Chapter 99: THE GUEST WHO DID NOT WARM HIS HANDS

The antlered figure stood at the edge of the firelight, and the fire did not reach it. Cynfael marked this at once, the way a man marks the first crack in a shieldwall: the flames leaned toward the thing and guttered low, as if they had found something colder than the night and lost their courage. Yet the figure's smile was warm. That was the worst of it. The smile was the warmest thing in the camp.

"Peace," it said, and its voice was many voices, a chorus pressed thin as a reed. "I have walked a long road to sit at your fire, and I am no enemy of the fire."

"Then come closer," Arthur said. He had not moved from where he stood, the spear of his name across his back, his hand loose on the shaft of a shorter blade. "Guests who will not warm their hands are guests who plan to leave in haste."

The antlered figure inclined its head, and the antlers — bone, or wood, or something that had been neither and had learned to be both — scraped softly against the dark. "I will not lie to you, Pendragon. I am always leaving. But I am also always here. You have felt me at Badon. You have felt me since."

Gwladys had not risen. She sat by the fire with her hands in her lap, and in her lap her fingers were closed over the thing she had pressed into Arthur's palm and then taken back — the memory of a heartbeat, the name almost spoken. Her face was calm in the way of deep water. "You stood at my shoulder for three days," she said. "You took a step toward me in every hour. You never touched me. Why?"

"Because you carry what I cannot take," the figure said. "And because I wished to see if you would offer it."

"I will not."

"No," the antlered figure agreed, and its smile did not change. "That is why I came to speak to the man who will."

Arthur's blade whispered a finger's width from its sheath. "Speak plainly or not at all."

The chorus-voice sighed, and every man in the camp felt the sigh in his teeth. "Plainly, then. The shadow that wore your druid has worn worse than druids. It has worn kings. It is wearing the Saxon now, and the Saxon host moves north, not south. You know this. You have felt the thread point north." A pause. "You believe you must reach Aelle before the shadow does. You are wrong. You must reach the cradle before the shadow's host does, or the shadow need not reach Aelle at all. It will have something better."

Cynfael spoke then, though the seed in his chest was so warm it seemed to be speaking through him. "And who are you, to counsel us?"

The antlered head turned. The eyes beneath the antlers were not eyes. They were the memory of eyes, two hollows where a forest had once looked out and now looked in. "I am what was here before the door was dug," it said. "I am what the door was dug to keep out. And I am, at this moment, the only creature on this island who does not wish the door to open — because when it opens, something older than me will come through, and I will be the first thing it eats."

The silence after that was very long.

Myrddin had been standing apart, his scarred face half-turned from the fire, and now he laughed — a dry, cracked sound, like a hinge that had forgotten oil. "It tells the truth," he said. "That is the trouble with the old things. They lie with every word and then ruin it by telling one true thing at the end, so you cannot sort the one from the other."

"You would know," the antlered figure said, and for the first time the smile faltered, just at one corner, the way a man's grip falters on a wet hilt. "You who went through and came back wearing your own face. How much of you came back, keeper? Show them your hands."

Myrddin did not show his hands.

Arthur stepped forward. The fire leaned away from him too, but Arthur did not notice, because Arthur had never in his life believed that fire owed him warmth. "Enough," he said. "You want something. Name it."

"The cup," said the antlered figure. "The cup the shadow drank from in Aelle's hall. It is not a cup. It is the cradle's tongue, and it is drinking the Saxon host dry of everything but hunger. Take it from them. Break it. And the shadow will have nothing left to pour into."

Gwladys rose then, slow, and the thing in her closed hand seemed to move — not a heartbeat, but the space where a heartbeat would be, filling and emptying. "And in return?"

"Nothing," said the antlered figure. "I ask nothing. I want nothing but to be left alive. That is what frightens me, healer. I have no price. I have only fear." It looked at her a long moment. "You understand fear. You have carried it since your father's hall burned."

Gwladys's face did not change, but Cynfael saw her grip tighten. The antlered figure saw it too, and its smile came back, and this time the warmth was gone out of it entirely, and what remained was the patience of roots.

"You have until the horn sounds at the hill's crown," it said. "After that, the shoot will have grown tall enough to hear, and the cradle will close, and what waits behind will not need a door at all." It took one step backward into the dark, and the fire leaped up again as if released from a hand. "I will walk beside you. Not toward you. Beside. Do not mistake me for a friend because I am not your enemy. That error has killed better men than all of you."

Then it was gone, though no one had seen it turn, and the night was only night again, and somewhere far to the north a horn sounded once, thin and clear, and every man in the camp looked north whether he wished to or not.

Arthur stood a long time staring after the dark. Then he turned to Myrddin.

"Your hands," he said.

Myrddin held them out over the fire. They were whole. They were his. But the fire did not warm them, and Cynfael saw that the old druid's fingers were trembling, and that the trembling had nothing to do with cold.

"The cup," Myrddin said at last, very quietly. "It is real. And it is worse than it said. I have seen what it is drinking toward." He looked at Gwladys, and then at Cynfael, and his scarred face was the face of a man who had walked to the edge of the world and found that the world had a lid. "We must decide by dawn whether to break it — or to drink from it ourselves."

Cynfael felt the seed turn over in his chest, warm as a sleeping animal, and beneath the hill, far down where the roots drank, something vast drew one long breath in, and this time it did not hold it. It let it out, slow, and the sound was almost like a word, and the word was almost his name.