Lancelot’s eyes were undisturbed, his voice utterly calm. “Then it leads there by your choice, Darien. Only thus are we not slaves: if we can choose where we would walk. Failing that, all is mockery.”
There was a silence, broken, to Flidais’ horror, by the sound of Darien laughing again, bitter, lonely, lost. “It is, though,” said the boy. “It is all mockery. The light went out when I put it on. Don’t you know that? And why, why should I choose to walk in any case?”
There was an instant of silence.
“No!” Flidais cried, reaching out to the child.
Too late. Perhaps it had always been too late: from birth, from conception amid the unlight of Starkadh, from the time the worlds first were spun, Flidais thought, heartsick.
The eyes blazed savagely red. There came a roaring sound from the powers of the Wood, a blurring of shapes in the grove, and suddenly Darien was not there anymore.
Instead, an owl, gleaming white in the darkness, darted swiftly down into the grass, seized a fallen dagger in its mouth, and was aloft and away, wheeling out of sight to the north.
To the north. Flidais gazed at the circle of night sky framed by the towering trees, and with all his soul he tried to will a shape to be there. The shape of a white owl returning, flying back to land beside them and turn into a child again, a fair child, with mild blue eyes, who had chosen the Light and been chosen by it to be a bright blade in the looming dark.
He swallowed. He looked away from the empty sky. He turned back to Lancelot—who was on his feet, bleeding, burnt, swaying with fatigue.
“What are you doing?” Flidais cried.
Lancelot looked down on him. “I am following,” he said calmly, as if it were the most obvious thing imaginable. “Will you help me with my sword?” He held up his mangled palm; his left arm hung at his side.
“Are you mad?” the andain spluttered.
Lancelot made a sound that managed to be a laugh. “I have been mad,” he admitted. “A long time ago. But not now, little one. What would you have me do? Lie here and lick my wounds in a time of war?”
Flidais did a little dance of sheer exasperation. “What role can you play if you kill yourself?”
“I am aware that I’m not good for much, right now,” Lancelot said gravely, “but I don’t think these wounds are going to—”
“You’re going to follow?” the andain interrupted, as the full import of Lancelot’s words struck him. “Lancelot, he’s an owl now, he’s flying! By the time you even get out of Pendaran he will be—”
He stopped abruptly, in mid-sentence.
“What is it? What have you thought of, wise child?”
He hadn’t been a child for a very long time. But he had, indeed, thought of something. He looked up at the man, saw the blood on his bare chest. “He was going to fly due north. That will take him over the western edge of Daniloth.”
“And?”
“And he may not get through. Time is very strange in the Shadowland.”
“My sword,” said Lancelot crisply. “Please.”
Somehow Flidais found himself collecting the discarded blade and then the scabbard. He came back to Lancelot and, as gently as he could, buckled the sword about the man’s waist.
“Will the spirits of the Wood let me pass?” Lancelot asked quietly.
Flidais paused to listen to the messages passing around them and beneath their feet.
“They will,” he said at length, not a little surprised. “For Guinevere, and for your blood spilled tonight. They do you honor, Lancelot.”
“More than I merit,” the man said. He drew a deep breath, as if gathering reserves of endurance, from where, Flidais knew not.
He scowled upward at Lancelot. “You will go easier with a guide. I will take you to the borders of Daniloth, but I have a condition.”
“Which is?” Always, the mild courtesy.
“One of my homes lies on our way. You will have to let me dress your wounds when we come there.”
“I will be grateful for it,” said Lancelot.
The andain opened his mouth, a cutting retort readied. He never said it. Instead, he turned and stomped from the grove, walking north. When he had gone a short way he stopped and looked back, to see a thing of wonder.
Lancelot was following, slowly, on the dark and narrow path. All about him and from high above, the mighty trees of Pendaran Wood were letting fall their green leaves,