The Tree of Swords and Jewels

ONE The Fuathas

It was the old hiding game, and they laughed, did Meadhbh and Ceallach, while Muirne searched. They watched the skinny woman up close by the keep looking this way and that among the bushes and covered their mouths to keep from setting one another to laughing aloud. Then Ceallach threw a stone and made the bushes rattle far over to the right so that Muirne spun and looked in that direction.

"Come out," Muirne cried. "Come out this instant. Hear me?"

She was angry now. Meadhbh slid backward through the brush and tugged at Ceallach's sleeve.

Ceallach followed. "You hear me?" Muirne went on shouting while they slid and slithered away on the slope. "Don't play such games!"

But a path appeared in their way as they got up and scrambled crouching through the trees. It was a strange place to find a path, because no one came and went in the world except by the great dusty road, and no one went off this direction from Caer Wiell, toward the river and the vast and haunted woods—excepting sometimes their father, who went alone and without any armor at all, and taking no one with him, not even Beorc, who went everywhere else. The pair had asked why, of course. They asked everything, why birds flew and why the sun rose and where the wind came from. But no one told them any of these things, and no one told them why their father went walking down by the Caerbourne where no one else would dare to walk, no, not even Beorc, who was a huge red-haired man that no one would ever call afraid.

So a thrill went up their backs when they suddenly found that path so close to them all their lives and unsuspected. One keen quick thought brought their eyes to each other and a secret excitement brought their hands together, fingers locked in fingers, Ceallach tug ging on his sister's hand when he had the lead. Then as he helped Meadhbh down over an old log, Meadhbh seized the first place and dragged him along. So they went, one and then the other, their eyes afever with the secrets of this path that seemed to welcome them. It was the way their father came. They were sure of that, and for that reason they had no fear of treading on it, never once thinking that he could lead them where he could not, if danger came on them, save them.

It was so sure in their minds that they exchanged only glances as they went, unraveling this path to its ending, one pulling the other, skipping over the old rocks, the bones of the ancient hill on which Caer Wiell was reared. They dodged through thickets which should have torn their skin yet magically refrained. It was a moment of magic. They were sure of that in the same fashion they were sure each what the other thought, as if some golden thread bound their minds so close there was no need of talking.

And never once did they think that where that path led might be farther than their young legs could run without stopping. They skipped and ran and fended the branches away, took wild chances with their leaping and dodging.

It was Meadhbh who slowed first, who first began to doubt the way that they were tending. She resisted Ceallach's tugging at her hand ever so slightly just as he had lighted on soft ground, so that he slipped and brought both of them reeling down an unexpected slope in the bracken. Meadhbh sat down at the bottom, plump among her woolen skirts, barking her skin on the tangle of roots and stones, and Ceallach slid past her right to the edge of the brambles.

"Ow!" said Ceallach. "What did you stop for?"

"Hush," Meadhbh said, shivering. "We've come near the river. Hear it?"

"We mustn't lose the path," Ceallach said. The brush seemed darker all about, and the water whispered like the breeze that sported in the conspiring leaves. "Come on, Meadhbh—it has to be just up there."

But Meadhbh bit her lip and tugged up her skirt to look at her shins, where her woolen hose were torn. The wounds stung. Every thing was wrong suddenly. The woods were dark and the river was chuckling nearby, so that it was hard now not to think of the strict warnings they had had about the deep forest. "We had better go back," she said. "Muirne will come looking." She said it even hoping at the moment that Muirne would turn up suddenly and rescue them. She gave her hand to Ceallach to be helped up, ready to run as hard to be out of this place as she had run to get into it, although now her side and her shins were hurting and she was far from sure in which direction home lay.

"Ah," a moan came to them. "Ah, ah, ah—"

They froze like fawns, and turned wide eyes in the direction of the voice, which was mixed with the sound of the river.

"Ah me," it said. "Ah me, so lost."

"Listen," Ceallach said.

"I don't know whether it means it's lost or we are," Meadhbh said, and her teeth began to chatter as if with winter cold. Her shins stung, reminding her of misfortune. She and Ceallach held onto each other with a grip that hurt her hand. "I don't think we ought to answer it."

"O lost," it cried. "O me, o me, o where?"

"It's a girl," said Ceallach then, with a fresh breath of courage. "Come on, Meadhbh, it's only someone, after all." He stood up, tugging at her hand.

"O, o!" it wept. "O, I'm caught, o the hurt, the hurt. . . ."

The sounds of sobs came to them, loud as the river, a crying that was everywhere, and Meadhbh, who was pulling back to look for the path again, stopped pulling at Ceallach's leading—not that she thought better of it, but that the someone was crying as if a heart were breaking, and that sobbing tugged as surely at her heart as at Ceallach's. She stopped pulling back at all and followed Ceallach down past the brambles and down and down where the river ran.

"I don't like this," Meadhbh found the heart to say, when they came on that black water, and Ceallach seemed daunted too. The water was sinister and wide, and gnarled old trees hung over it with a stillness that prickled through the snuffling and the weeping. "Ceal lach, let's be going home."

"Look," Ceallach said, and held onto her as she held to him, because of a sudden there was someone sitting on the black rocks, like someone wrapped up in weeds still glistening from the river water. That someone lifted a pale beautiful face and hair gold as pollen fell onto its shoulders among the weeds. This someone sat with legs curled sideways on the rock and arms holding the cloak of slickish weeds about her. Eyes dark as the riverwater looked at them both very solemnly. Then weed-covered arms lifted and flowed to ward the water in one smooth motion as that someone dived, so subtly it was like the pouring of water into water.

"Oh," Meadhbh said, and pulled at her brother to make him run away.

But a face bobbed up in the water, flowerlike, with the pale hair flowing about in the river currents and the eyes staring at them and the mouth making a round of surprise and wonder.

"I am lost," the someone said. "Oh, please, I am lost, quite lost."

"Where are you trying to go to?" Meadhbh asked, curious in spite of herself and quite forgetting to run.

"Lost," the someone insisted. The bright head sank beneath the dark water and came up again with her hair sheeting away in the currents. "Who are you?"

"Flann," said Ceallach thinking quickly. "Floinn," said Meadhbh with a very uncomfortable feeling, because she had not been taught to lie, but names were not for giving away, and Flann and Floinn were safe at home, being two fat bay ponies and not at all in ques tion. "Who are you?" It seemed completely mad to be talking to a creature floating in the river as if she were someone they had met in the field, as if she were someone dressed in honest clothes and not all in river weeds.

But the creature bobbed higher in the water as if she were standing up and brought her hands into sight, cupped as if she held some precious thing. "I shall give you a gift—see, pearls. Have you ever seen pearls or heard of them?"

"We have to go," said Ceallach.

"O, but you must never go!" The whole creature vanished again in a swirl of dark water and the waters boiled and broke at once in the appearance of a black horse's head, and neck and back, and the whole beast was surging up as a horse comes up from swimming, a horse that made all the horses of the hold look stock and dull, a horse so beautiful and sleek and black that it seemed that the night itself had come up out of the river. And they desired it, did Meadhbh and Ceallach, more than anything they had ever seen or imagined to desire. It was freedom, it was all the might of the river, it was a creature that flowed like waters and beckoned them with power. They saw themselves as queen and king, woman and man in an instant, with never waiting for tedious years to pass. They saw awe in the eyes of all about them and they never, never needed fear any man or beast anywhere or ever in the world.

It came closer, lowering its beautiful head. The water dripped off its mane and made its hide sleek and shining. It extended its foreleg and bowed itself, offering them its back, and Ceallach went first toward it with only the dimmest remembrance that he ought to be afraid, while Meadhbh came with her hands held out to it as she would come to her own pony, quite, quite forgetting the love she had for that poor, plain beast, because desire burned in her for what this one could give.

"No," a voice said distinctly, "I should not"

Ceallach stopped, and the black horse tossed its head. Meadhbh looked wildly about and her heart all but turned over, for a stranger stood at the edge of the thicket, cloaked in gray and deep in a kind of light and shadow that made it hard to see him. His hand seemed to rest on a sword hilt on the shadowed side, and his whole aspect was grim and dangerous. Of a sudden there was a splash where the horse had been, a scattering of cold water on them that made them cry out in fright.

And then whatever had possessed them to be here unafraid melted away from their hearts and left them terrified. The wood seemed dark and the figure dire and sinister. They held to each other in the nakedness of the riverbank, and Ceallach wound his fingers into Meadhbh's in the spell of a moment too terrible to move.

"Hardly wise," the stranger said. "Who gave you leave to be here?"

"This is our place," Meadhbh said to this intruder who was per haps an outlaw and perhaps worse, perhaps some spy from An Beag or way up on the Bradheath; and she thought that she ought to have said nothing at all, but she was never skilled at keeping quiet. And nothing seemed right about this stranger, in the rapid shifting of this truth and that about the Caerbourne's dark banks. She could put no quality to the voice, whether it was young or old or what it sounded like, or make out clearly what the stranger looked like in the shadow which was not all that deep a shadow, except that some trick of the leaves and sun made it hard to see who stood there at all.

"Your place," the stranger echoed. "Most assuredly it is not." And the stranger brightened, just that, as if the light had stopped playing tricks or the sun had come out from behind a cloud. It was no man from An Beag, and in one way of looking at the stranger it was not a man at all, but a tall, slim lady in patchwork gray and green like a hunter's clothes, wearing a gray cloak over it all. She went striding right past them to the riverbank as if they had never mattered. "Fuathas," the lady said in a voice that sent a shiver up their backs.

It was oh, so soft a voice, but the water stirred, and a golden head came up very carefully, just the eyes showing above the water, eyes dark as the water was dark, and very wary.

So they knew then that they had seen two of the Sidhe—one of whom stood on the bank, there and not there, with a brightness that was different from the daylight.

"Come out," the Sidhe said.

"No." The golden head had risen so that the lips were above the water, and now the creature looked frightened. "No, oh no, no, no."

"Out. At once. Shall I call your name? I shall teach it to these children and they will call you whenever they like."

"No," the creature wept. It slid to the shore and lay bowed in a miserable huddle of weed, only a knot of old riverweed which moved and bubbled.

"So you remember," said the Sidhe, "whose wood this is, and where you are. —Would you have its name?" she asked suddenly, and looked at Meadhbh so that all the forest seemed to have gone dim, and in Ceallaeh's breast his heart began to beat so heavily it seemed to fill the forest. "No," said the Sidhe then. "You wanted it once and you would want it again; and you would want it to be, and to do for you, and to do more and more until you saw everyone afraid of you. Is this what you should be?"

"No," said Meadhbh. She recalled the dream that was the water horse and the power of him, and suddenly she shuddered at the thought of her father and mother becoming very small and herself very great and tall. That was not the way the world was meant to be. She never wanted that. And: "No," Ceallach said, thinking of him self and Meadhbh powerful over everything and all alone, with no more games to play and only fear around them, and between them.

"Its name is Caolaidhe," said the Sidhe.

"Ah!" the creature wailed, "ah no, ah no, o mercy no!" She looked up at them, held up thin white hands as if she cupped the pearls. "O mercy, o mercy, o no, no, not to leave the river, never, no. I'll give you gifts, o such gifts!"

The thought of the pearls leapt into Meadhbh's mind. It was a good thought and unselfish surely, how the pearls would look about her mother's neck, how her mother would wonder at her having them to give. Surely to give them away would be the right thing to do. But the tall, gray-cloaked Sidhe was staring at her with a look so strange and piercing that no leaf could have moved in all the forest.

She could only think that something was expected of her, something more than she had ever done and might ever do, a thing that was wise and at once as simple as understanding. "Let it go," Meadhbh said.

"Go back to the river and don't come out," Ceallach told it.

The creature cast a wild look about and bent and flowed away. "O kind," it cried as it slid into the water. "O good children, o kind—" The sound became bubbles, and the river flowed with its accustomed rush.

"My calling-name is Thistle," the Sidhe said gravely, as if the fuath had been no more than a passing breeze. "You might be trusted with my true one; I do think you might, young as you are. But I am no small matter, no, not like that one. You have done wisely at the last if not at the first."

"We have to go home now," said Meadhbh as staunchly as she could.

"I shall take you there."

"We can go ourselves," said Ceallach.

"Then I shall walk with you and see you safe."

"You mustn't."

"Ah," the Sidhe said gravely. "But I am your father's friend."

"Are you what he comes to see?"

"Perhaps I am."

"I had thought—" Ceallach said and let his voice fall away.

"Be still," said the Sidhe. "Name no names near the riverside. Caolaidhe is listening. Come. Come, now. There are worse things about this stream than the each-uisge."

She offered her hands, one to each, and as Meadhbh considered gravely, so did Ceallach, looking up at their tall rescuer.

"Now you are wary," said the Sidhe. "Good. But wary of the wrong one, and that is ill. Go as you please then."

"Come on," said Ceallach to Meadhbh, and took his sister's hand. They went climbing up away from the Sidhe, up the bank, fighting the undergrowth among the gray stones. Bracken grew here, but bracken gave way to rougher growth, and thorns scratched them and tore at their hair and clothes.

"I don't think this is the way," Meadhbh said after a while. "I think we should go more to the left."

Ceallach went, and it was better for a time, but it was not the path, and very soon they both stopped and looked about them, each holding the other's hand and feeling very tired and frightened and wish ing desperately to be home again.

"We have to go on," said Ceallach.

"But which way?" asked Meadhbh. "I'm afraid I've lost us. The path is nowhere near here."

"I will show you," said a voice, and Thistle followed, shadowy and standing right amid a thorn thicket where no one could have walked.

"Is that herself?" asked Ceallach, "or only something like it?— Meadhbh, don't trust it."

"Wiser still," said Thistle, and walked out of the brambles and held out her hand again, clearer and sterner than before. "But that way leads to An Beag and I doubt you would like that. Come, I say —Ceallach and Meadhbh, come now."

There was a wanting, a desire as strong as for the water horse, and first Ceallach and then Meadhbh started to go, but each held the other back in small hesitations that made one great one.

"So, well," said the Sidhe. "But I am called. I hear your father calling me. If he calls a third time I must go and leave you, and that would be dangerous. The woods are roused and he is in danger as deep as yours. Come, I say, come now!"

Meadhbh went. It was the part about her father in danger that won her; and Ceallach came running an instant later. "Ah!" Meadhbh cried in fright, for the Sidhe at once flung her gray cloak about them both and cut off the sun. Strong arms held them, and there was a scent of flowers and grass and a grayness which stole the sight like mist, passing then to dark. Meadhbh was falling asleep and knew she ought to be afraid, but she was not. Ceallach knew too and struggled, or thought that he did, but the sleep came on him: he heard the Sidhe whisper his name.

They slept, not wishing to, wrapped all in gray.

So Arafel carried them both as she came, and laid them gently on the bracken.

"No harm is on them," she said to their father. Her heart hurt her to see how the years had dealt with this Man. It hurt her most to see his fright, how he ran and fell to his knees next his children, and gathered them each in an arm, sleeping as they were, hugging them and holding them as if he had just had part of his heart torn from him and restored. Arafel sat down crosslegged where she stood so that she need not look down at him, and wistfully gazed on the three of them until Ciaran found Ms wits again. "They are sleeping," she assured him, for he might not understand that sleep. "It was easier to bring them so."

"Arafel," he said, holding his children against his heart, two red-and-golden heads nodded together beneath his fair beard. Tears ran on his face. The years had graven lines about his eyes. He was heavy with a man's full strength, and yet held his burden so gently his hands could not have bruised a flower.

So quickly the years fled. Each time she looked at him something of him had changed, and life seemed to have more and more power over him. "They have grown so," she said with a nod toward the children.

"Yes. They've grown." Pain touched his face, a patient kind of pain, long-suffering. "I hoped this time—I had most hope of you, that when I truly needed you—I hoped you had them."

"I." Arafel laid a hand on the stone at her breast. It was like a wound, his look. "No. You wrong me, Man."

"Not that you would do them harm. Never that."

"Or misguide them. Or take them into Eald without your know ing."

"Where were they then? Lost? Only lost, after all?"

"O Man, Man."

"I thought," he said, "perhaps there had gotten to be too much of the world about me for you to hear me any longer. That perhaps it was a place only they could go."

The pain was deep and everywhere, but there were no tears for it. He was at once too proud and too humble and it wounded her more than tears. "You do not understand," she said. "I've always heard you."

"And never came."

"The time—is not the same for me. There was a moment I could come, and I have left things now—O believe me, my dear friend, that you never walked in Eald unattended, going or coming."

"I had hoped for a word through the years," he said simply, and his brows knit together. "That, if nothing more." He wound his fingers gently in his children's red hair and looked down at them and up again earnestly. "But this is more. Far more. This is all I ask."

"There was a difference in this calling. I felt it. Ah, Ciaran, I ran, I ran. I cannot tell you all of it, not here. Never think that it was nothing to me that you came."

"They were in danger, then."

"They fared better in it than some would have. There's much of their father in them." She saw the fear and put out her hand to his. "A silly nix, a danger most to children. Keep them from the forest And yourself—O my friend, no more of walks into the wood. I shall come to you, rather. Things are darker than they were and the way has changed."

He had always had more sight than most. Fear crept in where pain had been. "How, changed?"

"This is not the place to talk of it. Hist, Branwyn is calling."

"Branwyn." A thousand distracted cares drew at him, graving lines on his face. He hugged his children and tried to get to his feet, but Arafel was quicker, and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Let me take the girl," Arafel said, "and come with me."

He yielded up his daughter and Arafel took the girl into her arms, within her cloak, while he took his son and rose.

It was the merest shifting through the shadow, the lightest journey —and very swift. The walls of Caer Wiell showed beyond the mist, and grew out of shadow into daylight.

"So they are safe and home," said Arafel, and already the children were beginning to rub at their eyes as at the passing of an ordinary sleep. She set Meadhbh on her feet on the ground and steadied her, and looked into her face a moment. "Are you quite well, then?"

Meadhbh blinked and nodded dazedly. And Ceallach waked thor oughly and hugged his father's neck as Meadhbh discovered her father and her home at once and hurled herself against him to throw her arms about him.

"They know me as Thistle," Arafel said, beginning to depart into the night of her own world. "And that is best."

"Come back," Ciaran cried after her.

She stayed, half in his sunlight.

"Come soon," he wished her.

"To Caer Wiell? Yes, if you wish that. I shall come tonight—Yes, I shall. It is time I did that. Look for me at moonrise."

The children bunked and then losing sight of her, tumbled words one over the other, of water horses and river nixes and paths and rescues. Arafel heard them, even so.

And went her own way.

"She sent it back," said Meadhbh to her father, "into the river then, and we were afraid of her—minding what you always said about strangers—" It stuck in her throat to tell him what choice she had been offered, for that was too deep and too dark and too much knowledge of her growing heart to show to anyone, most of all any one she loved. Somehow she passed over all the rest of it, even know ing the Name of the creature; and so did Ceallach. She was not the same; she would never be the same again after knowing how to choose, and neither would Ceallach; and she discovered this as she faced her father, at once afraid and desperately sure what she was doing. She had begun to grow up and apart in a way she thought was right—but it was not something to speak of.

And Ciaran saw the secrets nesting in both his children, not being blind. "You have been with the Sidhe," he said, and felt the least and most desperate jealousy of those he loved most in all the world. "And some things are not for ordinary ears. There are those who would be frightened by hearing it, do you understand? Be wise and quiet on it." So he took them each by the hand and brought them toward the gates of Caer Wiell.

A horn began to sound from the walls, waking echoes across the hills. The lost was found, and now the searchers through the forest must come safely home. Following these echoes other horns began to sound through the forest and along the river as searchers heard and passed the signal on.

Women came running before ever they reached the gates, and quickest was Branwyn, who had been watching from the walls and seeking too with what small portion of Eald she held in her heart. She came running, her braids whipping loose, her skirts aflurry, her slippered feet hardly touching the stones. She caught her errant chil dren in her arms and looked at their faces and up at Ciaran's and wept.

"They were with her," Branwyn said hotly. "I knew, I knew—"

"No. They were not with her," Ciaran said. "But she found them."

Branwyn's face went pale beneath its flush, all her knowings in disorder. She held Meadhbh's face and then Ceallach's between her hands and looked them in the eyes, kneeling there on the muddy stones beneath the gate—looked last and most desperately at Ciaran, hearing silences. Muirne came, wiping her nose and her eyes and begging everyone's forgiveness. "You must beg Muirne's pardon," Ciaran said sternly to his children. "You left her, as I hear it."

Meadhbh made a grave curtsy, difficult to manage within her mother's arm; and: "I beg pardon, Muirne," Ceallach said faintly.

Ciaran looked at all those round about, and still there was a hush on all the crowd except the children. "Our thanks," he said. "Noth ing is amiss. The lost is found." He set a hand on his son's shoulder as Branwyn took Meadhbh in hand, and they passed through the gates of the hold he had held as lord the last ten years.