His deep voice carried the cadences of prophecy, of truth that had mastered time. He said, “But for now, here in this place, you are subject to my will because the child is lost again.”
“Only because of that,” said Owein, with a bitterness that cut through the air as keenly as his unsheathed blade might have done.
“Only because of that,” Ruana agreed gravely. And Kim knew then how narrow had been their escape. She looked to where Finn had fallen and saw that a man had gone over to that place and was kneeling beside the boy. She didn’t know, at first, who it was, and then she guessed.
Owein spoke again, and now the bitterness was gone, replaced by a quiet resignation. He said, “Do we go to the cave again, Connla’s heir?”
“Even so,” Ruana replied from the ridge, looking up into the sky. “You are to go there and lay you down upon your stone beds again, you and the seven kings. And I will follow to that place, and weave Connla’s spell a second time to bind you to your sleep.”
Owein lifted his hand. For a moment he remained so, a grey shadow on a black horse, the red jewels in his crown gleaming in the sunset. Then he bowed to Ruana, bound to the Giant’s will by what Finn had done, and lowered his hand.
And suddenly the Wild Hunt was flashing away, south toward a cave at the edge of Pendaran Wood, near to a tree forked by lightning thousands and thousands of years ago.
Last of them all, riderless, Iselen flew, her white tail streaming behind her like a comet, visible even after the horses of the kings were lost to sight.
Dazed by the intensity of what had just happened, Kim saw Jaelle going swiftly along the ridge to where Finn lay. Paul Schafer said something crisply to Aileron and then set out after the High Priestess.
Kim turned away from them and looked up, a long way up, at Ruana’s face. His eyes were as she remembered: deeply, quietly compassionate. He gazed down upon her, waiting.
She said, “Ruana, how did you come in time? So narrowly in time?”
He shook his head slowly. “I have been here since the Dragon came. I have been watching from behind—I would not come nearer to war than that. But when Starkadh fell, when the war was over and the Wolflord blew the horn, I realized what had drawn me here.”
“What, Ruana? What drew you here?”
“Seer, what you did in Khath Meigol changed us forever. As I watched my people set out for Eridu, it came to me that the Baelrath is a power of war, a summons to battle—and that we would not have been undone by it as we had been only to journey east, away from war, to the cleansing of the raindead, necessary as that might be. I did not think it was enough.”
Kim said nothing. There was a tightness in her throat. Ruana said, “And so I took it upon myself to come west instead of east. To journey to wherever the war might be and so to see if there was a truer part the Paraiko should play in what was to come. Something drove me from within. There was anger in me, Seer, and there was hatred of Maugrim, and neither of those had I ever felt before.”
“I know that,” Kim said. “I grieve for it, Ruana.” Again he shook his head. “Grieve not. The price of our sanctity would have been the Wild Hunt riding free, and the deaths of all living peoples gathered here. It was time, Seer of Brennin, past tune, for the Paraiko to be truly numbered among the army of Light.”
“I am forgiven, then?” she asked in a small voice. “You were forgiven in the kanior.” She remembered: the ghostly images of Kevin and Ysanne moving among all the thronging dead of the Paraiko, honored among them, reclaimed with them by the deep spell of Ruana’s song. She nodded. “I know,” she said. Around the two of them there was silence. Kim looked up at the grave, white-haired Giant. “You will have to go now? To follow them to the cave?”
“Soon,” he replied. “But there is something yet to happen here, I think, and I will stay to see.”
And with his words a dormant awareness came back to life within Kimberly as well. She looked past Ruana and saw Galadan on the plain, ringed about