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The Last Light of the Sun
Guy Gavriel Kay
From the multiple award-winning author of Ysabel, Tigana and A Song for Arbonne, this powerful, moving saga evokes the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse cultures of a thousand years ago.There is nothing soft or silken about the north. The lives of men and women are as challenging as the climate and lands in which they dwell. For generations, the Erlings of Vinmark have taken their dragon-prowed ships across the seas, raiding the lands of the Cyngael and Anglcyn peoples, leaving fire and death behind. But times change, even in the north, and in a tale woven with consummate artistry, people of all three cultures find the threads of their lives unexpectedly brought together…Bern Thorkellson, punished for his father's sins, commits an act of vengeance and desperation that brings him face-to-face, across the sea, with a past he's been trying to leave behind.In the Anglcyn lands of King Aeldred, the shrewd king, battling inner demons all the while, shores up his defenses with alliances and diplomacy-and with swords and arrows-while his exceptional, unpredictable sons and daughters pursue their own desires when battle comes and darkness falls in the woods.And in the valleys and shrouded hills of the Cyngael, whose voices carry music even as they feud and raid amongst each other, violence and love become deeply interwoven when the dragon ships come and Alun ab Owyn, chasing an enemy in the night, glimpses strange lights gleaming above forest pools.


GUY GAVRIEL KAY
The Last Light of the Sun



Copyright
Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay 2004
Guy Gavriel Kay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007342075
Ebook Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780007352098
Version: 2016-10-14
for George Jonas
I have a tale for you: a stag bells;
winter pours summer has gone.
The wind is high, cold; the sun is low;
its course is short the sea is strong running.
The bracken is very red; its shape has been hidden.
The cry of the barnacle goose has become usual.
Cold has taken the wings of birds.
Season of ice; this is my tale.
—FROM THE LIBER HYMNORUM MANUSCRIPT
Contents
Cover (#u613f9355-a896-54bd-9d3f-a9929a2cd3fc)
Title Page (#u7e1c6a68-0ea1-51c4-a781-d49bee39f918)
Copyright (#ue47cb692-0191-5fcb-96ea-8bfaecdf334f)
Dedication (#u096a07ca-8f67-5683-bc1a-b2d3aa67cb85)
Epigraph (#udc6e7937-da77-5aad-ba07-e1e0d22ac67e)
Characters: A Partial Listing (#u490f27ae-b67f-51a5-b27c-5681068e4989)

Part One (#u0d06807b-3eef-55d2-a603-8347a21da5d9)
Chapter I (#u25081201-79b3-503c-9c9d-81d1c870be8c)
Chapter II (#u9656d95d-2140-5881-ad07-e2a5628e8047)
Chapter III (#u4362b8b1-3e04-59c3-a06c-1faaaf87c8d3)
Chapter IV (#u08f37a6d-5381-579f-a5b2-062384f41c78)
Chapter V (#u8b9519ba-e306-5991-b4e6-800238ed87c8)

Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter IX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter X (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XI (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XIV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter XVII (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Guy Gavriel Kay (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Characters

(A Partial Listing)
The Anglcyn
Aeldred, son of Gademar, King of the Anglcyn
Elswith, his queen


Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, Aeldred’s chamberlain Burgred, Earl of Denferth
The Erlings
Thorkell Einarson, “Red Thorkell,” exiled from Rabady Isle
Frigga, his wife, daughter of Skadi
Bern Thorkellson, his son
Siv, Athira, his daughters
Iord, seer of Rabady, at the women’s compound
Anrid, a woman serving at the compound
Halldr Thinshank, once governor of Rabady Isle, deceased Sturla Ulfarson “Sturla One-hand,” governor of Rabady Isle


Thira, a prostitute in Jormsvik
Kjarten Vidurson, ruling in Hlegest
Siggur Volganson, “the Volgan,” deceased


Ingemar Svidrirson, of Erlond, paying tribute to King Aeldred
Hakon Ingemarson, his son
The Cyngael
Ceinion of Llywerth, high cleric of the Cyngael, “Cingalus”
Dai ab Owyn, heir to Prince Owyn of Cadyr
Alun ab Owyn, his brother
Gryffeth ap Ludh, their cousin
Brynn ap Hywll, of Brynnfell in Arberth (and other residences), “Erling’s Bane”
Enid, his wife
Rhiannon mer Brynn, his daughter
Helda, Rania, Eirin, Rhiannon’s women
Siawn, leader of Brynn’s fighting band
Other
Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, in the Khalifate of Al-Rassan
Part One
Chapter I
A horse, he came to understand, was missing.
Until it was found nothing could proceed. The island marketplace was crowded on this grey morning in spring. Large, armed, bearded men were very much present, but they were not here for trade. Not today. The market would not open, no matter how appealing the goods on a ship from the south might be.
He had arrived, clearly, at the wrong time.
Firaz ibn Bakir, merchant of Fezana, deliberately embodying in his brightly coloured silks (not nearly warm enough in the cutting wind) the glorious Khalifate of Al-Rassan, could not help but see this delay as yet another trial imposed upon him for transgressions in a less than virtuous life.
It was hard for a merchant to live virtuously. Partners demanded profit, and profit was difficult to come by if one piously ignored the needs—and opportunities—of the world of the flesh. The asceticism of a desert zealot was not, ibn Bakir had long since decided, for him.
At the same time, it would be entirely unfair to suggest that he lived a life of idleness and comfort. He had just endured (with such composure as Ashar and the holy stars had granted him) three storms on the very long sea journey north and then east, afflicted, as always at sea, by a stomach that heaved like the waves, and with the roundship handled precariously by a continuously drunken captain. Drinking was a profanation of the laws of Ashar, of course, but in this matter ibn Bakir was not, lamentably, in a position to take a vigorous moral stand.
Vigour had been quite absent from him on the journey, in any case.
It was said among the Asharites, both in the eastern homelands of Ammuz and Soriyya, and in Al-Rassan, that the world of men could be divided into three groups: those living, those dead, and those at sea.
Ibn Bakir had been awake before dawn this morning, praying to the last stars of the night in thanks for his finally being numbered once more among those in the blessed first group.
Here in the remote, pagan north, at this wind-scoured island market of Rabady, he was anxious to begin trading his leather and cloth and spices and bladed weapons for furs and amber and salt and heavy barrels of dried cod (to sell in Ferrieres on the way home)—and to take immediate leave of these barbarian Erlings, who stank of fish and beer and bear grease, who could kill a man in a bargaining over prices, and who burned their leaders—savages that they were—on ships among their belongings when they died.
This last, it was explained to him, was what the horse was all about. Why the funeral rites of Halldr Thinshank, who had governed Rabady until three nights ago, were currently suspended, to the visible consternation of an assembled multitude of warriors and traders.
The offence to their gods of oak and thunder, and to the lingering shade of Halldr (not a benign man in life, and unlikely to be so as a spirit), was considerable, ibn Bakir was told. Ill omens of the gravest import were to be assumed. No one wanted an angry, unhoused ghost lingering in a trading town. The fur-clad, weapon-bearing men in the windy square were worried, angry, and drunk, pretty much to a man.
The fellow doing the explaining, a bald-headed, ridiculously big Erling named Ofnir, was known to ibn Bakir from two previous journeys. He had been useful before, for a fee: the Erlings were ignorant, tree-worshipping pagans, but they had firm ideas about what their services were worth.
Ofnir had spent some years in the east among the Emperor’s Karchite Guard in Sarantium. He had returned home with a little money, a curved sword in a jewelled scabbard, two prominent scars (one on top of his head), and an affliction contracted in a brothel near the Sarantine waterfront. Also, a decent grasp of that difficult eastern tongue. In addition—usefully—he’d mastered sufficient words in ibn Bakir’s own Asharite to function as an interpreter for the handful of southern merchants foolhardy enough to sail along rocky coastlines fighting a lee shore, and then east into the frigid, choppy waters of these northern seas to trade with the barbarians.
The Erlings were raiders and pirates, ravaging in their longships all through these lands and waters and— increasingly—down south. But even pirates could be seduced by the lure of trade, and Firaz ibn Bakir (and his partners) had reaped profit from that truth. Enough so to have him back now for a third time, standing in a knife-like wind on a bitter morning, waiting for them to get on with burning Halldr Thinshank on a boat with his weapons and armour and his best household goods and wooden images of the gods and one of his slave girls … and a horse.
A pale grey horse, a beauty, Halldr’s favourite, and missing. On a very small island.
Ibn Bakir looked around. A sweeping gaze from the town square could almost encompass Rabady. The harbour, a stony beach, with a score of Erling ships and his own large roundship from the south—the first one in, which ought to have been splendid news. This town, sheltering several hundred souls perhaps, was deemed an important market in the northlands, a fact that brought private amusement to the merchant from Fezana, a man who had been received by the khalif in Cartada, who had walked in the gardens and heard the music of the fountains there.
No fountains here. Beyond the stockade walls and the ditch surrounding them, a quilting of stony farmland could be seen, then livestock grazing, then forest. Beyond the pine woods, he knew, the sea swept round again, with the rocky mainland of Vinmark across the strait. More farms there, fisher-villages along the coast, then emptiness: mountains and trees for a very long way, to the places where the reindeer ran (they said) in herds that could not be numbered, and the men who lived among them wore antlers themselves to hunt, and practised magics with blood in the winter nights.
Ibn Bakir had written these stories down during his last long journey home, had told them to the khalif at an audience in Cartada, presented his writings along with gifts of fur and amber. He’d been given gifts in return: a necklace, an ornamental dagger. His name was known in Cartada now.
It occurred to him that it might be useful to observe and chronicle this funeral—if the accursed rites ever began.
He shivered. It was cold in the blustering wind. An untidy clump of men made their way towards him, tacking across the square as if they were on a ship together. One man stumbled and bumped another; the second one swore, pushed back, put a hand to his axe. A third intervened, and took a punch to the shoulder for his pains. He ignored it like an insect bite. Another big man. They were all, ibn Bakir thought sorrowfully, big men.
It came to him, belatedly, that this was not really a good time to be a stranger on Rabady Isle, with the governor (they used an Erling word, but it meant, as best ibn Bakir could tell, something very like a governor) dead and his funeral rites marred by a mysteriously missing animal. Suspicions might fall.
As the group approached, he spread his hands, palms up, and brought them together in front of him. He bowed formally. Someone laughed. Someone stopped directly in front of him, reached out, unsteadily, and fingered the pale yellow silk of ibn Bakir’s tunic, leaving a smear of grease. Ofnir, his interpreter, said something in their language and the others laughed again. Ibn Bakir, alert now, believed he detected an easing of tension. He had no idea what he’d do if he was wrong.
The considerable profit you could make from trading with barbarians bore a direct relation to the dangers of the journey—and the risks were not only at sea. He was the youngest partner, investing less than the others, earning his share by being the one who travelled … by allowing thick, rancid-smelling barbarian fingers to tug at his clothing while he smiled and bowed and silently counted the hours and days till the roundship might leave, its hold emptied and refilled.
“They say,” Ofnir spoke slowly, in the loud voice one used with the simple-minded, “it is now known who take Halldr horse.” His breath, very close to ibn Bakir, smelled of herring and beer.
His tidings, however, were entirely sweet. It meant they didn’t think the trader from Al-Rassan, the stranger, had anything to do with it. Ibn Bakir had been dubious about his ability, with two dozen words in their tongue and Ofnir’s tenuous skills, to make the obvious point that he’d just arrived the afternoon before and had no earthly (or other) reason to impede local rites by stealing a horse. These were not men currently in a condition to assess cogency of argument.
“Who did it?” Ibn Bakir was only mildly curious.
“Servant to Halldr. Sold to him. Father make wrong killing. Sent away. Son have no right family now.”
Lack of family appeared to be an explanation for theft here, ibn Bakir thought wryly. That seemed to be what Ofnir was conveying. He knew someone back home who would find this diverting over a glass of good wine.
“So he took the horse? Where? Into the woods?” Ibn Bakir gestured at the pines beyond the fields.
Ofnir shrugged. He pointed out into the square. Ibn Bakir saw that men were now mounting horses there— not always smoothly—and riding towards the open town gate and the plank bridge across the ditch. Others ran or walked beside them. He heard shouts. Anger, yes, but also something else: zest, liveliness. The promise of sport.
“He will soon found,” Ofnir said, in what passed here in the northlands for Asharite.
Ibn Bakir nodded. He watched two men gallop past. One screamed suddenly as he passed and swung his axe in vicious, whistling circles over his head, for no evident reason.
“What will they do to him?” he asked, not caring very much.
Ofnir snorted. Spoke quickly in Erling to the others, evidently repeating the question.
There was a burst of laughter. One of them, in an effusion of good humour, punched ibn Bakir on the shoulder.
The merchant, regaining his balance, rubbing at his numbed arm, realized that he’d asked a naive question.
“Blood-eagle death, maybe,” said Ofnir, flashing yellow teeth in a wide grin, making a complex two-handed gesture the southern merchant was abruptly pleased not to understand. “You see? Ever you see?”
Firaz ibn Bakir, a long way from home, shook his head.
He could blame his father, and curse him, even go to the women at the compound outside the walls and pay to have them evoke seithr. The volur might then send a night-spirit to possess his father, wherever he was. But there was something cowardly about that, and a warrior could not be a coward and still go to the gods when he died. Besides which, he had no money.
Riding in darkness before the first moon rose, Bern Thorkellson thought bitterly about the bonds of family. He could smell his own fear and laid a hand forward on the horse’s neck to gentle it. It was too black to go quickly on this rough ground near the woods, and he could not—for obvious reasons—carry a torch.
He was entirely sober, which was useful. A man could die sober as well as drunken, he supposed, but had a better chance of avoiding some kinds of death. Of course it could also be said that no truly sober man would have done what he was doing now unless claimed by a spirit himself, ghost-ridden, god-tormented.
Bern didn’t think he was crazed, but he’d have acknowledged freely that what he was doing—without having planned it at all—was not the wisest thing he’d ever done.
He concentrated on riding. There was no good reason for anyone to be abroad in these fields at night—farmers would be asleep behind doors, the shepherds would have their herds farther west—but there was always the chance of someone hoping to find a cup of ale at some hut, or meeting a girl, or looking for something to steal.
He was stealing a dead man’s horse, himself.
A warrior’s vengeance would have had him kill Halldr Thinshank long ago and face the blood feud after, beside whatever distant kin, if any, might come to his aid. Instead, Halldr had died when the main crossbeam of the new house he was having built (with money that didn’t belong to him) fell on his back, breaking it. And Bern had stolen the grey horse that was to be burned with the governor tomorrow.
It would delay the rites, he knew, disquiet the ghost of the man who had exiled Bern’s father and taken his mother as a second wife. The man who had also, not incidentally, ordered Bern himself bound for three years as a servant to Arni Kjellson, recompense for his father’s crime.
A young man named to servitude, with an exiled father, and so without any supporting family or name, could not readily proclaim himself a warrior among the Erlings unless he went so far from home that his history was unknown. His father had probably done that, raiding overseas again. Red-bearded, fierce-tempered, experienced. A perfect oarsman for some longship, if he didn’t kill a benchmate in a fury, Bern thought sourly. He knew his father’s capacity for rage. Arni Kjellson’s brother Nikar was dead of it.
Halldr might fairly have exiled the murderer and given away half his land to stop a feud, but marrying the exile’s wife and claiming land for himself smacked too much of reaping in pleasure what he’d sowed as a judge. Bern Thorkellson, an only son with two sisters married and off the island, had found himself changed—in a blur of time—from the heir of a celebrated raider-turned-farmer to a landless servant without kin to protect him. Could any man wonder if there was bitterness in him, and more than that? He’d loathed Rabady’s governor with cold passion. A hatred shared by more than a few, if words whispered in ale were to be believed.
Of course no one else had ever done anything about Halldr. Bern was the one now riding Thinshank’s favourite stallion amid stones and boulders in cold darkness on the night before the governor’s pyre was to be lit on a ship by the rocky beach.
Not the wisest action of his life, agreed.
For one thing, he hadn’t anything even vaguely resembling a plan. He’d been lying awake, listening to the snoring and snorting of the other two servants in the shed behind Kjellson’s house. Not unusual, that wakefulness: bitterness could suck a man from sleep. But somehow he’d found himself on his feet this time, dressing, pulling on boots and the bearskin vest he’d been able to keep so far, though he’d had to fight for it. He’d gone outside, pissed against the shed wall, and then walked through the silent blackness of the town to Halldr’s house (Frigga, his mother, lying somewhere inside, alone now, without a husband for the second time in a year).
He’d slipped around the side, eased open the door to the stable, listened to the boy there, snuffling in the dreams of a straw-covered sleep, and then led the big grey horse called Gyllir quietly out under the watching stars.
The stableboy never stirred. No one appeared in the lane. Only the named shapes of heroes and beasts in the gods’ sky overhead. He’d been alone in Rabady with the night-spirits. It had felt like a dream.
The town gate was locked when danger threatened but not otherwise. Rabady was an island. Bern and the grey horse had walked right through the square by the harbour, past the shuttered booths, down the middle of the empty street, through the open gates, across the bridge over the ditch into the night fields.
As simple as that, as life-altering.
Life-ending was probably the better way to describe it, he decided, given that this was not, in fact, a dream. He had no access to a boat that could carry the horse, and come sunrise a goodly number of extremely angry men— appalled at his impiety and their own exposure to an unhoused ghost—would begin looking for the horse. When they found the son of exiled Thorkell also missing, the only challenging decision would be how to kill him.
This did raise a possibility, given that he was sober and capable of thought. He could change his mind and go back. Leave the horse out here to be found. A minor, disturbing incident. They might blame it on ghosts or wood spirits. Bern could be back in his shed, asleep behind Arni Kjellson’s village house, before anyone was the wiser. Could even join the morning search for the horse, if fat Kjellson let him off wood-splitting to go.
They’d find the grey, bring it back, strangle and burn it on the drifting longship with Halldr Thinshank and whichever girl had won her spirit a place among warriors and gods by drawing the straw that freed her from the slow misery of her life.
Bern guided the horse across a stream. The grey was big, restive, but knew him. Kjellson had been properly grateful to the governor when half of Red Thorkell’s farm and his house were settled on him, and he had assigned his servants to labour for Thinshank at regular times. Bern was one of those servants now, by the same judgement that had given his family’s lands to Kjellson. He had groomed the grey stallion often, walked him, cleaned out his straw. A magnificent horse, better than Halldr had ever deserved. There was nowhere to run this horse properly on Rabady; he was purely for display, an affirmation of wealth. Another reason, probably, why the thought of taking it away had come to him tonight in the dangerous space between dream and the waking world.
He rode on in the chill night. Winter was over, but it still had its hard fingers in the earth. Their lives were defined by it here in the north. Bern was cold, even with the vest.
At least he knew where he was going now; that much seemed to have come to him. The land his father had bought with looted gold (mostly from the celebrated raid in Ferrieres twenty-five years ago) was on the other side of the village, south and west. He was aiming for the northern fringes of the trees.
He saw the shape of the marker boulder and guided the horse past it. They’d killed and buried a girl there to bless the fields, so long ago the inscription on the marker had faded away. It hadn’t done much good. The land near the forest was too stony to be properly tilled. Ploughs broke up behind oxen or horses, metal bending, snapping off. Hard, ungiving soil. Sometimes the harvests were adequate, but most of the food that fed Rabady came from the mainland.
The boulder cast a shadow. He looked up, saw the blue moon had risen from beyond the woods. Spirits’ moon. It occurred to him, rather too late, that the ghost of Halldr Thinshank could not be unaware of what was happening to his horse. Halldr’s lingering soul would be set free only with the ship-burial and burning tomorrow. Tonight it could be abroad in the dark—which was where Bern was.
He made the hammer sign, invoking both Ingavin and Thünir. He shivered again. A stubborn man he was. Too clever for his own good? His father’s son in that? He’d deny it, at a blade’s end. This had nothing to do with Thorkell. He was pursuing his own feud with Halldr and the town, not his father’s. You exiled a murderer (twice a murderer) if need be. You didn’t condemn his freeborn son to years of servitude and a landless fate for the father’s crime—and expect him to forgive. A man without land had nothing, could not marry, speak in the thringmoot, claim honour or pride. His life and name were marred, broken as a plough by stones.
He ought to have killed Halldr. Or Arni Kjellson. Or someone. He wondered, sometimes, where his own rage lay. He didn’t seem to have that fury, like a berserkir in battle. Or like his father in drink.
His father had killed people, raiding with Siggur Volganson, and here at home.
Bern hadn’t done anything so … direct. Instead, he’d stolen a horse secretly in the dark and was now heading, for want of anything close to a better idea, to see if woman’s magic—the volur ’s—could offer him aid in the depths of a night. Not a brilliant plan, but the only one that had come to him. The women would probably scream, raise an alarm, turn him in.
That did make him think of something. A small measure of prudence. He turned east towards the risen moon and the edge of the wood, dismounted, and led the horse a short way in. He looped the rope to a tree trunk. He was not about to walk up to the women’s compound leading an obviously stolen horse. This called for some trickery.
It was hard to be devious when you had no idea what you were doing.
He despised the bleak infliction of this life upon him. Was unable, it seemed, to even consider two more years of servitude, with no assurance of a return to any proper status afterwards. So, no, he wasn’t going back, leaving the stallion to be found, slipping into his straw in the freezing shed behind Kjellson’s house. That was over. The sagas told of moments when the hero’s fate changed, when he came to the axle-tree. He wasn’t a hero, but he wasn’t going back. Not by choice.
He was likely to die tonight or tomorrow. No rites for him when that happened. There would be an excited quarrel over how to kill a defiling horse thief, how slowly, and who most deserved the pleasure of it. They would be drunk and happy. Bern thought of the blood-eagle then; pushed the image from his mind.
Even the heroes died. Usually young. The brave went to Ingavin’s halls. He wasn’t sure if he was brave.
It was dense and black in the trees. He felt the pine needles underfoot. Wood smells: moss, pine, scent of a fox. Bern listened; heard nothing but his own breathing, and the horse’s. Gyllir seemed calm enough. He left him there, turned north again, still in the woods, towards where he thought the volur’s compound was. He’d seen it a few times, a clearing carved out a little way into the forest. If someone had magic, Bern thought, they could deal with wolves. Or even make use of them. It was said that the women who lived here had tamed some of the beasts, could speak their language. Bern didn’t believe that. He made the hammer sign again, however, with the thought.
He’d have missed the branching path in the blackness if it hadn’t been for the distant spill of lantern light. It was late for that, the bottom of a night, but he had no idea what laws or rules women such as these would observe. Perhaps the seer—the volur—stayed awake all night, sleeping by day like the owls. The sense of being in a dream returned. He wasn’t going to go back, and he didn’t want to die.
Those two things together could bring you out alone in night approaching a seer’s cabin through black trees. The lights—there were two of them—grew brighter as he came nearer. He could see the path, and then the clearing, and the structures beyond a fence: one large cabin, smaller ones flanking it, evergreens in a circle around, as if held at bay.
An owl cried behind him. A moment later Bern realized that it wasn’t an owl. No going back now, even if his feet would carry him. He’d been seen, or heard.
The compound gate was closed and locked. He climbed over the fence. Saw a brewhouse and a locked storeroom with a heavy door. Walked past them into the glow cast by the lamplight in the windows of the largest cabin. The other buildings were dark. He stopped and cleared his throat. It was very quiet.
“Ingavin’s peace upon all dwelling here.”
He hadn’t said a word since rising from his bed. His voice sounded jarring and abrupt. No response from within, no one to be seen.
“I come without weapons, seeking guidance.”
The lanterns flickered as before in the windows on either side of the cabin door. He saw smoke rising from the chimney. There was a small garden on the far side of the building, mostly bare this early in the year, with the snow just gone.
He heard a noise behind him, wheeled.
“It is deep in the bowl of night,” said the woman, who unlocked and closed the outer gate behind her, entering the yard. She was hooded; in the darkness it was impossible to see her face. Her voice was low. “Our visitors come by daylight … bearing gifts.”
Bern looked down at his empty hands. Of course. Seithr had a price. Everything in the world did, it seemed. He shrugged, tried to appear indifferent. After a moment, he took off his vest. Held it out. The woman stood motionless, then came forward and took it, wordlessly. He saw that she limped, favouring her right leg. When she came near, he realized that she was young, no older than he was.
She walked to the door of the cabin, knocked. It opened, just a little. Bern couldn’t see who stood within. The young woman entered; the door closed. He was alone again, in a clearing under stars and the one moon. It was colder now without the vest.
His older sister had made it for him. Siv was in Vinmark, on the mainland, married, two children, maybe another by now … they’d had no reply after sending word of Thorkell’s exile a year ago. He hoped her husband was kind, had not changed with the news of her father’s banishment. He might have: shame could come from a wife’s kin, bad blood for his own sons, a check to his ambitions. That could alter a man.
There would be more shame when tidings of his own deeds crossed the water. Both his sisters might pay for what he’d done tonight. He hadn’t thought about that. He hadn’t thought very much at all. He’d only gotten up from bed and taken a horse before the ghost moon rose, as in a dream.
The cabin door opened.
The woman with the limp came out, standing in the spill of light. She motioned to him and so he walked forward. He felt afraid, didn’t want to show it. He came up to her and saw her make a slight gesture and realized she hadn’t seen him clearly before, in the darkness. She still had her hood up, hiding her face; he registered yellow hair, quick eyes. She opened her mouth as if to say something but didn’t speak. Just motioned for him to enter. Bern went within and she pulled the door shut behind him, from outside. He didn’t know where she was going. He didn’t know what she’d been doing outside, so late.
He really didn’t know much at all. Why else come to ask of women’s magic what a man ought to do for himself?
Taking a deep breath he looked around by firelight, and the lamps at both windows, and over against the far wall on a long table. It was warmer than he’d expected. He saw his vest lying on a second table in the middle of the room, among a clutter of objects: conjuring bones, a stone dagger, a small hammer, a carving of Thünir, a tree branch, twigs, soapstone pots of various sizes. There were herbs strewn everywhere, lying on the table, others in pots and bags on the other long surface against the wall. There was a chair on top of that table at the back, and two blocks of wood in front of it, for steps. He had no idea what that meant. He saw a skull on the nearer table. Kept his face impassive.
“Why take a dead man’s horse, Bern Thorkellson?”
Bern jumped, no chance of concealing it. His heart hammered. The voice came from the most shadowed corner of the room, near the back, to his right. Smoke drifted from a candle, recently extinguished. A bed there, a woman sitting upon it. They said she drank blood, the volur, that her spirit could leave her body and converse with spirits. That her curse killed. That she was past a hundred years old and knew where the Volgan’s sword was.
“How … how do you know what I …?” he stammered. Foolish question. She even knew his name.
She laughed at him. A cold laughter. He could have been in his straw right now, Bern thought, a little desperately. Sleeping. Not here.
“What power could I claim, Bern Thorkellson, if I didn’t know that much of someone come in the night?”
He swallowed.
She said, “You hated him so much? Thinshank?”
Bern nodded. What point denying?
“I had cause,” he said.
“Indeed,” said the seer. “Many had cause. He married your mother, did he not?”
“That isn’t why,” Bern said.
She laughed again. “No? Do you hate your father also?”
He swallowed again. He felt himself beginning to sweat.
“A clever man, Thorkell Einarson.”
Bern snorted bitterly, couldn’t help it. “Oh, very. Exiled himself, ruined his family, lost his land.”
“A temper when he drank. But a shrewd man, as I recall. Is his son?”
He still couldn’t see her clearly, a shadow on a bed. Had she been asleep? They said she didn’t sleep.
“You will be killed for this,” she said. Her voice held a dry amusement more than anything else. “They will fear an angry ghost.”
“I know that,” said Bern. “It is why I have come. I need … counsel.” He paused. “Is it clever to know that much, at least?”
“Take the horse back,” she said, blunt as a hammer.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t need magic to do that. I need counsel for how to live. And not go back.”
He saw her shift on the bed then. She stood up. Came forward. The light fell upon her, finally. She wasn’t a hundred years old.
She was very tall, thin and bony, his mother’s age, perhaps more. Her hair was long and plaited and fell on either side of her head like a maiden’s, but grey. Her eyes were a bright, icy blue, her face lined, long, no beauty in it, a hard authority. Cruelty. A raider’s face, had she been a man. She wore a heavy robe, dyed the colour of old blood. An expensive colour. He looked at her and was afraid. Her fingers were very long.
“You think a bearskin vest, badly made, buys you access to seithr?” she said. Her name was Iord, he suddenly remembered. Forgot who had told him that, long ago. In daylight.
Bern cleared his throat. “It isn’t badly made,” he protested.
She didn’t bother responding, stood waiting.
He said, “I have no other gifts to give. I am a servant to Arni Kjellson now.” He looked at her, standing as straight as he could. “You said … many had reason to hate Halldr. Was he … generous to you and the women here?”
A guess, a gamble, a throw of dice on a tavern table among beakers of ale. He hadn’t known he would say that. Had no idea whence the question had come.
She laughed again. A different tone this time. Then she was silent, looking at him with those hard eyes. Bern waited, his heart still pounding.
She came abruptly forward, moved past him to the table in the middle of the room, long-striding for a woman. He caught a scent about her as she went: pine resin, something else, an animal smell. She picked up some of the herbs, threw them in a bowl, took that and crossed to the back table for something beside the raised chair, put that in the bowl, too. He couldn’t see what. With the hammer she began pounding and grinding, her back to him.
Still working, her movements decisive, she said suddenly, “You had no thought of what you might do, son of Thorkell, son of Frigga? You just stole a horse. On an island. Is that it?”
Stung, Bern said, “Shouldn’t your magic tell you my thoughts—or lack of them?”
She laughed again. Glanced at him briefly then, over her shoulder. The eyes were bright. “If I could read a mind and future just from a man entering my room, I’d not be by the woods on Rabady Isle in a cabin with a leaking roof. I’d be at Kjarten Vidurson’s hall in Hlegest, or in Ferrieres, or even with the Emperor in Sarantium.”
“Jaddites? They’d burn you for pagan magic.”
She was still amused, still crushing herbs in the stone bowl. “Not if I told their future truly,” she said. “Sun god or no, kings want to know what will be. Even Aeldred would welcome me, could I look at any man and know all of him.”
“Aeldred? No he wouldn’t.”
She glanced back at him again. “You are wrong. His hunger is for knowledge, as much as for anything. Your father may even know that by now, if he’s gone raiding among the Anglcyn.”
“Has he? Gone raiding there?” He asked before he could stop himself.
He heard her laughing; she didn’t even look back at him this time.
She came again to the near table and took a flask of something. Poured a thick, pasty liquid into the bowl, stirred it, then poured it all back into the flask. Bern felt afraid still, watching her. This was magic. He was entangling himself with it. Witchery. Seithr. Dark as the night was, as the way of women in the dark. His own choice, though. He had come for this. And it seemed she was doing something.
There was a movement, from over by the fire. He looked quickly. Took an involuntary step backwards, an oath escaping him. Something slithered across the floor and beneath the far table. It disappeared behind a chest against that wall.
The seer followed his gaze, smiled. “Ah. You see my new friend? They brought me a serpent today, the ship from the south. They said his poison was gone. I had him bite one of the girls, to be sure. I need a serpent. They change worlds when they change skin, did you know that?”
He hadn’t known that. Of course he hadn’t known that. He kept his gaze on the wooden chest. Nothing moved, but it was there, coiled, behind. He felt much too warm now, smelled his own sweat.
He finally looked back at her. Her eyes were waiting, held his.
“Drink,” she said.
No one had made him come here. He took the flask from her hand. She had rings on three fingers. He drank. The herbs were thick in the drink, hard to swallow.
“Half only,” she said quickly. He stopped. She took the flask and drained it herself. Put it down on the table. Said something in a low voice he couldn’t hear. Turned back to him.
“Undress,” she said. He stared at her. “A vest will not buy your future or the spirit world’s guidance, but a young man always has another offering to give.”
He didn’t understand at first, and then he did.
A glitter in her coldness. She had to be older than his mother, lined and seamed, her breasts sunken on her chest beneath the dark red robe. Bern closed his eyes.
“I must have your seed, Bern Thorkellson, if you wish seithr’s power. You require more than a seer’s vision, and before daybreak, or they will find you and cut you apart before they allow you to die.” Her gaze was pitiless. “You know it to be so.”
He knew it. His mouth was dry. He looked at her.
“You hated him too?”
“Undress,” she said again.
He pulled his tunic over his head.
It ought to have been a dream, all of this. It wasn’t. He removed his boots, leaning against the table. She watched, her eyes never leaving him, very bright, very blue. His hand on the table touched the skull. It wasn’t human, he saw, belatedly. A wolf, most likely. He wasn’t reassured.
She wasn’t here to reassure. He was inside another world, or in the doorway to it: women’s world, gateway to women’s knowing. Shadows and blood. A serpent in the room. On the ship from the south … they had traded during the banned time, before the funeral rites. He didn’t think, somehow, they would be troubled by that here. They said his poison was gone. He felt whatever he had just drunk in his veins now.
“Go on,” said the seer. A woman ought not to watch like this, Bern thought, tasting his fear again. He hesitated, then took off his trousers, was naked before her. He squared his shoulders. He saw her smile, the thin mouth. He felt light-headed. What had she given him to drink? She gestured; his feet carried him across the room to her bed.
“Lie down,” she said, watching him. “On your back.”
He did what she told him. He had left the world where things were as they … ought to be. He had left it when he took the dead man’s horse. She walked about the room and pinched shut or blew out the candles and lamps, so only the firelight glowed, red on the farthest wall. In the near-dark it was easier. She came back, stood over against her bed where he lay—an outline against the fire, looking down upon him. She reached out, slowly— he saw her hand moving—and touched his manhood.
Bern closed his eyes again. He’d thought her touch would be cold, like age, like death, but it wasn’t. She moved her fingers, down and back up, and then slowly down again. He felt himself, even amid fear and a kind of horror, becoming aroused. A roaring in his blood. The drink? This wasn’t like a romp with Elli or Anrida in the stubbled fields after harvesting, in the straw of their barn by moonlight.
This wasn’t like anything.
“Good,” whispered the volur, and repeated it, her hand moving. “It needs your seed to be done, you see. You have a gift for me.”
Her voice had changed again, deepened. She withdrew her hand. Bern trembled, kept his eyes tightly closed, heard a rustling as she shed her own robe. He wondered suddenly where the serpent was; pushed that thought away. The bed shifted, he felt her hands on his shoulders, a knee by one hip, and then the other, smelled her scent— and then she mounted him from above without hesitation and sheathed him within her, hard.
Bern gasped, heard a sound torn from her. And with that, he understood—without warning or expectation— that he had a power here, after all. Even in this place of magic. She needed what was his to give. And it was that awareness, a kind of surging, that took him over, more than any other shape desire might wear, as the woman— the witch, volur, wise woman, seer, whatever she would be named—began rocking upon him, breathing harder. Crying a name then (not his), her hips moving as in a spasm. He made himself open his eyes, saw her head thrown back, her mouth wide open, her own eyes closed now upon need as she rode him wildly like a night horse of her own dark dreaming and claimed for herself—now, with his own harsh, torn spasm—the seed she said she needed to work magic in the night.
“GET DRESSED.”
She swung off his body and up from the bed. No lingering, no aftermath. The voice brittle and cold again. She put on her robe and went to the near wall of the cabin, rapped three times on it, hard. She looked back at him, her glance bleak as before, as if the woman upon him moments ago, with her closed eyes and shuddering breath, had never existed in the world. “Unless you’d prefer the others see you like this when they come in?”
Bern moved. As he hurried into clothing and boots, she crossed to the fire, took a taper, and began lighting the lamps again. Before they were all lit, before he had his overshirt on, the outside door opened and four women came in, moving quickly. He had a sense they’d been trying to catch him before he was dressed. Which meant they had …
He took a breath. He didn’t know what it meant. He was lost here, in this cabin, in the night.
One of the women carried a dark blue cloak, he saw. She took this to the volur and draped it about her, fastening it at one shoulder with a silver torque. Three of the others, none of them young, took over dealing with the lamps. The last one began preparing another mixture at the table, using a different bowl. No one said a word. Bern didn’t see the young girl who’d spoken to him outside.
After their entrance and quick glances at him, none of the women even seemed to acknowledge his presence here. A man, meaningless. He hadn’t been, just before, though, had he? A part of him wanted to say that. Bern slipped his head and arms into his shirt and stood near the rumpled bed. He felt oddly awake now, alert—something in the drink she’d given him?
The one making the new mixture poured it into a beaker and carried it to the seer, who drained it at once, making a face. She went over to the blocks of wood before the back table. A woman on each side helped her step up and then seat herself on the elevated chair. There were lights burning now, all through the room. The volur nodded.
The four women began to chant in a tongue Bern didn’t know. One of the lamps by the bed suddenly went out. Bern felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. This was seithr, magic, not just foretelling. The seer closed her eyes and gripped the arms of her heavy chair, as if afraid she might be carried off. One of the other women, still chanting, moved with a taper past Bern and relit the extinguished lamp. Returning, she paused by him for a moment. She squeezed his buttocks with one hand, saying nothing, not even looking at him. Then she rejoined the others in front of the elevated chair. Her gesture, casual and controlling, was exactly like a warrior’s with a serving girl passing his bench in a tavern.
Bern’s face reddened. He clenched his fists. But just then the seer spoke from her seat above them, her eyes still closed, hands clutching the chair arms, her voice high— greatly altered—but saying words he could understand.
THEY’D GIVEN HIM BACK his vest which was a blessing. The night felt even colder after the warmth inside. He walked slowly, eyes not yet adjusted to blackness, moving away from the compound lights through the trees on either side. He was concentrating: on finding his way, and on remembering exactly what the volur had told him. The instructions had been precise. Magic involved precision, it seemed. A narrow path to walk, ruin on either side, a single misstep away. He still felt the effects of the drink, a sharpening of perception. A part of him was aware that what he was doing now could be seen as mad, but it didn’t feel that way. He felt … protected.
He heard the horse before he saw it. Wolves might eat the moons, heralding the end of days and the death of gods, but they hadn’t found Halldr’s grey horse yet. Bern spoke softly, that the animal might know his voice as he approached. He rubbed Gyllir’s mane, untied the rope from the tree, led him back out into the field. The blue moon was high now, waning, the night past its deepest point, turning towards dawn. He would have to move quickly.
“What did she tell you to do?”
Bern wheeled. Sharpened perceptions or not, he hadn’t heard anyone approach. If he’d had a sword he’d have drawn it, but he didn’t even have a dagger. It was a woman’s voice, though, and he recognized it.
“What are you doing here?”
“Saving your life,” she said. “Perhaps. It may not be possible.”
She limped forward from the trees. He hadn’t heard her approach because she’d been waiting for him, he realized.
“What do you mean?”
“Answer my question. What did she tell you to do?”
Bern hesitated. Gyllir snorted, swung his head, restive now. “Do this, tell me that, stand here, go there,” Bern said. “Why do all of you enjoy giving orders so much?”
“I can leave,” the young woman said mildly. Though she was still hooded, he saw her shrug. “And I certainly haven’t ordered you to undress and get into bed for me.”
Bern went crimson. He was desperately glad of the darkness, suddenly. She waited. It was true, he thought, she could walk away and he’d be … exactly where he’d been a moment ago. He had no idea what she was doing here, but that ignorance was of a piece with everything else tonight. He could almost have found it amusing, if it hadn’t been so thickly trammelled in … woman things.
“She made a spell,” he said, finally, “up on that chair, in the blue cloak. For magic.”
“I know about the chair and cloak,” the girl said impatiently. “Where is she sending you?”
“Back to town. She’s made me invisible to them. I can ride right down the street and no one will see me.” He heard the note of triumph enter his voice. Well, why not? It was astonishing. “I’m to go onto the southerners’ ship—there’s a ramp out, by law, it is open for inspection— and go straight down into the hold.”
“With a horse?”
He nodded. “They have animals. There’s a ramp down, too.”
“And then?”
“Stay there till they leave, and get off at their next port of call. Ferrieres, probably.”
He could see she was staring straight at him. “Invisible? With a horse? On a ship?”
He nodded again.
She began to laugh. Bern felt himself flushing again. “You find this amusing? Your own volur ’s power? Women’s magic?”
She was trying to collect herself, a hand to her mouth. “Tell me,” she asked, finally, “if you can’t be seen, how am I looking at you?”
Bern’s heart knocked hard against his ribs. He rubbed a hand across his forehead. Found that he couldn’t speak for a moment.
“You, ah, are one of them. Part of, ah, the seithr?”
She took a step towards him. He saw her shake her head within the hooded robe. She wasn’t laughing now. “Bern Thorkellson, I see you because you aren’t under any spell. You will be taken as soon as you enter the town. Captured like a child. She lied to you.”
He took a deep breath. Looked up at the sky. Ghost moon, early spring stars. His hands were trembling, holding the horse’s reins.
“Why would … she said she hated Halldr as much as I did!”
“That’s true. He was no friend to us. Thinshank’s dead, though. She can use the goodwill of whoever becomes governor now. Her capturing you—and they will be told before midday that she put you under a spell and forced you to ride back to them—is a way to achieve that, isn’t it?”
He didn’t feel guarded any more.
“We need food and labour out here,” she went on calmly. “We need the fear and assistance of the town, both. All volurs require this, wherever they are. You become her way of starting again after the long quarrel with Halldr. Your coming here tonight was a gift to her.”
He thought of the woman above him in the bed, lit only by the fire.
“In more ways than one,” the girl added, as if reading his thoughts.
“She has no power, no seithr?”
“I didn’t say that. Although I don’t think she does.”
“There’s no magic? Nothing to make a man invisible?”
She laughed again. “If one spearman can’t hit a target when he throws, do you decide that spears are useless?” It was too dark to make out any expression on her face. He realized something.
“You hate her,” he said. “That’s why you are here. Because … because she had the snake bite you!”
He could see she was surprised, hesitating for the first time. “I don’t love her, no,” she agreed. “But I wouldn’t be here because of that.”
“Why then?” Bern asked, a little desperately.
Again a pause. He wished, now, that there were light. He still hadn’t seen her face.
She said, “We are kin, Bern Thorkellson. I’m here because of that.”
“What?” He was stunned.
“Your sister married my brother, on the mainland.”
“Siv married …?”
“No, Athira wedded my brother Gevin.”
He felt abruptly angry, couldn’t have said why. “That doesn’t make us kin, woman.”
Even in darkness he could see that he had wounded her.
The horse moved again, whickered, impatient with standing.
The woman said, “I am a long way from home. Your family is the closest I have on this island, I suppose. Forgive me for presuming.”
His family was landless, his father exiled. He was a servant, compelled to sleep in a barn on straw for two more years.
“What presumption?” Bern said roughly. “That isn’t what I meant.” He wasn’t sure what he’d meant.
There was a silence. He was thinking hard. “You were sent to the volur? They reported you had a gift?”
The hood moved up and down. “Curious, how often unwed youngest daughters have a gift, isn’t it?”
“Why did I never hear of you?”
“We are meant to be unattached, to be the more dependent. That’s why they bring girls from distant villages and farms. All the seers do that. I’ve spoken to your mother, though.”
“You have? What? Why …?”
The shrug again. “Frigga’s a woman. Athira gave me a message for her.”
“You all have your tricks, don’t you?” He felt bitter, suddenly.
“Swords and axes are so much better, aren’t they?” she said sharply. She was staring at him again, though he knew the darkness hid his face, too. “We’re all trying to make ourselves a life, Bern Thorkellson. Men and women both. Why else are you out here now?”
Bitterness still. “Because my father is a fool who killed a man.”
“And his son is what?”
“A fool about to die before the next moon rises. A good way to … make a life, isn’t it? Useful kin for you to have.”
She said nothing, looked away. He heard the horse again. Felt the wind, a change in it, as though the night had indeed turned, moving now towards dawn.
“The snake,” he said awkwardly. “Is it …?”
“I’m not poisoned. It hurts.”
“You … walked out here a long way.”
“There’s one of us out all night on watch. We take turns, the younger ones. People come in the dark. That’s how I saw you on the horse and told her.”
“No, I meant … just now. To warn me.”
“Oh.” She paused. “You believe me, then?”
For the first time, a note of doubt, wistfulness. She was betraying the volur for him.
He grinned crookedly. “You are looking right at me, as you said. I can’t be that hard to see. Even a piss-drunk raider falling off his horse will spot me when the sun comes up. Yes, I believe you.”
She let out a breath.
“What will they do to you?” he asked. It had just occurred to him.
“If they find out I was here? I don’t want to think about it.” She paused. “Thank you for asking.”
He felt suddenly shamed. Cleared his throat. “If I don’t ride back into the village, will they know you … warned me?”
Her laughter again, unexpected, bright and quick. “They could possibly decide you were clever, by yourself.”
He laughed too. Couldn’t help it. Was aware that it could be seen as a madness sent by the gods, laughter at the edge of dying one hideous death or another. Not like the mindlessness of the water-disease—a man bitten by a sick fox—but the madness where one has lost hold of the way things are. Laughter here, another kind of strangeness in this dark by the wood among the spirits of the dead, with the blue moon overhead, pursued by a wolf in the sky.
The world would end when that wolf caught the two moons.
He had more immediate problems, actually.
“What will you do?” she asked. The third time she’d seemed to track his thoughts. Perhaps it was more than being a youngest daughter, this matter of having a gift. He wished, again, he could see her clearly.
But, as it happened, he did know, finally, the answer to her question.
Once, years ago, his father had been in a genial mood one evening as they’d walked out together to repair a loose door on their barn. Thorkell wasn’t always drunk, or even often so (being honest with his own memories). That summer evening he was sober and easy, and the measure of that mood was that, after finishing the work, the two of them went walking, towards the northern boundary of their land, and Thorkell spoke of his raiding days to his only son, something that rarely happened.
Thorkell Einarson had not been a man given to boasting, or to offering scraps of advice from the table of his recollections. This made him unusual among the Erlings, or those that Bern knew, at any rate. It wasn’t always easy having an unusual father, though a boy could take some dark pride in seeing Thorkell feared by others as much as he was. They whispered about him, pointed him out, carefully, to merchants visiting the isle. Bern, a watchful child, had seen it happen.
Other men had told the boy tales; he knew something of what his father had done. Companion and friend to Siggur Volganson himself right to the end. Voyages in storm, raids in the dark. Escaping the Cyngael after Siggur died and his sword was lost. A journey alone across the Cyngael lands, then the width of the Anglcyn kingdom to the eastern coast, and finally home across the sea to Vinmark and this isle.
“I recollect a night like this, a long time ago,” his father said, leaning back against the boulder that marked the boundary of their land. “We went too far from the boats and they cut us off—Cuthbert’s household guard, his best men—between a wood and a stream.”
Cuthbert had been king of the Anglcyn in the years when Thorkell was raiding with the Volgan. Bern knew that much.
He remembered loving moments such as that one had been, the two of them together, the sun setting, the air mild, his father mild, and talking to him.
“Siggur said something to us that night. He said there are times when all you can do to survive is one single thing, however unlikely it may be, and so you act as if it can be done. The only chance we had was that the enemy was too sure of victory, and had not posted outliers against a night breakout.”
Thorkell looked at his son. “You understand that everyone posts outlying guards? It is the most basic thing an army does. It is mad not to. They had to have them, there was no chance they didn’t.”
Bern nodded.
“So we spoke our prayers to Ingavin and broke out,” Thorkell said, matter-of-factly. “Maybe sixty men—two boats’ worth of us—against two hundred, at the least. A blind rush in the dark, some of us on stolen horses, some running, no order to it, only speed. The whole thing being to get to their camp, and through it—take some horses on the run if we could—cut back towards the ships two days away.”
Thorkell paused then, looking out over summer farmlands, towards the woods. “They didn’t have outliers. They were waiting for morning to smash us, were mostly asleep, a few still singing and drinking. We killed thirty or forty of them, got horses for some of our unmounted, took two thegns hostage, by blind luck—couldn’t tell who they were in the dark. And we sold them back to Cuthbert the next day for our freedom to get to the boats and sail away.”
He’d actually grinned, Bern remembered, behind the red beard. His father had rarely smiled.
“The Anglcyn in the west rebelled against King Cuthbert after that, which is when Athelbert became king, then Gademar, and Aeldred. Raiding got harder, and then Siggur died in Llywerth. That’s when I decided to become a landowner. Spend my days fixing broken doors.”
He’d had to escape first, alone and on foot, across the breadth of two different countries.
You act as if it can be done.
“I’m crossing to the mainland,” Bern said quietly to the girl in that darkness by the wood.
She stood very still. “Steal a boat?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t take the horse on any boat I could manage alone.”
“You won’t leave the horse?”
“I won’t leave the horse.”
“Then?”
“Swim,” said Bern. “Clearly.” He smiled, but she couldn’t see it, he knew.
She was silent a moment. “You can swim?”
He shook his head. “Not that far.”
Heroes came to thresholds, to moments that marked them, and they died young, too. Icy water, end of winter, the stony shore of Vinmark a world away across the strait, just visible by daylight if the mist didn’t settle, but not now.
What was a hero, if he never had a chance to do anything? If he died at the first threshold?
“I think the horse can carry me,” he said. “I will … act as if it can.” He felt his mood changing, a strangeness overtaking him even as he spoke. “Promise me no monsters in the sea?”
“I wish I could,” said the girl.
“Well, that’s honest,” he said. He laughed again. She didn’t, this time.
“It will be very cold.”
“Of course it will.” He hesitated. “Can you … see anything?”
She knew what he meant. “No.”
“Am I underwater?” He tried to make it a joke.
Shook her head. “I can’t tell. I’m sorry. I’m … more a youngest daughter than a seer.”
Another silence. It struck him that it would be appropriate to begin feeling afraid. The sea at night, straight out into the black …
“Shall I … any word for your mother?”
It hadn’t occurred to him. Nothing had, really. He thought about it now. “Better you never saw me. That I was clever by myself. And died of it, in the sea.”
“You may not.”
She didn’t sound as if she believed that. She would have been rowed across from Vinmark, coming here. She knew the strait, the currents and the cold, even if there were no monsters.
Bern shrugged. “That will be as Ingavin and Thünir decide. Make some magic, if you have any. Pray for me, if you haven’t. Perhaps we’ll meet again. I thank you for coming out. You saved me from … one bad kind of death, at least.”
It was past the bottom of the night, and he had a distance to go to the beach nearest the mainland. He said nothing more, and neither did she, though he could see that she was still staring at him in the dark. He mounted up on the horse he wouldn’t leave for Halldr Thinshank’s funeral rites, and rode away.
Some time before reaching the strand south-east of the forest, he realized he didn’t know her name, or have any clear idea what she looked like. Unlikely to matter; if they met again it would probably be in the afterworld of souls.
He came around the looming dark of the pine woods to a stony place by the water: rocky and wild, exposed, no boats here, no fishermen in the night. The pounding of the sea, heavy sound of it, salt in his face, no shelter from the wind. The blue moon west, behind him now, the white one not rising tonight until dawn. It would be dark on the ocean water. Ingavin alone knew what creatures might be waiting to pull him down. He wouldn’t leave the horse. He wouldn’t go back. You did whatever was left, and acted as if it could be done. Bern cursed his father aloud, then, for murdering another man, doing that to all of them, his sisters and his mother and himself, and then he urged the grey horse into the surf, which was white where it hit the stones, and black beyond, under the stars.
Chapter II
“Our trouble,” muttered Dai, looking down through green-gold leaves at the farmyard, “is that we make good poems and bad siege weapons.”
A siege, in fact, wasn’t even remotely at issue. The comment was so inconsequential, and so typical of Dai, that Alun laughed aloud. Not the wisest thing to do, given where they were. Dai slapped a hand to his brother’s mouth. After a moment, Alun signalled he was under control and Dai moved his hand away, grunting.
“Anyone in particular you’d like to besiege?” Alun asked, quietly enough. He shifted his elbows carefully. The bushes didn’t move.
“One poet I can think of,” Dai said, unwisely. He was prone to jests, his younger brother prone to laughing at them; they were both prone under leaves, gazing at penned cattle below. They’d come north to steal cattle. The Cyngael did that to each other, frequently.
Dai moved a hand quickly, but Alun kept still this time. They couldn’t afford to be seen. There were just twelve of them—eleven, with Gryffeth now captured— and they were a long way north into Arberth. No more than two or three days from the sea, Dai reckoned, though he wasn’t sure exactly where they were, or what this very large farmhouse below them was.
Twelve had been a marginal number for a raiding party, but the brothers were confident in their abilities, not without some cause. Besides, in Cadyr it was said that any one of their own was worth two of the Arberthi, and at least three from Llywerth. They might do the arithmetic differently in the other two provinces, but that was just vanity and bluster.
Or it should have been. It was alarming that Gryffeth had been taken so easily, scouting ahead. The good news was that he’d prudently carried Alun’s harp with him, to be taken for a bard on the road. The bad news was that Gryffeth—notoriously—couldn’t sing or play to save his life. If they tested him down below, he was unmasked. And saving his life became an issue.
So the brothers had left nine men out of sight off the road and climbed this overlook to devise a rescue plan. If they went home without cattle it was bad but not humiliating. Not every raid succeeded; you could still do a few things to make a story worth telling. But if their royal father or uncle had to pay a ransom for a cousin taken on an unauthorized cattle raid into Arberth during a herald’s truce, well, that was … going to be quite bad.
And if Owyn of Cadyr’s nephew died in Arberth it could mean war.
“How many, do you think?” Dai murmured.
“Twenty, give or take a few? It’s a big farmhouse. Who lives here? Where are we?” Alun was still watching the cows, Dai saw.
“Forget the cattle,” Dai snapped. “Everything’s changed.”
“Maybe not. We let them out of the pen tonight, four of us scatter them north up the valley, the rest go in after Gryffeth while they’re rounding them up?”
Dai looked thoughtfully at his younger brother. “That’s unexpectedly clever,” he said, finally.
Alun punched him on the shoulder, fairly hard. “Hump a goat,” he added mildly. “This was your idea, I’m getting us out of it. Don’t be superior. Which room’s he in?”
Dai had been trying to sort that out. The farmhouse— whoever owned it was wealthy—was long and sprawling, running east to west. He saw the outline of a large hall beyond the double doors below them, wings bending back north at each end of that main building. A house that had expanded in stages, some parts stone, others wood. They hadn’t seen Gryffeth taken in, had only come upon the signs of struggle on the path.
Two cowherds were watching the cattle from the far side of the fenced enclosure east of the house. Boys, their hands moving ceaselessly to wave at flies. None of the armed men had emerged since a cluster of them had gone in through the main doors, talking angrily, just as the brothers had arrived here in the thicket above the farm. Once or twice they’d heard raised, distant voices within, and a girl had come out for well water. Otherwise it was quiet and hot, a sleepy afternoon, late spring, butterflies, the drone of bees, a hawk circling. Dai watched it for a moment.
What neither brother said, though both of them knew it, was that it was extremely unlikely they could get a man out of a guarded room, even at night and with a diversion, without men dying on both sides. During a truce. This raid had gone wrong before it had even begun.
“Are we even certain he’s in there?” Dai said.
“I am,” said Alun. “Nowhere else likely. Could he be a guest? Um, could they have …?”
Dai looked at him. Gryffeth couldn’t play the harp he carried, was wearing a sword and leather armour, had a helmet in his saddle gear, looked exactly the sort of young man—with a Cadyri accent, too—who’d be up to mischief, which he was.
The younger brother nodded, without Dai saying anything. It was too miserably obvious. Alun swore briefly, then murmured, “All right, he’s a prisoner. We’ll need to move fast, know exactly where we’re going. Come on, Dai, figure it out. In Jad’s name, where have they got him?”
“In Jad’s holy name, Brynn ap Hywll tends to use the room at the eastern end of the main building for prisoners, when he has them here. If I remember rightly.”
They whipped around. Dai’s knife was already out, Alun saw.
The world was a complex place sometimes, saturated with the unexpected. Especially when you left home and the trappings of the known. Even so, there were reasonable explanations for why someone might be up here now, right behind them. One of their own men might have followed with news; one of the guards from below could have intuited the presence of other Cadyri besides the captured one and come looking; they might even have been observed on their way up.
What was implausible in the extreme was what they actually saw. The man who’d answered Alun’s question was smallish, grey-haired, cheeks and chin smooth-shaven, smiling at the two of them. He was alone, hands out and open, weaponless … and he was wearing a faded, telltale yellow robe with a golden disk of Jad about his neck.
“I might not actually be remembering rightly,” he went on affably. “It has been some time since I’ve been here, and memory slips as you get older, you know.”
Dai blinked, and shook his head as if to clear it after a blow. They’d been completely surprised by an aging cleric.
Alun cleared his throat. One particular thing had registered, powerfully. “Did you, er, say … Brynn ap Hywll?”
Dai was still speechless.
The cleric nodded benignly. “Ah. You know of him, do you?”
Alun swore again. He was fighting a rising panic.
The cleric made a reproving face, then chuckled. “You do know him.”
Of course they did. “We don’t know you,” Dai said, finally recovering the capacity for speech. He’d lowered the knife. “How did you get up here?”
“Same way you did, I imagine.”
“We didn’t hear you.”
“Evidently. I do apologize. I was quiet. I’ve learned how to be. Not quite sure what I’d find, you know.”
The long yellow robes of a cleric were ill suited to silent climbing, and this man was not young. Whoever he was, he was no ordinary religious.
“Brynn!” Alun muttered grimly to his brother. The name—and what it meant—reverberated inside him. His heart was pounding.
“I heard.”
“What evil, Jad-cursed luck!”
“Yes, well,” said Dai. He was concentrating on the stranger for the moment. “I did ask who you were. I’d count it a great courtesy if you favoured us with your name.”
The cleric smiled, pleased. “Good manners,” he said, “were always a mark of your father’s family, whatever their other sins might have been. How is Owyn? And your lady mother? Both well, I dare hope? It has been many years.”
Dai blinked again. You are a prince of Cadyr, he reminded himself. Your royal father’s heir. Born to lead men, to control situations. It became a necessary reminder, suddenly.
“You have entirely the advantage of us,” said his brother, “in all ways I can imagine.” Alun’s mouth quirked. He found too many things amusing, Dai thought. A younger brother’s trait. Less responsibility.
“All ways? Well, one of you does have a knife,” said the cleric, but he was smiling as he said it. He lowered his hands. “I’m Ceinion of Llywerth, servant of Jad.”
Alun dropped to his knees.
Dai’s jaw seemed to be hanging open. He snapped it shut, felt himself going red as a boy caught idling by his tutor. He sheathed the knife hurriedly and sank down beside his brother, head lowered, hands together in submission. He felt overwhelmed. A saturation of the unexpected. The unprepossessing yellow-robed man on this wooded slope was the high cleric of the three fractious provinces of the Cyngael.
He calmly made the sign of Jad’s disk in blessing over both of them.
“Come down with me,” he said, “the way we came. Unless you have an objection, you are now my personal escorts. We’re stopping here at Brynnfell on our way north to Amren’s court at Beda.” He paused. “Or did you really want to try attacking Brynn’s own house? I shouldn’t advise it, you know.”
I shouldn’t advise it. Alun didn’t know whether to laugh or curse again. Brynn ap Hywll was only the subject of twenty-five years’ worth of songs and stories. Erling’s Bane they’d named him, here in the west. He’d spent his youth battling the raiders from overseas with his cousin Amren, now ruling in Arberth, of whom there were stories too. With them in those days had been Dai and Alun’s own father and uncle—and this man, Ceinion of Llywerth. The generation that had beaten back Siggur Volganson—the Volgan—and his longships. And Brynn was the one who’d killed him.
Alun drew a steadying breath. Their father, who liked to hold forth with a flask at his elbow, had told tales of all of these men. Had fought with—and then sometimes against—them. He and Dai and their friends were, Alun thought, as they walked down and out of the wood behind the anointed high cleric of the Cyngael, in waters far over their heads. Brynnfell. This was Brynnfell below them.
They had been about to attack it. With eleven men.
“This is his stronghold?” he heard Dai asking. “I thought—”
“Edrys was? His castle? It is, of course, north-east by Rheden and the Wall. And there are other farms. This is the largest one. He’s here now, as it happens.”
“What? Here? Himself? Brynn?”
Alun worked to breathe normally. Dai sounded stunned. His brother, who was always so composed. This, too, could almost be funny, Alun thought. Almost.
Ceinion of Llywerth was nodding his head, still leading the way downwards. “He’s here to receive me, actually. Good of him, I must say. I sent word that I would be passing through.” He glanced back. “How many men do you have? I saw you two climbing, but not the others.”
The cleric’s tone was precise, suddenly. Dai answered him.
“And how many were taken?”
“Just the one,” Dai said. Alun kept quiet. Younger brother.
“His name is Gryffeth? That’s Ludh’s son?”
Dai nodded.
He’d simply overheard them, Alun told himself. This wasn’t Jad’s gift of sight, or anything frightening.
“Very well,” said the cleric crisply, turning to them as they came out of the trees and onto the path. “I’d account it a waste to have good men killed today. I will do penance for a deception in the name of Jad’s peace. Hear me. You and your fellows joined me by arrangement at a ford of the Llyfarch River three days ago. You are escorting me north as a courtesy, and so that you might visit Amren’s court at Beda and offer prayers with him in his new-built sanctuary during this time of truce. Do you understand all that?”
They nodded, two heads bobbing up and down.
“Tell me, is your cousin Gryffeth ap Ludh a clever man?”
“No,” said Dai, truthfully.
The cleric made a face. “What will he have told them?”
“I have no idea,” Dai said.
“Nothing,” Alun said. “He isn’t quick, but he can keep silent.”
The cleric shook his head. “But why would he keep silent when all he had to say was that he was riding in advance to tell them I had arrived?”
Dai thought a moment, then he grinned. “If the Arberthi took him harshly, he’ll have been quiet just to embarrass them when you do show up, my lord.”
The cleric thought it through, then smiled back. “Owyn’s sons would be clever,” he murmured. He seemed pleased. “One of you will explain this to Ludh’s boy when we are inside. Where are your other men?”
“South of here, hidden off the road,” Dai said. “And yours, my lord?”
“Have none,” said the high cleric of the Cyngael. “Or I didn’t until now. You are my men, remember.”
“You rode alone from Llywerth?”
“Walked. But yes, alone. Some things to think about, and there’s a truce in the land, after all.”
“With outlaws in half the forests.”
“Outlaws who know a cleric has nothing worth the taking. I’ve said the dawn prayers with many of them.” He started walking.
Dai blinked again, and followed.
Alun wasn’t sure how he felt. Curiously elated, in part. For one thing, this was the figure of whom so many stories were told, some of them by his father and uncle, though he knew there had been a falling-out, and a little part of why. For another, the high cleric had just saved them from trying a mad attack on another legend in his own house.
A man of Cadyr might be worth two Arberthi, but that did not—harp-boasting and ale-born songs aside— apply to the warband of Brynn ap Hywll.
These were the men who had been fighting the Erlings before Dai and Alun were born, when the Cyngael lived in terror of slavery and savage death three seasons of every year, taking flight into the hills at the least rumour of the dragon-prows. It was clear now why Gryffeth had been captured so easily. They’d have had no chance trying to attack this farm tonight. They’d have been humiliated, or dead. A truth to run back and forth through the mind like the shuttling of a loom.
Alun ab Owyn was very young that day, a prince of Cadyr, and it was greenest springtime in the provinces of the Cyngael, in the world. He’d no wish to die. Something occurred to him.
“My cousin was only carrying the harp for me, by the way. If anyone asks, my lord.”
The cleric glanced back over his shoulder.
“Gryffeth can’t sing,” Dai explained. “Not that Alun’s much good.”
A joke, Alun thought. Good. Dai was feeling himself again, or starting to.
“There will be a feast, I expect,” Ceinion of Llywerth said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
“I’m actually better with siege weapons,” Alun said, not helpfully. He was rewarded by hearing his older brother laugh, and quickly smother it.
“YOUR ROYAL FATHER I knew very well. Fought against him, and beside him. A disgraceful youth, if I may be blunt, and a brave man.”
“It would be too much to hope that we might one day receive such a judgement from you, my lord, but to that we will aspire.” Dai bowed after he spoke.
They were in the great hall of Brynnfell, beyond the central doors. A long corridor behind them ran east and west towards the wings. It was a very large house. Gryffeth had already been released—from a room at the end of the eastern corridor, as the cleric had guessed. Alun had had a whispered word with him, and reclaimed his harp.
Dai straightened and smiled. “You will permit me to add, my lord, that disgrace among the Arberthi is sometimes honour in Cadyr. We have not always been favoured with the truce that brings us here, as you know.”
Alun smiled inwardly, kept his expression sincere. Dai had had a lifetime shaping this sort of speech, he thought. Words mattered among the Cyngael, nuance and subtlety. So did cattle-raiding, mind you, but the day’s game had changed.
The scarred older warrior—a head taller than the two brothers—beamed happily down on them. Brynn ap Hywll was big in every way—hands, face, shoulders, girth. Even his greying moustache was thick and full. He was red and fleshy and balding. He wore no weapon in his own home, had rings on several thick fingers and a massive golden torc around his throat. Erling work: the hammer of the thunder god replaced by a suspended sun disk. Something he’d captured or been offered as ransom, Alun guessed.
If Ceinion of Llywerth felt displeasure at seeing something made to hold pagan symbols of Ingavin, he didn’t show it. The high cleric was not at all what Alun had expected him to be, though he couldn’t have said what he had expected. Certainly not the man who had been kissed so enthusiastically by the Lady Enid, as her husband smiled approval.
Alun had a recollection that the cleric’s own wife had died long ago, but he was murky about the details. You couldn’t remember everything a tutor dictated, or a tale-spinning father by the fireside.
“Well spoken, young prince,” Brynn boomed, bringing Alun back to the present. Their host looked genuinely pleased with Dai’s answer. He’d a voice for the battlefield, Brynn, one that would carry.
Their arrival at Brynnfell had gone easily, after all. Alun had a sense that things tended to go that way when Ceinion of Llywerth was involved. If there had been something odd about the cleric arriving with a Cadyri escort when he usually walked alone to his destinations, and was widely known not to have spoken to Prince Owyn for a decade and more … well, sometimes odd things happened, and this was the high cleric.
Brynn was prepared to play along, it seemed, whatever he might privately think. Alun saw the big man’s gaze slide to where Ceinion stood, smooth face benign and attentive, slender hands folded in the sleeves of his robe. “Indeed, it would seem you have set your feet on the path of virtue already, serving as escorts to our beloved cleric, avoiding the scandalous conduct of your sire in his own youth.”
Dai kept a level expression. “His lordship the high cleric is persuasive in his holiness. We are honoured and grateful to be with him.”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Brynn ap Hywll, just a little too dryly.
Dai was afraid Alun would laugh, but he didn’t. Dai was fighting to control exhilaration himself … this was the dance, the thrust and twist of words, of meanings half-shown and then hidden, that underlay all the great songs and deeds of courts.
The Erlings might choose to loot and burn their way to some glorious afterlife of … more looting and burning, but the Cyngael saw the glory of the world— Jad’s holy gift of it—as embodied in more than just swords and raiding.
Though that, perhaps, might explain why they were so often raided and looted—from Vinmark overseas, and under pressure from the Anglcyn now, across the Rheden Wall. He’d said it himself today: poems over siege engines. Words above weapons, too often.
He wasn’t dwelling upon that now. He was exulting in the presence of two of the very great men of the west, as a springtime raid conjured out of boredom and their father’s absence, hunting without them (Owyn was meeting a mistress), had turned into something quite otherwise.
Young Dai ab Owyn was, in other words, in that elevated state of mind and spirit where what occurred that evening could almost have been anticipated. He was alert, receptive, highly attuned … vulnerable. At such times, one can be hammered hard by a variety of things, and the effect can last forever—though it should be said that this did happen more often in tales, bard-spun in meadhalls, than on an impulsive cattle raid gone strange.
Just before the meal began Alun had taken the musician’s stool at the Lady Enid’s request. Brynn’s wife was tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, younger than her husband. A handsome woman with no shyness among the men in the hall. None of the women here seemed shy, come to think of it.
He was tuning his harp (his favourite crwth, made for him), trying not to be distracted. They were playing the triad game in the hall, drinking the cup of welcome after the invocation by Brynn’s own cleric, before the food was brought. Ceinion had predicted a feast and had been proven right. They were drinking wine, not ale. Brynn ap Hywll was a wealthy man.
Some of the company were still standing, others had taken their seats; it was a relaxed gathering, this was a farmhouse not a castle, large and handsome as it might be. The room smelled of new rushes, freshly strewn herbs and flowers—and hunting dogs. There were at least ten wolfhounds, grey, black, brindled. Brynn’s warband, those with him here, were not men to put great weight on ceremony, it seemed.
“Cold as …?” called out a woman near the head of the table. Alun hadn’t sorted the names yet. She was a family cousin, he guessed. Round-faced, light brown hair.
“Cold as a winter lake,” answered a man leaning against the wall halfway down the room.
Cold was an easy start. They all knew the jokes: women’s hearts, or the space between the legs of some of them. Those phrases wouldn’t be offered now, before the drinking had properly begun, and with the ladies present.
“Cold as a loveless hearth,” said another. Worn phrases, too often heard. One more to complete the triad. Alun kept silent, listening to his strings as he tuned. There was always one song before the meal; he was being honoured with it, wasn’t sure what he wanted to sing.
“Cold as a world without Jad,” said Gryffeth suddenly, which wasn’t brilliant but wasn’t bad either, with the high cleric at the head table. It got him a murmur of approval and a smile from Ceinion. Alun saw his brother, next to the cleric, wink at their cousin. Mark one for Cadyr.
“Sorrowful as …?” said another of the ladies, an older one.
Trust the Cyngael, Alun thought wryly, to conjure with sorrow at a spring banquet’s beginning. We are a strange, wonderful people, he thought.
“Sorrowful as a swan alone.” A thin, satisfied-looking man sitting close to the high table. The ap Hywll bard, his own crwth beside him. An important figure. Accredited harpists always were. There was a rustle of approbation. Alun smiled at the man, received no response. Bards could be prickly, jealous of privilege, dangerous to offend. More than one prince had been humiliated by satires written against him. And Alun had been asked to take the stool first tonight. A guest indeed, but not a formally trained or licensed bard. Best to be cautious, he thought. He wished he knew a song about siege engines. Dai would have laughed.
“Sorrowful as a sword unused,” said Brynn himself, leaning back in his chair, the big voice. Predictable pounding of tables as the lord of the manor spoke.
“Sorrowful,” said Alun, surprising himself, since he’d just decided to be discreet, “as a singer without a song.”
A small silence as they considered it, then Brynn ap Hywll banged a meaty hand down on the board in front of him, and the Lady Enid clapped her palms in pleasure and then—of course—so did everyone else. Dai winked again quickly, and then contrived to look indifferent, leaning back as well, fingering his wine cup, as if they were always offering such original phrasings in the triad game back home. Alun felt like laughing: in truth, the phrase had come to him because he had no song yet and would be called upon in a moment.
“Needful as …?” suggested the Lady Enid, looking along the table.
A new phrase this time. Alun looked at Brynn’s wife. More than handsome, he corrected himself: there was beauty there still, glittering with the jewellery of rank upon her arms and about her throat. More people were seated now. Servants stood by, awaiting a signal to bring the food.
“Needful as warmed wine in winter,” someone Alun couldn’t see offered from down the room. Approval for that, a nicely phrased offering. Winter memory in midsummer, the phrase near to poetry. Their hostess turned to Dai, politely, beyond her husband and the cleric, to let the other Cadyri prince have a turn.
“Needful as night’s end,” Dai said gravely, without a pause, which was very good, actually. An image of darkness, the fear of it, a dream of dawn, when the god returned from his journey under the world.
As the real applause for this faded, as they waited for someone to throw the third leg of the triad, a young woman entered the room.
She moved quietly, clad in green, belted in gold, with gold in the brooch at her shoulder and on her fingers, to the empty place beside Enid at the high table—which would have told Alun who this was, if the look and manner of her hadn’t immediately done so. He stared, knew he was doing so, didn’t stop.
As she seated herself, aware—very obviously aware— that all eyes were upon her, including those of an indulgent father, she looked down the table, taking in the company, and Alun was made intensely conscious of dark eyes (like her mother’s), very black hair under the soft green cap, and skin whiter than … any easy phrase that came to mind.
And then he heard her murmur, voice rich, husky for one so young, unsettling: “Needful as night, I think many women would rather say.”
And because this was Rhiannon mer Brynn, through that crowded hall men felt that they knew exactly what she was saying, and wished that the words had been for their ears alone, whispered close at candle-time, not in company at table. And they thought that they could kill or do great deeds that it might be made so.
Alun could see his brother’s face as this green-gold woman-girl turned to Dai, whose phrase she had just echoed and challenged. And because he knew his brother better than he knew anyone on the god’s earth, Alun saw the world change for Dai in that crossing of glances. A moment with a name to it, as the bards said.
He had an instant to feel sorrow, the awareness of something ending as something else began, and then they asked him for a song, that the night might begin with music, which was the way of the Cyngael.
Brynnfell was a spacious property, well run by a competent steward, showing the touch of a mistress with taste, access to artisans, and a good deal of money. Still, it was only a farm, and there were a dozen young men from Cadyr now staying with them, over and above the thirty warriors and four women who’d accompanied ap Hywll and his wife and oldest daughter here.
Space was at a premium.
The Lady Enid had worked with efficiency informed by experience, meeting with the steward before the meal to arrange for the disposition of bodies at night. The hall would hold fighting men on pallets and rushes; it had done so before. The main barn was pressed into use, along with two outbuildings and the bakehouse. The brewhouse remained locked. Best not to put such temptation in men’s way. And there was another reason.
The two Cadyri princes and their cousin shared a room in the main house with a good bed for the three of them— honour demanded the host offer as much to royal guests.
The steward surrendered his own chamber to the high cleric. He himself would join the cook and kitchen hands in the kitchen for the night. He was grimly prepared to be as stoic as an eastern zealot on his crag, if not as serenely alone. The cook was notorious for the magnificence of his snoring, and had once been found walking about the kitchen, waving a blade and talking to himself, entirely asleep. He’d ended up chopping vegetables in the middle of the night without ever waking, as his helpers and a number of gathered household members watched in rapt silence, peering through the darkness.
The steward had already determined to place all the knives out of reach before closing his eyes.
In the pleasant chamber thus yielded to him, Ceinion of Llywerth finished the last words of the day’s office, offering at the end his customary silent prayer for the sheltering in light of those he had lost, some of them long ago, and also his gratitude, intensely felt, to holy Jad for all blessings given. The god had purposes not to be clearly seen. What had happened today—the lives he had likely saved, arriving when he did—was deserving of the humblest acknowledgement.
He rose, showing no signs of a strenuous day, or his years, and formally blessed the man kneeling beside him in prayer. He reclaimed his wine cup, subsiding happily onto the stool nearest the window. It was generally believed that the night air was noxious, carrying poisons and unholy spirits, but Ceinion had spent too many years sleeping out of doors, on walks across the three provinces and beyond. He found that he slept better by an open window, even in winter. It was springtime now, the air fragrant, night flowers under his window.
“I feel badly for the man who yielded me his bed.”
His companion shifted his considerable bulk up from the floor and grasped his own cup, refilling it to the brim, without water. He took the other, sturdier chair, keeping the flask close by. “And well you should,” Brynn ap Hywll said, smiling through his moustache. “Brynnfell’s bursting. Since when do you travel with an escort?”
Ceinion eyed him a moment, then sighed. “Since I found a Cadyri raiding party looking at your farm.”
Brynn laughed aloud. His laugh, like his voice, could overflow a room. “Well, thank you for deciding I’d sort out that much.” He drank thirstily, refilled his cup again. “They seem good lads, mind you. Jad knows, I did my share of raiding when young.”
“And their father.”
“Jad curse his eyes and hands,” Brynn said, though without force. “My royal cousin in Beda wants to know what to do about Owyn, you know.”
“I know. I’ll tell him when I get to Beda. With Owyn’s two sons beside me.” The cleric’s turn to grin this time.
He leaned back against the cool stone wall beside the window. Earthly pleasures: an old friend, food and wine, a day with some good unexpectedly done. There were learned men who taught withdrawal from the traps and tangles of the world. There was even a doctrinal movement afoot in Rhodias to deny marriage to clerics now, following the eastern, Sarantine rule, making them ascetics, detached from distractions of the flesh—and the complexities of having heirs to provide for.
Ceinion of Llywerth had always thought—and had written the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and others—that this was wrong thinking and even heresy, an outright denial of Jad’s full gift of life. Better to turn your love of the world into an honouring of the god, and if a wife died, or children, your own knowledge of sorrow might make you better able to counsel others, and comfort them. You lived with loss as they did. And shared their pleasures, too.
His words, written and spoken, mattered to others, by Jad’s holy grace. He was skilled at this sort of argument but didn’t know if he would be on the winning side of this one. The three provinces of the Cyngael were a long way from Rhodias, at the edge of the world, the misty borders of pagan belief. North of the north wind, the phrase went.
He sipped his wine, looking at his friend. Brynn’s expression was sly at the moment, amusingly so. “Happen to see the way Dai ab Owyn looked at my Rhiannon, did you?”
Ceinion took care that his own manner did not change. He had, in fact, seen it—and something else. “She’s a remarkable young woman,” he murmured.
“Her mother’s daughter. Same spirit to her. I’m an entirely beaten man, I tell you.” Brynn was smiling as he said this. “We solve a problem that way? Owyn’s heir handled by my girl?”
Ceinion kept his look noncommittal. “Certainly a useful match.”
“The lad’s already lost his head, I’d wager.” He chuckled. “Not the first to do so, with Rhiannon.”
“And your daughter?” Ceinion asked, perhaps unwisely.
Some fathers would have been startled, or offered an oath—what mattered the girl’s wishes in these things? But Brynn ap Hywll didn’t do that. Ceinion watched, and by the lamplight saw the big man, his old friend, grow thoughtful. Too much so. The cleric offered an inward, mildly blasphemous curse, and immediately sought—also silently—the god’s forgiveness for that.
“Interesting song the younger one sang before the meal, wasn’t it?”
There it was. A shrewd man, Ceinion thought ruefully. Much more than a warrior with a two-handed sword.
“It was,” he said, still keeping his own counsel. This was all too soon. He temporized. “Your bard was out of countenance.”
“Amund? It was too good, you mean? The song?”
“Not that. Though it was impressive. No, Alun ab Owyn breached the laws for such things. Only licensed bards are allowed to improvise in company. Your harper will need appeasing.”
“Spiky man, Amund. Not easily softened, if you are right.”
“I am right. Call it a word offered the wise.”
Brynn looked at him. “And your other question? About Rhiannon? What sort of word was that?”
Ceinion sighed. It had been a mistake. “I wish you weren’t clever, sometimes.”
“Have to be. To keep up in this family. She liked the … song, you think?”
“I think everyone liked the song.” He left it at that.
Both men were still awhile.
“Well,” Brynn said finally, “she’s of age, but there’s no great rush. Though Amren wants to know what to do about Owyn and Cadyr, and this …”
“Owyn ap Glynn isn’t the problem. Neither’s Amren, or Ielan in Llywerth. Except if they cling to these feuds that will end us.” He’d spoken with more fire than he’d intended.
The other man stretched out his legs and leaned back, unruffled. Brynn drank, wiped his moustache with a sleeve, and grinned. “Still riding that horse?”
“And I will all my life.” Ceinion didn’t smile this time. He hesitated, then shrugged. Wanted to change the subject, in any case. “I’ll tell you something before I tell it to Amren in Beda. But keep it close. Aeldred’s invited me to Esferth, to join his court.”
Brynn sat up abruptly, scraping the chair along the floor. He swore, without apologizing, then banged his cup down, spilling wine. “How dare he? Our high cleric he wants to steal now?”
“I said he’d invited me. Not an abduction, Brynn.”
“Even so, doesn’t he have his own Jad-cursed holy men among the Anglcyn? Rot the man!”
“He has a great many, and seeks more … not cursed, I hope.” Ceinion left a pointed little pause. “From here, from Ferrieres. Even from Rhodias. He is … a different sort of king, my friend. I think he feels his lands are on the way to being safe now, which means new ambitions, ways of thinking. He’s arranging to marry a daughter north, to Rheden.” He looked steadily at the other man.
Brynn sighed. “I’d heard that.”
“And if so, there goes that rivalry on the other side of the Wall, which we’ve relied upon. Our danger is if we remain … the old sort of princes.”
There were three oil lamps burning in the room, one set in the wall, two brought in for a guest: extravagance and respect. In the mingling of yellow lamplight, Brynn’s gaze was direct now. Ceinion, accepting it, felt a wave of memory crash over him from a terrible, glorious summer long ago. This happened more and more as he grew older. Past and present colliding, simultaneous visions, the present seen with the past. This same man, a quarter-century ago, on a battlefield by the sea, the Volgan himself and the Erling force they’d met by their boats. There had been three princes among the Cyngael that day but Brynn had led the centre. A full head of dark hair on him then, far less bulk, less of this easy humour. The same man, though. You changed, and you did not change.
“You said he’s after clerics from Ferrieres?” Picking up the other thing that mattered.
“So he wrote me.”
“It starts with clerics, doesn’t it?”
Ceinion gazed affectionately at his old friend. “Sometimes. They are notoriously aloof, my colleagues across the water.”
“But if not? If it works, opens channels? If the Anglcyn and Ferrieres join to push away the Erling raiders on both sides of the Strait? And mayhap a marriage that way, too …?”
“Then the Erlings come here again, I would think.” Ceinion finished the thought. “If we remain outside whatever is happening. That’s my message to Beda, when I get there.” He paused, then added the thought he’d been travelling with: “There are times when the world changes, Brynn.”
A silence in the room. No noises from the corridor either, now; the household abed, or most of them. Some of the warband likely dicing in the hall still, perhaps with the young Cadyri, money changing hands by lantern light. He didn’t think there would be trouble; Brynn’s men were extremely well trained, and they were hosts tonight. The night breeze came through the window, sweetened with the scent of flowers. Gifts of the god’s offered world. Not to be spurned.
“I hate them, you know. The Erlings and the Anglcyn, both.”
Ceinion nodded, said nothing. What was there to say? A homily about Jad, and love? The big man sighed again. Drained his cup one more time. He showed no effects from the unwatered wine.
“Will you go to him? To Aeldred?” he asked, as Ceinion had expected.
“I don’t know,” he said, which had the virtue of being honest.
BRYNN LEFT, not down the corridor to his own bedchamber, but for one of the outbuildings. A young serving lass waiting for him, no doubt, ready to slip out wrapped in a cloak as soon as she saw him go through the door. Ceinion knew it was his duty to chastise the other man for this. He didn’t even consider it; had known ap Hywll and his wife for too long. One of the things about living in and of the world: you learned how complex it could be.
He doused two of the lamps, disliking the waste. A habit of frugality. He left the door a little ajar, as a courtesy. With Brynn outside, the lord of the manor would not be his own last visitor of the night. He’d been here, and in ap Hywll’s other homes, before.
Somewhat as an afterthought, while he waited, he went to his pack and drew from it the letter he was carrying with him north-west to Beda on the sea. He took the same seat as before, by the window. No moons tonight. The young Cadyri princes would have had a good, black night for a cattle raid … and they’d have been slaughtered. Bad luck for them that Brynn and his men would have been here, but you could die of bad luck.
Jad of the Sun had allowed him to save lives today, a different sort of gift, one that might have meaning that went beyond what a man was permitted to see. His own prayer, every morning, was that the god see fit to make use of him. There was something—there had to be something—in his arriving when he did, looking up the slope, seeing movement in the bushes. And following, for no very good reason besides a knowing that sometimes came to him. More than he deserved, that gift, flawed as he knew he was. Things he had done, in grief, and otherwise. He turned his head and looked out, saw stars through rents in moving clouds, caught the scent of the flowers again, just outside in the night.
Needful as night’s end. Needful as night.
Two subtle offerings in the triad game, then a song, improvised as they listened. Three young people here, on the cusp of their real existence, the possible importance of their lives. And two of them would very likely have been lying dead tonight, if he’d been a day later on the road, or even a few moments.
He ought to kneel and give thanks again, feel a sense of blessing and hope. And those things were there, truly, but they lay underneath something else, more undefined, a heaviness. He felt tired suddenly. The years could creep up on you, if a day lasted too long. He opened the letter again, the red, broken seal crumbling a little.
“Whereas it has for some time been our belief that it is the proper duty of an anointed king under Jad to pursue wisdom and teach virtue by example, as much as it is our task to strengthen and defend …”
With the lamps doused, there wasn’t enough light to read by, particularly for a man no longer young, but he had this committed to memory and was communing with it more than actually considering the contents again, the way one might kneel before a familiar image of the god on one’s own stone chapel wall. Or, the thought came to him, the way one might contemplate the name and stone-carved sun disk over a grave visited so many times it wasn’t really seen, only apprehended, as one lingered one more time until twilight fell, and then the dark.
In the dark, from the corridor, she knocked softly then entered, taking the partially open door for the invitation it was.
“What?” said Enid, setting down the tall candle she carried. “Still dressed and not in the bed? I’d hoped you’d be waiting for me there.”
He stood up, smiling. She came forward and they kissed, though she was kind enough to let it be a kiss of peace on each cheek, and not more than that. She wore some sort of perfume. He wasn’t good at naming these woman-scents but it was immediately distracting. He was suddenly aware of the bed. She’d intended that, he knew. He knew her very well.
Enid looked at the wine cups and the wide-necked flask. “Did he leave any for me?”
“Not much, I fear. There may be some, and water to mix.”
Enid shook her head. “I don’t really need.”
She took the seat her husband had so recently vacated to go out with whichever girl had been waiting for him. In the softer light she was a presence sitting near to him, a scent, a memory of other nights—and other kisses of peace when peace had not been what she’d left behind when she went away. His restraint, not hers, or even Brynn’s, for these two had their own rules in this long marriage and Ceinion had, years ago, been made to understand that. His restraint. A woman very dear.
“You are tired,” she said after a moment’s scrutiny. “He gets the best of you, coming first, and then I arrive—always hoping—and find …”
“A man not worthy of you?”
“A man not susceptible to my diminishing charms. I’m getting old, Ceinion. I think my daughter fell in love tonight.”
He took a breath. “I’ll say, in sequence, no, and no, and … perhaps.”
“Let me work that out.” He could see she was amused. “You are finally yielding to me, I am not yet old in your sight, Rhiannon might be in love?”
There was something about Enid that always made him want to smile. “No, alas, and yes, indeed, and perhaps she is, but the young always are.”
“And those of us not young? Ceinion, will you not kiss me? It has been a year and more.”
He did hesitate a moment, for all the old reasons, but then he stood up and came forward to where she sat and kissed her full upon the lips as she lifted her head, and despite his genuine fatigue he was aware of the beating of his heart and the swift presence of desire. He stepped back. Read her mischievous expression an instant before she moved a hand and touched his sex through the robe.
He gasped, heard her laugh as she withdrew her touch.
“Only exploring, Ceinion. Fear me not. No matter what you say to be kind, there will come a night when I can’t excite you any longer. One of these visits …”
“The night I die,” he said, and meant it.
She stopped laughing, made the sign of the sun disk, averting evil.
Or trying to. They heard a cry from outdoors. Through the window, as he quickly turned, Ceinion saw the arc of a thrown and burning brand.
Then he saw horsemen in the farmyard and screaming began.
ALUN THOUGHT HE’D SEEN his brother this way before, if not quite like this. Dai was restless, irritable, and afraid. Gryffeth, staking out the left side of the just-wide-enough bed, made the mistake of complaining about Dai’s pacing in the dark and received a blister-inducing torrent of profanity in return.
“That wasn’t called for,” Alun said.
Dai wheeled on him, and Alun, in the middle of the bed (having drawn the short straw), stared back at his brother’s straining, rigid outline through the darkness. “Come to bed, get some sleep. She’ll still be here in the morning.”
“What are you talking about?” Dai demanded.
Gryffeth, unwisely, snorted with laughter. Dai took a step towards him. Alun actually thought his brother might strike their cousin. This anger was the part that wasn’t quite as it had been before, whenever Dai had been preoccupied with a girl. That, and the fear.
“Doesn’t matter,” Alun said quickly. “Listen, if you can’t sleep, there’s sure to be dicing in the hall. Just don’t take all the money and don’t drink too much.”
“Why are you telling me what to do?”
“So we can get some rest,” Alun said mildly. “Go with Jad. Win something.”
Dai hesitated, a taut form across the room. Then, with another flung, distracted curse, he jerked the door open and went out.
“Wait,” Alun said quietly to Gryffeth. They waited, side by side in the bed.
The door swung open again.
Dai strode back in, crossed to his pack, grabbed his purse, and went back out.
“Now,” said Alun, “you can call him an idiot.”
“He’s an idiot,” Gryffeth said, with feeling, and turned over in bed.
Alun turned the other way, determined to try to sleep. It didn’t happen. The tapping at their door—and the woman’s voice from the corridor—came only moments later.
IT WAS OBVIOUS from Helda’s expression, and her darting glances at Rhiannon, that she was concerned. Their young cousin had thrown herself on her bed as soon as the four of them had returned from the hall to her chambers. She lay there, still in the green, belted gown, an extravagance of light blazing in the two rooms (with Meredd away, forever now, among the Daughters of Jad, Rhiannon had claimed the adjoining chamber for the other three women). She looked, if truth were told, genuinely unwell: feverish, bright-eyed.
Without a word spoken the three had resolved to humour her, and so nothing had been said in opposition to her immediately voiced demand for all the lights to be lit, or the next request, either.
Rania had the purest voice, in chapel and banquet hall, and Eirin the best memory. They’d gone off to the other room together, murmuring, and now returned through the connecting doorway, Eirin smiling, Rania biting her lip, as she always did before singing.
“I won’t do very well,” she said. “We only heard it once.”
“I know,” Rhiannon said, unusually mild, her voice at odds with her look. “But try.”
They had no harp here with them. Rania sang unaccompanied. It was well done, in truth, a different tone given by a woman’s voice in a quiet (too-bright) room, late at night, as compared to the same song heard in the hall as the sun was going down, when the younger son of Owyn ap Glynn had given it to them:
The halls of Arberth are dark tonight,No moons ride above.I will sing a while and be done.
The night is a hidden stranger,An enemy with a sword,Beasts in field and wood.
The stars look down on owl and wolf,All manner of living creature,While men sleep safe behind their walls.
The halls of Arberth are dark tonight,No moons ride above.I will sing a while and be done.
The first star is a longed-for promise,The deep night a waking dream,Darkness is a net for the heart’s desire.
The stars look down on lover and loved,All manner of delight,For some do not sleep in the night.
The riddle of the darkest hoursHas ever and always been thus,And so it is we can say:
Needful as night’s end,Needful as night,By the holy blessed god, they are both true.
The halls of Arberth are dark tonight,No moons ride above.I have sung a while and I am done.
Rania looked down shyly when she finished. Eirin clapped her hands, beaming. Helda, older than the other three, sat quietly, a faraway look on her face. Rhiannon said, after a moment, “By the holy blessed god.”
It was unclear whether she was echoing the song, or speaking from the heart … or whether both of these were true.
They looked at her.
“What is happening to me?” Rhiannon said, in a small voice.
The others turned to Helda, who had been married and widowed. She said, gently, “You want a man, and it is consuming you. It passes, my dear. It really does.”
“Do you think?” said Rhiannon.
And none of them would ever have matched this voice to the tones of the one who normally controlled them all—the three of them, her sisters, all the young women of household and kin—the way her father commanded his warband.
It might have been amusing, it should have been, but the change cut too deeply, and she looked disturbingly unwell.
“I’m going to get you wine.” Eirin rose.
Rhiannon shook her head. Her green cap slipped off. “I don’t need wine.”
“Yes, you do,” said Helda. “Go, Eirin.”
“No,” said the girl on the bed, again. “That isn’t what I need.”
“You can’t have what you need,” Helda said, walking over to the bed, amusement in her voice, after all. “Eirin, a better thought. Go to the kitchen and have them make an infusion, the one for when we can’t sleep. We’ll all have some.” She smiled at the other three, ten years younger than she was. “Too many men in the house tonight.”
“Is it too late? Could we have him come here?”
“What? The singer?” Helda lifted her eyebrows.
Rhiannon nodded, her eyes beseeching. It was astonishing. She was pleading, not giving a command.
Helda considered it. She wasn’t sleepy at all, herself. “Not alone,” she said finally. “With his brother and the other Cadyri.”
“But I don’t need the other two,” Rhiannon said, a hint of herself again.
“You can’t have what you need,” Helda said again.
Rania took a candle and went for the infusion; Eirin, bolder, was sent to bring the three men. Rhiannon sat up in the bed, felt her own cheeks with the backs of her hands, then rose and went to the window and opened it—against all the best counsel—to let the breeze cool her, if only a little.
“Do I look all right?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Helda, maddeningly.
“I feel faint.”
“I know.”
“I never feel this way.”
“I know,” said Helda. “It passes.”
“Will they be here soon?”
ALUN DRESSED AT SPEED and went to find Dai in the banquet hall, leaving Gryffeth in the corridor with the girl and the candle. Neither of them seemed to mind. They could have gone to the women’s rooms around the corner and waited there, but they didn’t seem inclined to do that.
He carried his harp in its leather case. The woman had specifically said that the daughter of Brynn ap Hywll wanted the singer. The brown-haired girl, telling him this at the door, before Gryffeth got out of bed, had smiled, her eyes catching the candlelight she carried.
So Alun went to get Dai. Found him dicing at a table with two of their own friends and three of the ap Hywll men. He was relieved to see that Dai had a pile of coins in front of him already. His older brother was good at dice, decisive in betting and calculating, and with a wrist flick that let him land the bones—anyone’s bones—on the short side more often than one might expect. If he was winning, as usual, it meant he might not be too badly disturbed after all.
Perhaps. One of the others noticed Alun in the doorway, nudged Dai. His brother glanced up, and Alun motioned him over. Dai hesitated, then saw the harp. He got up and came across the room. It was dark except for lamps on the two tables where men were awake and gaming. Most of those bedding down here were asleep by now, on pallets along the walls, the dogs among them.
“What is it?” Dai said. His tone was curt.
Alun kept his own voice light. “Hate to take you from winning money from Arberthi, but we’ve been invited to the Lady Rhiannon’s rooms.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t make that up.”
Dai had gone rigid, Alun could see it even in the shadows.
“We? All of …?”
“All three of us.” He hesitated. Told truth, better here than there. “She, um, asked for the harp, I gather.”
“Who said that?”
“The girl who fetched us.”
A short silence. Someone laughed loudly at the dicing table. Someone else swore, one of the sleepers along the wall.
“Oh, Jad. Oh, holy Jad. Alun, why did you sing that song?” Dai asked, almost whispering.
“What?” said Alun, genuinely taken aback.
“If you hadn’t …” Dai closed his eyes. “I don’t suppose you could say you were sleepy, didn’t want to get out of bed?”
Alun cleared his throat. “I could.” He was finding this difficult.
Dai shook his head. Opened his eyes again. “No, you’re already out of bed, carrying the harp. The girl saw you.” He swore then, to himself, more like a prayer than an oath, not at Alun or anyone else, really.
Dai lifted both his hands and laid his fists on Alun’s shoulders, the way he sometimes did. Lifted them up and brought them down, halfway between a blow and an embrace. He left them there a moment, then he took his hands away.
“You go,” he said. “I don’t think I am equal to this. I’m going outside.”
“Dai?”
“Go,” said his brother, at some limit of control, and turned away.
Alun watched him walk across the room, unbar the heavy front doors of Brynn ap Hywll’s house, open one of them, and go out alone into the night.
Someone got up from the gaming table and barred the doors behind him. Alun saw one of their own band look over at him; he gestured, and their friend swept up Dai’s purse and winnings for him. Alun turned away.
And in that moment he heard his older brother scream an urgent, desperate warning from the yard outside. The last word he ever heard him speak.
Then the hoofbeats of horses were out there, drumming the hard earth, and the war cries of the Erlings, and fire, as the night went wild.
Chapter III
She is curious and too bold. Always has been, from first awakening under the mound. A lingering interest in the other world, less fear than the others, though iron’s presence can drain her as easily as any of them.
Tonight there are more mortals than she can remember in the house north of the wood; the aura is inescapable. No moons to cast a shadow: she has come away to see. Passed a green spruaugh on the way, seethed at him to stop his chattering, knows he will go now, to tell the queen where she is. No matter, she tells herself. They are not forbidden to look.
The cattle are restless in their pen. First thing she knows, an awareness of that. The lights almost all doused in the house now; shining only in one chamber window, two, and in the big room beyond the heavy doors. Iron on the doors. Mortals sleep at night, fearfully.
She feels hooves on the earth, west of them.
Her own fear, before sight. Then riders leaping the fence, smashing through it into the farmyard below and fire is thrown and iron is drawn, is everywhere, sharp as death, heavy as death. She hasn’t come for this, almost flees, to tell the queen, the others. Stays, up above, unseen flicker in the dark-leaved trees.
Brighter and lesser auras all around the farmyard. The doors bursting open, men running out, from house, from barn, iron to hand in the dark. A great deal of noise, screaming, though she can screen some of that away: mortals too loud, always. They are fighting now. A feeling of hotness within her, dizziness, blood smell in the yard. She feels her hair changing colour. Has seen this before, but not here. Memories, long ago, trying to cross to where she is.
She feels ill, thinned by the iron below. Clings to a beech, draws sap-strength from that. Keeps watching, cold and shivering now, afraid. No moons, she tells herself again, no shadow or flicker of her to be seen, unless a mortal has knowledge of her world.
She watches a black horse rear, strike a running man with hooves, sees him fall. There is fire, one of the outbuildings ablaze now. A confusion of dark and roiling mortal forms. Smoke. Too much blood, too much iron.
Then something else comes to her. And on the thought— quick and bright as a firefly over water—between her shoulders, where they all had wings once, she feels a spasm, a trembling of excitement, like desire. She shivers again, but differently. She spies out more closely: the living and the dead in the chaos of that farmyard below. And yes. Yes.
She knows who died first. She can tell.
He is face down on the churned, trampled earth. First dead of a moonless night. Could be theirs, if she moves quickly enough. Has to be fast, though, his soul fading already, very nearly gone, even as she watches. And such a long time since a mortal in his prime has come to them. To the queen. Her own place in the Ride forever changed if she can do this.
It means going down into that farmyard. Iron all around. Horses thundering, sensing her, afraid. Their hooves.
No moons. The only time this can be done. Nothing of her to be seen. Tells herself that, one more time.
None of them has wings any more or she could fly. She lets go of the tree, finger by finger, and goes forward and down. She sees someone on the way. He is hurrying up the slope, breathing hard. He never knows that she is there, a faerie passing by.
He had to get to his sword. Dai screamed a warning, and then he did it again. Men sprang from pallets, roaring, seizing weapons. The double doors were thrust open, the first of their people hurtling into the night. Alun heard the cries of the Erlings, Brynn’s warband shouting in reply, saw their own men from Cadyr rushing out. But his own room, and his sword, were back along the corridor the other way. Terribly, the other way.
Alun ran for all he was worth, heart pounding, his brother’s voice in his ears, a fist of fear squeezing his heart.
When he got to the room, Gryffeth—who knew battle sounds as well as any of them—had already claimed his own blade and leather helm. He came forward, handed Alun his, wordlessly. Alun dropped the harp where they were; he unsheathed the sword, dropped the scabbard, too, pushed the helmet down on his head.
The woman with Gryffeth was not wordless, and was terrified.
“Dear Jad! There are no guards where we are. Come! Hurry!”
Alun and Gryffeth looked at each other. Nothing to be said. The heart could crack. They ran the other way, farther down the same dark hallway, the brown-haired girl beside them, her hand somehow in Alun’s, candle fallen away. Then north, skidding at the hall’s turning, up the far wing to the women’s rooms.
Away from the double doors, from the fighting in the farmyard. From Dai.
The girl pointed, breathing in gasps. They burst in. A woman screamed, then saw it was them. Covered her mouth with the back of a hand, backing up against a table. Alun took a fast look, sword out. Three women here, one of them Brynn’s daughter. Two rooms, a connecting door. He went straight across to the eastern window, which was, inexplicably, open. Moved to close the shutters, slide down the wooden bar.
The Erling hammer, descending, splintered wood, shattered the sill, barely missed breaking Alun’s extended arm like so much kindling. A woman screamed. Alun stabbed through the wreckage of the window, blindly into the dark. Heard a grunt of pain. Someone shouted a high warning; he twisted hard, a wracking movement, back and away. Horse hooves loomed, thrust for the splintered window frame, smashed it in—and then a man hurtled through and into the room.
Gryffeth went for him, swearing, had his thrust taken by a round shield, barely dodged the axe blow that followed. The women pressed back, screaming. Alun stepped up beside his cousin—then had to wheel back the other way as a second man came roaring through the window, hammer in hand. They’d figured it out, where the women were. Erlings. Here. Nightmare on a moonless night; a night made for an attack.
But what were they doing so far inland? Why here? It made no sense. This was not where the raids came.
Alun swung at the second man, had his sword blocked, wrenchingly. He was bleeding from the splintered wood, so was the Erling. He stepped back, shielding the women. Heard a clattering noise, boots behind him, and then longed-for words.
“Drop weapons! There are two of you, five of us, more coming.”
Alun threw a glance back, saw one of Brynn’s captains, a man almost as big as the Erlings. Jad be thanked for mercy, he thought. The captain had spoken Anglcyn, but slowly. It was close to the Erling tongue; he’d be understood.
“You may be ransomed,” Brynn’s man went on, “if someone cares enough for you. Touch the women and you die badly, and will wish you were dead before you are.”
A mistake, those words, Alun later thought.
Because, hearing them, the first man moved, cat-quick in a crowded room, and he seized Rhiannon mer Brynn—whose warning had been the one that had drawn Alun back from the window—and wrenched her away from the others. The Erling gripped her in front of him as a shield, her arm behind her back, twisted high, his axe gripped short, held to her throat. Alun caught his breath on a curse.
One of the other women dropped to her knees. The room was crowded with men now, smell of sweat and blood, mud and muck from the yard. They could hear the fighting outside, dogs barking frantically, the cattle lowing and shifting in their pen. Someone cried out, and then stopped.
“Ransom, you say?” the Erling grunted. He was yellow-bearded, wearing armour. Eyes beneath a metal helmet, the long nosepiece. “No. Not so. You drop weapons now or this one’s breast is cut off. You want to see? I don’t know who she is, but clothing is fine. Shall I cut?”
Brynn’s captain stepped forward.
“I said drop weapons!”
A silence, taut, straining. Alun’s mouth was dry, as if full of ashes. Dai was outside. Dai was outside. Had been there alone.
“Let him do it,” said Rhiannon, the daughter of Brynn ap Hywll. “Let him do it, then kill him for me.”
“No! Hear me,” Alun said quickly. “There are better than fifty fighting men here. You will not have so many for a raid. Your leader made a mistake. You are losing out there. Listen! There is nowhere for you to go. Choose your fate here.”
“Chose it when we took ship,” the man rasped. “Ingavin claims his warriors.”
“And his warriors kill women?”
“Cyngael whores, they do.”
One of the men behind Alun made a strangled sound. Rhiannon stood, the one arm twisted behind her back, the axe fretting at her throat. Fear in her eyes, Alun saw; none in her words.
“Then die for this Cyngael whore. Kill him, Siawn! Do it!”
The axe, gripped close to the blade, moved. A tear in the high-necked green gown, blood at her collarbone.
“Dearest Jad,” said the woman on her knees.
A heartbeat without movement, without breath. And then the other Erling, the second man in through the window, dropped his shield with a clatter.
“Leave her, Svein. I’ve been taken by them before.”
“Be a woman for the Cyngael, if you want!” the man named Svein snarled. “Ingavin waits for me! Drop weapons, or I cut her apart!”
Alun, looking at pale, wild eyes, hearing battle madness in the voice, laid down his sword, slowly.
There was blood on the girl. He saw her staring back at him. He was thinking of Dai, outside, that shouted warning before the hooves and fire. No weapon at all. His heart was crying and there was a need to kill and he was trying to find a space within himself to pray.
“Do the same,” he said to Gryffeth, without turning his head.
“Do not!” Rhiannon said, whispering it, but very clear.
Gryffeth looked at her and then at Alun, and then he dropped his blade.
“He will kill her,” said Alun to the men behind him, not looking back. His eyes were on the girl’s. “Let his fellows be defeated outside, and then we will settle with these two. They have nowhere on Jad’s earth to go from here.”
“Then he will kill her,” said the man named Siawn, and he stepped forward, still with his sword. Death in his voice, and an old rage.
The axe moved again, another rip in the green, a second ribbon of blood against white skin. One of the women whimpered. Not the one being held, though she was biting her lip now.
They stayed like that, a moment as long as the one before Jad made the world. Then a hammer was thrown.
The yellow-bearded Erling was wearing his iron helmet or his head would have been pulped like a fruit by that blow. Even so, the sound of the impact was sickening at close range in a crowded room. The man crumpled like a child’s doll stuffed with straw; dead before his body, disjointed and splayed, hit the floor. The axe fell, harmlessly.
It seemed to Alun that no one in the room breathed for several moments. Extreme violence could do that, he thought. This wasn’t a battlefield. They were too close together. Such things should happen … outdoors, not in women’s chambers.
The woman in whose chambers they were standing remained where she’d been held, motionless. The flying hammer had passed near enough to brush her hair. Both arms were at her sides now, and no one was holding an axe to her. Alun could see two streams of blood on her gown, the cuts at throat and collarbone. He watched her draw one slow breath. Her hands were shaking. No other sign. Death had touched her, and turned away. One might tremble a little.
He turned away, to the Erling who had thrown that hammer. Reddish beard streaked with grey; long hair spilling from the helmet bowl. Not a young man. His throw, the slightest bit awry, would have killed Brynn’s daughter, crushing her skull. The man looked around at all of them, then held out empty hands.
“All men are fools,” he said in Anglcyn. They could make it out. “The gods gave us little wisdom, some less than others. That man, Svein, angered me, I confess. We all go to our gods, one way or another. Little profit in hurrying there. He’d have killed the girl, and both of us. Foolish. I will not bring a great deal in ransom, but I do yield me, to you both and to the lady.” He looked from Alun to Siawn behind him, and then to Rhiannon mer Brynn.
“Shall I kill him, my lady?” said Siawn grimly. You could hear the wish in him.
“Yes,” said the brown-haired woman, still on her knees. The third woman, Alun saw, had just been sick, on the far side of the room.
“No,” said Rhiannon. Her face was bone-white. She still hadn’t moved. “He’s yielded. Saved my life.”
“And what do you think he would have done if there’d been more of them here?” the man named Siawn asked harshly. “Or fewer of us in the house tonight, by Jad’s mercy? Do you think you’d still be clothed, and standing?” Alun had had the same thought.
They were speaking Cyngael. The Erling looked from one of them to the other, then he chuckled, and answered in their own language, heavily accented. He had been raiding here before; he’d said as much.
“She would have been claimed by Mikkel, who is the only reason we are so far from the ships. Or by his brother, which would have been worse. They’d have stripped her and taken her, in front of all of us, I imagine.” He looked at Alun. “Then they’d have found a bad way to kill her.”
“Why? Why that? She’s … just a woman.” Alun needed to leave, but also needed to understand. And another part of him was afraid to go. The world, his life, might change forever when he went outside. As long as he was here, in this room …
“This is the house of Brynn ap Hywll,” said the Erling. “Our guide told us that.”
“And so?” Alun asked. They’d had a guide. He registered that. Knew the Arberthi would, as well.
Rhiannon was breathing carefully, he saw. Not looking at anyone. Had never once screamed, he thought, only that one warning to him, when the horse smashed the window.
The Erling took off his iron helmet. His red hair was plastered to his skull, hung limply to his shoulders. He had a battered, broken-nosed face. “Mikkel Ragnarson leads this raid, with his brother. One purpose only, though I did try to change his mind for those of us who came for our own sakes, not his. He is the son of Ragnar Siggurson, and grandson of Siggur, the one we named the Volgan. This is vengeance.”
“Oh, Jad!” cried the man named Siawn. “Oh, Jad and all the Blessed Victims! Brynn was outside when they came! Let’s go!”
Alun had already picked up his sword, had turned, twisted through the others, was flying as fast as he could down the corridor for the double doors. Siawn’s desperate cry came from behind him.
Brynn ap Hywll hadn’t been the only one outside.
He hadn’t killed anyone yet, the thought came. A need was rising, with his terror.
TERROR WENT AWAY like smoke on a wind as soon as he was out through the doors and saw what there was to see. Its passing left behind a kind of hollowness: a space not yet filled by anything. He had been quite certain, in fact, from the moment he’d heard Dai’s first cry, but there was knowing, and knowing.
The attack was over. There hadn’t been enough of the Erlings to cope with Brynn’s warband here and their own Cadyri, even with the element of surprise. It was obviously to have been a raid on an isolated farmhouse—a large, specifically chosen farmhouse, but even so, this had been meant to kill Brynn ap Hywll, not meet his gathered force. Someone had erred, or had very bad luck. He’d said that himself, inside. Before he’d come running out into the yard to see the body lying here not far from the open doors. Not far at all.
He stopped running. Others were moving, all around him. They seemed oddly distant, vague, blurred somehow. He stood very still, and then, with an effort that took a great deal out of him, as though his body had become extremely heavy, Alun went forward again.
Dai hadn’t had anything but the knife in his belt when he’d gone out, but there was an Erling sword in his hand now. He was face down in the grass and mud, a dead raider beside him. Alun went over to that place, where he lay, and he knelt in the mud and put down his own blade, and took off his helmet and set it down, and then, after another moment, he turned his brother over and looked at him.
Not cheap, the selling of his life, the “Lament for Seisyth” went. The one the bards sang, at one point or another, in the halls of all three provinces during those winter nights when men longed for spring’s quickening and the blood and souls of the younger ones quickened at the thought of bright, known deeds.
The axe blow that killed Dai had fallen from behind and above, from horseback. Alun saw that by the light of the torches moving through the yard now. His blood and soul did not quicken. He held a maimed body, terribly loved. The soul was … elsewhere. He ought to pray now, Alun thought, offer the known, proper words. He couldn’t even remember them. He felt old, weighted by grief, the need to weep.
But not yet. It was not over yet. He heard shouting still. There was an armed Erling in the yard some distance away, his back to the door of one of the outbuildings, holding a sword to a nearly naked figure in a half-ring made by the Arberthi warband and Alun’s own companions.
Still on his knees, his brother’s head in his lap now, blood soaking into his leggings and tunic, Alun saw that the captive figure was Brynn ap Hywll, being held—in the most savage irony he could imagine—exactly as his daughter had been, moments before.
The clerics taught in chapel (and text, for those who could read) that Jad of the Sun did battle in the night under the world for his children, that he was not cruel or capricious as the gods of the pagans were, making sport of mortal men.
You would not have known it tonight.
Riderless horses moving in the yard among the dead; servants running after them, taking their reins. Wounded men crying. The flames seemed to have been put out except for one shed, burning down at the other end of the farmyard, nothing near it to be claimed by fire.
There had been more than fifty fighting men sleeping here tonight, with weapons and armour. The northmen could not have known or expected that, not in a farmhouse. Bad luck for them.
The Erlings had fled or were taken, or were dead. Except one of them held Brynn now, with nowhere to go. Alun wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but he was about to do something.
You go. I don’t think I am equal to this. Not the voice, the brother, he’d known all his life. And for a very last word, a command, torn from him: Go!
Sending Alun away, at the end. And how could that be their last shared moment in the god’s world? In a life Alun had lived with his brother from the time he was born?
He set Dai’s head gently down and rose from the mud and started over towards that torchlit half-circle of men. Someone was speaking; he was too far away yet to hear. He saw that Siawn and Gryffeth and the others had come out now, the big, red-bearded Erling gripped between two of them. He looked over at his cousin, and then away: Gryffeth had seen him kneeling beside Dai, so he knew. He was using his sword for support, point down in the earth, looked as if he wanted to sink into the dark, trampled grass. They had grown up together, the three of them, from childhood. Not so long ago.
Rhiannon mer Brynn was in the yard as well now, beside her mother, who was standing straight as a Rhodian marble column, not far from the arc of men, gaz ing at her captive husband through the smoke and flames.
HE SAW OWYN’S YOUNGER SON—Owyn’s only son now, a sorrow under Jad—moving too quickly towards the other men, sword in hand, and he understood what was working in him. It could be like a poison, grief. Ceinion went forward swiftly, at an angle, to intercept him. A necessary life was still in the balance. It was too dark to read faces, but you could sometimes tell a man’s intention from the way he moved. There was death around them in the farmyard, and death in the way the young Cadyri prince was going forward.
Ceinion spoke, almost running, calling his name. Alun kept going. Ceinion had to catch him, lay a hand on the young man’s arm—and received a look that chilled him, for his pains.
“Remember who you are!” the cleric snapped, deliberately cold. “And what is happening here.”
“I know what happened here,” said the boy—he was still something of that, though his father’s heir as of tonight. And there were ripples that might flow from that, for all of them. Princes mattered, under Jad.
“It is still happening. Wait, and pray. That man with the sword is the Volgan’s grandson.”
“I thought as much,” said Alun ab Owyn, a bleakness in his voice that was a sorrow of its own to the cleric hearing it. “We learned he was leading them, inside.” He drew a breath. “I need to kill him, my lord.”
There were things you were supposed to say to that, in the teachings, and he knew what they were, he had even written some of them. What Ceinion of Llywerth, high cleric of the Cyngael, anchor and emblem of his people’s faith in Jad, murmured amid the orange flickering of torches and the black smoke was: “Not yet, my dear. You can’t kill him yet. Soon, I hope.”
Alun looked at him, and after a stiff moment nodded his head, once. They went forward together into that half-circle of men and were in time to see what happened there.
The taken-away sword had struck the tumbled raider first, but a second Erling’s axe from behind and above had killed the Cyngael sooner.
She crouches by the fence until those first two bodies are left alone again—the one who knelt beside one of them standing and walking away—and then, not allowing any time for fear to take hold of her, she goes straight in, at speed, and claims a soul for the queen.
A moonless night. Only on a moonless night.
Once it was otherwise and easier, but once, also, they were able to fly. She lays hands on the body, and speaks the words they are all taught, says them for the first time, and—yes, there!—she sees his soul rise from blood and earth to her summoning.
It hovers, turning, drifting, in a stray breath of wind. She exults fiercely, aroused, her hair changing colour, again and then again, body tingling with excitement, even amid the fear of shod hooves and the presence of iron, which is weakening and can kill her.
She watches the soul she’s claimed for the Ride float above the sprawled, slain mortal body and she sees it turn to go, uncertain, insubstantial, not entirely present yet in her world, though that will come, it will come. She didn’t expect to feel so much desire. This isn’t hers, though, this is for the queen.
He turns completely around in the air, moves upwards, then comes slowly back down, touches ground, already gathering form again. He looks towards her, sees, doesn’t see—not quite yet—and then to the south he turns and begins to go, pulled towards the wood … as if to a half-remembered home.
He will reach them in the forest soon, taking surer, stronger form as he goes, a shape in their world now, and the queen will see him when he arrives, and will love him, as a precious gift, shining by water and wood and in the mound. And she herself, when she rejoins the others, will be touched by the glory of doing this as silver moonlight touches and lights pools in the night.
No moons tonight. A gift she has been given, this mortal death in the dark, and so beautiful.
She looks around, sees no one near, goes out then from that farmyard, from iron and mortals, living and dead, springing over the fence, up the slope, stronger as she leaves blades and armour behind. She pauses at the crest of the ridge to look back down. She always looks when near to them. Drawn to this other, mortal half of the world. It happens among the Ride, she isn’t the only one. There are stories told.
The auras below are brighter than torches for her: anger, grief, fear. She finds all of these, takes them in, tries to distill them and comprehend. She looks down from the same beech tree as before, fingers upon it, as before. Two very big men in the midst of a ring; one holding iron to the other, who came bursting out of the small structure, roaring for a weapon. It frightened her, the red heat in that voice. But he was seen by the raider before his own men could reach him, and pinned by a sword to the wall. Not killed. She was not sure why, at first, but now she sees. Or thinks she does: other men arrive, freeze like carvings, then more come, gather, and are there now, like stone, torchlight around two men.
One of the two is afraid, but not the one she would have thought. She doesn’t understand mortals well at all. Another world, they live in.
It is quiet now, the battle over except for this, and one other thing they will not know, down below. She listens. Has always liked to listen, and watch. Trying to understand.
“Understand me,” the Erling said again, in his own tongue. “I kill him if anyone moves!”
“Then do it!” snapped Brynn ap Hywll. He was barefoot in the grass, only a grey undertunic covering his belly and heavy thighs. Another man would have looked ridiculous, Ceinion thought. Not Brynn, even with a sword to him and the Erling’s left hand bunching his tunic tightly from behind.
“I want a horse and an oath to your god that I will be allowed passage to our ships. Swear it or he dies!” The voice was high, almost shrill.
“One horse? Pah! A dozen men you led are standing here! You stain the earth with your breathing.” Brynn was quivering with rage.
“Twelve horses! I want twelve horses! Or he dies!”
Brynn roared again. “No one swear that oath! No one dare!”
“I will kill him!” the Erling screamed. His hands were shaking, Ceinion saw. “I am the grandson of Siggur Volganson!”
“Then do it!” Brynn howled back. “You castrate coward! Do it!”
“No!” said Ceinion. He stepped forward into the ring of light. “No! My friend, be silent, in Jad’s name. You do not have permission to leave us!”
“Ceinion! Don’t swear that oath! Do not!”
“I will swear it. You are needed.”
“He won’t do it. He’s a coward. Kill me and die with me, Erling! Go to your gods. Your grandfather would have gutted me like a fish by now! He’d have ripped me open.” There was a white-hot, spitting fury in his voice, near to madness.
“You killed him!” the Erling snarled.
“I did! I did! I chopped off his arms and cut his chest open and ate his bloody heart and laughed! So carve me now and let them do the same to you!”
Ceinion closed his eyes. Opened them. “This must not be. Erling, hear me! I am high cleric of the Cyngael. Hear me! I swear by holiest Jad of the Sun—”
“No!” roared Brynn. “Ceinion, I forbid—”
“—that no harm will come to you when you release—”
“No!”
“—this man, and that you will be allowed—”
The small door to the outbuilding—it was the brewhouse—banged open, right behind the two men. The Erling startled like a nervous horse, looked frantically back over his shoulder, swore.
Died. Brynn ap Hywll, in the moment his captor half turned, hammered an elbow viciously backwards and up into the other man’s unprotected face beneath the nosepiece, smashing his mouth open. He twisted hard away from the sword thrust that followed. It raked blood from his side, no more than that. He stepped back quickly, turned …
“Here!”
Ceinion saw a sword arcing through the torchlight. Something beautiful in that flight, something terrible. Alun ab Owyn’s blade was caught by Brynn at the hilt. Ceinion saw his old friend smile then, a grey wolf in winter, at the Cadyri prince who had thrown it. I ate his heart.
He hadn’t. Might have done, though, the way he’d been that day. Ceinion remembered that fight—against this one’s grand father. A meeting of giants, crashing together on a blood-slick morning battlefield by the sea. In battle this fury happened to Brynn, the way it did to the Erlings of Ingavin’s bear cult: a madness of war, claiming a soul. If you became what you fought, what were you? Not the night for that thought. Not here, good men dead in the dark farmyard.
“He swore an oath!” the Erling bubbled, spitting teeth. Blood in the broken mouth.
“Jad curse you,” said Brynn. “My people died here. And my guests. Rot your ugly soul!” He moved, barefoot, half-naked. The Cadyri blade in his hand flicked right. The Erling moved to block it. The younger man wore armour, was big, rangy, in his prime.
Had been. The annihilating backhand blow swept down like a falling of rocks from a mountain height, crashing through his late parry, biting so deeply into his neck between helmet and breastplate that Brynn had to plant a foot on the fallen man, after, to lever and jerk it out.
He stood back, looked around slowly, flexing his neck and shoulder muscles, a bear in a circle of fire. No one moved, or said a word. Brynn shook his head, as if to clear it, to release fury, come back to himself. He turned to the door of the brewhouse. A girl stood there, in an unbelted tunic, flushing in the torchlight, her dark hair loose, for bed. For being bedded. Brynn looked at her.
“That was bravely done,” he said, quietly. “Let all men know it.”
She bit at her lower lip, was trembling. Ceinion was careful not to look to where Enid stood beside her daughter. Brynn turned around, took a step towards him, then another. Stopped squarely in front of the cleric, feet planted wide on his own soil.
“I’d never have forgiven you,” he said, after a moment.
Ceinion met that gaze. “You’d have been alive to not forgive me. I spoke truth: you do not have leave to go from us. You are needed still.”
Brynn was breathing hard, the coursing rage not yet gone from him, the big chest heaving, not from exertion but from the force of his anger. He looked at the young Cadyri behind Ceinion. Gestured with the blade.
“I thank you for this,” he said. “You were quicker than my own men.”
Owyn’s son said, “No thanks need be. At least my sword is blooded, though by another. I did nothing at all tonight but play a harp.”
Brynn looked down at him a moment from his great height. He was bleeding from the right side, Ceinion saw, the tunic ripped open there; he didn’t seem aware of it. Brynn glanced away into the shadows of the farmyard, west of them. The cattle were still lowing on the other side in their pen. “Your brother’s dead?”
Alun nodded his head, stiffly.
“Shame upon my life,” said Brynn ap Hywll. “This was a guest in my house.”
Alun made no reply. His own breathing was shallow, by contrast, constricted. Ceinion thought that he needed to be given wine, urgently. Oblivion for a night. Prayer could come after, in the morning with the god’s light.
Brynn bent down, wiped both sides of the blade on the black grass, handed it back to Alun. He turned towards the brewhouse. “I need clothing,” he said. “All of you, we will deal with …”
He stopped, seeing his wife in front of him.
“We will deal with the dead, and do what we can for the wounded,” Enid said crisply. “There will be ale for the living, who were so valiant here.” She looked over her shoulder. “Rhiannon, have the kitchen heat water and prepare cloths for wounds. Fetch all my herbs and medications, you know where they are. All of the women are to come to the hall.” She turned back to her husband. “And you, my lord, will apologize tonight and tomorrow and the next day to Kara, here. You likely gave her the fright of a young life, more than any Erling would have, when she came to fetch ale for those still dicing and found you sleeping in the brewhouse. If you want a night’s sleep outside the doors, my lord, choose another place next time, if we have guests?”
Ceinion loved her even more, then, than he had before.
Not the only one, he saw. Brynn bent down and kissed his wife on the cheek. “We hear and obey you, my lady,” he said.
“You are bleeding like a fat, speared boar,” she said. “Have yourself attended to.”
“Am I permitted the slight dignity of trousers and boots first?” he asked. “Please?” Someone laughed, a release of strain.
Someone else moved, very fast.
Siawn, a little tardy, cried out, following. But the red-bearded Erling had torn free of those holding him and, seizing a shield from one of them—not a sword— crashed through the ring around Brynn and his wife.
He turned away from them, looking up and south, raised the shield. Siawn hesitated, confused. Ceinion wheeled towards the slope and the trees. Saw nothing at all, in the black night.
Then he heard an arrow strike the lifted shield.
“There he goes!” said the Erling, speaking Cyngael very clearly.
He was pointing. Ceinion, whose eyes were good, saw nothing, but Alun ab Owyn shouted, “I see him. Same ridge we were on today! Heading down the other way.”
“Don’t touch the arrow!” Ceinion heard. He spun back. The big Erling, not a young man, grey in his hair and beard, set down the shield carefully. “Not even the shaft, mind.”
“Poison?” It was Brynn.
“Always.”
“You know who it was, then?”
“Ivarr, this one’s brother.” He jerked his head towards the one on the ground. “Black-souled from birth, and a coward.”
“This one was brave?” Brynn snarled it.
“He was here with a sword,” said the Erling. “The other one uses arrows, and poison.”
“And Erlings should be much too brave to do that,” Brynn said icily. “Can’t rape a woman with a bow and arrow.”
“Yes, you can,” said the Erling quietly, meeting his gaze.
Brynn took a step towards him.
“He saved your life!” Ceinion said quickly. “Or Enid’s.”
“Buying his own,” Brynn snapped.
The Erling actually laughed. “There’s that,” he said. “Trying to, at any rate. Ask someone what happened inside.”
But before that could be done, they heard another sound. Drumming hooves. An Erling horse thundered through the yard, leaped the fence. Ceinion, seeing the rider, cried out after him, hopelessly.
Alun ab Owyn, pursuing a foe he was unlikely ever to see or find, disappeared almost immediately on the dark path that curved around the ridge.
“Siawn!” said Brynn. “Six men. Follow him!”
“A horse for me,” cried Ceinion. “That is the heir of Cadyr, Brynn!”
“I know it is. He wants to kill someone.”
“Or be killed,” said the red-bearded Erling, watching with interest.
THE ARCHER HAD a considerable start and poison on his arrows. It was pitch black on the path among the trees. Alun had no knowledge of the Erling horse he’d seized and mounted, and the horse wouldn’t know the woods at all.
He cleared the fence, landed, kicked the animal ahead. They pounded up the path. He had a sword, no helmet (on the ground, in mud, beside Dai), no torch, felt a degree of unconcern he couldn’t ever remember in himself before. A branch over the path struck his left shoulder, rocked him in the saddle. He grunted with pain. He was doing something entirely mad, knew it.
He was also thinking as fast as he could. The archer would come out and down from the slope—almost certainly—at the place they had reached earlier today, with Ceinion. The Erling was fleeing, would have a horse waiting for him. Would anticipate pursuit and head back into the trees, not straight along the path to the main trail west.
Alun lashed the horse around a curve. He was going too fast. It was entirely possible that a stump or boulder would break the animal’s leg, send Alun flying, crack his neck. He flattened himself over the mane and felt the wind of another branch pass over his head. There was a body behind him, on the churned-up earth of a farmyard far from home. He thought of his mother and father. Another blackness there, darker than this night. He rode.
The only good thing about the moonless sky was that the archer would have trouble finding his way, too—and seeing Alun clearly, if he came close enough for a bowshot. Alun reached the forking trail where the slope came out on the path south-west. Remembered, only this afternoon, climbing up with Dai and then both of them coming down with the high cleric.
He drew a breath and left the path right there, not hesitating, plunging into the woods.
It was impossible, almost immediately. Swearing, he pulled the horse to a stop and listened in blackness. Heard—blessed be Jad—a sound through leaves, not far ahead. It could be an animal. He didn’t think it was. He twitched the reins, moved the horse forward, carefully now, picking his way, sword out. A semblance of a trail, no more than that. His eyes were adjusting but there was no light at all. An arrow would kill him, easily.
He dismounted on that thought. Looped the reins around a tree trunk. His hair was slick with sweat. He heard sounds again—something ahead of him. It wasn’t an animal. Someone unused to being silent in a forest, an unknown wood, far from the sea, amid the terror of pursuit, a raid having gone entirely wrong. Alun gripped his sword and followed.
He came upon the four Erlings too quickly, before he was ready for them, stumbling through beech trees into a sudden, small space, seeing them there, shadows—two kneeling to catch their breath, one slumped against a tree, the fourth directly in front of him, facing the other way.
Alun killed that one from behind, kept moving, slashed away the sword of the one leaning by the tree, gripped him and turned him with an arm twisted behind his back, snarled, “Drop blades, both of you!” to the kneeling pair.
A triad, he thought suddenly, remembering Rhiannon held, then Brynn. Third time tonight. The thought was urgent, sword-swift.
He remembered what had happened to the other two men who had held their captives this way, and even as the thought came he broke the pattern. He killed the man he was using as a shield, pushing him hard away to fall on the earth, and he stood alone to face two Erlings in a clearing in a wood.
He had never actually killed before. Two now, in moments.
“Come on!” he screamed at the pair before him. Both bigger than him, hardened sea-raiders. He saw the nearer one’s head jerk suddenly, looking past Alun, and without any actual thought Alun dove to his right. The arrow from behind flew past him and hit the Erling in the sword arm.
“Ivarr, no!” the man screamed.
Alun rolled, scrambled up, turned his back on the two of them, sprinting immediately east into the thicket where the bowman would be. He heard him running through to the other side, then mounting up. The horse was there!
He wheeled back, running hard, swearing savagely. The fourth of those he’d surprised here was running the other way, towards the path. The wounded man was on his knees, clutching the arrow in his arm, making small, queer sounds. He was as good as dead, they both knew it: poison on the arrowhead, the shaft. Alun ignored him, pushed through to his horse, clawed free the reins, mounted, forced his way back through the trees and then the clearing again to the other side. He could still hear the archer’s horse ahead of them, that rider swearing too, fighting to find a path through in thick, treed blackness. He felt a surging in his blood, fury and hardness and pain. His sword was red, his own doing this time. It didn’t help. It didn’t help.
He broke through, the horse thrashing into open space, saw water, a pool in the wood, the other rider going around it to the south. Alun roared wordlessly; galloped the Erling horse into the shallow water, splashing through at an angle to shorten the way, cut off the other man.
He was almost thrown over the animal’s head as it halted, stiff-legged.
It reared straight back up, neighing, clawing at the air in terror, and then it came down and did not move at all, as if anchored so firmly it might never stir again.
The entirely unexpected will elicit very different responses in people, and the sudden intrusion of the numinous—the vision utterly outside one’s range of experience—will exaggerate this, of course. One person will be terrified into denial, another will shiver in delight at a making manifest of dreams held close for a lifetime. A third might assume himself intoxicated or bewitched. Those who ground their lives in a firm set of beliefs about the nature of the world are particularly vulnerable to such moments, though not without exception.
Someone who—like Owyn’s younger son that night— had already had his life broken into shards, who was exposed and raw as a wound, might be said to have been ready for confirmation that he’d never properly understood the world. We are not constant, in our lives, or our responses to our lives. There are moments when this becomes clear.
Alun’s foot came out of one stirrup when the horse reared. He clutched at the animal’s neck, fought to stay in the saddle, barely did so as the hooves splashed down hard. His sword fell into the shallow water. He swore again, tried to make the horse move, could not. He heard music. Turned his head.
Saw a growing, inexplicable presence of light, pale as moonrise, but there were no moons tonight. Then, as the music grew louder, approaching, Alun ab Owyn saw what was passing by him, walking and riding on the surface of that water, in bright procession, the light a shimmering, around them and in them. And everything about the night and the world changed then, was silvered, because they were faeries and he could see them.
He closed his eyes, opened them again. They were still there. His heart was pounding, as if trying to break free of his breast. He was trammelled, entangled as in nets, between the desperate need to flee from the unholy Jad-cursed demons these must be—by all the teachings of his faith—and the impulse to dismount and kneel in the water of this starlit pool before the very tall, slender figure he saw on an open litter, borne in the midst of the dancing of them all, with her pale garments and nearly white skin and her hair that kept changing its colour in the silvered light that grew brighter as they passed, the music louder now, wild as his heart’s beating. There was a constriction in his chest, he had to remind himself to breathe.
If these were evil spirits, iron would keep them at bay, so the old tales promised. He’d dropped his sword in the water. It occurred to him that he ought to make the sign of the sun disk, and with that thought he realized that he couldn’t.
He couldn’t move. His hands on the horse’s reins, the horse rooted in the shallows of the pool, the two of them breathing statues watching what was passing by. And in that growing, spirit-shaped brightness in the depths of a moonless wood at night, Alun saw— for the first time— that the saddle cloth of the Erling horse he rode bore the pagan hammer symbol of Ingavin.
And then, looking at that queen again—for who else could this possibly be, borne across still waters, shining, beautiful as hope or memory?—Alun saw someone next to her, riding a small, high-stepping mare with bells and bright ribbons in its mane, and there came a harder pounding, like a killing hammer against his wounded heart.
He opened his mouth—he could do that—and he began to shout against the music, struggling more and more wildly to move arms or legs, to dismount, to go there. He was unable to do anything at all, couldn’t stir from where he and the horse were rooted, as his brother rode past him, changed utterly and not changed at all, dead in the farmyard below them, and riding across night waters here, not seeing Alun, or hearing him, one hand extended, and claimed, laced in the long white fingers of the faerie queen.
SIAWN AND HIS MEN knew exactly where they were going, heading up the slope. They also had torches. Ceinion, though he preferred to walk, had been riding all his life. They came to the place where the trail from the ridge met the path, stopped there, the horses stamping. The cleric, though much the oldest, was the first to hear sounds. Pointed into the woods. Siawn led them there, cutting a little north of where Alun had tried to force his way through. There were nine of them. The other young Cadyri, Gryffeth ap Ludh, had joined them, fighting sorrow. They found the two dead Erlings and a dying one almost immediately.
Siawn leaned over in his saddle and killed the wounded man with his sword. He’d needed to do that, Ceinion thought: Brynn’s captain had come into the yard too late, after the fighting was done. The cleric said nothing. There were teachings against this, but this wood tonight was not the place for them.
By the light of their smoking torches they saw signs of passage through the far side of that small glade. They went straight through and out the other side, and so came to the wider clearing, the pool of water under stars. Stopped then, all of them, without words. It became very quiet, even the horses.
The man next to Ceinion made the sign of the sun disk. The cleric, a little belatedly, did the same. Pools in the wood, wells, oak groves, mounds … the half-world. The pagan places that had once been holy before the Cyngael had come to Jad, or the god had come to them in their valleys and hills.
These forest pools were his enemies, and Ceinion knew it. The first clerics, arriving from Batiara and Ferrieres, had chanted stern invocations, reading from the liturgy beside such waters as this, casting out all presence of false spirits and old magics. Or trying to. People might kneel today in stone chapels of the god and go straight from them to seek their future from a wise woman using mouse bones, or drop an offering in a well. Or into a pool by moonlight, or under stars.
“Let’s go,” Ceinion said. “This is just water, just a wood.”
“No it isn’t, my lord,” said the man beside him, respectfully but firmly. The one who had made the sign. “He’s here. Look.” And only then did Ceinion see the boy on his horse, motionless in the water, and understand.
“Dear Jad!” said one of the others. “He went into the pool.”
“No moons,” said another. “A moonless night—look at him.”
“Do you hear music?” said Siawn abruptly. “Listen!”
“We do not,” said Ceinion of Llywerth, fiercely, his heart beating fast now.
“Look at him,” Siawn repeated. “He’s trapped. Can’t even move!” The horses were restive now, agitated by their riders, or by something else, tossing their heads.
“Of course he can move,” said the cleric, and swung down from his mount and went forward, striding hard, a man used to woods and nights and swift, decisive movement.
“No!” cried a voice from behind him. “My lord, do not—”
That he ignored. There were souls here, to save and defend. His entrusted task for so long. He heard an owl cry, hunting. A normal sound, proper in a night wood. Part of the order of things. Men feared the unknown, and so the dark. Jad was Light in his being, an answer to demons and spirits, shelter for his children.
He spoke a swift prayer and went straight into the pool, splashing through the shallows, calling the young prince’s name. The boy didn’t even turn his head. Ceinion came up beside him, and in the darkness he saw that Alun ab Owyn’s mouth was wide open, as though he was trying to speak—or shout. He caught his breath.
And then, terribly, there was the sound of music. Very faint it seemed to Ceinion, ahead of them and to the right. Horns and flutes, stringed instruments, bells, moving across the unrippled stillness of the water. He looked, saw nothing there. Ceinion spoke Jad’s holy name. He signed the disk, and seized the reins of the Erling horse. It wouldn’t move.
He didn’t want the others to see him struggling with the animal. Their souls, their belief, were in danger here. He reached up with both arms and pulled Owyn’s son, unresisting, from the saddle. He threw the young man over one shoulder and carried him, splashing and staggering, almost falling, out of the pool, and he laid him down on the dark grass at the water’s edge. Then he knelt beside him, touched the disk about his throat, and prayed.
After a moment, Alun ab Owyn blinked. He shook his head. Drew a breath and then closed his eyes, which was a curious relief, because what Ceinion saw in his face, even in the darkness, was harrowing.
Eyes still closed, voice low, utterly uninflected, the young Cadyri said, “I saw him. My brother. There were faeries, and he was there.”
“You did not,” Ceinion said firmly, clearly. “You are grieving, my child, and in a strange place, and you have just killed someone, I believe. Your mind was overswayed. It happens, son of Owyn. I know it happens. We long for those we have lost, we see them … everywhere. Believe me, sunrise and the god will set you right on this.”
“I saw him,” Alun repeated.
No emphasis, the quiet more unsettling than fervour or insistence would have been. He opened his eyes, looking up at Ceinion.
“You know that is heresy, lad. I do not want—”
“I saw him.”
Ceinion looked over his shoulder. The others had remained where they were, watching. Too far away to hear. The pool was still as glass. No wind in the glade. Nothing that could be taken for music now. He must have imagined it himself; would never claim to be immune to the strangeness of a place like this. And he had a memory of his own, pushed hard away, always, of … another place like this. He was aware of the shapes of power, the weight of the past. He was a fallible man, always had been, struggling to be virtuous in times that made it hard.
He heard the owl again; far side of the water now. Ceinion looked up, stars overhead in the bowl of sky between trees.
The Erling horse shook its head, snorted loudly, and walked placidly out of the pond by itself. It lowered its head to crop the black grass beside them. Ceinion watched it for a moment, the utter ordinariness. He looked back at the boy, took a deep breath.
“Come, lad,” he said. “Will you pray with me, at Brynn’s chapel?”
“Of course,” said Alun ab Owyn, almost too calmly. He sat up, and then stood, without aid. Then he walked straight back into the pool.
Ceinion half lifted a hand in protest, then saw the boy bend down and pick up a sword from the shallows. Alun walked back out.
“They’ve gone, you see,” he said.
They returned to the others, leading the Erling horse. Two of Brynn’s men made the sign of the disk as they came up, eyeing the Cadyri prince warily. Gryffeth ap Ludh dismounted and embraced his cousin. Alun returned the gesture, briefly. Ceinion watched him, his brow knit.
“The two Cadyri and I will go back to Brynnfell,” he said.
“Two of them escaped from me,” Alun said, looking up at Siawn. “The one with the bow. Ivarr.”
“We’ll catch him,” said Siawn, quietly.
“He went south, around the water,” Owyn’s son said, pointing. “Probably double back west.” He seemed composed, grave even. Too much so, in fact. The cousin was weeping. Ceinion felt a needle of fear.
“We’ll catch him,” Siawn repeated, and cantered off, giving the pool a wide berth, his men following.
Certainty can be misplaced, even when there is fair cause for it. They didn’t, in fact, catch him: a man on a good-enough horse, in darkness, which made tracking hard. Some days later, word would come to Brynnfell of two people killed, by arrows—a farm labourer and a young girl—in the thinly populated valley between them and the sea. Both the man and the girl had been blood-eagled, which was an abomination. Nor would anyone ever find the Erling ships moored, Jad alone knew where, along the wild and rocky coastline to the west. The god might indeed know, but he didn’t always confide such things to his mortal children, doing what they could to serve him in a dark and savage world.
Chapter IV
Rhiannon had known since childhood (not yet so far behind her) that her father’s importance did not emerge from court manners and courtly wit. Brynn ap Hywll had achieved power and renown by killing men: Anglcyn and Erling and, on more than one occasion, those from the provinces of Cadyr and Llywerth, in the (lengthy) intervals between (brief) truces among the Cyngael.
“Jad’s a warrior,” was his blunt response to a sequence of clerics who’d joined his household and then attempted to instill a gentler piety in the battle-scarred leader of the Hywll line.
Nonetheless, whatever she might have known from harp song and meadhall tale, his daughter had never seen her father kill until tonight. Until the moment when he had slashed a thrown and caught sword deep into the Erling who’d been trying to bargain his way to freedom.
It hadn’t disturbed her, watching the man die.
That was a surprise. She had discovered it about herself: seeing the sword of Alun ab Owyn in her father’s thick hands come down on the Erling. She wondered if it was a bad, even an impious thing that she didn’t recoil from what she saw and heard: strangled, bubbling cry, blood bursting, a man falling like a sack.
It gave her, in truth, a measure of satisfaction. She knew that she ought properly to atone for that, in chapel. She had no intention of doing so. There were two gashes on her throat and neck from an Erling axe. There was blood on her body, and on her green gown. She had been expecting to die in her own chambers tonight. Had told Siawn and his men to let the Erling kill her. She could still hear herself speaking those words. Resolute then, she’d had to conceal shaking hands after.
Had, accordingly, little sympathy to spare for Erling raiders when they were slain, and that applied to the five her father ordered executed when it became evident they were not going to bring any ransom.
They were dispatched where they stood in the torch-lit yard. No words spoken, no ceremony, pause for prayer. Five living men, five dead men. In the time one might lift and drink a cup of wine. Brynn’s men began walking around the yard with torches, killing those Erlings who lay on the ground, wounded, not yet dead. They had come to raid, take slaves, rape and kill, the way they always came.
A message needed to be sent, endlessly: the Cyngael might not worship gods of storm and sword, or believe in an afterworld of endless battle, but they could be— some of them could be—as bloody and as ruthless as an Erling when need was.
She was still outside when her father spoke to the older, red-bearded raider. Brynn walked up to the man, held again between two of their people, more tightly than before. He had broken free once—and saved Brynn from an arrow. Her father, Rhiannon realized, was dealing with a great anger because of that.
“How many of you were here?” Brynn bit off the words, speaking quietly. He was never quiet, she thought.
“Thirty, a few more.” No hesitation. The man was almost as big as her father, Rhiannon saw. And of an age.
“As many left behind?”
“Forty, to guard the ships. Take them off the coast, if necessary.”
“Two ships?”
“Three. We had some horses, to come inland.”
Brynn had dressed by now, was holding his own sword, though there was no need for it. He began to pace as they spoke. The red-bearded Erling watched his movements, standing between two men. They were gripping his arms tightly, Rhiannon saw. She was certain her father was going to kill him.
“You rode straight for this farmhouse?”
“Yes, that was the idea. If we could find it.”
“How did you find it?”
“Captured a shepherd.”
“And he is?”
“Dead,” said the Erling. “I can take you to him, if you want.”
“You expected this house to be undefended?”
The man smiled a little, then, and shook his head. “Not defended by your warband, certainly. Young leaders. They made a mistake.”
“You weren’t one of them?”
The other man shook his head.
“The one who held me brought you here? Of the line of the Volgan?”
The Erling nodded.
“Elder grandson?” Brynn had stopped in front of him again.
“Younger. Ivarr’s the elder.”
“But he didn’t lead.”
The man shook his head. “Yes and no. It was his idea. But Ivarr’s … different.”
Brynn was stabbing his blade into the earth now.
“You came to burn this farm?”
“And kill you, and any of your family here, yes.”
He was so calm, Rhiannon thought. Had he made his peace with dying? She didn’t think that was it. He’d surrendered, said he didn’t want to be killed, back in her chamber.
“Because of the grandfather?”
The man nodded. “Your killing him. Taking the sword. These two decided they were of an age to avenge it, since their father had not. They were wrong.”
“And why are you here? You’re as old as I am.”
First hesitation. In the silence Rhiannon could hear the horses and the crackle of torches. “Nothing to keep me in Vinmark. I made a mistake, too.”
Part of an answer, Rhiannon thought, listening closely.
Brynn was staring at him. “Coming, or before you came?”
Another pause. “Both.”
“There’s no ransom for you, is there.”
“No,” the man said frankly. “Once there might have been.”
Brynn’s gaze was steady. “Maybe. Were you ransomed last time you were taken here, or did you escape?”
Again, a silence. “Escaped,” the Erling admitted.
He had decided, Rhiannon realized, that there was no hope in anything but honesty.
Brynn was nodding. “I thought so. I believe I remember you. The red hair. You did raid with Volganson, didn’t you? You escaped east, twenty-five years ago, after he died. Through the hills. All the way to the Erling settlements on the east coast. They chased you, didn’t they? You used a cleric as hostage, if I remember.”
A murmur, from those listening.
“I did. I released him. He was a decent enough man.” Brynn’s voice altered slightly.
“That was a long way to go.”
“By Ingavin’s blind eye, I wouldn’t want to do it again,” the Erling said dryly.
Another silence. Brynn resumed his pacing. “There’s no ransom for you. What can you offer me?”
“A hammer, sworn loyalty.”
“Until you escape again?”
“I said I wouldn’t do it again, that journey. I was young then.” He looked down and away for the first time, then back up. “I have nothing to go home to, and this place is as good as any for me to end my days. You can make me a slave, to dig ditches or carry water, or use me more wisely, but I will not escape again.”
“You will take the oath and come to the faith of Jad?”
Another slight smile, torchlight upon him. “I did that last time.”
Brynn didn’t return the smile. “And recanted?”
“Last time. I was young. I’m not any more. Neither Ingavin nor your sun god are worth dying for, in my judgement. I suppose I am a heretic to two faiths. Kill me?”
Brynn was standing still again, in front of him.
“Where are the ships? You will guide us to them.”
The Erling shook his head. “Not that.”
Rhiannon saw her father’s expression. He wasn’t normally someone she feared.
“Yes that, Erling.”
“This is the price of being allowed to live?”
“It is. You spoke of loyalty. Prove it.”
The Erling was still a moment, considering. Torches moved in the yard around them. Men were being carried inside, or helped if they could walk.
“Best kill me then,” the red-bearded man said.
“If I must,” said Brynn.
“No,” said someone else, stepping forward. “I will take him as a man of mine. My own guard.”
Rhiannon turned, her mouth falling open.
“Let me be clear on this,” her mother went on, coming to stand beside her husband, looking at the Erling. Rhiannon hadn’t realized she was even with them. “I believe I understand. You would fight an Erling band that came upon us now, but will not reveal where your fellows are?”
The Erling looked at her. “Thank you, my lady,” he said. “Certain things done for life make the life unworthy. You become sick with them. They poison you, your thoughts.” He turned back to Brynn. “They were shipmates,” he said.
Brynn’s gaze held that of the Erling another moment, then he looked to his wife. “You trust him?”
Enid nodded her head.
He was still frowning. “He can easily be killed. I will do it myself.”
“I know you will. You want to. Leave him to me. Let us get to our work. There are wounded men here. Erling, what is your name?”
“Whatever name you give me,” the man said.
The Lady Enid swore. It was startling. “What is your name?” she repeated.
A last hesitation, then that wry expression again. “Forgive me. My mother named me Thorkell. I answer to it.”
RHIANNON WATCHED the Erling go with her mother. He’d said before, in her rooms, that he could be ransomed. A lie, it now emerged. From the look of him—an old man still raiding—Helda had said she doubted it. Helda was older, knew more about these things. She was the calmest of them, too, had helped Rhiannon simply by being that way. They had almost died. They could have died tonight. The one named Thorkell had saved her father and herself, both.
Rhiannon, hands steady as she gathered linens and carried heated water with Helda for the wounded in the hall, remembered the wind of that hammer flying past her face. Realized—already—that she would likely do so all her life, carrying the memory like the two scars on her throat.
Tonight the world had altered, very greatly, because there was also the other thing, which ought to have been pushed away or buried deep or lost in all the bloodshed, but wasn’t. Alun ab Owyn had ridden an Erling horse out of the yard, pursuing the archer who’d shot at her father. He hadn’t yet come back.
Brynn ordered a pit to be dug in the morning, beyond the cattle pen, and the bodies of the slain raiders shovelled in. Their own dead—nine so far, including Dai ab Owyn—had been taken into the room attached to the chapel, to be cleansed and clothed, laid out for the rituals of burial. Woman’s work after battle, when it could be done. Rhiannon had never performed these rites before. They had never been attacked at home before. Not in her lifetime. They didn’t live near the sea.
They tended the wounded in the banquet hall, the dead in the room by the chapel, lights burning through Brynnfell. Her mother stopped by her once, long enough to look at her neck and then lay a salve—briskly, expressionlessly—and wrap the two wounds with a linen cloth.
“You won’t die,” she said, and moved on. Rhiannon knew that. She would never now be sung for a pure white, swan-like neck, either. No matter. No matter at all. She carried on, following her mother. Enid knew what to do here, as in so many things.
Rhiannon helped, as best she could. Bathing and wrapping wounds, speaking comfort and praise, fetching ale with the servant girls for the thirsty. One man died on a table in their hall, as they watched. A sword had taken off most of one leg, at the thigh, they couldn’t stop the bleeding. His name was Bregon. He’d liked fishing, teasing the girls, had freckles on his nose and cheeks in summer. Rhiannon found herself weeping, which she didn’t want but couldn’t seem to do much about. Not very long ago, when tonight had begun, there had been a feast, and music. If Jad had shaped the world differently, time could run backwards and make it so the Erlings had never come. She kept moving a hand, touching the cloth around her neck. She wanted to stop doing that, too, but couldn’t.
Four men carried Bregon ap Moran from the hall on a table board, out the doors and across the yard to the room by the chapel where the dead men were. She looked at Helda and they followed. He used to make jokes about her hair, Rhiannon remembered, called her Crow when she was younger. Brynn’s men had not been shy with his children, though that had changed when she came into womanhood, as did much else.
She would lay him out for burial—with Helda’s help, for she didn’t know what to do. There were half a dozen women in the room, working among the dead by lantern light. The cleric, Cefan, was kneeling with a sun disk between his hands, unsteadily intoning the ritual words of the Night Passage. He was young, visibly shaken. How could he not be, Rhiannon thought.
They set Bregon’s board down on the floor. The tables were covered with other bodies already. There was water, and linen clothing. They had to wash the dead first, everywhere, comb out their hair and beards, clean their fingernails, that they might go to Jad fit to enter his halls if the god, in mercy, allowed. She knew every man lying here.
Helda began removing Bregon’s tunic. It was stiff with blood. Rhiannon went to get a knife to help her cut it away, but then she saw that there was no one by Dai ab Owyn, and she went and stood over the Cadyri prince where he lay.
Time didn’t run backwards in the world they had. Rhiannon looked down at him, and she knew it would be a lie to pretend she hadn’t seen him staring at her when she’d walked into the hall, and another lie to say it was the first time something of that sort had happened. And a third one (a failing of the Cyngael, threes all the time?) to deny that she’d enjoyed having that effect on men. The passage from girl to woman being negotiated in pleasure, an awareness of growing power.
No pleasure now, no power that meant anything at all. She knelt beside him on the stone floor and reached out and brushed his brown hair back. A handsome, clever man. Needful as night’s end, he had said. No ending to night now, unless the god allowed it for his soul. She looked at the wound in him, the dark blood clotted there. It occurred to her that it was proper that Brynn’s daughter be the one to attend to a prince of Cadyr, their guest. Cefan, not far away, was still chanting, his eyes closed, his voice wavering away from him like the smoke from the candles, rising up. The women whispered or were silent, moving back and forth, doing their tasks. Rhiannon swallowed hard, and began to undress the dead man.
“What are you doing?”
She’d thought, actually, that she would know if he came into a room; that already she would know when that happened. She turned and looked up.
“My lord prince,” she said. Rose and stood before him. Saw the cousin, Gryffeth, and the high priest behind, his face grave, uneasy.
“What are you doing?” Alun ab Owyn repeated. His expression was rigid, walled off.
“I am … attending to his body, my lord. For … laying out?” She heard herself stammering. She never did that.
“Not you,” he said flatly. “Someone else.”
She swallowed. Had never lacked courage, even as a child. “Why so?” she said.
“You dare ask?” Behind, Ceinion made a small sound and a gesture, then stood still.
“I must ask,” Rhiannon said. “I know of nothing I might ever have done to Owyn’s house to cause this to be said. I grieve for our people, and for your sorrow.”
He stared at her. It was difficult, in this light, to see his eyes, but she had seen them in the hall, before.
“Do you?” he said finally, blunt as a hammer. She couldn’t stop thinking of hammers. “Do you even begin to grieve? My brother went outside alone and unarmed because of you. He died hating me because of you. I will live with that the rest of my days. Do you realize this? At all?”
There was something hot, like a fever, coming off him now. She said, desperately, “I believe I understand what you are saying. It is unjust. I didn’t make him feel—”
“A lie! You wanted to make every man love you, to play at it. A game.”
Her heart was pounding now. “You are … unjust, my lord.” Repeating herself.
“Unjust? You tested that power every time you entered a room.”
“How do you know any such thing?” How did he know?
“Will you deny it?”
She was grieving, her heart twisting, because of who it was, saying these words to her. But she was also Brynn’s daughter, and Enid’s, and not raised to yield, or to cry.
“And you?” she asked, lifting her head. Her bandage chafed. “You, my lord? Never tested yourself? Never went on … cattle raids, son of Owyn? Into Arberth, perhaps? Never had someone hurt, or die, when you did that? You and your brother?”
She saw him check, breathing hard. She was aware that he was, amazingly, near to striking her. How had the world come to this? The cousin stepped forward, as if to stop him.
“It is wrong!” was all Alun could manage to say, fighting for self-control.
“No more than the things a boy does, becoming a man. I cannot steal cattle or swing a sword, ab Owyn!”
“Then go east to Sarantium!” he rasped, his voice altered. “If you want to deal in power like that. Learn … learn how to poison like their empresses, you’ll kill so many more men.”
She felt the colour leave her face. The others in the room had stopped moving, were looking at them. “Do you … hate me so much, my lord?”
He didn’t reply. She had thought, truly, he would say yes, had no idea what she’d have done if he did so. She swallowed hard. Needed her mother, suddenly. Enid was with the living, in the other room.
She said, “Would you wish the Erling hadn’t thrown his hammer to save my life?” Her voice was level, hands steady at her sides. Small blessings, he wouldn’t know how much this cost her. “Others died here, my lord prince. Nine of us now. Likely more, before sunrise. Men we knew and loved. Are you thinking only of your brother tonight? Like the Erling my father killed, who demanded one horse when he had men taken with him?”
His head snapped back, as from a blow. He opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. Their eyes locked. Then turning, blundering past the cleric and his cousin, he rushed from the room. Ceinion called his name. Alun never broke stride.
Rhiannon put a hand to her mouth. There was a need to weep, and a greater need not to do so. She saw the cousin, Gryffeth, take two steps towards the door, then stop and turn back. After a moment, he went and knelt beside the dead man. She saw him extend a hand and touch the place where the blade had gone in.
“Child,” whispered the high cleric, her father’s friend, her mother’s.
She didn’t look at him. She was staring, instead, at the open doorway. The emptiness of it, where someone had gone out. Had walked into the night, hating her—the way he’d said his brother had left him. A pattern? Set and sealed with iron and blood?
You can’t have what you want, Helda had said, even before everything else.
“How did this happen?” she asked, of the cleric, of the world.
Holy men usually spoke of the mysterious ways of the god.
“I do not know,” Ceinion of Llywerth murmured, instead.
“You’re supposed to know,” she said, turning to look at him. Heard her voice break. Hated that. He stepped forward, drew her into his arms. She let him, lowered her head. Didn’t weep, at first, and then she did. Heard the cousin praying over the body on the floor beside them.
Three things not well or wisely done, the triad went. Approaching a forest pool by night. Making wrathful a woman of spirit. Drinking unwatered wine alone.
They did things by threes in this land, Alun thought savagely. Obviously it was time for him to claim one of the wine jars and carry it off, drain it by himself until oblivion came down.
He wished in that moment, striding through the empty farmyard without the least idea where he meant to go, that the Erling arrow had killed him in the wood. The world was unassuageably awry. His heart had a hollow inside it where Dai had been. It was not going to fill; there was nothing to fill it with.
He saw a glimmering of light on the treed slope beyond the yard.
Not a torch. It was pale, motionless, no flickering.
He found himself breathing shallowly, as if he were hiding from searchers. He squeezed shut his eyes. The glow was still there when he opened them. There was no one else in the farmyard now. A spring night, the breeze mild, dawn a long way off still. The stars brilliant overhead, in patterns that told their stories of ancient glory and pain, figures from before the faith of Jad came north. Mortals and animals, gods and demigods. The night seemed heavy and endless, like something into which one fell.
A shining on the slope. Alun undid his belt, let fall his sword, walked through the gate of the yard and up the hill.
SHE SEES HIM drop the iron. Knows what that means. He can see her now. He has been in the pool with them. For some of them, after that, the faeries can be seen. Her impulse, very strong, is to flee. It is one thing to hover near, to watch them, unseen. This is something else.
She makes herself stay where she is, waiting. Has a sudden, fearful thought, scans with her mind’s eye: the spruaugh, who might tell of this, is curled asleep in the hollow of a tree.
The man comes through the gate, closes it behind him, begins to climb the slope. He can see her. She almost does fly away then, though they can’t really fly, not any more. She is trembling. Her hair shivers through its colours, again and again.
SHE WAS SMALLER than the queen, half a head smaller than he was. Alun stopped, just below where she stood. They were beside the thicket, on the mostly open slope. She’d been half hidden behind a sapling, came out when he stopped, but touching it. Utterly still, poised for flight. A faerie, standing before him in the world he’d thought he’d known.
She was slender, very long fingers, pale skin, wide-set eyes, a small face, though not a child’s. She was clad in something green that left her arms free and showed her legs to the knee. A belt made of flowers, he saw. Flowers in her hair—which kept changing colour as he looked, dizzyingly. The wonder of that, even under stars. He could only see clearly by the light she cast. That, as much as anything, telling him how far he’d come, walking up from the farmyard. The half-world, they named it in the tales. Where he was now. Men were lost here, in the stories. Never came back, or returned a hundred years after they’d walked or ridden away, everyone they knew long dead. He could see her small breasts through the thinness of what she wore. Did they feel the cold, faeries?
There was an ache in his throat.
“How … how am I seeing you?” He had no idea if she could even speak, use words. His words.
Her hair went pale, nearly white, came back towards gold but not all the way. She said, “You were in the pool. I … saved you there.” Her voice, simply speaking words, made him realize he had never, really, made music with his harp, or sung a song the way it should be sung. He felt that he would weep if he were not careful.
“How? Why?” He sounded harsh to his own ears, after her. A bruising of the starlit air.
“I stopped your horse, in the shallows. They would have killed you, had you come nearer the queen.”
She’d answered one question, not the other. “My brother was there.” It was difficult to speak.
“Your brother is dead. His soul is with the Ride.”
“Why?”
Reddened hair now, crimson in summer dark. Her shining let him see. “I took it for the queen. First dead of the battle tonight.”
Dai. No weapon, when he had gone out. First dead. Whatever that meant. But she was telling him. Alun knelt on the damp, cool grass. His legs were weak. “I should hate you,” he whispered.
“I do not know what that means,” she said. Music.
He thought about that, and then of the girl, Brynn’s daughter, in that room by the chapel, where his brother’s body lay. He wondered if he would ever play the harp again.
“What … why does the queen …?”
Saw her smile, first time, a flashing of small, white teeth. “She loves them. They excite her. Those who have been mortals. From your world.”
“Forever?”
The hair to violet. The slim, small body so white beneath the pale green garment. “What could be forever?”
That hollow, in his heart. “But after? What happens … to him?”
Grave as a cleric, as a wise child, as something so much older than he was. “They go from the Ride when she tires of them.”
“Go where?”
So sweet a music in this voice. “I am not wise. I do not know. I have never asked.”
“He’ll be a ghost,” Alun said then, with certainty, on his knees under stars. “A spirit, wandering alone, a soul lost.”
“I do not know. Would not your sun god take him?”
He placed his hands on the night grass beside him. The coolness, the needed ordinariness of it. Jad was beneath the world now, they were taught; doing battle with demons for his children’s sake. He echoed her, without her music. “I do not know. Tonight, I don’t know anything. Why did you … save me in the pool?” The question she hadn’t answered.
She moved her hands apart, a rippling, like water. “Why should you die?”
“But I am going to die.”
“Would you rush to the dark?” she asked.
He said nothing. After a moment, she took a step nearer to him. He remained motionless, kneeling, saw her hand reach out. He closed his eyes just before she touched his face. He felt, almost overwhelmingly, the presence of desire. A need: to be taken from himself, from the world. To never come back? She had the scent of flowers all about her, in the night.
Eyes still closed, Alun said, “They tell us … they tell us there will be Light.”
“Then there will be, for your brother,” she said. “If that is so.”
Her fingers moved, touched his hair. He could feel them trembling, and understood, only then, that she was as afraid, and as aroused as he was. Worlds that moved beside each other, never touched.
Almost never. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak again he felt a shockingly swift movement, an absence. Never said what he would have said, never knew what he would have said. He looked up quickly. She was already ten paces away. In no time at all. Standing against a sapling again, half turned, to fly farther. Her hair was dark, raven black.
He looked back over his shoulder. Someone was coming up the slope. He didn’t feel surprise at all. It was as if the capacity to feel that had been drained from him, like blood.
He was still very young that night, Alun ab Owyn. The thought that actually came to him as he recognized who was climbing—and was gazing past him at the faerie—was that nothing would ever surprise him again.
Brynn ap Hywll crested the ridge and crouched, grunting with the effort, beside Alun on the grass. The big man plucked some blades of grass, keeping silent, looking at the shimmering figure by the tree not far away.
“How do you see her?” Alun asked, softly.
Brynn rubbed the grass between his huge palms. “I was in that pool, most of a lifetime ago, lad. A night when a girl refused me and I went walking my sorrow into the wood. Did an unwise thing. Girls can make you do that, actually.”
“How did you know I …?”
“One of the men Siawn sent to report. Said you killed two Erlings, and were mazed in the pond till Ceinion took you out.”
“Does he … did Siawn …?”
“No. My man just told me that much. Didn’t understand any of it.”
“But you did?”
“I did.”
“You’ve … seen them all these years?”
“I’ve been able to. Hasn’t happened often. They avoid us. This one … is different, is often here. I think it’s the same one. I see her up here sometimes, when we’re at Brynnfell.”
“Never came up?”
Brynn looked over at him for the first time. “Afraid to,” he said, simply.
“I don’t think she’ll hurt us.”
The faerie was silent, still by the slender tree, still poised between lingering and flight, listening to them.
“She can hurt you by drawing you here,” Brynn said. “It gets hard to come back. You know the tales as well as I do. I had … tasks in the world, lad. So do you, now.”
Ceinion, down below, before: You do not have leave to go from us.
Alun looked at the other man in the darkness, thought about the burden in those words. A lifetime’s worth. “You dropped your sword, to climb up here.”
He saw Brynn smile then. A little ruefully, the big man said, “How could I let you be braver than me, lad?” He grunted again, and rose. “I’m too old and fat to crouch all night in the dark.” He stood there, bulky against the sky.
The shimmering figure by the tree moved back, another half a dozen paces.
“Iron,” she said, softly. “Still. It is … pain.”
Brynn was motionless. He’d never have heard her, Alun realized. Not ever have known the music of this voice, through all the years. Most of a lifetime ago. He wondered at someone with the will to know of this, and not speak of it, and stay away.
“But I left my …” Brynn stopped. Swore, though quietly. Reached down into his boot and pulled free the knife that was hidden there. “My sorrow,” he said. “It was not intended, spirit.” He turned away, and stepping forward strongly, hurled the blade, arcing it through the night air, all the way down the hill and over the fence into the empty yard.
A very long throw. I couldn’t have done that, Alun thought. He stared at the figure beside him: the man who’d killed the Volgan long ago, in the days when the Erlings were here every spring or summer, year after year. A harder, darker time, before Alun had been born, or Dai. But if you were slain in a small, failed raid today, you were just as dead as if it had been back then at the hands of the Volgan’s own host, weren’t you? And your soul …?
Brynn turned to him. “We should go,” he said. “We must go.”
Alun didn’t move from where he knelt on the cool grass. And your soul?
He said, “She isn’t supposed to exist, is she?”
“What man would say that?” Brynn said. “Were they fools, our ancestors who told of the faerie host? The glory and peril of them? Her kind have been here longer than we have. What the holy men teach is that they endanger our hope of Light.”
“Is that what they teach?” Alun said.
Heard his own bitterness. Dark here, in the starry night, except for the light where she was.
He turned his head again, almost against his will, looked at her, still backed away from the tree. Her hair was pale again. Since the knife had gone, he thought. She hadn’t come nearer, however. He thought of her fingers, touching him, the scent of flowers. He swallowed. He wanted to ask her again about Dai, but he did not. Kept silent.
“You know it is true, what they teach us,” said Brynn ap Hywll. He was looking at Alun, not over at the figure that stood beyond the tree, shimmering, her hair the colour now of the eastern sky before the morning sun. “You can feel it, can you not? Even here? Come down, lad. We’ll pray together. For your brother and my men, and for ourselves.”
“You can … just walk away from this?” Alun said. He was looking at the faerie, who was looking back at him, not moving, not saying a word now.
“I have to,” said the other man. “I have been doing it all my life. You will begin doing it now, for your soul’s sake, and all the things to be done.”
Alun heard something in the voice. Turned his head, looked up again. Brynn gazed back at him, steadily, a looming figure in the dark of the night. Thirty years with a sword, fighting. The things to be done. Had either of the moons been shining tonight—if the old tales told true— none of this would have happened.
Dai would still be dead, though. Among all the other dead. Brynn’s daughter had challenged him with that, driven him out of doors because there was … no answer for her, and no release from this hollowness within.
Alun turned back to the faerie. Her wide-set eyes held his. Maybe, he thought, there was a release. He drew a slow breath and let it out. He stood up.
“Watch over him,” he said. Not more than that. She would know.
She came forward a few steps, to the tree again. One hand on it, as if embracing, merging into it. Brynn turned his back and started resolutely down and Alun followed him, not looking back, knowing she was there, was watching him from the slope, from the other world.
When he reached the farmyard, Brynn had already reclaimed their swords. He handed Alun his, and his belt.
“I’ll get my knife in the morning,” ap Hywll said.
Alun shook his head. “I saw where it fell, I think.” He walked across the yard. The lanterns inside did not cast their glow this far, only lit the windows, showing where people were, the presence of life among the dying and the dead. He found the knife almost immediately, though. Carried it back to Brynn, who stood for a moment, holding it, looking at Alun.
“Your brother was our guest,” he said at length. “My sorrow is great, and for your mother and father.”
Alun nodded his head. “My father is a … hard man. I believe you know it. Our mother …”
Their mother.
Let the light of the god be yours, my child,Let it guide you through the world and home to me …
“My mother will want to die,” he said.
“We live in a hard world,” Brynn said after a moment, reaching for words. “They will surely find comfort in having a strong son yet, to take up the burdens that will fall to you now.”
Alun looked up at him in the darkness. The bulky presence. “Sometimes people … don’t take up their burdens, you know.”
Brynn shrugged. “Sometimes, yes.”
No more than that.
Alun sighed, felt a great weariness. He was the heir to Cadyr, with all that meant. He shook his head.
Brynn bent down and slipped the dagger into the sheath in his boot. He straightened. They stood there, the two of them in the yard, as in a halfway place between the treed slope and the lights.
Brynn coughed. “Up there you said … you asked her to take care of him. Um, what did …?”
Alun shook his head again, didn’t answer. Would never answer that question, he decided. Brynn cleared his throat again. From inside the house, beyond the double doors, they heard someone cry in pain.
Neither of them, Alun realized, was standing in such a way that they could see if there was still a shimmering above them on the hill. If he turned his head …
The big man abruptly slapped his hand against his thigh, as if to break a mood, or a spell. “I have a gift for you,” he said brusquely, and whistled.
Nothing for a moment, then out of the blackness a shape appeared and came to them. The dog—he was a wolfhound, and huge—rubbed its head against ap Hywll’s thigh. Brynn reached down, a hand in the dog’s fur at its neck.
“Cafall,” he said calmly. “Hear me. You have a new master. Here he is. Go to him.” He let go and stepped away. Nothing again, at first, then the dog tilted its head—a grey, Alun thought, though it was hard to be sure in the darkness—looked at Brynn a moment, then at Alun.
And then he came quietly across the space between.
Alun looked down at him, held out one hand. The dog sniffed it for a moment, then padded, with grace, to Alun’s side.
“You gave him … that name?” Alun asked. This was unexpected, but ought to have been trivial. It didn’t feel that way.
“Cafall, yes. When he was a year old, in the usual way.”
“Then he’s your best dog.”
He saw Brynn nod. “Best I’ve ever had.”
“Too great a gift, my lord. I cannot—”
“Yes, you can,” said Brynn. “For many reasons. Take a companion from me, lad.”
That was what the name meant, of course. Companion. Alun swallowed. There was a constriction in his throat. Was this what would make him weep tonight, after everything? He reached down and his hand rested on the warmth of the dog’s head. He rubbed back and forth, ruffling the fur. Cafall pushed against his thigh. The ancient name, oldest stories. A very big dog, graceful and strong. No ordinary wolfhound, to so calmly accept this change with a spoken word in the night. It wasn’t, he knew, a trivial gift at all.
Not to be refused.
“My thanks,” he said.
“My sorrow,” said Brynn again. “Let him … help keep you among us, lad.”
So that was it. Alun found himself blinking; the lights in the farmhouse windows blurring for a moment. “Shall we go in?” he asked.
Brynn nodded.
They went in, to where lanterns were burning among the dead in the room beside the chapel, and among all the wounded children of Jad—wounded in so many different ways—within the house.
The dog followed, then lay down by the chapel door at Alun’s murmured command. Outside, on the slope to the south, something lingered for a time in the dark and then went away, light as mist, before the morning came.
Chapter V
It had not been a good spring or summer for the traders of Rabady Isle, and there were those quite certain they knew why. The list of grievances was long.
Sturla Ulfarson, who had succeeded Halldr Thinshank as governor of the island’s merchants and farmers and fisherfolk, might have only one hand but he possessed two eyes and two ears and a nose for the mood of people, and he was aware that men were comparing the (exaggerated) glories of Thinshank’s days with the troubles and ill omens that had marked the beginning of his own.
Unfair, perhaps, but no one had made him mano euvre for this position, and Ulfarson wasn’t the self-pitying sort. Had he been so, he’d have been inclined to point out that the notorious theft of Thinshank’s grey horse and the marring of his funeral rites last spring—the start of all their troubles—had happened before the new governor had been acclaimed. He’d have noted that no man, whatever kind of leader he might be, could have prevented the thunderstorm that had killed two young people in the night fields shortly after that. And he might also have bemoaned the fact that it was hardly within the power of a local administrator to control events in the wider world: warfare among Karch and Moskav and the Sarantines couldn’t help but impact upon trade in the north.
Sturla One-hand did make these points decisively (he was a decisive man, for the most part) when someone dared challenge him directly, but he also set about doing what he could do on the isle, and as a result he discovered something.
It began with the families of the young man and woman killed in the storm. Everyone knew Ingavin sent the thunder and all manner of storms, that there was nothing accidental if people were killed or homes ruined by such things (a world where the weather was utterly random was a world not to be endured).
The girl had been doing her year of service to the volur at the compound by the edge of the forest. The young women of Rabady Isle took this duty, in turn, before they wed. It was a ritual, an honourable one. Fulla, the corn goddess, Ingavin’s bride, needed attention and worship too, if children were to be born healthy and the fields kept fertile. Iord, the seer, was an important figure here on the isle: in her own way, as powerful as the governor was.
Sturla One-hand had paid a formal visit to the compound, bringing gifts, shortly after his election by the thring. He hadn’t liked the volur, but that wasn’t the point. If there was magic being used, you wanted it used for you, not against you. Women could be dangerous.
And that, in fact, is what he discovered. The families of the young man and the girl were elbowing each other towards a feud over their deaths, each blaming the other’s offspring for the two of them being out by the memorial cairn, lying together when the lightning broke. Sturla had his own thoughts as to who had inveigled whom, but it was important to be seen to be conducting an inquiry first. His principal desire was to keep a blood feud from Rabady, or, at the least, to limit the casualties.
He set about speaking with as many of the young ones as he could, and in this way came to have a conversation with a yellow-haired girl from the mainland, the newest member of the circle of women in the compound. She had come (properly) in response to his summons and had knelt before him, shy, eyes suitably downcast.
She had little assistance, however, to offer concerning the two lightning-charred young ones, claiming to have seen Halli with the lad only once, “the evening before Bern Thorkellson came to the seer with Thinshank’s horse.”
The new governor of Rabady Isle, who had been leaning back in his seat, an ale flask in his one good hand, had leaned forward. The lightning storm, the two dead youngsters, and a possible feud became less compelling.
“Before he what?” said Sturla One-hand.
He put the flask down, reached out with his hand and grabbed the girl by her yellow hair, forcing her to look up at him. She paled, closed her eyes, as if overwhelmed by his powerful nearness. She was pretty.
“I … I … should not have said that,” she stammered.
“And why not?” growled Ulfarson, still gripping her by the hair.
“She will kill me!”
“And why?” the governor demanded.
She said nothing, obviously terrified. He tugged, hard. She whimpered. He did it again.
“She … she did a magic-working on him.”
“She what?” said Sturla, struggling, aware he was not sounding particularly astute. The girl—he didn’t know her name—suddenly rocked forward and threw her arms around his legs, pressing her face to his thighs. It was not actually unpleasant.
She said, weeping, “She hated Thinshank … she will kill me … but she uses her power for … for her own purposes. It is … wrong!” She spoke with her mouth against him, arms clutching his legs.
Sturla One-hand let go of her hair and leaned back again. She remained where she was. He said, “I will not hurt you, girl. Tell me what she did.”
In this way, the governor—and later the people of Rabady—learned of how Iord the seer had made a black seithr spell, rendering young Thorkellson her helpless servant, forcing him to steal the horse, then making him invisible, enabling him to board the southern ship that had been in the harbour—board it with the grey horse— and sail away unseen. It was done by the volur to spite Halldr Thinshank, of course, which was not an unreasonable desire, by any means. But it was a treachery that had unleashed—obviously—malevolent auras upon the isle (Halldr’s, one had to assume), causing the calamities of the season, including the lightning storm that killed two innocent youths.
Erling warriors were not, by collective disposition, inclined to nuanced debate when resolving matters of this sort. Sturla One-hand might have been more thoughtful than most, but he’d lost his hand (and achieved some wealth) raiding overseas. You didn’t ponder when attacking a village or sanctuary. You drank a lot beforehand, prayed to Ingavin and Thünir, and then fought and killed—and took home what you found in the fury and ruin you shaped.
An axe and sword were perfectly good responses to treachery, in his view. And they would serve the useful additional purpose of displaying Sturla’s resolution, early in what he hoped would be a prosperous tenure as governor of the isle.
Iord the seer and her five most senior companions were taken from the compound early the next morning, stripped naked (bony and slack-breasted, all of them, hags fit for no man), bound to hastily erected posts in the field near the cairn stone where the two youngsters had died.
When they came for her, the seer tried—babbling in terror—to say that she’d deceived young Thorkellson. That she’d only pretended to cast a spell for him, had sent him back into town to be found.
Sturla One-hand had not lived so many years by being a fool. He pointed out that the lad had not been found. So either the seer was lying, or the boy had seen through her deception. And though young Thorkellson had been known to be good with blade and hammer (Red Thorkell’s son would be, wouldn’t he?), he was barely grown. And where was he? And the horse? She had her magic, what answer would she give?
She never did answer.
The six women were stoned to death, the members of the two feuding families invited to throw—standing together—the first volleys of stone and rock, as the most immediately aggrieved. The wives and maidens joined the men, one of the times they were permitted to do that. It took some time to kill six women (stoning always did).
The ale was good that night and the next, and a second ship from Alrasan in the south—where they worshipped the stars—appeared in the harbour two days later, come to trade, a clear blessing of Ingavin.
The yellow-haired girl from the mainland had stood at the edges of the stoning ground; they’d made the younger ones from the compound come watch. She’d had a fearsome serpent coiled about her body, darting a venomous tongue. She was the only one not terrified of it. No one stood near her as they watched the old women die. The governor couldn’t remember (he’d drunk a good deal that day and night) just how he’d learned about her having been bitten back in the spring. Perhaps she had told him herself.

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