The Darkest Road (45 page)

Only when they were gone did she let herself go west to where Finn lay. She walked at first, but then began to run, wanting, for Leila’s sake, to be in time. She felt the circlet that held back her hair slip off; she didn’t stop to pick it up. And as she ran, her hair blowing free, she was remembering the last time this link had been forged, when Leila in the Temple had heard Green Ceinwen turn back the Hunt by the bloodied banks of the Adein.

Jaelle remembered the words she herself had spoken then, spoken in the voice of the Goddess:
there is a death in it
, she had said, knowing it was true.

She came to the place where he lay. His father was there already. She remembered Shahar, from when he had been home from war in the months after Darien was born, while the priestesses of Dana, privy to the secret, had helped Vae care for her new child.

He was sitting on the ground with his son’s head in his lap.
Over and over, his calloused hands were stroking the boy’s forehead. He looked up without speaking at Jaelle’s approach. Finn lay motionless, his eyes closed. He was mortal again, she saw. He looked as he had back in the days of the children’s game, the ta’kiena on the green at the end of Anvil Lane. When Leila, blindfolded, had called him to the Longest Road.

Someone else came. Jaelle looked over her shoulder and saw that it was Pwyll.

He handed her the silver circlet. Neither of them spoke. They looked down at father and son and then knelt on the stony ground beside the fallen boy.

He was dying. His breath was shallow and difficult, and there was blood at the corners of his mouth. Jaelle lifted an edge of her sleeve and wiped the blood away.

Finn opened his eyes at the touch. She saw that he knew her. She saw him ask a question without words.

Very carefully, speaking as clearly as she could, Jaelle said, “The Hunt has gone. One of the Paraiko came, and he bound them back to the cave by the spell that laid them there.”

She saw him nod. It seemed that he understood. He
would
understand, Jaelle realized. He had been one with the Wild Hunt. But now he was only a boy again, with his head in his father’s lap, and dying where he lay.

His eyes were still open, though. He said, so softly she had to bend close to hear, “What I did was all right, then?”

She heard Shahar make a small sound deep in his chest. Through her own tears, she said, “It was more than all right,
Finn. You did everything right. Every single thing, from the very beginning.”

She saw him smile. There was blood again, and once more she wiped it away with the sleeve of her robe. He coughed, and said, “She didn’t mean to throw me, you know.” It took Jaelle a moment to realize that he was talking about his horse. “She was afraid,” Finn said. “She wasn’t used to flying so far from the others. She was only afraid.”

“Oh, child,” Shahar said huskily. “Spare your strength.”

Finn reached up for his father’s hand. His eyes closed and his breathing slowed. Jaelle’s tears followed one another down her cheeks. Then Finn opened his eyes again.

Looking directly at her, he whispered, “Will you tell Leila I heard her? That I was coming?”

Jaelle nodded, half blind. “I think she knows. But I will tell her, Finn.”

He smiled at that. There was a great deal of pain in his brown eyes, but there was also a quiet peace. He was silent for a long time, having little strength left in him, but then he had one more question, and the High Priestess knew it was the last, because he meant it to be.

“
Dari?
” he asked.

She found that this time she couldn’t even answer. Her throat had closed completely around this grief.

It was Pwyll who spoke. He said, with infinite compassion, “He, too, did everything right, Finn. Everything. He is gone, but he killed Rakoth Maugrim before he died.”

Finn’s eyes widened at that, for the last time. There was joy in them, and a grieving pain, but at the end there was peace again, without border or limitation, just before the dark.

“Oh, little one,” he said. And then he died, holding his father’s hand.

There was a legend that took shape in after days, a tale that grew, perhaps, because so many of those who lived through that time wanted it to be true. A tale of how Darien’s soul, which had taken flight some time before his brother’s, was allowed by intercession to pause in the timelessness between the stars and wait for Finn to catch up to him.

And then the story told of how the two of them passed together over the walls of Night that lie all about the living worlds, toward the brightness of the Weaver’s Halls. And Darien’s soul was in the shape he’d had when he was small, when he was Dari, and the eyes of his soul were blue and Finn’s were brown as they went side by side towards the Light.

So the legend went, afterwards, born of sorrow and heart’s desire. But Jaelle, the High Priestess, rose that day from Finn’s side, and she saw that the westering sun had carried the afternoon well over towards twilight.

Then Pwyll also rose, and Jaelle looked upon his face and saw power written there so deeply and so clearly that she was afraid.

And it was as the Lord of the Summer Tree, the Twiceborn of Mörnir, that he spoke. “With all the griefs and joys of this
day,” Pwyll said, seeming almost to be looking through her, “there is one thing left to be done, and it is mine to do, I think.”

He walked past her, slowly, and she turned and saw, by the light of the setting sun, that everyone was gathered on the plain about the figure of Galadan. They were motionless, like statues, or figures caught in time.

Leaving Shahar alone with his son she followed after Pwyll, carrying her silver circlet in her hand. Above her head as she walked down to the plain she heard the quick, invisible wings of his ravens, Thought and Memory. She didn’t know what he was about to do, but in that moment she knew another thing, a truth in the depths of her own heart, as she saw the circle of men make way for Pwyll to pass within, facing the Wolflord of the andain.

Standing beside Loren, with Ruana at her other side, Kim watched Paul walk into the circle, and she had a sudden curious mental image—gone as soon as it came to her—of Kevin Laine, laughing carelessly in Convocation Hall before anything had happened. Anything at all.

It was very quiet in Andarien. In the red of the setting sun the faces of those assembled glowed with a strange light. The breeze was very soft, from the west. All around them lay the dead.

In the midst of the living, Paul Schafer faced Galadan and he said, “We meet for the third time, as I promised you we would. I told you in my own world that the third time would pay for all.”

His voice was level and low, but it carried an infinite authority. To this hour, Kim saw, Paul had brought all of his own driven
intensity, and added to that, now, was what he had become in Fionavar. Especially since the war was over. Because she had been right: his was
not
a power of battle. It was something else, and it had risen within him now.

He said, “Wolflord, I can see in any darkness you might shape and shatter any blade you could try to throw. I think you know that this is true.”

Galadan stood quietly, attending to him carefully. His scarred, aristocratic head was high; the slash of silver in his black hair gleamed in the waning light. Owein’s Horn lay at his feet like some discarded toy.

He said, “I have no blades left to throw. It might have been different had the dog not saved you on the Tree, but I have nothing left now, Twiceborn. The long cast is over.”

Kim heard and tried not to be moved by the weariness of centuries that lay buried in his voice.

Galadan turned, and it was to Ruana that he spoke. “For more years than I can remember,” he said gravely, “the Paraiko of Khath Meigol have troubled my dreams. In my sleep the shadows of the Giants always fell across the image of my desire. Now I know why. It was a deep spell Connla wove so long ago, that its binding could still hold the Hunt today.”

He bowed, without any visible irony, to Ruana, who looked back at him unblinking, saying nothing. Waiting.

Once more Galadan turned to Paul, and a second time he repeated, “It is over. I have nothing left. If you had hopes of a confrontation, now that you have come into your power, I am
sorry to disappoint you. I will be grateful for whatever end you make of me. As things have fallen out, it might as well have come a very long time ago. I might as well have also leaped from the Tower.”

It was upon them, Kim knew. She bit her lip as Paul said, quietly, completely in control, “It need not be over Galadan. You heard Owein’s Horn. Nothing truly evil can hear the horn. Will you not let that truth lead you back?”

There was a murmur of sound, quickly stilled. Galadan had suddenly gone white.

“I heard the horn,” he admitted, as if against his will. “I know not why. How should I come back, Twiceborn? Where could I go?”

Paul did not speak. He only raised one hand and pointed to the southeast.

There, far off on the ridge, a god was standing, naked and magnificent. The rays of the setting sun slanted low across the land and his body glowed red and bronze in that light, and there was a shining brightness to the branching tines of the horns upon his head.

The stag horns of Cernan
.

Only an act of will, Kim realized, kept Galadan steady on his feet when he saw that his father had come. There was no colour in his face at all.

Paul said, absolute master of the moment, voice of the God, “I can grant you the ending you seek, and I will, if you ask me again. But hear me first, Lord of the andain.”

He paused a moment and then, not without gentleness, said, “Lisen has been dead this thousand years, but only today, when her Circlet blazed to the undoing of Maugrim, did her spirit pass to its rest. So, too, has Amairgen’s soul now been released from wandering at sea. Two sides of the triangle, Galadan. They are gone, finally, truly gone. But you live yet, and for all that you have done in bitterness and pride, you still heard the sound of Light in Owein’s Horn. Will you not surrender your pain, Lord of the andain? Give it over. Today has marked the very ending of that tale of sorrow.
Will you not let it end?
You heard the horn—there is a way back for you on this side of Night. Your father has come to be your guide. Will you not let him take you away and heal you and bring you back?”

In the stillness, the clear words seemed to fall like drops of the life-giving rain Paul had bought with his body on the Tree. One after another, gentle as rain, drop by shining drop.

Then he was silent, having forsworn the vengeance he had claimed so long ago—and claimed a second time in the presence of Cernan by the Summer Tree on Midsummer’s Eve.

The sun was very low. It hung like a weight in a scale far in the west. Something moved in Galadan’s face, a spasm of ancient, unspeakable, never-spoken pain. His hands came up, as if of their own will, from his sides, and he cried aloud, “
If only she had loved me! I might have shone so bright!
”

Then he covered his face with his fingers and wept for the first and only time in a thousand years of loss.

He wept for a long time. Paul did not move or speak. But
then, from beside Kim, Ruana suddenly began, deep and low in his chest, a slow, sad chanting of lament. A moment later, with a shiver, Kim heard Ra-Tenniel, Lord of the lios alfar, lift his glorious voice in clear harmony, delicate as a chime in the evening wind.

And so the two of them made music in that place. For Lisen and Amairgen, for Finn and Darien, for Diarmuid dan Ailell, for all the dead gathered there and all the dead beyond, and for the first-fallen tears of the Lord of the andain who had served the Dark so long in his pride and bitter pain.

At length Galadan looked up. The singing stopped. His eyes were hollows, dark as Gereint’s. He faced Paul for the last time, and he said, “You would truly do this? Let me go from here?”

“I would,” said Paul, and not a person standing there spoke to gainsay his right to do so.

“Why?”

“Because you heard the horn.” Paul hesitated, then: “And because of another thing. When you first came to kill me on the Summer Tree you said something. Do you remember?”

Galadan nodded slowly.

“You said I was almost one of you,” Paul went on quietly, with compassion. “You were wrong, Wolflord. The truth is, you were almost one of us, but you didn’t know it then. You had put it too far behind you. Now you know, you have remembered. There has been more than enough killing today. Go home, unquiet spirit, and find healing. Then come back among us with the blessing of what you always should have been.”

Galadan’s hands were quiet at his sides again. He listened absorbing every word. Then he nodded his head, once. Very gracefully, he bowed to Paul, as his father once had done, and moving slowly he walked from the ring of men.

They made way for him on either side. Kim watched him ascend the slope and then walk south and east along the higher ground until he came to where his father stood. The evening sun was upon them both. By its light she saw Cernan open wide his arms and gather his broken, wayward child to his breast.

One moment they stood thus; then there seemed to Kim to be a sudden flaw of light upon the ridge, and they were gone. She looked away, to the west, and saw that Shahar, only a silhouette now against the light, was still sitting on the stony ground with Finn’s head cradled in his lap.

Her heart felt too large for her breast. There was so much glory and so much pain, all interwoven together and never to be untied, she feared. It was over, though. With this there had to have come an ending.

Then she turned back to Paul and realized that she was wrong, completely wrong. She looked at him, and she saw where his own gaze fell, and so she looked as well, at last, to where Arthur Pendragon had been standing quietly all this time.

Guinevere was beside him. Her beauty, the simplicity of it, was so great in that moment, that Kim found it hard to look upon her face. Next to her, but a little way apart and a little way behind, Lancelot du Lac leaned upon his sword, bleeding from more wounds than Kim could number. His mild eyes were clear,
though, and grave, and he managed to smile when he saw her looking at him. A smile so gentle, from one unmatched of any man, living or dead or ever to come, that Kim thought it might break her heart.