Amid the gathering hilarity and to the rhythm of five hundred hungry men banging their fists on the long wooden tables, Kevin reminded himself that such things were said to be a delicacy. With a full glass of wine to hand, he stood up, bowed to Diarmuid, and ate the testicles of the boar that had almost killed him.
Not bad, actually, all things considered.
“Any more?” he asked loudly and got his laugh for the night. Even from Dave Martyniuk, which took some doing.
Aileron made a short speech and so did Shalhassan, both of them too wise to try to say much, given the mood in the hall. Besides, Kevin thought, the Kings must be feeling it too. The serving girls—daughters of the villagers, he gathered—were giggling and dodging already. They didn’t seem to mind, though. He wondered what Maidaladan did to the women: to Jaelle and Sharra, even to that battleship Audiart, up at the high table. It was going to be wild later, when the priestesses came out.
There were windows high on all four sides. Amid the pandemonium, Kevin watched it growing dark outside. There was too much noise, too much febrile excitement, for anyone to mark his unwonted quiet.
He was the only one in the hall to see the moon when it first shone through the eastern windows. It was full and this was Midsummer’s Eve, and the thing at the edge of his mind was pushing harder now, straining towards a shape. Quietly he rose and went out, not the first to leave. Even in the cold, there were couples clinched heedlessly close outside the banquet hall.
He moved past them, his wound aching a little now, and stood in the middle of the icy street looking up and east at the moon. And in that moment awareness stirred within him, at last, and took a shape. Not desire, but whatever the thing was that lay behind desire.
“It isn’t a night to be alone,” a voice from just behind him said. He turned to look at Liane. There was a shyness in her eyes.
“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t see you at the banquet.”
“I didn’t come. I was sitting with Gereint.”
“How is he?” He began to walk, and she fell in stride beside him on the wide street. Other couples, laughing, running to warmth, passed them on all sides. It was very bright, with the moonlight on the snow.
“Well enough. He isn’t happy, though, not the way the others are.”
He glanced over at her and then, because it seemed right, took her hand. She wasn’t wearing gloves either, and her fingers were cold.
“Why isn’t he happy?” A random burst of laughter came from a window nearby, and a candle went out.
“He doesn’t think we can do it.”
“Do what?”
“Stop the winter. It seems they found out that Metran is making it—I didn’t understand how—from the spiralling place, Cader Sedat, out at sea.”
A quiet stretch of road. Inside himself Kevin felt a deeper quiet gathering, and suddenly he was afraid. “They can’t go there,” he said softly.
Her dark eyes were somber. “Not in winter. They can’t sail. They can’t end the winter while the winter lasts.”
It seemed to Kevin, then, that he had a vision of his past of chasing an elusive dream, waking or asleep, down all the nights of his life. The pieces were falling into place. There was a stillness in his soul. He said, “You told me, the time we were together, that I carried Dun Maura within me.”
She stopped abruptly in the road and turned to him.
“I remember,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “there’s something strange happening. I’m not feeling anything of what’s hitting everyone else tonight. I’m feeling something else.”
Her eyes were very wide in the moonlight. “The boar,” she whispered. “You were marked by the boar.”
That too. Slowly he nodded. It was coming together. The boar. The moon. Midsummer. The winter they could not end. It had, in fact, come together. From within the quiet, Kevin finally understood.
“You had better leave me,” he said, as gently as he could.
It took a moment before he realized that she was crying. He hadn’t expected that.
“Liadon?” she asked. Which was the name.
“Yes,” he said. “It looks as if. You had better leave me.”
She was very young, and he thought she might refuse. He underestimated her, though. With the back of her hand she wiped away her tears. Then, rising on tiptoe, she kissed him on the lips and walked away in the direction from which they had come, towards the lights.
He watched her go. Then he turned and went to the place where the stables were. He found his horse. As he was saddling it, he heard bells ring from the Temple and his movements slowed for a moment. The priestesses of Dana would be coming out.
He finished with the saddle and mounted up. He walked the horse quietly up the lane and stopped in the shadows where it joined the road from Morvran to the Temple. Looking north, he could see them coming, and a moment later he watched the priestesses go by. Some were running and some walked. They all wore long grey cloaks against the cold and they all had their hair unbound and loose down their backs, and all the women seemed to shine a little in the full moonlight. They went past and, turning his head to the left, he saw the men coming out to meet them from the town, and the moon was very bright and it shone on the snow and ice, and on all the men and women in the road as they came together.
In a very little while the street was empty again and then the bells were silent. There were cries and laughter not very far away, but he carried his own deep quiet now, and he set his horse towards the east and began to ride.
Kim woke late in the afternoon. She was in the room they had given her, and Jaelle was sitting quietly beside the bed.
Kim sat up a little and stretched her arms. “Did I sleep all day?” she asked.
Jaelle smiled, which was unexpected. “You were entitled.”
“How long have you been watching me?”
“Not long. We’ve been checking on all of you periodically.”
“All of us? Who else?”
“Gereint. The two sources.”
Kim pushed herself into a sitting position. “Are you all right?”
Jaelle nodded. “None of us went so far as you. The sources were recovering, until they were drained again.”
Kim asked with her eyes, and the red-haired Priestess told her about the hunt and then the boar. “No lasting damage to any of them,” she finished, “though Kevin came very close.”
Kim shook her head. “I’m glad I didn’t see it.” She drew a long breath. “Aileron told me that I did send something back. What was it, Jaelle?”
“The Cauldron,” the other woman replied, and then, as Kim waited: “The mage says Metran is making the winter with it from Cader Sedat, out at sea.”
There was a silence as Kim absorbed this. When it sank in, all she felt was despair. “Then I did no good at all! We can’t do anything about it. We can’t get there in winter!”
“Nicely planned, wasn’t it?” Jaelle murmured with a dryness that did not mask her own fear.
“What do we do?”
Jaelle stirred. “Not much, tonight. Don’t you feel it?”
And with the question, Kim realized she did. “I thought it was just an aftermath,” she murmured.
The Priestess shook her head. “Maidaladan. It reaches us later than the men, and more as restlessness than desire, I think, but it is almost sundown, and Midsummer’s Eve.”
Kim looked at her. “Will you go out?”
Jaelle rose abruptly and took a few paces towards the far wall. Kim thought she’d given offence, but after a moment the tall Priestess turned back to her. “Sorry,” she said, surprising Kim for the second time. “An old response. I will go to the banquet but come back afterwards. The grey-robed ones must go into the streets tonight, to any man who wants them. The red Mormae never go, though that is custom and not law.” She hesitated. “The High Priestess wears white and is not allowed to be part of Maidaladan or to have a man at any other time.”
“Is there a
reason?” Kim asked.
“You should know it,” Jaelle said flatly.
And reaching within, to the place of her second soul, Kim did. “I see,” she said quietly. “Is it difficult?”
For a moment Jaelle did not answer. Then she said, “I went from the brown of acolyte straight to the red and then the white.”
“Never grey.” Kim remembered something. “Neither was Ysanne.” And then, as the other stiffened, she asked, “Do you hate her so much? Because she went with Raederth?”
She didn’t expect an answer, but it was a strange afternoon, and Jaelle said, “I did once. It is harder now. Perhaps all the hate in me has gone north.”
There was a long silence. Jaelle broke it awkwardly.
“I wanted to say … you did a very great thing last night, whatever comes of it.”
For only the briefest moment Kim hesitated; then she said, “I had help. I’m only going to tell you and Loren, and Aileron, I think, because I’m not sure what will come of it and I want to go carefully.”
“What help?” Jaelle said.
“The Paraiko,” Kim replied. “The Giants are still alive and under siege in Khath Meigol.”
Jaelle sat down quite suddenly. “Dana, Mother of us all!” she breathed. “What do we do?”
Kim shook her head. “I’m not sure. We talk. But not tonight, I guess. As you said, I don’t think anything important will happen tonight.”
Jaelle’s mouth twitched. “Tell that to the ones in grey who have been waiting a year for this.”
Kim smiled. “I suppose. You know what I mean. We’ll have to talk about Darien, too.”
Jaelle said, “Pwyll is with him now.”
“I know. I guess he had to go, but I wish he were here.”
Jaelle rose again. “I’m going to have to leave. It will be starting soon. I am glad to see you better.”
“Thank you,” Kim said. “For everything. I may look in on Gereint and the sources. Just to say hello. Where are they?”
Again Jaelle coloured. “We put them in beds in the chambers I use. We thought it would be quiet there—not all the priestesses go out if there are men in the Temple.”
In spite of everything, Kim had to giggle. “Jaelle,” she said, “you’ve got the only three harmless men in Gwen Ystrat sleeping in your rooms tonight!”
After a second she heard the High Priestess laugh, for the first time she could remember.
When she was alone, for all her good intentions, she fell asleep again. No dreams, no workings of power, just the deep sleep of one who had overtaxed her soul and knew there was more to come.
The bells woke her. She heard the rustle of long robes in the hallway, the quick steps of a great many women, whispers and breathless laughter. After a while it was quiet again.
She lay in bed, wide awake now, thinking of many things. Eventually, because it was Maidaladan, her thoughts went back to an incident from the day before, and, after weighing it and lying still a while longer, she rose, washed her face, and put on her own long robe with nothing underneath.
She went along the curving hallway and listened at a door where a dim light yet showed. It was Midsummer’s Eve, in Gwen Ystrat. She knocked, and when he opened it, she stepped inside.
“It is not a night to be alone,” she said, looking up at him.
“Are you sure?” he asked, showing the strain.
“I am,” she said. Her mouth crooked. “Unless you’d prefer to go in search of that acolyte?”
He made no reply. Only came forward. She lifted her head for his kiss. Then she felt him unclasp her gown and as it fell she was lifted in Loren Silvercloak’s strong arms and carried to his bed on Midsummer’s Eve.
She was finally beginning to get a sense of what he might do, Sharra thought, of the forms his quest for diversion took. She had been a diversion herself a year ago, but that one had cost him a knife wound and very nearly his life. From her seat at the high table of the banquet hall she watched, a half smile on her lips, as Diarmuid rose and carried the steaming testicles of the boar to the one who had been gored. Miming a servant’s gestures, he presented the platter to Kevin.
She remembered that one: he had taken the same leap as she the year before, from the musicians’ gallery in Paras Derval, though for a very different reason. He, too, was handsome, fair as Diarmuid was, though his eyes were brown. There was a sadness in them, too, Sharra thought. Nor was she the first woman to see this.
Sadness or no, Kevin made some remark that convulsed those around him. Diarmuid was laughing as he returned to his seat between her father and the High Priestess, on the far side of Aileron. Briefly, he glanced at her as he sat down, and expressionlessly she looked away. They had not spoken since the sunlit afternoon he had so effortlessly mastered all of them. Tonight, though, was Maidaladan, and she was sure enough of him to expect an overture.
As the banquet proceeded—boar meat from the morning and eltor brought down from the Plain by the Dalrei contingent—the tone of the evening grew wilder. She was curious, certainly not afraid, and there was an unsettling disquiet within her as well. When the bells rang, she understood, the priestesses would be coming out. She herself, her father had made clear, would be in the Temple well before that. Already, Arthur Pendragon and Ivor, the Aven of the Dalrei, who had talked entertainingly on either side of her all evening, had gone back to the Temple. Or she assumed that was where they had gone.
There were, therefore, empty seats beside her in the increasingly unruly hall. She could see Shalhassan begin to stir restively. This was not a mood for the Supreme Lord of Cathal. She wondered, fleetingly, if her father was feeling the same upwelling of desire that was becoming more and more obvious in all the other men in the room. He must be, she supposed and suppressed a smile—it was a difficult thing to envisage Shalhassan at the mercy of his passions.
And in that instant, surprising her despite everything, Diarmuid was next to her. He did not sit. There would be a great many glances turned to them. Leaning on the back of the chair Arthur had been sitting in, he said, in a tone of mildest pleasantry, something that completely disconcerted her. A moment later, with a polite nod of his head, he moved away and, passing down the long room with a laugh or a jibe every few strides, out into the night.
She was her father’s daughter, and not even Shalhassan, looking over with an appraising glance, was able to read even a hint of her inner turmoil.
She had expected him to come to her tonight, expected the proposition he would make. For him to murmur as he had just done, “Later,” and no more was very much what she had thought he’d do. It fit his style, the indolent insouciance.
What didn’t fit, what had unnerved her so much, was that he had made it a question, a quiet request, and had looked for a reply from her. She had no idea what her eyes had told him, or what—and this was worse—she had wanted them to tell.
A few moments later her father rose and, halfway down the room, so did Bashrai. An honour guard, creditably disciplined, escorted the Supreme Lord and Princess of Cathal back to the Temple. At the doorway, Shalhassan, with a gracious gesture if not an actual smile, dismissed them for the night.
She had no servants of her own here; Jaelle had assigned one of the priestesses to look after her. As she entered her room, Sharra saw the woman turning down her bed by the light of the moon that slanted through the curtained window. The priestess was robed and hooded already for the winter outside. Sharra could guess why.
“Will they ring the bells soon?” she asked.
“Very soon, my lady,” the woman whispered, and Sharra heard a straining note in her low voice. This, too, unsettled her.
She sat down in the one chair, playing with the single gem she wore about her neck. With quick, almost impatient movements, the priestess finished with the bed.
“Is there more, my lady? Because, if not … I’m sorry, but—but it is only tonight …” Her voice trembled.
“No,” Sharra said kindly. “I will be fine.
Just … open the window for me before you go.”
“The window?” The priestess registered dismay. “Oh, my lady, no! Not for you, surely. You must understand, it will be very wild tonight, and the men of the village have been known to …”
She fixed the woman with her most repressive stare. It was hard, though, to quell a hooded priestess of Dana in Gwen Ystrat. “I do not think any men of the village will venture here,” she said, “and I am used to sleeping with a window open, even in winter.” Very deliberately, she turned her back and began removing her jewellery. Her hands were steady, but she could feel her heart racing at the implication of what she had done.
If he laughed when he entered, or mocked her, she would scream, she decided. And let him deal with the consequences. She heard the catch of the window spring open and a cold breeze blew into the room.
Then she heard the bells, and the priestess behind her drew a ragged breath.
“Thank you,” said Sharra, laying her necklace on the table. “I suppose that is your sign.”
“The window was, actually,” said Diarmuid.
Her dagger was drawn before she finished turning.
He had tossed back the hood and stood regarding her tranquilly. “Remind me to tell you some day about the other time I did this sort of thing. It’s a good story. Have you noticed,” he added, making conversation, “how tall some of these priestesses are? It was a lucky—”
“Are you trying to earn my hate?” She hurled it at him as if the words were her blade.
He stopped. “Never that,” he said, though easily still. “There is no approach to this room from outside for one man by himself, and I chose not to confide in anyone. I had no other way of coming here alone.”
“What made you assume you could? How much presumption—”
“Sharra. Have done with that tone. I didn’t assume. If you hadn’t had the window opened I would have walked out when the bells rang.”
“I—” She stopped. There was nothing to say.
“Will you do something for me?” He stepped forward. Instinctively she raised her blade, and at that, for the first time, he smiled. “Yes,” he said, “you can cut me. For obvious reasons I offered no blood when I came in. I don’t like being in here on Maidaladan without observing the rites. If Dana can affect me the way she is tonight, she deserves propitiation. There’s a bowl beside you.”
The Wandering Fire Page 19