Guy Kay - The Wandering Fire

And yet, he thought, to be fair, Jaelle had acknowledged it to him twice. He shook his head. The High Priestess with her emerald eyes was more than he could deal with now. He thought of Rachel and remembered music. Her music, and then Kev’s, in the tavern. They would share it now, forever, in him. A difficult realization, that.

“Am I intruding?”

Paul glanced back and, after a moment, shook his head.

“Night thoughts,” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Coll murmured, and moved up to the railing. “Thought I might be of some use up top, but it’s a quiet night and Averren knows his business.”

Paul smiled again. Listened to the easy sound of the ship and the sea. “It’s a strange hour,” he said. “I like it, actually. I’ve never been to sea before.”

“I grew up on ships,” Coll said quietly. “This feels like coming home.”

“Why did you leave, then?”

“Diar asked me to,” the big man said simply. Paul waited and, after a moment, Coll clasped his hands loosely over the rail and went on. “My mother worked in the tavern at Taerlindel. I never knew who my father was. All the mariners brought me up, it sometimes seemed. Taught me what they knew. My first memories are of being held up to steer a ship when I was too small to reach the tiller on my own.”

His voice was deep and low. Paul remembered the one other time the two of them had talked alone at night. About the Summer Tree. How many years ago it seemed.

Coll said, “I was seventeen when Diarmuid and Aileron first came to spend a summer at Taerlindel. I was older than both of them and minded to despise the royal brats. But Aileron… did everything impossibly quickly and impossibly well, and Diar…” He paused. A remembering smile played over his face.

“And Diar did everything his own way, and equally well, and he beat me in a fight outside my mother’s father’s house. Then, to apologize, he disguised us both and took me to the tavern where my mother worked. I wasn’t allowed in there, you see. Even my mother didn’t know me that night—they thought I’d come from Paras Derval with one of the court women.”

“Women?” Paul asked.

“Diar was the girl. He was young, remember.” They laughed softly in the dark. “I was wondering about him, just a little; then he got two of the town girls to walk with us on the beach beyond the track.”

“I know it,” said Paul.

Coll glanced at him. “They came because they thought Diarmuid was a woman and I was a lord from Paras Derval. We spent three hours on the beach. I’d never laughed so hard in my life as I did when he took off his skirt to swim and I saw their faces.”

They were both smiling. Paul was beginning to understand something, though not yet something else.

“Later, when his mother died, he was made Warden of the South Marches—I think they wanted him out of Paras Derval as much as anything else. He was even wilder in those days. Younger, and he’d loved the Queen, too. He came to Taerlindel and asked me to be his Second, and I went.”

The moon was west, as if leading them on. Paul said, looking at it, “He’s been lucky to have you. For ballast. And Sharra now, too. I think she’s a match for him.”

Coll nodded. “I think so. He loves her. He loves very strongly.”

Paul absorbed that, and after a moment it began to clear up the one puzzle he hadn’t quite understood.

He looked over at Coll. He could make out the square, honest face and the large many-times-broken nose. He said, “The one other night we talked alone, you said to me that had you any power you would curse Aileron. You weren’t even supposed to name him, then. Do you remember?”

“Of course I do,” said Coll clamly. Around them the quiet sounds of the ship seemed only to deepen the night stillness.

“Is it because he took all the father’s love?”

Coll looked at him, still calm. “In part,” he said. “You were good at guessing things from the start, I remember. But there is another thing, and you should be able to guess that too.”

Paul thought about it. “Well—” he began.

The sound of singing came to them over the water.

“Listen!” cried Averren, quite unnecessarily.

They all listened, the seven men awake on Prydwen. The singing was coming from ahead of them and off to starboard.

Averren moved the tiller over that they might come nearer to it. Elusive and faint was that sound, thin and beautiful. Like a fragile web it spun out of the dark toward them, woven of sweet sadness and allure. There were a great many voices twined together in it.

Paul had heard that song before. “We’re in trouble,” he said.

Coll’s head whipped around. “What?”

The monster’s head broke water off the starboard bow. Up and up it went, towering over Prydwen’s masts. The moon lit its gigantic flat head: the lidless eyes, the gaping, carnivorous jaws, the mottled grey-green slimy skin. Prydwen grated on something. Averren grappled with the helm and Coll hurried to aid him. One of the watchmen screamed a warning.

Paul caught a glimpse in the uncertain moonlight of something white, like a horn, between the monster’s terrible eyes. He still heard the singing, clear, heartachingly beautiful. A sick premonition swept over him. He turned instinctively. On the other side of Prydwen the monster’s tail had curved and it was raised, blotting the southern sky, to smash down on them!

Raven wings. He knew.

“Soulmonger!” Paul screamed. “Loren, make a shield!”

He saw the huge tail reach its full height. Saw it coming down with the force of malignant death, to crush them out of life. Then saw it smash brutally into nothing but air. Prydwen bounced like a toy with the shock of it, but the mage’s shield held. Loren came running up on deck, Diarmuid and Arthur supporting Matt Sören. Paul glimpsed the racking strain in the Dwarf’s face and then deliberately cut himself off from all sensation. There was no time to waste. He reached within for the pulse of Mórnir.

And found it, desperately faint, thin as starlight beside the moon. Which is what, in a way, it was. He was too far. Liranan had spoken true. How could he compel the sea god in the sea?

He tried. Felt the third pulse beat in him and cried with the fourth, “Liranan!”

He sensed, rather than saw, the effortless eluding of the god. Despair threatened to drown him. He dove, within his mind, as he had done on the beach. He heard the singing everywhere and then, far down and far away, the voice of Liranan: “I am sorry, brother. Truly sorry.”

He tried again. Put all his soul into the summoning. As if from undersea he saw the shadow of Prydwen above, and he apprehended the full magnitude of the monster that guarded Cader Sedat. Soulmonger, he thought again. Rage rose overwhelmingly in him, he channeled all its blind force into his call. He felt himself breaking with the desperate strain. It was not enough.

“I told you it would be so,” he heard the sea god say. Far off he saw a silver fish eluding through dark water. There were no sea stars. Overhead, Prydwen bounced wildly again, and he knew Loren had somehow blocked a second crashing of the monster’s tail. Not a third, he thought. He cannot block a third.

And in his mind a voice spoke: Then there must not be a third. Twiceborn, this is Gereint. Summon now, through me. I am rooted in the land.

Paul linked with the blind shaman he had never seen. Power surged within him, the godpulse of Mórnir beating fiercer than his own. Underwater in his mind, he stretched a hand downward through the ocean dark. He felt an explosion of his power, grounded on the Plain in Gereint. He felt it crest. Overhead, the vast tail was rising again. “Liranan!” Paul cried for the last time. On the deck of Prydwen they heard it like the voice of thunder.