He was drenched in sweat. “I’m … I’m sorry,” he stammered to Athelbert beside him. “This is my doing, my mistake.”
“Pray,” was all the Anglcyn said.
Alun did so, choking on the rotting stench that filled the grove. He saw Cafall trembling, ahead of him. The horses were steadier, strangely. One had whinnied; now they stood transfixed, statues, as if unable to move or make a sound. And he remembered how he and a different horse had been immobilized like that inside another pool in another wood when the queen of the faeries had passed by.
This was, he knew, another creature from that spirit world. What else could it be? Massive, carrying the odour of decaying animal and death. Not like the faeries. This was … something beyond them. “Get down!” he said to Thorkell.
The Erling had not knelt, didn’t turn his head. Afterwards, Alun would have a thought about that, but in that moment whatever it was that bulked beyond the clearing roared aloud.
The trees shook. It seemed to Alun, ears and mind blasted by immensity of sound, that the stars above the forest had to be swinging in their courses like carried censers in a wind.
Almost deafened, his hands in helpless spasm, he stared into the blank night and waited for this death to claim them. Cafall was on his belly, flat to the ground. Beside the dog, still on his feet, Thorkell Einarson took his hammer and—moving slowly, as if in some dream Alun was having, or pushing into a gale—he laid the shaft across both his palms and he stepped towards the sound, and then he set the hammer down, carefully, an offering upon the grass.
Alun didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything beyond terror and the awareness of their transgression and the engulfing power just out of sight.
Thorkell spoke then, in the Erling tongue and, his ears still ringing, Alun yet understood enough to hear him say, “We seek only passage, lord. Only that. Will harm no living creature of the wood, if it be thy will to grant us leave.” And then there was something else, spoken more softly, and Alun did not hear it.
There came a second roaring, even louder than the first, whether in reply or entirely oblivious to the feeble words of a mortal man, and it seemed to those in the glade as if that noise could flatten trees.
It was Athelbert, of the three of them, who thought he heard another thing within that sound, woven into it. He never put it into words, then or after, but what he sensed while he cowered, stuttering prayers in the gut-harrowing certainty of dying, was pain. Something older than he could even attempt to fathom. The downward reach of his soul didn’t go deep enough for that. He heard it, though, and had no idea why this was allowed.
There was no third roaring.
Alun had been waiting for it, instinctively, but then, in the silence, it occurred to him that triads, things in threes, were a shaping of bards, a mortal conceit, a way of the Cyngael, not a grounded truth of the spirit world.
He would take that, with some other things, away from that glade. For it seemed they were going to be allowed to leave. The silence continued. It grew, rippled, reclaimed the woods around. None of them moved. The stars did, ceaselessly, far above, and the blue moon was still rising, climbing the long track laid out for it in the sky. Time does not pause, for men or beasts, though it might seem to us to have stopped at some moments, or we might wish it to do so at others, to suspend a shining, call back a gesture or a blow, or someone lost. The dog stood up.
THORKELL WAS STILL SHIVERING. The odour was gone, that smell of maggot-eaten meat and fur and old blood. He felt sweat drying on his skin, cold in the night. He found himself eerily calm. He was thinking, in fact, of how many people he had killed in his raiding years. Another in an alley last night, once a shipmate. And of all of them, named or nameless, known, or seen only in the red moment his hammer or axe blade slew them, the one he so much wanted back, the moment he’d reclaim from time if he could, was Nikar Kjellson’s killing in the tavern at home a year ago.
In the otherworldly stillness of this glade, he could very nearly see himself going out through the low tavern door, stooping under the beam into a soft night, walking home under stars through a quiet town to his wife and son, instead of accepting one more flask of ale and a last round of wagering on the tumbled dice.
He’d have that one back, if the world were a different place.
It was different now, he thought, after what had just happened, but not in the way he needed it to be. It occurred to him, with something bordering astonishment, that he might weep. He rubbed a hand through his beard, drew it across his eyes, felt time grip him again, carrying them, small boats on a too-wide sea.
“Why are we alive?” Alun ab Owyn asked. His voice was rough. It was, Thorkell thought, the right question, the only one worth asking, and he had no answer.
“We didn’t matter enough to kill,” Athelbert said, surprising the other two. Thorkell looked over at him. They were shapes here, only, all of them. “What did you say to it, at the end? When you put down the hammer?”
Thorkell was trying to decide what to answer when the dog growled, deep in its throat.
“Dear Jad,” Alun said.
Thorkell saw where he was pointing. He caught his breath. Something green was shimmering at the edge of their glade, beyond the pool; a human form, or nearly so. He looked the other way, quickly. A second one on their right, then a third, beside that one. No sound at all this time, just the pale green glowing of these figures. He turned back to the Cyngael prince.
“Do you know … ? Is this what you … ?” he began.
“No,” said Alun. And again, “No.” Flatly, no hope offered. “Cafall, hold!”
The dog was still growling, straining forward. The horses, Thorkell saw, were agitated now; there was a risk they might break free of their tethers, or hurt themselves trying.
The shapes, whatever they were, were about the height of a man, but the shimmer and glow of them, wavering, made their appearance hard to determine. He wouldn’t have seen anything if they hadn’t cast that faint green illumination. There were at least six of them, perhaps one or two more behind those ringing the glade. His hammer was on the grass, where he’d laid it down.
“Do I shoot?” said Athelbert.
“No!” Thorkell said quickly. “I swore that we’d harm no living thing.”
“So we wait till they … ?”
“We don’t know what this is,” Alun said.
“You imagine they’re bringing pillows for our weary heads?” Athelbert snapped.
“I have no idea what to imagine. I can only—”
A never-finished thought, that one. Speech can be rendered meaningless sometimes, the sought-after clarity of words. The fierce white light that burst from the pond, shattering darkness like glass, made all three of them throw hands before their eyes and cry aloud.
They were blinded, as unable to see as they had been in the blackness. Too much light, too little light: the same consequence. They were men in a place where they ought not to have been. The sounds in the glade were their own cries, fading in the charged air, the horses’ neighing, thrashing of hooves. Nothing from the dog now, no noise at all from the green creatures that had encircled them, or from whatever had made that annihilating flare of light, which was also gone now. It was black again.
Alun, standing rigid and afraid, eyes clenched shut in pain, caught a scent, heard a rustling. A hand claimed his. Then a voice at his ear, music, scarcely a breath, “Drop your iron. Please. Come. I must get away from it. The spruaugh are gone.”
Fumbling, he let fall his sword and belt, let her lead him, his senses dazzled, eyes useless, heart painful, too large for his chest.
“Wait! I … can’t leave the others,” he stammered, after they’d gone a little distance from the glade.
“Why?” she said, but she did stop.
He’d known she would say that. They were impossibly different, the two of them, beyond his power to even nearly comprehend. The scent of her was intoxicating. His knees felt weak, her touch conjured a
kind of madness. She had come for him.
“I won’t leave the others,” he corrected. There were flashes and spirals of light in his field of vision. It was painful when he opened his eyes. He still couldn’t see. “What … what were … ?”
“Spruaugh.” He could hear disgust in her voice, could imagine her hair changing colour as she spoke, but he still couldn’t see. It occurred to him to be afraid again, to wonder if he would be forever blinded by that shattering flash, but even with the thought came the first hints of returning vision. She was a spilling light beside him.
“What are … ?”
“We don’t know. Or I don’t. The queen might. They are mostly in this forest. A few come into our small one, linger near us, but not often. They are cold and ugly, soulless, without grace. They try, sometimes, to make the queen attend to them, flying to her with tales when we do wrong. But mostly they stay away from where we are, in here.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“For you? Everything is dangerous here. You should not have come.”
“I know that. There was no choice.” He could almost see her. Her hair was an amber glow.
“No choice?” She laughed, rippling.
He said, “Did you feel you had a choice when you rescued me?” It was as if they had to teach each other how the world was made, or seen.
A silence, as she considered. “Is that … what you meant?”
He nodded. She was still holding his hand. Her fingers were cool. He brought them to his lips. She traced the outline of his mouth. Amid everything, after everything, here was desire. And wonder. She had come.
“What was it? Before them. The thing that—”
Fingers flat against his mouth, pressing. “We do not name it, for fear it will answer to the name. There is a reason why your people do not come here, why we almost never do. That one, not the spruaugh. It is older than we are.”
He was silent for a time. Her hand was moving again, tracing his face. “I don’t know why we’re alive,” he said.
“Nor do I.” Matter-of-factly, a simple truth. “One of you did make an offering.”
“The Erling. Thorkell. His hammer, yes.”
She said nothing, though he thought she was about to. Instead, she stepped nearer, rose upon her toes, and kissed him on the lips, tasting of moonlight, though it was dark where they stood, except for her. The blue moon outside, above, shining over his own lands, hers, over the seas. He brought his hands up, touched her hair. He could see the small, shining impossibility of her. A faerie in his arms.
He said, “Will we die here?”
“You think I can know what will come?”
“I know that I can’t.”
She smiled. “I can keep the spruaugh from you.”
“Can you guide us? To Brynnfell?”
“That is where you are going?”
“The Erlings are, we think. Another raid.”
She made a face, distaste more than anything else. Offended rather than fearful or dismayed. Iron and blood, near to their small wood and pool. And, truly, why should the deaths of mortal men cause a spirit such as this dismay, Alun thought.
Then he had another thought. Before he could back away from it he said, “You could go ahead? Warn them? Brynn has seen you. He might … come up the slope, if you were there again.”
Brynn had been there with him after the battle. And in that pool in the wood when he was young. He might fight his visions of the spirit world, but surely, surely he would not deny her if she came to him.
She stepped back. Her hair amber again, soft light among tall trees. “I cannot do that and guard you.”
“I know,” Alun said.
“Or guide.”
He nodded. “I know. We are hoping that Cafall can.”
“The dog? He might. It is many days for you.”
“Five or six, we thought.”
“Perhaps.”
“And you can be there … ”
“Sooner than that.”
“Will you?”
She was so small, delicate as spray from a waterfall. He could see her chasing a thought, her hair altering as she did, dark, then bright again. She smiled. “I might grieve for you. The way mortals do. I may start to understand.”
He swallowed, with sudden difficulty. “I … we will hope not to die here. But there are many people at risk. You saw what happened the last time they came.”
She nodded, gravely. “This is what you wish?”
It was what he needed. Wishes were another thing. He said, “It will be a gift, if you do this.”
So still a place, where they were. There ought to have been more noises in a wood at night, the pad of the animals that hunted now, scurry of those that moved along branches, between roots, fleeing. It was silent. Perhaps the light of her, he thought … steering the creatures of the forest away.
She said, serious as children could sometimes be, “You will have taught me sorrow.”
“Will you call it a gift?” He remembered what she’d said the night before.
She bit her lip. “I do not know. But I will go home to the hill above Brynnfell and try to tell him there are men coming, from the sea. How do you … how do mortals say farewell?”
He cleared his throat. “Many different ways.” He bent, with all the grace he could command, and kissed her on each cheek, and then upon the mouth. “I would not have thought my life would offer such a gift as you.”
She looked, he thought, surprised. After a moment, she said, “Stay with the dog.”
She turned, was moving away, carrying brightness and music. He said, in a panic, sudden and too loud, startling them both, “Wait. I don’t know your name.”
She smiled. “Neither do I,” she said, and went.
Darkness rushed back in her wake. The glade and pond were not far away. Alun made his way there. Called out as he approached, so as not to startle them. Cafall met him at the clearing’s edge.
Both men were standing.
“Do we know what that was?” Thorkell asked. “The light?”
“Another spirit,” Alun said. “This one a friend. She drove them away with it. I don’t think … we can’t stay here. I believe we need to keep moving.”
“Tsk. And here I was, imagining you’d gone to fetch those pillows for our heads,” said Athelbert.
“Sorry. Dropped them on the way back,” Alun replied.
“Dropped your sword and belt, too,” said the Anglcyn prince. “Here they are.” Alun took both, buckled the belt, adjusted the hang of his sword.
“Thorkell, your weapon?” asked Athelbert.
“It stays here,” said the Erling.
Alun saw Athelbert nod his head. “I thought as much. Take my sword. I’ll use the bow.”
“Cafall?” said Alun. The dog padded over. “Take us home.”
They untied and mounted their horses, left glade and silent pond behind, though never the memory of them, pushing westward in the dark on a narrow, subtle track, following the dog, a hammer left behind them in the grass.
Kendra would have liked to say that it was because of concern for her brother, an awareness of him, that she knew what she knew that night, but it wasn’t so.
Word, or a first word, came to Esferth very late. The king’s messengers sent from the sea strand to Drengest had carried orders that one ship should go to the Cyngael—to Prince Owyn in Cadyr, who was closest—with word of a possible Erling raid upon Brynnfell.
On the way to Drengest, the three outriders had divided, on orders, one of them racing his tidings to the nearest of the hilltop beacons. From there the message had come north in signal fires. The Erlings were routed, many of them slain. The rest had fled. Prince Athelbert had gone away on a journey. His brother was to be kept safe. The king and fyrd would be home in two days’ time. Further orders would follow.
Osbert dispatched runners to carry word of victory to the queen and to the city and the tents outside. There was a fair about to begin, men needed rea
ssurance, urgently. The rest of the message was not for others to hear.
It wasn’t actually difficult, Kendra thought, as the meaning of the words sank in, to realize what lay beneath the tidings of her brother. You didn’t have to be wise, or old.
There were a dozen of them in the hall. She had found it impossible to sleep, and equally difficult to stay all night in chapel praying. This hall, with Osbert, seemed the best place. Gareth had obviously felt the same way; Judit had been here earlier, was somewhere else now.
She looked over at Gareth, saw how pale he had become. Her heart went out to him. Younger son, the quiet one. Had never wanted more than the role life seemed to be offering him. You might even have said what he really wanted was less of a role.
But the very specific instructions—kept safe—said a great deal about what sort of journey their older brother was taking, though not where. If King Aeldred and the Anglcyn ended up with only one male heir left, life was about to change for Gareth. For all of them, Kendra thought. She looked around. She had no idea where Judit was; their mother was at chapel still, of course.
“Athelbert. In the name of Jad, what is … what has he done now?” Osbert asked, of no one in particular.
The chamberlain seemed to have aged tonight, Kendra thought. Burgred’s death would be part of it. He’d be moving through memories right now, even as he struggled to deal with unfolding events. The past always came back. In a way you could say that none of those who’d lived through that winter in Beortferth had ever left the marshes behind. Her father’s fevers were only the most obvious form of that.
“I have no idea,” someone said, from down the table. “Gone chasing them?”
“They have ships,” Gareth protested. “He can’t chase them.”
“Some of them might not have made it back to the sea.”
“Then he’d have the fyrd, they’d all go, and this message wouldn’t say—”