The Dreamstone

NINE Midsummer and Meetings

Summer lay over the old forest, when leaves veiled the twisted trunks and graced the skeletal branches with a gray-green life. They were stubborn, the old trees, and clung tenaciously to their long existence on the ridge above the dale. There was anger here, and long memory. The trees whispered and leaned together like conspirators in their old age while the rains came and the quick mortal suns shone, and shadows slithered round their roots within the brambles and the thickets. No creatures from the New Forest ventured here without fear; and none stayed the night—not the furtive hare, which nibbled the flowers that stopped at the forest edge, not the deer, which drew the air into quivering black nostrils and bounded away to take her chances with human hunters. Not the wariest or the boldest of such creatures which grew up under the mortal sun might love the Ealdwood . . . but there were hares and deer which did wander here, shadowy wanderers with dark, fey eyes, swift to run, and not for hunting.

At rare times the forest seemed other than sullen and dreambound, and stirred and wakened somewhat, while the moon shone less white and terrible. Midsummer was such a time, when the phantom deer gathered by night, and birds flew which would never be seen by day, and for a brief hour the Ealdwood forgot its anger and dreamed of itself.

On this night, after many such nights, Arafel came, a motion of the heart, a desire which was enough to span seeming and being, to slip from the passage of her time and her sun and moon which shone with a cooler, greener light, and out of the memory of trees and woods as they might have been, or were, or had once been. She brought a bit of that otherwhere with her, a bright gleaming where she walked. Flowers bloomed this magic night which without her presence might never have waked from their buds, as most flowers did not, in the Ealdwood men saw. She looked about her, and touched the moongreen stone at her throat, which was much of her heart, and shivered a bit in the cool dankness of a world she had much forgot. The deer and the hares which, like her, wandered the shadow-ways twixt there and here, moved the more boldly for her presence.

Once there had been dancing on such a night, merry revels, but the harpers and the pipers were stilled, gone far across the gray cold sea. The stone at her throat echoed only the remembrance of songs. She came this night out of curiosity, now that she remembered to come. Mortal years fled swiftly past and how many of them might have passed since her grief and her anger had faded, she did not know. She was dismayed. It pained her heart to see this heart of the wood so changed, so choked with brambles. A great mound rose in this place, thorn-ringed now, about which her folk had once danced on green grass, among great and beautiful trees. This night she walked the old dancing-ring, laid a hand on an oak impossibly old, and strength drained from her, greening his old heart and making thin buds swell at his branch-tips. Such magics she had left, native as breathing.

But overhead the stars should have shone clear. Clouds drifted, wrack in heaven. She looked up, wished them gone, that this night be what it ought. The deer and the hares looked up with their huge dreaming eyes, as for a little time the sky was pure. But quickly a wisp of cloud formed again, and fingers of wind drew the taint back across the sky.

“It is long,” Death whispered.

She turned, startled, laid her hand on the stone at her throat, for near the ring had appeared a blot of shadow, a darkness which hovered next a tree the lightning had slain, and for a moment ugly whisperings attended it

“Long absent,” said Lord Death.

“Go from here,” she bade him. “It is not your night, and not your place.”

Death stirred. Deer, beside her, trembled, their shifting steps carrying them nearer and nearer her, and the air breathed with the dankness of most nights in this wood.

“Many years,” Lord Death said, “you have not come at all. I have walked here. Should I not? I have hunted here. Do I not have leave?”

“I care not what you do,” she said. But such was her loneliness that even this converse drew her. She regarded the shadow more calmly, watched it spread and settle on the riven stump as brush swayed. Something doglike settled too, a puddle of shadow at its master’s feet. It dipped its inky head and yawned, panting softly in the dark, while the deer and hares froze. “Do not settle to stay, Lord Death. I have told you.”

“Proud. Lady of cobwebs and tatters. The old oak is younger tonight. Do you not care to tend the others? Or can it be . . . that a little of you fades, each time you do?”

“He is rooted elsewhere, that old tree, and he is more than he seems. Do not set your hand to him. There are some things not healthy for you as well, Lord Death.”

“For many years, many summers, you have neglected this place. And now your eyes turn this way. Have you cause to come?”

“Need I cause . . . in my wood?”

“The Ealdwood is smaller this year.”

“It is always smaller,” she said, and looked more closely at the shadow, in which for the first time she could see the least distinction, a suspicion of an arm, a, hand, but never, never a face.

“Old friend,” he said, “come walk with me.”

She smiled, mocking him, and the smile faded, for the hand reached out to her. “Upstart youth,” she said, “what have I to do with you?”

“You have given me souls to hunt, Arafel. And they are with me when I have taken them, but there is no sense in them. No gratitude. And less pleasure. Why do I come? What do you see in your side of Eald? What is there, that I can never see?” The shadow drew itself up, and the hound rose too. The likeness of the hand was still extended. “Walk with me,” Lord Death asked softly. “Is it not a night for fellowship? I beg you—walk with me.”

The deer fled away, bounding this way and that; the hares darted for cover in panic. The hound stayed, a breathing in the shadow. Suddenly there seemed others of them, a shadowy pack, and the shuffle and stamp of hooves sounded where the darkness was deepest.

A wind started through the trees. Where stars had shone, the blight in heaven had become a dark edge of cloud. Arafel glanced from sky to trees, where the shadow flowed, where small chitterings disturbed the peace.

“Send them away,” she said, and the other shadows slunk away, and the wind fell. There was only the greater Darkness, and a chill sense of presence.

She walked with him, from out the ring and more and more solidly within this world where Men lived—incongruous companionship, elven-kind and one of Men’s less-reputed gods. He said little. That was his wont, and hers. She had no deep fear of him, for elven-kind had never been subject to him; when their wounds took them, they simply faded, and where they went, Death was not, nor ever had been. All had faded now, but she had not; they had gone away beyond the sea, but she had not been willing. She was last, loving the woods too well to go when the despair came on others. It was perhaps habit kept her now; or pride—her kind had ever been proud; or perhaps her heart was bound here. Death had never known the motives of the elves.

She did not walk the shadow-ways, that path which was mostly under her moon. Death could not reach to that other place, and she meant that he never should. She stayed companionable with him, her Huntsman, guardian of her forest what time she was absent, who had come to the land when Men came, and who haunted this forest most of all places on the earth. He showed her the land he had had in care, the great old trees with roots well sunk in her own Eald, that could not easily die. She saw their other selves, their aspect beneath this moon, and now and again she found one dangerously fading, and gave her strength to heal.

“You undo my work,” he reproached her.

“Only where you trespass,” she said, and looked again at the darkness, wherein two soft gleams seemed to shine. “If I do not go where the others have gone, at the last I shall have drawn all Eald-that-was to heal this blight that Men make; and where shall I be then, Lord Death, having used my strength up so? Is that what you wait for? Do you think my kind can die?”

“I wait to see,” he said, and his voice was soft and still. A shadow-sleeve rippled in wide gesture. “All of this you might restore, drive out Men, claim it all, and rule—”

“And die, as it did.”

“And die,” Lord Death said softer still.

She smiled, perceiving wistfulness. “Merest youth.”

“Invite me with you,” Death wished her. “Let me once see what you see. Let me see you as you are. Show me . . . that other land.”

“No,” she said, shuddering, and felt the brush of a touch upon her cheek.

“Do not,” Death pleaded. “Do not hate me. Do not fear me. All do . . . but you.”

“Banish hope. My land fades from wounds.”

“But there is none can wound you,” he said. “None, Arafel. So you are bound here, to share the fate of Eald.”

“There are many who can wound me,” she said, looking placidly toward that place where she judged a face might be. “But not you.”

“Save when the woods are gone. Save when all that gives you strength has gone. And you live long, my lady of the fading trees, but not forever.”

“Yet I shall cheat you all the same.”

“Perhaps you will.” The whisper wavered, trembled. “Do you know where your kindred has gone? Do you know that that place is good? No. But me you know. I am familiar and easy. We are old companions, you and I.”

“Companions without fellowship.”

“Do you not know loneliness? That, we share.”

“But you are all darkness,” she said. “And cold.”

“Do all see you the same?”

“No,” she confessed.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you will come to see me as I am.”

She said nothing to that, for she was not as cruel as some of her kind, having felt pain.

“I also,” he said, “heal.”

Still she said nothing.

“Come,” he said. “I shall show you my other face.”

She stopped at his touch, for the way to another, third Ealdwood lay in his power and the wind from it was chill, that place of his making. “No,” she said. “Not there, my lord, never there.”

“What I take,” he said, “most oft I return. What comes into the cauldron comes out again. I have a fairer face, Arafel, which you do not know how to see, having no experience of me. You judge me amiss.”

“You have done me service,” she said, “in defending Eald from Men. Why?”

And now Death was still, giving her no answer.

“Perhaps,” she said, “I shall misjudge my time. Perhaps I shall delay in this woods too long. Only that must you hope for. I give you no hope of my consent.”

“I have no hope,” said Lord Death. Wind tugged at her, drew her farther. “But come, if not to the one place, to the other. I am anxious that you think well of me. See . . . that I can heal.”

His voice was gentle, promising no ill, and in truth there was none that he could do her. Because she had committed herself the once, she yielded, and walked where he would, as mortals walked, their common ground.

And then she wavered, because she knew where he would lead.

“Trust,” he begged of her, and the wind tugged more strongly, insistent and cold.

They walked slowly through the brambles and the thickets, mortal-wise and sometimes painfully; and at the last edge of night they came to that grove he sought, a part of the New Forest, that verge of Eald grown up on the edge of the old, nearest Men. Great trees had died, scarred with axes that she had not forgot The wanton destruction oppressed her heart, for an edge of her own Eald had died that day these trees had perished, truly died, into that gray haze which bordered all her world and bound her sight.

“See,” said Lord Death, and the shadow rippled toward a bank of bracken, lush ferns beneath the dimming stars. Man-tall saplings were springing up through it, straight and new. “See my handiwork. Can we be enemies?”

She saw, and shivered, remembering the place as it had been, when the fallen trees had stood tall and beautiful; and their counterparts in her own Eald had bloomed with stars and sheltered her with their white branches. “It is only more New Forest,” she said, “and mine is the smaller for it. They have no roots in Eald.”

“You do not see beauty here?”

“There is beauty,” she admitted, walking farther, and knelt with a pang of memory, for there were bones and shattered wood beneath the bracken, and she touched a long-broken skull. “The trees, you restored. Canst mend this, Lord Death?”

“In time, even that,” he said, twisting yet again at her heart. “Do you care for them?”

“I have my own cares,” she said; but when she had risen, an old curiosity tugged at her heart, and she walked farther with him, to the flat rock which overlooked the dale, upon a dark sea of trees. She recalled the stone keep the other side of the dale—oh, far too well, among villages and fields and tame beasts and all such business as Men cared for. It was all beyond their sight. Below them the Caerbourne rolled its dark flood seaward, a black snake dividing the wood; and that flow toward the sea made her think of endings, and partings from her kindred, and made her sad.

“Men fare as always,” said Death. “Borning and birthing and dying. There is no ending of it.”

“Yet they end.”

“Not forever. That is the nature of them. You will not look on my new woods; it does not please you.”

“Not while mine dies.”

“Dies and does not fade?”

She looked at him with cold in her heart. “Go away,” she wished him. “I am weary of your company.”

“You wound me.”

“You, spoiler of all you touch? You are beyond wounding. Begone from me.”

“You are wrong,” said Lord Death. “Wrong about my wounding. There is loneliness, Arafel; and heartlessness; I am never heartless. Beware of pride, Arafel.”

“Go hence,” she said. “I weary of you.”

There was a snuffling in the shadows at her back, a breathing, a chuckling. She frowned and laid her hand on the jewel that she wore at her throat. The sounds diminished. “You do not fright me, godling. You never did and never shall. Begone!”

The shadow fled, not without a touch, a chill which achieved wistfulness. She waved it away, and knew him truly fled. There was only the hillside, and the spoiled night, and the wind.

She walked along the ridge, having come this far. All the dale was dark before her, mortals still asleep in this their night and her day. She remembered what of hurt and of fairness Men had brought her . . . how many of their years ago she did not know. She lingered a time, and a curious longing possessed her, to know what passed there, what manner of thing their lives had become.

TEN Branwyn

She walked that other way, that slipped with speed no mortal limbs could pace, along paths where brambles did not trouble her. She paused, in the gray glimmering of dawn down the dale, in the pleasant green of new growth, a riverside where she had not come . . . in very, very long. She was beyond the present limits of Eald, and yet not, for Eald was where she willed it, and followed her, stretched thin, so that there was effort in this going.

Morning brought mortal beauty, soft touch of sun in golden haze above the black waters of the Caerbourne, beauty of contrasts which her world did not possess, for there was no ugliness there, no dead branch, no fallen tree or unshapely limb.. She glanced aside as a shadowy deer followed her out of otherwhere, black nose atwitch and large eyes full of daybreak. “Go back,” she bade it, for it did not know its way hereabouts, and it vanished with a breaking of brush and a flash of dappled rump, which flickered into that shadow world and safety.

She walked farther, across the water, where now she could see the grim walls of Caer Wiell on its hill, with fields spread beyond it like skirts of gold and green. Evil had lived here once, surrounding itself with harsh men and edged weapons. The keep had a new tower, greater defenses. But today the gates stood open. New Forest had urged its saplings close upon this side of the hill, with grass beyond, and flowers twined upon the grim black stones. She saw Men coming and going on a path, but these Men had no hardness about them. They laughed, and her heart was eased, her interest pricked as it had not been in long years of Men . . . for Death’s taunting had cast gloom over her and this sight of life and liveliness was heart-healing.

A few women sat on the green grass, between the forest edge of saplings and the flower-twined walls, and a golden-haired child ran with baby steps with the hillside, laughing. A strange feeling tugged at Arafel’s elvish heart to hear it, like the echo of such childish laughter in the long ago. She walked out, into mortal sunlight, saw that the child at least saw her, if others did not. The child’s eyes were cornflower blue and round with wonder.

Arafel knelt then and touched a flower, drew a glamour over it, a tiny magic, a gift. The child plucked it and the glamour died, leaving only a primrose clutched in a fat human fist, and dismay in the blue eyes.

Arafel spread the glamour across the whole hillside of primroses, shedding elven beauty on them, and the childish eyes danced for joy.

“Come,” whispered Arafel, holding out her hand. The child walked with her into the forest shade, forgetful of flowers.

“Branwyn,” a woman called. “Branwyn, don’t stray too far.”

The child stopped, turned eyes that way. Arafel dropped her hand and the child toddled away, ran at last to the outstretched arms of the woman who had risen to look fearfully into the morning haze amid the bracken.

Human fear. It was chill as Death himself, and Arafel had no love of it. She cast a last longing look at the child and walked away into the shadow of the woods.

“Beware of them,” said a whisper at her shoulder. “They die.”

It was Death, in the wreckage of an old tree.

“Begone,” she said to him.

“They will give you pain.”

“Begone, upstart.”

“They have no gratitude for gifts,” he said.

“The third time—begone.”

He went, for at her third command he must, and left a chill behind him.

She frowned and drew back, departing her own way into elven night, and the light of her own and pale green moon.

She thought often about the meeting, but she took her time in venturing again in the face of Death’s taunting. Her pride, pricklish elvish pride, refused to acknowledge that he had disturbed her, but she put it off past one midsummer’s eve, and yet another, and perhaps more . . . time meant little to her, who measured the oldest trees against her lifetime. But at last she came back to that forest below Caer Wiell, dismayed anew to realize how fast human life fled, for the babe was much taller when she had found her again playing on that strip beneath the walls. The child stared at her from wide, little-girl eyes, her doll forgotten in her lap. She had her attendants, who sat to themselves and laughed shrill sly laughs and never saw their visitor. They chattered among themselves, a ring of bright skirts and fingers busy with embroideries. But the child was grave and curious.

And Arafel sat down crosslegged on the ground, let a child show her daisy-chains and how to count wishes.

They laughed together, but then the watching girls came and fetched the child away from the forest edge and scolded her.

It was not every day, nor even every moon, that Arafel came. Sometimes other concerns kept her; but she remembered Men more often than her wont in those days, and sang much, and was happy.

Still the mortal time was long; and when at last she delayed for months, the child took her pony into the woods and set out seeking her, along the Caerbourne’s willow-shaded banks.

The wood grew darker very soon; and it was no good place to be. The fat pony knew that, and shook her off and raced away in terror. And Branwyn wiped the wet leaves from off her hands and tried to keep her lip from trembling, for what had frightened the pony chuckled and whispered in the bushes nearby.

Many the human intruder in Ealdwood that dusk, with calling and blowing of horns; and they found the poor pony with his neck broken. Lord Evald rode farthest and most desperately, driven by a father’s love . . . and Scaga led the searchers farther than most would have dared but for shame to Evald’s face and dread of Scaga’s anger.

Arafel came looking too, having heard the cries and the intrusion. She found the child tucked like a frightened fawn in the hollow of an old and trustworthy tree, dried her tears, banished the dark from that glade. “Did you come hunting me?” Arafel asked, her heart touched that at last, after so many years, there was some hope of Men. “Come,” she asked of Branwyn, trying to draw her to that place where childhood might be long, and life longer still. But the child feared those other sights.

And suddenly a father’s voice rang out, distant through the wood; and the child chose once for all, and called out, and fled for him.

Arafel drew away; and stayed away very long. It was shame perhaps, for intended theft. And pain . . . that, perhaps, most of all. Midsummers passed, and beltains, while mortal Eald grew rank and Death did as he would there, failing her presence.

But come she did when her heart was healed. She expected the child where she would always be, at the forest’s edge; and when she did not find her there . . . at least, she thought, Branwyn would be playing on the hillside on so bright a midsummer day; and finally, seeking with persistence, she went even to the stones of Caer Wiell, man-hewn with painful iron.

So she found Branwyn at last, on the tower’s crest, in that sheltered nook where the wind could not reach.

The child’s shape had changed. It was a budding woman in a woman’s gown, who stared at her in alarm and did not truly remember her, forgetting childish dreams.

Branwyn had brought bread there for the birds, and stopped in the very motion of her hand, the cornflower eyes greatly amazed, not seeing how her visitor had come, but only that she was there, which was the way most mortals looked at Arafel when they saw her at all.

“Do you remember me?” Arafel asked, saddened at the change she saw.

“No,” said Branwyn, wrinkling her nose and tilting her head back to stare at her visitor, from soles of her feet to a crown of her head. “You are poor.”

“So some see me.”

“Did you beg of me on the road? You should not have come inside.”

“No,” said Arafel patiently, “Perhaps you once saw me differently.”

“At our gate?”

“Never. I gave you a flower.”

The blue eyes blinked, and did not remember.

“I offered you magic. I did you daisy chains, and found you in the woods.”

“You never did,” Branwyn breathed, cupping the crumbs in both her hands. “I stopped believing in you.”

“So easily?” asked Arafel.

“My pony died.”

It was hate. It wounded. Arafel stood and stared.

“My father and Scaga brought me home. And I never went back.”

“You might . . . if you would.”

“I am a woman now.”

“You still remember my name.”

“Thistle.” Branwyn drew back, out of her shadow. “But little-girl playmates go away when girls are grown.”

“So I must,” said Arafel.

And she began to. But she stopped on a last forlorn hope and cast a glamor as once she had done, on the birds which hovered round about, silvering their wings. Branwyn quickly cast crumbs, and the birds alit and fought for them, so that the gleaming faded in a knot of wings and thieving. She threw more. Such were Branwyn’s magics, to tame wild things, by their desires. The cornflower eyes lifted, dark and ill-wishing, conscious of their own power and disdaining forever what was wild.

“Good-bye,” said Arafel, and yielded up the effort which held her so far out of Eald.

She faded back then, out of heart to linger there.

“Did I not warn you?” Death made bold to ask her, when next their paths crossed. Then in anger Arafel banished him from her presence, but not from the wood, for she was out of sorts with Men. The dream she had dreamed of humankind had proved more than vain, it was turned altogether against her, like the child who had grown as the saplings had grown in Death’s new forest, taking root in this world, and not in hers.

She slipped within the safer, kindlier light of her moon, and into the forest of Eald as her eyes saw it, a forest which had never faded since the beginning of the world, save those areas gone for good. Here all the leaves were silvered in the moon’s greener, younger glow; here waters sang, and the birds were free, and the deer wandered with all the stars of night in their eyes.

It was her consolation then, to dream, to walk the woods she loved, and to keep that which remained as it had always been, forgetting Men. Of midsummer nights, sometimes she came, and saw mortal Eald grown wilder and more deserted still. How Death fared, she had no knowledge, nor cared, though it seemed that he fared well, and hunted souls.

ELEVEN Dun na h-Eoin

The banners fluttered over the tumbled stones, the watchfires flickered in the dusk, like stars across the plain. There was war. It had raged from the Caerbourne to the Brown Hills to Aescford and south again, for the King had risen, Laochailan son of Ruaidhrigh, to claim the hall of his fathers, ruined as it was.

Evald had come, of course. He was among the first, riding out of Caerdale to forestall the King’s worst enemies in the days before the King declared himself. He came with Beorc Scaga’s son, and armed men and no few stout farmers’ sons out of the dale, with all the strength that he could muster. And Dryw the son of the Dryw of Niall’s day, rode from the southern mountains with the largest rising of that folk since Aescford. So Luel rose; and Ban; they were expected. Latest came the folk of Caer Donn, high in the hills: lord Ciaran led them. Ranged against them were Damh and An Beag, the wild men of the Boglach Tiamhaidh, and the bandit lords of the Bradhaeth and Lioslinn.

And the war was long, long and bitter, and Evald felt little of glory in it: they named him in songs, but more and more he understood the Cearbhallain, for what they sang as brave he remembered most as mud and fear and being cold and hungry. But all the same he fought, and when he had time to think at all, he spent it missing Meredydd and his daughter and his fireside. He had pains in his joints and his scars when it rained. A great deal of the war seemed to be marching and riding, moving bands of men here and there and forestalling the enemy at one point to have them break out in another burning and looting of what they had lately made safe, so that they had had great pains to make a border and to hold it, for the marshes could never be trusted and the hills were full of warfare.

But at Dun na h-Eoin all that had changed, where campfires gathered and the enemy massed so many they looked like a blight upon the land, their backs against the hills.

Then was a battle, fierce and long, fought from the breaking of one day to the evening of the next, and the dark birds gathered thick as the smoke had been before. But the King prevailed.

“Your leave,” Dryw ap Dryw asked of the King that day on the field: “They’ll have no rest of me.”

“Go,” said the King. Dryw was himself pale and spattered with blood, straining at the recall like some hound called back from the hunt. “Keep them on the move.”

So Dryw leapt onto his horse and gathered his men about him, afoot, many of them, accustomed to move like shadows among the hills.

“By your leave,” said Evald, “I would go with Dryw. An Beag and Damh are old enemies of my hold—and they have force left. The most of my men are here with me; if they should come at Caer Wiell now—”

“We will come at their backs,” said the King. “At all possible speed. Let Dryw harry them as he can.”

“But Caer Wiell—” said Evald. His heart was leaden in him looking around at the desolation, the clouds of birds vying with the smokes of fires to darken the sky. It was not well to dispute with Laochailan King; he was a man of middling height, Laochailan, fair with eyes of a pale cold blue that never took fire. He had outlived his counselors. They had held him on the leash most of his life, and he was cold, seldom roused. Even in battle his killing was cold; in policy he was deliberate and immovable. And Evald turned his shoulder and strode away with a turmoil in his thoughts. It was treason in his mind, but the will of the Cearbhallain still held him, so that it was would and would not with Evald. He was on the verge of gathering his folk and riding away despite the King; Beorc Scaga’s son hurried to his side seeing stormclouds in his eyes, seeing wrack and ruin in the offing, on the bloody field.

“Cousin,” the King called after him.

Evald strode to a stop and turned, lifted his head, keeping his anger behind his eyes. “My lord King.”

“I will not be scattering my men, some here, some there. You will not be leaving this place without my will.”

“Caer Wiell was refuge for your cousin and stronghold for men that held against all your enemies. It holds now against An Beag and Caer Damh and makes their homecoming dangerous. My steward is a capable man to hold against the force they left behind, but he has too few men in his command. I have stripped my land, giving you every man, every weapon I could bring. Now the onslaught comes at Caer Wiell, and what profit to you if Caer Wiell should fall? You would lose all the valley of the Caerbourne; and it would be strong against you—as strong as it ever was for you, lord King, and as dearly bought.”

Not even this brought passion to the King’s face. “Do you think to ride against my command, cousin?”

For a moment breath and sense failed Evald. The field, the King, the counselors about him swam in a bloody haze. They were close by the ruins of Dun na h-Eoin: the black birds settled on its broken walls to rest, some too sated to take wing. They began to pitch tents, some bright with the green and gold and most leathern brown, even among the slain, amid the wailing of the wounded. Men removed the bodies, looting them too; or carried the wounded to what care they could give them; or despatched the hopeless or the fallen enemy. That was the manner of the King’s war, and the sound and the stink of it muddled the mind and made right and wrong unclear. Evald’s hand was on his sheathed sword; and blood had gotten into his glove and dried about his fingers, whether his own or others’ he had not yet explored. He thought only of his home, and his eyes saw nothing clearly.

“Will you obey,” the King asked, “or no?”

“The King knows I am loyal.”

“Then come. Come take counsel with me. Now.”

Evald considered, looked at Beorc, Scaga’s younger image, beside him. Beorc would ride; and gladly. And thereafter they would be rebels against the King, and no less to be hunted. If they were rebels, then the King might fall, for Dryw would go with them, and so the southern mountains and dale would do the thing that would ally them with An Beag and Caer Damh, in deed though never in heart. And perhaps the King saw that looming before him, since he had called him cousin twice in the same address and spoke to him courteously. Laochailan was cold, but he was clever too, outside the cold determination which had peopled this field with dead. And he knew what was necessary.

“Come,” Evald said to Beorc quietly, and so they went, across the littered field with its canebrake of spears standing in corpses, of tattered banners of the Bogach and the Bradheath of, death and agony.

They had pitched a tent for the King among the ruined stones of Dun na h-Eoin, in the courtyard, by the struggling oak which had somehow survived the fires. They had driven the pegs between the shattered paving stones and into what had been a garden. Doves had sung there. Now carrion crows flapped their dark and sluggish wings, startled by their coming. And to this state the King retreated, drawing with him others of the lords.

As they gathered, Evald glowered about him and tried to think what there was to do—for he would far rather now have been the least of men in Dryw’s company than the lord he was. There was Beorc by him and no other, for he had no kinsman but the King himself, a king who would as lief not remember that dark history or how he had come to be. Ciaran of Donn was there with his sons Donnchadh and Ciaran Cuilean, a fey and strange lot. Fearghal of Ban came with his cousins, small dark men and blood-handed, like Dalach of Caer Luel and his brothers. They were northerners all of them and some from the plains, and none of them had any close ties to the dale or the south.

So perforce Evald came into the tent with them, and bided his time while the King’s servants helped Laochailan with his armor and one brought them wine to drink. It was the color of blood. Evald took the cup and it had the taste of it as well, a coppery ugliness in the smoky air, the reek of sweat that was on them.

“Dryw has sped after them,” the King said to those who had not been there earliest. “He will keep them moving and never give them rest.”

“I say again,” Evald began, but Laochailan King turned that pale cold glance on him.

“You have said much,” said Laochailan. “You try our patience.”

“I serve my King from a hold that has been his from my father’s time.”

“From the Cearbhallain’s,” the King said softly, as if it had to be explained, and the color leapt to Evald’s face.

“And your cousin’s, lord.” Evald kept his voice steady, set down the cup and stripped the glove from his hand. Some sword or axe had cut through the leather. The blood was his. “As you kindly remember. I ask your leave—no, I beg it, to go now and keep Caerdale in your hands. They will join with their own forces. Dryw may not be enough for them when they have gained what strength they have in their own holds. They will gather forces again—”

“Do you lesson me in warfare?”

They were of an age, he and his King, born near the same year. “I know my lord King has wide concerns. So I would take this small one on myself.”

“And shall we all go riding to our own holds?” asked Fearghal, ‘Two years it has taken to bring us and the traitors to this field, and lord Evald would have us go each to his own defense again.”

This field is half empty,” Evald said. “The enemy has gone, has it passed your notice, lord of Ban? We sit here licking our wounds while theirs will be healed when they have reinforced themselves, and their strength be doubled if they should take Caer Wiell. More than doubled. In its full strength, Caer Wiell could hold for longer than we may have strength in us to hurl against it, with all the Bradheath at our backs.”

“I will not have dissent,” said the King. “That is deadlier than swords. Nor will I release any but Dryw. His men are light-armed and apt to this kind of war. You fear too much, cousin. Your steward is a skilled man in war; and Caer Wiell has defenders. If anything An Beag is apt to draw off its attackers to come in our faces, not against your lands.”

“That was not the way I learned An Beag. No. Pardon me, lord King, but they know the value of Caer Wiell in their hands, and I know An Beag, that they will take what chance they have. Dryw may try but they may hold him in the hills—and I fear some all out attack against Caer Wiell before this is done, sparing nothing. We have hurt the enemy, never killed them. A wounded beast is still to fear.”

“Is fear your counsel then? No, hear me. I will not divide my forces. I will brook no talk of it.”

“Set us through the pass, lord King; and when you come at their backs then we will be at their faces. If we are divided, then reunite we will, over their corpses. But let Caer Wiell fall and we will leave our corpses at every step we take into the dale.”

The King’s fair face never turned color but his eyes were cold. He lifted a hand that bore the Old King’s ring and silenced the others with a gesture. “You are too forward. I will not yield in this.”

“Lord,” Evald muttered, and bowed his head and took np his cup again, moved off from the King’s presence, toward Beorc who kept to the shadow, for he did not trust his wits or his tongue just now. “Go,” he whispered to Beorc, “take horse and take at least the message of what happened here.”

“I will,” said Beorc, and bowed and was almost out the door with a turn upon his heel, a hasty man like his father.

“Recall your man,” the King said. “Hold him!”

Spears came down athwart the doorway. “Beorc!” Evald cried at once, knowing Beorc’s mind. Beorc stopped but scantly short of harm, and lowered the hand he bad almost to his sword.

“Where in such haste?” asked the King. “Dare I guess?”

A lie tempted Evald. He rejected it and looked Laochailan in the eye. “My messengers have the habit to come and go. Should the enemy know more of what was done on this field than my own folk?”

It was perilous. The King’s eye had that chillness that went with his deepest wrath. “Cousin,” said Laochailan, “messages are mine to send. Do you not agree?”

“Then I beg you send Beorc and quickly. He knows the way.”

“I will not have it said a man of this host vent home, not the lord of Caer Wiell, not his steward’s son, not the least man of his following.”

“Lord King,” said Ciaran of Caer Donn. “But a messenger—there is treachery in An Beag and Damh. There would be no whispering in the camp at this man’s going. It would be well understood—at least by Donn. The dale is at our doorstep, and if Caer Wiell should fall it would be like the old days, with burning and looting in the hills. A messenger to give them heart and ourselves to come at the backs of our enemies—but we will be slow. We have the longer way to go. And what if their heart failed them in Caer Wiell?”

“You make yourself a part of this contention,” the King said wryly, and he frowned, for Donn had favor with him. “But Caer Wiell will have no lack of heart. After all, they defend their own lives. And that is trustworthy in these dalemen.”

“Lord,” Evald said, hot with passion, “but the choice of a defender might be a sortie if he hoped for no help—they are brave, my folk, but they may also be desperate.”

“Lord King.” It was a voice hitherto unheard in council, Ciaran Cuilean, the younger son of Donn. “You gave your word no man of us should go home before the war is done. But Caer Wiell is not my home. And I know the hills.”

There was a deep frown on his father’s face and on his brother Donnchadh’s. But the King turned to him with his anger sinking. “So. Here is one man who has the gift of courtesy. And one I would be loath to lose.”

“Never lost,” the younger Ciaran said. He laughed, tallest of all his kindred, fairer than most and more lighthearted. “I have scoured those hills often enough. I can ride through them with less trouble now, if the King will, and maybe quicker than Beorc, who knows? He has not had the hills for his hunting, and I have.”

“Then you will carry lord Evald’s message,” the King said. “Do you frame it for him, cousin, and let us be done with it. I have given you all I will.”

A fell suspicion came on Evald then—that his cousin the King had some fear of him, feared messages and secrets passed—feared this kinship with him. It was a dark thought and unworthy. Others followed it, as dark and fearful. He drove them all away. “Lord King, my lord of Donn, my gratitude.” He worked the ring from his finger. “My steward’s likeness you can know from his son. Show this to him. Speak to my lady: I send this ring to her. Tell her how things stand. That whatever they hear they must hold a little time, and the King will be coming at An Beag from the back.”

“Lord,” said the younger Ciaran, taking the ring, “I will.”

“There will be peril in it,” Evald said.

“Aye,” said Ciaran, just that, which so quietly spoken mended all his thoughts of Donn.

“Speed well,” Evald said earnestly,” and safely.”

“Your leave, sir—lord King.” So Ciaran embraced his father, but his brother would not, and excused himself to the door of the tent.

“I am in your debt,” said Evald quietly. His pride was hurt, and anger still rankled in him, for it was less than he had wanted. A terrible fear was in him that the King wished the war to go toward the dale and batter down its strength awhile, for it was too rich and too well-situated and its lord was a kinsman. But that was too dire, even thinking what the war had come to. It was too great a waste. He looked on the young man Ciaran as young and high-hearted as once he had been, and all his heart went with the man as he walked from out the tent and into the dying day. But he ached with his wounds, and there was counsel to be held. He set his hand on Beorc’s shoulder, silently wishing him to peace, and Beorc’s arm was hard and stiff with anger.

So the King took counsel of them, how they should map the last assault on An Beag and Damh and the Bradhaeth, while the cries of the wounded and of the carrion crows mingled in the evening. Evald shivered and drank his wine. He served the King as his father would, if he had lived to see the day; and for his mother’s sake; and little for his own.

“That is a good man they sent,” Beorc said quietly while the King called for wine. “They speak well of the youngest son of Donn.”

“So shall I,” Evald said, “of all Donn, ever after this.”

As for Ciaran, he delayed little in his going, seeking after the best horse he could lay hand to, taking his brother’s shield with the crescent moon of Donn upon it, for his own was broken.

“Take care,” his brother said, Donnchadh, dark as he was fair, less tall, less favored by the King or even by their father.

“I shall,” Ciaran said soberly, seeing to the gear, and took the wineflask his brother pressed on him. “That will come welcome on the trail.”

“You should have kept silent. You never should have thrust yourself into this.”

“It is no small message,” Ciaran said, “the saving of the dale.”

“He never trusts the dale. Never. It is unsavory. And never you forget it.”

“I shall not,” Ciaran said, and hung the shield on his saddle, with the parcel of bread and meat a servant brought him. He slung his sword there too, and turned and embraced his brother longer than his wont at partings. “Evald galls the King. But that is not saying he is no true man, far too true to lose . . . Keep you safe, Donnchadh.”

“And you,” his brother said, holding him by the arms. “You take it far too lightly. As you take everything.”

“And you are far too worried. Is this more than riding into the same hills with the enemy in strength in them? More to fear is Dryw: I should hate him to take me for some wild man of the Bradhaeth. Keep yourself safe. I will see you at Caer Wiell—and I shall have been dining on plates and sleeping in a fine soft bed, while you shiver in the dew, Donnchadh.”

“Do not speak of sleeping.”

“Ah, you are too full of omens. I shall fare better than you do, and worry more for you before the walls than myself behind them. Only see that you come quickly and we will push the rascals north and be done with them. Be more cheerful, Donnchadh.”

So he took his leave, and flung himself into the saddle and rode away, taking the longer path at first, which was less littered by the dead and seeming-dead. The smokes of fires lit the hills, campfires and the fires lit by the pit where they dragged the dead.

It was not an auspicious hour. He would gladly have rested. But he served the King and lived to do it when others he knew had not. And he had to take Dryw’s way through the hills and not fall into ambush, either of Dryw or An Beag.

He lost no time in going now, through the wrack of war. Truth, he was not as light about the matter as he had told Donnchadh, but he saw ruin in delaying the army at Dun na h-Eoin, ruin for more than Caer Wiell. It was twice Laochailan’s failing, to delay too long upon a field and throw away half of what they had gained; and the dale was too close to Donn. Now it was rushing all downhill, the King on the verge of moving. He was, he hoped, the first pebble before the landslide—for now Donn would give the King no peace. And so they would remember this ride of his, he thought, for he rode to herald not alone the battle for the dale, but what might well prove the telling battle of all the years of war.

TWELVE The Faring of Ciaran Cuilean

It was not so swift a ride, from Dun na h-Eoin’s ruins through the hills. Once Ciaran met with Dryw’s folk, but only once, and that was to his liking, for the southrons were sudden men and apt to haste in their killings. He suspected their presence sometimes, a silence of birds where birds ought to sing, a strangeness in the air that he could not put name to. But at last he had passed all of that manner of thing and reckoned that he was past Dryw’s farthest easterly advance—for Dryw would go off to the north direct to the Caerbourne as the enemy had fled, while his own course cut deeper into the woods.

But at last he reached the river himself, and forded it, choosing rather the hazards of the far shore than the ill repute of the southern one. He had been in the saddle so long he had forgotten when he had rested—his resting when he took it was only for the horse, and then he was back in the saddle again, sleeping little, aching with the weight of the mail and of his bruises from the battle. Now he kept the shield uncased on his arm, trusting none of this dark wooded way through the vale of the Caerbourne. He was in the dale now. There were no friends hereabouts. He watched about him, no longer hoping that Dryw was close. This was the darkest, the most dangerous portion of his ride. He had managed it so that he reckoned to pass An Beag in the dark, and hoped that he knew well enough where he was.

The day waned, and at times the horse faltered on the narrow trail, which ran over stone and through woods, along the black waters of the Caerbourne, which rushed and splashed over rock in its shallow places, frothing white in the gathering murk. The brush was too thick here for his liking though it offered him cover. He was a horseman; he preferred something less tangled than this thicket, which wore at the horse and in places made every step a risk, in which their moving sounded all too loud. Least of all did he like the whispering that filled the twilight here, rustlings not of the horse’s making, little movings which seemed wind alone, and might be something else. All this forest was a place of ill legend; and they did not love such legends in his hills, in Caer Donn, where the old powers were still dreaded, where ruined towers and strange stones poked from out the gorse and broom and reminded them of all things older than the gods, old as stone and like the stone, everywhere underfoot. There were places in his own hills he would not ride by twilight, not for any cause; and names not for speaking by dark or brightest day. The terror was as close here. The horse, long-ridden and drenched in sweat as it was, still threw its head and rolled its eyes and stared into this shadow and the other, nostrils wide. Where it could it kept a steady pace through the forest shadow, a panting rhythm of leather and metal and the beat of hooves.

Then two pale moths came flying, a whipping arrow-sound . . . Ciaran flung up the shield; and a blow jarred it, while the horse reared up and leaned leftward in a sudden loosening of life.

He sprawled clear of the dying horse, shield lifting, jarred by a second shaft thumping into the wood while others hissed through brush and his back hit the thicket. He scrambled desperately to cover himself and to run, tore his ungloved right hand on thorns, while the crash of brush warned him of enemies coming. His back met a tree and he braced himself there on his feet. He had his sword from sheath, and they came on him in a mass in the forest dark, with staves and knives. Blows battered at his shield, and he hewed at them with every stroke that his weary left arm could gain him room to take—the blade bit and there were screams. They tried to come at him from behind, and he swung with his shoulders still to the tree and killed one of them and another, rammed his shield under a bearded chin and hewed again, with ebbing strength, for there was a quick numbing pain in his side and he knew something had gotten through, in the joinings. An axe swung down on him, shivered the top of the shield and stuck fast. He let the shield go and swung the sword two-handed, clove ribs and wrenched the blade free in back-swing, while a staff came down on him. The blow dazed him; but he rammed the blade’s point into that one’s belly and slew him too . . . while brush crashed and cries were raised beyond—Help, ho! help, we have him!

He took to the brush and began to run, staggered across the thigh-deep rush of the Caerbourne, chilled and sodden, waded ashore and set out running on the other bank, sought brush again when arrows hissed after. Voices cursed in the gathering dark. He sought higher ground with a wildling’s instinct, not to be driven into some hole against the stream’s winding banks. Branches tore at him and snapped. His limbs turned leaden with the weight of armor, and his side ached. A veil seemed fallen over his eyes and the little light in heaven was dimmed, all murky, yet for a time he ran with hope, for it seemed that his pursuers had fallen behind. He climbed, took ways closer and closer with brush and twisted, aged trees, through tangles so dense that even bracken would not grow, past stony upthrusts and over jagged ground. He hoped; and then the brush about him crackled to a chuckling, and the wind stirred through the branches like a rising storm. He ran farther, until all the sound in his ears was his heartbeat, and the brush breaking and his own harsh breath tearing his throat

But another breathing grew at his heels, the whuff of a running horse, the beat of hooves which broke no brush as it came.

He spun about to face attack, but there was nothing there but the blackness, and the wind and a cold which settled about his heart. Then he feared as he had never feared in battle, and ran as if effort before this were nothing. The ache in his side was more than want of breath; he pressed his swordhand’s wrist there and felt the ebb of blood.

He was weakening. He heard a chuckling and now knew the name of that rider which followed him, and the name of the wood into which he had strayed. And when he was nigh to falling he set his back against an aged tree in a space clearer than the others, where it seemed that he might at least have the grace of seeing his enemy come on him.

Shadow came, and a spatter of rain, a rattle of thunder, and the baying of hounds. Shadows flooded among the trees, black bits of night which rushed and leaped for him. His sword swept through them, nothing hindering, and a coldness fastened and worried at his arm, numbing all the way to his heart.

He cried aloud and tore free, ran, leaving a fragment of himself in the jaws, and the sword was no longer in his hand. The shadows coursed behind him, and the hoofbeats rang like the pulse in his ears and the hoarse breathing was like his own. The enemy was not behind him, but lodged in his side, where the wound worked at his life. A part of his soul was theirs, and they would tear him to nothing when they came on him again, a rending far worse than the first. Rain spattered into his face and blinded him, dampened the leaves so that they clung to him and his armor was soaked so that he did not know now what was blood and what was rain. He stumbled yet again, in a crash of thunder, and of a sudden as surely as there was a horror behind him he conceived of safety in the trees ahead, where seemed a mound overgrown, a swelling of the land with life, where the trees grew vast, and strong, stretching out their limbs in sympathy.

He reached it, entered it, sped in strange freedom of limb where trees were gnarled and straight at once, barren and flowered with stars, and aglitter with jewels like hanging fruit, with treasure of silver laid upon the white branches, swords and shining mail, cloth like morning haze, spiderweb among pale green leaves.

A sword hung before him, offered to his hand . . . he tore it from the leaves in a scatter of bright foliage, and the brightness about him faded, leaving him alone with the dark and the swift loping shadows, with the dark rider, who burst upon him in a flickering of lightnings and yet absorbed no light himself, like a hole in the world through which he might fall forever, if the hounds did not have him first. He held the illusory blade trembling before him, and shuddered as its light drew detail from the dark, of jaws and eyes of hounds. He was drawn to look up, to lift his face unwilling, to face the rider—he saw something, which his dazed mind would not recall even in the instant of beholding it.

The rider came closer, and a chill came on his flesh, on all but the hand which held the blade. He lost the brightness, could not hold even his vision of this grim place. The black began to come over him, but he slashed at it and the hounds yelped aside from him, bristling and trembling.

“Come,” a voice whispered to him, very softly.

He must, for he could not hold his arm up any longer. The blade wavered, and sank, and yet a warmth broke like a breath of spring at his back. “Stand firm,” someone said.

“He is mine,” said the shadow, a voice like shards of winter ice.

“Be off,” said the other, soft and without doubt

“He has stolen from you. Do you encourage thefts?” And for a moment the world was bright, and the shadow was a blight upon it, a robed darkness which stood in an attitude of amazement. “Ah,” the cold voice breathed, wonder-struck. “Ah. This you have kept from me.”

Light blazed. Ciaran staggered in it, and his knees hit the ground, a shock which wrung a sob of pain from him, and he could no longer tell earth from sky or day from night. Wet leaves lay against his cheek or cheek against the leaves, and the rain beat down into bis face, chilling his torn soul.

But the shadow was gone, and the thunder stilled. It seemed the moon shone down. A face confused itself with it, and with the sun in a strange, fair sky.

He still clutched the sword. Slim cool fingers pried his hand from it, eased his limbs, covered him with a downy peace in which the only pain was to his heart, an ache and a memory of loss.

THIRTEEN The Tree of Stones and Swords

She knelt with the rain still dripping off the leaves, a dew upon them both, and very still and pale the intruder lay beneath the mortal moon. Iron tainted him, and yet he had torn through into her forest—if only for a moment; had brought iron there, and Death. She was stirred to anger, and to fear, and to a longing which had not been in her heart since the child had broken it. To have entered her Eald, to have found that very heart of it and to have stolen an elvish sword . . . it was no common thief, this Man, and no common need could have forced him. Perhaps his mortal eyes had been affected by that terrible wound he bore, so that he fled with truer sight than most; but never in many a hunt had Lord Death failed.

Eald had stretched far once, before the coming of Men; and once, before her folk knew much of Men, there had been a few of halfling kind, for elvish loves and dalliances among these fatal strangers. Still, she thought, there might be elvish blood drawn very thin in some, halflings who had never felt the call across the dividing sea, who had never faded. In hope she tried to draw this stranger with her, but the iron weighted him and he could not stay.

She endured the anguish of handling it, undoing buckles, putting it off him, every bit and piece. So she uncovered a terrible wound in his side, and drew on her power to begin its mending, healed the little scratches with a single touch. And when she had rested a moment, it was not hard to bear him away with her, simply a holding of his head in her lap, and a thinking on elvish things. Then the trees became what they truly were, straight and beautiful, and the sun of her day shone down with kindly warmth in that grove.

He slept long, while the wound healed itself, while the lines of mortality faded from his face and left it beautiful, with that beauty which might be elven heritage. She did not leave him in all this time, waiting for his waking with all her heart.

And at last he did stir, and looked about him, and looked into her eyes, seeming much confused. He began at once to fade into the mortal world, into darkness, being in his own mind again, but she took his hand and drew him back before he could slip away. “Beware of going back,” she said. “Death has a part of you. Too, too easy for him to call you into his shadow as you are. You are much safer here.”

He tried to rise, still holding to her hand, maintaining that deleciate hold on here. She lent him strength, the green force which sustained the trees themselves, and after a moment he was able to stand and to look about him. Wind whispered through the leaves and the sun cast its own glamor, while deer stared at them both wise-eyed from the green shadow, in the grove of swords and jewels.

“I was dead,” he said.

“Never,” she assured him.

“My heart hurts.”

“So it may,” she said, “for it was torn. And that healing is beyond me—What is your name, Man?”

Dread touched his eyes. “Ciaran,” he said then quietly, as a guest ought. “Ciaran’s second son of Caer Donn.”

“Caer Donn. Caer Righ, we called it, the King’s domain.”

He feared, but he looked her in the face. “And what is your name?” he asked.

“I shall tell you my true one, that I do not give to mortals; for you are my guest. It is Arafel.”

“Then I must thank you with all my heart,” he said earnestly, “and then beg you set me on the road from here.”

In so many words he healed her heart and wounded it . . . and a regret came into his eyes as if he had seen the wounding. He held up before her his right hand, on which he bore a golden ring, worked with a seal.

“I have a duty,” be said. “On my honor, I have to go and do it, if there is still time.”

“Where is this duty?”

He lifted a hand as if he would give a direction, and nothing was the same. “There are armies,” he said in his confusion, pointing where he might mean the Brown Hills. “There is war on the plain; and my King has won. But the enemy has drawn off this way, which is a valley where they might hold long in a siege if they could take it. And lord Evald of Caer Wiell is riding with the King. Do you understand, lady Arafel? War is coming up the dale. Caer Wiell must not be deceived. They must hold firm, whatever the false reports and fair offers from the enemy, must hold only a little time, until the King’s army comes this way. Lord Evald’s hold—must hear the message I bear.”

“Wars,” she said faintly. “They will not be wise, who set foot in Ealdwood.”

“And I must go, lady Arafel. I must I beg you,” Already he began to fade, discovering the power of will within himself.

“Ciaran,” she said, a summoning, and held him by his name, still within the light of her sun. “You are determined. But you do not count the cost. The Huntsman will seek you out again. Once in the mortal world, you are a prey to him; he has never lost a hunt, do you see? And it is not finished.”

“That may be,” he said, pale-faced. “But I have sworn.”

“Pride,” she said. “It is empty pride. What arms have you, what means to pass through all of Eald against such enemies?”

He looked down at himself, armorless and empty-handed. But he wavered toward a parting, all the same.

“Wait,” she said, and went to the old oak, took from its branches one of the jewels which hung among the others, pale green like the one which hung at her own throat, though dimmed, for its master was ages gone. It sang to her, the dreams of an elf named Liosliath, a part of his soul, such souls as her kind had. “Take it. You borrowed his sword in your need, but this will serve you better. Wear it always about your neck.”

“What are these things?” he asked without taking, and looked about at all the trees which held such treasures, jewels and swords glimmering silver and light among the leaves. “What place is this?”

“You might liken it to a tomb; this you robbed . . . my brothers and my sisters, my fathers and mothers. It is elvish memory.”

“Forgive me,” he whispered, stricken.

“We do not die. We go . . . away; and when we are gone, what use are these things to us? Yet they hold memories. That is their use now. The sword, you could not fully use. But take this stone. Liosliath would not grudge it to a friend of mine. He was my cousin: he was young as our kind go, and so it may be safest for you. The shadows feared him.”

He took it in his hand, and his eyes widened and his lips parted. Fear . . . perhaps he felt fear. But he held it fast, and it sang to him, of elvish dreams and memories.

“It too is power,” she said. “And danger. It does not make you a match for Death; but ’twill fight the chill . . . if you have the heart to use it.”

He gathered the silver chain and hung it about his neck. His fair clear eyes clouded in the power of the dreams. But he was not lost in them. She touched her own dreamstone, and called forth the faintest of songs, a sweet, bright harping. “Do not trust in iron,” she warned him. “That and this . . . do not love one another. And come, since you must. Come, I shall walk with you on your way. Eald will take you there more safely than you might walk in the world of Men.”

“This is given for a baneful place,” he said.

“Walk it with me, and see.”

She offered her hand. He took it, and his was warm and strong in hers, human-broad but comfortable. He walked with her, and for all his apprehension a wonder came into his eyes when he saw the land, the trees of elven summer, the glamored meadows abloom with glistening flowers, the timid, wide-eyed deer which stared at them as they passed.

Stone sang to stone, his heart to hers, and the wind grew warm beneath that other sun. She felt something which had long frozen about her heart melt away, and she knew companionship for the first time in human ages, a fellowship lost since Liosliath himself had faded, last of all elves save herself.

(“Forgive me,” Liosliath had said, this Man’s unwitting words and her cousin’s last, which had tugged at her heart “I have tried to stay.” But he had had that look in his gray eyes which was the calling, and once it had begun in his heart, the fading began, and all her wishing could not hold him—nor could she go with him, for her heart was here.)

“It is beautiful,” Ciaran said.

“Not so wide as once,” she said. And, remembering: “We held Caer Donn once.”

“The grandfathers say—there are your sort still there.”

She tossed her head, stung. “Faery folk. Silly nixes. And sad. They have few wits. They shapeshift so often they forget themselves and cannot get back again—That is not to say they are not dangerous when crossed.”

“That is not your kind.”

“No,” she said, laughing, in better humor. “Not mine. We were the greater folk. Elves. The Daoine Sidhe. The faery-folk live in our ruin. They never loved us.”

“And others of your kind?”

“Gone,” she said. “But myself.”

He let go her hand to look at her, and in letting go he drifted, cried out in fear, for they were on Caerbourne’s edge, a bright stream, willow-bordered, and here its name was Airgiod, the Silver. She took his hand again and steadied him.

“Beware such lapses. You might fall. Caerbourne has eroded deep in human years, and his banks are steep. And worse, far worse, there is no knowing how deep he has sunk in the shadows. Lord Death’s geography is a darker mirror of this, but mirror nonetheless, and I should not care for his river. Remember your wound when you walk in Eald.”

He shivered; she felt the dread keenly, a chill in the stone upon her breast. She touched it and warmed it, and him.

“Use the stone,” she bade him. “He shall not have the rest of you if you but know how to walk in Eald. Your heart’s wish can bring you here, only so you do not stray too far; your heart’s wish can take you away.”

“It is a great gift,” he admitted at last “But they say all gifts in this world have cost.”

“Not among kinsmen.”

He looked up at her as deer look at hounds, wary and distraught

“There’s elvish blood in you,” she said. “Do you not know? You could not have come, else. We once ruled, I say, in Caer Donn.”

“So they say.” She felt the beating of his heart, like something trapped in the stone within her hand.

“Is it so terrible,” she asked, “to discover such a kinship?”

“I am my father’s own son, no changeling.”

“Then by father or mother, you carry blood of mine. You are no changeling, no. There is nothing of the little folk about you. Is it sire or mother stands taller than most?”

Fear filled him, a tumbling down of all truths he knew. Father, she thought, catching this from his mind. He said nothing. She felt a chill in him, self-aimed. She perceived memories of old stones near Caer Donn, recollections of childhood terrors, of ill legends and human hate, and shivered herself.

“I am sorry,” he said, sharing this. His mind was awash with fear, and with thoughts of his own duty, and of dying, and the black hounds. He touched the chain of the stone about his neck, making to draw it off, but she caught his hand and gently forbade that

“You will not die,” she promised him. “I will take you where you will go. Come, it is not far.”

The forest edge lay up the bright streamcourse, that place where sight stopped in mist, the edge of her world. She led him into that gray place, walking blind, but one hand she kept on the stone which remembered the world as it had been, and so she brought some substance out of nothingness, enough to find her way beyond the edge. She remembered Caer Wiell as it had once been, a fair green hill with a spring never failing; and so she came to it, and still held his hand fast. Half in the shadow-ways there was a dimming, a glare of fire, the shouts of war, ghosts of battle swirling about them.

Other things were there too. Death was one. “Pay him no mind,” she said to Ciaran, who turned and faced the shadow. “No. Hold to the stone and come with me.”

She set them more and more surely in mortal night, with the din of war about them, with Caer Wiell’s black walls above. She knew the gateway. It did not have wards against her. She set him through.

“Fare well,” she said. “And fare back again.”

So she stepped clear of Caer Wiell, back into the swirling shadow-din outside.

She felt a presence by her, a shadow which had drawn a moment out of the battle, a blackness sullen and cold.

“Hunt elsewhere,” she told him.

“You have had your will,” Lord Death said, making ironic homage.

“Hunt elsewhere.”

“You give this mortal uncommon gifts.”

“What if I do? Are they not mine to give?”

The shadow said nothing, and she walked away through the grayness, and into bright Eald, into her own. The phantom deer stared at her curiously in elven sunset; and she walked back to the grove of the circle, touched the stones which hung from the ancient oak, harked to precious memories which they sang as the wind blew among them. One voice was stilled now from the chorus, that which had been Liosliath’s.

“Forgive,” she whispered to him, who was far across the dividing sea, far from hearing her. “Forgive that it was you.”

But a strange companionship shivered through her still, after ages in solitude. She walked, and mingled with the eldritch harping which was the peculiar song of her stone of dreams, came the whisper of another heart, human-tainted, but true as earth. She was appalled somewhat at the nature of it, for he had known war; he had killed—but so had she, in the cruel, cold anger of elves. Human anger was different, all blood and blind rage, like wolves. He knew passions she felt strange; he knew strange fears; and self-doubts. It was all there, drowning Liosliath’s clear voice. He feared Liosliath; he denied, human-stubborn, the things his own eyes had seen in Eald.

But there was no hate in him.

She sank down at the base of the tree of memory, and drew her cloak about her, and dreamed his dream.

FOURTEEN Caer Wiell

They brought him as a prisoner into the torchlit hall, with the sounds of battle dying. They had handled him ungently, but it was their lord’s own ring upon his finger, and they had changed their manner quickly enough when he insisted to show them that. “Sit,” they told him now, showing him a bench, and he was only too glad to do so, weary as he was.

Another came—Old wolf, Ciaran thought at that grim broad face, besweated and flushed with battle-heat He straightened himself at once when that man came in with more men-at-arms behind him. He set himself most carefully on his feet. “Scaga?” he ventured, for he was very like his son, a huge man and red-haired. “I come from the King; and from your lord.”

“Let me see this ring,” Scaga said; and Ciaran thrust out his hand, which the old warrior took roughly, turning the ring to the firelight. Scaga let it go again, his scarred face still scowling.

“I have a message,” Ciaran said, “for your lady’s ears.” And became he could guess the keep’s want of hope: “Good news,” be urged on Scaga, though he was charged to take it higher.

“Then it comes welcome, if true.” Scaga turned his face toward the open door, where sounds of battle had much faded, then looked back again, looked him up and down. “How came you here?”

“My message,” he said, “is for lord Evald’s lady.”

Scaga still frowned; it might be the nature of his face, or of his heart: this was, Ciaran thought, a fell man to cross. But Evald trusted him as steward, in a hold beset with enemies: he was then a man of great worth and faithfulness.

“With neither armor,” said Scaga, “nor weapon . . . How came you into the courtyard?”

“Your lord’s ring,” Ciaran insisted. “I speak only to your lady.” He felt the stone which lay hidden within his collar, a presence, a warmth which seemed greater than natural. It frightened him, with that against his heart and the like of Scaga staring into his eyes, full of suspicions.

“You shall go to her,” Scaga said, and motioned to the stairs. “Boy!” he called. “See my lady roused.”

A lad scampered up the steps at a run. Ciaran shivered in weariness and cold, for wind blew through the door. He wished desperately for a cup of ale, for a place to lie down and rest himself.

And there was none, for Scaga looked on him with narrowed eyes and offered nothing of hospitality—motioned men-at-arms to go before and behind him and led him up the steps to another hall within Caer Wiell’s thick walls, which at least was warmer, with a fire blazing in the hearth.

“Beware,” a voice seemed to whisper in his hearing, and it startled him. He wondered could all the rest hear it; but the others did not turn: it was for him alone. “Beware this hall. They do not love elven-kind. And do not show them the stone.”

A stone wolf’s-head was set above the fireplace. It seemed he had seen it before; that he had sat here, a man, and that a harp should hang so, upon the rightward wall—he looked, and was dismayed to find a harp hanging there, just where he had thought it should. He had then dreamed this place.

Or she had. There was a great scarred table once had sat a chair, before the fire. He blinked it clear, went to it, leaned there wearily against the table, while weary men guarded him.

And women came, so soon that he supposed they had not been asleep. Surely they had not been, with the enemy hurling fire against the hold. They came from the inner door which opened on this hall, one woman older and somewhat grayed. This was Meredydd, he surmised, Evald’s own lady; and Meredydd the stone whispered in his heart, confirming it. The other of the twain was young, bright of hair—and that name came whispering through his heart as well: Branwyn. Branwyn. Branwyn. He stared without meaning to, for so much of anguish and of anger came whispering with that name. This Branwyn stopped and stared at him, blue eyes seemed bewildered and innocent of such pain.

“Your message,” Scaga’s harsh voice insisted.

Ciaran looked at Lady Meredydd instead, took a step toward her, but hands moved to weapons about him, and he did not go nearer. He tugged the ring from off his finger and gave it over to Scaga, who gave it to the lady. She took the ring as something precious, looked on it closely, lifted anxious eyes. “My husband,” she asked of him.

“Well, lady, he is well. I bring his love and my King’s word: Hold, defend, and do not be deceived by any lies of the enemy or accept any terms. The King has won a great battle at Dun na h-Eoin, and the enemy hopes for this valley as their last holding place. Only hold this tower, and the King and your lord will come as soon as possible against their backs. They know this. Now you do.”

“Now bless your news,” the lady wept, and even Scaga’s frown was eased. Meredydd came and offered her hands to him in welcome, but he felt Scaga’s heavy hand on his shoulder, pulling him away.

“There is more to hear,” said Scaga. “This man came over the walls somehow, with no armor, no arms—unmarked through the lines outside. There are questions should still be asked, my lady, however good and fair the counsel seems. I beg you, ask him how he came.”

For a moment doubt shadowed the lady’s eyes.

“My name is Ciaran,” he said, “Lord Ciaran of Caer Donn is my father. And as to how I came—lightly, as you see; by stealth. While your enemies struck at the gates—I came another way. I shall show you. But armed men could not take it.”

He was not used to lies. He felt fouled, wounded when the lady pressed his hands. “You will show us where,” Scaga said, and gave him in his turn a bearish embrace, gazed at him with emotion welling up—hope, it might be, where hope had been scant for them before. Branwyn too came and kissed his cheek; and weapons were done away as men came at last to clap him on the back and to hug one another for joy. A cheer lifted in the hall, and there was such desperate happiness—He felt a stirring through the jewel too, a presence, a distressing realization that he had said nothing on his own which ought to have convinced them and so relieved their hearts, but that some strangeness overlay him and his words, making them better than they were.

They gave him wine, and brought him upstairs to a princely room—her lord’s when he was young, the Lady Meredydd said; and true, everything there showed some woman’s love, the fine-pricked stitchery of coverlet and tapestries, the hangings of the bed. Branwyn herself brought a warm rug for the floor, and maids brought water for washing, while Lady Meredydd with her own hands brought him bread hot from the morning’s baking. He took it gratefully, while the lady and her daughter lingered to ply him with questions, how fared Evald and kinsmen, cousins, friends, men of the hold, a hundred questions during which maids eavesdropped and men-at-arms contrived to listen on pretext of errands. Some few men he knew; sometimes the news was sad and pained him; and most often he knew only a name, or less—but it gave him joy when he could report some loved one safe and well. Scaga’s son was one, for Scaga bent enough to ask. “He is well,” Ciaran said. “He led a good portion of Caer Wiell’s men at Dun na h-Eoin, first of those that broke the shields of the Bradhaeth while lord Evald cut off their retreat. He came out of the battle well enough; he was by lord Evald when we parted, in the King’s own tent.” The old warrior did not smile to hear it, but his eyes were bright.

“He must sleep,” Meredydd declared at last. “Surely he has travelled hard.”

“I fare well enough,” Ciaran said, for he ached after human company, for noise of voices, for all these sights and sounds of humankind.

“Before he sleeps,” said Scaga, “he must show us this weak place in our wall.”

The warmth drained from him. He nodded consent, not knowing what he was to do, but compelled to go. He swallowed a bit of bread gone dry in his throat, drank a last sip of the wine and set the cup down. “Aye,” he said. “Of course. That will not wait.”

Scaga rose, waiting at the door. Ciaran took his leave of the ladies, walked with the old warrior through the hall, his heart beating hard within his breast.

“I do not know if I can find it easily,” he said to prepare his excuse, and hating the lie. “From all the turnings of this place inside . . . I cannot be sure.”

Scaga said nothing, which seemed Scaga’s way. It gave him no comfort And when they had come up on the walls, Ciaran looked about him in deep distress, seeking something to confirm his lie.

“Look east,” the softest of whispers came to him, like the touch of a breeze. “Turn east and look down.”

He walked that way along the battlement, with Scaga treading heavily beside him. He paused at a place and looked down, where the stonework of the walls was oldest and roughest, where here and there brush had rooted itself in the gaps between the stones and man-made walls thrust crazily above the jagged stone of the underlying rocks. Of a sudden his eye picked out a way, weaving from one such foothold to another among brush rooted in the wall, a peril to the hold. “There,” he said. “We are a mountain hold, we of Caer Donn. And I climbed cliffs as a lad. There, do you see, Scaga? There and there and there.”

Scaga nodded. “Aye. That does want clearing, and watching. Our eyes must have been blind to it. A man sees things too often and so not at all: I had not marked how the brush had grown.”

“Rains, perhaps,” Ciaran said hoarsely, but in his heart he knew differently. He shivered, for his wool shirt was not enough against the wind, and felt Scaga’s friendly grip fall upon his shoulder.

“Come. Our thanks, young sir. Come in.”

He walked, glad of the wind-breaking shelter of walls on the one side of the battlements, gazed back as they walked, and suddenly down at an opening out of the walk. The courtyard was below, jammed with livestock and with village folk, a noise which welled up at him thinly, the wail of children and the listless bleating of goats. But it was a well-ordered place, Caer Wiell, and some of the men on the walls were country folk, light-armed, but goodly looking men, quick of eye and brisk about their business. Women were climbing up the inside scaffoldings which gave access to the battlements before the gates, bearing baskets of bread. There was then no hunger here, nor would there ever be thirst, because of the spring which named the hill, out of reach of the enemy. Ciaran felt much cheered by what he saw of the defense, even with the ominous smoke of enemy fires rising before the walls. He walked farther out than Scaga would have had him go, walked the wall to the area of the main gates and looked west.

Then he was less cheered, for the extent of the black ruin before the walls. The grass and fields were burned and trampled into mire. The enemy had carried away their dead and wounded; no corpse was left but the carcasses of slain horses, to draw the black birds; and beyond that trodden ground the hills were seared with fire, villages and farms burned, surely, from here to Caer Damh. The smoke rose in countless plumes from the hills, where a vast host camped, a crescent of smokes from the Caerbourne’s forested verge to the barren hills to the right, that spread itself on the winds and darkened the sky.

The attack could not have been this far advanced when he was on the road, riding from the King. He had passed one night—surely one night—in Eald.

How much of time? he asked that sometime whisper in the stone, feeling uncertainty all about him. How long did you hold me? He was betrayed. He knew it in his worst fears.

The fires would soon grow more and more, as Dryw and the King over the hills drove others into retreat. Or had it happened already? And what more had happened, and what men he just had named living might have died? And what stayed the King from coming?

Hold here. How old was the message, that Scaga was so grim, that lady Meredydd and her daughter caught so desperately at this hope he gave them? And how long had the King delayed to come?

“It seemed the fires had grown in number,” said Scaga out of his silence. “Now we know why.”

“Aye,” Ciaran said, wishing to say nothing at all.

He went back into the tower, and sat in the hall at the table by the fire, victim again of questions from those humbler folk who had not asked them before; and a few common folk who served there came only to look at him with their hopes unspoken in their eyes, and to steal quickly away. He sat there most of that long day, alone some of the hours, and sitting with Scaga in the afternoon, who brought some of his trusted men to question him at length—how great the strength of the enemy, what condition their arms, what number yet might come. He answered what questions he could as wisely as he could, hinting nothing, and was glad when they had gone away.

No more of lies, he wished of Arafel. You have tangled me in lies, more and more of them. They break my heart. What is truth? What should I say to them? Should I make them doubt the very hope I came to give them?

She had no answer for him, or did not hear.

But that evening after supper a young man came and took down the harp from off the wall, and played songs for him and for the ladies. Then he felt a warmth near his heart, a sweet, sad warmth. Then was peace, for the first time in the day. From the enemy there was no stirring, and the pure notes of the harp found another rapt listener: a joy flooded back from the stone, and filled Ciaran’s heart. He smiled.

And looked by chance into Branwyn’s eyes, who smiled too, in her hope. The smile faded to gravity. The eyes stayed upon his, flower-fair.

“No,” a whisper came to him from the depths of the stone.

The blue eyes were nearer, and had a glamor of their own. He gazed entranced while the harper sang.

“Cling to the stone,” the whisper came again, but he had Branwyn’s fair hand within closer reach of his upon the table. He touched her fingers and they clung to his. The harper sang of love, and heroes. Ciaran held her hand for more tangled reasons, that it was of this world, and that it too had power to hold.

At length the harper ceased. Ciaran drew back his hand, lest others remark it, for she was a great lord’s only daughter, however dire the times.

And in time he went alone to his bed in the room which had been Evald’s in his youth, the vast soft bed of broidered hangings. He stripped off his clothing, shivered in the wind which blew in out of the dark, through the slitted window—stripped off all that he wore but the stone on its silver chain and lay down quickly, drawing the heavy quilts over him, tucking up his limbs until he could warm him a spot in the bed. He reached out again to snuff the wick of the lamp on the table, drew the arm quickly back beneath the covers, as dark settled strange shapes over the unfamiliar objects of the borrowed room. There were creakings and movings, from outside and in; a child cried somewhere in the dark, from the courtyard on the other side, far, far away. His own slit of a window faced the river. He heard a distant whisper of leaves or water: wind, he thought; and somewhere hounds belled, a sound greatly out of place in besieged Caer Wiell. He clutched the stone in his hand, drew warmth from it, and no longer heard the dogs.

He dreamed of groves, vast trees; and of a hill. This was Caer Wiell; but he called its name Caer Glas, and there was no well, but a clear spring bubbling out over white stones, flowing unhindered to Airgiod’s pure waters in the vale, and the view was clear and bright toward the Brown Hills. He rode the plain, tall and bearing the same pale stone on his breast—rode among others, with the blowing of horns and flourishing of banners. Arrows came down like silver sleet, and the sullen host before them fled, seeking the mountains, the dark places at the roots of the hills. The Daoine Sidhe warred, and in the sky glittered the jeweled wings of dragons, serpent-shapes passing like storm in the blowing of horns and the clash of arms.

Then were ages of peace, when the pale sun and green moon shone down without change, and harpers sang songs beneath the pale, straight trees.

There came the age of parting, when the world began to change, when Men came, and Men’s gods, for the vile things were driven deep within the hills, and Men found the way now easy. Came bronze, and came iron, and some there were of the Sidhe who abided the killing of trees, small wights who burrowed in the earth close to Men; but the Daoine Sidhe hunted these, in bitter anger.

Yet the world had changed. The fading began, and the heart left them. One by one they fell to the affliction, departing beyond the gray edge of the world. They took no weapons with them; took not even the stones they had treasured—for it was the nature of the fading, that they lost interest in memory, and in dreams, and hung the stones to stay in rain and moonlight to console those still bound to the world. Most parted sadly, some in indirection, simply bewildered; and some in bitter renunciation, for wounded pride.

He felt anger, a power which might have made the hills to quake—Liosliath, the stone whispered in his mind, and he drew breath as if he had not breathed in a long, long age, and looked up and outward, forcing shapes to declare themselves in the mist which had taken the world, trees and stones and the rush of wind and water.

Ciaran waked, caught at the bed on which he lay, all sweating and trembling, for his heart beat in him far too loud. He stared into the shadowed beams above him, wiped the sweat from his face with hands callused and coarser than the hands he had had in his dream, rested them on a body rough with hair and sweating, with the pulse jarring at his ribs—not at all the body he had worn in the dream, slim and shining fair, with the stone aglow with life and light, with bright armor and a slim silver sword which shadows feared and no Sidhe enemy wished to face.

Liosliath, star-crowned, prince of the Daoine Sidhe, the tall fair folk.

And himself, who was earthen, and coarse, and whose power was only that in his arm and his wits.

He shivered, sweating as he was, and tears ran from the edges of his eyes. He tried again to sleep, and dreamed of Arafel, of sunlight and silver, and the phantom deer leaping in and out of shadow, for it was her waking and his night. The pale elven sun shone, blinding, and she walked the banks of Airgiod, up to the point where it faded into mist and nothingness, as near to him as it was easy for her to come.

Kinsman, she hailed him. It was as if she had suddenly turned her face toward him. He waked with a start in his own darkness, and in trembling, put off the stone, laid it and its chain on the table by the bedside, by the lamp. He wished no more such dreams, which tormented him with what he was and was not and could never be, which thrust an elflord into his heart with all the melancholy doom of the fair folk, all their chill love and colder pride. They were dread enemies when stirred: he knew so; and so, he thought, might she be, who had been kind to him.

Kinsman she had hailed him; but it was Liosliath who was her cousin, Liosliath whose cold pride wished to live again, Liosliath, the terrible bright lord whose sword had slain Men.

“A terrible enemy,” a shadow whispered.

And far away, even waking, Arafel cried to him: “The stone, Ciaran!”

He was dreaming then. He was naked and a part of him blew in tatters. There was a forest like the Ealdwood where a wild thing fled, and he was that creature. Limbs rustled, black branches, and even the leaves were black as old sins; the sky was leaden, with a moon like a baleful dead eye.

“Terrible,” it said again, and a wind blew through the inky leaves.

Behind him. It hunted him and he must not look at it, for he was in its land, and if he saw the enemy’s true face it would be real.

“The stone!” a voice wailed on the wind.

He reached for it, straining all his heart into that reaching. It met his fingers, and his hand glowed with that moonbright fire. Shadows yielded, as he retreated out of that third and dreadful Eald. He passed other creatures less fortunate, shadows which cried and pleaded for aid he could not give. Elf prince, some wailed, asking mercy; elf prince, some hissed, spitting venom. He dared not shut his eyes, dared not look.

Then he lay again within walk of stone, and Arafel’s voice was chiding him. He shivered in his borrowed bed, with the stone safe in his fingers. He lay shivering, with sullen day breaking through the windowslit. A chill breeze stirred his hair. Thunder rumbled outside.

He took the cold silver chain in his hands and slipped it again about his neck, lay still a time holding to the stone with both hands, shivering at the flood of elvish memories . . . of old quarrels with this shadow-lord. The courage seemed bled out of him, through the wounds the hounds had made in his soul. He knew himself maimed—maimed forever, in a way which others could not see and he could not forget. The stone must be forever about his neck to shield him, and it was more powerful than he. His hands were cold that clutched it, and would not warm easily; they were mortal, and that jewel was elvish memory—of one who had not loved Men.

He stirred at last, hearing others astir in the keep, the calling of voices one to the other, ordinary voices, recalling him to a world no longer fully his. He rose, his teeth chattering, and pulled on his breeches and went to the windowslit, hugging his arms about him. He saw the muddy hill, the forest verge, wet green leaves and gray sky. Of attackers there was no sign but the marks which had been there before. The rain was nothing but dreary mist. He turned back and sought after his shirt and the rest of his clothing. He tucked the stone within his collar, tied the laces which concealed it at his throat. He dared not leave it . . . ever.

FIFTEEN Of Fire and Iron

The ladies were in the great hall to give him morning’s hospitality, Meredydd and Branwyn and their maids; and two of the pages had stayed to serve them. He walked among them with a hope of a seat near the fire and a bit of bread crowded upon him; but there were places laid at the table, and he heard the lady Meredydd send a page for porridge. Scaga appeared in the door as the boy dodged and scurried mouselike about his errand, and nodded a good morning. “All’s quiet,” Scaga said. There was no great joy in the report, and Ciaran frowned too, wondering how long till it came down on them doubled. Perhaps the enemy had no liking for rain. Perhaps—the thought came worrisome at his empty stomach—there was something else astir. Perhaps something had gone amiss with the King, some trick, some trap prepared. The King, Dryw, his father—should come soon. They should make some move.

Perhaps—the thought would not leave him—they had tried and failed while he slept in Eald, unknowing. Some ambush in the lower end of the dale could have prevented them. The desolation before the walls of Caer Wiell was as wide as that at Dun na h-Eoin—and he could not judge whether the enemy was greater in the dale than they had reckoned in the first place or whether the forces fled from Dun na h-Eoin had joined them.

He sat where the Lady Meredydd bade him, at her right; and Branwyn sat at her left. Scaga sat down too, and others, but many seats at the great table stayed vacant, the hall of a hold long at war, its lord and young men absent. The harper sat with them, late arrival; there was the Lady Bebhinn, elderly and dour; and Muirne, all of twelve, who was a shy, pale-cheeked child, silent among her elders. The hall at Caer Donn came to his mind unbidden, his parents’ faces, the laughter of servants, joyous mornings, full of noise, himself and dour Donnchadh always at some friendly odds over trivial things. But it would be lonely there this morning too.

“You did not rest well,” the demoiselle Branwyn said, who sat facing him. Her face was troubled.

“I slept,” he said, straightening his shoulders; but the stone seemed a weight against his heart. And because his answer did not seem to satisfy those who stared at him: “I ran far—in coming here. I think the weariness has settled on me.”

“You must rest,” said Lady Meredydd. “Scaga, no harrying of him today.”

“Let him rest,” Scaga replied, a deep rumbling. “Only so they do.”

The porridge came. Ciaran ate, small familiar motions which gave him excuse not to talk. In truth he felt numb, endured a moment’s fear that he might have begun to fade into elsewhere, so distant he was in his thoughts. He imagined their dismay if he should do so.

And in this homelike place he thought a second time of home, and meetings. Of facing his father and mother and Donnchadh, bearing an elvish stone forever against his heart, with close knowledge of that past which Caer Donn tried never to recall. He could never again see the farmer’s wards against the fair folk without feeling his own peace threatened; could not see the ruins on the mountain above Caer Donn without seeing them as they had been before any Man set foot there; could not walk the hillsides without knowing there were other hills within his reach, and knowing what fell things swarmed beneath them, never truly gone. Worst, to face his father and Donnchadh, knowing what they must never know, that he and they were closer to those things than ever they had believed, these things which lurked and crept at the roots of the hills; and to look on his father’s and his brother’s faces and to wonder whether the taint always bred true.

Unsavory, Donnchadh had called the dale—but he must live with an enemy always a breath away, Man’s shadow enemy, who would take the rest of him—without the stone.

Then he looked about him at the faces of the folk of Caer Wiell, whose war was the same as his, but without such protections as the stone; it was the same Enemy. Death had been outside the walls yesterday, hunting souls. Do we not, he wondered, all bear the wound? And am I coward, because my eyes alone are cursed to see him coming?

The stone seemed to burn him. “Be wise,” a whisper reached him. “O be wise. He is my old enemy, before he was yours. He wants one of elven-kind. Me he waits for . . . and now you. Your fate is not theirs. Your danger is far more.”

He touched the stone, wished the whisper away. I am Man, he thought again and again, for the green vision was in his eyes and the voices about him seemed far away.

“Are you well?” asked Lady Meredydd. “Sir Ciaran, are you well?”

“A wound,” he said, bedazed into almost truth, and added: “Healed.”

“The rain,” Scaga said. “I have something will warm the aches.—Boy, fetch me the flask from the post downstairs.”

“ ’Twill pass,” Ciaran murmured, ashamed; but the boy had sped, and the ladies talked of herbs and wished to help him. He swallowed sips of Scaga’s remedy then, and accepted salves of Meredydd and the maids; and before they were done, warmer clothing and a good cloak all done with Meredydd’s own fine stitching. Their kindness touched his heart and plunged him the more deeply into melancholy. He walked the walls alone after that, staring toward the camp of the enemy and wishing that there were something his hands might do. All the mood of the keep was grim, with the drizzling rain and the unaccustomed silence. Women and children came up onto the walls to look out; and some wept to see the fields, while youngest children simply stared with bewildered eyes, and sought warmer places again in the camp below.

Beyond the river he saw the tops of green trees, and shadowy greater trees high upon the ridge beyond the Caerbourne, over which the clouds were darkest. Those clouds cast a pall over his heart, for it was Death’s presence, and the castle was indeed under siege by more than human foes. The thought came to him that he might bring danger on others, that Death who hunted him might take others near him. This enemy of his might bring ruin on Caer Wiell, on the very folk he came to aid. The thought began to obsess him and cause him deeper and deeper despair.

“Come back,” a voice whispered to him, offering peace, and dreams. “You’ve done your duty to Caer Wiell. Come back.”

“Sir,” said a human, clear voice, and he turned and looked on Branwyn, cloaked and hooded against the mist. He was dismayed for the moment, and recovering, made a bow.

“You seemed distressed,” she said. “Is there moving out there?”

He shrugged, looked across the wall and turned his gaze, back to her, a pale face framed in the broidered mantle, eyes as changing as the clouds, mirroring his own fears, unfearing while he was brave, frightened when the least fear came to him. “They seem to have no love of the rain,” he said. “And your father and mine, and the King himself—will come soon and teach them other things they will not be fond of.”

“It has been so long,” she said.

“It cannot be much longer,” he said in desperate hope.

Branwyn looked on him, and on the field before them, and they stood there a time, comforted in each other. Birds alit on the stone . . . wet and draggled; she had brought a crust of bread with her, and broke it and gave it to them, provoking battle, damp wings and stabbing beaks.

“Enchantress,” Arafel breathed into his heart. “They have stopped being honest; and it has always amused her.”

But Ciaran paid the voice no heed, for his eyes were on Branwyn, discovering how graceful her face, how pale on this gray day, how bright her eyes which surprised him with a direct glance and jarred all his senses.

A boy ran, scurried past them and stopped where they stood; he pointed silently and hastened on. With dread Ciaran turned and looked beyond the walls, for in that moment there was change. A group of riders had come out from the enemy camp, advancing toward the keep. There began to be a stirring in Caer Wiell as other sentries saw it. He looked back at Branwyn, and so distraught was her face that he reached out his hand to comfort her. Her chill fingers closed about his. They tood and watched the enemy ride closer.

“They wish to talk,” he said, seeing the fewness of the riders. “It is no attack.”

Scaga came thumping up the steps to the crest of the wall, leaned over the battlement and glared sourly at the advance. “My lady,” he wished Branwyn, looking about at them both, “I would have you back under cover. I do not trust you to luck. I would not have you seen.”

“I shall stay,” Branwyn said. “I have my cloak about me.”

“Stay away from the edge,” Scaga bade her, and stalked along the wall, giving orders to his men.

The enemy came into clear view, a score of riders bearing banners, most of them the red boar of An Beag, and the black stag of Caer Damh. But they had another banner trailing crosswise of a saddlebow, and this they lifted and showed. A cry of rage went up from the walls of Caer Wiell, for it was the green banner of their own lord.

“Surrender,” one rider of An Beag rode forth to shout against their walls. “This keep is yielded; your lord is dead, the King fallen, and his army scattered. Save your lives, and those of your lord’s wife and daughter—no harm will come to them. Scaga! Where is Scaga?”

“Here,” the old warrior roared, leaning out over the stones. “Take that lie hence! We name you the liars you are, in the one and in the other.”

A second rider spurred forward, and lifted a dark object on a spear, a head with hair matted with blood, a ruined face. He slung it at the gate.

“There is your lord! We offer you quarter, Scaga! When we come again, we will not.”

The lady Branwyn stood fast, her hand limp in Ciaran’s; but when he gathered her against him for pity, she failed a little of falling, and hung against him.

“Ride off!” Scaga roared. “Liars!”

A bow bent, among the riders. “Ware!” Ciaran cried, but Scaga had seen it, and hurled himself back from the edge as the shaft sped, a flight which hissed past and spent itself. Arrows sped from the walls in reply, and the party rode away not unscathed, leaving the green banner in the mud, and a bloody head at Caer Wiell’s gates.

“These are lies!” Ciaran said, turning to shout it over all the range his voice could reach, to walls and the courtyard below. “Your lord sent me to forewarn you all of tricks like these—a false banner and some poor wretch’s ruined face—these are lies!”

He was desperate in his appeal, only half believing it himself. The whole of the keep seemed frozen, none moving, none seeming sure.

“When was there truth in An Beag?” Scaga roared at them. “Trust rather the King’s own messenger than any word from them. They know they have no other hope. The King has won his battle. The King is coming here, with our own lord beside him, with Dryw ap Dryw and the lord of Donn. Who says he will not?”

“It was not my father!” Branwyn shouted out clear, stood on her own feet and flung back her hood. “I saw, and I say it was not!”

A handful cheered, and others followed. It became a tumult, a waving of weapons, a hammering of shields by those who had them.

“Come inside,” Ciaran urged Branwyn, and took her arm. “Haste, your mother may have heard.”

“Bury it,” she said, shuddering and weeping, and Ciaran looked at Scaga.

“I will see to it,” Scaga said, and with a word to his men on the wall to keep sharp watch, he went down the steps to the gate. Ciaran wrapped the corner of his cloak about Branwyn and walked with her inside the tower, into torchlight and warmth, and up into the hall, to bear the news themselves.

But he went down again when he had seen Branwyn to her mother and given report, into the court where Scaga stood.

“Was it?” he asked Scaga when he could ask with none overhearing.

“It was not,” Scaga said, his eyes dark and grim. “By the way of an old scar my lord has I know it was not; but no other feature did they leave him. We buried it. Our man or theirs—we do not know. Likest theirs, but we take no chances.”

Ciaran said nothing, but turned away unamazed, for he had fought the ilk of An Beag for years, and still it sickened him. He yearned for arms, for a weapon in hand, for an answer to make to such men. It was not the hour for it. No attack was coming. Their enemy meant they should brood upon what they had seen.

There was silence all the day. Ciaran sat in the hall and drowsed somewhat, with moments of peace between visions of that gory field and more terrible visions of silvered leaves, of all Eald whispering in anger beyond the walls. He would wake with a start and gaze long at something homely and real, at the gray of a stone wall, or the leaping of flames in the hearth, or listen to the folk who went about their ordinary business nearby. Branwyn came to sit by him, and that peace too he cherished.

“Ciaran,” a faint voice whispered from time to time, destroying that tranquility, but he refused to pay it heed.

They placed double guard that night, trusting nothing; but there was firelight and comfort in the hall. Ciaran recovered his appetite which had failed him all the day, and again the harper played them brave songs, to give them courage: but the stone plagued him—in his ears echoed other songs of slower measure, of tenor never human, of allure which made the other songs seem discordant and sour. Tears flowed down his face. The harper misunderstood, and was complimented mightily. Ciaran did not gainsay.

Then must be bed, and loneliness and the dark—worse, the silence, in which there were only inner echoes and no stilling them. He was ashamed to ask for more light, like a child, and yet he wished he had done so when all were abed and he was alone. He did not put out the light, having trimmed the wick to nurse it as long as he might. The stone and he were at war in the silence, memories which were not his nor even human, memories which grew stronger and stronger in the long hours of solitude, so that even waking was no true defense against the flood of images which poured down upon his mind.

Liosliath. He felt more than memories. He took in the nature of him who had worn these dreams so many ages, a pride which reckoned nothing of things he counted fair—which flung against them elvish beauties to turn them pale, and showed him the sadness in his world. He tried taking off the stone with the light there to comfort him, but that was worse still, for there was that aching loss, that knowledge that a part of him was in that darker Eald. Worst of all, he felt a sudden attention upon himself, so that the night outside seemed more threatening and more real, and the light of the lamp seemed weaker. He quickly placed the chain back about his neck and let the stone rest against his chest, which warmed the ache away . . . and brought back the tormenting bright memories.

Then the light guttered out, and he sat in the dark. The room was very still, and the memories grew harder and harder to push away.

“Sleep,” Arafel whispered across the distance, with pity in her voice. “Ah, Ciaran, sleep.”

“I am a Man,” he whispered back, holding to the stone clenched in his fist. “And if I yield to this I shall not be.”

Music came to him, soft singing, which soothed and filled him with an unspeakable weariness, lulling his senses. He slept without willing to, and dreams crept upon him, which were Liosliath’s proud self, burning pride and sometime heartlessness. He longed for the sun, which would make real the familiar, common things about him; and when the sun came at last, he bowed his head into his arms and did sleep a time, true sleep, and not a warfare for his soul.

Someone cried out. He came awake with brazen alarm clanging in his ears, with cries outside that attack was coming. “Arms!” echoed down the corridors of Caer Wiell and up from the distant court. “Arm and out!”

Fright brought him to his feet, and then a wild relief, that it was come to this, that it was no more an enemy within him, but one that yielded to weapons such as human hands could wield. He tugged on his clothing, raced into the hall with others, and finding no Scaga—down the stairs as far as the guard room. Scaga was arming, and others were.

“Get me weapons,” Ciaran begged of them; and Scaga ordered it. Boys hastened about measuring him with their hands, seeking what armor might fit him. Outside the alarm had ceased. The battle was preparing. The room had a busy traffic of boys running with arrows and the air stank of warming oil. They began to lace him into haqueton and leather, and one of the other pages came up panting with an aged coat of mail. Ciaran bent and they thrust it over his arms and head; he straightened and it jolted down over his body with a touch like ice and poison. “No,” he heard the whisper which had been urging at him, ignored. “No,” he raged in his own mind, with the poison seeping into his limbs and weakening them. Tears came to his eyes, and a bitter taste to his mouth, the harsh sour tang of iron. They did the laces, and he stood fast; they belted on the sword, and by now Scaga, armed, was staring at him with bewilderment, for his limbs had weakened and sweat poured on his face, cold in the wind from the door. The pain grew, eating into his bones and through his marrow, devouring his sense.

“No,” he cried aloud to Arafel; and “no,” he murmured, and crashed to his knees. He bowed over, nigh to fainting, consumed with the pain. “Take it off, take if off me.”

“Tend him,” Scaga ordered, and hesitated this way and that, then rushed off about his own business, for by now the sound of the enemy was a roar like many waters, and out of it came nearer shouts, and the angry whine of bows.

The pages loosed the belt and loosed the laces, pulled the iron weight off him while he knelt, racked with pain. They brought him wine and tended him among the wounded which began to be brought in from the walls. “See to them,” Ciaran cried, clamping his teeth against the poisoned anguish in his belly. Tears of shame stung his eyes, that they delayed with him, while others died. He gained his feet and held to the stones of the wall, sweating and trembling. He made his way out into the open air to use a bow, that much at least. But when a boy gave him a case of arrows, the iron sickness came on him again: the case spilled from his hand and the arrows scattered on the walk. “He cannot,” someone said. “Boy, get him hence, get him up to the hall.”

He went, steadied by a page on the stairs, staggering because of the pain in his bones. The boy and the maids together laid him down by the fire, and pillowed his head.

“He is hurt,” came Branwyn’s voice, all anguish for him, and gentle hands touched him. A halo of bright hair rimmed the face which bent above him, against the fire. Tears blurred his eyes, pain and shame commingled.

“No hurt touched him,” said a boy. “I think, lady, he must be ill.”

They brought him wine and herbs, covered him and kept him warm, while he hovered half-sensible. Outside he heard the clash of iron, heard battle shouts and heard the reports of boys and maids as they would scurry out and back again, how the battle leaned, this way and that. For a time the tower echoed to a crashing against the gates, and there was a dread splintering which brought him off his pallet and to his feet. The words were in his mouth to beg a weapon of them, but the pain in his bones urged otherwise. He hung there against the wardroom door and listened to reports more and more dire shouted up the stairs, for one of the great hinges of the gate had given way beneath the ram, and they braced it as they could, with timbers, and hailed arrows from the wall.

There were ebbs in the battle. Ciaran sat by the fire and pressed his hand against the stone which lay unseen against his breast, but it was silent, giving back only pain. She is wounded too, he thought, with only slight remorse. He was alone in the hall but for Branwyn and the Lady Meredydd, who stared at him with bewildered eyes when they did not go down to tend men more bloodily wounded.

All that day the battle raged about the gate. Men died. At times Ciaran rose and walked down as far as the edge of the wall, but men-at-arms urged him to go back again to safety, and the sight he saw gave him no comfort. The battered gate still held, though tilted on its hinges. Arrows sleeted both up and down the wall, and there was desperate talk of a sortie, to get the enemy from before the gate before it should fall entire.

“Do not,” he wished Scaga in his mind, but he could not pass that arrow storm to reach the place where Scaga stood above the gate. Scaga was wise and ordered defense and not attack; oil rained down and discouraged those below, but then the enemy set fires before the gate and the oil made them burn the more fiercely. Another hinge had yielded by afternoon, and more and more the enemy came. Wounded men, exhausted men, passed Ciaran empty-handed in his vantage place, some looking on him with bruised and accusing eyes. Women came up the scaffolding to carry arrows, stayed to tend wounds, to take bows, some of them, behind wickerwork defense, and sent shafts winging into the thick press of attackers. Ciaran came out at last, took a bow from a wounded archer, tried yet again; one and a second shaft he launched . . . but the sickness came on him, and his third went far amiss, fell without force, while the bow dropped from his hand across the crenel. A boy took up the bow, while Ciaran rested there overcome by shame, until he found the strength to carry himself back to shelter.

They brought the boy back later, dead, for a shaft had struck him in the throat, and another, younger boy had taken his post. Ciaran wept, seeing it, and stood in the corner in the shadow, wishing to be seen by no one.

He heard at twilight the battle din diminished; and at long last it faded entirely. He went back to the hall, to stand near the warmth of the fire and hear the servants talk. The women came, weary and shadow-eyed, and there was talk of a cold supper from which no one had heart. Men were down in the courtyard trying to brace up the gate, and the sound of hammers resounded through the hall.

Scaga came up, pale and sick from an arrow which had pierced his arm and drawn a great deal of blood. From him Ciaran turned his face, and stared into the embers as he leaned against the stones of the fireplace. The ladies sat; servants brought bread and wine and cold meat.

Ciaran came to table and sat down, staring at what was before him and not at the women, nor at the harper, who had fought that day; nor at Scaga, at him least of all. The servants served them, but no one touched the food.

“It is his wound,” Branwyn said suddenly, out of the silence. “He is ill.”

“He claims to have run through enemies and scaled our wall,” Scaga said. “He gives us fair advice. But who is he, truly? How far did he run? And what manner of man have we taken among us, when our lives rely on a gate staying shut?”

Ciaran looked up and met Scaga’s eyes. “I am of Caer Donn,” he said. “We serve the same King.”

Scaga stared at him, and no one moved.

“It is his wound,” Branwyn said again. He was grateful for it.

“We have seen no wound,” said Scaga.

“Would you?” Ciaran asked, for he had no lack of scars. He put on a face of anger, but it was shame that gnawed at him. “We can go into the guardroom, if you like. We can speak of it there, if you like.”

“Scaga,” Branwyn reproved the old warrior, but Lady Meredydd put a hand upon her daughter’s, silencing her. And Scaga put himself on his feet. Ciaran stood, prepared to go down with him, but Scaga beckoned a page.

“Sword,” Scaga said. The boy brought it from the doorway. Ciaran stood still, not to be made a coward in their eyes. Branwyn had risen to her feet, and Lady Meredydd and the others, one after the other.

“I would see you hold a sword,” Scaga said. “Mine will do. ’Tis good true iron.”

Ciaran said nothing. His heart shrank within him and the stone already pained him. He looked into the old warrior’s eyes, knowing the man had seen more than the others had. Scaga unsheathed the sword and offered it toward his hands; he reached for it, took the naked blade in his palms, and tried to keep the anguish from his face. He could not. He offered it back, not to dishonor the blade by flinging it, and Scaga took it gravely. There was a profound silence in the room.

“We are deceived,” Scaga said, his deep voice slow and sad. “You brought us fair words. But gifts of your sort do not come without cost.”

There was weeping. He saw the source of it, which was Branwyn, who suddenly tore herself from her mother’s arms and rushed from the hall. That wounded as much as the iron.

“I told you truth,” Ciaran said.

There was silence.

“The King,” Ciaran said, “will come here. I am not your enemy.”

“We have lived too long next the old forest,” said the Lady Meredydd. “I charge you tell me truth. Is my lord still alive?”

“I swear to you, lady, I had his ring from his own hand, and he was alive and well.”

“By what do the fair folk swear?”

He had no answer.

“What shall we do with him?” Scaga asked. “Lady? Iron would hold him. But it would be cruel.”

Meredydd shook her head. “Perhaps he has told the truth. It is all the hope we have, it it not? And we need no more enemies than we have. Let him do as he wills, but guard him.”

Ciaran bowed his head, grateful at least for this. He did not look at Scaga, nor at the others, only at the lady Meredydd. Since she had nothing more to say to him, he walked quietly from the hall and upstairs, to imprison himself in the room they had given him, where he was spared the accusation of their eyes.

Dark had fallen. There was no lamp burning in the room, nor did he reckon that any servant would come to him tonight. He closed the door behind him, gazed at the window through a haze of tears. The night was bright, framed in stone.

Branwyn wept somewhere, betrayed. The joy he had brought them all was gone. They expected now to die. He shut his eyes, seeing his own family, the pain he was sure to bring them. Shame, and grief more piercing than shame, that they would forever know what they were and distrust their own natures.

He sat down on the bed in the dark, and unlaced his collar, drew forth the stone and held it in his hands.

SIXTEEN The Paths of Eald

“Arafel,” he whispered, “help us.” But no answer came, and Ciaran had hoped for none. It was doubt, perhaps, which robbed him. He felt a pain in his heart, pain in all his joints, as if the poison of the iron he had touched had gone inward. Perhaps it had more than driven Arafel away; perhaps it had wounded her more than he had known. There was silence, where once her voice would have come whispering to him, and he was afraid.

The stone was power. She had promised so. To cast it off, seek a death in battle . . . he thought of this, foreknowing that he would see before his death what others could not see, and know it when it came. It seemed a small-hearted thing now, though lonely; a selfish thing, to perish to no avail, and to take the hope of Caer Wiell with him once for all. Power was for using in such straits as he had set them in, if he but knew how.

And what had the stone ever done, but link him to Eald? Fare back, Arafel had wished him.

He began, holding the stone between his hands. He rose and slipped his mind toward the green fair world . . . saw gray brightness, and moved into it.

There was nothing here. He tried to recall the way he had come with Arafel’s leading. He thought that it lay before him in the mist. A certain sense of his heart said so, and he trusted that sense, which he had denied before.

Liosliath, he thought, wishing now for the memories of that grim elf, but nothing came to him. It was, perhaps, the taint of iron. Panic swept on him like a flood of water. He wavered out of the mist and blinked in dismay, for he stood on the dark slope of the hill, outside the walls of Caer Wiell.

In panic he reached for the mist again, and ran into it, ran, with all his strength, but very quickly he was lost indeed, and he was not sure that he had taken the right course in the beginning. He thought that he could see trees in the grayness, but they were not straight and fair, but twisted shapes, and the mist darkened.

Shadows were with him, loping along in dreamlike slowness. He could not see them well, but he heard the crash of brush, the beat of hooves, slow and strange. A stag coursed the mist, but it was black, and lost itself in the grayness. A bird flew past, baleful-eyed, and black as the stag. It called at him and flew on. He ran the more, panting, and at times his feet seemed to lose their purchase and to stride lower than he wished. Hounds bayed, striking terror into his flesh, and his wound grew into an ache, and to agony. He heard the beat of heavier hooves, and the winding of a horn.

Something tattered swept by him, wailing. He stumbled away from it and shuddered against another shadow, saw trees taking tortured shape. The way was darker and darker, agreeing with mortal night, as the elven-wood never had. He was possessed of sudden terror, that he had fled the wrong way altogether, that he was driven and harried where the enemy would be, toward a place where the stone had no power to save him. A wind blew which did not scatter the mist, but chilled him to the bone.

“Arafel!” he cried, having no hope in silence. “Arafel!”

A shadow loomed ahead of him. He flung himself aside, but it caught at him, and the stone warmed at his heart.

“Names are power,” she said. “But you must use commands three times.”

He caught her hand and held it, shut his eyes, for a rush of shadows passed, and the Huntsman was among them. He thought that sight would scar him forever.

And the chill left him. He opened his eyes and they were walking through the mist into brightness, into sunlight, of green forest and meadows with pale flowers. He sank down on the grass, out of strength, and Arafel sat by him, gravely watching until he should have caught his breath.

“You are braver than wise,” she said.

“I need your help,” he said. “They need you.”

“They.” She flung herself to her feet, and indignation trembled in her voice. “Their wars are their own. You have seen. You have seen your choices. You have come back of your own will. Do you not know now how much we have to do with Men?”

He found no arguments. There was a grayness upon him like the grief of the fair folk themselves, when the world no longer suited them, nor they the world.

Her anger stilled. He felt it die from the stone. She knelt down by him and touched his face, touched him heart, which was still cold with the memory of the dogs.

“This,” she said, touching the stone, “and iron—cannot bear one another. You know that now. You are wiser than you were. And when you are wiser still, you will know that they—have no part or peace with you.”

“I have dreamed,” he said, “and I know what once you were. And I ask your help.—Arafel, Arafel—Arafel, I ask your help for Caer Wiell.”

Her face grew cold, and still. “Too wise,” she said. “Beware such invocations.”

“Then take back your gift,” he said. “There is no heart in it.”

“It is our heart,” she said, and walked away.

He rose, looked about him, at hares which sat solemnly beneath a white tree. He despaired, and shook his head, and would have cast off the stone, but it was all his hope of return to his own night. He had walked it once; he began to walk it again, beyond the silver trees, farther and farther into the mist, for he sighted the direction true, and for whatever reason, the fear had gone.

His step never faltered, not in the direst and strangest of the mist. Trees came clear to him, and the very way to the room showed itself. He saw it, a black cell before him in the grayness. He entered it, and found walls about him once more.

He sat still through the night. There were no dreams. He slept a time and found the sun coming up, washed himself and dressed and came out into the hall, strangely numb of terrors, even when he saw Scaga’s man guarding the hall, having watched him. He came down into the hall where others gathered, and silence fell.

“Is there place for me?” a voice asked softly. He looked. It was Arafel.

Others had risen from the table, a scraping of chairs and benches. Branwyn stared, her hands to her cheeks. Scaga laid hand to his sword, but no one drew. Arafel stood still, in forester’s garments much mended and much faded. A sword hung at her side. Her pale hair was drawn back. She looked like a tall, slim boy.

“Long since I was here,” she said in their silence. Somewhere on the walls alarms were sounding, summoning them to the attack. No one yet moved. “I am bidden aid you,” she said. “I ask—do you wish that aid? Bid me aid you; or bid me go.”

“We dare not take such help,” said Meredydd.

“It is dangerous,” said the harper.

“It is,” said Arafel.

“Arafel,” Ciaran said. “What danger?”

She turned her pale eyes on him. “The Daoine Sidhe had other enemies. There are things more than you see. Long and long it is since wars have reached into Eald.”

“We die without your help,” said Meredydd. “If help it is.”

“Aye,” said Arafel, “that might be true.”

“Then help us,” said Meredydd.

“Ask cost,” said Scaga.

“ ’Tis late for that,” Arafel said softly. “Hist, do you not hear the alarms?”

“What costs?” Scaga said again.

“I am not of the small folk,” Arafel said in measured words and cold. “I am not paid in a saucer of milk or a handful of grain. My reasons are my reasons. I speak of balances, Man, but it is late for that. My aid has been commanded, and I must give it.”

“Then we will take it,” said Scaga, with an anguished motion toward the door. “Out there, today.”

“Give me time,” said Arafel. “Hold against them in your own strength, and wait.” She turned, looked on Branwyn and looked last on him, without anger, without passion at all. “Do not go out onto the walk,” she said. “Stay within. Wait.”

Her voice dimmed, and she did, so that there was only the stonework and a chair, and the silence after her.

“Arm!” Scaga shouted at the men, for still the alarm was sounding, and they had not answered it. “Come and arm!”

They ran. Ciaran stood still in the hall, feeling naked and alone. He realized the stone was in plain sight about his neck, and touched it, but it gave him nothing.

He looked back, into Branwyn’s eyes. There was terror there.

“I knew her,” Branwyn said “We were friends.”

“What happened?” he asked, disturbed to realize how meshed this place had been, forever, in the doings of Eald. “What happened, Branwyn?”

“I went into the forest,” she said. “And I was afraid.”

He nodded, knowing. There were then the two of them in the circle of fearing eyes. Lady Meredydd looked on them with a terror greater than all the rest, as if it were a nightmare she had shared. A daughter—who had walked in the forest, that they had gotten back again from Eald. Scaga knew, he too—who had seen a flinching from iron, and known clearly the name of the ill. It was terror come among them; but it had been there always, next their hearts.

“I am Ciaran,” he said slowly, to hear the words himself, “Ciaran’s second son, of Caer Donn. I lost myself in the forest, and I had her help to come here. But of the King, of your lord—I never lied. No.”

No one spoke, not the ladies, not the harper. Ciaran went to the bench by the fire and sat down there to warm himself.

“Branwyn,” Meredydd said sharply.

But Branwyn came and sat down by him, and when he gave his hand, took it, not looking at him, but knowing, perhaps, what it was to have walked the paths he took.

Arafel would come back. He trusted in this; and he remembered what Arafel had said that the others had not been willing to hear, except only Scaga, who might not have understood what she had answered.

Eald had dreamed in long silence; and Men asked that silence broken. He had done so, seeing only the power, and not the cost. He held tightly to Branwyn’s hand, which was flesh, and warm, and he wondered if his hand had that solidness in hers.

War was coming, not of iron and blood. They were mistaken if they expected iron and fire of Arafel; and he had been blind.

He was not, now.

SEVENTEEN The Summoning of the Sidhe

She walked quickly, and that was swiftly indeed, through the mists which rimmed her world, into the soft green moonlight on the silver trees. The deer and other creatures stared at her and came no nearer.

And when she had come to the heart of Eald, that grassy mound starred with flowers, and the circle of aged trees, then all of Eald hushed, even to the warm breeze which sported there. Moonlight glistened and glowed in the hearts of stones which hung on the tree of memory, and on the silver swords which hung nearby, and the armor and the treasures which held the magics of Eald. The magics slept, but for what sustenance they gave. Sleeping too, were the memories of all the faded Daoine Sidhe, which were the life of Eald.

She cast off the aspect she wore for Men, stood still a moment listening for the faintest of sounds, and then for no sound at all, but the whispering of elven voices. From one to the other stone she walked, touched them gently and drew their memories into life, so that none slept, not the least or the greatest.

And in the world of Men, Ciaran shuddered, and stared at the fire before them, feeling a stirring which shivered through the very earth. All that Men stood upon seemed like gossamer, threatening to tear.

“What is wrong?” asked Branwyn. “What do you feel?”

“The world is shaken,” he said.

“I feel nothing,” she said, as if to reassure him; but it did not.

Eald stirred. Arafel stood amid the grove and looked about her and listened; and at last went among the treasures of Eald and gathered up armor ages untouched, which had been hers. She put it on, mail shining like the moon itself, and took up her bow, and shafts tipped with ice-clear stone and silver. She took up her sword, and gathered the sword of Liosliath, his bow and all his arms. She climbed the knoll, laid down her burden, and sat down with her sword across her knees. She shut her eyes to Eald as it was, and listened to the stones.

“Eachthighearn,” she whispered to the air, and the silence trembled. A breeze began, which whispered down the green grass of the knoll and set the leaves to stirring and the stones to singing.

It moved farther, coursing narrowly through the trees, across the meadows, making flowers nod, and the hares which moved by moonlight looked up and froze.

It touched the waters of Airgiod, and skimmed them with a little shiver.

It blew among the trees the other side of Airgiod, and branches stirred.

“Eachthighearn: lend me your children.”

The breeze blew along the distant flanks of hills, making them shiver, a nodding of grasses; and it traveled farther still.

Then it began to blow back again, through hills and forest, recrossing Airgiod’s quiet waters, into meadows and into the grove, stirring the grasses of the knoll, with sighings of the swaying stones and a faint tang of sea breeze, recalling mist, and partings, and the cries of gulls.

Arafel shuddered in that wind, and the grayness beckoned. A taint of melancholy came over her, but she held fast to her stone, and opened her eyes and saw the grove as it was.

“Fionnghuala!” she called. “Fionnghuala! Aodhan!”

The breeze fled back again, laden with the green glamor of Eald, with sweet grass and shade, with summer warmth. It fled away, and the air grew still.

Then a wind began to blow returning, softly at first; and with greater and greater force in its coming, rattling the branches and making Airgiod’s waters shiver, flattening the grasses and sweeping like storm into the grove, where the stones blazed with sudden light. The sky was clear, the stars pure, the moon undimmed, but storm crackled in the air, whipped the leaves, and Arafel sprang to her feet, holding the sword in her two hands. The force of lightnings stood about, shivered in her blowing hair and played about the swords in the trees. Thunder began, far away and growing in the wind, stirring like deepest song to the lighter chiming of the stones and the rush of leaves.

And with the wind came brightness in the night, one and the other, like moons coursing close to earth, with thunder in their hooves and moonlight for their manes . . . above the earth they ran, together, as they had always coursed side by side.

“Fionnghuala!” Arafel hailed them. “Aodhan!”

The elven horses came to her in a skirling of wind, and the thunders bated as they circled her, as pale Fionnghuala stepped close and breathed in her presence with velvet nostrils shot with fire, gazed at her with eyes like the deer, wide and wonderful. Aodhan snuffed the breeze and shook his head in a scattering of light, stamped the ground and shook it.

“No,” said Arafel sadly. “He is not here. But I ask, Aodhan.”

The bright head bowed and lifted. She belted her sword at her side and took up the arms which had been Liosliath’s. Fionnghuala came to her, whickering. She seized the bright mane in one hand and swung up, and Fionnghuala stamped and turned, with Aodhan beside. The pace quickened and the wind scoured the trees, swept the grass, a flicker of lightnings crackling in the manes and in her hair.

“Caer Wiell,” Arafel said to them, and Fionnghuala ran, easily above the ground. The mist lay before them, but the wind swept into it, and lightnings lit it, making clear the shapes long lost there, the upper course of Airgiod, the shapes of faded trees. Shadows were caught by surprise and fled in terror, wailing down the wind as thunder took a steady beat and mists were scattered.

Lightning blazed in Caer Wiell’s court, danced there, with thunder-mutterings . . . stood still, and horses and rider looked on chaos, a gateway near to yielding, a scattering of men in flight from the terror which had broken in their midst. “Ciaran!” she called. “I am here!”

And Ciaran rose from his place beside the fire, no more there, no more holding the hand of Branwyn, whose voice wailed after him in grief.

He stood in the courtyard, with the stone burning like fire against his heart, with lightnings crackling about him and above him . . . and the dreams were true.

Arafel slid down, a gleam of silver armor, and held out such armor to him in both her arms. He took it and put it on, buckled on the elvish sword, and all the while his heart was chilled, for the cold went from it to the center of him, and the lightnings surrounded them. The human day was murky, clouded; but they stood in otherwhere, and elven moonlight was cast on them, pale green; night went about them, an aura of storm, and of the two horses, he knew one for his.

“Aodhan,” he named him. “Aodhan. Aodhan.” And the horse came to him, stood waiting.

“Not yet,” said Arafel, for there were others about them, human folk, who huddled against the wind, faces stark and frightened in the reflected glow, women and children and wounded men. They had no word to say to her; there were none from her to them. She walked toward the gate with Ciaran at her side and the elvish horses walked after.

“Scaga,” Ciaran said, lifting his hand toward the wall. “Scaga,” she repeated, and the old warrior looked down from the chaos on the walls, his face distraught.

“What you can do,” Scaga said, “we beg you do.”

“Beware, Scaga, what you have already asked. You have horsemen; ready them to ride with us, if they will.”

The old warrior stood still several beatings of a mortal heart. He was wise, and feared them. But he called men to him, and came down the stairs, shouted orders at boys, and commanded the horses saddled. Arafel stood still, thoughtfully took her bow from off her shoulder, and strung it. She might, she thought, go to the wall, might aid them there. But iron arrows flew in plenty, and there was time enough for that.

“Mind,” she said to Ciaran, “when you ride the shadow-ways, you are safe from iron—but you cannot strike at Men. Shift in and out of them; that is wisest”

“We can die,” he said, “—can we not?”

“No,” she said. “Not while you wear the stone. There is the fading. And there are other fates, Ciaran. Death is out there. Step into the shadow-ways and you will see him. Leave Men to me, where Men want killing. I am kinder than you know how to be. The arrows—save them: they are too dire for Men.”

“Then what shall I do?”

“Ride with me,” she said softly. “When one can do much—wisdom must guide the hand, or folly will.—Hist, they are ready.”

Boys and men brought the horses of the keep, handled, a clattering in the yard, and men ran from the defense of the walls and the gate to take them. Aodhan whickered softly and Fionnghuala saluted them too, and the mortal steeds herded together, ears pricked, nostrils straining. But Arafel walked among them, touched one and the other, named them their true names, and calmed them. “He is Whitetip,” she told a rider; “and she if Jumper. Call them true and they are yours.” The Men stared at her, but none durst question, not even Scaga, Whitetip’s rider.

She looked toward the gate, which tottered beneath the ram. Fionnghuala stepped closer to her, dipped her head and shook it impatiently.

“Do not leave me,” she bade Ciaran. “You have compelled my help. I do not compel: I ask.”

“I am by you,” he said.

“Scaga,” she said. “Bid them open the gates.” And quietly, to Ciaran: “Oftenest, Men see what they will, and cannot truly see us. Even these. Well for them they do not.”

“Do I,” he asked, “see you as you are?”

“I cannot know,” she said. “But I know you. And you had power to call my name. One must see to do that.”

He said nothing. She seized Fionnghuala’s mane and swung to her back. He mounted Aodhan, and the horse suffered it with a shiver, a flaring and quivering of the nostrils, for it was not his rider, but Ciaran knew the dream about his neck, of which Aodhan was part. Fionnghuala tossed her head, and the wind rose.

EIGHTEEN The Battle before the Gates

The gates yielded, a groaning and splintering of wood as the braces which held them were let go and the gates grated inward. Ciaran felt the horse dance aside, light as thistledown, ears still pricked toward the enemy: no need of harness, no need of holding. Aodhan picked up his feet and began to move as effortlessly as the wind which stirred about them, and his feet came down in the boom of thunder. Lightnings cracked, making hair and mane fly. Arafel rode beside him, as the white mare, tinted with the elven moon, paced stride for stride with Aodhan.

And the enemy who had rushed against the gate saw them, mirrored terror in lightning-lit faces, a soundless, horrid screaming. They brandished weapons, and still came on, impelled by hordes behind.

“Follow me!” said Arafel, and Fionnghuala flickered into shadow as she drew the silver sword. Ciaran clung to Aodhan and the horse strode into the shadow-ways.

Horror followed. A sickness passed him near: that was iron, a blade which passed through his substance, harmless in shadow-shape. Arafel thrust at that man; she flickered out of otherwhere in the midst of that thrust and back again: the silver blade had killed. The movements of Men and mortal horses were slow, and slowing still, as the elven horses strode their gliding and fearsome way, seeming to gallop but gaining less ground than speed. Ciaran had the sword in hand, but skill failed him—he struck, and failed his mark and struck again. The stone sang in his mind and something far colder than himself seized his heart; Aodhan sprang forward feeling it, and the thunder grew. There were other shapes with them, low, loping shapes of hounds, the taller blackness of horse and rider, which raced with them. Ciaran reached for his bow, overcome with horror.

“No,” said Arafel. “Strike no blow at those.”

Death drew away, parted from them in the course, and Ciaran looked back—saw Scaga and the other riders in that same slow movement of Men, cutting their way behind them. Cloaks and hair flew in frozen swirlings, with lightning flashes. Arafel called to him and the elven horses lengthened stride, began to move forward as well as swifter. Men passed by them, faster and faster, shadows through which they could move. Iron shivered past them with pain and poison, and the horses shied farther into otherwhere, flickered out again enough to see their way.

We are phantoms on the earth, Ciaran thought, and knew not which heritage we meant—for between those flickerings of otherwhere, like lightning-strokes, there was no army, only murky day, a strange placid landscape void of farms and wars and Men.

Yet not deserted. A horn sounded, braying, and came small folk scurrying from the hooves of the elven steeds—some fair and some foul, some direly misshapen. A weapon glanced from Ciaran’s mail, and there was no fleeing. The thunder cracked and the horses leaped forward. Ciaran struck with the sword while it profited, saw Arafel herself beset by a tide of shadows which poured out of the thickening air. She vanished and he thought her slain, but the shadows poured after her into that nothingness.

“Go,” he cried at Aodhan, and the horse leaped, following Arafel into mortal daylight. The shadows had not come through, or they hid, or transformed themselves. Arafel slew Men, a dire dream in which Ciaran’s heart was chilled . . . I am of them, his heart cried; but another mind rose up in him, flowing into his limbs and his hands.

Give over, give over, the stone sang in his heart, showing him his helplessness to wield these weapons.

He fought that voice, that one who strove to live, to come back. Aodhan ceased to obey him, raced wildly, while the wind grew and grew, while nightmares passed on either side. An anger rose in him at these ill-shapen things, these shadows that twisted into vision, the prickling of old hostility.

“Liosliath!” he heard them shout in rage; and the anger grew in him, lifted his arm, swelled in his heart. He shouted—he knew not what he cried. Aodhan leapt under him willingly, bore him along while his hands strung the elvish bow and he gathered up an arrow. The air swirled with storm: the arrow flew, ice-tipped, feathered with light A horror shrieked and fled, and others coursed the winds. There was a light by him, which became Fionnghuala and her rider, and he saw Arafel’s face calm and terrible as she sent shafts winging after his. Men ceased to matter. They were nothing. This was the war, these the enemy, old as earth, as they were old. Shapes fled before them, turning sometimes to strike and suffer wounds.

Suddenly they were alone, in a place gone gray and full of mists—They are fled, fled, the dream sang to him; and elsewhere, wherever he looked, was an iron-poisoned hush.

“Come,” said Arafel, and shadow-shifted to a bloody and littered field. Rain came down and failed to reach them, pocked bloody puddles in the mire instead, drenched the broken human bodies and the shattered spears. They were in the midst of the field, with both sides drawn back for breath. Ciaran turned Aodhan and beheld Caer Wiell, with its men ranged before it afoot, the dozen riders still remaining to them standing huddled to the fore.

It was pause, not victory. It was regrouping, while the sky poured out its tears.

Another rider came treading above the mire of the center of the battlefield. He was a shape like a fragment of night, with his robes blowing in a wind counter of the wind which blew in the mortal realm. Lord Death stopped before them, leaned seemingly on the withers of the shadow-horse, and Ciaran shuddered, for in that shadow steed’s head there was a pale hint of naked bone when the lightnings flashed.

“You are mad,” said Death. “Go back. Cease this.”

“I am bound,” said Arafel. “They have invoked my aid.”

Death straightened, and lifted a black sleeve toward the distant lines of the enemy. “They are there, come from under the hills to aid them. Do you not know? There are powers which have come to align with them.”

“They would do so. But we are bound.”

“There are my brother gods,” said Death. “I bear you word from them; Withdraw, before worse is loosed.”

“Let them stay away,” said Arafel. “Enough is amiss here.”

“Go back,” Death whispered. “If the Daoine Sidhe had all left this land, these fell things would never have come again.”

“Because I have never gone away, dear youth—they have stayed to their hidings.” She laughed and the shadow horse trembled. “Do you know now what watch I stand in Eald?”

Death and his horse stood still, bereft of answers. Ciaran gazed at the blackness, and Aodhan shifted and stamped, for things moved underfoot, and forces gathered.

“I do not bid you,” Ciaran said to Arafel, although it was effort. “I know what has to be. I bound you to this. I release you. Give us over to Death, us and them, only so this ends.”

Arafel gazed at him, and his skin prickled, for the lightnings stirred. “It is Men who lend them power,” she said. “And your sight is truer than it was.—We are held to battle here on this field until the army yonder bids their own allies go back.”

“And they who are winning—or losing—will not.”

“That is so. When your mortal enemy has won, then their new allies will only be the stronger. They will go on, those powers; they will gather forces; they will sweep over all the world. Do you comprehend now, Man my cousin?”

“Forgive me,” Ciaran whispered.

“It is heartsease you ask. I give you that. And I confess I had hope of more strength than we have in Caer Wiell. If we might rob the enemy of lives and human hands . . . but we have not strength enough.”

“You have power unused,” said Death. “Use it! Will you let them all break forth?”

“The cost of that too you know.”

“Our need is now.”

“That sacrifice will not kill them, only drive them for now. And what then, Lord Death? What in a hundred lifetimes of Men—when they go unwatched? Yon have no power over them, no more than over me. There no hope that way. No, I will tell you what you must do: stay your hand from Caer Wiell. Our forces are too diminished as it is.”

“I cannot,” said Death, bowing his head. “I too am bound to what I do.”

“My King,” said Ciaran, “will come here, if only we can hold.”

“Your King delays overlong,” Arafel said quietly. “Wiser had you bound me to his aid, not to doomed Caer Wiell’s. As it is, we are bound to serve and fall. And the cost of that fall you do not guess even yet.”

“There was a battle,” said Death, “a day ago. Trust me, that I know. There are still skirmishes; and that force is well-occupied in the hills, Man. Have no hope of them. This enemy has engaged them too, at the pass of Caerdale; and all your King’s strength cannot rout the enemy from those heights.”

Ciaran listened. There seemed a gleam within that dark hood. There began a beating that was his heart, or Arafel’s, or both. He laid a hand upon the stone at his throat, heard a whisper from it, felt an elvish presence that found courage to laugh at the thought that came into his mind; and Aodhan shifted to move at once.

“No,” Arafel forbade him, but a light was in her eyes. “Wise you are, but that is no road for you, o Man. Yours to hold here. Where it serves Caer Wiell, I am free to ride.”

“His human allies will all fall and the enemy will take him,” Death said. His darkness became a nimbus about him. “I shall depart this field with all my forces. That much I can do.”

“Go,” said Arafel.

Death faded. There was only the rain, and then that stopped.

Arafel spoke to Fionnghuala. The white mare began to run. Aodhan whinnied after her, and pawed the ground, but stood fast.

And across the field the enemy began to gather their line.

Ciaran shivered. Beware, a voice in him whispered: you are only seeing Men. Others are closer.

“Liosliath,” he said, holding up the stone, and shuddered, surrendering. “I shall stop being. Wake. Wake, Liosliath. It is you they need now. Wake! your enemies are here!”

Cold fire spread from the stone. It frightened him, the power which spread through his limbs and the pride which drew breath and laughed, despising Men.

Aodhan wheeled then, and sped with long strides toward the battered lines of Caer Wiell, to pace delicately along before them. He saw Scaga’s face, marred with a bloody slash; saw this fearless man give ground from him, saw others flinch. He flickered into otherwhere and saw the enemy gathered like a tide. He drew an arrow from his quiver and fired, saw the icy point lodge deep in a shadow which faded in torment

And with the stone he drew on Eald, cast a glamor over all the force at his back, sheening them all in silver.

“Come,” he called to them, and not he: the elf prince, who drew his sword and clapped his heels to Aodhan, the prince who knew well how to fence with iron, nothing reckoning the poisoned pain which whipped through his body when it must. Faster and faster Aodhan sped, and slower and slower the Men, while he brought the flickering elvish sword out of otherwhere, lodged in human flesh—gone again before human weapon could strike.

Yet none died. Enemies weakened, and human weapons hewed them ghastly wounds, and folk of Caer Wiell were spitted in turn, and did not die, but kept hewing others, so long as they had limbs which would move.

There was a wailing on the wind, a darkness. He gathered strength against it and lightnings flashed on monstrous shapes. Blows rained against the silver mail; in rage he swept against them, wounded them, and time and time again Aodhan dropped into the mortal world, until some of the dire things followed him there, and undying Men stared in fear.

One of the Men was Scaga, whose anguished look Ciaran knew, who still held his sword, standing unhorsed in the mud. Then Ciaran’s heart was moved to pity, and he would have taken the old warrior up, but Liosliath was stronger, and Aodhan swept him on, skimming the ground with thunder. The Caerbourne down the hill flowed with blood. Saplings on the banks were trampled. He used his sword against Men wherever their ranks tried to stand, and herded them and hurt them, though they would not die. The light about him began to grow paler and brighter, for human sun was sinking into twilight, and elven sun was rising.

Then the dark things drew power more than they had before, thrusting maimed human folk forward to press against maimed Caer Wiell.

And now he was pressed back and back, for the enemy was in all places, and on all sides, converging on the ruined gate, and rending those defenders who lagged in their retreat.

A Man stood by him, at Aodhan’s shoulder: Scaga. The old warrior shouted orders to his men and from the walls of Caer Wiell arrows flew, iron which the creatures hated as much as he. Some writhed in pain. Others crept up against the walls of the hold, and tore at the very stone.

And a wind grew in the east, and thunder.

“Arafel!” he cried.

She was there. He flickered into otherwhere and saw a light among the mists of the faded lands, with shadows rearing up between, caught and desperate. He held the gate against them, though his arm grew tired and Aodhan trembled beneath him. There was a thunder in the earth as well, and more and more human attackers added force to those who had come before. But a cry of dismay went up at the far side of that living tide, human screams and battle cries.

“Liosliath!” the call came down the wind, and he saw the flickering of the white mare and the gleam of Arafel’s sword. Aodhan gathered himself and began to move, striding faster and faster.

And suddenly a shadow was beside him, a void shaped like horse and rider, and shapes like coursing hounds. Other dark riders had joined them, blacknesses as great as Death; and some who ran afoot, some like Men and some horned like stags.

Fionnghuala shone in the murk, and her rider no less than she: a pale and terrible gleaming, her hair astream on the wind. “Liosliath!” Arafel hailed him, and he reached out a hand as bright, caught hers across the gap, a joy which burned and died, because of the dire things about them.

Armies clashed in the dark and the storm, and that noise was far from them. Dark things leapt and attacked, slaying and being slain, and wounded shapes climbed the winds. Lord Death lifted the likeness of a horn and sounded it, and the clouds increased as the dark horse began to move; Aodhan paced the dark rider, and Fionnghuala joined him. Side by side with Death they rode, and the dogs bayed, coursing more and more rapidly through the air. They strode above the ground, and mounted the skirling winds. Aodhan threw his head and shook himself and Arafel circled Fionnghuala out and back again, hastening something fell and fugitive toward the dogs. Clouds tattered beneath the hooves, and the thunders rolled. The horn sounded yet again, and more and more riders joined them, bearing banners like black cloud. Armored Men, with darkened eyes set ahead upon the quarry, and lances agleam in their hands, rode on horses with eyes as dead as theirs. The slain had gathered to hunt the newly dead. Ciaran looked, and the Man in him shuddered, for he knew some of these faces, and he had loved no few of them. He saw a cousin there; and a childhood friend, and another rider on a horse with a white-tipped ear—“Scaga!” he called, but the rider coursed past, eyes dark, unheeding; and many a man of Caer Wiell followed after. The last turned and beckoned to him.

“Liosliath!” Arafel rebuked him. She held out her hand to him. Ciaran came, yielded to the elf prince, and Aodhan ran his gliding pace across the clouds, while the shadows fled.

They two turned back alone then, and rode the field in the human world, but the battle was done. Dark shapes slunk aside where they passed, sought refuge elsewhere, and vanished.

Men gathered at the gates of Caer Wiell, atop the hill. They rode quietly now, covering ground, a rush of wind about them, and had their weapons sheathed.

Then Arafel stopped, sat still on Fionnghuala, gazing toward the gates. “I am free,” she said. “ ’Tis done.”

“Let us ride nearer,” he begged her, for Donn had come riding in with lord Evald and the King’s army; and there were the folk inside Caer Wiell. He ached to know how those he loved had fared.

“Would you see them?” Arafel asked him. “Aye, I do understand the bonds of kinship. Go.”

She would not come inside the walls. He knew her pride, and ached for that as well. But Aodhan felt his will to go, and moved.

Men gave way before him, with fear on their faces. And when he had come as far as the gate, he saw lord Evald’s banner, and Evald of Caer Wiell himself standing near it, giving orders to his men. Evald stopped and stared at him. And there kneeling by Evald’s feet was Beorc, Scaga’s son, who held Scaga’s maimed and muddy body in his arms and mourned.

“He fought more than well,” Ciaran said. Beorc looked up, and grief in his eyes became dread at what he saw. The look pained Ciaran like the iron, which ached more and more in the air about him, a taint in which it grew hard to breathe. Aodhan fretted to be away, and Ciaran rode farther, within the ruined gates, sought his father and Donnchadh and the moon banner of his own Caer Donn. Elf-sight found them quickly, and he stopped Aodhan by them in the swirl of Men in the courtyard.

They looked up at a strange rider and did not know him—surely they failed to recognize him, or they would never have had such a look of dread at the sight of him. He rode away from them, and Men shrank from his path in the crowded yard. “Stay,” he bade Aodhan, slid down and walked among the Men, among his own, past cousins of his, seeing everywhere that look he dreaded.

He moved elsewhere, a reaching of the heart, a shifting, and found himself in the stone hall of Caer Wiell, by the fireside, where Lady Meredydd and Branwyn stood. Their eyes showed no less fear than the others had.

“They are well,” he said, holding the stone at his heart to ease the ache in it. “Your lord is home. You are safe. But Scaga is dead.”

He wept in telling it, not having wished to weep, and began to fade. But Branwyn called his name and held him by it. She tried to come to him, a mortal yearning. He reached and took her hand to help her, but she could not come the way he could. He kissed her fingers, and kissed her brow, and stayed a time in the room with them.

Lord Evald came, and the King with him. To the King, Ciaran knelt, while Laochailan’s young eyes regarded him with that dread others turned on him.

“Welcome sight,” the King he had loved said of him; but with the lips, not with the heart. And Evald, lord Evald, who was Eald’s near and knowing neighbor, gave him a look as bleak and unwelcoming—then came and offered him an embrace.

No other human dared, not his own father or brother, when they had come up the stairs into the hall, all clattering with armor. “Ciaran,” his father said, and gazed on him with a bleak, hag-ridden stare. Donnchadh started a step toward him, but his father held his arm and prevented him. Then Donnchadh’s face became like a stranger’s to him, grim and mournful.

They have always known, Ciaran thought, both of them have always known what is in our blood. He recalled the elvish moon which had been Caer Donn’s banner for years out of memory, and was heartstricken at such a look as Donnchadh gave him.

“We are going back,” his father told the King then without looking at him, as if he had not been there. “We have our own cares, too long neglected.”

“Go,” the King bade him; so his father and his brother went their way from the hall, not to linger long near Eald, and never looked back.

Ciaran stood wounded, looked last at Branwyn, who looked at him, and in his pain he wished himself away, in the cold air, in the mist, the deserted shadow-ways.

He came back into the mortal night in the courtyard after some time had passed, where all was quieter than it had been.

He walked outside the riven gates, where the horror of the field was honest and undiminished. “Aodhan,” he said quietly, and a wind gusted as the horse moved out of the night toward him, slow peals of thunder, a blazing like the noon of elvish sun. He stroked the white neck and thought of his home in the hills, at Caer Donn. He might go there, might—once—go there, greet his mother and his kin, see the things he had known, bring them word days before his father and Donnchadh and the men could come and tell them—before that place was closed to him forever, before—so many things. Aodhan could carry him.

He touched the stone at his throat. “Arafel,” he said.

It was another presence which came to him instead, which touched his heart far more gently than it had ever done, with elvish brightness. There was pride—always that; but this time the touch was warm. “Man,” it whispered; and there was the roar of the sea and the cries of gulls. “Man.”

Only that he said, the elven prince, and it sufficed.

NINETEEN The End of It All

He came, but not alone, and that surprised her—in plain good clothes, and with Branwyn tramping along with him through the brambles, her golden hair tangled with twigs. He wore the sword and carried the bow and a pack which clearly burdened him. She watched them, and would have reached out to help them, but she sensed the fear in Branwyn, and could not have helped, no more than he could: Branwyn was doomed to the thorns.

They reached the dancing-ring. He called her in his mind, and she came, smiling sadly at the pain in his eyes, and looked then at Branwyn, who managed to look back at her.

“I have brought Aodhan back,” Ciaran said.

“Swiftest to have ridden,” said Arafel.

“Branwyn tried.”

“Ah,” she said in pity, and again met Branwyn’s blue eyes, “You might have.”

Fear looked back at her, but something like the child struggled behind it. “I wanted to.”

“That is much,” said Arafel.

A wind had risen. She sensed Aodhan near, but it was Ciaran who had the summoning of him. Ciaran held out a hand, and the horse stepped into mortal sunlight, aglow with the elvish moon. Small thunders rumbled in the glade, and lightnings flickered. Ciaran stroked Aodhan’s neck, and whispered his name and bade him go. The thunder clapped and the horse was gone, that swiftly, and perhaps something of Ciaran’s heart went with him; he had that look.

Then Ciaran knelt down and unbound the pack which he had brought, and took the sword and bow and laid them atop it all the shining armor at her feet.

“Thank you,” Arafel said, and the gifts faded.

“I thank you,” Ciaran said. “I must thank you. But—do you understand?—I have carried them as far as I can. I have seen things—I shall always see them. They are enough.”

“I know,” she said.

He rose, and reached last for the chain about his neck.

“No,”’she said. “That, you must keep.”

“I cannot,” he said. He drew it off, and offered it to her hands, his own hands trembling.

“It is your protection.”

“Take it.”

“And Branwyn’s too. Do you even hope to get from out this forest without it? Would you see her hunted too?”

That struck deep. Ciaran’s hands fell; but Branwyn took his arm.

“I knew that too,” said Branwyn, and there was more of sense in her blue eyes than there had ever been. “But I am here. And we will walk out again.”

“Please,” Ciaran said, offering the stone yet again. “I am a Man, and when he comes, that is the way of Men, is it not? But if I keep this, there is no hope for me.”

Arafel took it then, unwilling, and her lips parted in shock at the strength that had come to it, and the presence in it which was indeed almost beyond bearing.

“Ah,” she said, folding it to her heart. She looked on him with tears. “You have given me a gift, o Man. And now there is nothing you have left me to give you.”

“A blessing,” he said, “for us. That I will take.”

“Few Men have ever asked it of the Daoine Sidhe.”

“I ask.”

She kissed him then, and kissed Branwyn. “Go,” she said.

They went, hand in hand, and she walked behind them, the shadow-ways, unseen. They had trouble in the going, took scratches of the thorns, and climbed high places and limped on unexpected stones; shadows hissed at them, but fled quickly when she bade them gone.

And at last it was New Forest, and Arafel stood upon the flat rock and watched them down the slope, toward the Caerbourne, and Caer Wiell.

A blackness settled near her. She frowned at it.

“Give them a little,” she asked. “Only a little time.”

“We were allies,” Death said. “Should I have so short a memory? I shall wait. As for Branwyn—she was always mine.”

Again she frowned.

“I have another face,” he said.

She drew herself up and laid a hand on her sword. “Beware of me, Lord Death; I know your name; and the day I see you as you are, you are yourself in peril. Do not tempt me.”

“You have asked a favor,” he said.

“Aye,” she said more softly, anger fallen. “That I have.”

“He may come here if he wills; and she may. He will die abed, years hence. That, I give to him.”

“Then I forgive you,” she said, “other things.”

She left him then, and walked her own way, from Airgiod’s quiet rim, to the moonlit grove.

Fionnghuala was there, and Aodhan. “Go,” she bade them. “You are free.”

They did not go; and they were free to choose that too. They stayed near, and the grove breathed with wind and memories.

“Liosliath,” she said, holding the stone near her heart.

He was aware. There was another place but this. She held it close and walked amid the silver trees.

Eald was smaller. But it had held. She found that place at the edge of Eald, hers and not quite hers, and the Gruagach scampered into hiding, remembering ancient quarrels—but he fared well, and so did all he cared for. The fields were safe. She preferred the earth no iron had delved, the lands shadowed with her trees—but she took care now of lands far wider than Eald, so that the lands of Men had rarely seen such a year, in which no planting failed. It cost her. She did all she could to mend what war had done, and stretched her care as far as it could go. Long ago she had chosen this woods and kept it—but now it had neighbors she valued, with special poignancy, that they were brief and brave and given to doing as they would. She had never known why she watched, except for pride, not to yield forever what once the Sidhe had been; but now it was for love.

Yet one day, one day she almost despaired, so much of Eald she had given away. She came for comfort to that heart of her wood and walked there listening to the stones, her head bowed in a weariness almost too much to bear.

So she found it, a tiny thing unlooked for at her feet. A branch, she thought, had fallen from the silver trees, which had never happened in any wind that blew—so, she thought as she bent down by it, Eald had at last begun to die, from the heart outward.

Then she cast herself to her knees in wonder—for the sprig was rooted in the ground, thrusting up from the earth with silver leaves all delicately veined, the first new life in Eald since the dimming of the world.