Chapter 90: THE SMILE AT THE FIRELIGHT

The antlered figure stood where the firelight failed, and the firelight did not reach it. That was the first wrongness. The flames guttered and leaned away as though the air had thickened, and the shadows pooled at the creature's feet like water seeking a drain. It was tall, taller than any man Cynfael had known, and its antlers rose in a crown of pale bone that caught no gleam from the burning wood. Its face was a man's face, long and narrow and worn smooth by centuries, and its smile was the smile of a thing that had waited a very long time and found the waiting sweet.

Cynfael's hand found his sword before his mind had finished naming the danger. The seed in his chest had gone cold now, banked like a hearth at night, and that frightened him more than the heat.

"You," he said. His voice came out rough. "You walked beside us. From Badon. You never came toward us. You only walked."

"I walked where the road went," the antlered figure said. Its voice was pleasant. That was the second wrongness. It sounded like a man who had learned speech from rivers and wind and had practiced until he could pass. "You were kind enough to walk the same road."

Behind Cynfael, men were waking. He heard the clatter of a spear butt against a shield rim, the hiss of a sword drawn from leather. Arthur's voice, low and level, cutting through the dark: "No one moves until I say."

The antlered figure inclined its head, as though acknowledging a courtesy.

Gwladys had gone silent. Cynfael could not see her past the fire, past the tents, but he could feel her—the way he felt the land, the way he felt the seed, a pressure at the edge of his senses like a held breath. She was not screaming now. That was worse than the scream.

"What do you want?" Cynfael said.

"I want what I have always wanted," the figure said. "To be let in."

The fire popped. A spark leaped and died before it reached the antlers, as though even fire knew better than to touch them.

"You wore Myrddin's face," Cynfael said. "At the cradle. You spoke with his voice."

"I wear many faces. I wore his before he was born, and I will wear it after his bones are dust. He knows this. It is why he ran from me, and why he came back, and why he will run again." The smile did not change. "He is a door too, in his way. He has simply never decided which side he wishes to open toward."

Arthur stepped into the light. He had not drawn his sword, but he held the Spear—not the great tree at Badon, but the spear that had grown from it, pale wood veined with something darker than grain. The point rested on the earth, and the earth around it was very still.

"You are the shadow," Arthur said. "The one that took Aelle's voice."

"I am what the shadow becomes when it is given a shape," the figure said. "Aelle's voice was a cup. I drank from it. Now the cup is empty and the host is walking, and it walks toward the cradle, and you are walking toward it too. We are all walking toward the same place. It is almost a pilgrimage."

"Then why stop here?" Arthur said. "Why show yourself now?"

The antlered figure looked at him for a long moment. Then it turned its head—slowly, deliberately—toward the place where Gwladys lay.

"Because she is nearly ready," it said.

Cynfael moved. He did not decide to move; the seed decided for him, or the land did, or the thing beneath the hill that had planted him. One moment he stood by the fire, and the next he was between the antlered figure and the tents, his sword up, the cold seed in his chest hammering like a second heart.

"You will not touch her."

The figure regarded him with something that might have been fondness. "You are the seed," it said. "You are the thing that was planted so that the door could be opened from the inside. Do you understand that yet? The keeper beneath the hill did not give you a gift. He gave you a purpose. You are the key, and you have been turning in the lock since the day you swallowed it."

"I am not a key," Cynfael said. "I am a man."

"You are both. That is the cruelty of it." The figure took one step forward. The firelight did not follow. "And she is both. She has carried the door in her palm since before she knew what a door was. Her father was a king, and kings are doors; her mother was a healer, and healers are doors; and the thing she pressed into Arthur's hand was not a memory. It was a hinge."

Arthur's grip tightened on the Spear. "You speak in riddles because you are afraid to speak plainly."

"I speak plainly," the figure said, "and you hear riddles, because plain speech is a riddle to men who have already decided what they believe." It looked at the Spear, and for the first time the smile faltered—just slightly, like a candle flame in a draft. "That is a beautiful weapon. It remembers being a tree. Trees remember very little, but they remember being cut down. It will serve you well, and it will fail you at the end, as all beautiful things do."

"Then why fear it?" Arthur said.

The figure did not answer. It looked north, past the camp, past the dark hills, to where the green light had pulsed and vanished. When it spoke again, its voice had changed—lower, older, the voice of the thing beneath the hill rather than the thing wearing a man's shape.

"Because the cradle is waking," it said. "And when it wakes, it will not ask which of us is worthy. It will ask which of us is willing. I am willing. Are you?"

The ground trembled. It was a small thing, a shiver, like a horse shifting its weight—but every man in the camp felt it, and every man went still. Cynfael felt the seed stir, felt the voice beneath the earth rise up through the soles of his feet, and this time it did not speak in words. It spoke in a feeling, vast and cold and patient, and the feeling was hunger.

The antlered figure smiled again, and this time the smile reached its eyes, and its eyes were not a man's eyes at all.

"Come north," it said. "Bring the hinge. Bring the key. Bring the spear that remembers. The door is waiting, and I have kept it waiting long enough."

It stepped backward into the dark, and the dark took it the way water takes a stone. There was no sound. There was no trace. Only the fire, burning low, and the men standing frozen around it, and Gwladys's voice at last, thin and clear from the tent behind him:

"Cynfael. It is not the shadow that wants the door." A pause. "It is the door that wants the shadow. And it is using all of us to get it."

Cynfael turned. She stood at the tent flap, her palm open, and in her palm something glowed—not green, not gold, but the pale, cold white of a bone that remembers fire.

"We must reach Aelle before it does," she said. "Not to stop the shadow. To stop the door."

Arthur looked at the Spear, and the Spear, for one heartbeat, looked back. Then he drove its butt into the earth and said, "Then we ride at dawn. And we ride fast."

But Cynfael did not move. He was listening to the earth, and the earth was listening to him, and somewhere far to the north, beneath a hill whose name no living man remembered, something that had waited since before the Romans came opened one eye and began, very slowly, to smile.