain, sustaining knowledge of her love. To carry him forward across the darkened ground of that plain in Andarien, toward the last thing he could do.
Straight at the slaug he rode, his horse gallantly reaching for a last flourish of