Bryni would have come with him the first few miles, but he had not wanted that. No long-drawn farewells at all that he could help. He had not even gone for the last time to look at Dog’s grave or the girl with the bird and the flowering branch. He had simply picked up his cloak and the old well worn sword and his small bundle of belongings and taken his leave of the household—all save Lilla, who at the last moment was not there—as briefly as though he would be back by nightfall.
This was his true leave-taking, this pause between the Intake and the Wild, and the last look back towards the familiar steading beside its wind-shaped apple trees; and when he turned his face northward again and went on into the woods towards the ferry, a part of his life would be finished and laid away behind him, and he would be walking forward into the future.
A little rustle among the bushes of the woodshore made him turn quickly, and Lilla stepped out on to the old paved road, with burrs clinging in her yellow hair. Owain’s heart sank a little. ‘Why, Lilla! What brings you out here, then?’
‘You,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I hoped that you would not be gone beyond my catching up with you. I came to bid you the Sun and Moon as your path.’ And then in a little rush: ‘No I didn’t; I came to say—don’t go, Owain.’
Owain’s heart sank further. ‘I must go, Lilla.’
‘Why? We are your people—the nearest people you have. I can scarcely remember the time when you were not here, and nor can Helga and Bryni; the hearth will be desolate without you.’
‘You’ll be going to a hearth of your own, soon. I don’t belong here, anyway.’
She was silent a moment, then she came nearer and put her hand urgently on his that held the bundle. ‘Then let me come too. I don’t mind where. I’ll belong wherever you do, if you’ll let me come too.’
Owain was silent also, looking into her small round pleading face. Then he shook his head. ‘I’ve a girl of my own, you see.’
She dropped her hand as though it had been stung. ‘Where did you find her? At the Kentish Court?’
‘She was my girl before ever I wore your father’s thrall-ring round my neck.’
‘That’s a long time,’ Lilla said, her eyes huge and grave on his face. ‘Do you think that she will have waited for you?’
He looked down at her very kindly. ‘I don’t know. But I am going to see.’
‘And if she has not waited—’
Again he shook his head. ‘No, I shan’t come back, even if she hasn’t waited. It is as I said: I don’t belong here. And you—you want a good steady lad of your own age, like Horn.’ How pompous and grey-bearded that sounded. Well, if it made Lilla laugh at him, as he knew Regina would have laughed at him, that would be something.
But Lilla did not laugh. She only said in a small flat voice, ‘I suppose you are right. I suppose I never really thought that you would let me come with you.’
‘I know I’m right, but thank you for wanting to come, all the same.’ He gave a little hitch to his bundle. ‘You must go home now and I must be on my way.’
‘Yes—it is no good starting on a wayfaring with the day half spent. The Sun and the Moon on your path, then, Owain.’
‘And on yours, Lilla. Life be kind to you.’ He knew that she wanted him to kiss her, so that she might have it to remember, afterwards. But the less she had to remember the better for her and Horn. So he only took her by the shoulder and turned her round. ‘Go now, and don’t look back, and I won’t look back either.’
He stood for a long moment to watch her walk away, feeling completely wretched, because he knew that she was crying. Then he hitched up his bundle again, and turned northward into the trees.
Weeks later, brown and ragged and travel-hard, lean as a winter wolf, Owain stood among the hazel and wayfaring scrub of another woodshore, looking out over cleared land, and knew that his memory had not played him false. He had remembered every detail of that long road south with Beornwulf; he had turned it round and followed it northward in his mind so often in the early days, and again in these last few months; and now here he stood, just where he had stood turning for one last look back before he stumbled on after his new master, eleven years ago.
But he had had slow travelling, sometimes hunting as he went, sometimes stopping to put in a day’s work on a farm in exchange for a meal and a night in the corner of a hay loft; and once his memory had been unsure and he had taken a track that carried him too far westward and cost him two days to get back on to his proper trail again. And already summer was falling behind; the first yellow leaves were falling from the birch trees, and in the open land before him the autumn ploughing had begun.
For a little, standing there on the woodshore, he did not want to go forward, thinking suddenly that Lilla had been right: eleven years was a long time.
Then he shook his shoulders and took a new hold of his bundle, and strode on into the driftway that led up through the cultivated land past the steading gate. He looked about him eagerly as he walked, in case Regina was working in the kale garth or the orchard plot; half expecting her to know that he was near, and come running to meet him, ready to take up again the journey that they had had to lay down here so long ago. But they would not make for Gaul this time, even if they had had the gold. Gaul had been a plan for despair and defeat, for the black darkness. It was different now. ‘Not the dawn yet, but I think the dawn wind stirring.’ It came to him suddenly, but as though it were a thing he had known for a long time, that he would take her to Priscus and Priscilla.
But she was not in the kale garth nor the orchard plot, and she did not come running. He was at the steading gate now, and the dogs were baying at the ends of their chains. A woman with children clinging about her blue skirts appeared in the house-place doorway and cried out sharply to quieten the dogs, and then seeing Owain, stood waiting for him with her hands on her broad hips, as he came up past the midden. She was a plump pretty creature with a full pink mouth and eyes as blue as her kirtle and as hard as pebbles. ‘If you want my man or his father,’ she said without a greeting, ‘they’re down at Ella’s stead, helping with the thrashing.’
‘Good fortune on the house and the woman of the house,’ Owain said. ‘I was not wanting your man or his father. I come seeking a girl—a girl called Regina. Is she here?’
The woman stared at him for a moment, and then laughed in his face. ‘A girl called Regina? Why, she was years older than I am.’
‘Was.’ Owain had a sudden feeling of coldness in the very midst of him, that made it difficult to breathe. ‘Is she—not here any more, Mistress?’
‘Not now. She was here until not much more than a moon since. Then she ran away.’
The cold clutch on Owain relaxed, leaving him a little sick. ‘Why?’ he demanded.
She looked at him sharply and consideringly. ‘Who are you, then? What business is Regina of yours? I have never seen you round here before.’
‘No, you would not,’ Owain said wearily. ‘I have not been able to come back until now. It was I who left her here.’
Her eyes widened, and she gave a snort that was between laughter and scorn. ‘So! I’ve heard that story! She always thought you would come one day.’
‘Why—did she run away, Mistress?’ Owain asked again.
She looked at him in silence a moment, while the children stared bright-eyed and curious round her skirts. Then she seemed to make up her vixenish mind. ‘I’ll tell you. My man’s mother made a waiting-woman and a friend of her, and that was a fine thing for her so long as the old woman lived, but she died at hay harvest, and then my man would have taken Regina for his other woman. The Great Mother alone knows why, for she was thin and thorny as a bramble spray and none so young as she used to be, either.’
Owain was remembering the boy like a handsome bull calf, who had thrust forward to stare at Regina as she lay unconscious beside the fire. ‘And so she ran away,’ he said.
‘Yes, and I helped her. If she had wanted him, I’d have poisoned her.
’ He saw how hard the blue eyes were, and believed it. ‘As it was, I gave her a cloak and some food and a knife, and told my man that she lay sick in the woman’s quarters, for three days after she was away. He beat me for that, but I didn’t care.’
Owain was not listening to that part of the story. ‘But where to?’ he burst out. ‘Where would she go? What would she do? She had no one to turn to—’
The woman shrugged. ‘She said she would go, and she went northward. I know no more than that.’
‘But did she not tell you what was in her mind to do? If she thought that I would come, did she not leave any word for me?’
‘Maybe she did not know herself what she would do, or maybe she feared that if I knew, he might drag it out of me. She need not have feared, if that was the way of it.’
Owain stood looking at her, trying to be sure if she was telling the truth; but the hard eyes met his without any shadow of guile in them, and he could think of no reason why she should be lying. Slowly he straightened his shoulders, and hitched up his bundle. ‘Then I’ll be on my way, Mistress.’
She shrugged again. ‘As you please. Do you want a drink of milk before you go?’
‘Not in this house, New Mistress, since the Old Mistress is no more here to give it to me,’ Owain said, and turned and trudged away.
Outside the steading gate he checked a moment, then set off north-westward following the stream without any very clear idea of his direction, save that he wanted to get away from the farm. Once he was clear of the farm he would be able to think. He felt so dazed that it was not until he was actually among the scrub of the woodshore that he remembered the other thing he had left here: his father’s ring.
He found the great thorn tree just as he remembered it, standing out from the forest, with its crown of branches spread triumphantly against the sky. It was so old that the years since he left the ring in its keeping had made no difference to it at all, only the leaves that had been, green with early summer were tinged with russet here and there, and the berries turning darkly red. He found the place, where one of the twisted roots thrust out from the bole, and squatting down beside it, pulled his knife from his belt and began to poke through the moss and leaf-mould. In a little the knife point found something, but it did not feel as a ring wrapped in rotten cloth would feel, more like a stone, and the point grated on it. Just a stone in the ground, yet he did not remember to have come up against a stone when he buried the ring there, and however he probed about, he could find no trace of the ring itself.
He dropped the knife on the moss beside him, and thrust his hand into the hole he had made, feeling about and working the damp crumbling earth with his fingers. Something soft and cold and many-legged twisted under his thumb and ran, but still he could not feel the ring—only the thing like a stone that was just about where the ring should have been. It was rounded and regular. Suddenly he knew with a little jump of the heart that it was too regular for a stone; whatever it was, it was man-made.
He worked it free with his fingers, and pulled it out. It was a tiny earthen pot such as the women used for salves and unguents, and the narrow mouth had been sealed with a lump of streamside clay. With his heart racing, Owain picked up his knife and dashed the hilt down on to the little pot. It fell in shards like the petals of a brown flower in his palm, and in their midst, he saw a lock of hair black as a rook’s wing, twisted close and tied with a strand of scarlet thread.
So Regina had left word for him after all, in the best way she could, seeing that she could not write. And as he poked the broken shards back into the hole under the tree-root and flattened the earth back over them, Owain was trying desperately to think out what it was she had tried to tell him. In the first place, she had taken his father’s ring, and left the strand of her hair in its place to tell him, if ever he came that way, that it was she who had taken it. (So she must have seen and understood, in that brief moment when her eyes were open, what it was that he was doing among the roots of the thorn tree.) And that could surely only mean that she was hoping for him to find her again. And that could only mean that she had made for some place where he would think of looking for her. She could not have gone seeking him, for she would not have known in all South Britain, where to seek. For a moment he wondered whether she might have gone to Priscus and Priscilla, but he did not think he had ever told her about them—they had not talked much about things that were past, they had been too busy living from day to day. And then with the suddenness of the blue flash of a jay’s wing through the undergrowth, he knew that she would have gone home to Viroconium.
He flattened the torn moss back over the loose earth, and thrust his knife again into his belt. He untied the scarlet thread, and knotted the long strand of black hair again and again round his wrist, as the best way that he could think of, to keep it safe. Then he got to his feet, picked up his ragged bundle, and set off for Viroconium after Regina.
He did not attempt to retrace the way that they had come so long ago, but simply headed north-westward as well as he could and as fast as he could, until he struck the great double-track frontier road that he had followed twice before. After that it was simple enough, so far as finding the way was concerned. But it was a gruelling journey, none the less, for he was hunted on by sharp anxiety for Regina, who had always been afraid of the world outside her city walls: Regina alone in the ruins of Viroconium, if indeed she had got so far, after eleven sheltered years that must surely have made her unfit to fend for herself in the wilds. Every time he stopped to hunt for food the delay was maddening to him, and often he went hungry on a handful of blackberries, rather than stop to hunt at all. It was wild country here in the west, too, still border country for all the treaties that man might make, not like the long-settled lands further east; and once he saw the smoke of a burning farm in the distance, and never knew whether it was a Saxon or a British blaze.
But the day came at last, a still autumn day, turning towards evening, when Owain came loping wearily up the straight stretch to the South Gate of Viroconium. The yellow poplar leaves were drifting down. The gravestones of the old burial ground had sunk into a tangle of elder and wild rose, and the brambles had arched out to engulf the road.
It looked as though no one had passed that way in a hundred years, and Owain’s heart sank a little. But that was foolishness, he told himself; one girl would scarcely have left a cleared track behind her—nor her footsteps marked with the little three-fold clover, like the Princess of his childhood’s legends. He passed the turf banks of the Amphitheatre, and came to the crumbling gate-arch, and went through into the city.
The wilderness had been kind to Viroconium. It had come flowing in like a slow green tide—like the compassion of God, Owain thought, looking about him—to cover the sorrow and the scars. In the year that Kyndylan died, his city had been raw with the newness of its ruin; but now the silent streets had become green ways, and everywhere, wherever he looked, was the soft grey smoke of seeding willow-herb. The horror, too, was gone, and Owain thought that under this in-flowing of the Wild, the old man with his bag of gold must surely sleep as quietly as the standard bearer of the 14th Legion whose headstone had long ago collapsed into the brambles.
He walked on slowly, listening and looking about him as he went, towards the heart of the city and the Palace of Kyndylan the Fair. He was thirsty, and he turned aside from the street, heading for the gap in the wall and the old short cut that would take him by the grotto; maybe there was still water to be had there. The garden of Kyndylan’s Palace had been a flowering wilderness when last he came that way; now it was a tangle of hawthorn and elder and run-wild roses, so dense that in places he had to cast about to find a way round and through and between the thickets.
A thrush gorging on the elderberries flew off with an alarm call, as he ducked under a bush, but somewhere ahead of him a robin sang on quite undisturbed, and ahead of him also, he heard the trickle of falling water. He came round a tangle of bushes and found himself on th
e edge of the well-hollow. Below him the three steps, mossier than he remembered them, led down to the grotto under its overarching hazel, and the water still fell through the bronze jaws of the lion mask, into the basin and away under the stones and ferns. And standing with her head turned expectantly towards the sound of his coming, the crock that she had been filling still in her hand, was a woman.
A tall very thin woman in the rags of a russet kirtle, her face brown-skinned and narrow under the heavy masses of black hair knotted about her head, who stood looking up at him out of black-fringed eyes that were as pale as rain. There had been birds all round her feet, but they had taken fright at his coming, and burst upward into the hazel tree, so that the branches over her head were full of the rustling of their wings.
‘Regina,’ Owain said.
She did not smile, or make any movement to set the crock down. ‘Owain,’ she said. ‘I knew that you would come one day.’ And that was all.
Owain went down the three steps into the grotto, and took the crock from her and set it down. Her hands were cold as though she had been holding them in the running water. ‘I came as soon as I could,’ he said, ‘and I followed on as soon as I found your message.’
‘I hoped you would understand. I could not have left the ring there, anyway, lest they cleared the land properly one day and found it; but I hoped that if I left my hair to tell you that it was I who had taken it, you might guess where I had gone, and follow after.’ Her hands had gone to her neck as she spoke, where something hung on a scarlet thread under her kirtle. She pulled it up and bit the thread through, and gave it to him. ‘There—take your father’s ring again.’
He took it from her without a word, knowing the familiar feel of it without looking, and slipped it on to his signet finger. It fitted now, as though it had been made for him. And all the while he never stopped looking at Regina, trying to join this woman who was ‘thin and thorny as a bramble spray and none so young as she used to be’ on to the girl he remembered and had somehow expected to find again.