In the same grave spirit he bowed to her and, bringing one of her hands to his lips, kissed it. She thought of Diarmuid and Jen, the first night they had come to Fionavar. Most of a long lifetime ago, it seemed. She gave Loren’s hand a squeeze and then, ignoring the guards, let her glance—imperious, she devoutly hoped—sweep over the assembled Dwarves.
Doing so, she noticed something. She turned back to Loren and said, softly, “Almost all women. Why?”
“Women and older men. And the members of the Moot who will be coming out soon. Oh, Kim, my dear, why do you think?” His eyes—so kind, she remembered them being—seemed to hold a crushing weight of trouble within their depths.
“Silence!” one of the guards snapped. Not harshly, but his tone meant business.
It didn’t matter. Loren’s expression had told her what she had to know. She felt the weight of knowledge that he carried come into her as well.
Women, and the old, and the councillors of the Moot. The men in their prime, the warriors, away. Away, of course, at war.
She didn’t need to be told which side they would be fighting on, if Kaen had sent them forth.
And in that moment Kaen himself came forth from the far wing of the stage, and so for the first time she saw the one who had unchained blackest evil in their time. Quietly, without any evident pride or arrogance, he strode to stand at one side of the stone table. His thick hair was raven black, his beard closely trimmed. He was slighter than Matt or Brock, not as powerful, except for one thing: his hands were those of a sculptor, large, capable, very strong. He rested one of them on the table, although, carefully, he did not touch the Crown. He was clad unpretentiously in simple brown, and his eyes betrayed no hint of madness or delusions. They were meditative, tranquil, almost sorrowful.
There was another footfall on the stage. Kim tore her eyes away from Kaen to watch Matt Sören step forward from the near wing. She expected a babble of noise, a murmur, some level of response. But the Dwarf she knew and loved—unchanged, she saw, always unchanged, no matter what might come to pass—moved to stand at the other side of the table from Kaen, and as he came there was not a single thread of sound in all the vastness of Seithr’s Hall.
In the well of that silence Matt waited, scanning the Dwarves assembled there with his one dark eye. She heard the guards shift restively behind her. Then, without any fuss at all, Matt took the Diamond Crown and placed it upon his head.
It was as if a tree in a dry forest had been struck by lightning, so explosive was the response. Her heart leaping, Kim heard a shocked roar of sound ignite the hall. In the thunder of it she felt anger and confusion, strove to detect a hint of joy, and thought that she did. But her gaze had gone instinctively to Kaen, as soon as Matt claimed the Crown.
Kaen’s mouth was crooked in a wry, caustic smile, unruffled, even amused. But his eyes had given him away, for in them Kim had seen, if only for an instant, a bleak, vicious malevolence. She read murder there, and it knifed into her heart.
Powerless, a prisoner, fear within her like a living, sharp-clawed creature, Kim turned back to Matt and felt her racing heartbeat slow. Even with a Crown of a thousand diamonds dazzling upon his head, the aura of him, the essence, was still a quiet, reassuring certitude, an everlasting calm.
He raised one hand and waited patiently for silence. When he had it, nearly, he said, “Calor Diman never surrenders her Kings.”
Nothing more, and he did not say it loudly, but the acoustics of that chamber carried his words to the farthest corners of Seithr’s Hall. When their resonance had died away, the silence once more was complete.
Into it, emerging from either wing of the stage, there came some fifteen or twenty Dwarves. They were all clad in black, and Kim saw that each of them wore, upon the third finger of his right hand, a diamond ring gleaming like white fire. None of them were young, but the one who came first was the eldest by far. White-bearded and leaning for support upon a staff, he paused to let the others file past him to stone seats placed on one side of the stage.
“The Dwarfmoot,” Loren whispered softly. “They will judge between Kaen and Matt. The one with the staff is Miach, First of the Moot.”
“Judge what?” Kim whispered back apprehensively.
“The word-striving,” Loren murmured, not very helpfully. “Of the same kind as the one Matt lost forty years ago, when the Moot judged in favor of Kaen and voted to continue the search for the Cauldron—”
“Silence!” hissed the same guard as before. He emphasized the command by striking Loren on the arm with his hand, not gently.
Silvercloak turned swiftly and fixed the guard with a gaze that made the Dwarf stumble quickly backward, blanching.
“I am… I am ordered to keep you quiet,” he stammered.
“I do not intend to say overmuch,” Loren said. “But if you touch me again I will turn you into a geiala and roast you for lunch. Once warned is all you will be!”
He turned back to the stage, his face impressive. It was a bluff, nothing more, Kim knew, but she also realized that none of the Dwarves, not even Kaen, could know what had happened to the mage’s powers in Cader Sedat.
Miach had moved forward, the click of his staff on the stone sounding loud in the silence. He took a position in front of Kaen and Matt, a little to one side. After bowing with equal gravity to each of them, he turned and addressed the assembled Dwarves.
“Daughters and sons of Calor Diman, you will have heard why we are summoned to Seithr’s Hall. Matt, who was King once here under Banir Lok, has returned and has satisfied the Moot that he is who he claims to be. This is so, despite the passage of forty years. He carries a second name now—Sören—to mark the loss of an eye in a war far from our mountains. A war,” Miach added quietly, “in which the Dwarves had no proper role to play.”
Kim winced. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Loren bite his lower lip in consternation.
Miach continued in the same judicious tones. “Be that as it may, Matt Sören it is who is here again, and last night before the convened Moot he issued challenge to Kaen, who has ruled us these forty years—ruled, but only by the support and sufferance of the Dwarfmoot, not as a true King, for he has never shaped a crystal for the Lake nor spent a night beside her shores under the full moon.”
There was a tiny ripple of sound at that. It was Kaen’s turn to react. His expression of attentive deference did not change, but Kim, watching closely, saw his hand on the table close into a fist. A moment later, he seemed to become aware of this, and the fist opened again.
“Be that as it may,” Miach said a second time, “you are summoned to hear and the Moot to judge a word-striving after the old kind, such as we have not seen in forty years—since last these two stood before us. I have lived long enough, by a grace of the Weaver’s hand upon my thread, to say that a pattern is unfolding here, with a symmetry that bears witness to interwoven destinies.”
He paused. Then, looking directly at Kim, to her great surprise, he said, “There are two here not of our people. Tidings are slow to come across the mountains, and slower still to come within them, but the Dwarves know well of Loren Silvercloak the mage, whose source was once our King. And Matt Sören has named the woman here as Seer to the High King of Brennin. He has also undertaken to stand surety with his life that both of them will not wield the magics we know they carry, and will accept whatever judgment the Dwarfmoot makes of this striving. Matt Sören has said this. I now ask that they acknowledge, by whatever oath they deem most binding, that this is true. In return, I offer the assurance of the Dwarfmoot, to which Kaen has acceded—indeed, it was his suggestion—that they will be conducted safely from our realm if such need be after the striving is judged.”