You can’t have what you want, Helda had said, even before everything else.
“How did this happen?” she asked, of the cleric, of the world.
Holy men usually spoke of the mysterious ways of the god.
“I do not know,” Ceinion of Llywerth murmured, instead.
“You’re supposed to know,” she said, turning to look at him. Heard her voice break. Hated that. He stepped forward, drew her into his arms. She let him, lowered her head. Didn’t weep, at first, and then she did. Heard the cousin praying over the body on the floor beside them.
Three things not well or wisely done, the triad went. Approaching a forest pool by night. Making wrathful a woman of spirit. Drinking unwatered wine alone.
They did things by threes in this land, Alun thought savagely. Obviously it was time for him to claim one of the wine jars and carry it off, drain it by himself until oblivion came down.
He wished in that moment, striding through the empty farmyard without the least idea where he meant to go, that the Erling arrow had killed him in the wood. The world was unassuageably awry. His heart had a hollow inside it where Dai had been. It was not going to fill; there was nothing to fill it with.
He saw a glimmering of light on the treed slope beyond the yard.
Not a torch. It was pale, motionless, no flickering.
He found himself breathing shallowly, as if he were hiding from searchers. He squeezed shut his eyes. The glow was still there when he opened them. There was no one else in the farmyard now. A spring night, the breeze mild, dawn a long way off still. The stars brilliant overhead, in patterns that told their stories of ancient glory and pain, figures from before the faith of Jad came north. Mortals and animals, gods and demigods. The night seemed heavy and endless, like something into which one fell.
A shining on the slope. Alun undid his belt, let fall his sword, walked through the gate of the yard and up the hill.
SHE SEES HIM drop the iron. Knows what that means. He can see her now. He has been in the pool with them. For some of them, after that, the faeries can be seen. Her impulse, very strong, is to flee. It is one thing to hover near, to watch them, unseen. This is something else.
She makes herself stay where she is, waiting. Has a sudden, fearful thought, scans with her mind’s eye: the spruaugh, who might tell of this, is curled asleep in the hollow of a tree.
The man comes through the gate, closes it behind him, begins to climb the slope. He can see her. She almost does fly away then, though they can’t really fly, not any more. She is trembling. Her hair shivers through its colours, again and again.
SHE WAS SMALLER than the queen, half a head smaller than he was. Alun stopped, just below where she stood. They were beside the thicket, on the mostly open slope. She’d been half hidden behind a sapling, came out when he stopped, but touching it. Utterly still, poised for flight. A faerie, standing before him in the world he’d thought he’d known.
She was slender, very long fingers, pale skin, wide-set eyes, a small face, though not a child’s. She was clad in something green that left her arms free and showed her legs to the knee. A belt made of flowers, he saw. Flowers in her hair—which kept changing colour as he looked, dizzyingly. The wonder of that, even under stars. He could only see clearly by the light she cast. That, as much as anything, telling him how far he’d come, walking up from the farmyard. The half-world, they named it in the tales. Where he was now. Men were lost here, in the stories. Never came back, or returned a hundred years after they’d walked or ridden away, everyone they knew long dead. He could see her small breasts through the thinness of what she wore. Did they feel the cold, faeries?
There was an ache in his throat.
“How … how am I seeing you?” He had no idea if she could even speak, use words. His words.
Her hair went pale, nearly white, came back towards gold but not all the way. She said, “You were in the pool. I … saved you there.” Her voice, simply speaking words, made him realize he had never, really, made music with his harp, or sung a song the way it should be sung. He felt that he would weep if he were not careful.
“How? Why?” He sounded harsh to his own ears, after her. A bruising of the starlit air.
“I stopped your horse, in the shallows. They would have killed you, had you come nearer the queen.”
She’d answered one question, not the other. “My brother was there.” It was difficult to speak.
“Your brother is dead. His soul is with the Ride.”
“Why?”
Reddened hair now, crimson in summer dark. Her shining let him see. “I took it for the queen. First dead of the battle tonight.”
Dai. No weapon, when he had gone out. First dead. Whatever that meant. But she was telling him. Alun knelt on the damp, cool grass. His legs were weak. “I should hate you,” he whispered.
“I do not know what that means,” she said. Music.
He thought about that, and then of the girl, Brynn’s daughter, in that room by the chapel, where his brother’s body lay. He wondered if he would ever play the harp again.
“What … why does the queen …?”
Saw her smile, first time, a flashing of small, white teeth. “She loves them. They excite her. Those who have been mortals. From your world.”
“Forever?”
The hair to violet. The slim, small body so white beneath the pale green garment. “What could be forever?”
That hollow, in his heart. “But after? What happens … to him?”
Grave as a cleric, as a wise child, as something so much older than he was. “They go from the Ride when she tires of them.”
“Go where?”
So sweet a music in this voice. “I am not wise. I do not know. I have never asked.”
“He’ll be a ghost,” Alun said then, with certainty, on his knees under stars. “A spirit, wandering alone, a soul lost.”
“I do not know. Would not your sun god take him?”
He placed his hands on the night grass beside him. The coolness, the needed ordinariness of it. Jad was beneath the world now, they were taught; doing battle with demons for his children’s sake. He echoed her, without her music. “I do not know. Tonight, I don’t know anything. Why did you … save me in the pool?” The question she hadn’t answered.
She moved her hands apart, a rippling, like water. “Why should you die?”
“But I am going to die.”
“Would you rush to the dark?” she asked.
He said nothing. After a moment, she took a step nearer to him. He remained motionless, kneeling, saw her hand reach out. He closed his eyes just before she touched his face. He felt, almost overwhelmingly, the presence of desire. A need: to be taken from himself, from the world. To never come back? She had the scent of flowers all about her, in the night.
Eyes still closed, Alun said, “They tell us … they tell us there will be Light.”
“Then there will be, for your brother,” she said. “If that is so.”
Her fingers moved, touched his hair. He could feel them trembling, and understood, only then, that she was as afraid, and as aroused as he was. Worlds that moved beside each other, never touched.
Almost never. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak again he felt a shockingly swift movement, an absence. Never said what he would have said,