As if in answer to his thoughts, his unspoken fears, Darien spoke again, clearly this time, in a voice that mastered the wind and the thunder out at sea and the drumming, rising now from the forest floor.
“Shall I go to Starkadh?” he challenged his mother. “Shall I see if my father gives me a fairer welcome? I doubt Rakoth will scruple to take a stolen dagger! Do you leave me any choice—Mother?”
He’s not a child, Brendel thought. It was not the words or the voice of a child.
Jennifer had not moved or flinched, even when the bolts of power flew by her. Only her fingers, spread-eagled at her sides, gave any hint of tension. And again, amid his doubt and fear and numbing incomprehension, Brendel of the lios alfar was awed by what he saw in her.
She said, “Darien, I leave you the only choice there is. I will say this much and nothing more: you live, though your father wanted me dead so that you would never come into the Tapestry. I cannot hold you in my arms or seek shelter and love for you as I did in Vae’s house when you were born. We are past the time for that. There is a choice for you to make, and everything I know tells me that you must make it freely and unconstrained, or it will never have been made at all. If I bind you to me now, or even try, I strip you of what you are.”
“What if I don’t want to make that choice?”
Struggling to understand, Brendel heard Darien’s voice suspended, halfway, it seemed, between the explosion of his power and the supplication of his longing.
His mother laughed, but not harshly. “Oh, my child,” she said. “None of us want to make it, and all of us must. Yours is only the hardest, and the one that matters most.”
The wind died a little, a lull, a hesitation. Darien said, “Finn told me… before… that my mother loved me and that she had made me special.”
And now, as if involuntarily, Jennifer’s hands did move, up from her sides, to clutch her elbows tightly in front of her.
“Acushla machree,” she said—or so Brendel thought. She started to go on, then seemed to pull herself up short, as on a tight, harsh rein.
After a moment she added, in a different voice, “He was wrong… about making you special. You know that now. Your power comes from Rakoth when your eyes go red. What you have of me is only freedom and the right to choose, to make your own choice between Light and Dark. Nothing more than that.”
“No, Jen!” the Seer of Brennin screamed, into the wind.
Too late, Darien’s eyes changed again as the last words were spoken, and from the bitterness of his laughter Brendel knew they had lost him. The wind rose again, wilder than before; over it, over the deep drumming of Pendaran Wood, Darien cried, “Wrong, Mother! You have it all wrong. I am not here to choose but to be chosen!”
He gestured toward his forehead. “Do you not see what I wear on my brow? Do you not recognize it?” There was another peal of thunder, louder than any yet, and rain began to fall. Through it, over it, Darien’s voice soared. “This is the Circlet of Lisen! The Light against the Dark—and it went out when I put it on!”
A sheet of lightning seared the sky west of them. Then thunder again. Then Darien: “Don’t you see? The Light has turned away, and now you have as well. Choice? I have none! I am of the Dark that extinguishes the Light— and I know where to go!”
With those words he reclaimed the dagger from the strand before his feet; then he was running, heedless, contemptuous of the ominous drumming in the Wood, straight into Pendaran through the slashing, driving rain, leaving the six of them exposed on the shore to both the storm which had come and the rawness of their terror.
Jennifer turned. The rain was sheeting down; Brendel had no way to tell if there were tears or raindrops on her face.
“Come,” he said, “we must go inside. It is dangerous out here in this!”
Jennifer ignored him. The other three women had come up. She turned to Kim, waiting, expecting something.
And it came. “What in the name of all that is holy have you done?” the Seer of Brennin screamed into the gale. It was hard to stand upright; they were all drenched to the bone. “I sent him here as a last chance to keep him from Starkadh, and you drove him straight there! All he wanted was comfort, Jen!”
But it was Guinevere who answered, colder, sterner than the elements. “Comfort? Have I comfort to give, Kimberly? Have you? Or any of us, today, now? You had no right to send him here, and you know it! I meant him to be random, free to choose, and I will not back away from that! Jaelle, what did you think you were doing? You were there in the music room at Paras Derval when I told that to Paul. I meant everything I said! If we bind him, or try, he is lost to us!”
There was another thing inside her, at the very deepest place in her heart, but she did not say it. It was her own, too naked for the telling: He is my Wild Hunt, she whispered over and over in her soul. My Owein, my shadow kings, my child on Iselen. All of them. She was not blind to the resonances. She knew that they killed, with joy and without discrimination. She knew what they were. She also knew, since Flidais’ tale on the balcony, what they meant.
She glared at Kimberly through the slashing rain, daring her to speak again. But the Seer was silent, and in her eyes Jennifer saw no more anger or fear, only sadness and wisdom and a love she remembered as never varying. There was a queer constriction in her throat.
“Excuse me.” The women looked down at the one who had spoken. “Excuse me,” Flidais repeated, fighting hard against the surging in his heart, straining to keep his voice calm. “I take it you are the Seer of Brennin?”
“I am,” Kim said.
“I am Flidais,” he said, unconscionably quick with even this casually chosen name. But he had no patience left; he was near now, so near. He was afraid he would go mad with excitement. “I should tell you that Galadan is very close to this place—minutes away, I think.”
Jennifer brought her hands to her mouth. She had forgotten, in the total absorption of the last few minutes. But it all came back now: the night in the wood and the wolf who had taken her away for Maugrim and then had become a man who said, She is still to go north. If it were not so, I might take her for myself. Just before he gave her to the swan.
She shuddered. She could not help herself. She heard Flidais say, still for some reason addressing Kim, “I can be of aid, I believe. I think I could divert him from this place, if I go fast enough.”
“Well, then, go!” Kim exclaimed. “If he’s only a few minutes—”
“Or,” Flidais went on, unable now to keep the rising note from finally reaching his voice, “I could do nothing, as the andain usually do. Or, if I choose, I could tell him exactly who just left the glade, and who is here. ”
“I would kill you first!” Brendel burst out, his eyes gleaming through the rain. A bolt of lightning knifed into the roiling sea. There came another peal of thunder.
“You could try,” Flidais said, with equanimity. “You would fail. And then Galadan could come.”
He paused, waiting, looking at Kim, who said, slowly, “All right. What is it you want?”
Amid the howling of the storm Flidais was conscious of a great, cresting illumination in his heart. Tenderly, with a delicate ineffable joy, he said, “Only one thing. A small thing. So small. Only a name. The summoning name of the Warrior.” His soul was singing. He did a little dance on the wet strand; he couldn’t help himself. It was here. It was in his hands.
“No,” said Kimberly.
His jaw dropped into the soaked mat of his beard. “No,” she repeated. “I swore an oath when he came to me, and I will not break it.”
“Seer—” Jaelle began.
“You must!” Flidais moaned. “You must tell me! It is the only riddle. The last one! I know all the other answers. I would never tell. Never! The Weaver and all the gods know I would never tell—but I must know it, Seer! It is the wish of my heart!”