silence in the room. After a moment, Mabon went on, almost whispering.
“Maugrim is outside of time, not spun on the Loom. He cannot be killed. And he has shown, with the long winter, that he is in no hurry this time to bring us to battle. Would he not glory and his lieutenants exult to watch our army waiting uselessly before impregnable Starkadh while the svarts and urgach and Galadan’s wolves were ravaging all we loved?”
He stopped. Dave felt a weight like an anvil hanging from his heart. It was painful to draw breath. He looked at Tore for reassurance and saw anguish in his face, saw it mirrored deeply in Ivor’s and, somehow most frighteningly, in the normally unreadable features of Aileron.
“Fear not that,” said Ra-Tenniel.
A voice so very clear. Blurring forever, Ivor dan Banor thought, the borders between sound and light, between music and spoken word. The Aven turned to the Lord of the lios alfar as might one desperate for water in a rainless land.
“Fear Maugrim,” said Ra-Tenniel, “as must any who name themselves wise. Fear defeat and the dominion of the Dark. Fear, also, the annihilation that Galadan purposes and strives for, ever.”
Water, Ivor was thinking, as the measured words flowed over him. Water, with sorrow like a stone at the bottom of the cup.
“Fear any and all of these things,” Ra-Tenniel said. “The tearing of our threads from the Loom, the unsaying of our histories, the unraveling of the Weaver’s design.”
He paused. Water in time of drought. Music and light.
“But do not fear,” said the Lord of the lios alfar, “that he will avoid a battle with us, should we march to Andarien. I am your surety for that. I and my people. The lios alfar are out from Daniloth for the first time in a thousand years. He can see us. He can reach us. We are no longer hidden in the Shadowland. He will not pass us by. It lies not in his nature to pass us by. Rakoth Maugrim will meet this army if the lios alfar go into Andarien.”
It was true. Ivor knew that as soon as he heard the words, and he knew it as deeply as he had known any single thing in all his life. It reinforced his own counsel and offered complete answer to Mabon’s terrifying question, an answer wrought from the very essence of the lios alfar, the Weaver’s chosen ones, the Children of Light. What they were and had always been; and the terrible, bitter price they paid. The other side of the image. The stone in the cup.
Most hated by the Dark, for their name was Light.
Ivor wanted to bow, to kneel, to offer grief, pity, love, heart’s gratitude. Somehow none of them, nor all of them together, seemed adequate in the face of what Ra-Tenniel had just said. Ivor felt heavy, clodlike. Looking at the three lios alfar he felt like a lump of earth.
And yes, he thought. Yes, he was exactly that. He was prosaic, unglamorous, he was of the earth, the grass. He was of the Plain, which endured, which would endure this too if they proved equal to the days ahead, but not otherwise.
Reaching back into his own history, as Ra-Tenniel had just done, the Aven cast aside all thoughts, all emotions save those that spoke of strength, of resistance. “A thousand years ago the first Aven of the Plain led every Dalrei hunter who could ride into the woven mists and the skewed time of Daniloth, and the Weaver laid a straight track for them. They came out onto a battlefield by Linden Bay that would otherwise have been lost. Revor rode from there beside Ra-Termaine across the River Celyn into Andarien. And so, Brightest Lord, will I ride beside you, should that be our decision when we leave this place.”
He paused and turned to the other King in the room. “When Revor rode, and Ra-Termaine, it was in the army and at the command of Conary of Brennin, and then of Colan, his son. It was so then, and rightly so—for the High Kings of Brennin are the Children of Mórnir—and it will be so again, and as rightly, should you accept this counsel, High King.”
He was utterly unaware of the ringing cadences, the upwelling power of his own voice. He said, “You are heir to what Conary was, as we are the heirs of Revor and Ra-Termaine. Do you accede to this counsel? Yours is governance here,