The Last Light of the Sun (48 page)

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 reassurance, 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—”

“We will learn more soon,” Osbert said quietly. “I shouldn’t have asked. There’s little point in guessing like children at a riddle game.”

And that was true enough, as most things Osbert said were. But it was then, in precisely that moment, looking at her father’s crippled, beloved chamberlain, that Kendra realized that she knew what was happening.

She knew. As simple and appalling as that. And it was because of the Cyngael prince who had come to them, not her brother. Something had changed in her life the moment the Cyngael had crossed the stream the day before, towards where she and the others were lying on summer grass, idling a morning away.

Just as she had the night before, she knew where Alun ab Owyn had gone. And Athelbert was with him.

As simple as that. As impossible. Had she asked for this? Done something that had brought it upon her as a curse?
Am I a witch?
the thought came, intrusive. Her hand closed, a little desperately, on the sun disk about her neck. Witches sold love potions, ground up herbs for ailments, blighted crops and cattle for a fee, held converse with the dead. Could go safely into enchanted places.

She took her hand from the disk. Closed her eyes a moment.

It is in the nature of things that when we judge actions to be memorably courageous, they are invariably those that have an impact that resonates: saving other lives at great risk, winning a battle, losing one’s life in a valiant attempt to do one or the other. A death of that sort can lead to songs and memories at least as much—sometimes more—than a triumph. We celebrate our losses, knowing how they are woven into the gift of our being here.

Sometimes, however, an action that might be considered as gallant as any of these will take its shape and pass unknown. No singer to observe and mourn, or celebrate, no vivid, world-changing consequence to spur the harpist’s fingers.

Kendra rose quietly, as she always did, murmured her excuses, and left the hall.

She didn’t think anyone noticed. Men were coming and going, despite the hour. The beacon fire’s tidings were running through the city. Outside, in the torchlit corridor, she found herself walking a little more quickly
than usual, as though she needed to keep moving or she would falter. The guard at the doors, someone she knew, smiled at her and opened to the street outside.

“An escort, my lady?”

“None needed. My thanks. I’m going only back to chapel and my lady mother.”

The chapel was to the left so she had to turn that way at the first meeting of lanes. She paused, out of sight, long enough for him to close the door again. Then she went back the other way, heading towards the wall and gates for the second time in as many nights.

Footsteps, a known voice.

“You lied to him. Where are you going?”

She turned. Felt a swift, unworthy flowering of relief, offered thanks to the god. She would be stopped now, would not have to do this after all. Gareth, his face taut with concern, came up to her. She had no idea what to say.

So offered truth. “Gareth. Listen. I can’t tell you how, and it frightens me, but I am quite certain Athelbert is in the spirit wood.”

He had taken a blow this evening with the tidings, harder than hers. He was still adjusting to it. She saw him step back a little.
A witch! Unclean!
she thought. Couldn’t help but think.