Brock nodded.
“It is why I am here,” said Faebur. A young voice, trying hard to be stern. “To ride with you, and do what I can when battle comes.”
Aileron looked over at the older man who called himself Dalreidan. Dave saw that Ivor was looking at him too, and that Dalreidan was gazing back, not at the High King but at the Aven.
“I can ride,” Dalreidan said, very softly. “Have I leave?”
Abruptly, Dave realized that something else was happening here.
Ivor looked at Dalreidan for a long time without answering. Then: “No Chieftain can reclaim an exile within the Law. But nothing I know in the parchments at Celidon speaks to what the Aven may do in such a case. We are at war, and you have done service already in our cause. You have leave to return. As Aven I say so now.”
He stopped. Then, in a different voice, Ivor said, “You have leave to return to the Plain and to your tribe, though not under the name you have taken now. Be welcome back under the name you bore before the accident that thrust you forth into the mountains. This is a brighter thread in darkness than I ever thought to see, a promise of return. I cannot say how glad I am to see you here again.”
He smiled. “Turn now, for there is another here who will be as glad. Sorcha of the third tribe, turn and greet your son!”
In front of Dave, Tore went rigid, as Levon let out a whoop of delight. Sorcha turned. He looked at his son, and Dave, still standing behind Tore, saw the old Dalrei’s begrimed face light up with an unlooked-for joy.
One moment the tableau held; then Tore stumbled forward with unwonted awkwardness, and he and his father met in an embrace so fierce it seemed as if they meant to squeeze away all the dark years that had lain between.
Dave, who had given Tore the push that sent him forward, was smiling through tears. He looked at Levon and then at Ivor. He thought of his own father, so far away— so far away, it seemed, all his life. He looked over and up at Rangat and remembered the hand of fire.
“Do you think,” Mabon of Rhoden murmured, “that that small expedition we were planning might just as easily be done with seven?”
Dave wiped his eyes. He nodded. Then, still unable to speak, he nodded again.
Levon signaled them forward. Careful of the axe he carried, moving as silently as he could, Dave crawled up beside his friend. The others did the same. Lying prone on a hillock—scant shelter on the open Plain—the seven of them gazed north toward the darkness of Gwynir.
Overhead, clouds scudded eastward, now revealing, now obscuring the waning moon. Sighing through the tall grass, the breeze carried for the first time the scent of the evergreen forest. Far beyond the trees Rangat reared up, dominating the northern sky. When the moon was clear of the clouds the mountain glowed with a strange, spectral light. Dave looked away to the west and saw that the world ended there.
Or seemed to. They were on the very edge of Daniloth: the Shadowland, where time changed. Where men could wander lost in Ra-Lathen’s mist until the end of all the worlds. Dave peered into the moonlit shadows, the drifting fog, and it seemed to him that he saw blurred figures moving there, some riding ghostly horses, others on foot, all silent in the mist.
They had left the camp at moonrise, with less difficulty than expected. Levon had led them to the guard post manned by Cechtar of the third tribe, who was not about to betray or impede the designs of the Aven’s son. Indeed, his only objection had been in not being allowed to accompany them.
“You can’t,” Levon had murmured very calmly, in control. “If we aren’t back before sunrise, we will be captured or dead, and someone will have to warn the High King. The someone is you, Cechtar. I’m sorry. A thankless task. If the gods love us, it is a message you’ll not have to carry.”
After that, there had been no more words for a long time. Only the whisper of the night breeze across the Plain, the hoot of a hunting owl, the soft tread of their own footsteps as they walked away from the fires of the camp into the dark. Then the rustling sound of grasses parting as they dropped down and crawled the last part of the way toward the low tummock Levon had pointed out, just east of Daniloth, just south of Gwynir.
Crawling along beside Mabon of Rhoden, behind Tore and Sorcha, who seemed unwilling to allow more than a few inches of space between them now, Dave found himself thinking about how much a part of his reality death had been since he came to Fionavar.
Since he had crashed through the space between worlds here on the Plain and Tore had almost killed him with a dagger. There had been a killing that first night: he and the dark Dalrei he called a brother now had slain an urgach together in Faelinn Grove, first death among so many. There had been a battle by Llewenmere, and then among the snows of the Latham. A wolf hunt in Gwen Ystrat, and then, only three nights ago, the carnage along the banks of the Adein.
He had been lucky, he realized, moving more cautiously forward as the moon came out from between two banks of cloud. He could have died a dozen times over. Died a long way from home. The moon slid back behind the clouds. The breeze was cool. Another owl hooted. There were scattered stars overhead, where the cloud cover broke.
He thought of his father for the second time that day. It wasn’t hard, even for Dave, to figure out why. He looked at Sorcha, just ahead, moving effortlessly over the shadowed ground. Almost against his will, a trick of distance and shadows and of long sorrow, he pictured his father here with them, an eighth figure on the dark Plain. Josef Martyniuk had fought among the Ukrainian partisans for three years. More than forty years ago, but even so. Even so, a lifetime of physical labor had kept his big body hard, and Dave had grown up fearing the power of his father’s brawny arm. Josef could have swung a killing axe, and his icy blue eyes might have glinted just a little—too much to ask? — to see how easily his son handled one, how honored Dave was among people of rank and wisdom.
He could have kept up, too, Dave thought, going with the fantasy a little way. At least as well as Mabon, surely. And he wouldn’t have had any doubts, any hesitations about the lightness of doing this, of going to war in this cause. There had been stories in Dave’s childhood about his father’s deeds in his own war.
None from Josef, though. Whatever fragments Dave had heard had come from friends of his parents, middle-aged men pouring a third glass of iced vodka for themselves, telling the awkward, oversized younger son stories about his father long ago. Or beginning the stories. Before Josef, overhearing, would silence them with a harsh storm of words in the old tongue.
Dave could still remember the first time he had beaten up his older brother. When Vincent, late one night in the room they shared, had let slip a casual reference to a railway bombing their father had organized.
“How do you know about that?” Dave, perhaps ten, had demanded. He could still remember the way his heart had lurched.
“Dad told me,” Vincent had answered calmly. “He’s told me lots of those stories.”
Perhaps even now, fifteen years after, Vincent still didn’t know why his younger brother had so ferociously attacked him. For the first time ever, and the only time. Leaping upon his smaller, frailer older brother and punching him about. Crying that Vincent was lying.
Vincent’s own cries had brought Josef storming into the room, to block the light from the hallway with his size, to seize his younger son in one hand and hold him in the air as he cuffed him about with an open, meaty palm.
“He is smaller than you!” Josef had roared. “You are never to hit him!”
And Dave, crying, suspended helplessly in the air, unable to dodge the slaps raining down on him, had screamed, almost incoherently, “But I’m smaller than you!”