Paul had the keys to two adjacent rooms. Leaving Kimberly, at her own insistence, alone in one of the rooms, the four others drove the mile west to join the tour buses and pocket cameras by the monument. Once there, even with the daytime tackiness, Kevin sobered. There was work to be done, to prepare for what would happen that night.
Dave had asked on the plane. It had been very late, the movie over, lights dimmed. Jennifer and Paul had been asleep when the big man had come over to where Kevin and Kim were sitting, awake but not speaking. Kim hadn’t spoken the whole time, lost in some troubled country born of dream.
“What are we going to do there?” Dave had asked her diffidently, as if fearing to intrude.
And the white-haired girl beside him had roused herself to say, “You four will have to do whatever it takes, to give me enough time.”
“For what?” Dave had said.
Kevin, too, had turned his head to look at Kim as she replied, far too matter-of-factly, “To raise a King from the dead and make him surrender a name. After that I’ll be on my own.”
Kevin had looked past her then, out the window, and seen stars beyond the wing; they were flying very high over deep waters.
“What time is it?” Dave asked for the fifth time, fighting a case of nerves.
“After eleven,” said Paul, continuing to fidget with a spoon. They were in the saloon bar of the hotel; he, Dave, and Jen at the table, Kevin, unbelievably, chatting up the waitress over by the bar. Or not, actually, unbelievably; he’d known Kevin Laine a long time.
“When the hell is she coming down?” Dave had an edge in his voice, a real one, and Paul could feel anxiety building in himself as well. It was going to be a very different place at night, he knew, with the crowds of the afternoon gone. Under stars, Stonehenge would move back in time a long way. There was a power here still, he could feel it, and he knew it would be made manifest at night.
“Does everyone know what they have to do?” he repeated.
“Yes, Paul,” said Jennifer, surprisingly calm. They’d worked out their plans over dinner after returning from the monument. Kim hadn’t left her room, not since they’d arrived.
Kevin strolled back to the table, with a full pint of beer.
“Are you drinking?” Dave said sharply.
“Don’t be an idiot. While you two have been sitting here doing nothing, I’ve gotten the names of two of the guards out there. Len is the big bearded one, and there’s another named Dougal, Kate says.”
Dave and Paul were silent.
“Nicely done,” said Jennifer. She smiled slightly.
“Okay,” said Kim, “let’s go.” She was standing by the table in a bomber jacket and scarf. Her eyes were a little wild below the locks of white hair and her face was deathly pale. A single vertical line creased her forehead. She held up her hands; she was wearing gloves.
“It started to glow five minutes ago,” she said.
And so she had come to the place and it was time indeed, here, now, to manifest herself, to show forth the Baelrath in a crimson blaze of power. It was the Warstone, found, not made, and very wild, but there was a war now, and the ring was coming into its force, carrying her with it past the high shrouded stones, the fallen one, and the tilting one, to the highest lintel stone. Beside which she stopped.
There was shouting behind her. Very far behind her. It was time. Raising her hand before her face Kimberly cried out in a cold voice, far from what she sounded like when allowed to be only herself, only Kim, and said into stillness, the waiting calm of that place, words of power upon power to summon its dead from beyond the walls of Night.
“Damae Pendragon! Sed Baelrath riden log verenth. Pendragon rabenna, nisei damae!”
There was no moon yet. Between the ancient stones, the Baelrath glowed brighter than any star. It lit the giant teeth of rock luridly. There was nothing subtle or mild, nothing beautiful about this force. She had come to coerce, by the power she bore and the secret she knew. She had come to summon.
And then, by the rising of a wind where none had been before, she knew she had.
Leaning forward into it, holding the Baelrath before her, she saw, in the very center of the monument, a figure standing on the altar stone. He was tall and shadowed, wrapped in mist as in a shroud, only half incarnated in the half-light of star and stone. She fought the weight of him, the drag; he had been so long dead and she had made him rise.
No space for sorrow here, and weakness shown might break the summoning. She said:
“Uther Pendragon, attend me, for I command your will!”
“Command me not, I am a King!” His voice was high, stretched taut on a wire of centuries, but imperious still.
No space for mercy. None at all. She hardened her heart. “You are dead,” she said coldly, in the cold wind. “And given over to the stone I bear.”
“Why should this be so?”
The wind was rising. “For Ygraine deceived, and a son falsely engendered.” The old, old telling.
Uther drew himself to his fullest height, and he was very tall above his tomb. “Has he not proven great beyond all measure?”
And thus: “Even so,” said Kimberly, and there was a soreness in her now that no hardening could stay. “And I would call him by the name you guard.”
The dead King spread his hands to the watching stars. “Has he not suffered enough?” the father cried in a voice that overrode the wind.
To this there was no decent reply, and so she said, “I have no time, Uther, and he is needed. By the burning of my stone I compel you—what is the name?”
She could see the sternness of his face, and steeled her own that he might read no irresolution there. He was fighting her; she could feel the earth pulling him away, and down.
“Do you know the place?” Uther Pendragon asked.
“I know.”
And in his eyes, as if through mist or smoke, she saw that he knew this was so, and with the Baelrath would master him. Her very soul was turning over with the pain of it. So much steel she could not be, it seemed.
He said, “He was young when it happened, the incest, and the rest of it. He was afraid, because of the prophecy. Can they not have pity? Is there none?”
What was she that the proud Kings of the dead should beseech her so? “The name!” said Kimberly into the keening of the wind, and she raised the ring above her head to master him.
And, mastered, he told her, and it seemed as if stars were falling everywhere, and she had brought them tumbling down from heaven with what she was.
She was sheer red, she was wild, the night could not hold her. She could rise, even now, to come down as red moonlight might fall, but not here. In another place.
It was high. High enough to have once been an island in a lake like glass. Then the waters had receded all over Somerset, leaving a plain where waters had been, and a seven-ridged hill high above that plain. But when a place has been an island the memory of water lingers, and of water magic, no matter how far away the sea may be, or how long ago it fell away.
And so it was with Glastonbury Tor, which had been called Avalon in its day and had seen three queens row a dying king to its shore.
So much of the filtered legends had been close to true, but the rest was so far off it carried its own grief with it. Kim looked around the summit of the Tor and saw the thin moon rise in the east above the long plain. The Baelrath was beginning to fade even as she watched, and with it the power that had carried her here.