The Darkest Road

He lowered his hand and looked around again. About him, in every direction, stretched the desolation of Andarien. He was so far to the north that Rangat was almost east of him. It towered over the whole of the northlands, dominant and magnificent. He didn’t look at the Mountain for long.

Instead he turned his gaze due north. And because he was much more than mortal and his eyes were very good, he could discern, far off through the moonlit shadows, where the stony highlands reached the mountains and the ice, a cold greenish glow. And he knew that this was Starkadh, beyond the Valgrind Bridge, and that he could fly there by tomorrow.

He decided that he would not fly, though. Something about the owl shape felt wrong. He wanted to hold to his own form, he realized: to be Darien, whatever and whoever that might be, to regain the clarity of thought that came in his human shape, though at the price of loneliness. Even so, he would do it this way. He would not fly. He would go on foot over the stones and the barren soil, over the ruin of this wasteland. He would go, with an extinguished light upon his brow, bearing a blade in his hand as a gift for the Dark.

Not tonight, though. He was much too tired, and there was a pain in his side where the swan’s claw had caught him. He was probably bleeding but was too weary to even check. He lay down on the south side of the largest of the boulders—for such scant shelter as it might offer from the wind—and in time he did fall asleep, despite his fears and cares. He was young yet, and had come a long distance to a lonely place, and his soul was as much overtaxed as his body was.

As he passed over into the far countries of sleep, his mother was sailing in a ghostly ship down Linden Bay, just beyond the moonlit western ridges of the land, toward the river mouth of the Celyn.

He dreamt of Fi

He did not know, huddled in the shadow of a leaning boulder on the cold ground of Andarien, that he was crying in his sleep. Nor did he know that all night long his hand kept returning to the lifeless gem bound about his brow, reaching, reaching out for something, finding no response.

“Do you know,” said Diarmuid, gazing east with an enigmatic expression, “this is almost enough to make one believe in fraternal instincts, after all.”

Beside him on the banks of the River Celyn, Paul remained silent. Across the northwestern spur of the lake the army was coming. They were too far off yet for him to make out individual details, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Diarmuid, for all the reflexive irony of his words, had indeed been right.

Aileron had not waited, for them or for anyone. He had carried this war to Maugrim. The army of the High King was in Andarien again, a thousand years after it had last swept through these wild, desolate highlands. And waiting for them in the late-afternoon light was his brother, with Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, with Sharra of Cathal, and Jaelle, the High Priestess, with the men of South Keep who had ma

For what, Paul thought, that last was worth. It didn’t, at the moment, feel like much. He should be used to this by now, he knew: this sense of latency without control. Of holding power without harnessing it. He remembered Jaelle’s words on the rocks, and he was acutely aware that she was right—aware of how much his difficulties were caused by his own overdeveloped need for controlling things. Particularly himself. All of this was true; it made sense; he even understood it. It didn’t make him feel any better, though. Not now, not so near to whatever ending lay in wait, whatever future toward which they were toiling.

“He has the Dwarves with him!” keen-eyed Brendel suddenly cried.

“Now that,” said Dia

It was. “Matt succeeded, then!” Paul exclaimed. “Do you see him, Brendel?”

The silver-haired lios alfar sca

Paul looked quickly over at Je

“Should we walk around the lake to meet them?” Arthur asked.

Diarmuid shook his head with exaggerated decisiveness. “They have horses,” he said pointedly, “and we have been walking all day. If Brendel can see them, then the lios alfar in the army can see us. There are limits, I’m afraid, to how far I will stumble over those rocks in order to meet a brother who didn’t bother to wait for me!”

Lancelot laughed. Glancing over at him, Paul was hit with a renewed sense of awe and, predictably, by another wave of his own frustrated impotence.

Lancelot had been waiting for them here, sitting patiently under the trees, as they had walked up along the river two hours ago. In the gentle restraint of his greeting of Guinevere, and then of Arthur, Paul had glimpsed again the depths of the grief that bound these three. It was not an easy thing to watch.

And then Lancelot had told, sparely, without inflection, the tale of his night battle with the demon in the sacred grove for the life of Darien. He made it sound prosaic, almost a negligible event. But every man and the three women there could see the wounds and burns of that battle, the price he had paid.

For what? Paul didn’t know. None of them did, not even Je

A war that seemed to be upon them now. The army had come closer; it was rounding the tip of Celyn Lake. Beneath Diarmuid’s acerbic flippancy Paul could read a febrile tension building: the reunion with his brother, the nearness of battle. They could make out figures now. Paul saw Aileron under the ba

Instead, the moon above the tree was the red full moon Dana had caused to shine on a new moon night—the Goddess’s challenge to Maugrim and the challenge Aileron was carrying now, at the head of the army of Light.

And so that army rode up around the lake, and it came to pass that the sons of Ailell met again on the borders of Daniloth, north of the River Celyn among the broad-leafed aum trees and the silver and red flowers of sylvain on the riverbank.

Diarmuid, with Sharra holding him by the hand, walked a little forward from the others, and Aileron, too, stepped apart from the army he led. Paul saw Ivor watching, and a lios alfar who had to be Ra-Te