The Darkest Road

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  However hard she tried, though, she could not entirely school her thoughts, for the andain’s earlier explanation had reached into her heart, and not just in the way Brendel had discerned. The question of randomness, of the Weaver’s gift of choice to his Children, touched Arthur’s woven doom with a possibility of expiation she’d never really allowed herself to dream about before. But there was something else in what Flidais had said. Something that went beyond their own long tragedy in all its returnings, and this the lios alfar had not seen, and Flidais knew nothing at all of it.

  Jennifer did, though, and she held it close to her rapidly beating heart. Random, Cernan of the Beasts had said of the Wild Hunt and the choice they embodied. It was her own word. Her own instinctive word for her response to Maugrim. For her child, and his choice.

  She looked out to sea, searching. The wind was very strong now, and there were storm clouds coming up fast. She forced herself to keep her features calm as she gazed, but inwardly she was as open, as exposed, as she had ever been.

  And in that moment Darien landed near the rivet, at the edge of the trees, and took his human form again.

  The sound of thunder was distant yet and the clouds were still far out at sea. But it was a southwest wind that was carrying the storm, and when the light began to change the weather-wise lios alfar grew uneasy. He took Jennifer’s hand, and the three of them withdrew into the high chamber. Flidais rolled the curved glass windows shut along their tracks. They sealed tightly, and in the abrupt silence Brendel saw the andain suddenly tilt his head, as if hearing something.

  He was. The howl of wind on the balcony had screened from him the alarms running through the Great Wood. There was an intruder. There were two: one was here, even now, and the other was coming and would arrive very soon.

  The one who was coming he knew, and feared, for it was his own lord, lord of all the andain and mightiest of them, but the other one, the one standing below them at this moment, he knew not, nor did the powers of the Wood, and it frightened them. In their fear they grew enraged, and he could feel that rage now as a buffeting greater than the wind on the balcony.

  Be calm, he sent inwardly, though he was anything but calm himself. I will go down. I will deal with this.

  To the others, to the lios alfar and the woman he’d known as Guinevere, he said grimly, “Someone has come, and Galadan is on his way to this place even now.”

  He saw a look pass between the two of them, and he felt the tightening of tension in the room. He thought they were mirroring his own anxiety, knowing nothing of the memory they shared of the Wolflord in a wood east of Paras Derval a little more than a year ago.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” he demanded. “Who would follow you here?”

  “Who could follow us here?” Brendel replied quickly. There was suddenly a new brightness to the lios, as if he had shed a cloak and his true nature was shining through. “No one has come by sea; we would have seen them—and how could anyone pass through the forest?”

  “Someone stronger than the Wood,” Flidais replied, vexed at the hint of apprehension that reached his voice.

  Brendel was already by the stairwell. “Jennifer, wait here. We will go down and deal with this. Lock the door after us, and open only to one of our voices.” He loosened his short sword in its scabbard as he spoke, then turned to Flidais, “How long before Galadan arrives?”

  The andain sent the query out to the Wood and relayed the answer back, “Half an hour, perhaps less. He is running very fast, in his wolf shape.”

  “Will you help me?” Brendel asked him directly.

  This was, of course, the question. The andain rarely cared for the affairs of mortals, and even more rarely intervened in them. But Flidais had a purpose here, his oldest, deepest purpose, and so he temporized. “I will go down with you. I told the forest I would see who this was.”

  Jennifer had gone very pale again, Brendel saw, but her hands were steady and her head very high, and once more he marveled at her sheer, unwavering courage as she said, “I will come down. Whoever is here has come because of me; it may be a friend.”

  “It may not be,” Brendel replied gravely.

  “Then I should be no safer in this room,” she answered calmly, and paused at the head of the curving stairs waiting for him to lead her down. One more moment he hesitated, then his eyes went green, exactly the color of her own. He took her hand and brought it to his forehead and then his lips before turning to descend, sword drawn now, his tread quick and light on the stone stairs. She followed, and Flidais behind her, his mind racing with calculations, boiling over with considerations and possibilities and a frantically stifled excitement.

  They saw Darien standing by the river as soon as they stepped out onto the beach.

  The wind carried lashings of sea spray that stung when they struck, and the sky had grown darker even in the moments of their descent. It was purple now, shot through with streaks of red, and thunder was rolling out at sea beyond the rising waves.

  But for Brendel of the lios alfar, who immediately recognized who had come, none of this even registered. Quickly he spun around, to fling some warning to Jennifer, to give her time to prepare herself. Then he saw from her expression that she didn’t need his warning. She knew, already, who this boy standing before them was. He looked at her face, wet now with ocean spray, and stepped aside as she moved forward toward the river where Darien stood.

  Flidais came up beside him, droplets of spray glittering on his bald head, an avid curiosity in his face. Brendel became aware of the sword he carried, and he sheathed it silently. Then he and the andain watched mother and child come together for the first time since the night Darien was born.

  An overwhelming awareness filled Brendel’s mind of how many things might lie in the balance here. He would never forget that afternoon by the Summer Tree, and the words of Cernan: Why was he allowed to live? He thought of that, he thought of Pwyll, far out at sea, and he was conscious every moment of Cernan’s son, running toward them even now, as fast as the gathering storm and more dangerous.

  He looked down at the andain beside him, not trusting the vivid, inquisitive brightness in Flidais’ eyes. But what, after all, could he do? He could stand by, apprehensive and ready; he could die in Jennifer’s defense, if it came to that; he could watch.

  And, watching, he saw Darien step cautiously forward away from the riverbank. As the boy came nearer, Brendel saw some sort of circlet about his brow, with a dark gem enclosed within it, and deep in his mind a chime sounded, crystal on crystal, a warning from memories not his own. He reached back toward them, but even as he did he saw the boy hold out a sheathed dagger toward his mother, and as Darien spoke, Brendel’s memories were wiped away by the urgent demands of the present.

  “Will you… will you take a gift?” he heard. It seemed to him as if the boy were poised to take sudden flight at a breath, at the fall of a leaf. He held himself very still and, disbelieving, heard Jennifer’s reply.

  “Is it yours to give?” There was ice in her voice, and steel. Hard and cold and carrying, her tone knifed through the wind, sharp as the dagger her son was offering her.

  Confused, unprepared, Darien stumbled back. The blade fell from his fingers. Aching for him, for both of them, Brendel kept silence though his whole being was crying out to Jennifer to be careful, to be gentle, to do whatever she had to do to hold the boy and claim him.

  There was a sound from behind him. Quickly he glanced back, his hand gliding to his sword. The Seer of Brennin, her white hair whipping across her eyes, was standing at the edge of the forest east of the Anor. A moment later, his shocked eyes discerned the High Priestess, and then Sharra of Cathal’s unmistakable beauty, and the mystery cleared and deepened, both. They must have come from the Temple, by using the earthroot and Jaelle’s power. But why? What was happening?

  Flidais, too, had heard them come, but not Jennifer or Darien, who were too intent on each other. Brendel turned back to them. He was behind
Jennifer, could not see her face, but her back was straight and her head imperiously high as she faced her son.

  Who said, small and seeming frail in the wild wind, “I thought it might… please you. I took it. I thought…”

  Surely now, Brendel thought. Surely she would ease the path for him now?

  “It does not,” Jennifer replied. “Why should I welcome a blade that does not belong to you?”

  Brendel clenched his hands. There seemed to be a fist squeezing his heart. Oh, careful, he thought. Oh, please take care.

  “What,” he heard Darien’s mother say, “are you doing here?”

  The boy’s head jerked as if she’d struck him. “I—she told me. The one with white hair. She said you were…” His words failed him. Whatever else he said was lost in the tearing wind.

  “She said I was here,” his mother said coldly, very clearly. “Very well. She was right, of course. What of it? What do you want, Darien? You are no longer a baby—you arranged for that yourself. Would you have me treat you like one?”

  Of course he would, Brendel wanted to say. Couldn’t she see that? Was it so hard for her?

  Darien straightened. His hands thrust forward, almost of themselves. He threw his head back, and Brendel thought he saw a flash. Then the boy cried, from the center of his heart, “Don’t you want me?”

  From his extended hands two bolts of power flew, to left and right of his mother. One hurtled into the bay, struck the small boat tied up to the dock, and blasted it into shards and fragments of wood. The other sizzled just past his mother’s face and torched a tree at the edge of the Wood.

  “Weaver at the Loom!” Brendel gasped. At his side, Flidais made a strangled sound and then ran, as fast as his short legs could carry him, to stand beneath the burning tree. The andain raised his arms toward the blaze, he spoke words too rapid and low to follow, and the fire went out.

  A real fire this time, Brendel thought numbly. It had been only illusion the last time, by the Summer Tree. Weaver alone knew where this child’s power ended or where it would go.

  As if in answer to his thoughts, his unspoken fears, Darien spoke again, clearly this time, in a voice that mastered the wind and the thunder out at sea and the drumming, rising now from the forest floor.

  “Shall I go to Starkadh?” he challenged his mother. “Shall I see if my father gives me a fairer welcome? I doubt Rakoth will scruple to take a stolen dagger! Do you leave me any choice—Mother?”

  He’s not a child, Brendel thought. It was not the words or the voice of a child.

  Jennifer had not moved or flinched, even when the bolts of power flew by her. Only her fingers, spread-eagled at her sides, gave any hint of tension. And again, amid his doubt and fear and numbing incomprehension, Brendel of the lios alfar was awed by what he saw in her.

  She said, “Darien, I leave you the only choice there is. I will say this much and nothing more: you live, though your father wanted me dead so that you would never come into the Tapestry. I cannot hold you in my arms or seek shelter and love for you as I did in Vae’s house when you were born. We are past the time for that. There is a choice for you to make, and everything I know tells me that you must make it freely and unconstrained, or it will never have been made at all. If I bind you to me now, or even try, I strip you of what you are.”

  “What if I don’t want to make that choice?”

  Struggling to understand, Brendel heard Darien’s voice suspended, halfway, it seemed, between the explosion of his power and the supplication of his longing.

  His mother laughed, but not harshly. “Oh, my child,” she said. “None of us want to make it, and all of us must. Yours is only the hardest, and the one that matters most.”

  The wind died a little, a lull, a hesitation. Darien said, “Finn told me… before… that my mother loved me and that she had made me special.”

  And now, as if involuntarily, Jennifer’s hands did move, up from her sides, to clutch her elbows tightly in front of her.

  “Acushla machree,” she said—or so Brendel thought. She started to go on, then seemed to pull herself up short, as on a tight, harsh rein.

  After a moment she added, in a different voice, “He was wrong… about making you special. You know that now. Your power comes from Rakoth when your eyes go red. What you have of me is only freedom and the right to choose, to make your own choice between Light and Dark. Nothing more than that.”

  “No, Jen!” the Seer of Brennin screamed, into the wind.

  Too late, Darien’s eyes changed again as the last words were spoken, and from the bitterness of his laughter Brendel knew they had lost him. The wind rose again, wilder than before; over it, over the deep drumming of Pendaran Wood, Darien cried, “Wrong, Mother! You have it all wrong. I am not here to choose but to be chosen!”

  He gestured toward his forehead. “Do you not see what I wear on my brow? Do you not recognize it?” There was another peal of thunder, louder than any yet, and rain began to fall. Through it, over it, Darien’s voice soared. “This is the Circlet of Lisen! The Light against the Dark—and it went out when I put it on!”

  A sheet of lightning seared the sky west of them. Then thunder again. Then Darien: “Don’t you see? The Light has turned away, and now you have as well. Choice? I have none! I am of the Dark that extinguishes the Light—and I know where to go!”

  With those words he reclaimed the dagger from the strand before his feet; then he was running, heedless, contemptuous of the ominous drumming in the Wood, straight into Pendaran through the slashing, driving rain, leaving the six of them exposed on the shore to both the storm which had come and the rawness of their terror.

  Jennifer turned. The rain was sheeting down; Brendel had no way to tell if there were tears or raindrops on her face.

  “Come,” he said, “we must go inside. It is dangerous out here in this!”

  Jennifer ignored him. The other three women had come up. She turned to Kim, waiting, expecting something.

  And it came. “What in the name of all that is holy have you done?” the Seer of Brennin screamed into the gale. It was hard to stand upright; they were all drenched to the bone. “I sent him here as a last chance to keep him from Starkadh, and you drove him straight there! All he wanted was comfort, Jen!”

  But it was Guinevere who answered, colder, sterner than the elements. “Comfort? Have I comfort to give, Kimberly? Have you? Or any of us, today, now? You had no right to send him here, and you know it! I meant him to be random, free to choose, and I will not back away from that! Jaelle, what did you think you were doing? You were there in the music room at Paras Derval when I told that to Paul. I meant everything I said! If we bind him, or try, he is lost to us!”

  There was another thing inside her, at the very deepest place in her heart, but she did not say it. It was her own, too naked for the telling: He is my Wild Hunt, she whispered over and over in her soul. My Owein, my shadow kings, my child on Iselen. All of them. She was not blind to the resonances. She knew that they killed, with joy and without discrimination. She knew what they were. She also knew, since Flidais’ tale on the balcony, what they meant.

  She glared at Kimberly through the slashing rain, daring her to speak again. But the Seer was silent, and in her eyes Jennifer saw no more anger or fear, only sadness and wisdom and a love she remembered as never varying. There was a queer constriction in her throat.

  “Excuse me.” The women looked down at the one who had spoken. “Excuse me,” Flidais repeated, fighting hard against the surging in his heart, straining to keep his voice calm. “I take it you are the Seer of Brennin?”

  “I am,” Kim said.

  “I am Flidais,” he said, unconscionably quick with even this casually chosen name. But he had no patience left; he was near now, so near. He was afraid he would go mad with excitement. “I should tell you that Galadan is very close to this place—minutes away, I think.”

  Jennifer brought her hands to her mouth. She had forgotten, in the total absorpt
ion of the last few minutes. But it all came back now: the night in the wood and the wolf who had taken her away for Maugrim and then had become a man who said, She is still to go north. If it were not so, I might take her for myself. Just before he gave her to the swan.

  She shuddered. She could not help herself. She heard Flidais say, still for some reason addressing Kim, “I can be of aid, I believe. I think I could divert him from this place, if I go fast enough.”

  “Well, then, go!” Kim exclaimed. “If he’s only a few minutes—”

  “Or,” Flidais went on, unable now to keep the rising note from finally reaching his voice, “I could do nothing, as the andain usually do. Or, if I choose, I could tell him exactly who just left the glade, and who is here.”

  “I would kill you first!” Brendel burst out, his eyes gleaming through the rain. A bolt of lightning knifed into the roiling sea. There came another peal of thunder.

  “You could try,” Flidais said, with equanimity. “You would fail. And then Galadan could come.”

  He paused, waiting, looking at Kim, who said, slowly, “All right. What is it you want?”

  Amid the howling of the storm Flidais was conscious of a great, cresting illumination in his heart. Tenderly, with a delicate ineffable joy, he said, “Only one thing. A small thing. So small. Only a name. The summoning name of the Warrior.” His soul was singing. He did a little dance on the wet strand; he couldn’t help himself. It was here. It was in his hands.

  “No,” said Kimberly.

  His jaw dropped into the soaked mat of his beard. “No,” she repeated. “I swore an oath when he came to me, and I will not break it.”