The Dreamstone

ONE Of Fish and Fire

Things there are in the world which have never loved Men, which have been in the world far longer than humankind, so that once when Men were newer on the earth and the woods were greater, there had been places a Man might walk where he might feel the age of the world on his shoulders. Forests grew in which the stillness was so great he could hear stirrings of a life no part of his own. There were brooks from which the magic had not gone, mountains which sang with voices, and sometimes a wind touched the back of his neck and lifted the hairs with the shiver of a presence at which a Man must never turn and stare.

But the noise of Men grew more and more insistent Their trespasses became more bold. Death had come with them, and the knowledge of good and evil, and this was a power they had, both to be virtuous and to be blind.

Axes rang. Men built houses, and holds, rooted up stone, felled trees, made fields where forests had stood from the foundation of the world; and they brought bleating flocks to guard with dogs that had forgotten they were wolves. Men changed whatever they set hand to. They wrought their magic on beasts, to make them dull and patient. They brought fire and the reek of smoke to the dales. They brought lines and order to the curve of the hills. Most of all they brought the chill of iron, to sweep away the ancient shadows.

But they took the brightness too. It was inevitable, because that brightness was measured against that dark. Men piled stone on stone and made warm homes, and tamed some humbler, quieter things, but the darkest burrowed deep and the brightest went away, heartbroken.

Save one, whose patience or whose pride was more than all the rest.

So one place, one untouched place in all the world remained, a rather smallish forest near the sea and near humankind, keeping a time different than elsewhere.

Somewhen this forest had ceased to be a lovely place. Thorns choked it, beyond its fringe of bracken. Dead trees lay unhewn by any woodman, for none would venture there. It was a perilous place by day. By night it felt far worse, and a man did well not to build a fire too neat the aged trees. Things whispered here, and the trees muttered with the wind and perhaps with other things. Men knew the place was old, old as the world, and they never made peace with it.

But on a certain night a man was weary, and he had seen very much of horror and of the world’s hard places, so that a little fire to cook by seemed a very small hazard against others he had run this day, the matter of a few twigs to cook a bit to eat.

He had come and gone a great deal on the banks of the river Caerbourne and in the fringes of this forest, for five whole years. If there were outlaws hereabouts he knew them all by name. And if there were other dangers he had never met them, so they failed to frighten him, this night, and on other nights when he had come this far beneath the aged boughs and heard the rustlings and the whisperings of the leaves. He made his little fire and cooked his fish and ate it, which seemed to him like a feast after his famine of recent days. He felt home again; he felt safe; he looked forward to a bed among the leaves where no two-legged enemy would be likely to come on him.

But Arafel had noticed him.

She had little interest in the doings of Men in general. Her time and her living were very much different from the years of humankind, but she had seen this Man before as he slipped about the margins of her wood. He was deft about it and did no harm, and he was wary and hard for harm to come to: such a Man never quite disturbed her peace.

But this night he took a fish from the Caerbourne’s stream and built a fire to cook it, beneath an ancient oak. And this was far too great a familiarity.

So she came. She stood watching for a while unnoticed in her gray hooded cloak, in the shadows among the oaks. The Man had had his fish, leaving only the naked bones in the fire, and now knelt, cherishing the warmth of the tiny flame and heap of ash, cupping his hands close above it. He was rough-looking, with a weathered countenance and gray-streaked hair—a lean and weary Man with the taint of iron about his person, for a sword lay close beside his knee. She had been apt to anger when she came, but he sat so small and quiet for so tall a Man, clinging to so small a warmth in the great dark of the wood, that she wondered at him, how he had come, or why, presuming so much for so little comfort. She was not the first to come. The shadows moved beyond his little fire and hissed in indignation. He never seemed to notice, deaf to them and blinded by the light he clung to.

“You should take more care,” she said.

He snatched at his great sword and came to one knee all in one motion.

“No,” she said quietly, moving forward. “No, I am quite alone coming here. I saw your fire.”

The sword stayed half-drawn across his knee. He had heard nothing, seen nothing until now. A gray-mantled figure showed like a trick of moonlight in the thicket, so dim even the tiny fire might have blinded his eyes, but he had no excuse at all for his ears. “Who are you?” he asked. “Of An Beag, would you be?”

“No. Of this place. I rarely stir out of it. Put the sword away.”

He was off his balance and not accustomed to that. Why he was sitting still at all instead of standing sword in hand was not quite clear to him, only that there had never seemed a moment of clear decision since the stranger started speaking. The voice was smooth and fair. He could not get the timbre of it in his mind, whether it was young or old or what it was even when it was just dying in the air, no more than he could make out the figure in the dark, but he found he had slid the sword back into its sheath, not having clearly decided to put it back at all. His hands were cold. “Share if you like,” he said, with a motion toward the fire. “The warmth, at least. If it’s food you want, catch your own. I’ve eaten all I had.”

“I have no need.” The stranger came nearer, so silently no leaf whispered, and settled at the side of the tiny clearing on the dead log that fended the wind from his fire. “What would your name be?”

“Give me yours,” he said.

“I have many.”

Little by little the chill of the ground had come creeping up to him, and now the fire between them seemed all too dun and small. “And what would one of them be?” he asked, because he was always a man to want answers even when they were ill.

“I have marked your coming and going hereabouts.” The answer came so still and soft the rustle of a leaf might have overcome it. “Other things have seen you, do you not know? Your step was always soft and quick until tonight; but now you settle in to stay—is that your hope? No, I think not. I do think not. You are wiser than that.”

She saw the hardness of his face as he stared at her. It was a face which might well have been fair once, but years and scars had marred it; and sun and wind had weathered it, so that it was fit for the rest of him, with ragged hair and ragged clothes and dark, hopeless eyes. As for him, there was no knowing what he saw of her: Men saw what they pleased to see, often as not. Perhaps to him she was some outlaw like himself or some great mail-clad warrior from over the river. His hand never let go the sword.

“Why do you come?” she asked him last

“For shelter.”

“What, in my wood?”

“Then I will leave your wood, as quickly as I may.”

“There is harm outside this circle—No, it would not be well to look just now. As for the fish and the fire, both are costly. And what will you offer me for them?”

He gave no answer. If there was any wealth he had besides the sword itself she could not tell it. And that he did not offer.

“What,” she said, “nothing?”

“What will you have?” he asked.

“Truth. For the fish and the fire tell me truly what you do in my woods.”

“I live.”

“No more than that? It seems to be a hard living. There’s a sorrow about you, Man. Is there ever joy?”

This was baiting. The Man felt it, and felt his weariness hovering over him like urging sleep. There was peril in that sleep, and that he also knew. He set the cap of his sheathed sword on the ground and leaned heavily on it, looking at the stranger, trying to look more closely, but his sight seemed to dim whenever he looked hardest, and some fold of the cloak was always casting a shifting shadow just where he looked, so that he could see nothing that was beneath it. He knew beyond a doubt that he had met one of the fair folk, and he knew it though the moment was moonbeams and shadows and something his eyes refused to see. He had never expected such a meeting in his life, being occupied with his own business, but he knew it when it was on him and understood his danger, that the fair folk were fell and deadly with trespassers, and given to dark mischief. But perhaps it was part of the binding on him that he felt no reticence at all with this stranger, as if it were the last night of the world and the last friend had come to listen. “I have come here,” he said, “sometimes. It seemed safe. I brought no enemy here. An Beag would never follow.”

“Why do they hunt you?”

“I am a King’s man.”

“And they have some quarrel with this King?”

The voice seemed innocent, fair as a child’s. The years went reeling back and back for him and he leaned the more heavily on the hilt of his sword, aching in all his bones, and laughed. “Quarrel, aye. They killed the King at Aescford, burned Dun na h-Eoin—now there is no king at all. Five years gone—” He grew hoarse in telling it. It was incredible to him that all the world was not shaken by that fall, but the figure before him stayed unmoved.

“Wars of Men. They are nothing to me. The fish matters. That touches my boundaries.”

A chill wandered up his back, but dimly through his remembered grief. “So, but I gave you the truth for it.”

“That was the price I named. Now I give you good advice: do not come again.” The shadow rose, graying into dark. “This once I will guide you to the river, but only once.”

He leaned on the sword and levered himself to his feet as if it were the last strength he had; and perhaps it was. His shoulders were bowed. His head was down for the moment, but then it lifted, and he pointed another way with a straightening of his shoulders. “Give me leave to go along the shore. A mile or so down the river I can slip my enemies and I will go as quickly as I can.”

“No. You must go as you came, and now.”

“So,” he said, and bent and patiently covered up his fire, then took up his sword, half drawing it although in his eyes was no hope at all. “But my enemies are waiting there, and whatever you are, I will make a beginning here if I have no choice. I ask you again—let me pass along the shore. I was always a good neighbor to this wood. I never set axe to it. I beg your courtesy this once. It is so small a thing.”

She considered him, so soft-spoken, so set upon his way. Almost she went fading back again and leaving this Man to the dark and the night. But there was no dark anger in him, only the sadness of something brave that once had been. So the old stag died, among the wolves; or the eagle fell; or the wolf himself went down. She thought a moment and thinking on such a heart remembered a place, a small place, the only warmth she knew among humankind.

“I shall tell you a way to go,” she said gently, “and help you come to it if perhaps you can, a place deep in the hills and not so perilous as my lands. But you must come with me now step for step and never stray: Death has been very near to you tonight. He is very skillful at stalking, more than any Man. No, never look. Come now, come, put away the sword and follow. Follow me.”

A second time he slid the sword back into its sheath and never felt the doing of it; he walked as once he had walked after bloody Aescford, out of the hills, aware first of fending branches from his face and then that he had come some distance never remembering any of it; and that he was lost. He was well-schooled in woodcraft and no man could have eluded him so close at hand, but the gray cloak melted through the thickets before him as if the branches had no substance, and though he went as quickly as he could, he could never come near his guide. He was panting, and his heart labored with a beating he could hear, so loud it dimmed all other sounds. Branches raked his face and arms. Leaves whipped past with a soft and clinging touch.

But at last the stranger waited for him on the river bank, standing against a very aged tree, so that the gray cloak might have been part of the bark in the moonlight. They had come to the widest part of the Caerbourne, where it flowed most shallowly: he knew it, every stone along the shore.

And his guide pointed him the way across.

“This is the ford,” he objected. “And they will be watching it.”

“They are not. Not this while. Perhaps not again for several nights—trust me that I know. Yonder you see the hills, and atop the first hill is a cairn; and beneath the second as you follow the river course from the narrows below the cairn, there go up the dale and up the farther hill. The place I send you, you will never see it, except you come up the dell and over against the shoulder of the Raven’s Hill . . . do they call it that, these days?”

“That is still the name.” He looked toward the shadowy line of hills beyond the river, beyond the trees. The river water danced with a light that broke beside him. He turned his head in alarm toward his companion. There was no one there, as if there had never been, only the fading memory of a voice of a high, fair tone, as he had never heard it, and the recollection of a light he had almost seen.

The world seemed dark then, and cold, and the shadows full of menace.

“Are you there?” he asked the dark, but nothing answered.

He shivered then, and slinging his sword at his back, waded the Caerbourne’s chill flood up to his waist, constantly expecting arrows from out of the dark trees on the other side, ambush and after all, the chill laughter of the fair folk at his back. There was no luck in faery-gifts. He doubted all his safety now, forever.

But nothing started on that shore except a small splash that swam away into the reeds, and he climbed out again on the side of the river his enemies held, finding no one watching, and no harm near him. He began at once to run to keep the warmth in his legs, dodging along among the few young trees which grew on the naked borders of An Beag and its villages.

He was Niall, lately called Dubhlachan and formerly other names, who had been a lord in years gone by; but the King he served now was a helpless babe hidden somewhere in the hills—so loyal hearts believed. And the loyal men lived and harried the traitors’ fields in Caerbourne vale and elsewhere as they could, which was all they could do till the young King should live to be a man.

Five years Niall had lived in the forest edges, under stone and hidden in thickets, and men had followed him, but most were dead and the rest now scattered.

So he ran, ran at last because the sun was coming, and ran because a dream in the dark wood had promised safety. He was not young any longer. He had lost all his faith in kings to come. It was only a fireside he wanted, and bread to eat, and no more hunt at his heels.

The sun came up on him and still he ran by turns, coming up into the Brown Hills. Men called them haunted, like the wood. But he had long had the habit of such places, where no comfortable men would go. The rumor only gave him hope, more and more as he came among the hills. Weariness left him, so that he ran more lightly than he had run before, through the rough stones and the desolation. The sun was on him. The sweat ran. He heard his steps fall and jar the stones together, but nothing more in all the world, as if some veil lay on his senses and the world had stopped being what it was. If the forest had been dark, this was bright, and the sun danced here, and the stones shone in the light.

He reached the Raven’s Hill and climbed. A strangeness glistened under the nooning sun, under the shoulder of the opposing hill. And so he ran, ran, ran, with a great expectation in his heart, and if he began to die in that running, still he drove himself with the hope of something, some barrier to cross, some place one only got to by chance or luck or the last hope in all the world.

It was a homely place, of fields and fences, stone and golden thatch and a crooked chimney, and the smell of bread baking, and the sun shining on the barley round about and on the dust.

“Come see, come see!” he heard someone call as he fell to his knees and full length on the ground. “O come! here’s a man come fallen in the yard!”

TWO Beorc’s Steading

The sweat ran in rivulets on Niall’s back, and it was a good feeling, swinging a mallet and not a sword, driving the pegs in just so, to mend the grain-bin before the new harvest came in, the fields standing golden white in the sun.

A dour-faced boy brought him water: he dipped up enough to drink and poured the rest over his head, blinking in the stream, and the boy Scaga took the dipper back and sulked off about his rounds, but that was ever Scaga’s manner and no one minded. Birds lighted on the fencepost when the boy had gone, cocked wise eyes at Niall, darted down to peck a bit of grain from the dust as he turned back to work again. Dinner was foremost in his mind, one of Aelfraeda’s fine hearty dinners set beneath the evening sky as they ate in summertime, beneath the spreading oak that shaded the Steading; some would sing and some would listen, and so the stars would light them to bed until the sun waked them out of it.

That was the way of the days at Beorc’s Steading, and Beorc himself ordered matters in all this wide farm so that no days were idle and everything was done in its season, like the mending before the harvest. There were full two score hands to work, men and women and children. The fields were wide, and the orchards likewise, and the sheep grazed the hill by the spring while the cattle and the pony pastured down by the tiny brook it made. There gnarled willows shaded time-rounded stones and a child could wade most of it. Closer, where the brook came nearest the barn, lived a herd of fat pigs and a flock of geese as fat as the pigs and noisier, who bullied their way about the farm. But also about the hillside there was a wolf, a well-fed and lazy cub who liked ear-scratching; and a fawn who strayed in and nosed her way everywhere. A badger had his hole in the hollow next the turnip field; and a host of birds lived round about, from the heron who lived on the brook to the family of owls who lived in the barn. They were all lostlings. They had all come like the cub and the fawn and fallen under the peace Aelfraeda maintained. There was such a spell on them they never preyed on each other, except the heron fished the brook and the owls had the barn mice who minded no laws at all.

This extended to the two-footed kind—for they all had come, excepting Beorc and Aelfraeda themselves, as lostlings themselves, both old and young, and none were kin at all. There was old grandfather Sgeulaiche, as wizened and withered as last winter’s apple, whose hands and clever blade turned out the most marvelous things of wood, who sat on the porch in a pool of sweet smelling curls of wood and told stories to whatever girl or boy who was set to work the churn or card the wool—for there were children here, half a dozen of them, no one’s and everyone’s, like the fawn. There was of course half-grown Scaga, who pilfered food at every chance and hid it, though Aelfraeda would have given him both hands full of anything he asked—he fears being hungry, Aelfraeda said; so, let him hide all he will, and eat all he can—someday he will smile. There was Haesel hardly six and Holen more than twelve; and Siobrach and Eadwulf and Cinhil in between. Of adults there was Siolta, who was lame and in middle years, who baked and made wonderful cheeses, and there was Lonn who had a great swordcut running from brow to chin and many others beside, but his hands were sure and good with the cattle: Siolta and Lonn were man and wife, though never they had known each other before this place. There was Conmhaighe and Carraig and Cinnfhail and Flann; and Diomasach, Diarmaid and the other Diarmaid; and Ruadh; and Fitheach and the other men and women, so that there were never workers lacking for the hardest tasks inside the house or out, besides Beorc and Aelfraeda themselves, who were wherever work wanted doing, cheerful and foremost in any task.

In all, the weather blessed the place and the grain grew tall and the green apples grew round and fine; and the brook never failed in summer. There was a haze of light about the hills by daylight, so that it made the eyes sting to try to look into the distance of the Brown Hills; and the mountain shoulder lay between the Steading and the river away to the south, and between it and the harrying of An Beag and other names which seemed a dream here.

“Do you not set a guard?” Niall had asked of Beorc early, while they had tended him in the house and fed him until he was less gaunt than before. “Do you not have men to watch the way to this place? I would do that. Weapons are what I know.”

But, “No,” Beorc had said, and his face, broad and plain and ruddy, had creased with laughter. “No. You had luck to come here. Few are lucky, and them I welcome. So there is a great deal of luck on this valley of mine. If you will stay, stay: if you will go, I will show you a way to go, but if you turned round again after, I do not think your luck would find the place a second time.”

Then Niall said nothing more of boundaries and borders, perceiving some force in Beorc that kept its own limits and expected everything about him to do likewise. He is, Niall had thought then with a queer kind of shiver, more like a king than not. And king did not fit Beorc either, with his wispy nimbus of gray-red hair, his cheeks wind-burned above a beard as wild and lawless as his mane. Like a fire he was, a gust of wind, a great broad man who laughed much and kept his own counsels; and Aelfraeda was like him and unlike, a woman of strong hands and ample girth and beautiful golden braids coiled crownlike about her head, who carried her own milkpails, thank you, and wove and spun and fed strays both two and four-footed, having the law in her house and for scepter a wooden spoon.

It was a place that luck smiled on, and in which more than a usual share of amazing things happened: for weeds that happened into the crops turned up in the morning wilted and limp beside the rows so that hardly ever did one have to take a hoe to the vegetables; and if some few vegetables vanished in the same night, no one spoke of it. Tools one would have sworn were lost turned up found in the morning on the porch, fit to set a shiver up a less complacent spine. Likewise the pannikin of milk and the buttered cakes Aelfraeda faithfully set out each night on the bench on the porch turned up missing, each and every crumb, which might have been the wolf cub’s doing or the fawn’s, or the geese, but Niall never spied the cakes vanishing and had no wish to go out of nights to see.

And most peculiar, there was the Brown Man, or so Niall called him, skulking here and there in the orchards, or among the rocks, fit to account for a great deal that was odd hereabouts. “He is very old,” said Beorc when Niall reported it. “Never trouble him.”

Old he might be, Niall suspected, old as stone and hills and all, for there was something uncanny about him and bespelled. Nothing could move so quickly, coming into the tail of the eye and out again, and skipping away among the rocks. There he sat now, a small brown lump by the barn, barefoot, knees tucked up in arms, and watching, watching the mending of the bin. He was wrinkled as an old man and agile as any child; and his brown hair fell down about his hairy arms and his beard sprayed about his bare and well-thatched chest. His oversized hands and feet were furred just the same. Brown as a nut and no taller than a half-grown boy, with hair well-shot with gray and usually flecked with wisps of straw, he hung about the barn and nipped apples from the barrel and sometimes sat on the pony’s back in the stall, feeding him with good apples too.

And this Brown Man had a way about him of being there one moment and elsewhere in the next, so that when Niall cast him a second look round the corner of the shed he was gone.

On that same instant something prickled his bare back and he spun about with an oath and almost a sweep of the hammer. As quickly as he spun a shadow dived in the corner of his eye and he kept spinning, following it as it nabbed a fistful of grain from the bin: but it was gone, quick as he could turn, and round the corner of the shed. “Hey!” he cried, and hurled himself round the corner, but it was gone a second time, a wisp of brown headed around the corner.

Once he had followed it: he knew better now. It had led him over fences and stones and over the brook and back again. Now he dived back again around the corner and caught it coming round behind him. He flung the mallet, not to hit it, but to scare it.

It screamed and tucked down instead of running. It kept tucked down, its face in its hairy hands, and peered out quickly to see if another mallet was coming.

“Here now,” Niall said. “Here.” He was suddenly in the wrong and hoping no one had seen.

It ventured another eye above its hands, then spat and scampered off on its short legs.

“Perish it,” Niall muttered to himself, and then wished he had not said that either. Nothing went well this day. He left his pegs and his mallet and followed it to the barn and inside.

Straw showered down his neck. “Plague on you,” he cried, but it went scampering through the rafters disturbing the owls in a flapping of wings. “Come back!”

But it was gone and out the door.

“Do not try.”

It was Beorc who had come in behind him, and shame flooded Niall’s face. He was not accustomed to be made sport of or to be caught in the wrong either. “I would not have hit him.”

“No, but you hurt his pride.”

A moment Niall was silent. “What will mend it?”

“Be kind,” said Beorc. “Only be kind.”

“Call him back,” said Niall in sudden despair.

“That I cannot. He is the Gruagach and no one has the calling of him: he will never tell his name.”

Niall shivered then, for his luck seemed to have left him. It will end now, he thought, for frightening one of the fair folk: he remembered how he had come to the Steading, and how it needed luck to find the place and needed luck to stay.

That night he had no appetite, and set his dinner on the porch beside the platter Aelfraeda set out; but in the morning Aelfraeda’s gift was taken and his was left

Yet there was no certain turning in his luck, except that now and again he had straw dumped on his head when he went into the barn and now and again his tools vanished when his back was turned, to appear on their pegs in the barn when he came hunting others.

All this he bore with patience unlike himself, even setting an especially fine apple out where the theft was returned—which gift vanished: but so, daily, did his tools. All the same he taught himself to smile about it, concealing his misfortune and making little of it, no matter how long the walk.

So great a patience did he achieve that it even extended to the boy Scaga’s thefts, so that one day that he came on the boy pilfering his lunch in the field he only stood there, and Scaga looked up with his eyes all round with startlement

Niall had a mallet in his hand this day too, but he kept it in his hand. “Will you not leave a morsel?” he asked. “I’ve been hard at my work.”

The boy looked at him, down on his haunches as he was and ill-set for running. And he set the basket down.

“Will you have half?” Niall asked the boy. “I’d like the company.”

“There’s not much,” the red-baked rascal said, looking doubtfully under the napkin.

“There’s always enough to give half of,” Niall said, and did.

It was a silent lunch. Scaga stole from others after, but never from him. And sometimes his tools came back on Scaga’s quick legs before he missed them.

One day about that time the Gruagach came and sat and watched him, and he spied it looking round the corner of the barn at him.

“Here,” he said, his heart lifting at this approach. He offered a handful from the bin, “here’s grain. I’ve a bit of bread about me if you like. Good cheese.” The head vanished before the words had left his mouth. But it lurked about and looked at him and stole his tools only now and again, just to remind him.

His luck lasted, and the days rolled on, from summer heat to harvest: the fawn grew gangling and the wolf cub yelped at the moon of nights; and the sickles turned up sharpened on their own each harvest morning.

But one nooning a man came stumbling up the valley from the south, off the shoulder of Raven’s Hill, startling the geese.

Niall came as all the house came running. The man had fallen trying to cross the fence, a bony huddle of limbs and weapons, for he carried a bow and an empty quiver, a sword at his side. Lonn had caught him up and held him, and so Niall came, and stopped and fell to his knees in dismay, because he knew this man. “His name is Caoimhin,” Niall said. A fear had come on him as if all his safety wavered. For the briefest moment he looked beyond the fences, where the folding hills trapped his sight, half-expecting to see pursuit coming hard on Caoimhin’s heels. But then he felt a hand close on his and looked down in shame.

“Lord,” Caoimhin said, and his hand trembled in its grip on his, Caoimhin, best of bowmen they had had. “O my lord, we heard that you were dead.”

“No,” said Niall, “hush, be still, lean on me: I’ll help you walk”

Caoimhin let him lift him up, trusting only him, clinging most to him and leaning on him, so with Beorc and Lonn and Flann and Carraig and all the troop they brought him into the yard, and so into the house and Aelfraeda’s care, than which there was none better.

It was broth that day and bread and butter, but Caoimhin limped as far as the porch in the evening, and then to the yard where the table groaned with food beneath the oak, and the harvesters came singing home. Having gotten that far he only stared with that far lost look of a man too hard for tears, but Niall came to rescue him and Beorc clapped him heartily on the shoulder and called for a cup of ale for him, and another plate at table.

“Here,” Niall bade Caoimhin quickly, and gave up his own seat until everyone rearranged themselves and Siolta brought a dish and cup for him. “He is Caoimhin,” Beorc said, lifting his cup to him. So they all did, and fell to one of Aelfraeda’s grand good meals.

Caoimhin tried, a bit of this and that, but his hands shook and at last he sat there with the tears running down his face and a bit of bread in his hand. But Niall put his arm about him and held him in his place, he was so weak, and if the company grew quiet a moment, they understood and the merriment picked up again. “What is this place?” Caoimhin asked when he had had a sip of ale.

“Refuge,” said Niall. “And safety. A place where ill has never been. And never shall.”

“Are we dead then?”

“No,” Niall laughed. “Never dead.”

But a niggling fear was on him. He even wished Caoimhin had never come, because this man reminded him what he had been, and brought the stink of death about him. More, he was afraid for the peace of all this place, as if it had taken some great danger to its heart.

Caoimhin lay about the house the next few days, or rested on the porch in the sunlight and the breeze, and slept much and drank and ate wholesome food when he waked, so that his face looked less haggard and less desperate.

In those first days he wanted at least his sword by him and kept it by him even napping in the sun. And ever and again his hand would stray to find it in his sleep, and his fingers curl about the sheath or hilt, so his face would lose its moment’s trouble and he would rest again. But on the third day he let it go; and the fourth he walked out of the house and left it behind, beside the hearth with his bow and his empty quiver. So he sat with old Sgeulaiche on the porch and finally strolled about the yard and out to the threshing.

There Niall saw him and wiped the sweat and the dust from his brow and came over to him.

“What,” Niall said lightly, “does Aelfraeda know you’ve strayed?”

“By your leave—”

Niall’s brows drew down. “No. Not mine. Not here.”

“My lord—”

“No lord, I say. No longer—Caoimhin.” He clapped him gently on the shoulder. “Come aside with me.”

Caoimhin walked with him, as far as the barn and into the shadow inside, and there Niall stopped. “There is no lord in the Steading,” Niall said at once, “if not Beorc himself; no lady if not Aelfraeda. And that is well enough with me. Forget my name.”

“I have rested. I am well enough to go back again—I will bring you word again. There are men of ours in the hills—”

“No. No. If you leave this place I do not think you will find it again.”

The eagerness died in Caoimhin’s lean face. From toe to crown Caoimhin looked at him and seemed to doubt what he saw as if it were his first clear look. “You have got calluses on your hands and not from the sword, my lord. There is straw in your hair. You do a farmer’s work.”

“I do it well. And I have more joy of it than anything I did. And I will tell you there is more good in it than ever I have hoped to do. Caoimhin, Caoimhin, you will see. You will see what this place is.”

“It has cast a spell on you, that much I see. The King—”

“The King.” A shudder came over Niall and he turned away. “My King is dead; the other—who knows? Who knows if he even exists? I saw my King dead. The other I never saw. A babe smuggled away at night—and who knows whose babe? Some serving maid’s? Some beggar’s child? Or any child at all.”

“I have seen him!”

“So you have seen him. And what proof is that? Any child, I say.”

“A boy—a fair blond boy. Laochailan son of Ruaidhrigh, like him as a boy could be. He has five years now. Taithleach keeps him safe—would you doubt his word?—always on the move through the hills, so that the traitors will never find him, and they need you now—They need you, Niall Cearbhallain.”

“A boy.” Niall sat down on the gram bin and looked up at Caoimhin with the taste of ashes in his mouth, “And what am I, Caoimhin? I was forty and two when I began to serve this hope of a King to come; and my joints ache, Caoimhin, with five years’ sleeping under tree and stone. And if this boy ever comes to take Dun na h-Eoin—look at me. Twenty years it will need to make a boy a man; and how many more to make that man a king? Am I likely to see it done?”

“So, well—and who of the men dead on Aescford field will ever see him king? Or shall I? Or shall I? I do not know. But I do what I can as we always did. Where is your heart, Cearbhallain?”

“Broken. Long ago. I will hear no more of it. No more. You’ll go or you’ll stay as you wish, when you can. But stay for now. Rest. Only a little time. And see what things are here. O Caoimhin—leave me my peace.”

A long time Caoimhin was silent, looking desolate and lost.

“Peace,” Niall repeated. “Our war is done. There is the harvest; the apples are ripening; there’ll be the long wintertime. And no need of swords and no help at all we can be. It’s all for younger men. If there’s to be a king, he will be theirs, not ours. If we have begun, others will finish. And is that not the way of things?”

“Lord,” Caoimhin whispered softly; and then a sudden alarm came into his eyes at a quiet scurrying, a shadow by the door. Caoimhin sprang and hit the door and hurled the listener in the dust. “Here are spies,” Caoimhin cried, and nabbed the brown man by the hair and hauled him back struggling and gasping as he was and slammed the door.

“Let it go,” Niall said at once, “let it go.”

Caoimhin had a look at it and flung his right hand back with an oath and an outcry, for it bit him and scratched and clawed, but he held it with the left. “This is no man, this—”

“Gruagach is his name,” Niall said, and took Caoimhin’s hand from the brown man. The creature hugged Niall’s arm and danced behind him and fled, peering out again from the refuge of a pile of hay, with straw and dust clinging all over its hair.

“Wicked, wicked,” it said, a voice as slight as itself, that lifted the hairs on a man’s neck.

“He will never hurt you,” Niall promised it. Never had he heard it speak, though others said it could. “Open the door, Caoimhin—open it! Let it go!”

Carefully Caoimhin pushed at the door and light flooded in. The Gruagach stirred himself and sidled that way, closer than ever Niall had seen him clearly, face seamed and brown and bearded, eyes lightless as deep water peering out from under matted hair. It looked up at him and bobbed as if it bowed on its thick legs. And then it fled, scuttling out as quick as the breeze, and was gone.

Then Niall looked toward Caoimhin, and saw the dread there, and all the surmise. “There is no harm in it.”

“Is there none?” Caoimhin leaned against the door. “Now I know where the cakes go at night, and what the luck is in this place. Come away, Cearbhallain, come now.”

“I will never go. No. You do not know—the way of this place. Come, a bargain with me—only a little time. You would always take my word. Stay. You can always leave—but you will never find the way back again. Was it ill luck brought you here? Tell me that. Or tell me whether you would be breathing the air this morning or eating a good breakfast and looking forward to dinner. There’s no dishonor in being alive. It’s not our war any longer. It was our luck that brought us here; it was—perhaps something won. I think so. Think on it, Caoimhin. And stay.”

A long time Caoimhin reflected on it, and at last looked at the ground and at last looked at him. “There’s autumn ahead,” Caoimhin said, weakening.

“And winter. There is winter, Caoimhin.”

“Till the spring,” Caoimhin said. “In the spring I’ll go.”

The apples went into the bins; the sausages went to smoke; the oak tree shed his leaves and deep snow drifted down. The Gruagach sat on the roof by the chimney and left prints by the step where the cakes and mulled ale disappeared; and of nights he kept the pony and the oxen company.

“Tell us tales,” young Scaga said, as all the household sat about the fire. Marvelous to say, Scaga had taken to making the pony’s mash this winter without being asked; and never a thing had been missed about the house since summer. He had, from being last and least, become a thoughtful if sober lad, and attached himself to Niall’s side and by adoption, to Caoimhin’s as well.

So Caoimhin told of a winter on the Daur and a storm that had cracked old trees; and Sgeulaiche recalled being lost in such a storm. And after, when the whole house curled up to sleep each in their warm nooks, and Beorc and Aelfraeda in their great close-bed in the loft: “It is a young man’s winter,” Caoimhin said to Niall whose pallet was near his.

“A young man’s war,” said Niall.

“They have taken your lands,” Caoimhin said, “and mine.”

A long time Niall was silent. “I have no heir. Nor ever shall, most likely.”

“As for that—” Now the silence was on Caoimhin’s side, a very long time. “As for that, well, that is for young men too. Like the winter. Like the war.”

And after that Caoimhin said nothing. But in the morning a lightness was on him, as if some weight had passed.

He will stay, Niall thought, taking in his breath. At least one man of all that followed me. And then he put that prideful thought away, along with my lord and Cearbhallain and bundled himself into warm clothes, for there was winter’s work to do, the beasts to care for. The children fought snowball battles: Caoimhin joined in, stalking with Scaga round the barn. Niall saw the stealth, the skill that Caoimhin taught the boy. A moment the chill got through: but they were only snowballs, and the squeals and shouts were only children’s laughter.

The Gruagach perched on the roof, and let fall a double armful and laughed and ran.

“Ha,” it cried, going over the rooftree. “Ha! Wicked!”

“Wither it!” cried Caoimhin, but the ambush was sprung and the battle lost in pelting snowballs.

A moment Niall watched, and turned away, hearing still the squeals and hearing something else. He turned and looked back to prove to his ears and eyes what it was he heard, and succeeded, and went his way.

THREE The Harper

The harvest had come again. The scythes went back and forth and left stubble in their wake. By morning the sheaves appeared all in rows, neatly tied; so the Gruagach slept a mighty sleep by day, and ate and ate. A pair of fawns had come this year, a fledgling falcon, a bittern, a trio of fox kits and a starved and arrow-shot piebald mare: such were the fugitives the Steading gathered. Now the falcon was flown, and the bittern too; the fox kits instead of tumbling about the porch were beginning to stray toward the margins of the Steading, going the way of the wolf; and the mare had become fast friends with the Steading’s own pony, grown fat and sleek on sweet grass and grain. The children were delighted with her and hung garlands about her neck which she contrived to slip and eat often as not: she ate and ate, and began to frisk about at daybreak as if it were the morning of the world and no war had ever been.

So here is another fled from the madness, Niall thought to himself, and loved the mare for her courage in living. He rode at times bareback and reinless when he had leisure, letting her go where she would through the pastures and the hills. He loved the feeling of riding again, and the mare swished her tail and cantered at times for the joy of it, going where she pleased, from rich pasture to cool brook to hillsides in the sunlight, or home again to stable and grain. Banain, he called her, his fair darling. She would bear him of her own will; or any of the children, or the Gruagach who whispered to her in a way that horses understood. Sometimes she was willing to be bridled and Caoimhin rode when the mood came on him, and others did, but rarely and not so well and not so far, for, as Caoimhin said, she has one love and none of us can win her.

So this year had been even kinder than the first to him. But the year was not done with arrivals.

This last one came singing, blithe as brazen, down the dusty margin of the fields, along the track the cattle took to pasture, a youth, a vagabond with a sack on his back and a staff in his hand and no weapon but a dagger. His hair was blond to whiteness, and blew about his shoulders to the time of his walking and the whim of the breeze.

Hey, he sang, the winds do blow,

And ho, the leaves are dying,

And season doth to season go

The summer swiftly flying.

Niall was one that saw this apparition. He was mending fences, and Beorc was near him, with Caoimhin and Lonn and Scaga. “Look,” said Caoimhin, and look they did, and looked at Beorc. Beorc stopped his work and with hands on hips watched the lad coming so merrily down the far hillside, Beorc seeming less perplexed than solemn.

“Here’s one come walking where he knows not,” Niall said. In a furtive smallness of his heart it disturbed him that anyone could come less desperate than himself, than Caoimhin wounded, than half-starved Banain or the grounded falcon. It upset all his world that this place could be gained so casually, by simple accident. And then he thought again on the meanness of that; and a third time that it was less than likely.

“It be one of the fair folk,” said Lonn uneasily.

“No,” said Beorc. “That he is not. He has a harp on his shoulder, and his singing is uncommon fine but he is none of the fair folk.”

“Do you know him then?” Niall asked, wishing some surety in this meeting.

“No,” Beorc said. “Not I.” There was no man living had sharper eyes or ears than Beorc. He spoke while the boy was well off in the distance and the voice was still unclear. But the song came clearer as they listened, bright and fair, and the boy came walking up to them in no great hurry: there was indeed a harp on his shoulder. It rang as he walked and as he stopped.

“Is there welcome here?” the boy asked.

“Always,” said Beorc. “For all that find the way. Have you walked far?”

For a moment there seemed a confusion in the boy’s eyes. He half turned as if seeking the way that he had come. “I came on the path. It seemed a short way through the hills.”

“Well,” said Beorc. “Well, shorter and longer than some. The hills are not safe these days.”

“There were riders,” said the harper vaguely, pointing at the hills. “But they went off their way and I went mine, and I sing as I walk so they will not mistake me—there is still some respect for a harper, is there not, in the lands about Caer Donn?”

“Ah, if you were seeking Caer Donn you are somewhat off your path.”

Now the boy looked afraid—not greatly so, but uneasy all the same. “I had come from Donn. Is this then An Beag’s land? I had not thought it reached within the hills.”

“Freeheld, this is,” said Beorc and laughed, waving an arm at all the steading, the house set on the side of the great hill, the golden-stubbled fields, the orchards, the whole wide valley. “And Aelfraeda, my wife, will give a harper a cup of ale and a place by the fire for the asking. If you’ve a taste for cakes and honey, that we always have. Scaga, show the lad the way.”

“Sir,” said the harper, quite courteous in his recovery, and made a bow as respectful as for a lord. He shouldered the strap of his harpcase and went off up the hill with Scaga’s leading, not without a troubled glance or two the way he had come, but after a few paces his step was light again and quick.

“You have misgivings,” Niall said to Beorc at the harper’s back, when he was out of hearing. “You never wondered at me or at Caoimhin. Who is he? Or what?”

Beorc continued to stare after the boy a moment, leaning on the rail, and his face had no laughter in it, none. “Something strayed. Caer Donn, he says. Yet his heart is hidden.”

“Does he lie?” asked Caoimhin.

“No,” said Beorc. “Do you think a harper could?”

“A harper is a man,” said Caoimhin. “And men have been known to lie upon a time.”

Beorc turned on Caoimhin one of his searching looks, his beard like so much fire in the wind and his hair blowing likewise. “The world has gotten to be an ill place if that is so. But this one does not. I do not fear that.”

“And what when he goes singing songs of us in An Beag?” asked Caoimhin.

“They may search as they will,” said Beorc, and shrugged and took up the rail again, “But we shall have songs for it. Perhaps a whole winter’s songs, perhaps not.”

And Beorc fell to singing himself, which he would when he wished not to discuss a thing.

“Master Beorc,” said Caoimhin, annoyed, but Niall took up the other end of the rail and held it in place in silence, so Caoimhin, scowling still, knelt to set the pole.

That evening there were indeed songs at the table in the yard, beneath the stars. The harper played for them on his plain and battered harp, delighting the children with merry songs made just for them. But there were great songs too. He had made one of the great battle at Aesclinn; he sang of the King and Niall Cearbhallain, while Niall himself looked only at the cup in his hands, wishing the song done. There were tears in many eyes as the harper sang; but Beorc and Aelfraeda sat hand in hand, listening and still, keeping their thoughts to themselves; and Niall sat dry-eyed and miserable until the last chord was struck. Then Caoimhin cleared his throat loudly and offered the harper ale.

“Thank you,” the boy said—Fionn, he called himself, and that was all. He drank a sip and struck a thoughtful chord, and let the strings ripple a moment. “Ah,” he said, and after a moment let the music die and took up the ale again. He drank and looked up at them with the sweat cooling on his brow, and then gave his attention to the harp again.

“The fires are low

The breezes blow

And stone lies not on stone.

The stars do wane

And hope be vain

Till he comes to his own.”

Then a chill came on Niall Cearbhallain, and he clenched tight the cup in his hand, for it meant the boy King.

“That song,” said Caoimhin, “is dangerous.”

“So,” said the harper. “But I am wary where I sing it. And a harper is sacred—is he not?”

“He is not,” said Niall harshly and set his cup down. “They hanged Coinneach the king’s bard in the court of Dun na h-Eoin, before they pulled the walls down.” He stood up to leave the table, and then recalled that it was Beorc’s table and Aelfraeda’s, and not his to be leaving in any quarrel. “It is the ale,” he said then lamely, and sank back into his place. “Sing something less grim, master harper. Sing something for the children.”

“Aye,” said the harper after a moment of looking at him, and blinked and seemed a moment lost. “I will sing for them.”

So the harper did, a lilting, merry song, but it struck differently on Niall’s heart. Niall looked toward Aelfraeda and Beorc, a pleading look and, receiving nothing of offense, gathered himself from his bench and went away into the dark, down by the barn, where the music was far away and thin and eerie in the night, and the laughter far.

There he leaned against the rail of the pen and felt the night colder than it had been.

“Singing,” piped a voice.

It startled him, thin and strange as it was, coming from the haystack, even if he knew the source of it.

“Mind your business,” he said.

“Niall Cearbhallain.”

A chill ran through him, that it had somehow gotten his name. “You’ve been lurking under more haystacks than this,” he said. “I’d be ashamed.”

“Niall Cearbhallain.”

The chill grew deeper. “Let me be.”

“Be what, Niall Cearbhallain?”

He shrugged aside, shivering, ready to go off anywhere to be rid of this badgering.

“Feasts at the house,” said the Gruagach. “And what for me?”

“I’ll see a plate set out for you.”

“With ale.”

“The largest cup.”

The Gruagach rustled out of the haystack and hopped up onto the rail, his shagginess all shot through with bits of straw in the dark. “This harper does not see,” said the Gruagach. “He sits and harps and sometimes it comes clear to him and most times not. Your luck has brought him here, Niall Cearbhallain. He came to you first. He is fey. He is your luck and none of his own.”

“What made you so wise?” Niall snapped, dismayed.

“What made you so blind, Man? You came here once yourself with the smell of the Sidhe about you.”

He had started to turn away. He stopped and stared, cold to the heart. But the Gruagach bounded off the rail and ran.

“Come back!” he called. “Come back here!” But the Gruagach never would. He was lost into the dark and gone at least until he came for his cakes and ale.

There was a quieter gathering very late that night, in the hall by the fireside where the harper sat half-drowsing with ale, the harp clasped in his arms and the firelight bathing his face with a kindly glow. Beorc and Aelfraeda, Lonn and Sgeulaiche and Diarmaid, a scattering about the room; and Caoimhin was there when Niall came straying in, thinking the hall at rest.

“Sir,” said the harper, who rose and bowed, “I hope there was no distress I gave you.”

“None,” said Niall, constrained by the courtesy. He bowed, and addressed himself to Aelfraeda. “The matter of the cakes—may I see to it?”

Aelfraeda gathered herself up and everyone was dislodged. “The harper’s tired,” she said. ‘To bed, to bed all.” She clapped her hands. Beorc moved and the rest did, and the drowsing harper blinked and settled the more comfortably into his corner.

Niall filled the cup himself and took the plate of cakes out on the porch. “Gruagach,” he called softly, but heard and saw nothing. He went inside, as all the house was settling to their rest; and Scaga who had made himself inconspicuous in the corner came out of his hiding.

“Enough,” said Niall. “To bed.—Now.” So Scaga fled.

But over Caoimhin he had no such power. Caoimhin remained, watching him, and the harper’s eyes were on him.

“Cearbhallain,” said the harper quietly.

“And has he told you? And how many know?”

“I knew at the table. I have heard the manner of your face.”

“What, that it is foul? That it is graceless?”

“I have heard it said you are a hard man, lord. Among the best that served the King. I saw you once—I was a boy. I saw you stand at table tonight and for a moment you were Cearbhallain.”

“You are still a boy to my years,” Niall snapped. “And songs are very well in their moment. In hall. You were not at Aescford or Aesclinn. It stank and it was long and loud. That was the battle, and we lost.”

“But did great good.”

“Did we?” Niall turned his side to him, taking the warmth of the dying fire on his face, and a great weariness came on him. “Be that so. But I am for bed now, master harper. For bed and rest.”

“You gather men here. To ride out to Caer Wiell. Is that your purpose?”

It startled him. He laughed without mirth. “Boy, you dream. Ride with what? A haying fork and hoe?”

The harper reached beside him at the bricks of the fireplace, pulled forward an old sheath and sword.

“Dusty, is it not?” said Niall. “Aelfraeda must have missed it.”

“If you would take me with you—lord, I can use a bow.”

“You are mistaken. You are gravely mistaken. The sword is old, the metal brittle. It is no good any more. And I have settled here to stay.”

A pain came over the harper’s face. “I am no spy, but a King’s man.”

“Well for you. Forget Caer Wiell.”

“Your cousin—the traitor—”

“Give me no news of him.”

“—holds your lands. The lady Meara is prisoned there, his wife by force. The King’s own cousin. And you have settled here?”

Niall’s hand lifted and he turned. The harper had set himself for the blow. He let his hand fall.

“Lord,” Caoimhin said.

“If I were the Cearbhallain,” said Niall, “would I be patient? He was never patient. As for taking Caer Wiell—what would you, harper? Strike a blow? An untimely blow. Look you, look you, lad—Think like a soldier, only once. Say that the blow fell true. Say that I took Caer Wiell and dealt all that was due there. And how long should I hold it?”

“Men would come to you.”

“Aye, oh aye, the King’s faithful men would come—to one hold, to the Cearbhallain’s name. And begin battle for an infant king—for a power before its time. But An Beag would rise; and Caer Damh—no gentle enemies. Donn is fey and strange and no trust is in them if there is no strong king. Luel’s heart is good but Donn lies between, and Caer Damh—No. This is not the year. In ten, perhaps; in two score there may be a man to crown. Maybe you will see that day. But it is not this day. And my day is past. I have learned patience. That is all I have.”

For a moment all was silence. An ember snapped within the hearth. “I am Coinneach the king’s bard’s son,” the harper said. “And I saw you at Dun na h-Eoin once, in the court where my father died.”

“Coinneach’s son.” Niall looked at him, and the cold seemed greater still. “I had not thought you lived.”

“I was with the young King—King he is, lord—until I took to the roads. And I have lodged under hedges and among old stones and now and again in Luel and Donn, aye, and An Beag’s steadings too, so never name me coward, lord. Two years I have come and gone and not all in safety.”

“Stay,” Niall said. “Lad, stay here. There is no safety else.”

“Not I. Not I, lord. This place is asleep. I have felt it more and more, and I have slept places round about Donn that I would never cross again. Leave this place with me.”

“No,” Niall said. “Neither Caoimhin nor I. You will not listen. Then never think to come back again. Or to live if you once pass the gates of Caer Wiell. Have you thought how much you could betray?”

“Nothing and no one. I have taken care to know nothing. Two years on the road, lord. Do you think I have not thought? Aye, since Dun na h-Eoin I have thought and come on this journey.”

“Then farewell, friend’s son,” Niall said. “Take my sword if it would serve you. Its owner cannot go.”

“It is a courteous offer,” the harper said, “but I’ve no skill with swords. My harp is all I need.”

“Take or leave it as you will,” Niall said. “It will rust here.” He turned away and went toward his own nook back along the halls. He did not hear Caoimhin follow. He looked back. “Caoimhin,” he said. “The lad has a long way to travel. Go to bed.”

“Aye,” said Caoimhin, and left him.

The harper left before the dawn—quietly, and taking nothing with him that was not his—“Not a bit to eat,” Siolta mourned, “nor anything to drink. We should have set it out for him, and him giving us songs till his voice was gone.” But Aelfraeda said nothing, only shook her head in silence and put the kettle on.

And all that morning there was a heavy silence, as if merriment had left them, as if the singing had exhausted them. Scaga moped about his tasks. Beorc went down to the barn in silence and took Lonn and, others with him. Sgeulaiche sat and carved on something Sgeulaiche understood, an inchoate thing, but the children were out of sorts from late hours and sulked and complained about their tasks. And Caoimhin who had gone down with Beorc never came to his work.

So Niall found him, sitting on the bench at the side of the barn where he should have gathered his tools. “Come,” said Niall, “the fence is yet to do.”

“I cannot stay,” said Caoimhin, so all that he had feared in searching for Caoimhin came tumbling in on him; but he laughed all the same.

“Work is a cure for melancholy, man. Come on. You’ll think better of it by noontime.”

“I cannot stay any longer.” Caoimhin gathered himself to his feet and met his eyes. “I shall be taking my sword and bow.”

“To what use? To defend a harper? What will he be saying to An Beag along the way?—Pray you never notice that great armed man: he set it on himself to follow me? A fine pair you would be along the road.”

“So I shall follow. A winter I said I would stay. But you have stolen a year from me. The boy was right: this place is full of sleep. Leave it, Cearbhallain, leave it and come do some good in the world before we end. No more of this waking sleep, no more of this place.”

“Think of it when you are starved again and cold, or when you lie in some ditch and none to hear you—O Caoimhin! Listen to me.”

“No,” said Caoimhin and flung his arms about him briefly. “O my lord, one of us should go to serve the King, even if neither sees his day.”

Then Caoimhin went striding off toward the house, never looking back.

“Then take Banain,” Niall cried after him. “And if you have need then give her her head: she might bring you home.”

Caoimhin stopped, his shoulders fallen. “You love her too much. Give me your blessing, lord. Give me that instead.”

“My blessing then,” said Cearbhallain, and watched him go toward the house, which was as much as he cared to see. He turned. He ran, ran as he had run that day long ago, across the fields, as a child would run from something or to something, or simply because his heart was breaking and he wanted no sight of anyone, least of all of Caoimhin going away to die.

He fell down at last high upon the hillside among the weeds, and his side ached almost as much as his heart. He had no tears—saw himself, a grim, lean man the years had worn as they wore the rocks; and about him was the peace the hillside gave; and below him when he looked down was the orchard ripe with apples, the broad meadow pastures, the house with the barn and the old oak. And above him was the sky. And beyond the shoulder of the hill the way grew strange like the glare of rocks in summer noon, the sheen of sun on grass stems, so that his eyes hurt and he looked away and rose, walking along the hill.

Then a doubt came gnawing at him, so that he passed along the ridge looking for some sight of Caoimhin, like a man worrying at a wound. But when he had come on the valley way he saw no one, and knew himself too late.

“Death,” said a thin small voice above him on the hill.

Niall looked up in rage at the shaggy creature on the rock. “What would you know, you croaking lump of straw? Starve from now on! Steal all I have, creeping thief, and starve!”

“Evil words for evil, but only one is true.”

“A plague on your prophecy.”

“Ill and ill.”

“Leave me.”

The Gruagach hopped down from the rock and came nearer still “Not I.”

“Will he die then?”

“Perhaps.”

Then be clear.” Hope had started up in him, a guilty desperate thing, and he seized the Gruagach by its shaggy arms and held it “If you have the Sight, then See. Tell me—tell me—was there truth in the harper? Is there hope at all? If there was hope—will there be a King again? Is it on me to serve this King?”

“Let go!” it cried. “Let go!”

“Be plain with me,” Niall said and shook it hard, for a terror made him cruel, and the creature’s eyes were wild. “Is there hope in this King?”

“He is dark,” hissed the Gruagach with a wild shake of its shaggy head, and its eyes rolled aside and fixed again on his. “O dark.”

“Who? What meaning, dark? Name me names. Will this young King live?”

The Gruagach gave a moan and suddenly bit him fiercely, so that he jerked his hand back and lost the Gruagach from his grip, holding the wounded hand to his lips. But the creature stopped and hugged itself and rocked to and fro, wild eyed, and spoke in a thin, wailing voice:

Dark the blight and dark the path and strong the chains that bind them

Fell the day that on them dawns, for doom comes swift behind them.

“What sense is that?” Niall cried. “Who are they? Do you mean myself?”

“No, no, never Cearbhallain. O Man, the Gruagach weeps for you.”

“Shall I die then?”

“All Men die.”

“A plague on you!” He sucked at his wounded hand. “What chains and where? Is it Caer Wiell you mean?”

“Stay,” it said, and fled.

He almost had the will to go. He stood on the hillside and looked down at the dale that led away toward the outgoing of the hills. But that Stay rang in his ears, and his bones ached with his running, and Caoimhin was nowhere in sight

He sank down there, and watched till sundown, but the courage for the road grew colder and colder, and his belief in it less and less.

At last a boy came running, jogging along by turns and running as if his side hurt, down in the place between the hills.

“Scaga!” Niall called, rising to his feet.

The boy stopped as if struck, and looked up, and began to run toward him, stumbling as he ran; but Niall came down to him and caught him in his arms.

“I thought you had gone,” the boy said, and never Scaga wept, but his lip quivered.

“Caoimhin is gone,” Niall said, “not I. Is supper ready?”

For a moment Scaga fought for breath. “I think so.”

So he came back with Scaga, and the snare was fast.

FOUR The Hunting

Arafel dreamed. It was only a moment of a dream, a slipping elsewhere into memory, which she did much, into a brightness much different from the dim nights and blinding days of mortal Eald. But her time being never what the time of Men was, she had hardly time to sink to sleep again when a sound had waked her, a plaintive sound and strange.

He has come back again, she thought drowsily, no little annoyed; and then she sought and found something quite different—a fell thing had gotten in, or came close, and something bright fled ringing through her memory.

She gathered herself. The dream scattered in pieces beyond recall, but she never heeded. The wind blew a sound to her and all of Eald quivered like a spider web. She took a sword and flung her cloak about her, though she could have done more. It was carelessness and habit; it was fey ill luck, perhaps. But no one challenged Arafel; so she followed what she heard.

There was a path through Eald, up from the Caerbourne ford. It was the darkest of all ways to be taking out of Caerdale, and since she had barred it few had traveled it: brigands like the outlaw—this kind of Man might try it, the sort with eyes so dull and dead they were numb to ordinary fear and sense. Sometimes they were even fortunate and won through, if they came by day, if they moved quickly and never tarried or hunted the beasts of Eald. If they sped quickly enough then evening might see them safe away into the New Forest in the hills, or out of Eald again to cross the river.

But a runner entering by night, and this one young and wild-eyed and carrying no sword or bow, but only a dagger and a harp—this was a far rarer venturer in Eald, and all the deeper shadows chuckled and whispered in their startlement

It was the harp she had heard, this unlikely thing which jangled on his shoulder and betrayed him to all with ears to hear, in this world and the other. She marked his flight by that sound and walked straight into the way to meet him, out of the soft cool light of the elvish sun and into the colder white of his moonlight. Unhooded she came, the cloak carelessly flung back; and shadows which had grown quite bold in the Ealdwood of latter earth suddenly felt the warm breath of spring and drew aside, slinking into dark places where neither moon nor sun cast light

“Boy,” she whispered.

He started in mid-step like a wounded deer, hesitated, searching out the voice in the brambles. She stepped full into his light and felt the dank wind of mortal Eald on her face. The boy seemed more solid then, ragged and torn by thorns in his headlong flight through the wood. His clothes were better suited to some sheltered hall—they were fine wool and embroidered linen, soiled now and rent; and the harp at his shoulders had a broidered case.

She had taken little with her out of otherwhere, and yet did take: it was always in the eye which saw her. She had come as plainly as ever she had ventured into the mortal world, and leaned against the rotting trunk of a dying tree and folded her arms without a hint of threat, laying no hand now to the silver sword she wore. More, she propped one foot against a projecting root and offered him her thinnest smile, much out of the habit of smiling at all. The boy looked at her with no less apprehension for that effort, seeing, perhaps, a ragged vagabond in outlaw’s habit—or perhaps seeing more and having more reason to fear, because he did not look to be as blind as some. His hand touched a talisman at his breast and she, smiling still, touched that pale green stone which hung at her own throat, a talisman which had power to answer his.

“Now where would you be going,” she asked him, “so recklessly through the Ealdwood? To some misdeed? Some mischief?”

“Misfortune, most like.” He was out of breath. He still stared at her as if he thought her no more than moonbeams, which amused her in a distant, dreaming way. She took in all of him, the fine ruined clothes, the harp on his shoulder, so very strange a traveler on any path in all the world. She was intrigued by him as no doings of Men had yet interested her; she longed—But suddenly and far away the wind carried a baying of hounds. The boy cried out and fled away from her, breaking branches in his flight.

His quickness amazed her out of her long indolence, catching her quite by surprise, which nothing had done in long ages. “Stay!” she cried, and stepped into his path a second time, shadow-shifting through the dark and the undergrowth like some trick of moonlight. She had felt that other, darker presence; she had not forgotten, far from forgotten it, but she was light with that threat, having far more interest in this visitor than any other. He touched something forgotten in her, brought something of brightness in himself, amid the dark. “I do doubt,” she said quite casually to calm him, the while he stared at her as if his reason had fled him, “I do much doubt they’ll come this far. What is your name, boy?”

He was instantly wary of that question, staring at her with that trapped deer’s look, surely knowing the power of names to bind.

“Come,” she said reasonably. “You disturb the peace here, you trespass my forest—What name do you give me for it?”

Perhaps he would not have given his true one and perhaps he would not have stayed at all, but that she fixed him sternly with her eyes and he stammered out: “Fionn.”

“Fionn.” Fair was apt, for he was very fair for humankind, with tangled pale hair and the first down of beard. It was a true name, holding much of him, and his heart was in his eyes. “Fionn.” She spoke it a third time softly, like a charm. “Fionn. Are you hunted, then?”

“Aye,” he said.

“By Men, is it?”

“Aye,” he said still softer.

‘To what purpose do they hunt you?”

He said nothing, but she reckoned well enough for herself.

“Come then,” she said, “come, walk with me. I think I should be seeing to this intrusion before others do.—Come, come, have no dread of me.”

She parted the brambles for him. A last moment he delayed, then did as she asked and walked after her, carefully and much loath, retracing the path on which he had fled, held by nothing but his name.

She stayed by that track for a little distance, taking mortal time for his sake, not walking the quicker ways through her own Eald. But soon she left that easiest path, finding others. The thicket which degenerated from the dark heart of Eald was an unlovely place, for the Ealdwood had once been better than it was, and there was still a ruined fairness about that wood; but these young trees they began to meet had never been other than desolate. They twisted and tangled their roots among the bones of the crumbling hills, making deceiving and thorny barriers. It was unlikely that any Man could ever have seen the ways she found, let alone track her through the night against her will—but she patiently made a way for the boy who followed her, now and again waiting, holding branches parted for him. So she took time to look about her as she went, amazed by the changes the years had wrought in this place she once had known. She saw the slow work of root and branch and ice and sun, labored hard-breathing, mortal-wise, and scratched with thorns, but strangely gloried in it, alive to the world this unexpected night, waking more and more. Ever and again she turned when she sensed faltering behind her: the boy each time caught that look of hers and came on with a fresh effort, pale and fearful as he seemed, past clinging thickets and over stones; doggedly, as if he had lost all will or hope of doing otherwise.

“I shall not leave you alone,” she said. “Take your time.”

But he never answered, not one word.

At last the woods gave them a little clear space, at the veriest edge of the New Forest. She knew very well where she was. The baying of hounds came echoing up to her out of Caerdale, from the deep valley the river cut below the heights, and below was the land of Men, with all their doings, good and ill. She thought a moment of her outlaw, of a night he sped away; a moment her thoughts ranged far and darted over all the land; and back again to this place, this time, the boy.

She stepped up onto the shelf of rock at the head of that last slope, while at her feet stretched all the great vale of the Caerbourne, a dark, tree-filled void beneath the moon. A towered heap of stones had lately risen across the vale on the hill. Men called it Caer Wiell, but that was not its true name. Men forgot, and threw down old stones and raised new. So much did the years do with the world. And only a moment ago a man had sped—or how many years?

Behind her the boy arrived, panting and struggling through the undergrowth, and dropped down to sit on the edge of that slanting stone, the harp on his shoulders echoing. His head sank on his folded arms and he wiped the sweat and the tangled pale hair from his brow. The baying, which had been still a moment, began again much nearer, and he lifted frightened eyes and clenched his hands on the rock.

Now, now he would run, having come as far as her light wish could bring him. Fear shattered the spell. He started to his feet. She leapt down and stayed him yet again with a touch of light fingers on his sweating arm.

“Here’s the limit of my woods,” she said, “and in it hounds do hunt that you could never shake from your heels, no. You’d do well to stay here by me, Fionn, indeed you would. Is it yours, that harp?”

He nodded, distracted by the hounds. His eyes turned away from her, toward that dark gulf of trees.

“Will you play for me?” she asked. She had desired this from the beginning, from the first she had felt the ringing of the harp; and the desire of it burned far more keenly than did any curiosity about Men and dogs—but one would serve the other. It was elvish curiosity; it was simplicity; it was, elvish-wise, the truest thing, and mattered most.

The boy looked back into her steady gaze as though he thought her mad; but perhaps he had given over fear, or hope, or reason. Something of all three left his eyes, and he sat down on the edge of the stone again, took the harp from his shoulders and stripped off the case.

Dark wood starred and banded with gold, it was very, very fine: there was more than mortal skill in that workmanship, and more than beauty in its tone. It sounded like a living voice when he took it into his arms. He held it close to him like something protected, and lifted a pale, still sullen face.

Then he bowed his head and played as she had bidden him, soft touches at the strings that quickly grew bolder, that waked echoes out of the depths of Caerdale and set the hounds in the distance to baying madly. The music drowned the voices, filled the air, filled her heart, and now she felt no faltering or tremor of his hands. She listened, and almost forgot which moon shone down on them, for it had been long, so very long, since the last song had been heard in the Ealdwood, and that was sung soft and elsewhere.

He surely sensed a glamor on him, in which the wind blew warmer and the trees sighed with listening. The fear passed from his eyes, and while the sweat stood on his face like jewels, it was clear, brave music that he made.

Then suddenly, with a bright ripple of the strings, the music became a defiant song, strange to her ears.

Discord crept in, the hounds’ fell voices which took the music and warped it out of tune. Arafel rose as that sound grew near. The harper’s hands fell abruptly still. There was the rush and clatter of horses in the thicket below.

Fionn himself sprang to his feet, the harp laid aside. He snatched at once at the small dagger at his belt, and Arafel flinched at the drawing of that blade, the swift, bitter taint of iron. “No,” she wished him, wished him very strongly, and stayed his hand. Unwillingly he slid the weapon back into its sheath.

Then the hounds and the riders came pouring up at them out of the darkness of the trees, a flood of dogs black and slavering and two great horses clattering among them, bearing Men with the smell of iron about them, Men glittering terribly in the moonlight. The hounds surged up the slope baying and bugling and as suddenly fell back again, making a wide circle, alternately whining and cringing and lifting their hackles at what they saw. The riders whipped them, but their horses shied and screamed under the spurs and neither horses nor hounds could be driven farther.

Arafel stood, one foot braced against the rock, and regarded this chaos of Men and beasts with cold curiosity. She found them strange, harder and wilder than the outlaws she knew; and strange too was the device on them, a wolf’s grinning head. She did not recall that emblem—or care for the manner of these visitors, less even than the outlaws.

A third rider came rattling up the slope, a large man who gave a great shout and whipped his unwilling horse farther than the other two, all the way to the crest of the hill facing the rock, and halfway up that slope advanced more Men who had followed him, no few of them with bows. The rider reined aside, out of the way. His arm lifted. The bows bent, at the harper and at her.

“Hold,” said Arafel.

The Man’s arm did not fall: it slowly lowered. He glared at her, and she stepped lightly up onto the rock so that she need not look up so far, to this Man on his tall black horse. The beast suddenly shied under him and he spurred it and curbed it cruelly; but he gave no order to his men, as if the cowering hounds and trembling horses had finally made him see what he faced.

“Away from there!” he shouted at her, a voice fit to make the earth quake. “Away! or I daresay you need a lesson too.” And he drew his great sword and held it toward her, curbing the protesting horse.

“Me, lessons?” Arafel stepped lightly to the ground and set her hand on the harper’s arm. “Is it on his account you set foot here and raise this noise?”

“My harper,” the lord said, “and a thief. Witch, step aside. Fire and iron can answer the likes of you.”

Now in truth she had no liking for the sword the Man wielded or for the iron-headed arrows yonder which could come speeding their way at this Man’s lightest word. She kept her hand on Fionn’s arm nonetheless, seeing well enough how he would fare with them alone. “But he’s mine, lord-of-Men. I should say that the harper’s no joy to you, or you’d not come chasing him from your land. And great joy he is to me, for long and long it is since I’ve met so pleasant a companion in the Ealdwood—Gather the harp, lad, do, and walk away now. Let me talk to this rash Man.”

“Stay!” the lord shouted; but Fionn snatched the harp into his arms and edged away.

An arrow hissed: the boy flung himself aside with a terrible clangor of the harp, and lost the harp on the slope. He might have fled, but he scrambled back for it and that was his undoing. Of a sudden there was a half-ring of arrows drawn ready and aimed at them both.

“Do not,” said Arafel plainly to the lord.

“What’s mine is mine.” The lord held his horse still, his sword outstretched before his archers, bating the signal. “Harp and harper are mine. And you’ll rue it if you think any words of yours weigh with me. I’ll have him and you for your impudence.”

It seemed wisest then to walk away, and Arafel did so. But she turned back again in the next instant, at distance, at Fionn’s side, and only half under his moon. “I ask your Name, lord-of-Men, if you aren’t fearful of my curse.”

So she mocked him, to make him afraid before his men. “Evald of Caer Wiell,” he said back in spite of what he had seen, no hesitating, with all contempt for her. “And yours, witch?”

“Call me what you like, lord.” Never in human ages had she showed herself for what she was, but her anger rose. “And take warning, that these woods are not for human hunting and your harper is not yours anymore. Go away and be grateful. Men have Caerdale. If it does not please you, shape it until it does. The Ealdwood’s not for trespass.”

The lord gnawed at his mustaches and gripped his sword the tighter, but about him the drawn bows had begun to sag and the loosened arrows to aim at the dirt. Fear was in the bowmen’s eyes, and the riders who had come first and farthest up the slope hung back, free men and less constrained than the archers.

“You have what’s mine,” the lord insisted, though his horse fought to be away.

“And so I do. Go on, Fionn. Do go, quietly.”

“You’ve what’s mine,” the valley lord shouted. “Are you thief then, as well as witch? You owe me a price for it.”

She drew in a sharp breath and yet did not waver in or out of the shadow. It was so, if his claim was true. “Then do not name too high, lord-of-Men. I may hear you, if that will quit us. And likewise I will warn you: things of Eald are always in Eald. Wisest of all if what you ask is my leave to go.”

His eyes roved harshly about her, full of hate and yet of wariness as well. Arafel felt cold at that look, especially where it centered, above her heart, and her hand stole to that moon-green stone which hung uncloaked at her throat.

“I take leave of no witch,” said the lord. “This land is mine—and for my leave to go—The stone will be enough,” he said. “That.”

“I have told you,” she said. “You are not wise.”

The Man showed no sign of yielding. So she drew it off, and still held it dangling on its chain, insubstantial as she was at present—for she had the measure of them and it was small. “Go, Fionn,” she bade the harper; and when he lingered yet: “Go!” she shouted. At the last he ran, fled, raced away like a mad thing, clutching the harp to him.

And when the woods all about were still again, hushed but for the shifting and stamp of the horses on the stones and the whining complaint of the hounds, she let fall the stone. “Be paid,” she said, and walked away.

She heard the hooves racing at her back and turned to face treachery, fading even then, felt Evald’s insubstantial sword like a stab of ice into her heart. She recoiled elsewhere, bowed with the pain of it that took her breath away.

In time she could stand again, and had taken from the iron no lasting hurt. Yet it had been close: she had stepped otherwhere only narrowly in time, and the feeling of cold lingered even in the warm winds. She cast about her, found the clearing empty of Men and beasts, only trampled bracken marking the place. So he had gone with his prize.

And the boy—She went striding through the shades and shadows in greatest anxiety until she had found him, where he huddled hurt and lost in a thicket deep in Eald.

“Are you well?” she asked lightly, concealing afl concern. She dropped to her heels beside him. For a moment she feared he might be hurt more than the scratches she saw, so tightly he was bowed over the harp; but he lifted his pale face to her in shock, seeing her so noiselessly by him. “You will stay while you wish,” she said, out of a solitude so long it spanned the age of the trees about them, of a stillness so deep the leaves of them never moved. “You will harp for me.” And when he still looked at her in fear: “You’d not like the New Forest. They’ve no ear for harpers there.”

Perhaps she was too sudden with him. Perhaps it wanted time. Perhaps Men had truly forgotten what she was. But his look achieved a perilous sanity, a will to trust.

“Perhaps not,” he said.

“Then you will stay here, and be welcome. It is a rare offer. Believe me that it is.”

“What is your name, lady?”

“What do you see of me? Am I fair?”

Fionn looked swiftly at the ground, so that she reckoned he could not say the truth without offending her. And she mustered a laugh at that in the darkness.

“Then call me Feochadan,” she said. “Thistle is one of my names and has its truth—for rough I am, and have my sting. Fm afraid it’s very much the truth you see of me.—But you’ll stay. You’ll harp for me.” This last she spoke full of earnestness.

“Yes.” He hugged the harp closer. “But I’ll not go with you, understand, any farther than this. Please don’t ask. I’ve no wish to find the years passed in a night and all the world grown old.”

“Ah.” She leaned back, crouching near him with her arms about her knees. “Then you do know me.—But what harm could it do you for years to pass? What do you care for this age of yours? The times hardly seem kind to you. I should think you would be glad to see them pass.”

“I am a Man,” he said ever so quietly. “I serve my King. And it’s my age, isn’t it?”

It was so. She could never force him. One entered otherwhere only by wishing it. He did not wish, and that was the end of it. More, she sensed about him and in his heart a deep bitterness, the taint of iron.

She might still have fled away, deserting him in his stubbornness. She had given a price beyond all counting and yet there was retreat and some recovery, even if she spent human years in waiting. In the harper she sensed disaster. He offended her hopes. She sensed mortality and dread and all too much of humanness.

But she settled in the sinking moonlight, and watched beside him, choosing instead to stay. He leaned against the side of an aged tree, gazed at her and watched her watching him, eyes darting to the least movement in the leaves, and back again to her, who was the focus of all ancientness in the wood, of dangers to more than life. And at last for all his caution his eyes began to dim, and the whispers had power over him, the sibilance of leaves and the warmth of dreaming Eald.

FIVE The Hunter

Fionn slept, and waked at last by sunrise, blinking and looking about him in plain fear that trees might have grown and died of old age while he slept. His eyes fixed on Arafel last of all and she laughed in elvish humor, which was gentle if sometimes cruel. She knew her own look by daylight, which was indeed as rough as the weed she had named herself. She seemed tanned and thin and hard-handed, her gray-and-green all cobweb patchwork, and only the sword stayed true. She sat plaiting her hair to a single silver braid and smiling sidelong at the harper, who gave her back a sidelong and anxious glance.

All the earth had grown warm in that morning. The sun did come here, unclouded on this day. Fionn rubbed the sleep from his eyes and opening his wallet, began looking for his breakfast.

There seemed very little in it: he shook out a bit of jerky, looked at it ruefully, then split off a bit of it with his knife and offered half his breakfast to her—so small a morsel that, halved, was not enough for a Man, and a haggard and hungry one at that.

“No,” she said. She had been offended at once by the smell of it, having no appetite for man-taint, or the flesh of any poor forest creature. But the offering of it, the desperate courtesy, had thawed her heart. She brought out food of her own store, a gift of trees and bees and whatsoever things felt no hurt at sharing. She gave him a share, and he took it with a desperate dread and hunger.

“It’s good,” he pronounced quickly and laughed a little, and finished it all. He licked the very last from his fingers, and now there was relief in his eyes, of hunger, of fear, of so many burdens. He gave a great sigh and she smiled a warmer smile than she was wont, remembrance of a brighter world.

“Play for me,” she wished him.

He played for her then, idly and softly, heart-healing songs, and slept again, for bright day in Ealdwood counseled sleep, when the sun burned its warmth through the tangled branches and brambles and the air hung still, nothing breathing, least of all the wind. Arafel drowsed too, at peace in mortal Eald for the first time since many a tree had grown. The touch of the mortal sun did that kindness for her, a benison she had all but forgotten.

But as she slept she dreamed, and there were halls in that vision, of cold gray stone.

In that dark dream she had a Man’s body, heavy and reeking of wine and ugly memories, such a dark fierceness she would gladly have fled it running if she might. She felt the hate, she felt the weight of human frame, the reeling unsteadiness of strong drink.

He had had an unwilling wife, had Evald of Caer Wiell—Meara of Dun na h-Eoin was her name; he had a small son who huddled afraid and away from him in the upstairs of this great stone keep, the while Evald drank with his sullen kinsmen and cursed the day. Evald brooded and he hated, and looked oftentimes at the empty pegs on his wall where the harp had hung. The song gnawed at him, and the shame gnawed at him, bitter as the song—for that harp came from Dun na h-Eoin, as Meara came.

Treason, it had sung once, and the murder of kings and bards. Keeping it was his victory.

So Evald sat and drank his ale and heard the echoes of that harping. And in her dream Arafel’s hand sought the moonstone on its chain and found it at his throat

She had laid a virtue on it in giving it, that he could neither lose it nor destroy it. Now she offered him better dreams and more kindly as he nodded, for it had that power. She would have given him peace and mended all that was awry in him, drawing him back and back to Eald. But he made bitter mock of any kindness, hating all that he did not comprehend.

“No,” whispered Arafel, grieving, dreaming still before that fire in Caer Wiell. She would have made the hand put the stone off that foul neck; but she had no power against the virtue she herself had given it, so far, so wrapped in humankind, while he would not. And Evald possessed what he owned, so fiercely and with such jealousy it cramped the muscles and stifled the breath.

Most of all he hated what he did not have and could not have; and the heart of it was the harper and the respect of those about him and his lust for Dun na h-Eoin.

So she had erred, and knew it. She tried to reason within this strange, closed mind. It was impossible. The heart was almost without love, and what little it had ever been given it folded in upon itself lest what it possessed escape.

He had betrayed his King, murdered his kinsmen, and sat in a stolen hall with a wife who despised him. These were the truths which gnawed at him in his darkness, in the stone mass which was Caer Wiell.

Of these he dreamed, and clenched the stone tightly in his fist, and would never let it go: this was all he understood of power—to hold, and not let go.

“Why?” asked Arafel of Fionn that night, when the moon shed light on the Ealdwood and the land was quiet, no ill thing near them, no cloud above them. “Why does he seek you?” Her dreams had told her Evald’s truth, but she sensed another in the harper.

Fionn shrugged, his young eyes for a moment aged; and he gathered his harp against him. “This,” he said.

“You said it was yours. He called you thief. What then did you steal?”

“It is mine.” He settled it in his arms, touched the strings and brought forth melody. “It hung in his hall so long he thought it was his, and the strings were cut and dead.”

“And how did it come to him?”

Fionn rippled out a somber note and his face grew darker. “It was my father’s and his father’s before him, and they harped in Dun na h-Eoin before the Kings. It is old, this harp.”

“Ah,” she said, “yes, it is old, and one made it who knew his craft. A harp for kings. But how did it come to Evald’s keeping?”

The fair head bowed over the harp and his hands coaxed sound from it, answerless.

“I’ve given a price,” she said, “to keep him from it and from you. Will you not give back an answer?”

The sound burst into softness. “It was my father’s. Evald hanged him in Dun na h-Eoin, in the court when it burned. Because of songs my father made, for truth he sang, how men the King trusted were not what they seemed. Evald was the least of that company, not great; petty even in that great a wrong. When the King died, when Dun na h-Eoin was burning, my father harped them one last song. But he fell into their hands and so to Evald’s—dead or living, I never knew. Evald hanged him from the tree in the court and took the harp of Dun na h-Eoin for his own. He hung it on his own wall in Caer Wiell for mock of my father and the King. So it was never his.”

“A king’s own harper.”

Fionn never looked at her and never ceased to play. “Ah, worse things he has done. But that was seven years ago. And so I came, when I was grown—wandering the roads and harping in all the halls. Last of all to Caer Wiell. Last of all to him. All this winter I gave Evald songs he liked. But at winter’s end I came down to the hall at night and mended the old harp. So I fled over the walls. From the hill I gave it voice and a song he remembered. For that he hunts me. And beyond that there is no more to tell.”

Then softly Fionn sang, of humankind and wolves, and that song was bitter. Arafel shuddered to hear it, and quickly bade him cease, for mind to mind with her in troubled dreams Evald heard and tossed, and waked starting in sweat.

“Sing more kindly now,” she said. “More kindly. It was never made for hate, this harp, this gift of my folk to the Kings of Men. There were such gifts once long and long ago, did you not know? It sounds through all the realms of Eald, mine and thine and places far darker. Never sing dark songs. Harp me brighter things. Sing me sun and moon and laughing, sing me the lightest song you know.”

“I know children’s songs,” he said doubtfully. “Or walking songs. The great songs—well, it seems an age for dark ones.”

“Then sing the little ones,” she said, “the small ones that make Men laugh—oh, I have need to laugh, harper, that most of all.”

Fionn did so, while the moon climbed above the trees, and Arafel recalled elder-day songs which the world had not heard in long years, sang them sweetly. Fionn listened and caught up the words in his strings, until the tears ran down his face for joy.

There could be no harm in Ealdwood in that hour: the spirits of latter earth which skulked and strove and haunted Men fled elsewhere, finding nothing in this place that they knew; and the old shadows slipped away trembling, for they remembered.

But now and again the elvish song faltered, for there came a touch of ill and smallness into Arafel’s own mind, a cold piercing as the iron, bringing thoughts of hate, which she had never held so close.

Then she laughed, breaking the spell, and put it from her. She bent herself to teach the harper songs which she herself had almost forgotten, conscious the while that elsewhere, down in Caerbourne vale, on the hill of Caer Wiell, a Man’s body tossed in sweaty dreams which seemed constantly to mock him, with sounds of eldritch harping that stirred echoes and sleeping ghosts.

With the dawn, she and Fionn rose and walked a time, and shared food, and drank at a cold, clear spring she knew, until the sun’s hot eye fell upon them and cast its numbing spell on all the Ealdwood.

Then Fionn slept in innocence, while Arafel fought the sleep which came to her. Dreams were in that sleep, her time to dream while he should wake, Evald, the lord in the valley, and those dreams would not stay at bay, not as her eyes grew heavy and the midmorning air thickened with urging sleep. They pressed at her more and more strongly. The Man’s strong legs bestrode a great brute horse, and his hands plied the whip and his feet the spurs, hurting it cruelly. She dreamed the noise of hounds and bunt, a coursing of woods and hedges and the bright spurt of blood on dappled hide—Evald sought blood to wipe out blood, because the harping still rang in his mind, and he remembered . . . harper, and hall, and the harper who sang the truth of how he served his king. He hunted deer and thought other things. She shuddered at the killing her own hands did, and at the fear that gathered thickly about the valley lord, reflected in his comrades’ eyes, reflected in his wife’s and son’s pale faces when he came riding home again with deer’s blood on his clothes.

It was better that night, when the waking was Arafel’s and her harper’s, and sweet songs banished fear and dreams. But even then Arafel recalled and grieved, and at times the cold came so heavily on her that her hand would steal to her throat where the moongreen stone had hung. Her eyes brimmed once suddenly with tears. Fionn saw that, and tried to sing her merry songs instead.

They failed, and the music died.

“Teach me another song,” he begged of her, attempting distraction. “No harper ever had such songs. And will you not play for me?”

“I have no art,” she said, for the last true harper of her own folk had gone long ago to the sea. The answer was not all truth. Once she had played. But there was no more music in her hands, none since the last of her folk had gone and she had willed to stay, loving this woods too well in spite of Men. “Play,” she asked of Fionn, and tried desperately to smile, though the iron closed about her heart and the valley lord raged at the nightmare, waking in sweat, ghost-ridden.

It was that human song which Fionn had played in his despair on the hillside, bright and defiant that it was: Eald rang with it; and that night the lord Evald did not sleep again, but sat shivering and wrapped in furs before his hearth, his hand clenched in hate on the stone which he possessed and would not, though it killed him, let go.

But Arafel quietly began to sing, a song of elder earth unheard since the world had dimmed. The harper took up the tune, which sang of earth and shores and water, the last great journey, at Men’s coming and the changing of the world. Fionn wept while he played, and Arafel smiled sadly and at last fell silent, for it was the last of all elvish songs. Her heart had gone gray and cold.

The sun returned at last, but Arafel had no will now to eat or rest, only to sit grieving, because she had lost her peace. She would have been glad now to have fled the shadow-shifting way back into otherwhere, to her own fair moon and softer sunlight. She might have persuaded the harper to come with her now. She thought now perhaps he could find the way. But now there was a portion of her heart in pawn, and she could not even take herself away from this world: she was too heavily bound to thoughts of it. She fell to mourning and despair, and often pressed her hand where the stone should rest. It was time, the shadows whispered, that Eald should end. She held in ancient stubbornness. And she felt some feyness on her, that many things together had gone amiss, that even on her the harp had power.

He hunted again, did Evald of Caer Wiell, now that the sun was up. Sleepless, driven mad by dreams, he whipped his folk out of the hold as he did his hounds, out to the margin of the Ealdwood, to harry the creatures of the woods’ edge—having guessed well the source of his luck and the harping in his dreams. He brought fire and axes across the Caerbourne’s dark flood, meaning to fell the old trees one by one until all was dead and bare.

The wood muttered now with whisperings and angers. A wall of cloud rolled down from the north on Ealdwood and all deep Caerdale, dimming the sun. A wind sighed in the faces of the Men, so that no torch was set to wood for fear of fire turning back on the hold itself; but axes rang, all the same, that day and the next. The clouds gathered thicker and the winds blew colder, making the Ealdwood dim again and dank. Arafel still managed to smile by night, hearing the harper’s songs. But every stroke of the axes by day made her shudder, and while Fionn slept by snatches, the iron about her heart grew constantly closer. The wound in the Ealdwood grew day by day, and the valley lord was coming: she knew it well.

And at last there remained no rest at all, by day or night.

She sat then with her head bowed beneath the clouded moon, and Fionn was powerless to cheer her. He sat and regarded her with deep despair, and reached and touched her hand for comfort.

She said no word to that offering, but rose and invited the harper to walk with her awhile. He did so. And vile things stirred and muttered in the shadow of the thickets and the briers, whispering malice to the winds, so that often Fionn started aside and stared and kept close beside her.

Her strength was fading, first that she could not keep these voices away, and then that she could not keep herself from listening. Ruin, they whispered. All useless. And at last she sank on Fionn’s arm, eased to the cold ground and leaned her head against the bark of a gnarled and dying tree.

“What ails?” he asked, and patted her face and pried at her clenched and empty fingers, opened the fist which hovered near her throat, as if seeking there the answer. “What ails you?”

She shrugged and smiled and shuddered, because even now by the glare of fires and torches in the dark, the axes had begun again, and she felt the iron like a wound, a great cry going through the wood as it had gone ceaselessly for days; but he was deaf to it, being what he was.

“Make a song for me,” she said.

“I have no heart for it.”

“Nor have I,” she said. A sweat stood on her face, and he wiped at it with his gentle hand and tried to ease her pain.

And again he caught and unclenched the hand which rested, empty, at her throat. “The stone,” he said. “Is it that you miss?”

She shrugged, and turned her head, for the axes then seemed loud and near. He looked that way too—and glanced back deaf and puzzled, to gaze into her eyes.

“ ’Tis time,” she said. “You have to be on your way this morning, as soon as there’s sun enough. The New Forest will hide you after all.”

“And leave you? Is that what you mean?”

She smiled, touched his anxious face. “I’ve paid enough.”

“How paid? What did you pay? What was it you gave away?”

“Dreams,” she said. “Only that. And all of that” Her hands shook terribly, and a blackness came on her heart too miserable to bear: it was hate, and aimed at him and at herself and all that lived; and it was harder and harder to fend away. “Evil has it. He would do you hurt, and I would dream that too. Harper, it’s time to go.”

“Why would you give such a thing?” Great tears started from his eyes. “Was it worth such a cost, my harping?”

“Why, well worth it,” she said, and managed such a laugh as she had left to laugh, that shattered all the evil for a moment and left her clean. “I have remembered how to sing.”

He snatched up the harp and ran, breaking branches and tearing flesh in his headlong haste, but not, she realized in horror, not the way he ought—but back again, to Caerdale.

She cried out her dismay and seized at branches to pull herself to her feet; she could in no wise follow. Her limbs which had been quick to run beneath this moon or the other were leaden, and her breath came hard. Brambles caught and held with all but mindful malice, and dark things which had never had power in her presence whispered loudly now, of murder.

And elsewhere the wolf-lord with his men drove at the forest with great ringing blows, the poison of iron. The heavy human body which she sometime wore seemed hers again, and the moonstone was prisoned near a heart that beat with hate.

She tried the more to make haste, and could not. She looked helplessly through Evald’s narrow eyes and saw—saw the young harper break through the thickets near them. Weapons lifted, bows and axes. Hounds bayed and lunged at leashes in the firelight

Fionn came, nothing hesitating, bringing the harp, and himself. “A trade,” she heard him say. “The stone for the harp.”

There was such hate in Evald’s heart, and such fear, it was hard to breathe. She felt a pain to the depth of her as Evald’s coarse fingers pawed at the stone. She felt his fear, felt his loathing of the stone. Nothing would he truly let go. But this—this, he abhorred, and was fierce in his joy to lose it.

“Come,” the lord Evald said, and held the stone dangling and spinning before him, so that for that moment the hate was far and cold.

Another hand took it then, and very gentle it was, and very full of love. She felt the sudden draught of strength and desperation—she sprang up then, to run, to save—

But pain stabbed through her heart, with one last ringing of the harp, with such an ebbing out of love and grief that she cried aloud, and stumbled, blind, dead in that part of her.

She did not cease to run; and she ran now that shadow-way, for the heaviness was gone. Across meadows, under that other light she sped, and gathered up all that she had left behind, burst out again in the blink of an eye and elsewhere.

Horses shied in the dark dawning and dogs barked; for now she did not care to be what suited men’s eyes. Bright as the moon she broke among them, and in her hand was a sharp silver sword, to meet with iron.

Harp and harper lay together, sword-riven. She saw the underlings start away from her and cared nothing for them; but Evald she sought, lifted that fragile silver blade. Evald cursed at her, drove spurs into his horse and rode down at her, sword swinging, shivering the winds with a horrid sweep of iron. The horse screamed and shied; he cursed and reined the beast, and drove it for her again. But this time the blow was hers, a scratch that made him shriek with rage.

She fled at once. He pursued. It was his nature that he must. She might have fled elsewhere and deceived him, but she would not. She darted and dodged ahead of the great horse, and it broke down the brush and the thorns and panted after, hard-ridden.

Shadows gathered, stirring and urgent on this side and on that, who gibbered and rejoiced for the way the chase was tending, to the woods’ blackest heart—for some of them had been Men; and some had known the wolf’s justice, and had come by that to what they were. They reached, these shadows, but durst not touch him: she would not have it so. Over all the trees bowed and groaned in the winds and the leaves went flying as clouds took back the dawn in storm: thunder in the heavens and thunder of hooves below, cracks of brush scattering the shadows.

Suddenly in the dark of a hollow she whirled, flung back her dimming cloak and the light gleamed suddenly: the horse shied up and fell, casting Evald sprawling among the wet leaves. The shaken beast scrambled up and evaded its master’s reaching hands and his threats, thundered away on the moist earth, breaking branches as it went, splashing across some hidden stream in the dark, and then the shadows chuckled. Arafel stood still, fully in his world, moonbright and silver. Evald cursed, shifted that great black sword of his in his hand, which bore a scratch now that must trouble him. He shrieked with hate and slashed.

She laughed and stepped into otherwhere as iron passed where she had stood, shifted back again and fled yet farther, letting him pursue until he stumbled with exhaustion and sobbed and fell in the storm-dark, forgetting now his anger, for the whispers came loud, in the moving of the trees.

“Up,” she bade him, mocking, and stepped again to here. Thunder rolled above them on the wind, and the sound of horses and hounds came at distance.

Evald heard the sounds. A joyous malice came into his eyes at the thought of allies; his face grinned in the lightnings as he gathered his sword.

She laughed too, elvish-cruel, as the horses neared them—and Evald’s confident mirth died as the sound came over them, shattering the heavens, shaking the earth—a Hunt of a different kind, from a third and other Eald.

Evald cursed and swung the blade, ranged and slashed again, and she flinched from the almost-kiss of iron. Again he whirled his great sword, pressing close. She stepped elsewhere, avoiding the iron, stepped back again with her silver blade set full in his heart and suddenly here. The lightning cracked—he shrieked a curse, and, silver-spitted—died.

She did not weep or laugh now; she had known this Man too well for either. She looked up instead to the clouds, gray wrack scudding before the storm, where other hunters coursed the winds and wild cries wailed across belated dawn—heard hounds baying after something fugitive and wild. She lifted then her fragile sword, salute to lord Death, who had governance over Men, a Huntsman too; and many the old comrades the wolf would find following in his train.

Then the sorrow came on her, and she walked the otherwhere path to the beginning and end of her course, where harp and harper lay, deserted, the Wolf’s comrades all fled. There was no mending here. The light was gone from his eyes and the wood of the harp was shattered.

But in his fingers lay another thing, which gleamed like the summer moon in his hand.

Clean it was from his keeping, and loved. She gathered the moonstone to her. The silver chain went again about her neck and the stone rested where it ought. She bent last of all and kissed him to his long sleep, fading then to otherwhere.

And the storm grew.

SIX Setting Forth

The storm had come over the Steading, a wall of cloud and wind which whipped the branches of the oak and ripped the young spring leaves.

And in it Caoimhin came home, running breathless, panting and stumbling as he came along the fence row, fighting the wind which drove across his path.

So he came to the gate and up the path, and young Eadwulf who had come out to see to the sheep saw him first: “Caoimhin!” Eadwulf cried.

But Caoimhin passed on, running and holding his side. Blood was on his face. Eadwulf saw that and clambered over the pen and ran after him.

So Niall saw him, not knowing him at first, seeing only that a man had come to the Steading: he left his securing of the barn against the storm and came running from the other side as many did from many points of the Steading, from the house and from the pens, leaving their work in haste.

But when he had come into Caoimhin’s way his heart turned in him, seeing the quiver and the bow, the gauntness of the man, the recent scar that crossed his unshaven face, the blood that ran on it from scratches.

“Caoimhin!” Niall said and caught him up arm to arm. “Caoimhin!”

Caoimhin fell, collapsing to his knees, and Niall went down to his own, holding his arms while Caoimhin’s body heaved with his breathing. The bloody face lifted again, glazed with sweat, pale and gaunt. His beard and hair showed dirt and grass from his falling. “Lord,” Caoimhin said, “he’s dead, Evald is lost and dead.”

A moment Niall stared at him blankly and Caoimhin’s hands gripped his arms as the others gathered round. “Dead,” Niall said, but nothing else he understood. “But you are back, Caoimhin—You found the way.”

“Dead, hear me, Cearbhallain.” Caoimhin found strength to shake at him. “Caer Wiell is without a lord—it is your hour, your hour, Cearbhallain. He went into the wood and never out again; he has crossed the fair folk and never will he come out again. Fionn—”

“Is he with you?”

“The harper’s dead. Evald killed him.”

“Coinneach’s son.”

“Listen to me. There is no time but now. There are men would ride with you, I have told you—”

“The harper dead.”

“Cearbhallain, are you deaf to me?” The tears poured down Caoimhin’s face. “I came back for you.”

Niall knelt still in the dust. Beorc was there, and set his large hands on Caoimhin’s shoulders. Most of the Steading gathered and was still gathering, some standing, some kneeling near, and the latest come were shushed so the silence thickened, a deep and terrible waiting.

“Tell me,” Niall said, “when and where. Tell me from the beginning.”

“From time to time—” Caoimhin caught his breath, leaning his hands now on his knees. “We met, Coinneach’s son and I. Fionn Fionnbharr. On the road, when I went after him. And so we parted. Only he brought word to me now and again—how he fared, and where. He wintered in Caer Wiell as he had said he would and the men—I have gathered old friends, my lord, men you knew. I have never been idle, about the roads and the hills and the fringes of the river; I have been to Donn and Ban and all such places and back again, and sent men to Caer Luel—”

“—in my name?”

“What less would bring them? Aye, your name. But we have kept quiet, lord, and hunted and done little—in your name. And we took our news from the harper when he could bring it, even from Caer Wiell. But lately he fled the hold—fled with Evald behind him, and so they report him dead, murdered—but Evald himself died after, this very morning. A man of ours was hidden near his camp; and brings word his men believe him dead—fear other things less lucky to talk of—in this storm—” Caoimhin fought for breath and caught his arms. “They will be riding back to Caer Wiell this morning, today, lordless, and leaderless—Caer Wiell is yours again. You cannot deny it now. Men are ready to follow you—Fearghal and Cadawg and Dryw, Ogan, the lot of them—”

“You had no right!” Niall flung Caoimhin’s hands aside and rose, swung his arm to clear himself a space and stopped at the shocked and staring faces of those about him, of Lonn and the others, and turned back to look on Beorc himself, his eyes stinging in the wind which howled and whipped about them. Lastly he looked down at Caoimhin, who looked up at him, hurt and worn as the world had worn him, bearing such scars as he had been spared in the Steading, where no war could come—and all at once his peace was shattered beyond recall. It was not a clap of thunder, although thunder rolled; it was only a sudden clear sight, how men fared that he once had loved, how life and death had gone on for all the world without him. He felt robbed, for in the stormlight everything about him seemed dimmed and less beautiful than it had been. There was gray about the Steading, which had never been. There were flaws in the faces about him he had never seen. Tears started from his eyes and ran crooked in the wind. “So, well, we ought to be on our way,” he said, and helped Caoimhin to his feet. It was hard to look at the others, but he must, at Beorc’s solemn face, whose red mane whipped in the gale; at Aelfraeda, whose golden braids were immovable in strongest winds; at Siolta and Lonn, steadfast; at Scaga whose thin young face had hollowed almost to manhood in the passing years. “I have a thing to see to,” Niall said to them. “Like for the wolf and foxes—there comes a time, doesn’t there? The deer are gone. They’ll hunt one another in the hills.”

“You’ll want food,” said Aelfraeda.

“If you will,” Niall whispered and looked at Beorc. “If you will—Banain—”

“She will bear you,” said Beorc, “I do not doubt. And if she will, then what she wills.”

“I need my sword,” Niall said then, and turned away, not having the heart for facing Beorc or Aelfraeda any longer. He flung his arm about Caoimhin. “Come up to the house. There’ll be ale and bread at least”

So they went. He found Scaga at his left, trudging along with him and Caoimhin, and so he set his left hand on Scaga’s shoulder, but the boy bowed his head and said nothing to him, nothing at all, while the thunder rumbled over the Steading and the wind blew the young leaves of the oak in shreds.

They came into the house, into warmth and a busy flurrying after drink and bread and the wherewithal to feed two and more hungry men on their way. Niall went to the corner by the fire and took his sword, but he did not draw it, not even to see to the blade of it. The sheath and hilt were covered with dust. Perhaps rust had gotten to it as it lay by the hearth. But it was not a thing for bringing to light in Beorc’s house and in Aelfraeda’s. Diarmaid brought the remnant of the armor he had had, and this he put on with Scaga and Lonn and Diarmaid to help him, while Caoimhin sat shaking with weariness and cramming food into his mouth. He had no cloak any longer. He put on the warm vest he had had on before, hung the dusty sword on his shoulder and went out into the chill of the storm to find Banain in the barn.

“I’ll come with you,” Scaga cried after him, following him outside.

“No,” he shouted back to the porch. “Stay warm. Help Aelfraeda. I’ll not be leaving without seeing you. Stay inside.”

The thunder cracked. He turned and ran, past the gate of the yard and down the hill to the barn and so inside, where was shelter from the wind and the warm smell of straw and horses.

“Banain,” he whispered, coming to her in the shadow of the stall. He brought the bridle she had been wearing when she came to them. They had mended its broken rein for the children’s riding; but he had never put it on her. He hugged her about the neck and got a nudging in the ribs in return, a whickering from the pony near her in the dark. “Banain,” he said. “Banain.”

“Cruel,” a small voice piped.

He whirled about with his back to the mare. The Gruagach sat on the pony’s back, peering at him across the rails of the next stall.

“Cruel to take Banain. Cruel Caoimhin, to take his lord away. O where is peace, Man? Never, never, for Caoimhin; now never for Banain; never for Cearbhallain. O never go.”

“I would I never had to.” He recovered himself and turned about again, stroking Banain’s neck. His hands were still cold from the wind outside. He coaxed the bit into Banain’s mouth and drew the strap past her ears. She turned her head and butted him gently in the chest, snorted as a dark shape landed on the rail in front of them.

“Never go,” said the Gruagach.

“I have no choice.”

“Always, always comes a choice. O Man, the Gruagach warns you.” It shifted and hugged itself upon its rail. “Wicked Caoimhin, wicked.”

Niall took the cheekstrap and backed Banain out of her warm nest of straw and comfort. The Gruagach followed, a scurrying in the straw: it came out into the light of the half-open door well-dusted, with straws in its hair, and hugged itself and rocked. “Never go,” it said.

A sadness came on Niall. He would never have expected such a feeling toward the Gruagach, but he knew that where he fared would be nothing like the creature, never in all the cold strange world. Already it seemed small and wizened and more afraid than frightening. He held out his hand as he would have to a child. “Gruagach,” he said, “take care of the people I love. And this place. I have stayed too long.”

The Gruagach touched his hand with fingertips, so, so lightly, and cocked his head and looked up at him, then shivered and bounded away to the top of the apple-bin, burying his head in his arms. “She sees, she sees,” he wept, “o the terrible face, the terrible lights of her eyes, she sees!”

“Who?” asked Niall. “What—sees?”

“She is waked,” the Gruagach cried, looking from between his arms. “She is waked, waked, waked! and the harp of Kings is broken. O the terrible sword, the sharp, the wicked sword! O never go, Man, O Man, the Gruagach warns you, never go.”

“Who is she?”

“In the forest, deep and still. The harp came there because it had to come. Things of Eald must. Beware, o beware of Donn.”

The thunder rumbled and muttered over them. Banain threw her head. “I have no choice,” Niall said shivering. “I never had. Farewell.”

He flung open the door and led Banain out. He would have shut it for the pony’s sake, but the Gruagach was in the doorway. He swung up to Banain’s back and rode up toward the house, from which the others were coming down.

So he should not have the chance to come into the house again. He felt cheated—of even that little time. The world seemed the colder as the wind howled and whipped at him and Banain, who danced and fretted under him for distaste of this weather and for the thunder—and never yet it rained. Something keened. It was not the wind. He looked up and behind him and saw the Gruagach perched on the rooftop of the barn, a lumpish knot of hair.

“Man,” it wailed. “O Man.”

The others came about him, Caoimhin and Beorc and Aelfraeda and all the house so far as he could judge. “Here,” said Niall, flinging a leg over Banaia’s back. “Caoimhin, you must ride. You’re spent.”

Caoimhin would not, not without arguing about it; but Niall slid down and put him up, and on his own shoulders he took the healthy pack Aelfraeda had put up for them. He kissed her cheek and pressed Beorc’s hand. He looked round on all the faces, and they seemed already far from him, slipping away from him, a love he did not know how to hold onto any longer.

“Scaga,” he said, missing one. “Where is Scaga?”

Everyone looked around, but the boy was not to be found. “He was with me,” said Siolta, “only a moment ago.”

“He is hurt,” said Lonn.

So Niall shook his head heavily, well understanding that. “Come,” he said to Caoimhin, and hitched the cords of the pack on his shoulder. “Good-bye,” he said. “Good-bye.”

“Farewell,” said Beorc, “and wisely. A blessing beyond that I cannot give you, though I would.”

Niall turned his shoulder then and walked beside Caoimhin on Banain. The wind battered at them, and never a drop of rain fell from the black clouds above. The grass and the tender crops flattened in waves, and now and again the lightning flashed in the clouds. He looked back more than once and waved each time, but now they all seemed hazy, shadowed under the storm that had come over the Steading. His heart felt heavier and heavier and his steps were leaden.

“Have care,” a small voice wailed from the hilltop at his right “Have care.” It was the Gruagach, sitting on a stone in a sea of blowing grass. “O Man, it is no common rain this brings.”

“That fell creature,” Caoimhin muttered.

“Speak it fair,” said Niall. “O Caoimhin, speak it only fair.”

But it was gone, the rock deserted. Banain tossed her head and snorted in the wind.

“Here, lord, she can carry two,” Caoimhin said. “Ride with me.”

“No,” said Niall. A last time he looked back, but a hill was passing between him and those behind: he waved a last time, but they perhaps did not see. He felt a loneliness and desolation, blinked as some wind-borne dust hit his eyes and rubbed at them as he walked along, blind for the moment. When he had gotten them clear he looked back again, squinting in the gusts.

The fences at least should have been in sight. There was only the blowing grass. “Caoimhin,” he said, “the fences are gone.”

Caoimhin looked, but never said a word. Again Niall rubbed his eyes, feeling a great cold settle into his bones, as if the wind had finally gotten through. Caoimhin had found his way back again, the thought came to him; Caoimhin had come as the harper had come, never reckoning how hard it was—for need, for need of him. A haste had come on him, all the same, a blind numb haste to go back to the world again: Ogan, Caoimhin had named the names—Ogan and Dryw and the others, names that he had known, bloody names of bloody years, of his years with the King—

And Caer Wiell, to go home again, to whatever home was left—

“Niall!” he heard cry from the hill above him, a human, cracking voice, wind-thinned. “Caoimhin! Niall!”

“Scaga,” Niall said, and bis heart turned over in him. “Scaga, no.”

But the boy came running—boy: he was near a man. He came down the hill and joined them, panting as if his ribs would crack, for he had come the longer, harder way.

“Go back,” Niall said, shaking him by the arms.

“I will follow,” Scaga said reasonably, “lord.”

Niall flung his arms about him; there was nothing left to do. Caoimhin had gotten down off Banain and hugged him too.

So they went, down among the hills, Caoimhin riding mostly and they two jogging along beside, then taking turn about.

“By the river we will find them,” Caoimhin said. “There.”

SEVEN Meara

Women grieved in Caer Wiell, a slow sort of grief, lacking substance or hope. The hunters came home by evening without their quarry and without their lord—men scratched and torn and haunted by long wandering in the wood. They drank together now in the hall, a silent, brooding crowd, whose eyes kept much to the table and to their ale. One man wept, his head bowed into his arms. He was the only one.

In her upstairs chamber Meara sat with her arm about her small son and the boy leaning his dark head against her skirts—not asleep, but drowsing sometimes in his weariness and his fright Meara sat still and silent, so that the maid, the only servant left her, dared not move or question anything.

“They brought neither home,” Meara said at last when the boy had drifted off. She looked toward the tall slit window, toward the night and still-brooding storm. “And they do not come upstairs. So they are not yet sure that he is dead.” She stroked her son’s drowsing head, looked toward young Cadhla the maid, who had pretended to be at sewing and left it now in her lap. There was stark, constant fear in Cadhla’s eyes. There was no law in Caer Wiell this night but fear. The thunder that had rumbled all the day, unnatural, cracked and shook the ancient stones. Then the rain began, at long last, a natural, driving rain. Cadhla looked toward the ceiling, a great and shaken sigh as if some long-held breath had passed her lips as if all nature had been holding its breath. The boy lifted his head. “Hush,” said Meara, “it’s only rain.”

“Does he come?” the boy asked.

“Hush, no, be still. Shall I hold you?”

He reached. Meara took him up. He was a lad of five and mostly too proud to be held, but she took him into her lap and rocked him now.

“Lady,” said Cadhla, “let me.”

“No,” said Meara, just that: “No.” So Cadhla stayed, and, looking down, pricked at ill-made stitches, flinching from the thunderclaps. The rain sluiced down the walls, a constant spatter and whisper, and the trees sighed down by the Caerbourne’s flood. Ever and again a gust whipped at the curtains and sent the lamps and candles flickering, but the child slept on. From the hall came a clattering of metal, but quiet fell again below, leaving only the rain.

“They do not come,” the lady Meara said again in the softest of voices, only for Cadhla’s ears. “But tomorrow if he has not come home again, then they will come upstairs.”

“Lady,” whispered Cadhla, “what shall we do?”

“Why, I go to the strongest,” the lady Meara said, “as I did before.” She looked down at her sleeping son. Her hand smoothed his dark cap of ham His small fist clenched the tighter on her sleeve. He was never a hearty child, Evald’s son, but small and quick to understand too much. “Hush, what can we do? What could we ever do? But if you can you must be away with him, you understand?”

“Aye,” said Cadhla softly, her blue eyes round. “I will.” But both of them understood the chances of it, Meara most of all. Gently she caressed her sleeping son, well knowing the men downstairs, that one of them would soon take ambition; and then there was no chance for the boy, no chance at all for any bearer of Evald’s blood to survive—perhaps not even past the dawn. There were Beorhthramm and the others, fell and bloody men, wild and bloody as her lord . . . and growing more drunken with every passing hour. The cups were filled again and again downstairs; and cowards gathered the courage they had lost in the woods.

But distant, from outside the window in the dark, from beneath the walls, came the hoofbeats of a running horse.

Meara lifted her head and listened through the thunder and the rush of wind and rain.

“Off the road,” whispered Cadhla. “It comes from under the walls, not the gate.”

It grew nearer still, seemed to rush beneath the window, and echoed off the stone, distinct in spite of the water’s rushing and the blowing of the leaves. A moment it lingered below, then seemed to move on again, and the thunder muttered.

“O lady,” Cadhla breathed, clutching the luckpiece at her throat, “it be faery, that”

“It would be my husband’s horse come home,” said Meara, and her eyes were far and cold. “But it could circle the hold all night and they will not unbar the gates to see, no, they are haunted men. Hush,” she said, for the boy stirred in his sleep, and she rocked him, hugged him. The hoofbeats came back again and lingered.

“Faery,” Cadhla insisted when the pacing went on and on. “O lady—”

But the hoofbeats passed away into the dark, and below, in the hall, no door was opened or closed: no one went out to see. So the sound died, and the hall grew quiet in the abating of the rain. There were not even footsteps below. The child slept exhausted in Meara’s arms, and Cadhla stopped her shivering. The curtain flapped; it had come undone in the wind which now had sunk away. Meara waved a hand toward it and with dread Cadhla got up and approached the dark window to tie it fast, then began to trim the lamps one by one, a homely act and peaceful in a hall that waited murder.

“You’ll sleep a bit,” Cadhla said when she had done. She offered her shawl. With a gesture Meara bade her spread it so, over the boy, and some peace they had after that. Cadhla fell asleep in the chair they had set against the door, her hands fallen in her lap, her head resting on her ample breast.

But Meara kept her watch, and listened to the rain which had mostly spent its fury. No tears fell from her eyes, not now. They are for yesterday, she thought to herself, and for tomorrow. Had the window been wide enough she would have thought of escape; of braiding together all the cloth they had and so letting themselves down. But it was far too narrow for any but her son. She thought desperately of waiting until those below were sunk in their cups and so trying to run with him, passing through that hall. But there was the watch below to pass, and they might be less drunken.

Perhaps, perhaps, she thought, she could win time for her son, only a little time; and wise Cadhla, faithful Cadhla might find a way for him and her, a country woman and not so lost as she. Or Cadhla might somehow get outside the gates and she might let down her son to Cadhla’s arms.

Or perhaps, after all, her lord would come home—he was safety, at least, from worse than himself. And this was the hope which turned her coward, for from the tower there was no way of escape but the hall below and the drunken men.

She might feign a mourning for her lord; but any of them who knew her would laugh at that; nor respect it even if it were true.

They might fight among themselves, that being the way of them when they had no one to stop them; and that was all the respite she could hope for, perhaps a day to save her son. But that contest only the bloodiest of them would win.

A door opened in the dark, far away and muffled. Meara heard, and shivered in the long cold, near the dawn, waking from almost-sleep with her son’s weight leaden in her arms. He comes home, she thought without thinking. He has come to the gates after all, bloody and angry.

But she doubted that. She doubted every hope of safety except Cadhla still sleeping against the door. She looked down at her son’s face. That wayward lock of hair had strayed again onto his cheek. She dared not move to brush it away, fearing to wake him. Let him sleep, she thought, o let him sleep. He will be less afraid if he can sleep.

She heard steps of more than one man coming up from the wardroom below, as one came into the hall. So, she thought with a chill up her back, it is himself; he has come up with the gatekeeper, or waked someone below. We are safe, we are safe if only we stay still—for she knew in her heart of hearts that if the ruffians had left their lord horseless and alive in the forest, then there would be a grim reckoning for that.

Then came a ring of steel, and a cry—a clatter of metal and the dying screams of men.

“Ah!” cried Meara and hugged her frightened son to her breast. “Hush, no, be still, be still.”

“It would be himself,” sobbed Cadhla, bolt upright, her hands before her lips. “Oh, he has come back!”

In a moment the cries and the blows and the screaming became loud. The boy shivered in Meara’s arms, and Cadhla ran to them and hugged them both and shivered along with them.

“It is not,” said Meara then, hearing the voices, and turned cold at the heart. Someone was coming up the stairs in haste. “O Cadhla, the door!”

The latch was down but that was never stout enough. Cadhla flung herself for that chair before the door to add her weight to it, but the door crashed open before her and flung the chair against the wall. Men red with blood stood there, with swords naked in their hands.

Cadhla stopped still between, making herself a barrier.

But one came last through the door, a long-faced man in a shepherd’s coat and carrying a sword, undistinguished by any badge or arms, but marked by a quiet uncommon in Caer Wiell. His hair was long and mostly grayed, his lean face seamed with scars. A grim, wide-shouldered man came in at his back, and last, a red-haired youth with a cut across his brow.

“Lady Meara,” the invader said. “Call off your defender.”

“Cadhla,” Meara said. Cadhla came aside and stood against the wall, her busy eyes traveling over all the men, her small mouth clamped tight. There was a dagger beneath her apron and her hand was not in sight.

But the tall stranger came as far as Meara’s feet and sank down on one knee, the bloody sword clasped in the crook of his arm.

“Cearbhallain,” Meara said half doubting, for the face was aged and changed.

“Meara Ceannard’s daughter. You are widowed, if that is any grief to you.”

“I do not know,” she said. Her heart was beating fast “You must tell me that.”

“This is my hold. My cousin is dead—and not at my hand, though I will not say as much for men of his below. Caer Wiell is in my hands.”

“So are we all,” she said. It was all before her, the hope of passing the gates in safety, the hopelessness of wandering after. “I may have kin in Ban.”

“Ban swings with every wind. And what then for you—the wolf’s widow? Seek shelter of An Beag? The wolf’s friends are not trustworthy. Caer Wiell is mine, I say; and I will hold it.” He put out his hand to the boy, whose fists were clenched tight in Meara’s sleeve, who flinched from the stranger’s touch. “Is he yours?”

Never yet the tears had fallen. Meara held them now, while this large and bloody hand stretched out toward her son, her babe. “He is mine,” she said. “Evald is his name. But he is mine.”

The hand lingered a moment and left him. “Evald’s heir has nothing from me; but I will treat him as a son and his mother—if she stays in Caer Wiell—will be safe while I can make her so.”

With that he rose and gave a sign to his men, only some of whom remained. “Guard this door,” he bade them. “Let no one trouble them. They are innocent.” He looked down again, a grim figure still, and holding the bloody sword still in his arm, for it could not be sheathed. “If my cousin should come home again he will have a bitter welcome. But I do not expect he will.”

“No,” said Meara, and shivered. For the first time the tears fell. “There would be no luck for him now.”

“There was no luck for him in Caer Wiell while he had it,” said Niall Cearbhallain. “But I will hold it, by my own.”

She bowed her head and wept, that being all there was to do. “Mother,” her son wailed; she held him close for comfort, and Cadhla came and held them too.

“I would not come down to the hall,” said Cearbhallain, “until we have cleansed it.” And he went away, never smiling, never once smiling. But Meara laughed, laughed as she had almost forgotten how.

“Free,” she said. “Free!—o Cadhla, he is Niall Cearbhallain, the King’s own champion! O cleansed the hall! That they have, they have. I knew him once—oh, years and years ago; and the morning has come and our night is over.”

A furtive hope had burst in Meara’s eyes, a shielded, suspecting hope, as every hope in Caer Wiell was long apt to be twisted and used for hurt. It forgot that the young harper Fionn was dead and lost; forgot an almost-love, for she was still young and the harper had touched her heart in her desolation. She forgot, forgot, and set all her future hopes on Cearbhallain. That was the nature of the niece of the former King, who had learned how to live in storms, that she knew how to find another staying place.

“Mother,” her son said—he said little always, did Evald’s son: he had learned his safety too, small that he was, which was silence, to clench his small fists on what help there was and never to let go. “Is he coming?”

“Never,” she said, “never again, little son. That man will keep us safe.”

“There was blood on him.”

“It was the blood of all the wicked in Caer Wiell. But he would never hurt us.”

So she rocked her son, and the strength left her of a sudden, so that Cadhla must catch them both. And still Meara laughed.

There was a marriage made in Caer Wiell, when the warmth of summer came. There were new faces in the hold, stark, grim men, but soft-spoken and courteous, and no few of them Meara had known in her youth, who smiled to see her, those of them who remembered to smile at all. Some folk remained from the Caer Wiell that was, but the worst had died or fled and the rest had mended what they were; and more and more came to the gates, even farmers who hoped for land—which they got as long as there was land fallow. There were some kinsmen of Niall’s, but few; there was a motley lot of folk met over the hills and in them, wild sorts and never to be crossed. There was Caoimhin, lame from the attack; and gangling Scaga; and grim, mad lord Dryw from the southern hills. But whatever the nature of them, there was law, and more, word spread abroad in what ill-luck the wolf had died, which kept the mutterings from An Beag and Caer Damh only mutterings: they had no desire to trifle with the wood and the power in it. They had felt the storm. So they were content to close the road and to pen Caer Wiell in its remoteness—as if there were anywhere to go.

So Meara wed, decked in flowers and quiet as she was always quiet, and became Niall’s lady in Caer Wiell.

And the boy Evald dogged Niall’s steps and Caoimhin’s and Scaga’s; and learned play and laughter.

“He is your son,” Niall would say to Meara, which he knew pleased her. “And my cousin, and the blood of the Kings is in him on your side.”

But at times he saw another thing, when the boy was crossed, when his temper rose. And then twice as resolutely Niall used patience with young Evald, for there were times when the boy could melt his heart, when he laughed or when, though tired, he tried to follow, matching a grown man’s steps. He would go everywhere with Niall, onto the walls, up the stairs and down, into the stables and storerooms. A word from Niall could light his eyes or cloud them, and there was no stopping such adoration.

So the boy grew, and if at times Scaga cuffed his ears when he needed it, Evald no more than frowned; it was only Niall could get tears from him. He had a pony to ride, a shaggy beast rescued from the mill, and it thrived and became a merry wicked kind of pony, jogging along by Banain on summer rides. Evald outgrew all his clothes by winter, and all his sleeves were let out, and his waists likewise, keeping Cadhla busy. And on winter nights he listened to the warriors’ tales.

But never to anything of Eald, for at any such tale Meara drew him to herself and shivered, so in this Niall forbore.

Meara bore a daughter for him, a fair blue-eyed child; and after her a sister, so he had no son, but this was, if a matter to him, still no real grief—for his luck had brought him two, Scaga, who went to broad-shouldered manhood, a dour young man who managed well the sometime defense against An Beag; who learned his soldiery of men who had fought the long hard war; and he had Evald, who grew to youth—his heir, for Scaga had no thought of ruling anything. As for Evald, Evald was innocent in his assumption that the hold was his . . . for he was fierce and prideful in his devotion—and learned to be gentle too, giving all his heart to those who gave to him—for so Niall had taught him.

So Niall had his daughters and loved them wholeheartedly, and they inherited Evald’s pony when he had outgrown it. To Evald he gave Banain’s latest foal instead.

Caoimhin died, the greatest grief that came to Niall in those happy years: it was a simple fall, his lame leg betraying him on the stairs. So Caoimhin slept in the heart of Caer Wiell, of a kind of death he had never looked to die, a peaceful one.

The trees grew again across the river. Snow fell and melted into spring, and Caer Wiell began a new tower—for, said Niall, one never knew what the times would bring. Mostly in his heart was the thought of the King, who was now toward his manhood, and that wars might come which he would never see—for age was coming on him. His hair had gone from grey to white, and one day he sent Banain away, for she was failing and he could no longer pretend the years away. He sent Scaga to lead her, and a troop of his armed men, as if the piebald mare had been some great chieftain under escort, for they had to pass the road that An Beag held: and so they did, with never a stirring from An Beag, which chose to watch more of late than act, having learned bitter lessons.

So Banain went, free up the dell.

“She ran,” Scaga reported later, his eyes alight. “She seemed doubtful a moment, and then she threw her head and lifted her tail and ran the way she could when she was young. I lost sight of her; the hills came between. But she knew the way. I do not doubt it.”

“You might have followed her yourself,” Niall said, and the tears shimmered in his eyes.

“So might you,” said Scaga. “I have my wife, my son—my home here.”

“Well, well, and Banain is home.” He set his lips. “So, well, but so am I, and so are you, that’s true. That’s true. There’s a time to let things go even when we love them.”

“Lord,” said Scaga, his strong face now much concerned. “You are out of heart about the mare. You were right. It was her time, but it’s not yet yours.”

“Caoimhin is gone. Of all the rest he had no ties; would I could have sent him.”

“He would never have left you.”

“Would never have left Caer Wiell,” Niall said. “It was the land he loved, these stones; and now he sleeps in the heart of them. I have Meara and Evald and my daughters—That foal of Banain’s will serve me, but a strong-willed horse she is. I never liked her half so well.”

“We will hunt tomorrow, lord, and change your mood.”

“I never found much joy in it, I tell you truth. It minds me of things.”

“Then we will ride and let the deer do as they like.”

“So. Yes,” said Niall, and gazed into the embers from his chair before the fire. A stone wolf’s head was above the hearth. It stared back at him. He had never taken it away.

EIGHT The Luck of Niall Cearbhallain

The seasons passed. For long, for very long there was peace—for the young King was a rumor in the hills, and if men spoke well of him, still his day was not yet dawned. So traitors aged who had had most guilt; and true men grew old as well.

“You must do what I cannot,” Niall would say to Evald of the King; and poured his hopes into him and taught him arms, “He is your cousin,” Niall would say. “And you will set him on his throne. As I would.”

Any war in which Niall would not be foremost seemed very far to Evald, for out of his childhood this man had come, already gray, and soon white-haired, but vigorous, a storm that scoured out the hold and scoured the land of every injustice he could find; and rode at times, he or his men, to remind his enemies whose hand ruled in Caerdale. And Evald, who remembered only hurt before this man came and took him to his heart, had never thought those days would end. But end they did, at first without his realizing it—for first Caoimhin went, and then Banain, and Dryw went back to his mountains, and then Scaga took most of the border-riding on himself, while Niall sat at home. And so age came on him. So it came to a small talk in the hall, not the first such sober talk, but the deepest.

“Time will come,” said Niall, “when I am gone; and men will talk—mark you, son, I love you. But true it is you are my son by love and not by blood. The King’s own cousin: never you forget it. But Evald’s too; you are my cousin and not my son. There are those faithful who will stand by you come what may: you know their names. But men will whisper and try to bring you down, that being the way of men.”

“Then I will fight them,” said Evald. “And you will not be gone. Never speak of it.”

“That would not be wise.” Niall reached for a pitcher and poured wine into his cup, poured another for him. “So. I have a match for you in mind.”

The color fled Evald’s face and flooded it. He took the cup. He was sixteen and until that moment he had been a boy, thought like one, mostly for the hunt and games and dreams of glory in the skirmishes with An Beag; but he shared a cup with his father, rare honor, and asked quietly: “Who?”

“Dryw’s daughter.”

“Dryw!”

“His daughter, I say, not the man.”

“Dryw is—”

“Not the cheeriest of men that were my friends. But the youngest and well-gifted with sons—a fierce lot. He has one daughter, dear to his heart. His sons have one sister. And they care for their own. I could set no truer folk at your back than Dryw’s. It would ease my mind.”

“Because the man who sired me was one who killed the king.” Evald lowered his head. He had never said as much, but he had heard.

“Because you are my heir,” Niall said sternly. Then more gently: “I would not see the alliances I made slip away from you. Dryw I trust; his sons I would trust if you had a bond to them. Her name is Meredydd.”

“What does Mother say?”

“That it is the wisest thing to do.”

“What says lord Dryw?”

“He is yet to ask. First I ask my son.”

“So, well,” Evald said uncomfortably. “Yes. If it’s right.” It was unfair. There was nothing Niall could not have asked of him. For love of Niall and his mother he would have flung himself on spears, this being the direst kind of fate he had imagined for himself, warriorlike to keep Caer WielL He had never thought that there were other ways. This dismayed him more than enemies, that he had to suddenly become a man in many ways, and to be wise, and to get children of his own.

“This year,” said Niall.

“So soon.”

“I do not count my time in years.”

“Sir—”

“ ’Twould please me and please your mother. I think of her. I would see you with the strongest allies I can find—for her sake, if I am gone.”

“She will always be safe.”

“Of course she will.” Niall drank and put on a merrier face, and smiled for him, which was always like a stone that had learned to smile, so lean and hard he was.

But looking at him Evald grew afraid, perceiving for the first time that he was, after all, old; and that his riding out of the hold was growing hard for him, and his limbs were not so strong as they had been. So Banain had begun, growing thinner, bonier in the knees, until she stopped being young, and they took her to the hills. Evald believed no fables: Banain was dead; his pony had died this spring leaving his sisters heartbroken, and he cherished no illusions.

Why must things die at all? he thought. Or grow old? And he thought with terror that the curse was on him too, that now he must be a man and learn to trade in councils what men traded, and that fighting for the King when he should rise might be something less glorious and more the slow and lifelong battle it had been for Niall.

Evald’s son, they would call him, and never trust him without the claim of his mother’s blood and Cearbhallain’s allies to support him. He lost his boyhood in that thinking, and knew what, somewhere in the depth of his heart, he had always feared: that he might lose Cearbhallain himself, and slip back into the dark from which Cearbhallain had rescued him. They sang songs of Cearbhallain, of bloody Aescford, of bravery and wit and gallant deeds; and this man fostered him and shielded him and his mother, which he was old enough to understand was not the least of the gallantries of Cearbhallain. He remembered the harper, if very dimly, a golden vision and bright songs; he remembered mostly pain of his true father, blood and pain and a harsh loud voice; and one night of shining metal and hands with the blood of all those who had ever hurt his mother. She had laughed that night, and ever after smiled, and Niall had let no more blood come near her—he washed when he had come home from fighting on the border and never would see them until he and all the men with him had put off their armor and all the manner of war—because this is Caer Wiell, Niall said, not a robber hold like An Beag. And so the men about him learned to say.

But that was years ago. Before the tower rose.

It is for me, Evald thought, full of dread, and looked up at the scaffolding and the jagged stone against the sky. He builds it for me, not for himself. And then the foreboding came on him that it was the last thing Niall might do.

I do not reckon my time in years, he had said.

So month by month of summer the tower rose toward its roofing, and in all those months Niall rode but seldom, and ached much of nights: Meara tended him gently in his sometime illness, and Evald saw how the gray had touched her hair as well, and how worn she grew as his father failed. Only Niall smiled and won her smile from her. But most times Meara wore a worried look.

Month by month the messengers went back and forth with Dryw; and that grim man came, all grayed himself, a lean clamp-jawed man with young men about him who looked little more than thieves—his sons. “So, well,” Dryw said having looked Evald up and down, “I have had my spies. They report well of the boy.”

“My father speaks well of you,” Evald said, which impertinence brought the mountain lord’s cold eye back to him and gained a frown.

“Which father?” Dryw asked with Niall there to witness.

“The one who calls you friend,” Evald said sharply, “and whose opinions of men I honor.”—Which pleased Dryw and made him laugh his dry chill laugh and clap Niall on the arm.

“He is not easily at a loss,” said Dryw. And so they sent him away and arranged particulars together, Dryw and Niall, like two farmers chaffering over sheep.

So it was done, and Niall reckoned he had done the best he could. Spring, Dryw promised; Meredydd should come by spring. So Dryw and his sons went home again before the winter snows and Evald walked about with that stricken, panicked look about him that he had had that day of the talk in the hall—but it was well done, well done, Niall told himself, and so Meara said—For, said Meara, now he has kin of mine on the one side and friends of yours on the other.

“And he has Scaga,” Niall said. “He has Scaga, truest and closest,” which eased his heart to think on.

But that, with his tower, seemed enough. It seemed too wearying to bundle into heavy garments and go riding in the autumn chill; the fire was comfort. Many things which he had done of duty he left now to younger hands, and while he thought it would be splendid, as the snow fell, to saddle up and ride, to hear the hooves crunching the snow, the steady whuff of breath, and to feel the keen edge of the wind against his face—it would not be Banain under him. And to wrap up to take a ride to exercise some horse his men could do as much for seemed pointless, when his men must shelter him from any hostile meeting, when the most that they might look for was a cup of cheer at some farmhouse—but that put him all too keenly in mind of other things he missed. So he forever thought he would like to do these things, and the wanting was joy enough, not to be spoiled by doing. The best thing was his fireside, and listening to the harper who had come to his hall (but nothing like Fionn Fionnbharr, so even that joy paled). At last there was the fire’s warmth against the cold that crept into his limbs, and good food, and Meara’s kindness and his folk about him. He was fading, that was all, a gentle fading, so that he went all to gauntness.

“I shall see the spring,” he said to Meara. “That long I shall live.” What he meant was that he should see his son wed, but that seemed too grim a promise set against a wedding: and Meara shook her head and shed tears over him, scolding at him finally, which well contented him: so he smiled to please her. In all he was very tired, and thought the winter would be enough for him. His dreams when he dreamed were of that place between the hills; of orchards bare with winter; of walking knee-deep in snow to the barn and of the smell of bread when he was coming home.

He became a burden: he feared he was. He lay about much in the hall. His sons and his daughters cared for him—for his daughters too he intended marriages, young as they were, and sent messages, and arranged one for Ban and his youngest for one of Dryw’s grim sons, the best that he could do. So even in his fading his reach was far, and he took care for years to come. But Meara surprised him in her devotion and her tears—a deep surprise, for it had never seemed love on her part, only habit; for his part it was tenderness, a habit too. It was the only thing which grieved him, that he had always been scattered here and there, doing this or that for her, and for the children, and never knowing that very simple thing.

Had he loved her, he wondered? He was not sure whether he had loved anything as it deserved, only he had done his duty by everything, save only a little while, a few years for himself, to which his mind kept drifting back for refuge. But he had been very fortunate, he thought, that his duty had brought so much of love to him.

And he had made a place for gentler things. That, most. He had brought a little of the Steading with him. It all seemed a dream, and that of Aescford dimmest, and Dun na h-Eoin, and the very walls of Caer Wiell. What was real was a fire, a fish, a shadow among the oaks; but—strange—he was not afraid this time. And a small brown face with eyes like murky water.

O Man, it said, O Man—come back.

Niall Cearbhallain was dying. There was no longer any hiding it. An Beag had made trial of the borders, but prematurely: Scaga drove them out again, and harried them within sight of their own hold for good measure, before grief and concern drew him back again. So Scaga was there by the hall both day and night, and had armed men stationed here and there about the countryside; and farmers to light watchfires if anything stirred.

It was all, Evald recognized, well done, as Niall himself would have ordered it—as perhaps Niall had ordered it in his clearer moments, to the man who was his right hand and much of his heart.

So Dryw came, winter as it still was, and the frosts still too bitter for any greening of the land. He came riding up the Caerbourne with enough armed men about him to force his way if he must, like a cold wind out of the southern heights—so unlooked for that at first the outposts took alarm. But then they could see his banners from the walls, the blue and the white, and the first cheer came that Caer Wiell had known for days.

Evald watched them ride beneath the gates. It was, he knew, like what his father had told him of Dryw, not to waste time with messengers, and for the first time he felt an affection for that skull-faced madman. They came with rattle of armor and the gleam of spears and expected to be housed; but among them came a pony with ribbons in its mane, and on that pony rode a cloak-shrouded girl.

“Meredydd,” he whispered, slinking from the wall as if he had seen something best forgot. He had no heart for marryings. Not now, never now.

But, “Yes,” his father said when Dryw had come to him. “Yes, good for you, old friend.” His mind was clear, at least this evening.

So Evald met his bride, who was a thin girl whose clothes ill-fit her, and whose eyes looked nervously over him. Meara had scarcely any time for her with so much on her thoughts, so Evald was left to murmur courtesies in the lesser hall. He was only grateful she had brought her nurse to take care of her.

“I wish,” Meredydd said mouselike, from the door in leaving to go upstairs, “I wish I had got my best dress finished. It doesn’t fit.”

This was all very far from him, but he saw the red in her cheeks and saw how young she was. “It was good of you to come sooner than you promised,” he said. “That was more important.”

Meredydd lifted her face and looked at him, seeming heartened.

She was not, he decided, what he had planned, but not what he had dreaded either, having a capable way about her when she looked like that. And truth, she quickly had her own baggage up the stairs and ordered her own room and was down seeing to her father’s housing and running back and forth with this and that, taking loads from the servants and sending them on other errands so deftly all that number was fed, while his mother took the respite offered her and simply stayed by his father’s bedside.

So Evald stayed there what time he could, but never now did Niall stir that evening, but slept a great deal, and seemed deeper in his sleep.

“Go,” Meara said to him. “Tomorrow the wedding, Dryw has said. And it would please him to know. She is a fair child, is she not?”

“Fair to us,” Evald said, numb in his deeper feelings, but Meredydd had settled into his thinking as she had settled into the hold, without question, because it had to be. “Yes, fair.” His eyes were for Niall’s face. And then he turned away, and passed the door where Scaga stood watch, haggard and grim and never leaving.

“He sleeps,” he said to Scaga.

“So,” said Scaga. Nothing more.

It was a premonition on Evald that he should not go up to bed tonight, but stay near. He went down into the wardroom where there was a fire, and lingered there a time, into the dark of the night and the sinking of the fire. There was little murmur from the courtyard or the barracks where Dryw’s folk had settled: there was little sound from anywhere.

But the beat of hooves came gently through the dark, gently past the wall, so that it might have been a dream if his eyes had not been open. The hair prickled at his nape and for a moment there was a heaviness over him too deep to throw off.

After that came a scratching at the stones of the wall, and that was too much. He got up and flung his cloak about him, moving quietly, not to disturb the peace. He went out onto the wall, padding softly as he could, unsure whether his ears had tricked him.

Suddenly a darkness bounded up onto the wall, a hairy thing, all arms and eyes. He cried out, a strangled cry, and it leapt back again.

“Cearbhallain,” it piped. “I have come for Cearbhallain.”

Evald lunged at him: it was too quick and bounded away, but he threw his knife at it. It wailed and dived over the wall, and now everywhere men were crying after lights.

But Scaga reached him first, pelting down the stairs.

“It was a hairy man,” Evald cried, “some dark thing—come for him; it said, it had come for him. I flung my knife at it—it went down again.”

“No,” said Scaga. No more than that. Scaga went running for the stairs; but that no was one of anguish—of fear, as if he knew the nature of the thing. Evald hurried after, but “Stay by your father,” Scaga shouted at him, and was gone.

He stood still upon the stairs. He heard the lesser gate open, heard the hoofbeats going away and rushed to the wall to look. It was a piebald horse with something on its back; and after it Scaga ran, down by the river, under the trees.

“Dryw!” Evald shouted into the yard. “Dryw!”

So it stopped, small and forlorn. The horse had fled, going whatever way it could. And Scaga stopped, crouched near, panting.

“Iron,” it wept, “o the bitter iron. I bleed.”

“Come back,” said Scaga. “Was it for him you came? O take him back.”

A shake of the hairy head, of all the body, indistinct in the moonlight, among the leaves. “The Gruagach pities him. Pities you. O too late, too late. His luck is driven all away now. O the bitter iron.”

Scaga looked down at himself, his weapons. He laid aside his sword. “That was his son. He did not understand, never knew you. O Gruagach—”

“He is gone,” the Gruagach said, “gone, gone, gone.”

“Never say so!” Scaga cried. “A curse on you for saying it!”

“Scaga goes wrapped in iron. O Scaga, ill for you the forest, ill for you. The Gruagach goes back again where you might go, but never will you. Ill for you the meeting. You were never like your lord. Eald will kill you in the day you meet. O Scaga, Scaga, Scaga, they wept for you when you left And the Gruagach weeps, but he cannot stay.”

There was nothing there—neither shadow nor moving branch or leaf, only the moonlight on the river.

And Scaga ran, ran with all that was in him, to reach Caer Wiell.

“He is dead,” Evald told him when he came inside, when he had reached the doors. And Scaga bowed down in the hall and wept.

There was a decent time of burying and mourning, and Dryw stayed, buttressing Caer Wiell against its enemies. Evald—lord Evald—with Scaga at his side, dispensed justice, ordered this and that in the lands round about, set guards and posts and took oaths from men that came.

Even from aged Taithleach came a message that only Dryw understood. “The King,” said Dryw privily, his skull’s-face ever more grim than its wont: “this passing has set back the time that might have been. Had your father lived and been strong—but he is gone. Alliances must be proved again.”

“Send back,” Evald said, “and say that I am Cearbhallain’s son and the lady Meara’s, no other.”

“So,” said Dryw, “I have done.”

And another time: “You cannot go back to your lands,” Evald said, “without the promise kept my father made. And I shall be glad of your daughter.” It had come to be the truth, for Meredydd had nested in the heart of Caer Wiell to his mother’s comfort and to his own, and if it was not love at least it was deepest need. If he had had to sue for Meredydd on his knees now he would have done so; and it was his father’s will, the which he tried to do in everything.

“It is nigh time,” said Dryw.

So Caer Wiell put off its mourning in the spring. The stones remained, and the grass grew and flowers bloomed, violets and rue.

And vines twined in the wood, among forgotten bones.