“Where are they, Gereint and the Seer? Can we not bring them here now—with the raithen, perhaps?” It was Tulger of the eighth tribe.

Ivor looked at his old friend, worry deep in his eyes. “Gereint has left his body. He is soul-traveling. He did not say why. The Seer went into the mountains from Gwen Ystrat. Again, I know not why.” He looked at Aileron.

The High King hesitated. “If I tell you, it must not leave this chamber. We have fear enough without summoning more.” And into the stillness, he said, “She went to free the Paraiko in Khath Meigol.”

There was a babble of sound. One man made the sign against evil, but only one. These were Chieftains and their hunt leaders, and this was a time of war.

“They live?” Ra-Tenniel whispered softly.

“She tells me so,” Aileron replied.

“Weaver at the Loom!” Dhira murmured, from the heart. This time it didn’t sound inappropriate. Dave, comprehending little, felt tension in the room like an enveloping presence.

“So we have no access to the Seer either,” Mabon continued grimly. “And we must accept, given what you have said, that we may never have her or Gereint or Loren again. We will have to decide this using what wisdom we have among ourselves, and so I have one question for you, Aven.” He paused. “What assurance do we have that Maugrim will fight us in Andarien when we get there? Could his army not sweep around us among the evergreens of Gwynir and so run south to destroy what we have left behind: the mid-Plain here? The Dalrei women and children? Gwen Ystrat? All of Brennin and Cathal, open to him with our army so far away? Could he not do that?”

There was total silence in the room. After a moment, Mabon went on, almost whispering.

“Maugrim is outside of time, not spun on the Loom. He cannot be killed. And he has shown, with the long winter, that he is in no hurry this time to bring us to battle. Would he not glory and his lieutenants exult to watch our army waiting uselessly before impregnable Starkadh while the svarts and urgach and Galadan’s wolves were ravaging all we loved?”

He stopped. Dave felt a weight like an anvil hanging from his heart. It was painful to draw breath. He looked at Tore for reassurance and saw anguish in his face, saw it mirrored deeply in Ivor’s and, somehow most frighteningly, in the normally unreadable features of Aileron.

“Fear not that,” said Ra-Tenniel.

A voice so very clear. Blurring forever, Ivor dan Banor thought, the borders between sound and light, between music and spoken word. The Aven turned to the Lord of the lios alfar as might one desperate for water in a rainless land.

“Fear Maugrim,” said Ra-Tenniel, “as must any who name themselves wise. Fear defeat and the dominion of the Dark. Fear, also, the annihilation that Galadan purposes and strives for, ever.”

Water, Ivor was thinking, as the measured words flowed over him. Water, with sorrow like a stone at the bottom of the cup.

“Fear any and all of these things,” Ra-Tenniel said. “The tearing of our threads from the Loom, the unsaying of our histories, the unraveling of the Weaver’s design.”

He paused. Water in time of drought. Music and light.

“But do not fear,” said the Lord of the lios alfar, “that he will avoid a battle with us, should we march to Andarien. I am your surety for that. I and my people. The lios alfar are out from Daniloth for the first time in a thousand years. He can see us. He can reach us. We are no longer hidden in the Shadowland. He will not pass us by. It lies not in his nature to pass us by. Rakoth Maugrim will meet this army if the lios alfar go into Andarien.”

It was true. Ivor knew that as soon as he heard the words, and he knew it as deeply as he had known any single thing in all his life. It reinforced his own counsel and offered complete answer to Mabon’s terrifying question, an answer wrought from the very essence of the lios alfar, the Weaver’s chosen ones, the Children of Light. What they were and had always been; and the terrible, bitter price they paid. The other side of the image. The stone in the cup.

Most hated by the Dark, for their name was Light.

Ivor wanted to bow, to kneel, to offer grief, pity, love, heart’s gratitude. Somehow none of them, nor all of them together, seemed adequate in the face of what Ra-Tenniel had just said. Ivor felt heavy, clodlike. Looking at the three lios alfar he felt like a lump of earth.

And yes, he thought. Yes, he was exactly that. He was prosaic, unglamorous, he was of the earth, the grass. He was of the Plain, which endured, which would endure this too if they proved equal to the days ahead, but not otherwise.

Reaching back into his own history, as Ra-Tenniel had just done, the Aven cast aside all thoughts, all emotions save those that spoke of strength, of resistance. “A thousand years ago the first Aven of the Plain led every Dalrei hunter who could ride into the woven mists and the skewed time of Daniloth, and the Weaver laid a straight track for them. They came out onto a battlefield by Linden Bay that would otherwise have been lost. Revor rode from there beside Ra-Termaine across the River Celyn into Andarien. And so, Brightest Lord, will I ride beside you, should that be our decision when we leave this place.”

He paused and turned to the other King in the room. “When Revor rode, and Ra-Termaine, it was in the army and at the command of Conary of Brennin, and then of Colan, his son. It was so then, and rightly so—for the High Kings of Brennin are the Children of Mórnir—and it will be so again, and as rightly, should you accept this counsel, High King.”

He was utterly unaware of the ringing cadences, the upwelling power of his own voice. He said, “You are heir to what Conary was, as we are the heirs of Revor and Ra-Termaine. Do you accede to this counsel? Yours is governance here, Aileron dan Ailell. Will you have us to ride with you?”

Bearded and dark, devoid of ornament, a soldier’s sword in a plain sheath at his side, Aileron looked the very image of a war king. Not bright and glittering as Conary had been, or Colan, or even as his own brother was. He was stern and expressionless and grim, and one of the youngest men in the room.

“I accede,” he said. “I would have you ride with me. When the army comes tomorrow, we set out for Andarien.”

In that moment, halfway and a little more to Gwynir, a lean and scarred figure, incongruously aristocratic atop one of the hideous slaug, slowed and then dragged his mount to a complete stop. Motionless on the wide Plain, he watched the dust of Rakoth’s retreating army settle in front of him.

For most of the night he had run in his wolf form. In careful silence he had observed as Uathach, the giant urgach in white, had enforced an orderly withdrawal out of what had begun as blind flight. There had been a question of precedence there, to be resolved eventually, but not now. Galadan had other things to think about.

And he thought more clearly in his human shape. So a little before dawn he had taken his own form again and commandeered one of the slaug, even though he hated them. Gradually through the greyness of dawn he had let the army pass him by, making sure that Uathach did not notice.

He was far from afraid of the white-clad urgach, but he knew too little about him, and knowledge, for the Wolflord, had always been the key to power. It mattered almost not at all that he was reasonably certain he could kill Uathach; what was important was that he understand what had made him what he was. Six months ago Uathach had been summoned to Starkadh, an oversized urgach, as stupid as any of the others, a little more dangerous because of quickness and size.

He had come out again four nights ago, augmented, enhanced in some unsettling way. He was clever now, vicious and articulate, and clad by Rakoth in white—a touch that Galadan appreciated, remembering Lauriel, the swan the lios had loved. Uathach had been given command of the army that issued over the Valgrind Bridge. That, in the inception, Galadan had no quarrel with.