The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [151]
“Splendid. Tell me somewhat. Will the same seals keep out the Hawkmaster? The one who used to own Gwin?”
“They should. Why?”
“I don’t know. I told you how he sent the wolf back to me. I just can’t believe that he packed himself off and went home after that.”
“No doubt you’re right. Well, we’ll just have to deal with him, too.”
Yet even as he spoke, Nevyn felt the dweomer-cold run down his back, a warning against arrogance. As he considered its implications, he realized that he might be drawn into a situation where he would have to do something that he abhorred above all else: use violence to kill on his own authority, not that of the laws. Or would he have to offer himself as a sacrifice, now that his time was finally drawing near? The thought brought him close to tears, that he would lose Brangwen so soon after bringing her to her Wyrd, but he knew that he would always put the Light before all else, even the woman he’d loved for four hundred years, and that he would obey its will.
Yet even so, the decision lay heavily upon him, and it was nothing that he could share with Jill or even Salamander. That night, when the camp was asleep except for a trio of armed guards, he went a little ways away to the top of a hill and sat down cross-legged in the long grass. Above him the night sky was so clear that the great drift of the Snowy Road seemed to hang just an arm’s length away. As he slowed his breathing and let his mind calm of its own accord, the Wildfolk came to cluster round him, especially the gnomes, who patted his arm with timid paws and climbed into his lap as if they wanted to comfort him.
“I’m afraid there’s naught you can do, my friends. If there’s a sacrifice to be made, it’s mine alone.”
He felt their distress as an exhalation of sadness, wrapping him round and mingling with his own melancholy until he nearly wept. Then, with a toss of his head, he threw the feeling off: he had work to do, whether it cost his death or not, and he would do it.
“If I die, so be it,” he said aloud. “Now, let’s sec if we can find the Old One. You guard my body, my friends, and wake me up if anything goes wrong.”
As soon as he transferred his consciousness over to his body of light, Nevyn knew that he wasn’t alone; the feeling of another magical presence was so strong that it sent ripples through the blue light, like a stone thrown into a pond. In the swirling blue waves of the etheric plane he rose high above the hilltop, then let himself drift, turning this way and that as he tried to see his enemy. Up higher, far above the sleeping camp, he saw a pentagram, a silver shape floating in the light, and all his blood ran cold, because this was no construction of the Old One’s demented mind, but a talisman of beauty, with the single point upright as is natural and holy, glowing in the center with a golden light that streamed from some plane far beyond the simple etheric. As Nevyn rose toward it, he was trembling with awe, so badly that he had to exert all his craft to keep his body of light from breaking up and dropping him unceremoniously back to the physical plane.
There, arranged in all their splendor round the pentagram, were the Kings of the elements: Aethyr, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, each a pillar and a blaze of many-colored light pulsating at a point of the star. In the center was a presence, impossible to see in the spill of golden brilliance pouring from the center—if indeed he had anything so concrete as a form to be seen. Even though Nevyn felt the presence as masculine and thus still linked to the worlds of form, they were too far apart to communicate in words or concrete thoughts. It seemed to him that the presence spoke—a clumsy word, but the one that’s available—to the Kings of the Elements, and they in turn spoke to him in waves of feeling and imagery, with here and there a snatch of thought. But even though he couldn’t know how he heard, he knew that he knew what had been spoken, a rebuke and a promise. Pride, his wretched princely pride had once again tripped him up and sent