Ysabel

‘Reminds me,’ she said. ‘You asked about Celts, where they were around here?’

‘And of course you found out. Google is your friend?’

‘Google is my midnight lover.’

‘I’m not sure I’m ready to hear that, actually.’

She laughed. ‘They were all over the area. Which figured. There’s one place I’ve seen that we can walk to if you want. Above the city.’

The waiter came by and they paid for their drinks.

‘Might as well,’ Ned said. ‘Can’t tomorrow, we’re going to Arles.’

She nodded. ‘Day after? Thursday? Meet after school, say, outside Cézanne’s studio? Can you find it? We have to go that way.’

‘I’ll find it. Where are we going?’

‘It’s called Entremont. Where the Celts were based before the Romans built this city.’

‘OK. I’ll be outside that studio at five. I’ll call you tomorrow, when we get back from Arles.’

‘Cool.’ She got up, stuffed the notepad in her pack. They walked out together. On the street he turned to her.

‘Thanks, Kate.’

She shrugged. ‘Down, boy. You may not like the essay.’

‘Now who’s joking?’

She made a face. ‘Okay. You’re welcome. Call me.’

She gave him a little flip-wave with one hand, then turned and walked along the cobblestones. He watched her go.

*****

Inside the café, the man in the grey leather jacket, two tables over from where they’d been, puts down his newspaper. There is no need to hide his face any more.

He might have learned something here, he is thinking.

A thread, a way into the labyrinth. This is a possibility, no more than that, but it is that. When you were in urgent need and time was very short and your enemy had most of the weapons – at this point – you used tools like these two children, and prayed to your gods.

In one way it is obvious; in another, the girl is entirely right: there are too many choices here. And from where he is – outside the fires – he has no easy way to narrow them down.

There are still too many places, that hasn’t changed, but he’s decided something sitting here – and these two are at the heart of it, despite what he said to them yesterday.

The boy, from the start. From before the baptistry, since he’s being truthful – and he always is, with himself.

He isn’t certain about the girl. He waited and watched them from a distance yesterday, after leaving the cloister. Saw them walk here. Made an assumption they’d be back. If he’d been wrong, if they had met elsewhere, not after school, or not at all, he wouldn’t have been unduly disturbed. Few things affect him that much any more. When he is in the world again, when he returns, his is an entirely focused existence.

He is only ever alive for one thing. Well, two, really.

At the same time, he wasn’t surprised when they did show up here. Nor by what he heard the girl say, from behind the screening pages of Le Monde. They have no business going where they are going two days from now, but he might.

He might have many lives’ worth of business there. Or not. He might lose this time, before it even begins. It has happened. It is unfair, an unbalanced aspect of the combat, but he has long since moved beyond thinking that way. What is fairness, in this dance?

His sitting here is, in the end, just a feeble reaching out for signs – from two children who have nothing to do with the tale. At the same time, he has learned (he’s had a long time to learn), that little is truly coincidence. Things fall into patterns. You can miss patterns, or break them, but they are there. He has acted upon that yesterday, and now.

He finds a few coins, drops them on the table, rises to go.

‘Why didn’t I know you were here?’

He looks up. His way out is blocked. He is actually startled. The sensation is truly strange; a lost feeling remembered. For no easy reason he suddenly has an image of his first time here, walking through the forest from the landing place, invited but uncertain. Afraid, so far from home. Then coming out of the woods, the lit fires.

He sits down again. He gestures. The boy is standing between the table and the door. He sits gingerly opposite, edge of chair, as if ready to bolt. Not a bad instinct, all things considered.

The newspaper lies on the table between them, folded back. He’d been reading the forecast. Wind, clear skies. There will be a full moon Thursday. He’d known that, of course.

The boy has spoken in English. The man says, gravely, in the same language, ‘You have surprised me again. Brave of you to come back. I take it you sent the girl away?’

Ned Marriner shrugs. He has dark brown hair and light blue eyes, a lean build, medium height, wiry rather than strong. Barely old enough to shave. His face is pale; he will be dealing with tension and fear. Fair enough.

Welcome to my world, the man thinks, but doesn’t say. He doesn’t feel welcoming.

‘No, she just went. I don’t send her places. I didn’t know anything till I was outside. And besides, I’m the one feeling – whatever this is. If you’re dangerous, there’s no reason for her to be here.’

‘Dangerous?’ He smiles at that. ‘You have no idea. I said I wouldn’t kill you but there are others who might view your presence differently.’

‘I know I have no idea. But what does ‘my presence’ mean? My presence where?’ He stops, to control himself. His voice has risen. ‘And why didn’t I know you were here until I got outside? Yesterday I–‘

That last he decides to answer.

‘I was careless. I was screening myself from you, after yesterday in the cloister, but I thought you’d gone and let it down.’

‘I had gone. I don’t even know why I checked inside. I was halfway across the market square.’

He considers that. ‘Then you are stronger than you knew.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ the boy says again. His voice is lower now, intense. There was someone like this, long ago. A vague sense tugs at him. But there are too many years between. He has been here so many times.

Ned Marriner leans back, folding his arms defensively across his chest. ‘I have no idea who you are, what happened to me yesterday or today, if you heard us talking about that?’

He nods. The mountain.

‘So what is this about?’ the boy demands. He really shouldn’t be using that tone. ‘You said we were an accident, had no role to play, but you followed, or waited for us.’

He is clever, it seems. ‘Followed yesterday, waited just now. I took a chance you’d come back.’

‘But why?’

The waiter is hovering. He signals for another of what each of them was drinking.

A mild curiosity rises. He still has some of that, it seems. ‘You don’t feel reckless, interrogating me like this?’

‘I’m scared out of my mind, if you want the truth.’

‘But that isn’t the truth,’ he says. Who did this one remind him of? ‘You came back by choice, you’re demanding answers of me. And yet you know that I sculpted a column eight hundred years ago. No. You’re frightened, but not ruled by it.’

‘I probably should be,’ the boy says in a small voice. ‘It isn’t a column, either, it’s a woman.’

The quick, familiar anger. A sense of intrusion, violation, rude feet trampling in something private beyond words.

He makes himself move past it. By today’s standards this one is young, can still properly be called a boy. In the past, he could have been a war leader at his age. Fit for challenging, killing. He has killed children.

The world has changed. He has lived through the changes, at intervals. Coming and going, enmeshed in the long pattern. Sometimes he wants it over, mostly he is terrified, heart-scalded that it might end. You could grow weary beyond measure, feeling all those things at once.

The waiter comes back: an espresso, an orange juice. The brisk, habitual motions. He waits until the man leaves.

He says, still speaking English for privacy, ‘Once this awareness comes to you, it can be a kind of anchor against fear. You know what you are feeling, know a new thing is in you. The fear lies in not understanding why, but already you’re not the person you were yesterday morning.’

He sips his espresso, put the cup down, adds quietly, ‘You never will be again.’

A cruel thing to say, perhaps; he isn’t beyond enjoying that.

‘That’s scary, too.’

‘I imagine it is.’

He remembers his own first awareness of this boy, decisions made quickly. They look at each other. The boy glances down. Few people meet his gaze for long. He finishes his coffee. ‘Frightened or not, you came back. You could have kept walking. You’re inside now.’

‘Then you need to tell me what I’m inside.’

Another flaring within. ‘I need to do nothing. Use words more cautiously.’

‘Or what?’

Opposing anger across the table, interestingly. He really isn’t accustomed to talking this much any more.

‘Or what?’ the boy demands again. ‘You’ll stab me in here? Pull the knife again?’

He shakes his head. ‘Or I’ll walk out.’

Ned Marriner hesitates again, then leans forward. ‘No you won’t. You don’t want to leave me. You want me in this, somehow. What did we say, Kate and me, that you needed to hear?’

Someone else had once talked to him this way. That nagging memory still there. Was it centuries ago, or a millennium? He isn’t sure; people blur after so much time, but he believes he killed that other one.

He looks across the table and realizes that he was wrong, in fact. This impudent tone isn’t the same as that other, long ago voice: with a degree of surprise (again) he sees that the boy is close to tears, fighting to hide it.

He tries, unsuccessfully, to remember when he felt that way himself. Too far back. Mist-wrapped, forest-shrouded.

This defiant anger is a boy’s, in the end. Or perhaps in the beginning. Anger at helplessness, at being ignorant and young, not yet an adult and so immune (boys believed adults were immune) to the pain he is feeling.

Had he been a different man he might have addressed some of this. Ned Marriner has, after all, come into the edges of the tale, and he might even be an instrument.

But that is all he can be. You didn’t confide in tools or comfort them. You made use of what lay to hand. He stands up, drops a few coins on the table. The boy lifts his head to look at him.

‘I don’t know if you said anything I need. It is too long to tell, and I’m disinclined to do so. You are better off not knowing, though it may not seem that way to you. You will have to forgive me – or not, as you like.’

Then he adds (perhaps a mistake, it occurs to him even as he speaks), ‘I wouldn’t go up to Entremont on the eve of Beltaine, though.’

The youthful gaze is sharp, suddenly.

‘That was it, wasn’t it?’ Ned Marriner says. He doesn’t look any more as if he might cry. ‘What Kate said? About that place?’

The man doesn’t respond. He really isn’t accustomed to answering questions. Never had been, if truth were told, even from when he entered the tale himself a little west of here, having come across the sea.

Everyone here has come from somewhere else.

He’d said that to her, once. He remembers her reply. He remembers everything she has ever said to him, it sometimes feels.

He walks to the café door and out into the late-April afternoon.

The dogs have been waiting, scuffling around the market nearby. They attack as soon as he reaches the street.

Excerpt from Chapter 5. © Guy Gavriel Kay 2007

The Darkest Road

For a long time Coll of Taerlindel at the helm of his ship had fought the wind. Tacking desperately and with a certain brilliance across the line of the southwesterly, he struggled through most of a darkening day to hold Prydwen to a course that would bring them back to the harbor from which they had set out. Bellowing commands, his voice riding over the gale, he kept the men of South Keep leaping from sail to sail, pulling them down, adjusting them, straining for every inch of eastward motion he could gain against the elements that were forcing him north.

It was an exercise in seamanship of the highest order, of calculations done by instinct and nerve on the deck of a wildly tossing ship, of raw strength and raw courage, as Coll fought with all the power of his corded arms to hold the tiller against the gale that was pulling the ship from his chosen path.

And this was only wind, only the first fine mist of rain. The true storm, massive and glowering to starboard and behind them, was yet to come. But it was coming, swallowing what was left of the sky. They heard thunder, saw sheets of lightning ignite in the west, felt the screaming wind grow wilder yet, were drenched by driving, blinding spray as they slid and slipped on the heaving deck, struggling to obey Coll’s steadily shouted commands.

Calmly he called out his orders, angling his ship with consummate inbred artistry along the troughs and into the crests of the waves, gauging the seas on either side, casting a frequent eye above him to judge the filling of the sails and the speed of the oncoming storm. Calmly he did it all, though with fierce, passionate intensity and not a little pride. And calmly, when it was clear past doubt that he had no choice, Coll surrendered.

“Over to port!” he roared in the same voice he’d used throughout his pitched battle against the storm. “Northeast it is! I’m sorry, Diar, we’ll have to run with it and take our chances at the other end!”

Diarmuid dan Ailell, heir to the High Kingdom of Brennin, was far too busy grappling with a sail rope in obedience to the command to do much in the way of dealing with the apology. Beside the Prince, soaked through and through, almost deafened by the scream of the gale, Paul struggled to be useful and to cope with what he knew.

With what he had known from the first rising of the wind two hours ago, and his first glimpse, far down on the southwest horizon of the black line that was a curtain now, an enveloping darkness blotting out the sky. From the pulsebeat of Mörnir within himself, the still place like a pool in his blood that marked the presence of the God, he knew that what was coming, what had come, was more than a storm.

He was Pwyll Twiceborn, marked on the Summer Tree for power, named to it, and he knew when power of this magnitude was present, manifesting itself. Mörnir had warned him but could do no more, Paul knew. This was not his storm despite the crashing thunder, nor was it Liranan’s, the elusive god of the sea. It might have been Metran, with the Cauldron of Khath Meigol, but the renegade mage was dead and the Cauldron shattered into fragments. And this storm far out at sea was not Rakoth Maugrim’s in Starkadh.

Which meant one thing and one thing only, and Coll of Taerlindel, for all his gallant skill, hadn’t a chance. It was not a thing you tell a captain of a ship at sea, Paul was wise enough to know. You let him fight, and trusted him to know when he could not fight any longer. And after, if you survived, you could try to heal his pride with the knowledge of what had beated him.

If you survived.

“By Lisen’s blood!” Diarmuid cried. Paul looked up – in time to see the sky swallowed, quite utterly, and the dark green curling wave, twice the height of the ship, begin to fall.

“Hang on!” the Prince screamed again, and clutched Paul’s hastily donned jacket with an iron grip. Paul threw one arm around Diarmuid and looped the other through a rope lashed to the mast, gripping with all the strength he had. Then he closed his eyes.

The wave fell upon them with the weight of the sea and of doom. Of destiny not to be delayed or denied. Diarmuid held him, and Paul gripped the Prince, and they both clung to their handholds like children, which they were.

The Weaver’s children. The Weaver at the Loom, whose storm this was. When he could see again, and breathe, Paul looked up at the tiller through the shining rain and spray. Coll had help there now, badly needed help, in the muscle-tearing task of holding the ship to its new course, running now with the full speed of the storm, dangerously, shockingly fast in the raging sea, at a speed where the slightest turning of the rudder could heel them over like a toy into the waves. But Arthur Pendragon was with Coll now, balancing him, pulling shoulder to shoulder beside the mariner, salt spray drenching his greying beard, and Paul knew – though he could not actually see them from where he crouched in the shadow of the mainmast – that there would be stars falling and falling in the Warrior’s eyes as he was carried toward his foretold fate again, by the hand of the Weaver who had woven his doom.

Children, Paul thought. Both the children they all were, helpless on this ship, and the children who had died when the Warrior was young, and so terribly afraid that his bright dream should be destroyed. The two images blurred in his mind, as the rain and the sea spray blurred together, driving them on.

Running before the wind, Prydwen tore through the seas at a speed no ship should have been asked to sustain, no sails to endure. But the timbers of that ship, screaming and creaking with strain, yet held, and the sails, woven with love and care and centuries of handed-down artistry in Taerlindel of the Mariners, caught that howling wind and filled with it and did not tear, though the black sky above might shred with lightning and the very sea rock with the thunder.

Riding the mad crest of that speed, the two men at the tiller fought to hold their course, their bodies taut with brutal strain. And then, with no surprise at all, only a dulled, hurting sense of inevitability, Paul saw Lancelot du Lac grapple his way to their side. And so, at the last, it was the three of them: Coll conning his ship with Lancelot and Arthur at either side, their feet braced wide on the slippery deck, gripping the tiller together, in flawless, necessary harmony, guiding that small, gallant, much-enduring ship into the bay of the Anor Lisen.

And, helpless to do so much as veer a single point off the wind, onto the jagged teeth of the rocks that guarded the southern entrance to that bay.

Paul never knew, afterward, whether they had been meant to survive. Arthur and Lancelot had to, he knew, else there would have been no point to the storm that carried them here. But the rest of them were expendable, however bitter the thought might be, in the unfolding of this tale.

He never knew, either, exactly what it was that warned him. They were moving so fast, through the darkness and the pelting, blinding sheets of rain, that none of them had even seen the shore, let alone the rocks. Reaching back, trying to relive the moment afterward, he thought it might have been his ravens that spoke, but chaos reigned on Prydwen in that moment, and he could never be sure.

What he knew was that in the fraction of splintered time before Prydwen splintered forever into fragments and spars, he had risen to his feet, unnaturally surefooted in the unnatural storm, and had cried out in a voice that encompassed the thunder and contained it, that was of it and within it – exactly as he had been of and within the Summer Tree on the night he thought he’d died – and in that voice, the voice of Mörnir who had sent him back, he cried, “Liranan!” just as they struck.

The masts cracked with the sound of broken trees; the sides cracked, and the deck; the bottom of the ship was gouged mercilessly, utterly, and the dark sea blasted in. Paul was catapulted, a leaf, a twig, a meaningless thing, from the deck of the suddenly grounded ship. They all hurtled over the sides, every man of what had been, a moment before, Coll’s grandfather’s beloved Prydwen.

And as Paul flew, a split second in the air, another fraction of scintillated time, tasting his second death, knowing the rocks were there and the boiling, enraged, annihilating sea, even in that instant he heard a voice in his mind, clear and remembered.

And Liranan spoke to him and said, I will pay for this, and pay, and be made to pay again, before the weaving of time is done. But I owe you, brother – the sea stars are shining in a certain place again because you bound me to your aid. This is not binding; this is a gift. Remember me!

And then Paul cartwheeled helplessly into the waters of the bay.

The calm, unruffled, blue-green waters of the bay. Away from the jagged, killing rocks. Out of the murderous wind, and under a mild rain that fell gently down, bereft of the gale that had given it its cutting edge.

Just beyond the curve of the bay the storm raged yet, the lightning still slashed from the purpled clouds. Where he was, where all of them were, rain fell softly from an overcast summer sky, as they swam, singly, in pairs, in clusters, to the strand of beach under the shadow of Lisen’s Tower.

Where Guinevere stood.

It was a miracle, Kim realized. But she also realized too much more for her tears to be shed only for relief and joy. Too dense this weaving, too laden with shadings and textures and a myriad of intermingled threads, both warp and weft, for any emotion to be truly unmixed.

They had seen the ship cannon toward the rocks. Then, even in that moment of realization and terror, they heard a single imperative crash of sound, halfway between thunder and a voice, and on the instant – absolutely on the instant – the wind had cut out completely and the waters of the bay had gone glassily calm. The men who manned Prydwen were spilled over the disintegrating sides of the ship into a bay that would have destroyed them not two seconds before.

A miracle. There might be time enough later to search for the source of it and give thanks. But not yet. Not now, in this tangled sorrow-strewn unfolding of a long destiny.

For there were three of them, after all, and Kim could do nothing, nothing at all to stop the hurting in her heart. A man stepped from the sea who had not been on Prydwen when she sailed. A man who was very tall, his hair dark, and his eyes as well. There was a long sword at his side, and beside him came Cavall, the grey dog, and in his arms, held carefully out before him, the man carried the body of Arthur Pendragon, and all five people on the beach, waiting, knew who this man was.

Four of them stayed a little way behind, though Kim knew how every instinct in Sharra’s soul was driving her to the sea where Diarmuid was even now emerging, helping one of his men out of the water. She fought that instinct, though, and Kim honored her for it. Standing between Sharra and Jaelle, with Brendel a pace to the side and behind, she watched as Jennifer moved forward through the gentle rain to stand before the two men she had loved and been loved by through so many lives in so many worlds.

Excerpt from Chapter 6. © Guy Gavriel Kay 1987

The Wandering Fire

The hunt started with the sunrise. The sky was a bright blue overhead, and the early rays of sunlight glittered on the snow. It was milder too, Dave thought, as if somehow the fact of midsummer was registering. Among the hunters there was an electric energy one could almost see. The erotic surges that had begun when they had first entered Gwen Ystrat were even deeper now. Dave had never felt anything like it in his life, and they said the priestesses would come out to them tonight. It made him weak just to think of it.

He forced his mind back to the morning’s work. He had wanted to hunt with the small contingent of the Dalrei, but horses weren’t going to be much use in the wood and Aileron had asked the Riders to join the bowmen, who were to ring the forest and cut down any wolves that tried to flee. Dave saw Diarmuid’s big lieutenant, Coll, unsling an enormous bow and ride over the bridge to the northwest with Torc and Levon.

It left an opening for him, he supposed, and somewhat reluctantly he walked over with his axe to where Kevin Laine stood joking with two other members of the Prince’s band. There was a rumor going about that they had gotten an early start on the midsummer festival last night, defying the orders of the two Kings. Dave couldn’t say he was impressed. It was one thing to carouse in town, another to be partying on the eve of battle.

On the other hand, none of them seemed the worse for it this morning, and he didn’t really know anyone else to join up with so he awkwardly planted himself by the Prince and waited to be noticed. Diarmuid was rapidly scanning his brother’s written instructions. When he finished, he looked up, noting Dave’s presence with his disconcertingly blue gaze.

“Room for one more?” Dave asked.

He was prepared for a jibe but the Prince said only, “Of course. I’ve seen you fight, remember?” He raised his voice very slightly, and the fifty or so men around him quieted. “Gather round, children, and I’ll tell you a story. My brother has outdone himself in preparing this. Here is what we are to do.”

Despite the frivolous tone, his words were crisp. Behind the Prince, Dave could see the eidolath, the honor guard of Cathal, riding quickly off to the northeast behind Shalhassan. Nearby, Aileron himself was addressing another cluster of men, and, past him, Arthur was doing the same. It was going to be a pincer movement, he gathered, with the two hosts moving together from southwest and northeast.

The archers, about two hundred of them, were to ring the wood. The Cathalians were already along the line of the Kharn River, on the eastern edge, and across the northern boundary as far as the Latham. The bowmen of Brennin were posted from the Latham as well, in the north and then, at intervals, around to the south and west. The thinner copses east of the Kharn had already been checked and found empty, Diarmuid explained. The wolves were within the circle of Leinanwood itself and, if all went according to design, would soon be within the circle of the armies. The dogs were to be set loose to drive the wolves toward the forest center.

“Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King’s plans, we should meet Shalhassan’s forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren’t,” Diarmuid concluded, “we blame anyone and everything except the plan. Any questions?”

“Where are the mages? asked Kevin Laine. He always had questions, Dave thought. One of those. Couldn’t just get on with it.

But Diarmuid answered seriously. “We were going to have them. But something happened last night in the Temple. The sources are completely drained. Swords and arrows are all we can use this morning.”

And axes, Dave thought grimly. Didn’t need anything more. It was cleaner this way with the magic kept out of it. There were no more questions, and no time for more; Aileron had begun moving his company forward. Diarmuid, neat-footed and quick, led them across the Latham bridge to the left flank, and Dave saw Arthur’s company take the right.

They were on the southwestern edge of the wood, on the strip of land between forest and frozen lake. Around to the west and north Dave could see the archers, bows drawn, sitting on their horses where he wood thinned out.

Then Arthur signaled Aileron, and Dave saw the Warrior speak to his dog. With a howl, the grey dog exploded forward into Leinanwood and the hunting pack sprang after him. Dave heard faint answering sounds from the northern side as the other half of the pack was released. A moment the men waited; then the High King stepped forward, and they entered the wood.

It grew darker very suddenly, for even without leaves the trees were thick enough to screen the sun. They were moving northwest, before beginning their wide sweep back to the east, so Diarmuid’s flank, their own, was in the lead. Abruptly Dave became aware of the smell of wolf, sharp and unmistakable. All around them the dogs were barking, but not urgently. His axe carried at the ready, with its thong looped around his wrist, Dave strode with Kevin Laine on his left and the Dwarf named Brock, bearing an axe of his own, on his right, behind the figure of Diarmuid.

Then, off to their right, Cavall gave tongue again, so loudly that even someone who had never hunted before knew what the sound meant.

“Turn!” Aileron cried from behind them. “Spread out and turn, toward the river!”

Dave’s sense of direction was hopelessly gone by then, but he pointed his nose where Diarmuid went and, with quickening heart, set off to find the wolves.

They were found first.

Before they reached the river or the men of Cathal, the black and grey and brindle shapes were upon them. Scorning to be hunted, the giant wolves surged to the attack, and even as he swung the axe in a killing stroke, Dave heard the sounds of battle to the east as well. The men of Cathal had their own fight.

He had no more time to think. Swerving down and to his right, he dodged the fanged leap of a black beast. He felt claws shred his coat. No time to look back; there was another coming. He killed it with a chopping backhand slash, then had to duck, almost to his knees, as another leaped for his face. It was the last clear moment he remembered.

The battle became a chaotic melee as they twisted through the trees, pursuing and pursued. Within his breast Dave felt a surge of the obliterating fury that seemed to be his in battle, and he waded forward through snow red with blood, his axe rising and falling. In front of him all the time he saw the Prince, elegantly lethal with a sword, and heard Diarmuid singing as he killed.

He had no conception of time, could not have said how long it was before they broke through, he and the Prince, with Brock just behind. In front of him he could see the figures of the Cathalians across the frozen river. There were wolves to the right, though, engaging the center of the Brennin ranks and Arthur’s flank as well. Dave turned to go to their aid.

“Wait!” Diarmuid laid a hand on his arm. “Watch.”

Kevin Laine came up beside them, bleeding from a gash on his arm. Dave turned to watch the last of the battle on their side of the Latham.

Not far off, Arthur Pendragon, with grey Cavall by his side, was wreaking controlled destruction among the wolves. Dave had a sudden unexpected sense of how many times the Warrior had swung the blade he carried, and in how many wars.

But it wasn’t Arthur whom Diarmuid was watching. Following the Prince’s gaze, Dave saw, and Kevin beside him, the same thing Kimberly had seen a year before on a twilit path west of Paras Derval.

Aileron dan Ailell with a sword.

Dave had seen Levon fight, and Torc; he had watched Diarmuid’s insouciant deadliness and, just now, Arthur’s flawless swordplay with never a motion wasted; he even knew how he battled in his own right, fueled by a rising tide of rage. But Aileron fought the way an eagle flew, or an eltor ran on the summer Plain.

It had ended on the other side. Shalhassan, bloody but triumphant, led his men down to the frozen waters of the Latham, and so they saw as well.

Seven wolves remained. Without a word spoken, they were left for the High King. Six were black, Dave saw, and one was grey, and they attacked in a rush from three sides. He saw how the grey one died and two of the black, but he never knew what motion of the sword killed the other four.

It was very nearly silent in the wood after that. Dave heard scattered coughing on both sides of the river; a dog barked once, nervously; a man not far away swore softly at the pain of a wound he’d taken. Dave never took his eyes from the High King. Kneeling in the trampled snow, Aileron carefully wiped his blade clean before rising to sheath it. He glanced fleetingly at his brother, then turned, with an expression almost shy, to Arthur Pendragon.

Who said, in a voice of wonder, “Only one man I ever saw could do what you just did.”

Aileron’s voice was low but steady. “I am not him,” he said. “I am not part of it.”

“No,” said Arthur. “You are not part of it.”

After another moment, Aileron turned to the river. “Brightly woven, men of Cathal. A small blow only have we given the Dark this morning, but better that we have given it than otherwise. There are people who will sleep easier tonight for our work in this wood.”

Shalhassan of Cathal was splotched in blood from shoulders to boot and there were bloody smears in the forked plaits of his beard, but, kingly still, he nodded grave agreement. “Shall we sound the maron to end the hunt?” Aileron asked formally.

“Do so,” Shalhassan said. “All five notes, for there are six of us dead on this side of the river.”

“As many here,” said Arthur. “If it please you, High King, Cavall can give tongue for both triumph and loss.”

Aileron nodded. Arthur spoke to the dog.

Grey Cavall walked to an open space by the riverbank where the snow was neither trampled down nor red with wolf or dog or human blood. In a white place among the bare trees he lifted his head.

But the growl he gave was no sound of triumph nor yet of loss.

Dave would never be sure which caused him to turn, the dog’s snarled warning or the trembling of the earth. Faster than thought he spun.

There was an instant – less than that, a scintilla of time in the space between seconds – and in it he had a flash of memory. Another wood: Pendaran. Flidais, the gnomelike creature with his eerie chants. And one of them: Beware the boar, beware the swan, the salt sea bore her body on.

Beware the boar.

He had never seen a creature like the one that rumbled now from the trees. It had to be eight hundred pounds, at least, with savage curving tusks and enraged eyes, and it was an albino, white as the snow all around them.

Kevin Laine, directly in its path, with only a sword and a wounded shoulder, wasn’t going to be able to dodge it, and he hadn’t a hope in hell of stopping the rush of that thing.

He had turned to face it. Bravely, but too late, and armed with too little. Even as the bizarre memory of Flidais exploded and he heard Diarmuid’s cry of warning, Dave took two quick steps, let go of his axe, and launched himself in a lunatic, weaponless dive.

He had the angle, sort of. He hit the boar with a flying tackle on the near side shoulder, and he put every ounce of his weight and strength into it.

He was bounced like a Ping-Pong ball from a wall. He felt himself flying, had time to realize it, before he crashed, pinwheeling, into the trees.

“Kevin!” he screamed and tried, unwisely, to stand. The world rocked. He put a hand to his forehead and it came away covered with blood. There was blood in his eyes; he couldn’t see. There was screaming, though, and a snarling dog, and something had happened to his head. There was someone on the ground and people running everywhere, then a person was with him, then another. He tried to rise again. They pushed him back. They were talking to him. He didn’t understand.

“Kevin?” he tried to ask. He couldn’t form the name. Blood got in his mouth. He turned to cough and fainted dead away from the pain.

*****

It hadn’t actually been bravery, or foolish bravado either – there had been no time for such complex things. He’d been at the back and heard a grunt and a trampling sound, so he’d been turning, even before the dog barked and the earth began to shake under the charge of the white boar.

In the half second he’d had, Kevin had thought it was going for Diarmuid and so he yelped to get its attention. Unnecessary, that, for the boar was coming for him all way.

Strange how much time there seemed to be when there was no time at all. At least somebody wants me, was the first hilarious thought that cut in and out of his mind. But he was quick, he’d always been quick, even if he didn’t know how to use a sword. He had no place to run and no way on earth of killing this monster. so, as the boar thundered up, grunting insanely and already beginning to raise its tusks to disembowel him, Kevin, timing it with coolest precision, jumped up in a forward somersault, to put his hands on the stinking white fur of the boar’s huge back and flip over it like a Minoan bull dancer, to land in the soft snow.

In theory, anyway.

Theory and reality began their radical bifurcation around the axis formed by the flying figure of Dave Martyniuk at precisely the point where his shoulder crashed into that of the boar.

He moved it maybe two inches, all told. Which was just enough to cause Kevin’s injured right arm to slip as he reached for the hold that would let him flip. He never got it. He was lying sprawled on top of the boar, with every molecule of usable air cannonballed out of his lungs, when some last primitive mechanism of his mind screamed roll, and his body obeyed.

Enough so that the tusk of the animal in its vicious, ripping thrust tore through the outer flesh of his groin and not up and through it to kill. He did his somersault in the end and came down, unlike Dave, in snow.

There was a lot of pain, though, in a very bad place and there were droplets of his blood all over the snow like red flowers.

It was Brock who turned the boar away from him and Diarmuid who planted the first sword. Eventually there were a number of swords; he saw it all, but it was impossible to tell who struck the killing blow.

They were very gentle when it came time to move him and it would have been rude, almost, to scream, so he gripped the branches of his makeshift stretcher until he thought his hands had torn through the wood, and he didn’t scream.

Tried one joke as Diarmuid’s face, unnaturally white, loomed up. “If it’s a choice between me and the baby,” he mumbled, “save the baby.” Diar didn’t laugh. Kevin wondered if he’d gotten the joke, wondered where Paul was, who would have. Didn’t scream.

Didn’t pass out until one of the stretcher bearers stumbled over a branch as they left the forest.

Excerpt from Chapter 11. © Guy Gavriel Kay 1986

The Summer Tree

There had been light, now there was not. One measured time in such ways. There were stars in the space above the trees; no moon yet, and only a thin one later, for tomorrow would be the night of the new moon.

His last night, if he lived through this one.

The Tree was part of him now, another name, a summoning. He almost heard a meaning in the breathing of the forest all around him, but his mind was stretched and flattened, he could not reach to it, he could only endure, and hold the wall of memory as best he might.

One more night. After which there would be no music to be laid open by, no highways to forget, no rain, no sirens, none, no Rachel. One more night at most, for he wasn’t sure he could survive another day like the last.

Though truly he would try: for the old King, and the slain farmer, and the faces he’d seen on the roads. Better to die for a reason, and with what one could retain of pride. Better, surely, though he could not say why.

Now I give you to Mörnir, Ailell had said. Which meant he was a gift, an offering, and it was all waste if he died too soon. So he had to hold to life, hold the wall, hold for the God, for he was the God’s to claim, and there was thunder now. It seemed at times to come from within the Tree, which meant, in the way of things, from within himself. If only there could be rain before he died, he might find some kind of peace at the end. It had rained, though, when she died, it had rained all night.

His eyes were hurting now. He closed them, but that was no good, either, because she was waiting there, with music. Once, earlier, he had wanted to call her name in the wood, as he had not beside the open grave, to feel it on his lips again as he had not since; to burn his dry soul with her. Burn, since he could not cry.

Silence, of course. One did not do any such thing. One opened one’s eyes instead on the Summer Tree, in the deep of Mörnirwood, and one saw a man come forward from among the trees.

It was very dark, he could not see who it was, but the faint starlight reflected from silver hair and so he thought…

“Loren?” he tried, but scarcely any sound escaped his cracked lips. He tried to wet them, but he had no moisture, he was dry. Then the figure came nearer, to stand in the starlight below where he was bound, and Paul saw that he had been wrong. The eyes that met his own were not those of the mage, and, looking into them, he did know fear then, for it should not end so, truly it should not. But the man below stood as if cloaked in power, even in that place, even in the glade of the Summer Tree, and in the dark eyes Paul saw his death.

Then the figure spoke. “I cannot allow it,” he said, with finality. “You have courage, and something else, I think. Almost you are one of us, and it might have been that we could have shared something, you and I. Not now, though. This I cannot allow. You are calling a force too strong for the knowing, and it must not be wakened. Not when I am so near. Will you believe,” the voice said, low and assured, “that I am sorry to have to kill you?”

Paul moved his lips. “Who?” he asked, the sound a scrape in his throat.

The other smiled at that. “Names matter to you? They should. It is Galadan who has come, and I fear it is the end.”

Bound and utterly helpless, Paul saw the elegant figure draw a knife from his belt. “It will be clean, I promise you,” he said. “Did you not come here for release? I will give it to you.”

Their eyes locked once more. It was a dream, it was so like a dream, so dark, blurred, shadowed. He closed his eyes; one closed one’s eyes to dream. She was there, of course, but it was ending, so all right then, fine, let it end on her.

A moment passed. No blade, no severing. Then Galadan spoke again, but not to him, and in a different voice.

“You?” he said. “Here? Now I understand.”

For reply there came only a deep, rumbling growl. His heart leaping, Paul opened his eyes. In the clearing facing Galadan was the grey dog he had seen on the palace wall.

Gazing at the dog, Galadan spoke again. “It was written in wind and fire long ago that we should meet,” he said. “And here is as fit a place as any in all the worlds. Would you guard the sacrifice? Then your blood is the gateway to my desire. Come, and I shall drink it now!”

He placed a hand over his heart and made a twisting gesture, and after a brief blurring of space, there stood a moment later, where he had been, a wolf so large it dwarfed the grey figure of the dog. And the wolf had a splash of silver between its ears.

There took place then a battle foretold in the first depths of time by the twin goddesses of war, who are named in all the worlds as Macha and Nemain. A portent it was to be, a presaging of the greatest war of all, this coming together in darkness of the wolf, who was a man whose spirit was annihilation, and the grey dog, who had been called by many names but was always the Companion.

The battle the two goddesses foreknew – for war was their demesne – but not the resolution. A portent then, a presaging, a beginning.

And so it came to pass that wolf and dog met at last in Fionavar, first of all the worlds, and below the Summer Tree they ripped and tore at one another with such fury that soon dark blood soaked the glade under the stars.

Again and again they hurled themselves upon each other, black on grey, and Paul, straining to see, felt his heart go out to the dog, with all the force of his being. He remembered the loss he had seen in its eyes, and he saw now, even in the shadows, as the animals rolled over and over, biting and grappling, engaging and recoiling in desperate frenzy, that the wolf was too large.

They were both black now, for the light grey fur of the dog was matted and dark with its own blood. Still it fought, eluding and attacking, summoning a courage, embodying a gallantry of defiance that hurt to see, it was so noble and so doomed.

The wolf was bleeding, too, and its flesh was ripped and torn, but it was so much larger; and more, more than that, Galadan carried within himself a power that went far deeper than tooth and gashing claw.

Paul became aware that his bound hands were torn and bleeding. Unconsciously he had been struggling to free himself, to go to the aid of the dog who was dying in his defence. The bonds held, though, and so, too, did the prophecy, for this was to be wolf and dog alone, and so it was.

Through the night it continued. Weary and scored with wounds, the grey dog fought on; but its attacks were parried more easily now, its defences were more agonizing, more narrowly averting the final closing of jaw on jugular. It could only be a question of time, Paul realized, grieving and forced to bear witness. It hurt so much, so much….

“Fight!” he screamed suddenly, his throat raw with effort. “Go on! I’ll hold if you can – I’ll make it through tomorrow night. In the name of the God, I swear it. Give me till tomorrow and I’ll bring you rain.”

For a moment the animals were checked by the force of his cry. Then, limp and drained, Paul saw with agony that it was the wolf who lifted a head to look at him, a terrible smile distorting its face. Then it turned back, back for the last attack, a force of fury, of annihilation. Galadan who had returned. It was a charge of uncoiled power, not to be denied or withstood.

And yet it was.

The dog, too, had heard Paul’s cry; without the strength to raise its head in reply, it found yet in the words, in the desperate, scarcely articulate vow, a pure white power of its own; and reaching back, far back into its own long history of battle and loss, the grey dog met the wolf for the last time with a spirit of utmost denial, and the earth shook beneath them as they crashed together.

Over and over on the sodden ground they rolled, indistinguishable, one contorted shape that embodied all the endless conflict of Light and Dark in all the turning worlds.

Then the world turned enough, finally, for the moon to rise above the trees.

Only a crescent she was, the last thin, pale sliver before the dark of tomorrow. But she was still there, still glorious, a light. And Paul, looking up, understood then, from a deep place in his soul, that just as the Tree belonged to Mörnir, so did the moon to the Mother; and when the crescent moon shone above the Summer Tree, then was the banner of Brennin made real in that wood.

In silence, in awe, in deepest humility, he watched at length as one dark, blood-spattered animal disengaged from the other. It limped, tail down, to the edge of the glade, and when it turned to look back, Paul saw a splash of silver between its ears. With a snarl of rage, Galadan fled the wood.

The dog could barely stand. It breathed with a sucking heave of flank and sides that Paul ached to see. It was so terribly hurt, it was scarcely alive; the blood so thick upon it, he could not see an untorn patch of fur.

But it was alive, and it came haltingly over to gaze up at him, lifting its torn head under the light and succour of the moon it had waited for. In that moment, Paul Schafer felt his own, cracked, dry soul open up again to love as he looked down upon the dog.

For the second time their eyes met, and this time Paul did not back away. He took in the loss he saw, all of it, the pain endured for him and endured long before him, and with the first power of the Tree, he made it his own.

“Oh, brave,” he said, finding that he could speak. “There can never have been a thing so brave. Go now, for it is my turn, and I will keep faith. I’ll hold now, until tomorrow night, for you as much as anything.”

The dog looked at him, the eyes clouded with pain, but still deep with intelligence, and Paul knew he was understood.

“Goodbye,” he whispered, a kind of caress in the words.

And in response the grey dog threw back its proud head and howled: a cry of triumph and farewell, so loud and clear it filled all the Godwood and then echoed far beyond it, beyond the bounds of the worlds, even, hurtling into time and space, that the goddesses might hear it, and know.

*****

There was a very great deal of pain now. The moon had passed from overhead. His last moon, he realized, though thought was difficult. Consciousness was going to become a transient condition, a very hard thing, and already, with a long way yet to go, he was beginning to hallucinate. Colours, sounds. The trunk of the Tree seemed to have grown fingers, rough like bark, that wrapped themselves around him. He was touching the Tree everywhere now. Once, for a long spell, he thought he was inside it, looking out, not bound upon it. He thought he was the Summer Tree.

He was truly not afraid of dying, only of dying too soon. He had sworn an oath. But it was so hard to hold onto his mind, to hold his will to living another night. So much easier to let go, to leave the pain behind. Already the dog and wolf seemed to have been half dreamt, though he knew the battle had ended only hours before. There was dried blood on his wrists from when he had tried to free himself.

When the second man appeared before him, he was sure it was a vision. He was so far gone. Popular attraction, a faint, fading capacity of his mind mocked. Come see the hanging man!

This man had a beard, and deep-set dark eyes, and didn’t seem about to change into an animal. He just stood there, looking up. A very boring vision. The trees were loud in the wind; there was thunder, he could feel it.

Paul made an effort, moving his head back and forth to clear it. His eyes hurt, for some reason, but he could see. And what he saw on the face of the figure below was an expression of such appalling, balked desire that the hair rose up on his neck. He should know who this was, he should. If his mind were working, he would know, but it was too hard, it was hopelessly beyond him.

“You have stolen my death,” the figure said.

Paul closed his eyes. He was too far away from this. Too far down the road. He was incapable of explaining, unable to do more than try to endure.

An oath. He had sworn an oath. What did an oath mean? A whole day more, it meant. And a third night.

Some time later his eyes seemed to be open again and he saw, with uttermost relief, that he was alone. There was grey in the eastern sky; one more, one last.

And this was the second night of Pwyll the Stranger on the Summer Tree.

Excerpt from Chapter 8. © Guy Gavriel Kay 1984

A Song for Arbonne

Hirnan, threading his way around roots and under branches, finally struck a rough east-west track in the wood and Blaise drew a calmer breath again. He was surprisingly conscious of where they were. Not that he had any real superstition in him, but there was something about this forest that, even more than the thought of tawncat or boar, would make him very happy when they left. In fact, that same truth applied to all of this island, he realized: the sooner they left the more pleased he would be. Just then a bird of some sort – owl or corfe almost certainly – landed with a slight, rushing sound of wings in air in the tree directly above him. Luth, Blaise thought, would have soiled his clothing. Refusing to look up, he moved on, following Hirnan’s shadowy form eastward towards the temples of the goddess worshipped here in the south as a huntress and a mother, as a lover and a bride, and as a dark and final gatherer and layer-out, by moonlight, of the dead. If we’re luckier than we deserve, Blaise of Gorhaut thought grimly, more unsettled than he really wanted to acknowledge, even to himself, maybe he’ll be outside singing at the moon.

Which, as it happened, was exactly what Evrard of Lussan was doing. Troubadours seldom in fact sang their own songs; musical performance was seen as a lesser art than composing. It was the joglars who did the actual singing, to the music of varied instruments. But here on Rian’s Island there were no joglars now, and Evrard had always found it a help when writing to hear his own words and evolving tune, even in his own thin voice. And he liked to compose at night.

They heard him as they approached the sanctuary grounds, emerging from the blackness of the forest into moonlight and a sight of distant lanterns. Drawing a breath, Blaise registered the fact that there were no walls around the guestquarters south of the temple complex, though a high wooden palisade surrounded the inner buildings where the priests and priestesses would be sleeping. There didn’t appear to be any guards manning the ramparts behind those walls, or none that could be seen. Silver light fell on the temples, lending a soft white shimmer to the three domes.

They didn’t have to go that way. On the extreme southern edge of the goddess’s compound, not far from where they stood, there was a garden. Palm trees swayed in the gentle breeze, and the scent of roses and anemones and early lavender drifted towards them. So did a voice.

Grant, bright goddess, that the words of my heart
Find favour and haven in the shrine of your love.
Yours are the seafoam and the groves in the wood
And yours ever the moonlight in the skies above…

There was a brief, meditative pause. Then:

And yours the moonlight that falls from above…

Another ruminating silence, then again Evrard’s voice:

Yours is the moonlight and the stars overhead
And the moonlit seafoam and each forest grove.

Blaise saw Hirnan glancing at him, an ironic look on his expressive face. Blaise shrugged. ‘Mallin wants him back,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t look at me.’ Hirnan grinned.

Blaise stepped past the other man and, keeping to the shadowy cover at the edge of the wood, began working his way around towards the garden, where the thin voice was still essaying variants of the same sentiment. Blaise wondered if it happened every night. He had a suspicion, knowing Evrard of Lussan, that it might.

They reached the southern end of the wood. Only grass, silvered by moonlight, open to view from the walls, lay between them and the hedges and palms of the garden now. Blaise dropped down, remembering with an eerie, unexpected vividness as he did the last time he’d performed this kind of manoeuvre, in Portezza with Rudel, when they had killed Engarro di Faenna.

And now here he was, fetching a sulky, petulant poet for a minor baron of Arbonne so the baron’s wife could kiss the man on his balding brow – and the god knew where else – and say how extremely sorry she was for chancing to scream when he assaulted her in bed.

A long way from Portezza, from Gorhaut. From the sort of doings in which a man should properly find himself engaged. The fact that Blaise loathed almost everything about Gorhaut, which was his home, and trusted at most half a dozen of the Portezzan nobility he’d met was, frankly, not relevant to this particular truth.

‘Thiers and Giresse – wait here,’ he whispered over his shoulder to the youngest two. ‘We won’t need six men for this. Whistle like a corfe if there’s trouble coming. We’ll hear you. Maffour, you’ve been told what speech to give. Better you than me, frankly. When we get to the garden and I give you the sign go in and try, for what it’s worth. We won’t be far.’

He didn’t wait for acknowledgements. At this point, any halfway decent men would know as well as he did what had to be done, and if there were any legitimate pint to this mission in Blaise’s eyes, it was that he might begin to get a sense of what these seven Arbonnais corans he was training were like.

Without looking back he began moving on elbows and knees across the damp cool grass towards the hedgebreak that marked the entrance to the garden. Evrard was still carrying on inside; something about stars now, and white-capped waves.

In his irritation with the man, with himself, with the very nature of this errand, he almost crawled, quite unprofessionally, squarely into the backside of the priestess who was standing, half-hidden, beside the closest palm to the entranceway. Blaise didn’t know if she was there as a guard for the poet or as a devotee of his art. There really wasn’t time to explore such nuances. A sound from the woman could kill them all.

Fortunately, she was raptly intent on the figure of the chanting poet not far away. Blaise could see Evrard sitting on a stone bench at the near end of a pool in the garden, facing away from them, communing with himself, or the still waters, or whatever poets did their communing with.

Disdaining finesse, Blaise surged to his feet, grabbed the woman from behind and covered her mouth with one hand. She sucked air to scream and he tightened his grip about her mouth and throat. They were not to kill. He disliked unnecessary death in any event. In the silence he had been trained to by the assassins of Portezza, Blaise held the struggling woman, depriving her of air until he felt her slump heavily back against him. Carefully – for this was an old trick – he relaxed his grip. There was no deception here though; the priestess lay slack in his arms. She was a large woman with an unexpectedly young face. Looking at her, Blaise doubted this one would have been a guard. He wondered how she’d got out from the compound; it was the sort of thing that might someday be useful to know. Not that he planned on coming back here in a hurry, if ever.

Laying the priestess carefully down beneath the palm tree, he motioned Maffour with a jerk of his head to go into the garden. Hirnan and Thulier came silently up and began binding the woman in the shadows.

Yours the glory, bright Rian, while we mortal men
Walk humbly in the umbra of your great light,
Seeking sweet solace in the–

‘Who is there?’ Evrard of Lussan called without turning, more peeved than alarmed. ‘You all know I must not be disturbed when I work.’

‘We do know that, your grace,’ Maffour said smoothly, coming up beside the man.

Edging closer, hidden by the bushes, Blaise winced at the unctuous flattery of the title. Evrard had no more claim to it than Maffour did, but Mallin had been explicit in his instructions to the most articulate of his corans.

‘Who are you?’ Evrard asked sharply, turning quickly to look at Maffour in the moonlight. Blaise moved nearer, low to the ground, trying to slip around to the other side of the bench. He had his own views on what was about to happen.

‘Maffour of Baude, your grace, with a message from En Mallin himself.’

‘I thought I recognized you,’ Evrard said haughtily. ‘How dare you come in this fashion, disturbing my thoughts and my art?’ Nothing about impiety or trespass or the affront to the goddess he was currently lauding, Blaise thought sardonically, pausing next to a small statue.

‘I have nothing to say to your baron or his ill-mannered wife, and am in no mood to listen to whatever tritely phrased message they have cobbled together for me.’ Evrard’s tone was lordly.

‘I have come a long way in some peril,’ Maffour said placatingly, ‘and Mallin de Baude’s message is deeply sincere and not long. Will you not honour me by hearing it, your grace?’

‘Honour?’ Evrard of Lussan said, his voice rising querulously. ‘What claim has anyone in that castle to honour of any kind? I bestowed upon them a grace they never deserved. I gave to Mallin whatever dignity he claimed – through my presence there, through my art.’ His words grew dangerously loud. ‘Whatever he was becoming in the gaze of Arbonne, of the world, he owed to me. And in return, in return for that -‘

‘In return for that, for no reason I understand, he seeks your company again,’ Blaise said, stepping quickly forward, having heard quite a bit more than enough.

As Evrard glanced back at him wide-eyed, attempting to rise, Blaise used the haft of his dagger for the second time that night, bringing it down with carefully judged force on the balding pate of the troubadour. Maffour moved quickly to catch the man as he fell.

‘I cannot begin to tell you,’ Blaise said fervently as Hirnan and Thulier joined them, ‘how much I enjoyed doing that.’

Hirnan grunted. ‘We can guess. What took you so long?!

Blaise grinned at the three of them. ‘What? And interfere with Maffour’s great moment? I really wanted to hear that speech.’

‘I’ll recite it for you on the way back then,’ Maffour said sourly. ‘With all the “your grace’s” too.’

‘Spare us,’ said Hirnan briefly. He bent and effortlessly shouldered the body of the small troubadour.

Still grinning, Blaise led the way this time, without a word, down towards the south end of the garden, away from the sanctuary lights and the walls and the temple domes, and then, circling carefully, back towards the shelter of the wood. If these were the corans of a lesser baron, he was thinking to himself, and they turned out to be this cooly competent – with one vivid exception – he was going to have to do some serious reassessing, when they got back to land, of the men of this country of Arbonne, even with its troubadours and joglars and a woman ruling them.

*****

The one vivid exception was having, without the least shadow of any possible doubt, the worst night of his life.

In the first place, there were the noises. Even at the edge of the woods, the sounds of the night forest kept making their way to Luth’s pricked ears, triggering waves of panic that succeeded each other in a seemingly endless progression.

Secondly there was Vanne. Or, not exactly Vanne, but his absence, for the other coran assigned to guard duty kept wilfully abandoning Luth, his designated partner, and making his own way down the rope to check on the two clerics in the sailboat, then going off into the forest itself to listen for the return of their fellows, or for other less happy possibilities. Either of these forays would leave Luth alone for long moments at a time to cope with sounds and ambiguous shiftings in the shadows of the plateau or at the edges of the trees, with no one to turn to for reassurance.

The truth was, Luth said to himself – and he would have sworn to it as an oath in any temple of the goddess – that he really wasn’t a coward, though he knew every man here would think him one from tonight onward. He wasn’t though: put him on a crag above Castle Baude in a thunderstorm, with thieves on the slopes making off with the baron’s sheep, and Luth would be fierce in pursuit of them, sure-footed and deft among the rocks, and not at all bad with his bow or blade when he caught up with the bandits. He’d done that, he’d done it last summer, with Giresse and Hirnan. He’d killed a man that night with a bowshot in darkness, and it was he who had led the other two back down the treacherous slopes to safety with the flock.

Not that they were likely to remember that, or bother to remind the others of it, after tonight. If any of them lived through tonight. If they ever left this island. If they–

What was that?

Luth wheeled, his heart lurching like a small boat hit by a crossing wave, in time to see Vanne making his way back onto the plateau from yet another survey of the woods. The other coran gave him a curious glance in the shadows but said nothing. They were not to speak, Luth knew. He found their own enforced silence almost as stressful as the noises of the night forest.

Because they weren’t just noises, and this wasn’t just night-time. These were the sounds of Rian’s Island, which was holy, and the eight of them were here without proper consecration, without any claim of right – only a drunken ex-priest’s mangling of the words of ritual – and they had laid violent hands on two of the goddess’s truly anointed before they’d even landed.

Luth’s problem, very simply, was that he was a believer in the powers of the goddess, profoundly so. If that could really be called a problem. He’d had a religious, superstitious grandmother who’d worshipped both Rian and Corannos along with a variety of hearth spirits and seasonal ones, and who’d known just enough about magic and folk spells to leave the grandson she’d reared helplessly prey to the terrors of precisely the sort of place where they were now. Had he not been so anxious not to lose face among the other corans and his baron and the big, capable, grimly sardonic northern mercenary Mallin had brought to lead and train them, Luth would certainly have found a way to back out of the mission when he was named for it.

He should have, he thought dismally. Whatever status that withdrawal would have cost him was as nothing compared to how he’d be diminished and mocked because of what had happened tonight. Who would ever have thought that simple piety, a prayer of thanks to holy Rian herself, could get a person into so much trouble? How should a high country man know how bizarrely far sound – a murmured prayer! – could carry at sea? And Hirnan had hurt him with that pincer-like grip of his. The oldest coran was a big man, almost as big as the bearded northerner, and his fingers had been like claws of iron. Hirnan should have known better, Luth thought, trying to summon some sense of outrage at how unfair all of this was turning out to be.

He jumped sideways again, stumbled, and almost fell. He was grappling for his sword when he realized that it was Vanne who had come up to him. He tried, with minimal success, to turn the motion into one of alertly prudent caution. Vanne, his face blandly expressionless, gestured and Luth bent his head towards him.

‘I’m going down to check on them again,’ the other coran said, as Luth had despairingly known he would. ‘Remember, a corfe whistle if you need me. I’ll do the same.’ Mutely, trying to keep his own expression from shaping a forlorn plea, Luth nodded.

Moving easily, Vanne negotiated the plateau, grasped the rope and slipped over the side. Luth watched the line jerk for a few moments and then go slack as Vanne reached the rocks at the bottom. He walked over to the tree that Maffour had tied the rope to and knelt to run a practised eye over the knot. It was fine, Luth judged, it would continue to hold.

He straightened and stepped back. And bumped into something.

His heart lurching, he spun around. As he did, as he saw what had come, all the flowing blood in his veins seemed to dry up and change to arid powder. He pursed his lips and tried to whistle. Like a corfe.

No sound came out. His lips were dry, as bone, as dust, as death. He opened his mouth to scream but closed it silently and quite suddenly as a curved, jewelled, inordinately long dagger was lifted and held to his throat.

The figures on the plateau were robed in silk and satin, dyed crimson and silver, as for a ceremony. They were mostly women, at least eight of them, but there were two men besides. It was a woman, though, who held the crescent-shaped blade to his throat. He could tell from the swell of her body beneath her robe, even though she was masked. They were all masked. And the masks, every one of them, were of predatory animals and birds. Wolf and hunting cat, owl and hawk, and a silver-feathered corfe with golden eyes that glittered in the moonlight.

‘Come,’ said the priestess with the blade to Luth of Castle Baude, her voice cold and remote, the voice of a goddess at night. A goddess of the Hunt, in her violated sanctuary. She wore a wolf mask, Luth saw, and then he also realized that the ends of the gloves on her hands were shaped like the claws of a wolf. ‘Did you truly think you would not be found and known? she said.

No, Luth wanted frantically to say. No, I never thought we could do this. I was sure we would be caught.

He said nothing. The capacity for speech seemed to have left him, silence lying like a weight of stones on his chest. In terror, his brain going numb, Luth felt the blade caress his throat almost lovingly. The priestess gestured with a clawed hand; in response, Luth’s feet, as if of their own will, led him stumbling into the night forest of Rian. There were scented priestesses of the goddess all about him as he went, women masked like so many creatures of prey, clad in soft robes of silver and red amid the darkness of the trees, with the pale moon lost to sight, like hope.

Excerpt from Chapter 1. © Guy Gavriel Kay 1992