"Wait here, Falon." She fixes him with a steady stare, to show that she is serious, and he stops. "You should be with the others. I do not want you to interfere.
The timewinds are easily disturbed. Do you understand?"
Falon says nothing. He looks beyond her to where
the giant advances, boar-skin boots crunching down the gravel slide of the talus slope directly ahead. Curiously, as he paces closer, he condenses. His translucent colors harden. In moments, he is before them, a head taller than Falon, yet human-sized. A dense fragrance of stormwind and lightning rolls from him. And this heaven's smoke alone is imposing enough to drop them humbly to their knees.
"All-Seeing Father!" Ygrane pipes, her eyes fixed on his scuffed boot-tips. "I am Ygrane, queen of the Celts—"
"I know you." The Furor's deep voice encloses them.
"I have seen you in this moment before."
"I come offering myself—"
"You want alliance with the north tribes. I know. I know all this." His low voice, with its sediment of gravel, carries grave concern, some profound unhappiness. "We have been in this moment before, you and I. You must
have seen it."
"I have, my lord," the queen confesses.
"Then why is he here? You know he should not be
here."
Falon dares a glimpse up through his eyebrows and
catches enough of the Furor's scowl to slam his attention back to the ground, to the luminous filaments of crushed grass under his knees.
"He came unbidden, my lord. He is my personal
guard. Faith has led to Fate."
The Furor is groggy from the magic he has worked
on the Raven Branch. His head throbs. All the strength in his giant frame has been depleted binding demons, and now he just wants to go Home. But there are obstacles, first among them his aching brain, full of time-shadows and the sickly aftermath of magic.
Then, there is the obstacle of time itself. Climbing to the Raven Branch and back down has seemed to take a
few very strenuous minutes, when in fact twenty years have lapsed. Once more, it is Ancestor Night, and before he can return to Home, he must go first to the drunken festival, where the Liar will mock him openly and the others hide their smirks. Otherwise, his role as chieftain of the Abiding North is in jeopardy. With all his allies asleep, he must stay close to his enemies.
And then, there is this queer obstacle—this
aberration before him, Ygrane, queen of the Celts. While in the throes of calling the Dark Dwellers out of their House of Fog, he glimpsed this human. The winds of the future blew images of this encounter into his entranced mind.
At the time, he dismissed what he had seen,
believing it a blurred deflection of time's currents. That happens often in the stormy branches, in trance. Time surges and eddies like the wind, and sometimes it goes still and glassy and carries mirages.
Seeing people in the Great Tree is usually an
illusion. Few humans have the electrostatic strength to project their waveforms into the Tree. Those few who have arrived – old wizards and witches – had spent their
lifetimes hoarding energy as greedily as the Dragon. This one is too young to be here by her own magic. She is
some kind of priestess chosen by others of her kind, older ones who have accrued a great deal of power and are
using her to reach him.
The Furor removes his hat to pinch the knot of flesh
between his eyebrows, where his headache is nailed. In trance, he heard her plead with him to spare her people, to take her as sacrifice, to use her as he pleases. But he does not want her. Unlike his old friend Bright Sky, the Furor has no desire for intimacy with the denizens of the rootlands.
Though his years among them have bred admiration in him and though he sacrificed an eye to gain their knowledge, he still considers them a breed of lesser beings, no matter their uncanny resemblance to the gods.
"Faith has led to Fate," the Furor grumbles, gazing down at the abject mortals. The appearance of this other one, this antique warrior, disturbs him. He was not in the trance. That can only mean that the timewinds are picking up, beginning to surge again and shift the future his magic has wrought. He must hurry on, to Ancestor Night, to Home for rest, and then down to the hot, sweltering rootlands, into the stink and humidity of the Dragon, and there to purge the land of the Fire Lords' minions, the foreign tribes from the far south.
But first, this obstacle. This foretold encounter.
Consequence ripples from this young queen or he would not have seen her in trance. His head aches so
remorselessly, he cannot think clearly what this must mean, and he simply wants to be on his way. "I will not have you, queen of the Celts. I will not have any earthly woman. This you should know."
"I am not any earthly woman, my lord," Ygrane speaks up respectfully, yet with a hint of petulance in her voice. Still, she does not raise her face. The god's field of force is so highly charged that, unless he restrains himself, just being near him could cause her and Falon's body-lights to burst apart in a blink.
Yet, she is fearless. She has come into this life for this very moment, to win the Furor's favor and save her people. "The Celts are a cousin race of the north tribes. I am offering you our allegiance."
The Furor heaves a sigh like a hush of steamy rain.
"We have seen this moment before, Ygrane. You know my answer."
The queen is undaunted. From a waist-pouch in her
robes, she withdraws a rock. It is round and flat, big as her open hand and with an off-center hole the width of a
thumb. At first, the stone appears black. But as Ygrane lifts it in offering to the god, light threads through the hole and shows that the stone is black and jellied with amber, like molasses.
"This is a rubbing stone," Ygrane says, sitting back
on her haunches and facing the Furor's rawhide-lashed leggings. "It is old, from a time when the Celts and the north tribes were one clan." With her free hand, she takes a lock of her apricot hair and guides it through the hole in the stone, sawing it back and forth. "Across three hundred centuries, this gentle movement has shaped rock. A
thousand separate lives have carved this emblem. A
thousand deaths have carried it through time to me."
After vigorously rubbing the pierced stone with her
hair, she touches her finger to the stone, and a spark snaps between them. The electric fire ignites her fingertip, and it burns with a slow white brilliance. "This is my gift to you, in honor of our common past," she says, and dares to raise her flourishing green gaze as she presents her
offering.
A gift on Ancestor Night! The Furor gnashes his
teeth but withholds his ire. He does not want to incinerate this crafty little witch, not on Ancestor Night. She could well have been sent here by the Liar, who would make himself chief if his brother proved himself a murderer on this holy night.
Exhilaration whirls through Ygrane when the chief of
the north gods takes the pierced stone from her fiery hands. This much has transpired exactly as Ygrane's
mentor, the crone Raglaw, predicted. By keeping the
pierced stone in the same pouch that had held the god's eye, it had indeed remained invisible to the Furor's trance vision.
Upon taking the offering of amber schist, the Furor
feels the pain dim within his skull. This is a true gift. It carries enough electric potential to soothe his weary body.
And now that he has accepted it—as tradition requires—
and received its benefit, he must reply in kind.
An atmosphere of hazard thickens in the space
where the pain had been. In kind. A gift this venerable, going back to before his reign, to the early days of the Old Ones, when even they were young, requires respect. If he gives her an object of his power, as she rightly expects, having cleverly found her way not only in
to the Great Tree but deftly into his very presence, he cannot fight her people.
Ygrane keeps her lustrous face upturned, her green
eyes glittering with anticipation. She is a breath away from saving her people a savage war. All she needs is for the Furor to acknowledge their kinship with a personal gift—a whisker from his beard, the cord from a boot, anything tangible that she can carry to earth and shape into magic.
"Did the Liar send you to me?" he asks, his good eye a squint.
"No! I used the pierced stone and the magic of the Crones to climb here. They told me where I would find you."
"The Crones," he mutters into his beard, relieved this is not the Liar's work. He presses the pierced stone to his brow and drinks in the soothing coolness of it. "I did not think the Celts obeyed the Crones anymore, not in these modern times, not under the chiefs."
The proud plane of her cheek darkens as she says,
"The chiefs lead us to war. That is why I am here, offering myself to you. The mothers do not want war, especially not with you. We are kin. Marry me to one of your warrior-lords in the rootlands. To Horsa—he is the Saxon warlord you have sent against us. Let us stop killing each other and let the old ways flourish."
"Old ways?" He slaps his hat back on and slants it menacingly over his one eye. "Your ways are not old ways.
When the Celts split with the north tribes, the Celts went south, into the tropic lands—and there you learned foreign ways, alien teachings—the god Brahma and all the strange gods of the south became your gods, and the written word, and your obsession with numbers and metals—the very
madness that the Fire Lords are using to contaminate the Earth."
"Numbers—letters—" Ygrane stammers, swiftly pulling together her thoughts before this unexpected
outburst. "These gifts can be used by the north tribes, too."
"No!" The boom of his voice makes Falon jump and the queen sit back. "Don't you see, witch? These are not gifts. They are poisons! They grow cities. They cover the rootlands with straight lines, breaking the dragon-flow of energy, turning your people from the wandering tribesfolk we have always been into zombies that live in boxes and never touch the naked earth. The magic of the Fire Lords is the secret of other worlds, not Earth. I will not let the Fire Lords destroy our Earth!"
Ygrane bows her head under the impact of the god's
voice and submerges her fears in thought: This is Ancestor Night, and she is safe from his wrath. He has already accepted her gift. Clearly, Falon's presence troubles him, as it does her. Time's weird dimensions shift and stretch to include this new presence. She tries to feel deeper inward, to feel out what will happen next. She is too airy in this disembodied state to feel anything but the chill wind descending from the stars.
"The old ways of this stone have long been lost by your people," the Furor states, tapping the artifact against his palm. "You are possessed by alien forces that want to clear the primeval woodlands and build cities of steel. I
have seen it. If it is not stopped now, there are terrors you cannot imagine awaiting us."
Ygrane notes the lack of bitterness in his voice, the tinge of melancholy behind his outrage, as though he
already understands his effort is too late. And she dares to say to his face of haggard shadows, "You are wrong. The magic of the south tribes has already changed the world.
We cannot go back. But if we go forward together, as one people, we can use the best of this magic to—"
"Silence!" His voice explodes over her, and she covers her face, expecting to be extinguished. And though her body of light wavers, it does not fly apart. "Out of respect for Mother and Freeze, our common parents, I will not destroy you, queen of the Celts. Not this night. Look at me."
She lifts her pallid face and stares into the black
core of his one eye.
"You are everything I want to destroy," he says with icy intensity. "I cannot give you what you want. Not a hair from my head, witch. Yet—" He tilts back his hat and thumbs away the last of the hurt that thorns his brow. "Yet, in honor of Mother and Freeze, I will not withhold my gift.
And though I know you will use it against me, I give it freely. Stand, Ygrane. Stand and accept my gift of a single memory."
The queen sways to her feet, dizzy with a sense of
miracle and a great depth of disappointment. The crone Raglaw has said that Ygrane must return with some thing from the Furor in exchange for the ancient stone—but a memory? Is that enough to work magic?
"Twenty years ago, before I climbed into the Raven Branch from where I am now descending, I observed a
unicorn." He strokes his beard, rubbing the pierced stone against its turbulent length as he remembers. "Have you ever seen one?"
She shakes her head.
"They come from the sun. They come down here
into the Tree now and then. The Fire Lords send them like pack animals to carry away energy from the Dragon. They come and they go. Only rarely do I see them in the north, where I spied this one. Twenty years ago. Not that long ago. They may prowl around for a century or two before returning to the other side of the sky and the herds on the sun's wind."
The Furor extends the pierced stone toward her
face, and a green spark hops from it to her brow. She sees the memory then—the radiant point of the unicorn's
extraterrestrial energy tracing a slow path over the
Dragon's pelt.
"The memory is a god's memory," the Furor states, tucking the pierced stone into the pocket of his rawhide leggings. "I do not need to tell you, a witch-queen, how much power a god's memory has in the mind of a lesser being. The unicorn will come when you call it. And you will see, it is a worthy gift for the pierced stone."
The Furor strolls away, down the bluff and into the
woodland on his way to the festival of Ancestor Night. The gods will be amused by the old stone polished so bright with human dreams. With this energy of bygone times for play, there will be less time to mock and plot against him.
And then, he will return to Home and rest. In a few years, he will be ready to climb down to the rootlands to conquer the West Isles and earn himself a long draught of the Keeper's golden wine of dreams.
Already far behind him, on the grassy bluff, Falon
remains with his face to the ground until the queen puts her hand in his hair and bids him rise. Her woeful features pretend composure. "We can wait here till moonset," she says in a thick voice of swallowed tears. She shuffles through the switching grass to a cowl of rock that mutes the wind. "We will fall asleep then. When we wake, we will return to the circle of swords."
Falon sits beside her, close enough for the tearful
embrace he knows is coming. He says nothing, just
watches her freckled face grow more and more childlike as the import of what has happened settles in. At last, the tears come, and he presses her to him and holds her
steadily, glad at last to be strong for her.
"I have failed our people," she sobs. "Again—I have failed."
"No, older sister. You have climbed the Storm Tree.
You have stared into the face of a god and yet live. And you have his gift."
"There will be war."
"There is always war."
The oversized moon touches the deep violet haze of
the mountains, its broken face coppery in the long light of its setting. Ygrane pulls away and blots her tears with her sleeve. "We cannot stand alone against the Furor." She cannot say the rest—that the Druids are right and an
alliance with the Romans is their only hope—and for that, she must marry their warlord.
Falon knows what she thinks, and he cannot deny
her reasoning. She is the queen. By magic or marriage, she is the salvation of her people, who look to her and the chiefs to protect them from the sea raiders and the
wilderness marauders. From that fate, neither he nor even the gods can protect her.
"There is the unicorn," he says. "It is a magical creature—and it is yours."
Ygrane does not speak as she sinks into the sorrow
of her failure. The unicorn to her is only an emblem, a token of this fabulous adventure. It will not stop the Furor.
She fiercely remembers that the god himself predicted she would use the beast against him. And she will.
As sleep insinuates itself, she determines that she
will defy the Furor. She will make him wish he had
accepted her for his own. She will hate him so much, he will wish he had loved her.
Book One
Dragon Lord
I am a brother to dragons...
-Job 30:29
The Sorrows of Lailoken
Tintagel at high morning shines as though carved
from tusk. Its fabled spires and terraced battlements float among rainbows and sea spray. Spume from the breakers exploding on the cliff-rocks far below floats upward in goat-feathers, and drifts past the windows of the queen's
chambers.
Ygrane, her brassy red hair torqued with sweat,
squats in bed wearing a green satin birthing gown. She is eighteen hours into hard labor and lies exhausted. Three maidens kneel at her bedside praying. Another cools her brow with a damp cloth.
Between contractions, she dozes, oblivious to those
around her. She drifts among moody memories of all that brought her to this suffering, and the past encloses her in its haunted cave. There, the ghost of the child's father unfurls like incense smoke, and she quickly turns her mind away.
Uther Pendragon has been cursed enough—she
thinks, and she will not blame him for her anguish. It was she who called him—she who called this destiny to herself across lifetimes. She understands this is so, though she can no longer feel the timewinds that blow souls among the forms.
The magic is gone. The next contraction is coming.
That is all she knows now of memory and prophecy She
floats on her pain as on a pale, glacial lake. Clouds shimmer in the lake. They are souls. Some have died and are drifting away. Others arrive to be born. One of them is her child. He is coming. She has called him to her as she called to herself the baby's father, Uther Pendragon, and before him the demon-wizard Myrddin, and before him the unicorn, the Furor's gift...
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