Running with the Demon - Terry Brooks [83]
“You were summoned to me by Owain Glyndwr, my brave Owain, as he in his time was summoned by another in my service. I am the Lady. I am the Light. I am the voice of the Word. I have need of you. Will you embrace me?”
Her voice whispered in the deep night silence, low and compelling, vast and unalterable, the sum of all that could ever be. He knew her for what she was instantly, knew her for her power and her purpose. He went to his knees before her on the crushed rock bed of the glen’s damp floor, his eyes fixed on her, his arms clutching his body in despair. Behind her, where the waterfall tumbled away in the darkness, lights began to twinkle and shimmer against the black. One by one they blinked on, then soared outward on the cool air, on gossamer wings that glimmered faintly with color, like fireflies. He knew they were the fairies he had come to find, and tears sprang to his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered finally. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe.”
“You do not believe yet,” the Lady sang, as if the words were cotton and the air a net in which they were to be caught and held up for admiration. “You lack reason to believe, John Ross. But that will change when you enter into my service. All will change. Your life and your soul will be transformed. You will become for me, as Owain Glyndwr once was, as others have been, a Knight of the Word. Stand now.”
He rose and tried to gather up his scattered thoughts. Owain Glyndwr. The fisherman? Was he that Owain Glyndwr, the Welsh patriot and warrior? He had read of him. Owain Glyndwr had fought the English Bolingbroke, Henry IV, in the early 1400s. For a time he had prevailed over Henry, and the Welsh were made free again. No one could stand against him, not even the vaunted Prince of Wales, who in time would be Henry V, and the Welsh armies under Glyndwr’s command marched into England itself. Then he simply disappeared — vanished so completely that there was no record of what had become of him. And the English marched back into Wales once more.
“It is so,” said the Lady, who, though he had not given voice to his thoughts, seemed to have heard them anyway.
“He was in your service?” John Ross whispered. “Owain Glyndwr?”
“For many years.” The Lady shimmered with movement as she passed to another point, closer to where the fairies spilled down off the waterfall in a shower of light. “He chose service to me over service to his country, a new life and commitment in exchange for an old. My need for him was greater. He understood that. He understood that only he would do. He sacrificed himself. He was valiant and strong in the face of terrible danger. He was one of the brave. And more. Look closely on his face, John Ross.”
One arm gestured, and the fisherman reappeared, standing close beside her. His cloak and broad-brimmed hat were gone, replaced by chain mail and armor plate. His fishing pole was gone as well, and he held instead a broadsword. He looked on John Ross, his face fully revealed by the starlight, and in that face Ross saw himself.
“You carry his blood in your veins.” The Lady’s voice floated on a whisper of night breeze. “That is why you are summoned to me. What was best in him six hundred years ago reflects anew in you, born of the time and the need, by my will and my command.”
The Fairy Glen echoed with her words, the sounds reverberating off the rush of the water, off the shimmer of the light from stars and fairies. John Ross was frozen with fear and disbelief, so petrified he could not move. A part of him thought to run, a part to stand, and a part to scream, to give voice to what roiled within. This was all wrong; it was madness. Why him? .Why, even if he was Owain Glyndwr’s kin? He was no warrior, no fighter, no leader, no man of courage or strength. He was a failed scholar and a drifter with no purpose or conviction. He might have thought to find himself by coming here, but not in this way, and surely not in whatever