to reach for them, to carry them all with his song.
Then his voice went deeper yet, with a new note spun within it, and Kim saw that one had come into the circle who was taller than any Giant there, whose eyes, even from beyond the world, were brighter than any other’s, and she knew from Ruana’s song that this was Connla himself, who had transgressed in binding Owein, and again in making the Cauldron. Connla, who had gone forth from Khath Meigol alone in voluntary exile from his people—to be reclaimed on this night when every one of them was being reclaimed and mourned anew.
Kim saw Kevin there, honored among those gathered. And she saw Ysanne, insubstantial even among ghosts, for she had gone farther away than any of them, had gone so far, with her own sacrifice, that Kim scarcely grasped how Ruana had managed to bring even her shadow back to this place.
And at length there came a time when no new figures were drifting into the ring. Kim looked at Ruana as he swayed slowly back and forth, his eyes closed with the weight of all he was carrying. She saw his hands close tightly in his lap as his voice changed one last time, as it went deeper yet, found access to even purer sorrow.
And one by one, into the humbling amplitude of his soul, he summoned the dead svart alfar and the urgach who had imprisoned his people and slain them and devoured them when they were dead.
Kim had never known an act to match the grandeur of what Ruana did in that moment. It was an assertion, utter and irrefutable, of his people’s identity. A clear sound in the wide dark of the night, proclaiming that the Paraiko were still without hate, that they were equal to and greater than the worst of what Rakoth Maugrim could do. That they could endure his evil, and absorb it, and rise above it in the end, continuing to be what they had always been, never less than such and never slaves of the Dark.
Kim felt purified in that moment, transfigured by what Ruana was shaping, and when she saw his eyes open and come to rest upon her, even as he sang, she knew what was to come and fearing nothing in his presence she watched him lift a finger and, using it like a blade, lay open the skin on his face and arms in long, deep cuts.
No blood flowed. None at all, though the skin curled back from the gashes he had made and she could see the nerves and arteries exposed within.
He looked at her. With no fear in her, none at all, in a spirit of mourning and expiation, Kim raised her own hands and drew her fingernails along her cheeks and then down the veins of her forearms, feeling the skin slice open to her touch. She was a doctor, and she knew that this could kill.
It did not. No blood welled from her wounds either, though her tears were falling still. Tears of sorrow and now of gratitude as well, that Ruana had offered her this, had been strong enough to shape a magic so profound that even she, who was not one of the Paraiko, and who carried grief and guilt running so deep, might find absolution in the bloodless rites amid the presence of the dead.
Even as Ruana’s voice lifted in the last notes of his kanior, Kim felt her gashes closing, and looking down on her arms she saw the skin knit whole and unscarred, and she gave thanks from the wellspring of her being for what he had given her.
Then she saw the Baelrath burning.
Nothing had ever been worse, not even the summoning of Arthur from his rest in Avalon among the summer stars. The Warrior had been doomed by the will of the Weaver to his long fate of summoning and grief, to restitution through all the years and worlds for having the children slain. She had shattered his rest with that terrible name cried out upon the Tor, and her own heart had almost shattered with the pain of it. But she had not shaped his doom; that had been done long ago. She and the Baelrath had created nothing, had changed nothing. She had only compelled him, in sorrow, to do what he was bound by his destiny to do.
This was different, and unimaginably worse, for with the flaming of the ring