to stay out long. Nothing could. How, Kevin thought, did you fight an enemy who could do this? He had sworn revenge for Jennifer, he remembered, and his mouth twisted with bitter irony. Such bravado that had been. First of all, there wasn’t even a war in which to fight—Rakoth Maugrim was breaking them with a hammer of wind and ice. Second, and this truth had been coiling within him since they had arrived from Stonehenge, he wouldn’t be much good for anything even if, somehow, they ended the winter and there was a war. The memory of his useless flailing about during the battle on the Plain three nights ago was still raw.
He had moved past jealousy—hadn’t lingered long there anyhow—it wasn’t really a part of his nature. He was used to being able to do something, though. He no longer envied Paul or Kim their dark, burdensome powers—Kim’s grief by Pendaran Wood the night before and Paul’s loneliness had wiped that away, leaving a kind of pity.
He didn’t want their roles or Dave’s axe-wielding strength, and no sane person would want any part of what fate Jennifer had found. All he wanted was to matter, to have some way, however slight, of affectuating the heartfelt vow he had sworn.
Two, actually. He had done it twice. Once in the Great Hall when Brendel had brought word of the lios alfar dead and Jennifer taken away. Then a second time, when Kim had brought them home and he looked down at what had been done to a woman he loved and then forced himself not to look away, that the scalding image might always be there if courage ever flagged in him.
It was still there, that image, and—he searched himself for this—he was not lacking in courage. He had no fear of tomorrow’s hunt, whatever the others might think, only a bitterly honest awareness that he was just along for the ride.
And this, for Kevin Laine, was the hardest thing in any world to handle. What he seemed to be, here in Fionavar, was utterly impotent. Again his mouth crooked bitterly in the cold, for this description was especially accurate now. Every man in Gwen Ystrat was feeling the pull of the Goddess. Every man but him, for whom, all his adult days, the workings of desire had been a deep, enduring constant, known only to the women who had shared a night with him.
If love and desire belonged to the Goddess, it seemed that even she was leaving him. What did that leave?
He shook his head—too much self-pity there. What was left was still Kevin Laine, who was known to be bright and accomplished, a star in law school and one in the making, everyone said, when he got to the courts. He had respect and friendship and he had been loved, more than once. His, a woman had told him years ago, was a face made for good fortune. A curious phrase; he had remembered it.
There was, he told himself, no room for maudlin self-pity in a curriculum vitae like that.
On the other hand, all the glitter of his accomplishments lay squarely within his own world. How could he glory in mock trial triumphs any more? How set his sights on legal excellence after what he had seen here? What could possibly have meaning at home once he had watched Rangat hurl a burning hand into the sky and heard the Unraveller’s laughter on the north wind?
Very little, next to nothing. In fact, one thing only, but he did have that one thing, and with the pang of his heart that always came when he hadn’t done so for a while, Kevin thought of his father.
“Fur gezunter heit, und cum gezunter heit,” Sol Laine had said in Yiddish, when Kevin had told him he had to fly to London on ten hours’ notice. Go safely, and come safely. Nothing more. In this lay a boundless trust. If Kevin had wanted to tell, Kevin would have explained the trip. If Kevin did not explain, he had a reason and a right.
“Oh, Abba,” he murmured aloud in the cruel night. And in the country of the Mother his word for father became a talisman of sorts that carried him in from the slash of wind to the house Diarmuid had been given in Morvran.
There were prerogatives of royalty. Only Coll and Kevin and Brock were sharing the place with the Prince. Coll was in the tavern, and the Dwarf was