She nodded, never taking her eyes from the brilliant colors of the harbor. She said, wonderingly, “Do you see that ship from Raith? And the smaller one—over there—with the flag of Cynan? Diar, my country doesn’t even exist yet! Those are ships of the principalities. They only became a country after Angirad returned from the Bael Rangat.”
“I know that,” he said gently. “We’re looking at a world that was destroyed.”
From over the water now she recognized the sound of a t’rena, played high and sweet on the deck of the ship from Cynan. She knew that music; she had grown up with it.
A thought came to her, born of the ache lodged in her heart. “Can’t we warn them? Can’t we do something?”
Diarmuid shook his head. “They can’t see us or hear us.”
“What do you mean? Can’t you hear the music? And look—they’re waving to us!”
His hands were loosely clasped together as he leaned on the rail, but the strain in his voice gave the lie to that casualness. “Not to us, my dear. They aren’t waving to us. What they see isn’t this broken hulk. They see a beautiful ship passing, with a picked crew from Brennin. They see Amairgen’s mariners, Sharra, and his ship as it was before it sailed for Cader Sedat. We’re invisible, I’m afraid.”
So, finally, she understood. They sailed north along the line of the coast, and Guiraut Town disappeared from sight, soon to disappear forever from the world of men, its brightness remembered only in song. Soon, and yet long ago. Both. Loops in the weaving of time.
The sound of the t’rena followed them a long way, even after the town was lost behind the curve of the bay. They left it, because they had no choice, to the fires of its future and their past.
After that the mood of the ship turned grim, not with apprehension, but with a newer, sterner resolution, a deeper awareness of what evil was, and meant. There was a harder tone to the speech of the men on the deck, a crispness to the movements with which they cleaned and polished their weapons, that boded ill for those who would seek to oppose mem in what was to come. And it was coming, Sharra knew that now, and she too was ready for it. Some of that same resolution had hardened in her own heart.
They sailed north up the seaward coast of Sennett Strand, and late in the afternoon, with the sun well out over the sea, they came to the northernmost tip of Sennett and rounded that cape, swinging east, and they saw the glaciers and the fjords, and the blackness of Starkadh beyond.
Sharra gazed upon it and did not flinch or close her eyes. She looked upon the heart of evil, and she willed herself not to look away.
She could not, of course, see herself in that moment, but others could, and there was a murmuring along the ship at how fierce and cold the beauty of the Dark Rose of Cathal had suddenly become. An Ice Queen from the Garden Country, a rival to the Queen of Rük herself, as stern and as unyielding.
And even here, on this doorstep of the Dark, there was a thing of beauty to be found. High above and far beyond Starkadh, Rangat reared up, snow-crowned, cloud-shouldered, mastering the northlands with its glory.
Sharra understood suddenly, for the first time, why the conflict of a thousand years ago had come to be called the Bael Rangat even though not one of the major battles had taken place by the mountain. The truth was that Rangat loomed so imperiously high, this far north, there was no place in these lands that could not be said to lie under the sovereignty of the mountain.
Unless and until Rakoth defeated them.
They sailed down the bay of a thousand years ago under the westering sun. To the east they could see the golden beaches of Andarien and, beyond them, a hint of a green fair land, rising in gentle slopes toward the north. It would be dotted with strands of tall trees, Sharra knew, and there would be deep blue lakes, sparkling in the sun, with fish leaping from them in curved homage to the light. All gone, she knew, all gone to dust and barrenness, to bleak highlands where the north wind whistled down over nothingness. The forests were leveled, the lakes dry, the thin grasses scattered and brown. Ruined Andarien, where the war had been fought.
And would be again, if Diarmuid was right. If, even now, Aileron the High King was leading his armies from the Plain toward Gwynir, to come on the morrow through the evergreens to Andarien. They too would be there, those on this ship, if Amairgen’s promise held.
It did. They sailed southeast down Linden Bay, through the growing shadows of that afternoon and the long summer twilight, watching the golden sands where Andarien met the bay gradually grow dark. Looking back to the west, over Sennett Strand again, Sham saw the evening star—Lauriel’s—and then, a moment later, the sun set.
And Amairgen was among them again, shadowy and insubstantial, but growing clearer as the night deepened. There was a cold arrogance to him and she wondered for a moment that Lisen had loved this man. Then she thought about how long ago she had died, and how long he had wandered, a ghost, loveless and unrevenged, through lonely, endless seas. He would have been different, she guessed, when he was a living man, and young, and loved by the fairest child of all the Weaver’s worlds.
A pity she could never have expressed rose in her as she looked upon the proud figure of the first mage. Later it grew too dark, and she could no longer see him clearly under the starlight. The moon, thinning toward new, rose very late.
Sharra slept for a time; most of them did, knowing how little rest might lie in the days ahead—or how much rest, an eternity of it. She woke long before dawn. The moon was over the Strand, west of them. They carried no lights on that ship. Andarien was a dark blur to the east.
She heard low voices speaking again—Amairgen, Diar, and Arthur Pendragon. Then the voices were gradually stilled. Sharra rose, Diarmuid’s cloak about her in the chill. Jaelle, the High Priestess, came to stand beside her, and the two of them watched as the Warrior walked to the prow of the ship. He stood there—Cavall beside him, as ever—and in the darkness of that night he suddenly thrust high his spear, and the head of the King Spear blazed, blue-white and dazzling.
And by that light Amairgen Whitebranch guided his ship to land by the mouth of the River Celyn where it ran into Linden Bay.
They disembarked in the shallows by that sweetest of rivers, which flowed from Celyn Lake along the enchanted borders of Daniloth. Last of all to leave the ship, Sharra saw, was the one they called Pwyll Twiceborn. He stood on the deck above the swaying ladder and said something to Amairgen, and the mage made reply. She couldn’t hear what they said, but she felt a shiver raise the hairs of her neck to look upon the two of them.
Then Pwyll came down the rope ladder, and they were all gathered on land again. Amairgen stood above them, proud and austere in what was left of the moonlight.
He said, “High Priestess of Dana, I have done as you bade me. Have I still the prayers you promised?”
Gravely, Jaelle replied, “You would have had them even had you not carried us. Go to your rest, unquiet ghost. All of you. The Soulmonger is dead. You are released. May there be Light for you at the Weaver’s side.”
“And for you,” Amairgen said. “And for all of you.”
He turned to Pwyll again and seemed about to speak once more. He did not. Instead, he slowly lifted high both his hands, and then, amid the sudden enraptured crying of his unseen mariners, he faded from sight in the darkness. And his ship faded away with him, and the crying of the mariners fell slowly away on the breeze, leaving only the sound of the surf to carry its echo awhile from so far back in time.
In that place where the river met the bay they turned and, led by Brendel of the lios alfar, who knew every slope and shadow of this country so near his home, they began walking east, toward where the sun would rise.