She knew she was sane, did not know why.
One thing only pulled her forward into some future tense. Not a good thing, nor could it have been, but it was real, and random, and hers. She would not be gainsaid.
And so, when Kim had first told the other three, and they had come in July to argue with her, she had stood up and left the room. Nor had she seen Kevin or Dave or Paul since that day.
She would bear this child, the child of Rakoth Maugrim. She intended to die giving birth.
She would not have let him in, except that she saw that he was alone, and this was sufficiently unexpected to cause her to open the door.
Paul Schafer said, “I have a story to tell. Will you listen?”
It was cold on the porch. After a moment she stepped aside and he entered. She closed the door and walked into the living room. He hung up his coat in the hall closet and followed her.
She had taken the rocking chair. He sat down on the couch and looked at her, tall and fair, still graceful though no longer slim, seven months heavy with the child. Her head was high, her wide-set green eyes uncompromising.
“I walked away from you last time, and I will again, Paul. I will not be moved on this.”
“I said, a story,” he murmured.
“Then tell it.”
So he told her for the first time about the grey dog on the wall of Paras Derval and the fathomless sorrow in its eyes; he told her about his second night on the Summer Tree, when Galadan, whom she also knew, had come for him, and how the dog had appeared again, and of the battle fought here in the Mórnirwood. He told her about being bound on the Tree of the God, and seeing the red moon rise and the grey dog drive the wolf from the wood.
He told her of Dana. And Mórnir. The powers shown forth that night in answer to the Darkness in the north. His voice was deeper than she remembered; there were echoes in it.
He said, “We are not in this alone. He may break us into fragments in the end, but he will not be unresisted, and whatever you may have seen or endured in that place you must understand that he cannot shape the pattern exactly to his desire. Or else you would not be here.”
She listened, almost against her will. His words brought back words of her own, spoken in Starkadh itself: You will have nothing of me that you do not take, she had said. But that was before. Before he had set about taking everything—until Kim had pulled her out.
She lifted her head a little. “Yes,” Paul said, his eyes never leaving her face. “Do you understand? He is stronger than any of us, stronger even than the God who sent me back. He is stronger than you, Jennifer; it is not worth saying except for this: he cannot take away what you are.”
“I know this,” said Jennifer Lowell. “It is why I will bear his child.”
He sat back. “Then you become his servant.”
“No. You listen to me now, Paul, because you don’t know everything either. When he left me… after, he gave me to a Dwarf. Blod was his name. I was a reward, a toy, but he said something to the Dwarf: he said I was to be killed, and that there was a reason.” There was cold resolution in her voice. “I will bear this child because I am alive when he wished me dead—the child is random, it is outside his purposes.”
He was silent a long time. Then, “But so are you, in and of yourself.”
Her laugh was a brutal sound. “And how am I, in and of myself, to answer him? I am going to have a son, Paul, and he will be my answer.”
He shook his head. “There is too much evil in this, and only to prove a point already proven.”
“Nonetheless,” said Jennifer.
After a moment his mouth crooked sideways. “I won’t press you on it, then. I came for you, not him. Kim’s already dreamt his name, anyhow.”
Her eyes flashed. “Paul, understand me. I would do what I am doing whatever Kim said. Whatever she happened to dream. And I will name him as I choose!”
He was smiling, improbably. “Stick around and do that then. Stay with us, Jen. We need you back.” Only when he spoke did she realize what she’d said. He’d tricked her, she decided, had goaded her quite deliberately into something unintended. But she couldn’t, for some reason, feel angry. Had this first tenuous spar he’d thrown across to her been a little firmer she might, in fact, have smiled.
Paul stood up. “There is an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Art Gallery. Would you like to see it with me?”
For a long time she rocked in the chair, looking up at him. He was dark-haired, slight, still frail-seeming, though not so much as last spring.
“What was the dog’s name?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I wish I did.”
After another moment she rose, put on her coat, and took her first careful step on the first bridge.
Dark seed of a dark god, Paul was thinking, as he tried to simulate an interest in nineteenth-century prints from Kyoto and Osaka. Cranes, twisted trees, elegant ladies with long pins in their hair.
The lady beside him wasn’t talking a great deal, but she was there in the gallery, and it was not a small grace. He remembered the crumpled figure she had been seven months before, when Kim had brought them desperately from Fionavar with the wild, blazing power of the Baelrath.
This was Kim’s power, he knew: the Warstone and the dreams in which she walked at night, white-haired as Ysanne had been, two souls within her, and knowledge of two worlds. It had to be a difficult thing. The price of power, he remembered Ailell the High King telling him, the night they played their game of ta’bael. The night that had been overture to the three nights that became his own hard, hardest thing. The gateway to whatever he now was, Lord of the Summer Tree.
Whatever he now was. They had moved into the twentieth century now: more cranes, long, narrow mountain scenes, low boats riding on wide rivers.
“The themes don’t change much,” Jennifer said.
“Not much.”
He had been sent back, he was Mórnir’s response, but he had no ring with which to burn, no dreams down which to track the secrets of the Tapestry, not even a horn such as Dave had found, no skylore like Loren, or crown like Aileron; not even—though he felt a chill at the thought—a child within him like the woman at his side.
And yet. There had been ravens at his shoulder in the branches of the Tree: Thought and Memory were their names. There had been a figure in the clearing, hard to see, but he had seen horns on its head and seen it bow to him. There had been the white mist rising up through him to the sky in which a red moon sailed on new moon night. There had been rain. And then the God.
And there was still the God. At night, sometimes, he could feel the tacit presence, immense, in the rush and slide of his blood, the muffled thunder of his human heart.
Was he a symbol only? A manifestation of what he had been telling Jennifer: the presence of opposition to the workings of the Unraveller? There were worse roles, he supposed. It gave him a part to play in what was to come, but something within—and there was a god within him—said that there was more. No man shall be Lord of the Summer Tree who has not twice been born, Jaelle had said to him in the sanctuary.
He was more than symbol. The waiting to learn what, and how, seemed to be part of the price.
Almost at the end now. They stopped in front of a large print of a river scene: boats being poled along, others unloading at a crowded dock; there were woods on the far side of the stream, snow-capped mountains beyond. It was badly hung, though; he could see people behind them reflected in the glass, two students, the sleepy guard. And then Paul saw the blurred reflection in the doorway of a wolf.
Turning quickly on a taken breath he met the eyes of Galadan.