The Last Light of the Sun

THIRTEEN

Given what followed, it might have been a mistake to stop for what remained of the night, but at the time there hadn't seemed to be much choice.

All three men were hardened and fit and two of them were young, but they'd been awake for two days and nights and in the saddle. In this forest, Thorkell had judged it more dangerous to keep moving in exhaustion, tired horses stumbling, than to stop. They could be attacked as easily while moving, in any case.

He made it easier for the others, asking a respite for himself, though he undermined that somewhat by offering to take the first watch by the pool they found. They filled their flasks. Water was important. Food would become a problem when his small supply ran out. They hadn't decided if they would hunt here; probably they'd have to, though Thorkell knew what his grandmother would have said about killing in a spirit wood.

All three of them drank deeply; the horses did the same. The water was cool and sweet. There was no thought of making a fire. Athelbert hadn't eaten at all; Thorkell gave him bread in the darkness, some of the cold meat. They tethered the horses. Then both princes, Anglcyn and Cyngael, fell asleep almost immediately. Thorkell approved. You needed to be able to do that; it was a skill, a task, your turn on watch would come soon enough.

He stretched out his legs, leaned back against a tree, his hammer across his lap. He was weary but not sleepy. It was very black, sight was next to useless. He would have to listen, mostly. The dog came over, sank down beside him, head on paws. He could see the faint gleam of its eyes. He didn't actually like this dog, but he had a sense that there would be no hope of achieving this journey without Alun ab Owyn's hound.

He made his muscles relax. Shifted his neck from side to side, to ease the pain there. So many years, so many times he'd done this: night watch in a dangerous place. He'd thought he was through with it. No need to be on guard behind an oak door on Rabady Isle. Life twisted on you—or you twisted it for yourself. No man knew his ending, or even the next branching of his path.

Branching paths. In the quiet of the wood, his mind went back. That often happened when you were awake alone at night.

Once, in fog, on a raid in Ferrieres, he and Siggur and a small band of others had found themselves separated from the main party on a retreat to the coast. They'd gone too far inland for safety, but Siggur had been drinking steadily on that raid (so had Thorkell, truth be told) and they'd been reckless with it. They'd also been young.

They literally stumbled upon a sanctuary they hadn't even known about: a chapel and outbuildings hidden in a knife of a valley east of Champieres. They saw the chapel lights through mist. A sanctuary of the Sleepless Ones, at their endless vigil. There'd have been no lights to see them by, otherwise.

They attacked, screaming Ingavin's name, in the dense, blurred dark. Foolish beyond any words it was, for they were being pursued by the young Prince Carloman, who'd already proven himself a warrior, and it was not a time to be staying to raid, let alone with a dozen men.

But that branching path that had separated them from the body of their company made Thorkell Einarson's fortune. They killed twenty clerics and their cudgel-bearing servants in that isolated valley, seeing terror flare whitely in men's eyes before they fled from the northmen.

Laughing, blood-soaked and blood-drunk, they set fire to the outbuildings and took away all the sanctuary treasure they could carry. Those treasures were astonishing. That hidden complex turned out to be a burial place of royalty, and what they discovered in the recesses of side chapels and surrounding tombs was dazzling.

Siggur had found his sword there.

Being Siggur, he decreed, when they made their way back to the ships and found the others, that this portion of the raid's plunder belonged only to those who had been there. And being Siggur, he had no trouble enforcing his will. Every young man in Vinmark wanted to be one of the Volgan's shipmates in those days. They'd already begun using that name for him.

Thorkell supposed, sitting in darkness, entirely sober, that it could be fairly said that that friendship had shaped his life. Siggur had been very young when they'd started raiding, and Thorkell had been even younger, in awe that such a man seemed to consider him a companion, want him at his side, on a battlefield or tavern bench.

Siggur had never been a thoughtful, considering sort. He'd led by leading, by being at the front of every assault: faster, stronger, a little bit wilder than anyone else—except perhaps for the occasional berserkir who'd join them at times. He'd drunk more than any of them, awake and upright after the rest were snoring at benches or sprawled among the rushes of an ale-room floor.

Thorkell remembered—it was a well-known tale—the morning Siggur had come out of an inn with another raider, a man named Leif, after a full night of drinking, and challenged the other to a race—along the oars of their ships, moored side by each in the harbour.

Nothing like it had ever been done before. No one had ever thought of such a thing. Amid laughter and wagers flying, they roused and assembled their bleary-eyed men, had them take their places on board and level their oars straight out. Then, as the sun came up, the two leaders began a race, up one side of their ships, leaping from oar to oar, and back down the other side, swinging across by using the dragon-prows.

Leif Fenrikson didn't even make it to the prow.

Siggur went around his ship twice, at speed. That was Siggur at his best: blazoning his own prowess, and also showing that of his chosen companions, for a wobbling or uneven oar would have made him fall, no doubting it. Twice around he ran that course, with Thorkell and every other man on board holding steady for him as he raced alone, bare-chested, around and around them, laughing for the joy of being young and what he was, in morning's first light.

It changed over the years, for so much of youth cannot linger, and ale can bring rage and bitterness as easily as laughter and fellowship. Thorkell realized at some point that Siggur Volganson was never going to stop drinking and raiding, that he couldn't. That there was nothing in Ingavin's offered middle-world for him but cresting white foam waves in sunlight or storm, appearing out of the sea to beach the ships and ride or run inland to burn and kill. It was the doing that mattered. Gold, silver, gems, women, the slaves they took—these were only the world's reasons. Access to glory.

Salt spray and lit fires and testing himself again and again, endlessly, those were the things that drove him all his too-short life.

Never saying a word about these thoughts, Thorkell rowed and fought beside him until the end, which came in Llywerth, as everyone knew. Siggur had heard that the Cyngael were gathering a force to meet his ships, and had led them ashore regardless, for the joy of battling what might be there.

They were outnumbered there by the sea, a host assembled from each of the Cyngael's warring provinces. He offered single combat to them, a challenge hurled at all three princes of the Cyngael but taken up by a young man who was no prince at all. And Brynn ap Hywll, big and hard and sober as a Jad-mad cleric on a fasting retreat, had altered the northlands entirely by killing Siggur Volganson on that strand—and taking the sword he'd carried since the raid by Champieres.

It was the death Siggur had always sought. Thorkell knew it, even then, that same day. The only ending Siggur could have imagined. The infirmities of age, sober governing, kingship… could not even be conceived. But by then Thorkell already knew it was not his own idea of a life and its iron-swift ending. He'd yielded to the Cyngael, in a sudden stunned emptiness. In time he made his escape, for servitude wasn't his vision of existence either. He crossed the Wall and the Anglcyn lands and then autumn seas home. And then he made a home. It was his share of the gems and gold carried away from that chanced-upon valley in Ferrieres that bought him land and a farm on Rabady, in the year he decided it was time.

Rabady Isle was as good a place as any, and better than most, to shape a second life. He found a wife (and no man, living or dead, ever heard him say a word against her), had the two daughters, then his boy. Married the girls off when they were of age, and well enough, across on the mainland. Watched the boy—clever and with some spirit—as he grew. He did some more raiding in those years, chose ships and companions and landings. Salt got in the blood, the Erlings said. The sea was hard to leave behind you. But no wintering over for him, no grand designs of conquest. Sober captains, neatly planned journeys.

Siggur was dead; Thorkell wasn't going back to that time. He crossed the seas for what there was in it, for what he could bring home. No man would have said he was other than prosperous, Thorkell Einarson of Rabady Isle, once a companion of the Volgan himself. A good-enough life, with a hearth and a bed at the end, it seemed, not a blade-death on a distant shore. No man living knew his end.

Here he was, overseas again, in a wood where no man should be. And how had that come to pass? The oath sworn to ap Hywll's wife, yes, but he'd broken oaths over the years. He'd done so when he first escaped the Cyngael, hadn't he, after surrendering?

He could have found a way to do the same thing here. Could do it right now. Kill these two sleeping princes—in a place where they'd be expected to die, where no one would ever find them—make his way back out of the wood, wait for the fyrd to go north, as they surely would, start across country to Erlond, where his own people had settled. In a still-forming colony like that one there would be many men with stories they didn't want told. That was how a people's boundaries expanded, how they moved on from starting points. Questions didn't get asked. You could make a new life. Again.

He shook his head, to clear it, order his mind. He was tired, not thinking well. He didn't have to kill the other two. Could just rise up now, while they slept, start back east. He snorted softly, amused at himself. That still wasn't right. He didn't even need to sneak away. Could wake them, bid farewell, invoke Jad's blessing on the two of them (and Ingavin's, inwardly). Alun ab Owyn had told him to leave. He didn't have to be here at all. Except for the one thing. The awareness that lay under the folly of this night like a seed in hard spring ground.

His son was on those dragon-ships, and he was there because Thorkell had killed a man in a tavern a little more than a year ago. If you were a particular kind of man (Thorkell wasn't) you could probably throw away a good deal of time thinking about fathers and sons; time better spent with an ale flask and honest dice. He couldn't truthfully say he'd put his mind very often to the boy over the years on Rabady. He'd taught him something of fighting, a father owed that duty. If pressed he'd have pointed to a house, land, a position on the isle. Bern was to have had all those when his father died, and wasn't that enough? Wasn't it more than Thorkell had ever had?

He didn't carry many memories of the two of them together as the boy grew up. Some men liked to talk, spin tales at their own hearth or a tavern's—spin them so far from truth you could laugh. His first tavern killing had come about because he had laughed at someone doing that. Thorkell wasn't a tale-spinner, never had been. A man's tongue could bring him trouble more quickly than anything else. He kept his counsel, guarded memories. If others in Rabady told the boy tales about his father—truth or lies—well, Bern would learn to sort those for himself, or he wouldn't. No one had taken Thorkell in hand as a boy and taught him how you handled yourself when you came ashore in a thunderstorm on rocks and found armed men waiting for you.

Sitting in that wood that lay like a locked barrier between Cyngael lands and Anglcyn, awake while two young men slept, he did find himself recalling—unexpectedly—an evening long ago. A summer's twilight, mild as a maiden. The boy—eight summers old, ten? — had come out with him while he repaired a door on the barn. Bern had carried his father's tools, Thorkell seemed to remember, had been amusingly proud to do so. He'd fixed the door then they'd walked somewhere—he didn't remember where, the boundaries of their land—and for some reason he'd told Bern the story of the raid when the Anglcyn royal guard had trapped them too far from the sea.

He really didn't tell many of the old tales. Maybe that's why the evening was with him. The scent of the summer flowers, a breeze, the rock—he remembered now, he'd been leaning against the rock at their northern boundary, the boy looking up at him as he listened, so intent it could make you smile. One evening, one story. They'd walked back to the house, after. No more to it than that. Bern wouldn't even recall the evening, he knew. Nothing of any meaning had taken place.

Bern was bearded and grown. Their land was gone; an exile's house always went to someone else. You could say the boy had made his own choice, but you could also say Thorkell had taken choices away from him, put him in a circumstance where a poisonous serpent like Ivarr Ragnarson might think through whose son this was and take vengeance for what had happened at Brynnfell. You could say his father had put him on that branching path.

Even so, you might even find a reason to chuckle about all of this tonight, if that was the way your humour worked. All you needed to do was think about it. Consider the three of them in this wood. Alun ab Owyn was really here, more than a little maddened, because of a dead brother. Athelbert had come because of his father—the need to make proof of himself in Aeldred's eyes and his own. And Thorkell Einarson, exiled from Rabady, was-truthfully—in this forest for his son.

Someone should make a song of it, he thought, shaking his head. He spat into the darkness. He was too tired to laugh, but felt like it, a little.

A small sound. The grey dog had lifted his head, seemed to be watching him. He really was weary, but it almost seemed as if the dog were tracking his thoughts. An unsettling animal, more to it than you'd expect.

He had no idea which way the Jormsvik ships were going, none of them did. This desperate, foolish journey might be entirely unnecessary. You had to come to terms with that. You could be dying for no reason at all. Well, what of that? Reason or no reason, you were just as dead. He'd already lived longer than he'd expected to.

He heard a different sound.

The dog again; Cafall had risen, was standing rigidly, head lifted. Thorkell blinked in surprise. Then the animal whimpered.

And that sound, from that source, frightened him beyond words. He scrambled to his feet. His heart was pounding even before he, too, caught the smell.

That smell first, then sounds, he never saw a thing. The other two men rose, jerked from sleep at the first loud crashing, as if pulled upright like toys on a string. Athelbert began swearing; both unsheathed their swords.

None of them could see anything at all. It was black beyond power of sight to penetrate, stars and moon blocked by the encircling trees and their green-black summer leaves. The pool beside them dark, utterly still.

Such pools, Thorkell thought, rather too late, were where the creatures that ruled the night came to drink, or hunt.

"Jad's holy blood," whispered Athelbert, "was is that?"

Thorkell, had he been less afraid, might have made the easy, profane jest. Because it was blood they smelled. And flesh: pungent, rotting, like a kill left in the sun. A smell of earth, too, underneath, heavy, loamy, an animal odour with all of these.

Another sound, sharp in the black, something cracking: a small tree, a branch. Athelbert swore again. Alun had not yet spoken. The dog whimpered again, and Thorkell's hand on his hammer began to shake. One of the horses tossed its head and whinnied loudly. No secret to their presence now, if ever there had been.

"Stand close," he snapped, under his breath, though there was hardly a reason to be quiet now.

The other two came over. Alun still had his sword out. Athelbert sheathed his now, took his bow, notched an arrow. There was nothing to be seen, nowhere to shoot. Something fell heavily, north of them. Whatever this was, it was large enough to knock over trees.

And it was in that moment that Thorkell had an image burst within his mind and lodge there, as if rooted. His jaw clenched, to stop himself from crying out.

He had been a fighter almost all his life, had seen brain matter and entrails spilled to lie slippery on sodden ground, had watched a woman's face burn away, melting to bone. He'd seen blood-eaglings, a Karchite hostage torn apart between whipped horses, and never flinched, even when he was sober. These were the northlands, life was what it was. Hard things happened. But his hands were trembling now like an old man's. He actually wondered if he was going to fall. He thought of his grandmother, these long years dead, who had known of such things as the creature out there in the night must be, perhaps even its name.

"Ingavin's blind eye! Kneel!" he rasped, the words forming themselves, forced from him. But when he looked over he saw that the other two were already kneeling on that dark ground by the pool. The smell from beyond the glade was overpowering, you could gag or retch; Thorkell apprehended something hideous and immense, ancient, not to be in any way confronted by three men, frail with mortality, in a place where they should not be.

In terror then, weariness entirely gone, Thorkell looked at the shapes of the two men kneeling beside him, and he made a decision, a choice, took a path. The gods called you to themselves—wherever and whatever the gods might be—as it pleased them to do so. Men lived and died, knowing this.

He stayed on his feet.

In all of us, fear and memory interweave in complex, changing ways. Sometimes it is the thing unseen that will linger and appall long afterwards. Sliding into dreams from the blurred borders of awareness, or emerging, perhaps, when we stand alone, on first waking, at the fence of a farmyard or the perimeter of an encampment in that misty hour when the idea of morning is not quite incarnate in the east. Or it can assail us like a blow in the bright shimmer of a crowded market at midday. We do not ever move entirely beyond what has brought us mortal terror.

Alun would never know it, for it was not a thing that could be shared in words, but the image, the aura he had in his mind as he sank to his knees, was exactly what Thorkell Einarson apprehended within himself, and Athelbert was aware of the same thing in the blackness of that glade.

The smell, to Alun, was death. Decay, corruption, that which had been living and was no longer so, not for a long time, and yet was moving as it rotted, crashing in some vast bulk through trees. He had a sense of a creature larger than the woods should, by rights, have held. His heart hammered. Blessed Jad of Light, the god behind the sun: was he not to defend his children from terrors such as this, whatever it was?

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 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.

Unworthy, that thought. This was her brother. After a moment, he said, carefully, "You feel a… sense of him?"

He was close to truth. It wasn't Athelbert, in fact, but that much she wasn't ready to divulge. She swallowed hard, and nodded. "I think he… and some others are trying to get west."

"Through that forest? No one… Kendra, that's… folly."

"That's Athelbert," she said, but it didn't come out lightly. Not tonight. "I think they feel a need to go very fast, or even he wouldn't do this."

Gareth's brow had knitted the way it did when he was thinking hard. "A warning? The Erlings going that way by sea?" She nodded. "I think that must be it."

"But why would Athelbert care?"

This became difficult. "He might be joining others, making one with them."

"The Cyngael prince?"

He was clever, her little brother. He might also be the kingdom's heir by now. She nodded her head again.

"But how… Kendra, how would you know?"

She shrugged. "You said it… a sense of him." A lie, but not too far from truth.

He was visibly struggling with this. And how should he not? She was struggling, and it was inside her.

He took a breath. "Very well. What is it you want to do?"

There it was. She wasn't going to be stopped unless she stopped herself. She swallowed. "Only one thing," she said. "A small thing. Take me outside the walls. It will be easier if I'm with you."

He loved her. His life was altered forever if Athelbert died. And in a different way, she supposed, if she died. Gareth looked at her a moment, then nodded his head. They went to the gate together in the blue moonlight.

A different man on watch, which was good; the last one would have been stricken with fear to see her, after what had happened the night before. There were still hundreds of men (and not a few women, she knew) outside by the tents. They'd have heard glorious tidings by now, a celebration would be beginning.

Gareth had no trouble persuading the guard that they were going out to join in that. Suggested that their sister, the princess Judit, would likely be not far behind, which happened to be—very probably—the case. If she wasn't ahead of them, having gone out another way.

Outside, walking quickly west, not north towards the lights and the tents, Kendra had a tardy thought. She stopped again. "You… the message said you were to be kept safe."

Gareth, uncharacteristically, swore. It would have been more impressive if he hadn't sounded as though he were imitating Judit. She might have been amused at any other time. He glared at her. She lowered her gaze.

They moved on, came at length to the river. It all felt oddly like a dream now, a repeating of something done. She had been here last night.

She'd stopped on this side, then, waited for someone to come out of the trees.

Kendra hesitated now, looked up at her brother.

"You are going in, aren't you," he said. "The forest. To… spirits there."

Not really a question.

She nodded her head. "Stay for me? Please?"

"I can come."

She touched his hand. That was brave, very much Gareth, would bring her to tears if she wasn't careful. "If you do, I will not go. You may curse all you like at instructions, but I will not lead you into the spirit wood. I won't be long, or go far. Say you'll stay here, or we both go back now."

"That last sounds perfectly good to me."

She didn't smile, though she could see he wanted her to. She waited.

He said, finally, "You are sure of this?"

She nodded again. Another lie, of course, but at least not a spoken one this time.

He leaned forward, kissed her on the forehead. "You are so much better than all the rest of us," he said. "Jad defend you. I'll be here."

Moonlight on the water, reflecting from the stream. Very little breeze, the night mild, late summer. She went quickly, wading in and across, before she could lose what felt like a too-small store of courage, or he could see that she was crying, after all.

The forest here began only a little way beyond the water. It slanted west farther south, and then there was the long knife of the valley half a day's ride that way—and the holy house at Retherly where her mother was going to go after Judit was wed. She knew about that and Judit did. She didn't think her brothers had been told yet.

Marriages and retreats. Kendra couldn't say she'd spent any great amount of time thinking about either, or about boys and men. Perhaps she ought to have. Perhaps this had been a sister's reaction to Judit, whose lifelong defiance of any imposed order or protocol had led her far from the norms of a proper young woman's behaviour.

Kendra was, she supposed, the proper young woman of the family. (An alarming thought, at that particular moment.) It hadn't ever felt as though she was, it was more a matter of not enough inclination to pursue such matters, and no one—in truth—alluring or engaging enough to change her mind on the vague but undeniably important subject of men. Her brothers and sisters made jokes about Hakon's interest in her (they weren't kind to him about it), but Kendra considered him a friend, and… a boy, really. There wasn't much point thinking about it, in any case. Her father would decide where she wed, just as he had with Judit.

Her sister's fiery recklessness hadn't done much to alter the fact that she was marrying a thirteen-year-old Rheden prince this winter. As far as Kendra was concerned, defiance needed to get you somewhere, or it was just… being noisy.

She wasn't sure whether what she was doing now was defiant, or mad, or—most alarmingly—if it was something dark and complex and having to do with a man, after all. There was nothing ordinary about it, she knew.

She also knew, very near the trees now, that if she even slowed, let alone broke stride here at the wood's edge, fear would take hold of her entirely, so she kept walking—into the darkness of branches and leaves where Alun ab Owyn had gone the night before.

The strangeness, this terrible, unsettling inward strangeness, grew stronger. He was in these woods. She knew it. And she even seemed to know exactly where she needed to go now, where he had been last night. This is unholy, she thought, and bit her lip. I could burn for this.

It wasn't far, which was a blessing of the god upon her life, and might mean she was not yet entirely cast out from Jad's countenance and protection. She had no time to try to think that through.

Where she stopped was less a clearing than an easing of the press of trees around, where grass might grow. She thought about wolves, then snakes, made herself stop that. She stood very still, because this was the place. She waited.

And nothing happened. A sense of foolishness assailed her. That, too, she pushed away. She might not understand this awareness within, but it would be the worst sort of lie to the self to deny it was in her, and she would not do that. She cleared her throat, too loudly, almost made herself jump.

In the darkness of the spirit wood, Kendra said, very clearly, "If you are here, whatever it is you are, whatever was here last night, that he came to meet… you need to know that he's in the woods again now, to the south, which is… very dangerous. And with him is my brother, Athelbert. Maybe others. If you mean him well, and I pray to… my god that you do, will you help them? Please?"

Silence. Her voice, words spoken, then nothing, as if the sounds had been simply swallowed, absorbed, sinking away into never-having-been. That feeling of foolishness again, hard to push back. They would name her mad or a witch, or both. That Ferrieres cleric visiting had spoken in the royal chapel four days ago of the heresies and pagan rites that still flourished in corners of the Jaddite world, and his voice had hardened when he'd told how such things needed to be burned away, that the light of the god might not be dimmed by them.

This was, she supposed, a corner of the world.

She saw a light, where none had been. Kendra cried out, then covered her mouth quickly. She had come here to be heard. Trembling, groping for courage she really wasn't sure she possessed, she saw something green appear in front of her, beside a tree trunk. A little taller than she was. Slender, hairless; it was hard to discern features, or eyes, for the glow was strange, obscuring as much as it illuminated. So this, she thought, was what Alun ab Owyn had come to meet.

In the oddest, almost inexplicable way, seeing this vague, sexless, indeterminate shape, she suddenly felt better—couldn't sort out why that might be. It didn't seem malevolent. Nor should it be, she thought, if Alun had been here to meet it.

"Thank… thank you," she managed. "For co… coming to me. Did you hear? They are south. Near the coast, I believe. They… they are trying to get through the wood. Do… do you understand anything I say?"

No response, no movement, no eyes to see or read. A green shape, a muted glow in the wood. It was real, however. The spirits were real. She was speaking to one. Fear, and wonder, and a sense of… very great urgency.

"Can you help them? Will you?"

Nothing at all. The creature was motionless, as if carved. Only a slight shimmer of the green aura suggested it was a living thing. But fire glowed and shimmered and was not alive.

She might be wrong. She might not understand any of this properly.

And that last thought, in fact, was nearest to the truth.

Why should she have understood what was happening? How could she do so? The spruaugh stayed another moment and then withdrew, leaving darkness behind it again, deeper for the lost light.

Kendra sensed immediately that this was all she was going to see, all that would happen. The space among the trees felt… emptied out. Fear had gone, she realized, replaced by wonder, a kind of awe. The world, she thought, was never going to seem the same again. Going back, she wouldn't be returning to the same stream or moonlight or the city she had left.

There were green shimmering creatures in the woods beside Esferth, whatever the clerics might say. And people had always known this was so. Why else the centuries-long fear of this forest? The stories told to frighten children, or around night fires? She stayed where she was another moment, a pause before returning, breathing in the darkness, alone, as she had been last night, but not quite the same.

And so a difficult truth about human courage was played out among those trees. A truth we resist for what it suggests about our lives. But sometimes the most gallant actions, those requiring a summoning of all our will, access to bravery beyond easy understanding or description… have no consequence that matters. They leave no ripples upon the surface of succeeding events, cause nothing, achieve nothing. Are trivial, marginal. This can be hard to accept.

Aeldred's younger daughter did something almost unspeakably brave, going alone at night into the blackness of a wood believed to be haunted, intending to confront the spirit world—which was the most appalling heresy according to every tenet she had ever learned. And she did do that and spoke a message, the warning she'd come to give—and it signified nothing at all, in the wheel and turn of that night.

The faerie had gone already, long before.

She had, in fact, been tracking Aeldred's fyrd all the previous night and through this day and into evening from within the wood. Almost all of the spruaugh in the forest were south as well by now, and this one, hearing (and, yes, understanding) Kendra's words, set itself to quickly go that way also, but pursuing its own desires: such desires as those creatures still possessed, which had nothing to do with guarding three mortal men in a forest that had once been named a godwood, in the days when men dissembled less about such things.

A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done… something. That can ripple, might do so, though in a different way.

Mostly, walking as quickly now as she dared in the root-and-branch darkness, what Kendra felt was relief. A rush of it, like blood to the head when you stand up too quickly. She had no idea what that green spirit had been, but it had come to her. Spirit world, half-world. She had seen it, a glowing in the night. Everything altered with that.

She came to the edge of the trees, saw moonlight through the last screening leaves, then unmediated, with stars, as she came out. The stream, the summer grass, her brother on the far bank. And what she felt, emerging, was near to joy.

The world had changed, in ways she couldn't sort through, but it was still, in the main, the place she'd always known. The water, as she waded through, was cool, pleasantly so on a summer night. She could hear music and laughter to her left, north of the city. She could see the walls in the distance, torches for the guards on the ramparts.

She could see her brother, solid and familiar and reassuring. She stopped in front of him. He seemed taller, Kendra thought: somewhere over the summer Gareth had grown. Or was that a sense that came from what she knew about Athelbert? Gareth touched her shoulder.

"I'm me," she said. "Not spirit-claimed. Shall I kick you to prove it?"

He shook his head. "I'd think Judit's soul had claimed you. Do you want to go to the tents? Be with people?"

He hadn't probed or pressed her at all. She shook her head. "My clothing and boots are wet. I want to change. Then I think I need to go to chapel, if that's all right? You can go over to the—"

"I'll stay with you."

The guard said nothing (what was he going to say?) when they called to come back in so soon after going out. Kendra went to her rooms, woke her women, had two of them help her change (they raised eyebrows but said nothing either—and what were they going to say?). Then she went back out to where Gareth had waited (again) and they went to chapel together.

The streets were busy for so late an hour, but Esferth was crowded and jubilant. They could hear the noise from the taverns as they went. Walked past the one where she'd stood across the street last night when Alun ab Owyn had come out with his dog, and she'd called the Erling over to her.

Gareth broke their silence. "Is he all right?"

"Who?"

"Athelbert. Of course."

She blinked. Had made an error there. She managed a shrug. "I think he'll be all right. After all, Judit is nowhere near him."

Gareth stopped for a second, then burst out laughing. He dropped an arm around her shoulder and they continued that way, turning right at the next junction of streets towards the chapel.

"Where is Judit, do you think?" she asked.

"I imagine at the tents."

He was probably right, Kendra thought: there was cause for wine and celebration with the Erlings slaughtered and driven away.

In the event, however, they were wrong. Entering the royal chapel they saw their sister beside the queen, at prayer. Kendra stopped for a moment in the side aisle, surprised. She found herself gazing at two profiles, candlelight upon them. The queen's face round, fleshy, though still smooth, hints of a nearly lost beauty; Judit in the bright flush of red-haired, fair-skinned glory, on the cusp of her journey north to Rheden and marriage.

Kendra knew she had been avoiding the thought of that. So much would change. Their mother would leave for Retherly, and once Judit was married it would be her turn next. There might be green spirits in the wood, but the way of the world was not going to change for an Anglcyn princess because of them.

Aeldred's two younger children went over and knelt beside their mother and sister, looking towards the sun disk and the altar and the cleric standing there, leading the prayers. After a moment they added their voices to the incantations and responses. Some things at least still seemed clear enough, and needful: in the nighttime you prayed for light.