cried aloud, “But this is terrible! That poor child! No one else in any world can be so lonely.”
It carried. Kim saw the soldiers glance over at them from farther along the shore. Jaelle made a queer sound, between a gasp and a breathless laugh. “Really,” she began. “Poor child? I don’t think you’ve quite understood—”
“No,” Kim interrupted, laying an urgent hand on Jaelle’s arm. “No, wait. She isn’t wrong.” Even as she spoke, she was reliving the scene under the cottage, scanning it again, trying to see past her terrified awareness of who this child’s father was. And as she looked back, straining to remember, she heard again the sound that had escaped him when Lisen’s Light had gone out.
And this time, removed from it, with Sharra’s words to guide her, Kim heard clearly what she’d missed before: the loneliness, the terrible sense of rejection in that bewildered cry wrung from the soul of this boy—only a boy, they had to remember that—who had no one and nothing, and nowhere to turn. And from whom the very light had turned away, as if in denial and abhorrence.
He’d actually said that, she remembered now. He’d said as much to her, but in her fear she’d registered only the terrible threat that followed: he was going to his father bearing gifts. Gifts of entreaty, she now realized, of supplication, of longing for a place, from the most solitary soul there was.
From Darien, on the Darkest Road.
Kim stood up. Sharra’s words had crystallized things for her, finally, and she had thought of the one tiny thing she could do. A desperate hope it was, but it was all they had. For although it might still be proven true that it was the armies and a battlefield that would end things one way or the other, Kim knew that there were too many other powers arrayed for that to be a certainty.
And she was one of the powers, and another was the boy she’d seen that morning. She glanced over at the soldiers, concerned for a moment, but only for a moment; it was too late for absolute secrecy, the game was too far along, and too much was riding on what would follow. So she stepped forward a little, off the stony shoreline onto the grass running up to the front door of the cottage.
Then she lifted her voice and cried, “Darien, I know you can hear me! Before you go where you said you would go, let me tell you this: your mother is standing now in a tower west of Pendaran Wood.” That was all. It was all she had left: a scrap of information given to the wind. After the shouting, a very great silence, made deeper, not broken, by the waves on the shore. She felt a little ridiculous, knowing how it must appear to the soldiers. But dignity meant less than nothing now; only the reaching out mattered, the casting of her voice with her heart behind it, with the one thing that might get through to him.
But there was only silence. From the trees east of the cottage a white owl, roused from daytime slumber, rose briefly at her cry, then settled again deeper in the woods. Still, she was fairly certain, and she trusted her instincts by now, having had so little else to guide her for so long; Darien was still there. He was drawn to this place, and held by it, and if he was nearby he could hear her. And if he heard?
She didn’t know what he would do. She only knew that if anyone, anywhere, could hold him from that journey to his father, it was Jennifer in her tower. With her burdens and her griefs, and her insistence, from the start, that her child was to be random. But he couldn’t be left so anymore, Kim told herself. Surely Jennifer would see that? He was on his way to Starkadh, comfortless and lonely. Surely his mother would forgive Kim this act of intervention?
Kim turned back to the others. Jaelle was on her feet as well, standing very tall, composed, very much aware of what had just been done. She said, “Should we warn her? What will she do if he goes to her?”
Kim felt suddenly weary and fragile. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know if he’ll go there. He might. I think Sharra’s right, though, he’s looking for a place. As to warning her—I have no idea how.