“I think not,” said Dalreidan. “Leave them alone, Ceriog.”
The Eridun wheeled. A twisted light of pleasure shone in his dark face. “You will stop me, old man?”
“I shouldn’t have to,” Dalreidan said calmly. “You are no fool. You heard what she said: the Seer of Brennin. With whom else and how else will we stop what is coming?”
The other man seemed scarcely to have heard. “For a Dwarf?” he snarled. “You would intercede, now, for a Dwarf?” His voice skirled upward with growing incredulity. “Dalreidan, this has been coming between us for a long time.”
“It need not come. Only hear reason. I seek no leadership, Ceriog. Only to—”
“Only to tell the leader what he may or may not do!” said Ceriog viciously. There was a frozen half second of stillness, then Ceriog’s arm whipped forward and his dagger flew—
—over the shoulder of Dalreidan, who had dived and rolled and was up again in a move the Plain had seen rehearsed from horseback for past a thousand years. No one had seen his own blade drawn, nor had they seen it thrown.
They did see it, all of them, buried in Ceriog’s heart. And an instant later, after the shock had passed, they saw also that the dead Eridun was smiling as might one who has found release from overmastering pain.
Kim was suddenly aware of the silence. Of the sun overhead, the finger of the breeze, the weight of Brock’s head in her lap—details of time and place made unnaturally vivid by the explosion of violence.
Which had come and was gone, leaving this stillness of fifty people in a high place. Dalreidan walked over to retrieve his blade. His steps were loud on the rocks. No one spoke. Dalreidan knelt and, pulling the dagger free, cleaned it of blood on the dead man’s sleeve. Slowly he rose again and looked around the ring of faces.
“First blade was his,” he said.
There was a stir, a loosening of strain, as if every man there had been holding his breath.
“It was,” said an Eridun quietly, a man older even than Dalreidan himself, with his green tattoos sunken deep in the wrinkles of his face. “Revenge lies not in such a cause, neither by the laws of the Lion nor the code of the mountains.”
Slowly, Dalreidan nodded his head. “I know nothing of the former and too much of the latter,” he said, “but I think you will know that I had no desire for Ceriog’s death, and none at all to take his place. I will be gone from this place. I will be gone from this place within the hour.”
There was another stir at that. “Does it matter?” young Faebur asked. “You need not go, not with the rain coming so soon.”
And that, Kim realized, brought things back round to her. She had recovered from the shock—Ceriog’s was not the first violent death she’d seen in Fionavar—and she was ready when all their eyes swung to where she sat.
“It may not come,” she said, looking at Faebur. The Baelrath was still alive, flickering, but not intensely so.
“You are truly the Seer of Brennin?” he asked.
She nodded. “On a journey for the High King with this Dwarf, Brock of Banir Tal. Who fled the twin mountains to bring us tidings of the treachery of others.”
“A dwarf in the service of Ailell?” Dalreidan asked.
She shook her head. “Of his son. Ailell died more than a year ago, the day the Mountain flamed. Aileron rules in Paras Derval.”
Dalreidan’s mouth crooked wryly. “News,” he said, “is woven slowly in the mountains.”
“Aileron?” Faebur interjected. “We heard a tale of him in Larak. He was an exile, wasn’t he?”
Kim heard the hope in his voice, the unspoken thought. He was very young; the beard concealed it only partially. “He was,” she said gently. “Sometimes they go back home.”
“If,” the older Eridun interposed, “there is a home to go back to. Seer, can you stop the rain?”
She hesitated, looking beyond him, east to where the clouds were piled high. She said, “I cannot, not directly. But the High King has others in his service, and by the Sight I have I know that some of them are sailing even now to the place where the death rain is being shaped, just as the winter was. And if we stopped the winter, then—”
“—then we can end the rain!” a deep voice rumbled, low and fierce.