The Bitterbynde Trilogy: The Ill-Made Mute, The Lady of the Sorrows, and The Battle of Evernight
Author: Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Date: 2015-08-25 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy; Speculative Fiction
Description: “A beautifully spun fantasy” of love, war, rebirth, and magical destiny, based on the haunting folklore of England, Ireland, and Scotland (Andre Norton). In The Ill-Made Mute , a wretched, nameless mute awakens without a memory in a lofty tower upon whose battlements winged horses and flying ships make landfall. The amnesiac longs to escape and roam the wild landscape in search of a past, a name, and a destiny. But the tales the servants whisper by the hearth all turn out to be true: The legendary creatures that plague the world beyond the castle walls are real and innumerable. Travelers in th
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Rights: All rights are reserved.

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PRAISE FOR THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

The Ill-Made Mute

“Cecilia Dart-Thornton exhibits strong and authentic evidence of having visited some of the more exotic corners of Faerie.… The opener of Dart-Thornton’s series proves a sweet surprise.” —The Washington Post

“Not since Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring fell into my hands have I been so impressed by a beautifully spun fantasy. [The Ill-Made Mute] is indeed a find!” —Andre Norton

“With deep roots in folklore and myth, tirelessly inventive, fascinating, affecting and profoundly satisfying, [The Ill-Made Mute] is a stunning, dazzling debut.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[The Ill-Made Mute] is a generously conceived, gorgeously written novel, recalling to mind the wonder we encountered upon reading such books as Tolkien’s or Mervyn Peake’s.… It well might go on to become—the potential is manifest—one of the great fantasies.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

“An elegantly written saga that invites comparison with the best fantasy novels of the 20th century, [The Ill-Made Mute] may well prove to be one of the classics of the 21st.” —Elizabeth Hand

The Battle of Evernight

“Dart-Thornton beguiles with poetic, songlike prose.… Those who esteem the Irish and Scottish myths of faerie folk will be delighted by the magic folklore and tales within tales that fill [The Battle of Evernight].” —Publishers Weekly

“This complex conclusion to a trilogy inspired by British folklore … makes for action, suspense, and powerful, vivid conflicts.… Dart-Thornton courteously provides … a short glossary and references reflecting her folkloric expertise, which is of a high order and may win the trilogy additional readers among folklore enthusiasts.” —Booklist

The Bitterbynde Trilogy

The Ill-Made Mute, The Lady of the Sorrows, and The Battle of Evernight

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

The Ill-Made Mute

Book One of the Bitterbynde Trilogy

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

INTRODUCTION

Becoming a Writer

Recently I saw an interview with Michael Morpurgo, an author I admire greatly. A child asked him what she must do to become an author. His reply was, in a nutshell, ‘Read, Write, Live’.

I couldn’t agree more.

Read.

Looking back, it seems as if Circumstance was moulding me into a writer from the very beginning. My parents played the chief role. My mother loved to read and in her efforts to be a good mother, she surrounded her children with books. Literally. The walls of my childhood home were lined with bookshelves, which in turn were packed from end to end with books: paperbacks, hardcovers, illustrated editions large and small, non-illustrated titles, classics, modern works, dog-eared volumes read over and over.

My father, for whom his children were the centre of the world, took the time at the end of each day—whether or not he was exhausted—to read aloud to us, when we ourselves were too young to be able to decipher the written code.

Our parents instilled in us a love of books, a thirst for books; a certainty that books were not merely bound pages between covers, but portals into other worlds. They also passed on to their offspring some innate, genetic ability to read easily, with profound comprehension and at very high speed. For this, neither they nor I can claim applause. It just happened. Reading came as easily to me as breathing, and often seemed as essential to life.

I learned to read at the age of five, and thrived on it as a plant thrives in a well-composted garden, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on—perusing the cereal packets on the table at breakfast time, labels, signs, advertisements splashed across hoardings, the multiplication tables on the back covers of school exercise books. Anything. We didn’t own a TV, so reading and playing games were our entertainment.

During our childhood, Mum walked to the library and back every week (our family couldn’t afford a car), for the purpose of refreshing the exciting selection of books on our shelves. Every birthday and at Christmas, Mum and Dad gave us each a carefully chosen book, lovingly wrapped in gift paper, with a handwritten inscription and the date on the flyleaf. Oh yes, my siblings and I knew full well that books were treasures.

When, in our early teenage years, life became more difficult, books were—for me at least—saviours. They were refuges, escapes and fortifiers. Friends and supporters. Stories would take you by the hand and, flashing you a conspiratorial smile, run away with you on winged feet to wonderful places where hardship could not touch you—at least for a while.

Most of the stories available to me and my siblings were fiction, and most of that fiction was written by British authors. Two reasons lay behind this—the majority of children’s books stocked by the local library in those days had been shipped over from the UK, and my mother was an Anglophile.

Mum also loved fantasy and science fiction. Her taste in books helped form my taste, and thank goodness, for all our lives together, she and I shared that bond. Never have I known anyone’s taste to so closely reflect my own literary preferences. I was shocked, once, to discover that Mum and I differed on the matter of Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tales for Children’, which Mum considered hilarious, but which Child Me disliked heartily. Mum was also greatly fond of Tove Jansson’s Moomin series which, though I liked it, scared me slightly, it being a little too weird and eerie for the emotionally vulnerable child I was.

Notwithstanding, Mum opened the doors of my young mind to the thrilling prose and poetry of E. Nesbit, Nicholas Stuart Gray, Alan Garner, Eleanor Farjeon, Andre Norton, George MacDonald, Walter de la Mare, C.S. Lewis, Rosemary Sutcliff, Andrew Lang, Madeline L’Engle and Hilda Lewis. Later, when Mum joined the mail order Science Fiction Book Club, my mind was enriched by the genius of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and the like. In my teens Mum introduced me to Douglas Adams, Ursula LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, the folklore collections of Katharine Briggs and, of course, the incomparable Tanith Lee, whose brilliant use of language captivated and inspired me. Mum also brought us myths and legends from Japan, India, Russia, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand … from all over the world. My mother may have been an Anglophile, but she was utterly catholic in her love of the fabulous.

It was not all speculative fiction—we also delved with relish into the works of classic writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Classic fantasy was, nonetheless, my favourite and I devoured books by the likes of Charles Kingsley, William Morris, Lord Dunsany and William Allingham. I discovered the Romantic poets—Keats and Wordworth, Shelley, Coleridge and Byron and lost myself in the beauty of their dreams.

The books in our house were an eclectic collection. Many of them were far beyond the comprehension of children, so that when I poked inquisitively amongst them, turning the pages and trying to understand the unfamiliar words, learning from context and by asking my parents, I was always stretching, reaching out for knowledge and skill. Only the library books and the gift books and some beautiful volumes My mother herself owned as a child (I still have one of them) were written for our age group. This combination of being fiercely driven to comprehend the more sophisticated works, and having access to children’s literature to reassure us that yes, we were capable of understanding a story from beginning to end, was a mightily powerful stimulant to our reading abilities.

The culmination of all this reading, however; the star atop the Christmas Tree of my literary influences was The Lord of the Rings, which I first encountered at the age of nine. From the moment I entered its pages, J.R.R. Tolkien became my favorite writer. I wanted to visit Middle-earth, and that reinforced my desire to create my own “alternative world”.

Read. I echo Michael Morpurgo’s advice. Read, but read the best authors, the ones whose works enchant you, the ones you love.

Yet it was not only words, but art and music (their sister muses) that formed me; in particular the art of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (especially John Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones), the masters of Art Nouveau such as Beardsley and Mucha, and unparalleled artists like Cicely Mary Barker, Arthur Rackham, Maxfield Parrish, Brian Froud, Alan Lee, Kinuko Y. Craft, Julek Heller and Michael Whelan. The love of art made me pick up a brush and execute several oil paintings of my own.

During my teenage years I was inspired by rock ’n roll and heavy metal music, and by the melodies and lyrics of the English and Celtic folk-rock revival, including such bands as Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, The Chieftains and Clannad. Again, I was so thrilled by this art form that I felt compelled to participate. I began playing and singing in amateur folk-rock bands, having learned piano as a child and having taught myself to play guitar.

Music, poetry, prose, art, sculpture—they are all faces of the same muse—my muse. For me, visual images, sounds and literature are so closely related they can at times be almost indistinguishable.

Write.

Since stories are so enthralling and delightful, what could be better than to create one’s own? I cannot remember when this notion first occurred to me; I can only assume that I was born with it. Very early I began, as soon as my small fingers could hold a pencil, to record the tales that were already chasing each other around in my head. My mother preserved a story I wrote when I was about six years old, in painstakingly formed, rounded letters. Approximately six pages long, with one very short sentence per page, it is illustrated with pictures of a prince, a princess, a horse and a willow tree. I still have this story filed somewhere, and it reminds me of how desperately I wanted to create something that did not exist in the real world but that had sprung from the fount of my imagination.

Write. In my room at night, after school, hour after hour into the darkness, that’s what I did. Poetry (plenty of that, all rhyming, all metrical). Ideas. Diaries. Stories—never short, always epic. Pictures to illustrate the stories. Notes. Lists of fantastic character names and place names. Maps. Descriptions. Outlines of plots. Fragments. Most were more ‘outpourings of spirit’ than anything that could claim to belong in the literary domain. All the tales I wrote before I reached my teens were tales of fantasy. After Mum joined the Science Fiction Book Club (which is still running), I incorporated sci-fi into them as well.

Writing was a form of recreation. ‘Come out and be with the rest of the family!’ Mum sometimes irritably called to me from the other side of my bedroom door. But they were all watching TV. I wanted to be somewhere better.

Not that I never watched TV. When at last we owned one, I made full use of it. According to my teen diaries, I adored old movies—movies made before 1950, preferably starring Jeanette McDonald and Nelson Eddy, Deanna Durbin or Shirley Temple. These films helped shape my literary wellspring, with their elaborate costumes and hair styles, their romantic themes and their sheer innocence.

Write I did, and my purpose was to construct a world that blended all the best parts of the Real World, with none of the bits I despised, and some extra ingredients concocted by myself. For Teenage Me it was nature, seasons, landscape, music and weather that I loved best in the real world. (That, and boys.) If ever I awoke to a clear autumn day with the sun shining and a breeze blowing through the fiery panes of a liquidambar tree, or looked out across the horizon to see the piled-up purple cloud-bank of an approaching storm front, or found myself in the hills in winter, with snow encrusting the needles of fir trees, or noticed the first daffodil of spring pushing up from the earth, my heart leapt with such wonder that I longed to preserve the whole experience, to somehow place it in a jewel-box so that I could take it out in later days and look at it, and feel that thrill all over again—perhaps at some dark time when it was desperately needed. The only way I knew how to preserve impressions and feelings and scenes and events was to describe them in words. I tried to preserve them by drawing or filming (for a while I joined a film school), and I wanted to use a combination of drawing and filming to create fantasy animations, but all that was beyond me, then. These days, CGI and 3D animation are within our grasp. They are fields I would have greedily seized upon, had they been available when I was growing up. Their possibilities fascinate me. How I wish I could make my inner worlds real with the use of computers! No doubt future generations will be able to do this easily and cheaply.

I wrote and wrote. I filled drawers and boxes with my longhand scribblings, my ‘Juvenilia’. Images of some of this work are reproduced in this very volume. At the back of a wardrobe, recently, I came across not Narnia but an old story of mine called ‘Tales of Frostfire’. I wrote it when I was still learning, still finding my voice still experimenting. I had illustrated it in black and white, in a style reminiscent of art nouveau, of which I am a huge fan. Fortunately I never showed this work to anyone. It was never published and never should be, for it is a preliminary, not the finished product. The creating of it was a lesson—a lesson I was teaching myself.

For I did teach myself. I learned by writing and by reading. All the passion was innately in me, the stories were swirling in my head from the beginning—but I needed to learn the art of putting them on paper, not merely word after plodding word, but in a form that made the words sing. The more I wrote, the more they sang. In hindsight I am glad I never studied creative writing. In my case, learning the ‘rules’ would have stifled me.

Live.

Michael Morpurgo’s advice was to immerse yourself in real life—to watch it, and learn from it, and record it. As mentioned earlier, during my formative years Fantasy land was my favourite place; however good stories need good characters, and the best characters—there is no doubt of it—are drawn from real life. In ‘The Bitterbynde’, Sianadh’s personality, for example, is based on a friend by the name of George, a funny, loveable, irresponsible, reprehensible adventurer who looms larger than life.

Live.

Live life to the fullest. And while living, observe. Collect. Record. The person sitting next to you on the train, the teacher of your class, your friends and family—more often than not they will do or say something amazing or funny or profound or whimsical that you must capture before it wings away into the mists of forgetfulness. Carry a notebook. Keep your eyes and ears open.

Read, Write and Live. This is what Michael Morpurgo advised the little girl who wanted to write books.

Without my knowing it, from the moment I was born Fate was teaching me to be an author.

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Juvenilia: Youthful scribblings and fragments of poetry and prose

Juvenilia: Illustrations for an early fantasy story

1

FOUNDING

Speechless, castaway, and wry, a spellbound oddity am I.

My feet are planted in the clay, my gaze is locked upon the sky.

FROM THE TALITH SONG “YEARNING FOR FLIGHT”

The rain was without beginning and without end. It pattered on incessantly, a drumming of impatient fingers.

The creature knew only the sound of the rain and the rasp of its own breathing. It had no concept of its own identity, no memory of how it had come to this place. Inchoate purpose drove it upward, in darkness. Over levels of harsh stone it crawled, and through dripping claws of vegetation. Sometimes it slept momentarily or perhaps lost consciousness.

The rain lapsed.

Time wore away.

With stiffening limbs the nameless creature moved on. Reaching level ground, it now rose onto trembling legs and walked. Thought-fragments whirled like dead leaves inside its skull.

The ground emptied from beneath its feet. It hurtled downward, to be brought up on a spear-point of agony. A band around its arm had snagged on a projection. The scrawny thing dangled against the cliff face, slowly swinging like bait on a hook.

Then slowly, with great effort, it lifted its other arm. Bird-boned fingers found the catch and released it. The band sprang open and the creature fell.

Had it landed on the rocks, it would have been killed—a kinder fate—but it finished, instead, facedown in a green thicket of Hedera paradoxis. Stealthily the juices of the poisonous leaves ate into its face while it lay there for hours, insensate. When it awoke it was too weak to scream. It used its last energies to crawl from the toxic bushes and lie frozen in the morning sunlight, its now ghastly face turned up to the sky.

A benison of warmth began to creep into the chilled flesh, seeping into the very marrow of the bones. Detached, as though it viewed itself from afar, the creature felt its jaws being forced open, inhaled the steamy aroma of warm broth, and sipped instinctively. The sweet, rich liquid coursed inward, spreading waves of flowing warmth. The creature sipped again, then fell back, exhausted.

As its body attempted to normalize, its thoughts briefly coalesced. It held tightly to the one idea that did not spin away: the awareness that for as long as it could remember, its eyelids had been shut. It tried to open them but could not. It tried again and, before being sucked back into unconsciousness, stared briefly into the face of an old woman whose wisps of white hair stuck out like spiders’ legs from beneath a stained wimple.

There followed millennia or days or minutes of warm, foggy half-sleep interspersed with waking to drink, to stare again at that face bound in its net of wrinkles and to feel the first very faint glimmerings of strength returning to its wasted body. Recognition evolved, too, of walls, of rough blankets and a straw pallet on the stone-flagged floor beside the heatsource—the mighty, iron-mouthed furnace that combusted night and day. The creature’s face felt numb and itchy. And as senses returned, it must endure the sour stench of the blankets.

Stokers entered the room, fed the hungering furnace with sweetmeats of wood, clanged the iron door shut, raised their voices accusingly at one another, then went away. Children with malt-brown hair came and stared, keeping their distance.

The white-haired crone fed some broth to her charge and spoke to it in incomprehensible syllables. It stared back at her, wincing as she lifted it, blankets and all, and carried it into a small room. Beneath the peelings of bedding the creature was clad in filthy rags. The old woman stripped it naked before lowering it into a bath of tepid water. Wonderingly, it looked down at its own skeletal frame, floating like some pale, elongated fish, and perceived a person, with arms and legs like the crone but much younger. The crone was doing something to its hair, which it couldn’t see—washing it in a separate container behind the bath, lathering the hair thoroughly with scented soaps, rinsing again and again.

The woman dressed the rescuee in garments of a nondescript sepia hue—thick breeches, long-sleeved gipon, and thigh-length doublet corded at the waist. There was a heavy, pointed hood with a wide gorget that was allowed to hang down behind the shoulders, leaving the head bare. About the creature’s neck, beneath the gorget, she strung a leather thong tied to a rowan-wood charm crudely carved in the shape of a rooster. The bathed one sat, obediently, cross-legged while gnarled hands combed the cropped hair dry.

Bewildered, feeble, it lifted its scrawny hand to its head and felt the short stubble there. Its spindly fingers wandered to its face, where there was no sensation other than slight irritation. They found there grotesque lumps and swellings: a knobbed, jutting forehead, thick lips, an asymmetrical cauliflower of a nose, cheeks like bags of acorns. Tears filled its eyes, but its benefactress, chattering gummily to herself, seemed oblivious of its agony of humiliation.

Time organized itself into days and nights.

The days organized themselves around eating, dozing, and the exhausting minutiae of existence.

The spider-haired woman jabbed a stubby thumb at herself.

“Grethet,” she repeated. Apparently she had discovered her charge was not deaf.

Instantly grateful for this first attempt at communication, it opened its mouth to respond.

No sound came forth.

Its jaw hung slack, a crater of hollow disbelief—it had simply forgotten, or had never known, how to make speech. Frantically it searched its memories. It was then that the fist of despair slammed into the foundling.

There were no memories.

None at all.

The thing, pale and debilitated, stared into hot iron darkness for half the night. To its dismay, it could dredge up no recollection of a past and was unable to evoke its own name, if name it had ever possessed.

As days passed in bewilderment, meaningless sounds began to metamorphose into half-comprehended words—communications among other people. Although still confused, the newcomer compared their raiment with that which Grethet had put on him and concluded that its own sex was male. This was an identity, no matter how generalized, to be grasped and held secure, a solid fact in a morass of uncertainty.

He also discovered that he was unwelcome.

Despite his inability to guess or understand more than half of what they were saying, it was not difficult for the misshapen youth to recognize the despisal, contempt, and hatred of the people among whom he dwelled. He huddled into a smaller bony heap in the furnace room corner when children spat at him. They thought him too repulsive to be approached, or they would have pinched him, as indeed they slyly pinched one another. Men and women generally ignored him. When they noticed him, they ranted coldly at Grethet, who appeared unconcerned. Sometimes, as if in self-defense, she would point out the stranger’s hair for their inspection. The apparent importance of his hair, he could not fathom. It seemed that she was tough, this old woman; they could not sway her. However, her frail patient had no illusions that she nurtured any love for him—she was kind, in a callous way, and he owed her his life, but all her actions were in the long term self-serving. To act selfishly, as the youth learned, was the way to survive in this place.

What was this place? The youth knew little of it beyond the windowless furnace room with its huge wood-stack, where translucent spiders concealed themselves with only their claw-tips showing in rows of four. The black walls of this chamber were roughhewn blocks of rock; they sparkled with tiny silver points where they caught the firelight. One corner of the room held the hefty iron fire-tongs, pokers, and other implements with which Grethet poked the fire after the men stoked it, several times a day.

Men here wore the drab surcoat belted at the waist, the thick breeches stuffed into boots, and the oddly heavy hood that was left to hang down behind the shoulders. Their wood-brown hair was cut short. Some were bearded. They disregarded the stranger as they ignored the other crawling things scrambling out of the fuel or unwisely hiding in it, to be later incinerated, curling in silent agony like dried leaves in the flames.

The children would poke at the wood-heap, disturbing insects and arachnids that scuttled crazily across the floor. Curiously emotionless, the brats stamped in a frenzied dance—when they had finished, a random design of smashed cephalothoraxes and carapaces remained, like pressed orchids, scarcely visible on the black stone floor with its shining flecks.

Truly, the lesser creatures had little chance.

Most of the time, Grethet was elsewhere. She would appear briefly to tend the fire, sometimes bringing food, abruptly leaning close to her ward to whisper, so that he shrank from her stinking breath.

“Boy,” she would always say, “you, boy. You do as I say. It is better.”

The youth in his weakness was grateful to be left alone, to lie in the warmth, feeling the pounding of the ravening heart in his birdcage chest; drifting in and out of exhausted, dreamless sleep.

He had been discovered, like a babe, with eyes shuttered against the world; this finding was the foundation of his aliveness. But unlike a babe, he was gifted with more than raw, untutored instinct—his body remembered, if his mind did not. A wide, if basic, world-understanding was patterned there, so that he comprehended heat and cold, high and low, light and dark—if not the word-sounds that symbolized them—without having to experiment. He recognized that a frown or a sneer, a suddenly engorged vein at the temples, or a tautened jaw boded a forthcoming kick or blow; he could walk and work and feed himself as though he were normal, as though he were one of them. But he was not one of them. A huge piece was missing: the sum of a past.

Without memories he was merely an automated husk.

Some nights the youth half woke, with tingling sensations making a racetrack of his spine and standing his hair to attention. Some days that same surge charged the air, rousing the blood like strong liquor. These crispate experiences generally dissipated after an hour or so, and as time dragged on, he became accustomed to them and did not think on them any further. They were a phenomenon that issued from Outside, and Outside was, for now, beyond his reach.

But oh, it beckoned—and sounds came to his ears from Outside—voices, the distant silver fanfare of trumpets, shouting, the heavy tread of boots, the barking of dogs, and often, very often, the clatter of hooves on faceted planes of black stone that sparkled like a star-pricked sky.

One night, awakened by one such commotion, he crept on trembling legs into an adjoining storeroom. Through a thin slot of a window in the thick stone wall he glimpsed a round, red-gold moon. And for an instant he thought he saw an impossible silhouette flying across the bright face of it.

Soon—too soon for the nameless youth’s liking or well-being—his benefactress decided he was fit enough to work at light tasks. She hustled him out of his pile of blankets and set him to sweeping floors, helping in the laundries, and cleaning the various ingenious instruments of lighting that had accumulated in this place over the years—brass candlesticks and chamber-sticks, candle-snuffers, wax-jacks, bougie boxes, wick-trimmers, douters, candle-boxes, and lamps.

His legs trembled constantly, and sometimes he nearly fainted with the effort. Fatigue and unfamiliarity made him slow—at whiles, Grethet lost patience and cuffed him. The first time it happened, he was greatly shocked and stared at her in horror, his thick lips wordlessly mouthing protestations. At this an expression of guilt flashed across her face, chased by a look of ruthlessness, and she cuffed him again, harder.

As day followed day like a queue of weary gray beggars, he became accustomed to her light, stinging blows and abusive tone, but alone at night he sometimes wept silently for want of love.

Nourished by food, sleep, and warmth, he began to gain strength as time passed. With strength came more understanding of the words employed by the other servants living and working within these dark walls. He “spoke” with the loveless Grethet, employing simple, universally obvious gestures.

“Hide yourself,” she would nag. “Maimed boy, you are. Wrap yourself and they won’t see.”

How did I come to this place? he wanted to know, and, Who am I?

But he was unable to concoct a way of inquiring. Nonetheless, by keeping his eyes and ears keen he learned other things.

One law he learned first.

Miserable, stooped with weariness, he swept lint from the floors of the laundries. Steam imbued the air with breathless humidity. He pushed his taltry off his damp head for just a few moments of relief, but as he drew breath to sigh, a staff cracked down on his shoulder. He flinched but could not cry out.

“Taltry on … head!” screamed the chief laundress, her face empurpled as a ripe plum. “Never … off, understand?”

The wearing of the taltry hood was not merely a rule. To disobey it was a crime, punishable by beatings and deprivations. He must wear the heavy hood at all times, tied at the neck. It did not seem as important to wear it indoors, but outdoors was a different matter.

Later, Grethet took him aside and pointed to a slit of a window.

“Outside,” she pronounced in the simplified language she used for him, “outside. When outside, wear hood. Always.” She took him by the shoulders and shook him to emphasize the instructions. Working the drawstring of his hood, she compounded the ordeal by half strangling him. “Tie tightly,” she hissed. “Like this.”

The boy had examined his plain, mud-colored taltry closely, finding the reason for its peculiar heaviness. Between the outer cloth and the lining was a fine, metal chain mesh that could be felt through the cloth. Its purpose eluded him.

In the course of discharging his limited indoor employment, his toil in dark halls and cramped storerooms, the foundling came to understand in greater measure the vast and complex structure in whose understories he dwelt.

Grethet sent him to one of the kitchens to fetch bread. As he entered the fragrant, smoking cavern, one of the underbutlers spied him and emitted a yell of rage. By this time, the unnamed lad had become accustomed to loud vociferations of indignation accompanying his arrival anywhere. It had become part of his education.

“Get it out of here!” shouted the underbutler, brandishing a ladle. “It’s not allowed in the kitchens!”

As the lad was being chased down the passageway, he overheard a couple of scullery maids attempting to stifle their giggles.

“Its ugliness might cause Cook to faint into the soup,” said one.

“Such an accident might add flavor,” her companion retorted.

His appearance might have prevented his entry into some areas, but there were plenty of other tasks to be undertaken indoors.

Simply polishing the brass door fittings consumed much effort. There were knobs and handles, lock-plates and chased escutcheon plates embellished with the zigzag lightning insignia, engraved lock-covers, door-hinges and beaten copper finger-plates and cast-iron doorstops in the shape of coats of arms. Sometimes, with a sinking heart, the polisher caught sight of a monstrous visage leering at him from the convex surfaces of the burnished doorknobs and recognized his own reflection.

When Grethet suspected him of possessing a few moments of idle time, she would rattle off lists of occupations with which he might amuse himself. Unfortunately, by this time he understood her well enough.

“Furbish the bronze wall-sconces!” she would cry. “Wax the aumbries! Scrub the flagstones! Clean the second-best silver, sweep soot and cinders out of the fireplaces, and black the grates!”

He fetched, carried, and scoured. He rubbed whiting on the moon-bright trays, salvers, and elegant handbells with which the higher-ranking servants were summoned.

Once, lost in the labyrinth of passageways and stairs, the nameless lad found himself intruding upon a hitherto unexplored level of his prison-home. He had ventured higher than usual, climbing an unfamiliar stair. To his astonishment he gained the last step to see before him a corridor hung with finery, lit by the rich, golden glow of filigree lamps.

Massive rectangles of fabric covered the stone walls from floor to ceiling. Across them blazed spectacular scenes of forests, mountains, battles, gardens—scenes the lad recognized with that primeval instinct, but which he could not recall ever having beheld. On closer inspection, he perceived that the landscapes were in fact composed of countless tiny stitches in colored threads.

A voice from farther along the corridor jolted him into a panic. He sensed he should not be here, guessed he would be punished severely if caught. There was no time to dash back to the stair-head. Softly he sidestepped behind the nearest tapestry, flattening himself against the cold stone of the wall.

Two men strolled leisurely into view. Their raiment was simple in design but sewn of sumptuous fabrics. The first, clad in black velvet edged with silver, was pontificating to the second, who wore brocade in the colors of a Summer sunset.

“… lower third of the structure,” he expounded, “which is occupied by the servants, was long ago hewn from a massive bulwark of living rock. Those levels are riddled with natural caves and tunnels extended by excavation, while the upper levels, reserved exclusively for us, are constructed of huge blocks of dominite mined out from those diggings. Internal and external stairways spiral their way between the multiple levels, but of course we of the House only travel in the lift-cages.”

“What are the stairways for, then?” asked the second man, demonstrating remarkable obtuseness. Magnanimously, the first lord gushed on, gesturing with his pale hands, while the menial behind the tapestry trembled in his rags.

“The servants are arranged according to a complicated hierarchy. The lower ranks, being forbidden to ride up and down between levels in the busy lift-shafts, must needs use the stairways, which reach the ground at exits near the domestic goat caves. Forbidden to trespass in the higher regions of the Tower, they pursue their drudgeries out of sight of their betters. Only the higher echelons of servant are permitted to personally serve the lords and ladies of the Tower. They use the upper stairs or, on rare occasions, the lift-cages.”

He cleared his throat.

“You, my dear peddler, who visit Isse Tower from regions rife with warm underground springs, will be interested to discover how our bathwater is heated for the Relayers and our scented ladies.”

“Mmph,” was the grunted response.

“All heating here on the upper floors is achieved by means of an ingenious furnace.”

“Extraordinary,” mumbled the orange guest.

“Extraordinary? But no,” contradicted the black-and-silver lord. “Isse Tower is, after all, the chief stronghold of an ancient and powerful dynasty second only to royalty. We of the Seventh House of the Stormriders deserve only superlative service for our creature comforts!”

“Which no doubt is well earned, as compensation for being forced to dwell in such an island as this,” said the visitor somewhat sourly, “surrounded as you are by wights and wilderness. No doubt you and your servants are rarely able to leave the Tower, or never, unless you go with a well-guarded caravan.”

“On the contrary, we come and go on the sky-roads as we please,” cried the other. “And what matter the servants? It does them good. They are safe here, and well fed—too well fed for the paltry amount of work they do, the lazy gluttons. What need have they to wander?”

Their voices had begun to fade, indicating to the cringing eavesdropper that they had turned around and were pacing away from him. As the conversation died to a whisper, he peeped around the fringed border of the tapestry. The aristocrat and the visiting merchant had indeed vacated the corridor. Instantly the lad darted from his haven and hurtled down the stairs.

But he was not to be so easily reoriented. Frantically, he searched through the lower level for some passageway or gallery he knew. He felt certain the first person he met would redirect him to Floor Five as ungently as possible, but he preferred to try finding his own way—which was why, when he heard an approaching voice for the second time, he concealed himself once more. This time he slid into a dim niche in the wall, between two stone ribs supporting arched vaults.

The figure that wandered into view was that of Mad Mullet, the compost-hauler. His job was to carry vegetable scraps from the kitchens down to the ground. There he blended them with animal dung to form a scrumptious medley for the use of the kitchen-gardeners.

His approach was usually heralded by his odor, and by the curious rambling monologue he voiced wherever he went—a monologue that was barely intelligible at the best of times. As he ranted, he drooled. He was, as his nickname suggested, mad. However, being proud of bearing and regular of feature, he was quite comely to look at, and thus rated higher in the servants’ hierarchy than the deformed lad—not that Mad Mullet cared one whit.

Orating, chanting, and singing in a queer high-pitched tone, Mad Mullet passed quite close by the place where the lad crouched, endeavoring to resemble a grotesque carving decorating the wall. The lad noted that the eyes of Mad Mullet appeared unfocused, blank, as if fixed on some distant object that none but lunatics could discern.

On tiptoe, the lad followed him.

Mad Mullet was sometimes wont to frequent the furnace levels. He might lead the way back to Floor Five.

Through the worm-ways went the two, and Mad Mullet never looked back, nor did his step falter. He led the way, but not where the lad had hoped. Without warning, a gust of pure, cold air buffeted the two. Light broke on them like a blue crystal, and they emerged upon a stone-flagged balcony as vast and sheer as the floor of the ballroom.

For the first time, the lad was Outside.

In his awe, he momentarily forgot that he was trying to keep his presence hidden from Mad Mullet. Stumbling to the edge, he gazed out to the horizon, cramming his memory with the scene. When it was filled he looked down, then from left to right, and at last he turned his head and craned upward to discover what loomed above.

Built at the sea’s edge, the dominite fortress, black and glistening, towered more than forty stories straight up above the canopy of the surrounding forest. A soaring pile crowned with turrets, battlements, chimneys, and slender watchtowers, the fortress was defined by walled demesnes flanked on one side by a harbor and on the other by a sea of trees.

Balconies randomly toothed the sheer outer walls. Footed by jutting platforms leading nowhere, several arched gateways, set at varying altitudes, faced the four points of the compass. High above ground level, at the seventh story, the circumference of the structure suddenly narrowed on the western side like a giant stair, creating a wide, flat shelf that ended in midair. No parapet or balustrade enclosed this space—instead, a row of iron-capped bollards, evenly spaced, lined the edge. Below, the outer walls of the Tower dropped precipitously—the lad reckoned it was more than a hundred feet—to the ground.

It was here, on this brink, that he was standing.

As he woke to that fact, he woke also to the proximity of the madman beside him. But in the next instant Mad Mullet was no longer at his side, for with a clear cry of “I can fly!” he had stepped joyously from the platform and plummeted to his death.

As the lad later overheard, such “flights” were no uncommon occurrence.

2

THE HOUSE OF THE STORMRIDERS

Tale and Travail

Unremembered, yesterday is extinct.

Without yesterday, today has no meaning.

Who are you, if forgotten?

Who are you, but the sum of your memories?

ERTISH SAYING

Despite being immured within the dark, airless, walled spaces of the Tower, despite the fact that he was badly informed and struggling to comprehend his plight, the foundling came to understand that in some way the existence of Stormrider Houses revolved around horses. The sound of horses echoed from unexpected directions in the dominite cavities, the warm scent of them wafted suddenly to the nostrils from Outside, along with a thicker, avian odor as of caged birds. Horses were hoisted up and down the towers in lift-cages, and horses were kept in stalls in the upper stories. When he began Outside work, the newest and most lowly menial of the House was able to divine their purpose.

One morning the foundling was sent Outside to a balcony, to trounce the dust from floor-rugs. Flat-based cumulus clouds floated tranquilly like latherings of soap bubbles on invisible water, their frayed rims gilded by the dawn. Viewed from high on the balcony, the clouds were almost at eye level. This was the first time the boy had truly ventured into the open air, and excitement made him shiver.

Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, he could see the demesnes laid out like a map—the kitchen gardens, the neglected flower beds, the stables and training yards, the wizard’s hall, and glimpses of the rutted road between the trees that overhung it. Horses roamed the meadows, hattocking tracks, training yards, and stables below. They all seemed to be burdened with pairs of panniers slung on either side of their flanks, but what those baskets contained, the watcher could not tell from a distance.

On the other side, a wide, flat expanse of water—Isse Harbor, shimmered like rose-and-gold silk in the morning. From the shore projected a pier on marble stanchions, reaching far out into the bay, with docks and wharves set at intervals along its length. Still standing firm after uncounted centuries, Isse Harbor’s wharves had proved a marvel of engineering, a reminder of the lost skills of glorious days long past. Here anchored Waterships of the sea—splendid lily-winged birds of the deep, come from the outland runs to roost at this haven, if only for a while. They brought tidings and trade; their cargo was rich with barrels of pickled meats, fat flavescent cheeses, bales of cloth, sacks of flour and beans, casks of wines and spirits. There were stone jars brimming with honey, preserved and dried fruits, salt meat, sainfoin, stockfeed, leather, pots and porringers, pitchers and porcelain, fragrances, essences, spices, saffron, scrim, shabrack, musk, muslin, madder, purpurin, talmigold, tragacanth, wax, and all other manner of provisions.

The youth’s goggling eyes traveled to the north and west. Here, wooded hills rolled gently away to a horizon wrapped in a niveous haze. Beneath the innocent roof of leaves, it was said, roamed all manner of eldritch wights both seelie and unseelie, but although the boy searched, he could see no sign of such incarnations. He had heard that a haunted crater-lake lay nearby to the northwest, and to the east, two miles from the sea, a puzzle most curious—the ancient remains of a Watership, its back broken, wedged in a cleft between two hills. Were such a legend true, the Empire of Erith must indeed be wondrous and perilous.

A satin scarf of a breeze floated up from the forest. In the south, gulls circumaviated Isse Harbor. Dust motes swarmed from the patterned rugs as the youth beat them, causing him paroxysms of sneezing. Reeling, he leaned against the parapet to recover. At that moment his watering eyes saw a sight that assured him he had sneezed his wits out through his nostrils.

At first it seemed to him that high and far off the dark shape of a large bird—an eagle or an albatross—was flying out of the sky in the southeast. Yet, as it approached, the silhouette resolved itself into the shape of a winged horse and rider galloping through powder-puff clouds toward the fortress. The youth blinked and shook his head. A second look cleared any doubt that the vision not only existed, but was closing in rapidly. The rider’s head was the skull of a monster, or else he wore a winged helmet with a faceplate. Saddlebags bulged behind his thighs; his cloak billowed. The bird-horse moved fast, but with a strange and unnatural gait, placing its hooves with quick, mathematical precision just below the clouds’ condensation level, simultaneously beating its wings in long, graceful arcs.

Sagging against the parapet, the foundling stared. Blood drained from his head. Almost, he fainted. Surely the world must be turned upside down if a horse possessed wings to fly! As he gaped, looking like some rooftop gargoyle, a fanfare issued from a silver trumpet on the ramparts, cleaving the morning air with long, ringing notes. The aerial cavalier reached an upper story of the fortress and entered in at a platform jutting from the outer wall. His heart jumping like a scared rabbit, the youth sank to his bony knees. Then, recalling his task and how he would be beaten more vigorously than the carpet if he were discovered idling, he hastily returned to pounding mats, invoking dust, and sneezing.

Now at last he could make sense of the term he had heard so often—“eotaur.” The word referred to the mighty, horned Skyhorses, the pride of the Stormriders. And it was not the last marvel he was to discover.

Being shunned and ignored was not without its advantages. It meant that the lad was able to go about the mazy ways of the Tower largely unnoticed. He began to ascertain that insignificance was, in many ways, advantageous to his education.

In one instance, he had managed to elude Grethet and find an unobtrusive pantry-nook to doze in, when he was roused by a sound like the cooing of two doves. Within earshot a chambermaid was seated on a cider-barrel, her young child nestling on her lap. The two were conversing.

“… brought news from Namarre,” said the mother softly. “I heard one of the upper-level chambermaids say so.”

“Where is Namarre?” asked the child, snuggling her downy head closer to her mother’s shoulder.

“It is very far away.”

“The eotaurs must be truly strong, to be able to gallop from very far away.”

The mother shook her head. “Even the greatest among them has not the strength to come all the way from Namarre without resting. Letters and other air cargo must be relayed. Isse Tower is a Relay Station.”

“What is a Relay Station?”

“One of the staging posts where inland and outland runs meet. At Relay Stations, incoming mounts and Relayers interchange with fresh couriers. Messages and payloads are transferred.”

“Oh,” said the child, sounding disappointed. “Are there many Stations? But I thought Isse Tower was important.”

“Of course it is important. It is part of a network of Relay Stations and Interchange Turrets. They are the crossroads for communications networks spanning the countries of the world, far above the perils of land roads.”

The child digested these facts in silence. Presently she said, “And Stormriders—they are the most important lords in all of Erith, are they not? Aside from the King-Emperor, I mean.”

“They are aristocrats, yes,” replied the mother, caressing the child’s hair. “But there are other nobles at the court of the King-Emperor who are considered to be equally as important. Yet, hush now, for we must not talk so about our betters.”

By now the foundling had learned that the Stormriders were indeed peers of the realm—an exclusive caste born and trained to become masters of their profession. Without them, messages could not be Relayed. Without them, valuable small cargoes could not be forwarded across the country, among cities, mining-towns, and larger villages. The Stormriders’ trade was exacting, he knew, and it belonged exclusively to the twelve Houses.

However, the fact that his masters traversed the skies of Erith meant very little to the new servant-lad. Between the mortar of daily drudgery and the pestle of pain, life went grinding on. There was no shortage of provender in the Tower, but he did not receive a great deal of it. His ration, although insignificant, was often withheld or stolen. Emptiness always pinched at his insides, like tiny clockwork crabs.

Some of his fellow servitors shunned the nameless lad. Most ignored him. A few nursed a strong antipathy to him. No matter how obedient he showed himself, no matter how hard he tried to please, they discovered fault. These punished and bullied him continually; he feared them with every fiber of his being. When they came near, he shriveled and trembled to his bones. There was no appeal against their abuse and the pain they inflicted; it had to be endured, that was all. He became accustomed to the constant tenderness of flesh brought on by bruising and the cuts that occurred when he fell or was thrown against some unforgiving object.

Because it seemed obvious that the newcomer was a halfwit, no effort was made to communicate with him, let alone teach him. None offered kindness, save for the daughter of the Keeper of the Keys, who was powerless to help him substantially.

Her name was Caitri, and she was very young—perhaps twelve Summers old. She had encountered him once when he was at his work—waxing the aumbries and weeping, so that the wax mingled with his tears. She, like the rest, had at first recoiled from his ugliness—yet, after the shock of first sight, she looked upon him anew, and her gaze softened as though she viewed him not as a deformed idiot, but as an injured animal in need of succor.

“Why do you weep?” she asked. He could only shake his head. She perceived the way his belly hollowed beneath his tunic, and sometimes she brought him hunches of stale bread or withered apples. She was the only one who ever really talked to him. It was she who explained to him about Windships, the majestic vessels that sailed the skies and sometimes berthed at Isse Tower.

However, Caitri’s duties kept her away from Floor Five most of the time, and he met her infrequently, only accidentally.

Over time, by way of eavesdropping and osmosis and rare acts of kindness, the youth learned more from those who lorded him. Most of it he gleaned in the evenings, for that was when the servants would often gather and tell stories. In this way the unworthiest among them began to discover the nature of the perilous and wondrous world beyond the Tower.

The servants’ kitchen, Floor Five, was a spicery of sage and wood-smoke. Evening brought tranquillity to the bustling chamber. Fireplaces big enough to roast an ox glowed with the last of the day’s incandescence. In the chimney corner leaned one of the battered straw targets that, when soaked with water, was used to shield the spit-boys from the fierce heat of the fires. Lamps flickered with a dandelion light, describing various implements: copper pans, stoneware jars—gray hens and gotches, skeins of thyme and lemongrass, garlic, hams, onions, turnips, and cheeses hanging like comestible jewelry from blackened roof beams. Beside a set of scales, an empty one-gallon blackjack stood on a wooden bench, its leather seams reinforced with brass mounts and studs. Brass mote-skimmers, basting ladles with handles over a yard long, ale-mullers, and skillets dangled against the walls. Someone had left a warming-pan sticking out of a copper-bound wooden bucket. Caudle cups, posset pots, and pipkins lined up on a shelf beside a gristmill and a meat mincer. Alongside brass chamber-sticks, their candles dripping yellow tallow in turgid formations, the table supported several pitted pewter tankards and a large brown spike-pot with a miniature spike-pot mounted in its domed lid.

Shadows distorted themselves into uncanny shapes. Dogs and small capuchin monkeys sprawled before the open hearth, scratching their fleas. Like restless bees, scullery maids, flunkeys, cooks, and a few children congregated in buzzing groups, drinking from wooden porringers of steaming spike-leaf and medlure. The thin figure that slipped in at the far door and huddled in the corner beside a food-hutch went unnoticed, being among grotesque shadow-shapes of its own ilk.

Softly, a sweet young voice was singing some kind of incomprehensible lullaby:

Sweven, sweven, sooth and winly,

Blithely sing I leoth, by rike.

Hightly hast thou my este,

Mere leofost.

The song ended. As the chief cellar-keeper cleared his throat and spat precursively into the fire, an expectant hush settled over those assembled. Brand Brinkworth held the respected and well-deserved position of oldest and best Storyteller at Isse Tower. As a jongleur, he had traveled Beyond; his own life and adventures had already passed into legend, and he still wore about his neck the copper torque shaped like a snake—his most prized possession, the sigil of a bard, a lore-master.

Many traditional gestes had been passed down through the generations, and newer ones had been imported to the Tower by sailors, aeronauts, and outland road-caravaners. Most had been relished many times without losing their savor and garnished a little more with each recounting.

Stories of Beyond were, more often than not, stories of eldritch wights. Yarns were told about wights of the seelie kind, who wished mortals well and even gave them supernatural help or who merely used them as targets for their harmless mischief. Then there were the tales of unseelie things—wicked, fell wights of eldritch, the protagonists of nightmares.

Those were dark tales.

“Speaking of unseelie wights,” began Brinkworth, which he had not been doing, “did I ever give out about the time the Each Uisge happened by Lake Corrievreckan?”

The servants shuddered.

The stories described many different types of waterhorses haunting the lakes and rivers, the pools and oceans of Erith, but of all of them, the Each Uisge was the most ferocious and dangerous. It was one of the most notorious of all the unseelie creatures that frequented the watery places, although the Glastyn was almost as bad. Sometimes the Each Uisge appeared as a handsome young man, but usually it took the form of a bonny, dapper horse that virtually invited mortals to ride it. Once on its back, no rider could tear himself off, for its skin was imbued with a supernatural stickiness. If anyone was so foolish as to mount, he was carried with a breakneck rush into the nearest lake and torn to pieces. Only some of his innards would be discarded, to wash up later on the shore.

The occupants of the kitchen waited. They had heard the tale of Corrievreckan before but never tired of it. Besides, Brinkworth with his succinct style had a way of refreshing it so that it came to his audience like news each time.

“’Tis a very old story—I cannot say how old, maybe a thousand years—but true nonetheless,” said the old man, scratching his knee where one of the hounds’ fleas had bitten him. “Young Iainh and Caelinh Maghrain, twin sons of the Chieftain of the Western Isles of Finvarna at that time, were hunting with their comrades when they saw a magnificent horse grazing near Lake Corrievreckan.”

“Where is that?” interrupted a grizzled stoker.

“In the Western Isles, cloth-ears, in Finvarna,” hissed a buttery-maid. “Do you not listen?”

“I thought the Each Uisge dwelled in Eldaraigne.”

“It roams anywhere it pleases,” said Brand Brinkworth. “Who shall gainsay such a wicked lord of eldritch? Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be on with the tale.”

The other servants shot black looks at the stoker from beneath lowered brows. The stoker nodded nonchalantly, and the Storyteller continued.

“They saw a magnificent horse grazing near Lake Corrievreckan,” he repeated, and as his pleasant old voice lilted on, there unfolded in the minds of the listeners a place far off in time and space, a landscape they would never see.

A white pearl shone like an eye in a hazy sky. The sun was past its zenith, sinking toward a wintry horizon. It cast a pale gleam over the waters of the lake. The entire surface was lightly striated with long ripples, shimmering in silken shades of gray. Through a frayed rent in the clouds, a crescent moon rode like a ghostly canoe, translucent. A flock of birds crossed the sky in a long, trailing V-formation. Their cries threaded down the wind—wild ducks returning home.

Dead trees reached their black and twisted limbs out of the waters, and near the shore, long water-grasses bowed before the breeze, their tips bending to touch their own trembling reflections. Tiny glitters winked in and out across the wavelets. The play of light and shadow masked the realm that lay beneath the lake. Nothing could be seen of the swaying weeds, the landscapes of sand and stone, the dark crevasses, any shapes that might, or might not, move deep beneath the water.

As the wild ducks passed into the distance, the tranquillity of the lake was interrupted. Faint at first, then louder, yells and laughter could be heard from the eastern shore. A band of Ertishmen was approaching.

Eight of them came striding along, and their long, tangled hair was as red as sunset. They were accompanied by dogs, retrievers wagging feathery tails. Baldrics were slung across the shoulders of the men, quivers were on their backs and longbows in their hands. At the belts of some swung a brace of fowl, tied by the feet. Already they had had a successful day’s hunting. Buoyed by success, they were in high spirits. This last foray to the eastern shores of the lake was considered no more than a jaunt—they did not intend to hunt seriously, as was evidenced by the noise they were raising. They chaffed and bantered, teasing one another, sparring as they went along. All of them were young men, hale and strong—indeed, the youngest was only a boy.

“Sciobtha, Padraigh,” laughed the two eldest, slapping him on the back as he ran to keep up, “ta ocras orm! Tu faighim moran bia!” The looks of the two Maghrain brothers were striking—tall, copper-haired twins in the leather kilts and heavy gold torcs of Finvarnan aristocracy. Their grins were wide and frequent, a flash of white across their brown faces.

“Amharcaim! Amharcaim!” Padraigh shouted suddenly, pointing to the black and leafless alders leaning at the lake’s edge. The men halted and turned their heads.

A shadow moved there. Or was it a shadow?

Gracefully, with arched neck, the stallion came walking out from among the trees. Clean were his lines, and well molded; long and lean his legs, finely tapered his frame. He had the build of a champion racehorse in its prime. His coat was sleek and glossy as the water of the lake, oil-black but highlighted with silver gray where the sun’s diffuse glow caught the sliding of the muscles. Clearly, here was a horse to outrace the wind.

The men stood, watching in silent awe. The creature tossed his beautiful head, sending his mane flying like spume. He too stood still for a moment, then demurely, almost coquettishly, began to walk toward the huntsmen. The stallion seemed unconcerned by their presence, not frightened at all, but friendly and tame. They were able to go right up to him—he did not shy away but allowed them to stroke the midnight mane and marvel at the grand height of him, the sheer perfection of his contours and the power implicit therein.

Then, in their own Ertish language, Iainh Maghrain spoke huskily, from the back of his throat.

“That is the finest steed in Aia,” he said, “and I shall ride him.”

His brother threw him a swift, hard glance. “I, too,” he said immediately, not to be bettered.

Fearless, these two—and competitive. It did not enter their heads that appearances might be deceptive.

“Easy now, easy, alainn capall dubb,” said Iainh, caressing the elegant arch of the neck. The stallion stood as steady as a cornerstone, almost as though he were encouraging a rider to mount. His eyes were limpid pools, fringed with lashes as a pool is fringed with reeds.

But young Padraigh was wary.

“Don’t do it, Iainh,” he said. “See how the hounds droop their tails and slink away? They are afraid of him, for all that he is so fine.” Indeed, the retrievers were cowering in the shelter of a clump of tall rocks at the lake’s edge, a hundred yards away.

The brothers paid no heed to the youngster’s warning. In a trice, Iainh had vaulted up on the horse’s back, and in the next instant Caelinh was up behind him. Still, the stallion appeared unperturbed. At the touch of Iainh’s boot-heel he trotted amicably in a circle.

“The fine one is as quiet as a lamb!” cried their comrades. “Hey, make room for us—why should you two be having all the fun?”

One by one the other youths mounted. Like all Ertishmen, they were proficient horsemen and had been able to ride bareback since they could walk. They sprang with ease onto the stallion’s back. Meanwhile Padraigh hung back cautiously—prompted by some inner caution, he had decided to be last.

It seemed apparent, as he watched each man jump up, that no space would be left for the next. Yet each time a new rider took his place, there was still enough room for another. Padraigh’s eyes strayed to the horse’s croup. Something unusual about it disturbed him. He thought that under the satin hide, the bones of the skeleton were shifting in an odd way, and the sinews were—the only way to describe it was lengthening.

The last of his comrades leaped onto the horse. Now seven were seated there, laughing, jesting, and beckoning to him from atop the friendly steed.

“Come on, Padraigh mo reigh,” they cried. “Get up and let’s see how he gallops!”

A flash of understanding scorched the boy’s brain.

In horror, Padraigh realized that the horse had grown longer to fit all its riders. Utter terror seized him, and his voice choked in his own gullet. Too frightened to scream a warning, he ran to the lofty boulders that stood at the lake’s edge and concealed himself among them, with the cringing dogs.

Black against the silver-gray ripples of the lake, the horse turned its long head. It looked toward the rocks. Dark lips curled back from teeth as square as tombstones. An utterance issued like fumes from that aperture.

“Come along, snotty-nose, do not be left behind!”

A voice to corrode iron—cold, unforgiving, appalling.

The boy did not move.

The seven mounted men abruptly fell silent.

Then the horse came after Padraigh among the boulders, dodging this way and that, flinging the riders from side to side, and all the while they were screaming, unable to tear their hands off its back. Back and forth they ducked about among the monoliths, and the hounds fled, howling, and Padraigh’s stricken gasps tore at his chest like claws, and the pounding of his heart thundered in his skull as if his brain would burst; but the boy in his desperation proved too nimble for the Each Uisge. At last it gave up and tossed its stormy mane, and with a snort like laughter it dived into the lake and under the waters.

The last echo of their screams hung over the place where the men had vanished. Padraigh stared at the ripples spreading slowly from that center. He was shaking so violently that he could scarcely stand. Sweat dripped from his brow, but his flesh was cold as a fish’s.

He listened.

Nothing reached his ears but the fading staccato plaint of plovers on the wing, the sough of the wind bending the long water-grasses until their tips kissed their own reflections, and the lap, lap of wavelets licking the shore.

When the white sun sank into the mists on the edge of the world, he was there still, his face bloodless; listening, unmoving.

“The seven youths were never seen again,” concluded the Storyteller, leaning back.

“Let storms blow hard and wolves for flesh howl on!” a porter expleted fervently. Similar sentiments gripped the entire kitchen.

“What about the next morning?” persisted a wide-eyed potboy, perversely fascinated with the tale’s usual grisly ending.

“The clan went down to the lake at uhta,” said Brinkworth, “the hour before dawn. They found the boy, living but unable to speak. Some dark shapes were washing to and fro in the shallow margins of the shingle. When they went near to see what they were, they found human livers, five of them, torn and bloody.”

“What became of the other two?”

“Nobody kens.”

This narrative having been discussed and gravely pronounced upon by all, another took his turn to speak; a belligerent kitchen-gardener with a clever tongue who was always vying for a position in the storytelling echelons.

“Well, I heard of a lass what escaped the Each Uisge,” he argued. “In the south of Luindorn there was a farmer what had a large herd of cattle.”

“Luindorn now,” commented the stoker obstinately.

“Yes, Luindorn,” the kitchen-gardener confirmed, glaring. “And one day a round-eared calf was born amongst them. Well, he did not know what this meant, so he asked a woman what dwelled nearby—she was a carlin—and she said that it were a calf of a water-bull. It were lucky to have such a calf, she said, but it must be kept apart from the other cattle for seven years and fed with the milk from three different cows, each day. This farmer did as how she had told him.

“Some years later, one of his servant-lasses was down by the lake, keeping an eye on the cattle as they grazed. A young man came up to her, a tall, handsome lad with long dark hair and a winsome smile. She had never seen him before, but she was struck by his good looks.”

The gardener’s listeners nodded wisely.

“‘Fair damsel,’ says he, ‘will you do a favor for me?’ She, very much flattered by his attention, says that she will. ‘My hair is so matted and tangled,’ says he, ‘I thought a charming maid like you might have clever fingers enough to straighten it for me, for surely I am at a loss.’

“‘Of course, good sir,’ says the lass, and she seats herself on the grass with the young man’s head on her lap and proceeds to part and comb his hair with her fingers. But suddenly she freezes with fear, for what does she spy growing amongst his hair but green waterweed! Then she knew that he was no man of Erith but the terrible Each Uisge himself!”

On cue, the audience gasped.

“Woe the while!” they murmured. “O strange day and night!”

“She came to her senses at last and did not jump or cry out, but sat very still so as not to disturb him and lulled him to sleep with her combings, all the while craving deliverance. When she saw that he was indeed sleeping, she carefully untied her apron strings and worked her way out from under the head, then swiftly and silently she ran for home as fast as she could go.”

“But before she reached the gate she heard, hard at her heels, a thundering sound of hooves. The Each Uisge was coming for her, and his rage was dreadful!”

The servants shuddered.

“‘Loose the water-bull!’ cried the carlin, and the farmer, seeing what was about, did so. Just as the Each Uisge was about to seize the maiden and take her under the lake to be devoured, the water-bull came bellowing and charging between them. The two creatures fought each other all the way back to the lake and under the waters. The Each Uisge was never seen again at that lake, but the mauled body of the faithful water-bull was washed ashore next morning.”

A sigh swept the servants’ kitchen, like the passing of a Summer breeze.

“Water-bulls be good wights,” boldly squeaked a junior page. “My uncle said there were water-cattle blood in his herd, and there were always milk a-plenty.”

“Aye,” said a cellarman knowingly. “’Tis true that seelie wights such as water-bulls do not wantonly injure folk the way unseelie wights do, and they reward anyone who does them a kindness. Some of them be helpful and some be just pranksters, but mark you, they too will readily revenge any insult or injury and can cause great destruction.”

“Them duergars is some of the worst and most malicious order of unseelie things,” said a scullion.

“Aye,” echoed old Brand Brinkworth, “a sailor who came here last year on the Pride of Severnesse has a cousin who lives in the hills of northern Severnesse, and he knows of a fellow on his way to Riothbury what lost himself on the hills when the night came on.”

The servants pricked up their ears. They huddled closer together as the old man conjured a vision of a place far beyond the black-beamed kitchen and the cold stone walls of the Tower. The old man’s voice softly filled the night.

“O viper vile!” cried the scullery maids when the tale was ended, clutching each other in delicious horror.

At this display of sensibility Rennet Thighbone, a greasy-haired cook, snarled, “Fie, wenches!” and blew his nose on his sleeve. Old Brinkworth stretched his arms until they cracked and downed a draft of medlure, but he was not to be left in peace.

“Tell us more tales of the King-Emperor in Caermelor, and of his wizard, Sargoth the Cowled!”

“No, tell us a story of the Greayte Cities in the glorious days of old.”

“Tonight,” intoned Brand, unruffled, unswayed, “I will tell one more tale—the tale of the beautiful maiden who slept for a hundred years under an enchantment, until she was woken by a prince’s kiss.”

“Beauty, always beauty,” whined a peevish skivvy.

“By cock and pie! Nobody wishes to hear a tale about an ugly maiden,” her companion retorted.

“That’s why they’ve never made a story about you,” another added. He was thanked with a shove.

The Storyteller wove the words and embroidered the tale’s fabric according to his way, casting his own wizardly enchantment over his audience. And when the story was finished it made a mantle that covered them all and held them together for a time. The Keeper of the Keys sawed mournfully on her fiddle, and her daughter, Caitri, sang an old song of Eldaraigne, a ballad from days of yore when the Icemen used to sail from Rimany to raid the southern villages of the Feorhkind and the great wizard Lammath had overthrown the enemy at Saralainn Vale:

Oh, the fountains were frozen in Saralainn Vale

And the mountains of Sarn were on fire,

And the leaves blew like streaks down the dusty old streets

And the wind in the valley rose higher,

When down to the glen came four hundred men

While the rest of the village was sleeping,

And the light from their blades glittered bright through the glades

And the cruel kiss of ice was their greeting.

Behold the grim Icemen so pale and so bold!

Beware of their frostblades that glitter with cold!

But I saw them come and right swift did I run

Till I came to where Lammath was lying

“The Icemen are here!” I cried out in fear,

“And the folk of the village are dying!”

Then Lammath he rose and he put on his clothes

And he kindled a torch from the embers,

Saying, “I have a plan that I learned from a man

With such wisdom as no one remembers.”

Behind him I strode as through darkness he rode,

And the Icemen he met in the dawning

As the sun’s first flare turned to gold in their hair.

I cried out to Lammath in warning,

But the torch he held high drew the light from the sky

Flaring out with a terrible power,

And it turned them to stone and to ash and cold bone

All in that cold morning hour,

As the morning sun started to flower,

All around Saralainn Tower.

“Oh, Lammath,” I said, “what price have you paid

For the power of light against shadow?”

But he smiled with his eyes and they held no surprise

As he walked with me down to the meadow.

And I thought it might seem it had all been a dream,

Except for the ice on the fountains,

And the leaves in the street and the dust on my feet,

And the fires that burned on the mountains.

Singing along drowsily, the servants fell asleep, and a disharmony of snores jarred the kitchen.

There would be other nights, other songs and tales.…

The lad was intrigued: What powered the Tower’s lifts? How was water pumped up hundreds of feet of internal conduits to make possible life in the tall fortress? How could eotaurs lift themselves into the skies? Indeed, they were fine-boned horses, lean and sharp as swords, but surely even such powerful wings would not suffice to raise them. More puzzling yet—what was it that elevated the huge bulk of Windships?

Eventually he discovered the truth.

Their reputations among their peers being neither trifling nor illustrious, the newcomer ought to have guessed that the serving-lads Spatchwort and Sheepshorn would gift him with trouble—and perhaps he did, but as the saying went, When the ship’s a wreck, what’s one more storm? Yet when he chanced to overhear them whispering together, his curiosity mastered him.

“Ustorix will bribe the treasury guards tonight.”

“How many and of what purity?”

“Two, of alt four hundred. He says there is no activity scheduled for Gate South Four Hundred at moonrise. We meet there.”

At night, nothing much lit the winding internal stairways except moon and stars slicing pale light-blades through slits in the thick dominite walls. The servants all lived below Floor Fourteen, but for someone who was used to effacing himself, melting into shadows and doorways at the first hint of approaching torchlight, it was not difficult to reach Floor Twenty-six unnoticed.

Gate South Four Hundred stood open, its portcullis upraised. The floor of the gatehall formed a road that went out to the edge of the jutting doorsill and ended abruptly there, hard against the night sky. Far below, beneath a wispy cloud-layer at two hundred feet, pocket-handkerchief horse-yards and orchards gave on to a carpet of forest.

On each squadron level, alcoves and vestibules led off the gatehalls to either side, filled with an array of equipment for Stormrider Relayers and their steeds. These entrance rooms opened onto wide corridors that circumnavigated the fortress’s walls and rejoined themselves. The floor of these circuits was strewn with straw, for this was where the strappers walked the Skyhorses to cool them down after a long, hot ride.

Hidden among racks of saddles and tack beside a lift-shaft, the eavesdropper was able to glimpse a pattern of silver constellations on an ebony backdrop, dominated by a pale ship of a moon surfing cloud breakers. Somewhere in the dank and secret courses of the walls, water hammered in the pipes, or perhaps something else was pounding in there.

The festoons of lead-ropes, saddles, saddlebags, stirrups, surcingles and girths, reins, bits and bridles, martingales, cruppers, and breastplates about his ears were disturbed only by a scuttling of serpiginous rock-lizards that were in the habit of basking daily on the outer walls. Cool air brushed the back of his hand like lily-petals.

Three youths entered the gatehalls silently, two of them pulling their taltries up over their heads and tightening the drawstrings. They carried a horn lantern. The third was clad richly in black velvet edged with silver braid, colors denoting a Son of the Seventh House, for he was the heir of the Storm Chieftain. The noble youth wore a high-collared doublet, belted at the middle; full sleeves were slashed to show a lining of gleaming jet satin beneath a cloak that swung to meet turned-down boots just below the knees. Relayer uniform besported a V-shaped embroidery from shoulder to waist to shoulder in the colors of the House, and epaulets starred to indicate squadron status. The belt buckle was cast in the form of the zigzag Stormrider device, which, with its motto, “Arnath Lan Seren”—some relic of a dead language—was also emblazoned on the left side of the chest, over the heart. Two daggers were slung from his belt, in ornamented sheaths, black leather embossed with silver. The young lord’s long, walnut-brown hair was combed smoothly back and bound tightly into a club with cords of black and silver. His taltry, thrown back daringly, was edged with tiny diadems like the glints in dominite rock and sported a sable plume. Shining boots rang on stone as he approached the gate and carefully unwrapped a heavy package he carried, a blue metal box whose lid he opened. Two lustrous ingots gleamed dully in moonlight.

Grod Sheepshorn, a lanky servant-lad with a receding chin, laughed nervously in his throat.

“Go on, Spatchwort,” he said to his friend, “you be first since you are the clever one.”

“It matters not who is first.”

So saying, Lord Ustorix tossed the silvery bars over the edge of the platform, out into the chasm of night.

From behind distant mountains the moon continued to rise, the stars slid imperceptibly across black glass. To the south, ink-dark waters stretched to the head of the bay. The sound of waves on the shore far below was carried upward on a salt wind. Horses nickered faintly, and hooves drummed in the meadows. The two silvery bars hung motionless, four hundred feet off the ground, level with the doorsill’s rock shelving.

“Pure alt four hundred sildron ingots, I see,” said Grod Sheepshorn with an exaggerated bow to his superior. “Enough to forge hoof-crescents for half a squadron! Worth a gold piece or two to the guards for the borrowing, eh, my lord?”

“Worth none of your business,” the aristocrat said coldly. “Let’s see you boys perform, now.”

“First the wager,” demanded Tren Spatchwort. He stood half a head shorter than Sheepshorn, wiry and lithe.

“One gold eagle each if you do it. Nothing if you don’t. Maybe a broken neck.”

“Wha—one eagle?” stammered Spatchwort. “But my lord said three!”

Ustorix rounded on the menial, teetering on the edge of civility.

“Well do I recall the agreement. One for the first attempt, two for the second.”

“But there was nothing said about a second—” Sheepshorn broke off and turned away. When he turned back, he was grinning. The grin did not reach his eyes. He bowed stiffly.

“Is my life worth twenty shillings?” He laughed. “Hey for two sovereigns! My lord knows that we can do the trick once, twice, countless times! For us it is easy! True, Spatchwort?”

The smaller youth nodded uneasily.

Sheepshorn flung off his cloak. Measured strides brought him to the back wall of the gatehall. With a lunge, he broke into a run, straight toward the gate, where the sildron bars hung side by side several feet from the edge. His soft boots made no noise on the dominite floor. There would be no noise as his body hurtled down through four hundred feet of space—perhaps a slight disturbance when it encountered the ground below. The nameless watcher seized a martingale and gripped it fiercely. Having reached the platform, the servant-boy flung himself out and up. His leap brought him to the hovering bars. His feet planted firmly, one on each bar, the boy skated through the air, leaning back slightly, carried by his own momentum. It was a daring act, an act of great skill—for a second, as he slowed, he teetered on the brink of losing balance and life, caught it again, and stopped.

His friend Spatchwort whistled nervously through his teeth. Ustorix said nothing.

Squatting on his precarious perch, Sheepshorn tied the sildron bars to his boots. When he stood, he grinned again with his eyes—posed, poised like a dancer.

“Now look at me!” he crowed softly, so softly, on the breeze. Noise would bring discovery. “I can walk on the air, like a wizard.”

A rush of exhilaration had accompanied success. His confidence rose. Lifting a boot, he took a careful step, then another, almost swaggering. Lightly he bobbed in nothingness as he returned to the doorsill and simply stumped back inside.

Blandly, Lord Ustorix handed over the gold coin to the erstwhile performer, who, suddenly conscious of finishing an entertaining display in style, swept him a deep and ingratiating bow. Perhaps his cynicism was lost on the noble youth; perhaps not. Ustorix showed no sign.

The sildron ingots having been untied and returned to their gravity-defying position in space, it was Spatchwort’s turn. Moonlight accentuated the two gray wells of eyes in his pale face as he made his run. He stumbled before reaching the platform but recovered well to make the leap, and like Sheepshorn before him, he gained foothold and glided away as if on some invisible cushion. Triumphant, he slowed to a halt and fished a rope out of his pocket to tie on the bars so that he could walk. Then he looked down.

Presently the young lord called in a low tone, “Playing statues is not part of the game. This bores me.” He drew out a dagger and started cleaning his fingernails with it.

“Tie them on, Tren, just tie them on,” came Sheepshorn’s urgent whisper.

After a minute, the boy in the air moved. He moved as if he were made of crystal and the dark were a tightening vise.

He moved, and he fell.

The hidden watcher caught his breath. A dislodged stirrup clattered to the floor near his shoulder, but the noble and the servant made no response. Spatchwort had caught hold of a sildron bar as he fell and now hung there by one hand. He simply hung, as if he had no strength or will left. An image of his own recent past formed in the watcher’s mind. Sheepshorn pulled a coil of rope from a wall-hook, unwinding it rapidly.

“Catch hold when I throw to you,” he called. As he prepared to throw, Ustorix took the rope out of his hands and tossed the entire coil out the gate.

“What are you doing?” Sheepshorn’s face blazed with anger and disbelief.

“Let him hang there awhile longer. Give him a chance to prove himself by pulling himself up on top of the bar.”

“No one could do that. It is not possible. The ingot is too small.”

“Imagine if the unstorm came now and blew off his taltry.” Ustorix smiled. “What a joke! They wouldn’t want to use this gate for a thousand years!”

Sheepshorn grabbed a second rope and held firmly to it, tossing one end out toward the dangling figure. Spatchwort reached for it but missed. At the second try he caught it, and Sheepshorn reeled him in like a fish. Ustorix was laughing silently. Spatchwort collapsed, trembling, on the floor. Sheepshorn lassoed the hovering ingot and drew it in.

“You didn’t succeed,” said the Son of the House, regaining his customary coolness, “so you haven’t earned your reward. This time. However, you have another chance.”

“How gracious of you, my lord,” replied Sheepshorn with eyes of flint.

Lord Ustorix drew two rectangular plates of a dull blue metal from his cloak and clipped them onto the upper surfaces of the sildron ingots. The container for sildron had been made from the same stuff.

“Andalum!” cried Sheepshorn. “Not andalum!”

“Hush—do you desire discovery? This will be easy for you, as you boasted. It is no more difficult than what you have just done, and it will earn you two more gold eagles each. I want to see it.”

“But if we should somersault, if the andalum should come between the sildron and the ground, we should fall.” Sheepshorn opened his hands palms up in a gesture of honest astonishment.

“Of course you would, but it shall not happen—why should it?”

“My lord, we have never practiced with real sildron before, as you know.” An edge of real fear had crept into the servant’s voice. “We have only practiced with wheelboards, and with ice in Winter. What we have done is no mean feat. But to do it with an andalum surface could be suicide. We never agreed to this.”

Ustorix shrugged. “I will leave now.”

“No, wait.” Sheepshorn licked his lips nervously. His eyes were very bright, as bright as coins.

“Cur, you do not honor me sufficiently,” hissed Ustorix, now irritable.

“I am sorry, my lord—prithee wait, my lord. I will do this.”

Ustorix threw the ingots into the air. One came down and settled at its usual height, about two inches above the floor. The other crashed on the floor, the blue side facing down. He flipped it over casually and pushed them both out of the gate. They hovered. Sheepshorn walked to the back wall. He prepared to run, to build up speed for that final leap off the ledge.

To fall four hundred feet would take four and a half heartbeats, but it would seem longer until, accelerating to meet the cobblestones at 980 miles per hour, the descending note of a scream was cut off. This realization apparently illuminated Sheepshorn. He softly swore an oath and propped, shuddering, against the wall.

Ustorix shrugged.

Cramp seized the eavesdropper’s leg, and he shifted minimally. The forgotten stirrup, by his foot, rang against stone. Heads turned.

“Methinks I heard a sound there before.”

Crouched, heart pounding, the nameless one saw them draw back the curtains of harness and tack, peering down at him.

“What is this?” Ustorix’s tone dripped with the acid of disgust.

Spatchwort uneasily choked out, “It’s an ill-made thing that goes about with one of the menials, my lord. A half-wit and a mute.”

“From whence?”

“They say he’s a peddler’s son who was caught in a cave-in near Huntingtowers during that tremor in Autumn, or else some servant’s get, abandoned on the road.”

“What’s it doing here, spying on us? Hey, Poxface, what do you think you’re doing? Come out of there.”

As the discovered youth scrambled to obey, the lift-shaft rattled. In its remote depths, a cage began to ascend shakily. But before it hove into view, a deep voice boomed through the gatehall. Breathing hard, two men stood at the top of the stairwell—the dun-robed Chief Steward of the Household and the Master at Swords, cloaked in scarlet.

“Damn my eyes,” uttered the former quizzically.

“What brings you here, my lord Ustorix?” inquired Mortier, Master at Swords. “Do these louts trouble you? Something fell to the courtyard below this gate, and voices were heard up here. Others follow now, to investigate.”

Ustorix paused a moment before replying. He eyed the spy reflectively.

“My dear teacher, this creature here has stolen sildron from the treasury. Two of my servants discovered him, but instead of returning the sildron, they decided to play games with it. I was about to put a stop to all that when one of the common, blood-beggared scoundrels elected to try and kill himself.”

“Commendable action on your part, my lord, I’m certain your father will be proud to hear it.” The Master at Swords bowed graciously.

The lift-cage rose up in the shaft and bumped to a stop. The lift-keeper pulled back the folding iron grid, and several men strode forth. Mortier peered more closely at the disfigured youth.

“Most interesting,” he murmured nasally. “I was not aware of this boy. Take him away. Assuredly he shall be well punished.”

And he was.

He had known what Grethet, his keeper, would say:

“Who beat you? Did they see you? Did they see it is not only your face that is so repulsive?”

Early, she had informed him of the loathliness of his flesh. He had gone to great pains to conceal the skinny frame from which he himself now always averted his gaze, but in the end his punishers had not bothered to uncover more than his back and shoulders for the whipping. A severe lashing, it cut deep and bloodily. The wounds began to weep and brought on a fever.

For weeks he lay ill in the darkness of the candle-store, with only the spiders to hear his moans of agony. Grethet would come in to wash his wounds with herbal decoctions and impatiently pour water into the parched and choking well of his mouth. In his delirium he thought himself trapped in the stories he had heard in the servants’ kitchens, his liver being torn out over and over beneath some lonely mere, drowning in his own blood.

Eventually he recovered, but the scars remained.

When a Windship was due in before dawn, he used to creep out of a crumbling window and seat himself upon a narrow roof-gutter, buffeted by the breeze. In that hour, the ground and trees were black. The eastern horizon, between dark gray shoals of clouds, was singed brownish orange like burnt toast, fading to the palest lemon farther up the sky, blending to dilute, ethereal blue, which in turn shaded gradually to the deep, rich hue of the night sky overhead, still dark, still hung with stars.

Beyond Isse Harbor, along the world’s edge, the auburn singe deepened.

Birds uttered uneasy, sporadic sounds from the trees and the duck-pond far below. Their quacks and trills increased in proportion to the strength of the iron glow in the east, whose warm facade was smudged by cloud floatlets as a smith’s ruddy countenance is smirched by soot and ash. Above, the profound blue drained from the sky and the stars dissolved.

Burnt orange transmuted to pastel gold. A surprising ribbon of rose pink unrolled. Against the horizon, lacy foliage was pricked by unbearable motes of gold. The sea turned from black to gray green. A line of fire ran along the world’s rim, and the sun rose, to slide away from the ground, a silver coin through the wolf-gray clouds. Out of the south, half on fire, a sailing ship would come dipping and gliding through the air.

The world depended on the properties of sildron for many purposes.

Eotaurs’ beautiful swanlike wings were used mainly for maneuvering, the species having been bred, over hundreds of years, from the original tiny bird-horses to a ridable size. However, their greater bulk now required sildron to become airborne. Sildron, like magnetized iron, possessed invisible properties so strange and powerful that it seemed almost eldritch.

Diverse cargoes were brought from the outlands by Waterships. Some were destined for the Tower, others must travel farther inland. At Isse Harbor, freightage that was too large or inexpensive or heavy for thoroughbred Skyhorses was offloaded to heavily guarded road-cart caravans or hauled up on ropes to the Windship Dock 112 feet above ground level, at the seventh story. There it was loaded onto the mighty sildron-raised vessels. Eotaurs and carrier pigeons were not the only sky-travelers to come and go at the Tower, although they were the swiftest. The grandest of all, the Windships had the capacity to carry passengers and large cargoes.

The wind bellied their sails as it did for any Watership, but swaying treetops were their waves, birds their fish, mountains their reefs, the diurnal pulse of light and dark their tide, and clouds their foam. Sildron gave them lift, sildron pushed against the ground to power their small, unstable propellers.

This silvery metal shod and girded the eotaurs, it lifted and propelled the vessels of the sky. All the wealth of the Windship lines and the status of the twelve Stormrider Houses, the glory, the power, the skills, passed from generation to generation in traditions going back many centuries, all depended upon that most costly and rare of metals, even though it exerted no force against water and could not cross the sea.

It was so precious that it was the property only of kings and nobles. Watching the Windships go by in the skies, the most lowly of servants at Isse Tower often wondered what it would be like to go voyaging in them, up there where the clouds drifted like pillowy featherbeds, their scalloped borders gilded by sunshine, where it seemed that a voyager might sail on without a care, without pain, and the past would not matter.

His entire history was forgotten, gone without a trace. What took its place, always, was an aching sense of loss. Sometimes, when not too weary to ponder at all, he wondered who it was that peered out from his eyes and listened with his ears. Sometimes he conjectured about who his parents had been and where they might be now, and whether they had abandoned him because he was mute and malformed. Brand Brinkworth had once told of a legendary prince who had longed for the perfect wife and whose wizard had fashioned a maiden for him out of a mass of beautiful flowers. Later, the servants had speculated on one another’s origins had they been created from some fleshless material, mostly guessing “weeds” or “dung,” and the foundling wondered, in the cold recesses of his reverie, whether such a misfit as he had never been born but had been shaped or raised up out of starless depths by some raving and witless magician.

Often he tried to convey to Grethet the many questions about his beginnings. She seemed unable or unwilling to understand, slapping him away impatiently. He knew only that he was imprisoned here by his need to survive and that in this fantastic Tower he had come among a proud people who scorned excessive displays of joy or sorrow, excitement or fear, but who, beneath the iron bands they imposed, seethed with hidden turmoils.

Taunts and blows made life painful. Loneliness was his only companion. But certain things made it bearable—the sound of the wind crooning in the battlements, the days when vapors blanketed the world far below and he stood on an island in the clouds, the nights when rain pattered on the outer walls, the songs of birds on the morning breeze, the tok-tok-tok of the moss-frog whose call was reputed to improve the flavor of cellared wine, the salt sea-breeze tasting of far-off adventures, the sight of the Greayte Southern Star like a green firework burning low in the night sky, the warm, friendly noses of goats, hounds, and capuchins, glimpses of eotaurs and the mighty Windships that crossed the airs, stories told by the kitchen fire.

The stories, too, marked the passing of days and provided vicarious journeys from the sequestered Tower. They were the only way of finding out what it was like in Aia, the world, beyond the demesnes—lifelines to something Beyond.

He wondered: Will I escape someday, or are the demesnes of the Tower to be my graveyard?

All the talk was of the wedding to be held at the Tower in Teinemis, the Firemonth. The Lady Persefonae, daughter of Lord Voltasus and Lady Artemisia, was to be married to the young heir of the Fifth House, and the ceremony was to take place only forty-two days after Greatsun Day. The word on the floors below the dock was that the wedding cake was to be decorated with real Sugar shipped from the Turnagain Islands and that a Confectioner was to be flown from Caermelor, the Royal City, specially for the job.

In response to the servants’ complaints about the burden of extra work imposed by the forthcoming celebrations, Brand Brinkworth increased the quality and quantity of his evening tales.

He related a cheery account of the lucky and extremely virtuous farmer’s wife who would rise up in the morning and find that all her work had been completed for her overnight, finished to perfection—the cows already milked, the hens fed, the butter churned, the house cleaned from top to bottom, and a fire twinkling brightly in the hearth, with a pot of porridge bubbling merrily over it.

“Life went on like this for some time,” said the Storyteller, “but then the goodwife became curious to see who was being so kind and helpful. One night she rose from her bed, opened the kitchen door a crack, and peeped through. You can imagine her astonishment when she saw a crowd of busy little bruneys with green caps, sweeping and polishing, making everything spick-and-span. But she noticed that their clothes were rather plain and ragged, and she felt sorry for them, so she spent the next week sewing until she had made splendid new outfits for them all. These she laid out in the kitchen one evening, and that night she rose again from her bed and peeped through the door. Well, those little bruneys were delighted with their new clothes. They put them on at once and danced about with glee, but then with a shout they vanished clean away and the farmer’s wife never saw them again.”

“Addle-pated woman!” exclaimed a scullery maid. “The first thing any fool knows about seelie wights is that they mislike being thanked for their good turns. Thanking them with gifts or compliments is taken by them as an insult!”

“Not so,” another disagreed. “I’ll warrant they vanished because they thought they were too fine, in their new clothes, to do lowly work anymore.”

“Now there,” said Brinkworth, stroking his beard, “is a matter about which many folk disagree. A bone, one might say, of contention. To thank or not to thank. My own opinion is that by the thanking-gifts, the bruneys knew they had been spied upon. They detest spying as much as any eldritch wight, seelie or otherwise, and that is why they went away.”

“Body o’ me! If any of them helping-wights ever come here to the Tower, I’ll thrash anyone what spies on them or thanks them,” declared Rennet Thighbone. “I never get no thanks, and I don’t see why tricksy wights should. Anyway, I never seen one in me life, and I reckon it’s all just cock-and-bull.”

“So ringed is the Tower with rowan, iron, and wizardry,” commented Brand Brinkworth, “there’s never a minor wight of seelie or unseelie could invade us. That is why you have never seen one, Rennet.”

“What I say be no cock-and-bull,” said Teron Hoad the ostler, licking his lips. “This be truth.”

The kitchen’s occupants nervously gathered closer together. Hoad’s accounts were famed for their gruesomeness, and they did not want to miss a word. It seemed he felt it his duty to darken the mood if it chanced to become too cheery; for this he had unwittingly acquired the name “Hoad the Toad.” Two of his fingers were, inexplicably, missing. He kept them pickled, in a jar—a foible that added to his sinister reputation.

“I speak of the Beulach Beast what used to haunt the Ailagh Pass in Finvarna,” the aforesaid ostler began with relish.

“Used to haunt it?”

“Aye. It went away after its blood-search was successful. Only during the night hours it used to be heard, uttering shrieks and howls that chilled the blood of those who heard and made them flee in horror and set them to locking their doors and shutters.”

“How was it formed?”

“Sometimes like a man with one leg, sometimes like an ordinary man, sometimes like a greyhound or a fell beast of foul description. Folk dared not venture out after dark in those parts, for the Beast would be always on the prowl. Finally it got what it was after.”

He paused for dramatic effect.

“What, Hoad? What?” bleated the listeners. Hoad deliberately looked over his shoulder and lowered his tone confidentially.

“One morning,” he said, “a traveler was found dead by the side of the road—pierced by two deep wounds, one in his side and one in his leg. He had a hand pressed to each hurt. It was said that these injuries were too frightful and strange to have been made by a man, and indeed the Beulach Beast must have done it, for it was not seen or heard again at the Ailagh Pass.”

“They might have got rid of it, but it will just go somewhere else,” commented Thighbone, scraping his callused fingers with a paring-knife. “They’ll never get rid of the Buggane what haunts that Great Waterfall near Glyn Rushen.”

“That is a water-bull, is it not?” the stoker interjected dubiously.

“Aye. Not a seelie one, my friend, not at all, but a water-bull just the same. It is particularly dangerous and vicious. It lives in the pool right under where the Waterfall drops. Sometimes it is a man, but usually it takes the form of a big black calf what crosses the road and jumps down into the pool with a sound like the rattling of chains.”

A lackey shook the chains of the cast-iron stew-pot, and everyone jumped.

“I’ll box yer ears for yer, ribald clown!” Thighbone yelled indignantly.

The servants soothed the cook, and eventually he went on with his contribution.

“I heard a story of the Buggane not long ago, from a peddler in the last road-caravan. Seems a girl was working outside her house in Glyn Rushen, which is not far from the Great Waterfall—she was cutting up turnips for the pot, when the Buggane came roaring along in a man’s shape, picked her up, slung her over its back, and made off with her toward its home under the pool before anyone had time to save her. But the lass was lucky—she still held in her hand the knife what she had been slicing turnips with. Just as they reached the pool she cut through her apron strings and was able to get free and run home like the wind, all the while in terror thinking the thing was coming behind her.”

“That be not unlike one of the tales of the Each Uisge,” mused an understeward. “Seems a good idea to wear an apron around the haunts of these water wights.”

“You’d look a right gowk in a pinafore,” snorted the buttery-maid.

A half-deaf cellarman with crow’s-feet engraved at the corners of his eyes now roused himself.

“What about the old Trathley Kow what haunts the village of Trathley, in middle Eldaraigne?” he shouted. “He’s a bogie more mischievous than bad, but they’ll never see him leave.”

“On my troth! I hope he never does go,” said the understeward. “He’s always good for a fine story, the prankster that he is. Always he finishes his jokes with a laugh like a horse’s whinny, at the expense of his dupes!”

“I heard a good tale of the Trathley Kow,” offered a dimpled chambermaid, “which happened to two young men from a village near Trathley. It being a holiday, they had arranged to meet their sweethearts one afternoon at a stile by Cowslip Lane, but lo and behold, when the lads arrived there they saw their sweethearts across the meadow, walking away. They called out, but the lasses seemed not to hear, so the lads ran after them. On they went, for two or three miles, but although they went as fast as they could the young men could not catch up! They were so mindful of watching their quarry, they did not much look where they were going, and to their dismay they found themselves up to their knees in a muddy bog. At that moment their sweethearts vanished with a loud ‘Ha ha!’ and there was the Trathley Kow instead. Well, as you can imagine, the lads got themselves free of the muck in a trice and took to their heels at once. That waggish wight pursued them over hill and dale, hooting and mocking them. They had to cross the Shillingswater to get back home, but in their fright they both fell in! They came up covered with weeds and mud, and of course, each took a look at the other and immediately mistook him for the Trathley Kow!”

The chambermaid’s audience fought to contain its merriment.

“Go on, go on,” begged the stoker, red in the face, his eyes watering.

“Bawling with terror, they fought each other off and ran to their separate homes, each telling a story of having been chased by the Trathley Kow and almost drowned in the Shillingswater!”

The listeners stuffed their fists in their mouths, from whence burst sounds like escaping steam.

“Well,” Hoad the Toad interjected darkly, “those foolish lads are fortunate they did not live closer to the mountains.”

The mood dampened.

“Why?” piped up a spit-boy dutifully.

“Well, if they went out a-walking like that, the Gwithlion would have had them for sure.”

“Ah, the Gwithlion,” said Brinkworth, nodding. “Wicked wights they are.”

“What do they do, Master Hoad?” inquired the spit-boy.

“Hideous hags they are,” said the ostler, “hideouser than old biddy Grethet, if your brain can invent such. They mislead and waylay travelers by night on the mountain roads. Sometimes they take the form of goats. Not content with roaming about in the dark, they even visit the houses of the mountain people, especially in stormy weather, and when the Gwithlion knock at the door, the folk within know they must be greeted hospitably for fear of the harm they might do.”

“Yea, but draw a knife against them and they are defeated,” observed the wrinkled cellarman loudly. “They do hate the power of cold iron.”

“In truth,” acknowledged the Toad. “But cold iron and other charms are no help against the greater ones.”

At this grim and accurate observation, the kitchen fell silent for a time, until the spit-boy spoke up.

“Now, Master Brinkworth, sir, I have a request for you.”

“Ask away.”

“Pray tell us of the time the wizard Sargoth sliced the King-Emperor’s jester in two halves and put him back together again and he living still!”

Well aware of the man’s skill with a whip, the foundling tried to avoid the Master at Swords. Burial among the servants’ catacombs allowed little chance of encountering him. However, if he thought never to see his adversary again, he was mistaken.

Grethet said, “You can go down to help in the stables. You are very lucky. Do you understand? They are short of a stablehand down there. They need a boy to work. You do as you are told. You do not touch the horses unless you are told. The horses are precious. More precious than you. Mind your ways.”

So her ward minded his ways and went, for the first time, down to the stables and the eotaur training yards.

It seemed a long age since he had first come to live with the Seventh House of the Stormriders. He did not know how long, although his hair had grown a hand’s length until it touched his shoulders. When it fell across his eyes one day, he was astonished to see that its color was gold and hated it at once for being utterly different from the shades of brown around him. From that time onward he always wore the taltry pulled up to cover his head, whether indoors or out.

At mealtimes the fruits and berries of Autumn had given way to the dried-bean pottages of Winter.

The Tower had celebrated the Midwinter Imbrol Festival on Littlesun Day, first day of the New Year and of Dorchamis, the Darkmonth. The New Year 1090 had been ushered in with feasts and garlands of holly, bonfires in midnight meadows, and hulking great plum puddings blazing like miniature suns, little of which the lower menials tasted. The preserved fare of Winter had in turn been replaced by green worts and herbs as the seasons revolved. During all that time, the nameless one had been within walls, above the ground, able to glimpse very little through the attenuated windows of the servants’ levels. Now, at last, he was to venture into the demesnes.

The dominite stables adjoining the northern flank of the Tower harbored almost a hundred winged horses. Grooms, trainers, and strappers lived with them, slept with them, watched and tended them at every hour. Capacious storerooms, harness rooms, loose-boxes, exercise tracks, hattocking tracks, and lunging yards bustled daily with their noise. There was a smithy where the farrier plied his trade and workshops for the lorimer and saddler. The pungency of stables was tinged with the odor of a mews. Passing an open door, the youth glimpsed the rumps and tails of a dozen aviquine creatures standing in their stalls. Their well-groomed coats and feathers shone in shades of bay, chestnut, roan, and gray.

That fantastic plumage surely belonged to something beaked, tendril-tongued, and hollow-boned that had hatched out of an egg: an avian creature with a cold round eye, scaled claws, and quick, sharp movements. Instead it stroked the flanks of a round-haunched, hot-breathed mammal, feathered of fetlock and streamlined, certainly, to the utmost degree, but apparently as far removed from a bird as the moon from a loaf of bread.

The sound of steady munching was punctuated occasionally by the stamp of a hoof or the clatter of a rope. On the floor, wisps of straw mingled with horse-feathers. At the far end, a fledgling colt paced restlessly around a loose-box.

To the southwest, the stables overlooked Isse Harbor; to the north lay the green, fenced fields where eotaurs and landhorses grazed. Westward, the orchards. Beyond the acres of fruit-trees stretched the forest, apparently without end.

“You’ll be the lad they sent!” called a gruff voice. Keat Featherstone, the second groom, looked him over, nodding his closely shaven head. Light stubble dusted the jawline of a bluff face.

“You be a sorry sight, as they told me. Still, I suppose it be not your fault, and horses don’t take fright at ugly faces, thank the Star, or I’d be out of a job by now. They said you don’t talk, neither, but that makes you all right by me so long as I don’t have to look at you overmuch. I suppose you can polish tack?”

The youth nodded eagerly, willing to please any person who offered a way out of the servants’ quarters if only for a few hours, but particularly willing to please the first man who had not spontaneously displayed active hostility toward him.

“Aye. Well, here’s the tack room, so go to it. And keep your taltry tied on tight.” The second groom rolled his eyes.

The tack room walls bore an interesting clutter of saddles, bridles, rope halters, and baffling contraptions of leather and iron. Benches were strewn with tools, leather skins, bits of metal, rusty horseshoes, and nails. Horse-brasses cast in the shapes of roosters, daisies, loaves, rowan-berries, and hypericum leaves hung on tanned boars’-hide strips alongside strings of little bells. Canisters and bottles of simple equine physic stood arrayed along a shelf on one wall. Crude labels had been stuck on. Pictures were drawn on them, since most of the stablehands were illiterate, but there was also painstaking lettering that proclaimed the contents to be castor oyl, tarre, magneesya, malanders-oyntmente, jinnjer, and spyryts of wyne. A couple of horn darklanterns swung from iron hooks.

In these comfortable surroundings the lad worked hard all morning to please Keat Featherstone, rubbing in the mellow oils and pungent polishes until leather glowed; setting aside whatever needed stitching or replacing; creating order out of chaos caused by strappers who had thrown down tack and other equipment anywhere in their careless haste; picking up, hanging up, arranging, storing, always blending with shadows in case attention should bring the usual vilification. But there were unshuttered windows and an open door through which blew the sound of voices, barking dogs, hooves on the cobbles, metal on metal, seagulls on the wing.

Stableboys hurried in and out and past the windows. Through the doorway, the new polish-boy could see the smithy, its stone floor raised three feet above the andalum lining that spread between the building and the ground—an essential foundation for any place where sildron was worked freely. The high-chimneyed workshop, its windows barred against theft, was roofed with gray slate and shaded by antique chestnut trees, over a hundred feet high, dropping their alabaster flowers like snow. A roan eotaur mare, bronze-winged, was being ushered, unshod, up the ramp—a champion by the sleek, fine-muscled look of her.

A brass horn blared a signal; the fanfare, the lad had learned, that heralded the arrival of a Windship and a cause for excitement. It was silver for Relayers, bold brass for Windships, the Greayte Conch for Waterships, and the drum tattoo for land approaches.

External hubbub increased. The temporary stablehand craned his neck to get a better view out of the window and up toward the Tower.

She came in over the treetops, her masts, yards, and rigging appearing first. Festooned with a brave display of heraldry, she flew a pennoncel at the masthead, the standard of Eldaraigne at the forecastle, four other banners aft, including the yellow ensign of the Merchant Service, and streamers, thirty yards long, charged with yellow dragons, blue lozenges, and white birds. Her gittons, the small swallow-tailed flags, waved various devices of tyraxes, dragons, and lynxes’ heads.

A three-masted barque of the Rhyll-Desson Line, two hundred feet from bowsprit to stern, thirty feet across the beam; her mainmast rose 140 feet above deck. Her figurehead was a flowing-haired woman: the North Wind personified. Four aileroned wings jutted, two on each side of the keel. Wooden propellers whirled on their leading edges. As she neared the wharf on Floor Seven of the House, all sail was rapidly clewed up and furled, for to miscalculate velocity and hit the fortress, even though it was well buttressed, would bring a disaster beyond imagining. A Yeoman Stormrider circled, tossing mooring-lines to deckhands. Anchors were let go overboard to bite into the mooring-yard below the wharf; the tower’s dockers leaned out with pikestaffs and grapplers to push her off and pull her in, and with long springy baffles, hooked at either end, that would attach ship to wharf at a safe distance.

Whistles shrilled. The master and mates yelled commands. Aeronauts frantically cranked the onhebbing winch-handles, adjusting chains of andalum plate that slid back and forth between the sildron lining and the outer hull, to negotiate altitude so that ramps could be stretched across the gap for the exchange of cargo; for this was a supply ship from Gilvaris Tarv on her way to Rigspindle. A name was painted on her bows in flowing script—Dragonfly. She bobbed lightly, as a ship would in calm waters—shifting weights on board lent her this movement. Small mosses and lichens bedizened her wooden outer hull, where barnacles would have clung on a Watership, and she cast a stupendous shadow over the kitchen gardens.

“She’s passing fair, the Dragonfly, ain’t she!” An uncouth voice shattered the youth’s reverie and he started guiltily.

Dain Pennyrigg, a stablehand who ofttimes frequented the servants’ kitchen on Floor Five, walked into the harness room. His lively eyes missed nothing. Freckles foxtrotted across a face with a turned-up nose and a wide mouth.

“No need to cower, lad, anyone with half an eye could see you’re no shirker.”

He paused, a corner of his mouth quirked.

“Don’t go bragging that I said so, but you may have done a better job than any lad since I worked in here. Here’s a packet of bread and cheese for your dinner—Keat Featherstone sent it. The well’s around the corner if you’re wanting a drink.”

The youth knew he would have to go thirsty; others invariably complained of pollution if he drank from a common source.

“You’ve not been here before, eh, lad?” The eyebrow Dain Pennyrigg cocked was not unkind. The youth shook his head.

“You be always stuck in that dungeon with old mother Grethet. ‘Mind your ways now, mind your ways,’” he mimicked, cackling. “Silly old crone. I only go up there to hear the stories. Brinkworth’s the best Storyteller hereabouts—better than Hoad the Toad, at any rate. The Toad relishes gloom and darkness—makes it all up—invents characters just so’s he can kill ’em off in nasty ways. Lucky if anyone’s alive at the end. Now stop your chattering, lad, you’re distracting me from my work—Featherstone sent me to take you to your next job. Put away your polishes and follow me.”

Tucking the bread and cheese into his wallet, the youth followed, glancing up intensely at the moored Windship floating beside the Tower, now linked to it by wide boarding ramps, mooring-lines, flying foxes, and baffles and swarming with sailors and cargo-handlers. Down in the yards, horses and stablehands trotted to and fro. Shouts mingled with the hammering of iron, the blowing of bellows, the clanking of metal, boots ringing on stone. Gaps between buildings revealed glimpses of long meadows fringed by dark forest whence a westerly breeze brought green perfume and the “tink” of bellbirds. An andalum-lined horse-float clattered past, taking a sildron-shod eotaur to the Tower. Overhead, a whirlpool of Skyhorses cantered in training circuits, and the sun was a goldfish in a blue bowl.

As the two servants crossed the cobbles in front of the smithy, three riders almost mowed them down. They jumped to one side as landhorses squalled past.

“Curse him,” growled Pennyrigg, recovering equipoise, “Mortier the arrogant, the sly. Cares nothing. Does anything he pleases—how does he get away with wearing colors instead of trainers’ gray?”

The crimson-cloaked Master at Swords with his two attendants cantered around a corner of the stables and out of sight. Ivory chestnut-blossoms swirled in their wake. Pennyrigg was about to speak again when a commotion by the smithy door cut him short.

A gray Skyhorse reared and plunged, wild-eyed, snorting, out of control. Its huge wings thundered at full span with the noise of ten thousand feathers; dust billowed. At the eotaur’s hooves crouched a capuchin, one of the small, apelike creatures that were kept as pets. Someone had covered the urchin’s hairy, half-armored hide in a decaying leather jerkin. Shrieking stridently, the animal waved its hands, then ran off on all fours toward the nearest chestnut tree, a party of stableboys hard on its heels.

“Cock’s passion! How came that vermin here?” bellowed the blacksmith, scarlet-faced, appearing at the doorway brandishing red-hot tongs. Eotaurs were notoriously spooked by capuchins—the smith’s enraged blustering exacerbated the situation. The stallion screamed, backing into the wall. Two strappers hung from its rope, but it was too strong for them in its distraction, flinging them aside and breaking loose. Feathers flew.

Hooded men came running from every direction. An eotaur was far too valuable to be allowed to injure itself. The mighty gray pounded blindly down the smithy ramp, heading straight toward Pennyrigg and his obedient follower. Pennyrigg bawled a curse and flung himself aside for the second time in five minutes—his companion reacted from instinct. As the gray passed, he snatched its halter and hung on, was dragged several yards, and slid to a sudden stop.

Steam rising from its trembling flanks, the stallion stood motionless in a dust-haze, snorting like a dragon, its nostrils the color of flame. The great wings remained outstretched, the sun shining through the radiating pinions, frost white.

The youth never took his eyes off the horse. Holding its gaze, he reached up, still holding the halter in one hand, and stroked its girder neck. His fingers combed the coarse mane, traced the small silvery horns protruding from the brow ridges. His breath mingled with its burning exhalations, and he saw one of these amazing creatures closely, for the first time. Avian and equine, the two forms of life fused perfectly. The wings simply grew out of the hide at the withers, a velveted swelling musculature budding into the long arc of bone, down-wrapped, from which blossomed the primaries, the secondaries of flight in a sweeping fan, feather overlapping feather in perfect tessellation down to the pointed tip. The eotaur regarded the boy, and the boy held its liquid gaze. The crowd made a horseshoe of itself.

After a time, dust settled. The great animal breathed evenly and folded the powerful wings.

“Sods and little fishes!” Keat Featherstone strode forward to take the halter easily. Without turning to the new polish-boy, sweat-stained and streaked with dirt, he said quietly:

“That was well done, lad. Well done indeed.”

As the second groom began to lead the stallion away, three riders burst the bubbling crowd apart. Casually they reined in.

“What’s the fuss here?” a nasal voice demanded. Master Mortier’s crimson taltry, brocade-edged, rested heavily on his head. Although the drawstring was tied under the chin, strands of long, lank hair showed, pulled back from a face that might have been handsome had the chin not been so weak and the pouting lips so soft and shapeless. A slight paunch betrayed his propensity for sampling new and different flavors. Gloved hands held the reins lightly. At one side he was flanked by Galliard, Master at Aerial Navigation, and on the other by his valet.

The blacksmith, rotund and rubicund, panted down the ramp from his forge.

“Sir Masters,” he announced imperatively, “I never seen no ’puchin loose in these grounds that I can remember of, lately, at any rate!” Then he added as an afterthought, “And I never seen nothing like that there, neither.”

He pointed at the uncomely youth who followed Keat Featherstone. Here was a likely scapegoat.

“That there distempered wretch is what caused all this mischief, I’ll be certain—upsetting Storm Prince’s nerves like that, getting him all of a pother so’s he can’t be shod.”

The Master at Swords gazed down upon the accused from the height of his horse’s back. The youth stopped in his tracks, flushed. The crowd of stablehands loitered uncertainly.

“How now! ’Tis himself,” cried the fencing-tutor, adjusting his riding-gloves, “a known troublemaker. Have our lessons taught you nothing, young paragon? Alas, we shall have to teach them again.”

The valet giggled—short, sharp, high-pitched. Mortier pointed his riding crop at the youth.

“He shall accompany me now.”

A stocky figure pushed through the crowd.

“Good sir,” Dain Pennyrigg rasped grimly, “the lad is not at fault.”

“Hold your tongue, lackey, this is not your business.”

Keat Featherstone paused in his stride, turning on his heel impatiently.

“Nor is it yours, sir. These are stable-yards, not fencing-halls. The lad saved the gray from certain injury. The ’puchin which frightened the horse belongs not to the lad, nor did it accompany him. I know not how it came here, but it is being removed by my lads, as you can see.”

The lads in question, having been unable to entice the little ape out of the tree, had taken to hurling stones at it. Hissing and insulted, it bared its yellow teeth, leaped from a branch, and fled away across the rooftops.

His expression subtly transformed, Mortier turned his gaze back to the object of his previous discourse. His beady eyes raked the youth from head to foot. Then his lip curled.

Without deigning to reply, the Master at Swords and his companions jabbed their spurs into their landhorses’ ribs and galloped away, scattering the crowd.

“A bad enemy,” said Keat Featherstone later in the harness room. “I cannot guess how you’ve crossed his path and come to his attention, but it is the worse for you.” Abstractedly he picked up a currycomb that had been left on a shelf and turned it around and around in his hands. “If you’re as good with horses as it seems, I would have you work here, from time to time. Keep out of his way, lad. I don’t want to see you end up in the same straits as poor clubfooted Pod, the little half-fey lad Mortier keeps as a page. The Master … er,”—Featherstone scratched his nose, and his gaze slipped sideways for an instant—“studies the Nine Arts. He prefers def—I mean, weak sort of folks to perform errands for him. ’Tis said he has dealings with unseelie wights. The Lord Stormriders are unaware or seem to be unaware of all such matters as do not interfere with their own doings. Mortier is a master swordsman, there’s no doubt, and an excellent teacher for the young riders, who ought rightly to be skilled in such ways. His services are valued.” He sighed. “You’ll be safe, just as long as you stay out of his way.”

Having replaced the currycomb, he headed for the door. “Come, lad—it be nigh on dusk. You’d better be getting on up the Tower.”

There were things he would have liked to say; questions he would have liked to ask. They hammered at his skull from the inside, demanding to be freed, but they were locked in, as he was locked within this Tower and its demesnes. There was no password, no key, not even a hairline crack to suggest the door might be ajar.

‘And the raging trees, the raging trees did roar,

And the stormy winds did blow,

While we jolly sailor lads were skipping up aloft

And the landlubbers lying down below, below, below,

And the landlubbers lying down below.’

Tren Spatchwort sang out of tune, in the servants’ kitchen on Floor Five.

“Hold your noise, Spatchwort,” said Dain Pennyrigg. He yawned. “I’d rather hear a capuchin squalling.”

“That’s an old sea-shanty, is it not?” said the Keeper of the Keys. “But you’ve changed the words to suit Windships. Got a mind to sail on Windships, have you?”

“Aye. One day I’ll crew my way out of this place,” Tren Spatchwort answered.

“Why? It’s not so bad. Besides, what would you do to earn a crust? Not sing for your supper?” Pennyrigg took a draft from a cracked mazer of hot medlure and propped his boots on a table. Wooden paddles leaned against the still-warm bread-ovens. Lamplight danced off belt buckles wrought like various animals’ heads, reflected in eyes, and softened the faces of the gathering. Lounging on benches and stools around the tables, they gambled at cards and dice, drank, conversed, whittled. Children played Mouse and Stringtangle.

“I would assay for the Dainnan, just as you would, Pennyrigg, just as any of us would. Unlike you blunderheads, I would pass the trials and become a member of the Brotherhood. I would travel, then, and see the world, and fight, and be part of great ventures, and the Royal Bard would make songs about me. How can anyone do anything in this place? ’Tis like an island, here. We’re trapped, surrounded by a sea of forest filled with evil wights, gray malkins, and bruigas and—” Tren Spatchwort bit off his words. “Other things. And ships sail on it. If the forest has become the sea, shall the sea become the forest?”

Pennyrigg punched his friend lightly on the arm. “You’ve been drinking too much spike-leaf. You’re in danger of becoming a philosopher.”

“And my friend Sheepshorn is in danger of becoming worm’s meat.”

“In trouble again?”

“Aye, and locked in the cellars for punishment.”

“The cellar-keeper had better beware. Grod will drink the barrels dry by tomorrow morn!”

Spatchwort’s proclamation of discontent touched a chord within the nameless one. He yearned to leave this place of no answers, to journey until he found answers, and if there were none, to travel on. He knew that strange dangers and untame things lurked in the forest—such things were often spoken of among the Household. To him, as strength developed, the prospect of the forest’s eldritch perils seemed no worse than spending the rest of his life cringing in humiliation and servitude.

Curled in the lap of the Keeper of the Keys was a capuchin clothed in a perished velvet jerkin. It whimpered.

“Inch grieves for Punch,” the woman said softly. “He got into the stables today, and they chased him off into the forest.”

“Indeed, and ’puchins are supposed to be trained not to go to the stables, so who’s at fault?” commented a scullion offhandedly.

“I heard it had something to do with Poxface over there,” said a footman. He indicated a figure crouched in a corner that drew even farther into itself, toward the spark of anger within.

To most of the other household servants, the only thing that made amends for the presence of the spindle-shanked lad was that they were now the second-lowest-ranked group. This warmed their spirits somewhat, although not toward him. In fact, most of them were torn between bullying him to prove their rank and ignoring him out of laziness or because it pained their sense of the aesthetic to look at him. This conundrum proved too much for their intellects to resolve, and to avoid further mental suffering they ended up alternating between the two approaches.

“Why is it always creeping around here with real people?” interjected a drudge. “Why doesn’t it stay in the furnace room with batty Grethet?”

“Grethet’s sheep, it is,” gibed another. “Grows its yellow wool for her. Says she’ll sell it off for a pretty penny, and why should she get the benefit? Why not us?”

“Things like that oughtn’t to be allowed in places where people eat,” muttered another.

A bowl thrown by one of the older children found its mark on the youth’s shoulder.

“Leave off—he’s harmless enough,” snapped the Keeper of the Keys.

Attention drifted from the youth. The servant Grech began to hold forth about the hideous monster known as Nuckelavee, which came out of the sea spreading evil wherever he went, blighting crops, destroying livestock, and killing every mortal he encountered.

“His head is ten times the size of a man’s,” Grech grinned, accidentally spitting as he spoke, “and his mouth juts forth like a pig’s snout, yet ’tis wide enough to drive a wheelbarrow in. His home is the sea. He blights crops with mildew and sea-gales, he throws livestock over the rocky cliffs along the coast, he brings plague amongst all mortalkind. Poisonous is the foul blast from his nostrils, withering plants and causing animals to sicken. Never does he visit the land when rain is falling, and ’tis known he brings long droughts.”

“Droughts?” someone questioned. “Has he then some earnest disapprobation of fresh water?”

“That he does, and no mistake,” replied Grech wisely.

“You’ll be giving us nightmares! It’s naught but a sournatured and pestilent fat-guts you are, Grech!” the other servants exclaimed. “You polled bachelor!”

“Pray tell us a kinder story, Brand,” implored Rennet Thighbone. The old man obliged, and the evening passed quickly with the telling of tales.

As the nameless youth pursued his task of polishing the door fittings, a man came to him.

“You have been summoned, Lickspittle. The Master of Swords summons you to his presence now!”

Mortier’s chamber was dark. Velvet curtains muffled the slits of windows. No fire shed its cheery glow; the only light emanated from a quincunx of blue flames on a long table of polished oak. A broken orrery stood before a tall and tarnished mirror; also a tellurion, slightly damaged. Dirty retorts and vials disarrayed a wooden trestle. A similar edifice opposite supported rusted iron cogs, toothed wheels, springs, an astrolabe, a headless automaton, and several other half-gutted clockwork apparati of whose purpose the visitor had no idea. Over the whole chamber hung a heaviness, a shroud of lethargy. Things dismantled had never been reassembled; nothing stood complete—all projects abandoned, half-done.

The Master at Swords had melded with a high-backed chair.

“Come here.”

Accustomed to obedience, the lad obeyed, fighting for breath. Rising terror threatened to suffocate him. Even twilight could not hide the unsavoriness of the master’s helminthic features. For bleak moments the cold, watery eyes scanned the lad from head to foot, as if measuring him, while the youth trembled, wondering when the blow would fall. Mortier was not one to prolong suspense. Abruptly, wordlessly, he leaned forward and struck, suddenly and hard. The lad reeled and on finding his balance retreated a step or two.

“That is for your impertinence at the smithy yesterday.”

With surprising swiftness, the man rose out of his chair, lunging forward. A second blow landed like thunder on the side of the lad’s head. He felt blood trickle.

“And that for daring to turn folk against me to save your own hide. And that”—the third blow felled his victim—“for paining my sight with your ugliness.” The lad scrambled to evade the booted foot now, but it was useless. When the Master at Swords had kicked him to the other side of the room he rolled under a table, finding shelter behind its thick, carved legs. There he knelt, his ears ringing, his thin ribs rising and falling.

“Come forth. You shall kneel before my chair and beg pardon for your offenses. Come forth at once, I say, or you shall be further punished for your wanton disobedience, vile and ugly boy!”

Across the room a door opened. Distracted, Mortier turned. A servant’s head peered through the doorway.

“Master Mortier, sir—oh!”

The unfortunate intruder jumped back. Something fled past him, out the door, and down the dark corridor, away.

The lift-keeper slid the double sets of doors shut and locked them with a sonorous clang. Inside the lift-cage the boy without a name stared at the walls and ceiling.

The sildron-powered horse-lift was roomy. At that moment it carried an eotaur and five servants: the foundling, Keat Featherstone, Dain Pennyrigg, Teron Hoad the old ostler, and the lift-keeper, all dressed monotonously in tawny doublets, breeches, and boots, taltries pulled up to cover their heads. Lord Isterium’s bay mare, West Wind, was returning to work after a field-spell, to embark on a run that very evening.

Featherstone had called upon the young servant to accompany the mare. Famous for her hatred of lift-cages, she had in the past damaged her handlers and the cage in her display of contempt for such confines. After the last performance, there had been doubt as to whether she could continue her role as a Skyhorse.

Now she stood docile, nibbling at the youth’s hand, nuzzling his tunic as the lift rose. Featherstone and Pennyrigg looked on, bemused. They had not queried the bruised eye, the swollen lip.

Fresh straw heaped the dented andalum floor, padded corduroy lined the walls. An ornate box projected from each wall, seven feet up. The lift-keeper now opened one of these to reveal a row of ten andalum keys with elaborate filigree handles, each in its own recess, set well into the wall. He pulled out the first one almost as far as it would go—a long, narrow plate that had been shielding the slender sildron hoister attached to the lift’s outer wall. He did not withdraw it entirely but stopped it when it reached a certain notched position. By this simple and direct mechanism, the lift rose.

All the sildron hoisters in the main lifts were grade alt 640. Only the turret lifts went higher. But the exiguous dimensions of a single alt 640 hoister bar could lift only the weight of the cage, a horse, and six adults to a height of one story. Two holsters, unshielded, could lift to twice that height. When the payload was lighter, the andalum keys for each floor were only partially extracted, to a prereckoned calibration.

The lift-keeper watched through an open slot in the wall as descending marks passed by to indicate levels. As they neared the top of the first story he pulled the second key out smoothly, and so they ascended, evenly, barely altering in speed. He moved around the walls opening one key compartment after another until all four had been opened and thirty-one keys pulled out, leaving nine untouched. Deftly he made some final adjustments. The lift stopped at Floor Thirty-two, the level of the Noblesse Squadron.

The part-time stableboy led the compliant eotaur out into the circuit corridor. Other Skyhorses hung their long heads over the half-doors of loose-boxes, watching.

A black-and-silver horse-rug covered West Wind’s back; on it, her name and the Stormriders’ zigzag lightning device were embroidered in frosted capitals. Her coat glistened as if oiled, every muscle delineated. Her horns were polished marble. She was iron-shod—only when a Skyhorse had been brought up to the height of its run would the sildron hoof-crescents be clipped on and the flying-girth added.

“This way,” said the second groom, tightening his taltry strings from sheer habit.

The three stablehands worked together quietly in the saddling rooms while the youth, his job finished, looked on. When the girth had been tightened and checked, when sildron hoof-casings had been attached and the mare had taken her fill from the water-trough, Hoad walked with her around and around the circuit corridor to warm her sinews. She floated slightly, placing her feet with calculated exactness as she had been trained, flexing her wings.

Two other saddled eotaurs joined in. Their strappers chatted to Hoad as they strolled.

“Bad uncomber yesterday,” said the old ostler gloomily. “Couple of our boys were caught, out past the far meadow. Came in and got drunk, after. Bad tableau down in the forest near the boundary. You know the one?”

His companions nodded.

“Reckon unstorms are worse these days than when I was a lad. Much worse.”

The others somberly grunted agreement.

“Pirates, too,” Hoad the Toad continued savoringly, “sailors on the Dragonfly said there’s some about. Windship was plundered up northwest in the high country. Vicious, they were. Showed no mercy.”

A gatekeeper hurried in, extricating a timepiece on a fob from the folds of his tunic. He opened its gilt-metal lid, revealing a single hand on an unglazed face. After consulting it briefly, he raised the portcullis of Gate West Five Hundred.

The wind was warm. It was the beginning of Summer: Uianemis, the Greenmonth. Already the new season had provoked those downstairs into preparations for the Lugnais Festival and Greatsun Day.

A passenger lift descended and opened into the mounting rooms. The lift-keeper bowed deeply as three Relayers and their attendants swept out of the doors. Within the open cage, lamplight shone on pale buttoned-satin walls and intricately carved rosewood seats strewn with beaded cushions.

The Relayers of the Noblesse Squadron, in short cloaks and leather riding boots, clipped sildron flying-belts to their waists and paced restlessly. Beneath belted doublets of soft black leather they wore black linen shirts, the full sleeves gathered at seams just below the shoulders. Three silver stars glinted on each epaulet, echoing the gleam of the Stormrider V across the chest and the insignia over the heart. Thick black breeches completed the riding outfit. Two Relayers were silent; one badgered the equerries with questions and demands, obviously impatient to be off.

Pages, footmen, and stewards busied themselves. The gatekeeper stood watch, staring westward over the forest toward the mountain range. Mellifluous colors surged in and lay in pools of honey on the floor. Unable to restrain his curiosity, the flawed youth peered from around a corner.

“They come,” announced the gatekeeper, stepping precariously out on the doorsill. As he finished speaking, a single, silver note sounded from the watchmen on the parapets, whose spyglass saw farthest. Three dark specks came out of the sunset, forming themselves into horses and riders, wings double-arched, cloaks flying.

“Wind’s still from the west,” said the gatekeeper, eyeing a windsock, “about ten knots.”

Equerries helped their masters to pull on flying helmets and gauntlets. The Lord Relayers swung themselves up into the saddles, their silver and black matching the caparisons of the eotaurs who danced sideways and tossed their heads, held back within the mounting rooms by the practiced hands of their riders.

“They’re late,” someone muttered.

The dark shapes grew and slowed. Suddenly, with a blast of wind and a jingling, sweating clangor, they were in, alighting with a rush in the high-vaulted gatehall and adeptly drawing in their wings as they continued with a decelerating ride along its length.

Equerries and grooms ran to catch hold of bridles as the incoming Relayers dismounted. Stewards started unbuckling the saddlebags.

All the newcomers were clothed in Stormrider black, but the uniform of one man was trimmed with magenta where the others displayed silver, magenta being the color of the Ninth House. After pulling off his flying helmet, he shook the sweat from his eyes. The three outgoing riders entered the gatehalls for the exchange of saddlebags and the latest weather report.

“Isterium,” called the Son of the Ninth House, “I know thee beneath thy helm; I offer thee greetings from myself and my lady.”

“And to thee, Sartores. Rest well in our House this night,” responded the other. “What news?”

“Rumors, only rumors. Unrest in Namarre. I can say no more here, but all shall be known in due course.”

“Good morrow, Sartores.”

“Wind be with you, Isterium.”

West Wind burst forth, leading the others in an explosion of energy down the middle of the gatehall to gain momentum, leaping out from the doorsill onto the powerful updrafts at the most dangerous moment of a Relayer’s journey, when horse and rider could be blown back and smashed against the tower by the capricious gusts called windhooks. But they were away, all three, out over the forest and turning to the south. As they dwindled, so did the fires of the sky.

From a balcony below, Mortier, Master at Swords, craned his neck to watch them go. He stood awhile there, in accumulating darkness, as if waiting: a lone hooded figure on the Tower’s black wall. Shadows coagulated. An echoing howl grew from the forest and broke off; voices drifted up from the yards in snatches; a sickle moon swung up over the world’s edge. The wind abated.

With a sigh, another wind rippled over the tops of the trees. Leaf-edges glistened as if brushed with rime. A stronger sigh seemed to bring dim lights to life beneath the canopy and a faint echo, as of chiming glass. Mortier did not move, but he trembled. Beneath his fingernails, blood trickled from the palms of his hands. A low moan started in the depths of him and erupted suddenly in a short cry—he spun around and fled into his quarters, slamming shut the outer doors. Through more doors and into another room filled with fantastic apparatuses, then deeper still into the Tower he fled, until he reached a corner among woven hangings, where he pressed himself, face turned to the wall. Presently a smaller door opened hesitantly, admitting a limping boy.

“Master?” a thin voice quavered. “Master, I have come as you bid. I beg you, forgive Pod if he is late. Are you here?”

There was no reply.

Outside the tack room a light rain was falling, backlit by pale sunlight—a shaking of sharp, silver powders.

“Yan, tan, tethera,” instructed Keat Featherstone. “D’ye get it, lads? Yan, tan, tethera.”

He was teaching numeracy to some of the younger stableboys and the ugly menial. Featherstone had learned from his father, who knew only the shepherd’s procedure, used for tallying their flocks. He would count up to three, one for each finger-joint, then count the number of fingers. By this method, the counter could reach a total of thirty.

Laboriously, the impromptu school had reached this landmark.

“But what about if you want to count more than all your fingers times tethera?” an enterprising boy wanted to know.

“You get a wooden stick,” explained Featherstone, “and notch it with your knife, like so. One notch for every fingers times tethera.”

The eyes of his students bulged.

“Why,” they said, “you could count all the stars in the sky by that there stick!”

They went quiet for a moment, until one, reaching the end of a fruitless cogitation, said, “No, you couldn’t.”

Another added, “What if some of your fingers got chopped off, like the Toad’s?”

Featherstone glared at them. “What d’ye want to be counting up stars for?” He frowned. “How many hoof-crescents, how many apples and bales of hay, that’s what you’d be counting.”

“Yan tan tethera,” said the enterprising boy. “That ain’t right. Sailors count by their fingers, that’s tethera times tethera and one more for luck.”

“Sailors count by tens,” said Featherstone.

“That ain’t right, neither,” said the boy who had commented on Teron Hoad’s fingers. “I know more than that. There’s twelve inches in a foot and twelve pence in a shilling. We ought to be counting by twelves.”

“Sheepshorn can count all the Floors of the Tower,” complained another, “right up to the topmost, where the battlements are.”

“Look,” Keat Featherstone said exasperatedly, “if you want to be learning, then sit and listen. Don’t be arguing. ‘Yan tan tethera,’ that’s how it goes. That’s how I do tallying, and it’s been working for me all my life.”

Noting the second groom’s deepening grimace, the lads opened their eyes wide and developed expressions of innocence. As their tutor continued the lesson, they nodded, to all appearances drinking in every word.

It was a pity, as the servants usually said when they talked of the King-Emperor in Caermelor, it was a pity about the dreadful loss of the Queen, taken by wights of unseelie, and Prince Edward only a lad at the time. It was a blessing that the Prince and his father, King James, had survived, but a shame that the lad had to grow up motherless. Many whispered that the wickedness of unseelie wights was growing, their numbers multiplying. The world outside the Tower was reputedly becoming a darker and more dangerous place.

It was rumored, too, that some kind of trouble was brewing in the northeast, in Namarre. What it was, no one could be certain. Speculation was rife. Several of the servants lived in terror.

“Barbarians and unseelie wights shall come sweeping out of Namarre and slay us in our beds!” they said.

Others scoffed at their fears. “The King-Emperor’s warriors will overcome. The Dainnan Brotherhood shall water the turf with the blood of his enemies, and so shall the Royal Attriod and the Legions.”

In the kitchens at nights, these rumors revived talk of battles past and of a legend that was largely unrecalled.

“In time of great need, the Sleeping Warriors who lie beneath the Raven’s Howe,” proclaimed Brinkworth, “can be awakened. When their strength is most needed, a champion must find the entrance under the Hill, which is covered with briars and rubble—he must make his way in, down a long passage until he comes to the vault where they lie. Beside their King he will find a horn, a garter, and a stone sword. He must cut the garter with the sword and then blow the horn.”

“Has no one ever found the entrance?”

“Many have tried. It has been found, but only once. And the Sleepers were almost roused. It was poor Cobie Will that discovered the entrance by accident—a shepherd he was, sitting on the Hill winding a ball of wool while he minded his sheep. The ball slipped out of his hands and rolled down a deep and narrow hole. Cobie Will thought he must have found the entrance—all spirited up, he cleared away the brambles and rocks until he had uncovered a tunnel into which he could go. He followed his track of wool down under the ground, along a dark, vaulted passageway, until he saw a distant light. He pushed on toward it and found himself in the mighty chamber where the Sleeping Warriors lie, lit by a fire that burned without fuel. On a hundred rich couches round the room lay the sleeping bodies of caparisoned knights; in the dim light behind the fire, sixty couple of noble hounds were slumbering, and on a table in front of it he saw a gold-clasped horn, a curiously wrought stone sword, and an embroidered silk garter.”

“Foolish boy, he touched the stone sword, half lifting it, and at once the knights stirred and sat up on their couches. In fright, Will let go of the weapon and they lay down again and went to sleep. He must have breathed a sigh of relief then, looking around the chamber once again as still and silent as a tomb. But instead of leaving well alone and tiptoeing hence, he thought to interfere one more time. You see, he was an inquisitive lad and liked to try things out to see what would happen. Many a lad has come to grief in this way, Master Pennyrigg. So he picked up the horn and blew it. A clear ringing sound like the purest silver, loud enough to reach the farthest valleys, came out of that instrument, and all the knights rose up, drew their swords, and leaped toward him. A great voice cried out:

‘Woe to the coward, that ever he was born,

That did not draw the sword before he blew the horn!’

“A howling wind sprang up and whirled him out of the cave and down a precipice. There he lay broken until some shepherds found him—to them he told his story and then died. The Warriors remain there to this day,” concluded Brand, stroking his beard, “under Raven’s Howe, or some say Eagle’s Howe, all in their fine armor, with their shining swords and jeweled scabbards and their shields at their sides. Time has not corrupted their flesh. Their faces, it is said, are as noble and handsome as ever they were. And they sleep, and they wait. But every Midsuntide Eve, it is told, they come out of the mound and ride around it on horses shod with silver.”

As he finished speaking, an uneasy silence fell.

“Some say,” said Grech the cooper, “that Cobie Will did waken some of them, and they have stalked the secret ways of Erith ever since.”

“That’s just a story to frighten gullible idiots,” said the seamstress, “like tales of the—you know—”

“What do the Sleeping Warriors wait for—the kiss of a Prince?” interrupted a coarser voice. As tension broke, laughter bubbled but was suppressed. Dain Pennyrigg, the speaker, climbed onto a table and lay there on his back, his hands crossed upon his chest and his eyes closed, snoring stentoriously. Stifled giggles sprinkled themselves among the skivvies, becoming shrieks as the burly lad sat up abruptly, flinging out his arms.

“Oh, my Prince,” he falsettoed, “how my heart flutters!” Puckering his lips, he emitted slurping squeaks.

Smiling benevolently at the general merriment, Brand Brinkworth said:

“Laugh—be jolly. There are those who think it lordly to be cold as a stone, but feelings are like wolves. When caged they become more ferocious, and at the end, they always escape.”

He took up a poker and stirred the fire. At his feet, the capuchin Inch yawned and stretched.

A dispute that had arisen, between those who believed the Gooseberry Wife was just a nursery tale to frighten children and those who thought otherwise, was halted by the entrance of a large, dough-faced woman.

“There will be no more storytelling this eve in any of the kitchens—no, nor any eve until the day of the weddin’ and the days of feastin’ thereafter.”

Dolvach Trenchwhistle, the Head Housekeeper, banged an oak-root of a fist on the wooden tabletop for emphasis. In the ensuing silence, her small black eyes darted like flies around the kitchen, scrutinizing the faces of all those present. Satisfied that all due heed had been taken, she stood up, hands on hips.

“Larks’ tongues in aspic, pheasant under crystal, quails’ eggs, pigeon pies, venison, truffles, oysters, hulkin’ great puddin’s, syrups and spices, seedcakes, honest-to-goodness Sugar sweets and jellies from the Confect’ry House in the city, salmon and big blue squid and trout, not to mention wine, stout, mead, and cider by the barrelful, smoked eels, pickled tongue, fresh forest fruits and foods flown in specially, yellow and red cheeses, and pitchers of cream. Not in that order.”

She paused for effect.

“And that’s only the start of it.”

“And a snoutfish in a pear-tree,” shouted Dain Pennyrigg.

Conversations buzzed. Dolvach Trenchwhistle held up a meaty, work-chafed hand and received silence in the palm of it.

“We all have work to do, and there be no mistake. Every spare room must be cleaned and aired for the ’portant guests. And fresh bed-linen, perfumed, and towels and oils provided. There must not be a speck o’ dust to blacken my name. And decorations. The Greayte Hall is to be decked out in the colors of the two joinin’ Houses and weddin’ white. White satin everywhere, and silver lace by the yard, and bows of pale blue silk.”

“Fig’s end! Sounds like a weaver’s market. Will there be any room for the guests?” Pennyrigg inquired.

“Flowers everywhere, gathered fresh on the day,” Trenchwhistle continued, “and the road from the sea-docks to the main gate strewn with petals, all bedorned with silver and sky-blue and white buntin’, and every courtyard like a flower garden. No guest will have any reason to criticize. It will be done proper, and it will be done on time. Else heads will roll. You will all have a job to do—many jobs. And you will do them as best you can. Better.”

The servants nodded, mumbling tired assent.

“Porter and metheglin for us all, at the end. And odds bods, we’re goin’ to enjoy them leftovers,” muttered the Head Housekeeper, grimly hitching up her apron and departing in majesty.

“Shan’t be real larks’ tongues,” said the spit-boy. “Ain’t got no hawk-mews; ain’t got no merlins to catch larks.”

“Prob’ly be the nasty bits off billy-goats or somethin’,” his friend rejoined luridly. “No tellin’ what Rennet Thighbone puts in when ’e’s cooking.”

Eyes gleamed in the stuffy darkness beneath the benches. The unnoticed listener there tried to work out how he could escape the forthcoming extra workload. Soon he was to hear words that would make him fervent for a greater escape.

The roan gelding cantered through the air, mane and tail streaming, wings pumping, muscles flexing and stretching beneath a glossy hide. Its young rider shook the stirrups from his boots, leaned forward, and then with a shout launched himself sideways off his steed, beneath the pinions.

By means of a rope attached at one end to his sildron flying-belt and at the other to the saddle, he was dragged along, rotating rapidly and flopping like a fish on a hook, half-strangled by his own taltry. It soon became obvious that he could neither pull himself toward the horse nor free himself from the safety-rope. Gasping, he bellowed a command.

The eotaur halted.

“Most elegant, my lord,” commented the Master at Riding, who was standing on a circular wooden platform six feet above the sawdust floor of a lunging yard, on a level with the eotaur and the student trying to drag himself onto its back. His assistant held the training horse on a long lunge-rein.

“One can perceive,” he continued, “that if your steed threw you, startled by some bird of prey or jolted by some unexpectedly rough terrain, you would have no trouble in regaining your seat.”

“The rope was twisted. It spun me.”

“You coiled it yourself. You checked your own equipment, did you not, as part of your routine before riding? One of the first rules. And mark you—riders who cling with their knees are wont to pop off, like a peg on an apple. Enough of this for now. Come, let us to the hattocking circuits.”

The assistant, whose crippled face belied the agility of his body, leaped lightly down from the platform as the rider remounted.

“I will not be led like a child, six feet above the ground!” the trainee Relayer said brusquely, “and I in my second year. Throw me the lead-rope.”

The Master at Riding nodded to the helper, who did so; the student, a heavy-jawed husky fellow, jabbed his heels and galloped dangerously over the helper’s head and out of the yard.

“And may fate preserve us from young idiot hot-heads who know it all,” muttered the Master at Riding, glancing at the skies. He spoke to himself—not to the awkward figure who stood waiting on the sawdust floor, whose aid had been thrust upon him by Keat Featherstone and accepted with reluctant martyrdom.

Greatsun Day and the Lugnais Festival were well past, giving way to Grianmis, the second month of Summer, warm and welcoming. A brass cup of a sun poured golden benevolence over the red-roofed stables and the training yards. The foundling followed the Master, becoming part of the dance that was the daily running of the busy demesne. The greensward was smooth. Sildron-shod hooves could not scar the ground.

The concentric hattocking tracks were graded in order of difficulty; piled and stepped with rocks, boulders, and monoliths in imitation of shrunken mountains. The wings of eotaurs had once been vestigial. Breeding had developed them, but sildron flying-girths and sildron hoof-crescents were necessary to compensate for the weight of the horses. Without sildron they could not fly.

Sildron repelled the ground only when directly opposed to it. Rough, rock-strewn landscape was no obstacle if the ground was relatively flat and the rocks relatively small. Moreover, the higher the altitude, the less the flight was affected by terrain. However, an eotaur, traveling above a plain and arriving at a sheer cliff face whose top was higher than the traveling altitude, would not be able to scale the cliff and would have to skirt it. Sudden upthrusts of landscape disrupted an eotaur’s progress; steep-graded ground-slopes rising at an angle of more than twenty-nine degrees were unridable. For these reasons, hattocking circuits were designed to allow practice. The Skyroads were plotted to fit the land’s contours—although jagged patches and unforeseen deviations were inevitable and had to be taken into account.

The student Relayer, who had not yet earned his first star, wore the usual black. His linen riding shirt, open at the neck, was belted and tucked into jodhpurs, which in turn were stuffed into boots. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. A taltry flapped loosely down his back, revealing long brown hair tied fashionably in a club. The lunge-rein had been removed from the Skyhorse, and the Son of the House guided it with the reins, picking a way above the dirty jumble of rocks on the intermediate circuit to find the most even and scalable path.

“Of course, Star King would know these circuits in his sleep,” the Master at Riding remarked to the Second Master at Riding, who had just joined him. “He could hattock them unridden, blindfold, after all these years. The real test comes on training-forays in the field.”

Something shaped like a miniature dinghy with a rapidly revolving apparatus on the back suddenly shot past alongside the fence, two feet off the ground, raising a cumulus cloud of dirt. It was silent, save for a slight squeak and grating sounds at various pitches. Its driver was a white-robed, stripe-bearded man wearing gloves.

“Zimmuth and his evil engines,” muttered the Master at Riding, spitting dust.

The highly unstable sildron-powered skimboat grated to a stop, barely missing a lopsided outbuilding that was used to house the wizard’s experiments. While a henchman chained the vehicle to a post, the wizard disappeared indoors.

The Master at Riding and his companion turned their attention back to their protégé, who was negotiating the terrain circuit with surprising prowess, and regarded him critically, bestowing advice occasionally. Meanwhile, nine landhorses wearing curiously fashioned saddles were led into fenced yards beside the circuits. Sunlight slivers danced off buckles and stirrups. Their riders, eager young stablehands, urged them into a fast and furious gallop around the arena. They vaulted, somersaulted, and jumped on and off the horses’ backs—sometimes riding backward or standing up, or balancing on their hands, or riding three-tiered on one another’s shoulders.

“How fare the other entertainments for the wedding celebrations?” inquired the Master at Riding of his second, who gazed in open delight.

“Well enough, sir. The performing capuchins will be a great success, I am told.”

“Ho there, our young Lord Ariades has finished the circuit.”

As the two Masters, followed by the assistant, strode toward the circuit-exit to meet him, a ball of flame erupted from one of the grilled fenestrations of the wizard-hall, accompanied by a thunderous roar.

Shouting, two men came running from the arched doorway, trailing smoke. They threw themselves to the ground and beat at their clothes with their hands. Others ran to their aid. Acrid vapors belched from orifices in the outbuilding, veiling the scene.

“Another of the wizard’s failed experiments,” Ariades observed blandly from his saddle high above. “I believe he is working on a more sophisticated mechanism for the operation of the lifts, amongst other things. Behold!”

He pointed to where some dark specks of escaped sildron hung high above a gaping hole in the wizard-hall roof.

“He accidentally shot down a whole flock of wood-pigeons once,” remarked the Master at Riding. “I’m told they made a delicious pie.”

“I trust his wizardly achievements are good enough to redeem the skins of his roasted henchmen,” mused his second. “The House needs every servant fit to work during the forthcoming nuptial celebrations.”

The mention of servants reminded the Master at Riding of the flunkey waiting in the shadows. He eyed him distastefully.

“Good my lord Ariades, your circuit work has improved. Go now to the dismounting platform and then we shall take refreshment before the afternoon’s onhebbing lessons. You—servant—follow and tend the eotaur.”

“And what manner of servant is this?” asked the Second Master at Riding, noticing the youth for the first time.

Lord Ariades, his eyes straying to the appalling aftermath of the wizard’s fiasco, interjected:

“Even those of us who dwell in the higher regions have heard of the Beauteous One. Indeed, its face is worse than had been described—quite a monstrosity. I think it ought to be exhibited as a curiosity, as part of the wedding entertainments.”

“Nay, ’twould disgust the guests from their feasting,” protested the Master at Riding. “’Tis a shameful eyesore. I have never seen such a bad case of paradox ivy poisoning, Can it not be cured?”

“I have heard that it can,” said the second, scratching a stubbled chin.

The youth froze.

“A fingertip poisoned yesterday, perhaps,” said Ariades. “But an entire face poisoned for—how long? Years?” He shook his head.

“They say,” persisted the second, creasing his brow, “that there is something the city wizards know of—is it drinking toadwater? Or is it piercing with hot needles to open the boils, followed by the application of a certain herbal paste?… I don’t rightly recall.”

“In any case, cures would be too expensive to waste on a fly-struck scoundrel of a servant,” Lord Ariades said, kicking Star King into motion.

The youth stared at the trainee Relayer’s retreating back for several moments, before a similar kick from the Second Master broke his reverie and sent him hurrying.

The shadows in the goat-caves could play tricks, especially when outside daylight was so bright. The mute one moved uncertainly. No goats jostled therein; they were grazing at the forest’s fringe, under the herd-boys’ care. Their smell was there. patiently waiting for their return; some old straw and dung kept it company. Farther into the hollow places there was a hole in the wall, smaller and darker than the rest. It was toward this that the lad moved. He held a brass bougie-box by its handle, a wax taper coiled inside its drum-shaped interior like a pale, parasitic worm. The lighted end projected through the lid, breathing a weak flame, transparent.

“You! You followed me. Don’t tell anyone … don’t show anyone this place. What do you want?” wheezed a voice.

Clubfoot Pod’s pale face leaned out of the gloom. The intruder stood immobile. He put down the taper-box and slowly lowered the burden he had carried on his shoulder. Pod stared suspiciously.

“Don’t tell anyone that this is where I hide, will you? You won’t, will you? You cannot?”

The youth shook his head and held his hand out in a gesture of friendship, from which Pod shrank back.

“Go away, go away. Someone might have seen you come here.”

The youth shook his head again, pointed to Pod, and put a hand behind one ear as if listening. Pod nodded, watching the signals.

“Aye, but only if you make it quick.”

The nameless one pointed again to Pod, then to himself, then to the cavern’s entrance. He made flapping movements with his arms and shaded his eyes as if staring into the distance, then unwrapped the bundle to display a small pile of food: dried fruit, cheese, and hard bread.

“Go from here? You must be addled—don’t you understand? Nobody can live in the forest unprotected, and the forest’s all around. It stretches for miles and miles. I don’t know how many miles. Thousands.”

Pod’s eyes were white in their sockets, and his voice rose to a strangled squeak.

The youth made a shape with his hands.

“Windship? You mean, stow away on board? Kill yourself without my company. Don’t you know what happens to stowaways? Go! Go! Take your nightmares and stolen food. Don’t come near me! I’ll not have anything to do with it. You shall be discovered. You shall be punished.”

The mute one gazed at him for a moment, then nodded, folded his bundle, picked up the bougie-box, and moved out into the sunlight.

There is a cure for me out there. I shall go, one day, he said in his heart, I shall go Beyond the Tower and make a journey, a quest to find three things—a face to show the world without shame, my name, my past. I will not rest until I find them.

But without company, he was afraid to leave, so for now he endured.

“Wake up, wake up. Sunrise soon. Wake up, Lazy, you are strong now—hard work has made you grow strong, so now you must work harder.”

The partnership of Grethet’s parrot-squawk and her boot in his ribs dissolved the mists of slumber in an instant.

The crone’s ward no longer slept in the furnace room—she had made him move his bedding because she said the room was too bright, what with the constant opening of the furnace’s maw to feed the fires; and he must hide himself away in shadow. He now slept, washed, and dressed in a small windowless cell used to store candles, laundry soap, and beeswax—a cupboard shared with optimistic spiders that, when their roommate sat upright on his heap of rags, would spin their way down from the ceiling on their long threads to hang level with his eyes, staring, before reeling themselves up again.

“Undress in the dark,” Grethet reminded him constantly. “Don’t let them see you. No one must see you. You are deformed. They would have you thrown out. You understand?”

He understood. He obeyed.

Accustomed to darkness, he poured water from the ewer into the bowl and washed, as she had taught him, and dressed, tying the taltry over thick lustrous thatch, now the length of his fingers. He completed his first duties before eating the scrag of bread euphemistically known as “breakfast,” disposing of waste, sweeping the furnace room floor, drawing water for washing garments, setting fires under the laundry tubs, and vigorously rubbing a glass mushroom with a knopped handle across linen sheets to smooth them out.

His shoulders and arms ached always. Later he would be set to checking the stores. Featherstone had taught him to count. Now the mathematical equal of most of the other servants, he would repeat, over and over in his head, Yan, tan, tethera; yan, tan, tethera, after each trio, cutting a notch on a short green stick as evidence.

It was the twelfth of Teinemis, the Firemonth. From within the dominite walls came the screeching and thumping of sildron pumps assisting the flow of rainwater from the great roof-cisterns and drawing water from wells beneath the lowest dungeons. The sounds, as of a screaming, beating heart walled up behind stone, testified to the large number of guests occupying the upper levels on this important day, the wedding day.

A Stormrider wedding at the Relay Tower at Isse in Eldaraigne—a momentous event. Marriages customarily took place only between and within the twelve Houses. The eldest daughter of the House, the Lady Persefonae, was to be joined with her cousin Valerix from the Fifth House, whose chief stronghold was in Finvarna. The betrothal had been pledged on the day Persefonae was born. It was a bitterbynde, the lower servants whispered at the time—a geas laid upon someone despite their own will. This was a babe too young to know the light of day, let alone whom she would choose to wed, were she of marriageable age. It was a shame, they agreed—but these alliances must be made if the glory of the Houses were to continue to wax strong. Fortunately, the pairing of these two had proved to be to the liking of both, and when the time came there was no reluctance on either part.

From realms scattered over Erith came representatives of all Stormrider Houses and several noble and royal Houses. They came by Windship or Watership, riding sky or in guarded cavalcades along the King’s High Way, the great road that ringed Eldaraigne, to the Tower’s gate.

Three or four Windships rode at anchor against a mackerel sky, above the far meadow; another waited at the dock on the seventh story, their sails furled and propellers motionless. Lord Valerix remained aboard his Watership anchored among his fleet and the other visiting ships in Isse Harbor, where he made his preparations. He would not set foot on land until the morrow.

Above the Tower fluttered a forest of pennants and standards. The Stormrider device, a white lightning bolt zigzagged on a black background, had been raised for the twelve united Houses. The flag of the Seventh House was identical, but black on silver, while the Fifth House displayed black on sky blue. “Arnath Lan Seren,” the motto, translated as “Whatever It Takes”—whatever it takes to fulfill duty and preserve honor; whatever it takes to serve the King-Emperor, uphold the strength of the twelve Houses, and rule the Skyroads.

A high stone wall, topped with shards of flint, embraced the demesnes of Isse Tower. A second fence of sturdy rowan-trees grew all along the wall’s outer perimeter. Set in archways at wide intervals, the half-dozen posterns of oak and iron opened on little-used roads, scarcely more than cart-tracks, leading into the forest or the dunes. To the southeast, the main gate opened to the King’s High Way running along the coast.

The time had come for the servants to go gathering fruit and flowers in the forest.

In the oblique, insipid light of dawn a convoy jingled along the path by the walled kitchen gardens and the low-roofed dairy with its underground cellars. Led by armed riders, it comprised a wooden cart drawn by two old draft-horses and a straggle of assorted domestic servants, some sitting in the cart, looking out through the trellised sides, and others walking. Capuchins and children clung to the cart like barnacles or chased each other.

Every measure for protection against unseelie wights had been employed. Many folk wore their clothes turned inside out for the expedition, discarding comfort for added security; some were crowned and garlanded with daisy-chains. The cart was hung with bells, as were the headstalls and bridles of all the horses; horseshoes were nailed around it. The servants carried empty sacks, baskets, and rowan-wood staffs topped with bells and festoons of fraying red ribbon. Mumbling, Grethet clutched at the wooden rooster dangling around her scrawny chicken neck. Of all places, the charms known as tilhals were needed most in the wight-haunted forest. Tintinnabulating gaily, at odds with the somber visages of its members, the procession reached the Owl Postern and proceeded through it into the forest, at which point those with the sourest expressions began to whistle, a practice said to repel unseelie wights for miles around. Judging by the tuneless discord of their symphony, this was not surprising.

The fern-embroidered Owl’s Way twisted through overhanging trees forming a leafy tunnel. Tiny opalescent flies threaded themselves on gold needles of sunlight pricking the canopy. Sphagnum moss and skull fungus covered fallen logs. Wrens darted, and a gray shrike-thrush trilled. The convoy followed the track until it reached a clearing, at whose edge it halted. The horses dropped their heads to graze. A guard shouted orders. Hooded gatherers spread out in groups and disappeared among the trees, shaking the bell-tipped staffs and whistling. Some boys with capuchins who remained climbed the cart’s sides to pull vines of purple coral-pea from overhanging boughs. In the center of the clearing, in the full light of the warm morning sun, women and children knee-deep in grass gathered armfuls of yellow everlasting daisies, perfumed boronia, and rosy heath-myrtle, pushing the stems deep into the damp moss with which they had lined their baskets.

Grethet’s stooped figure pushed through nettles and undergrowth.

“This way, this way,” she panted. “Berries here, too, maybe. But beware of paradox ivy.”

She was one of a group of two that, although ostracized, reaped a good harvest during that morning: trails of fireweed, satiny snowblossom, and a small bag of early berries, whose livid juices prevented premature consumption by promising to advertise it. Tree trunks like pillars of a palace soared to a filigree ceiling. Grethet’s helper sucked greedily on sweet airs and feasted on the million green shades of wilderness, the thousand subtle songs of it.

The shouting of guards beckoned the gatherers back to a cart now overflowing with flowers; some folk began tying their baskets to the outside to avoid bruising the petals.

The certainty that it was about to happen had been with the nameless one since he and Grethet first pushed their way into the forest. He looked forward to it with excitement, light of step, eager, the blood already leaping in his veins. It was that same sensation he sometimes felt when inside the Tower—only now he was Outside. Now he would see what caused it.

The prickling wind came first, soft as a child’s breath, strengthening. A clamoring of birds. Clouds suddenly clustered over the sun, day turned to night, and gusts sprang up, bringing with them a racing exhilaration. Laughing soundlessly, the youth could not restrain himself from breaking into a run—at the same moment cries and violent oaths broke out on all sides:

“The unstorm! Cover your heads!”

Men and women clutched their taltries even closer to their scalps, hurrying toward the rocking cart. Some children laughed, some cried—capuchins shrieked, swarming like startled beetles. Soft lights then shone unexpectedly from darknesses among the trees, and as the wind gained power it seemed to awaken other lights and deepen other shadows. The dark forest sparkled. It changed.

Colored jewels of flowers glowed fiery against velvet; the edges and veins of leaves were dusted with tiny spangles of silver and gold along their skeletal networks; pinprick stars along each blade of grass brightened and faded with each gust and ebb of the wind. Branches tossed and bucked like restless horses, leaves dancing like seaweed in a shifting current, a current that eddied and swirled all around, satin smooth and cool, alive with movement. Behind the haunted sighs of the wind, soft glassy chimes. Bells on bridles winked with silver glitter and rang with a different, purer note, somehow poignant.

The driver’s whip cracked blue stars along its length, and the draft-horses sprang into motion, striking red sparks from their hooves. The cavalcade moved through the unstorm like swimmers underwater. As the wind’s voice rose to a moan, the strange fires brightened and weaker ones began to appear.

The youth longed to leap up and ride away on the wind’s back, far from contumely and contusion, but he must run with the taltried crowd who followed the cart with eyes downcast. They did not look to left or right, but he did, and he saw under an archway of trees halfway down Owl’s Way a flickering scene, half-transparent, made of light. Two men, unhooded, dressed outlandishly, dueled with swords. Weapons clashed but made no sound. A tree grew in the center of the scene, unheeded by the combatants, who passed through it as though it were not there—or perhaps it passed through them.

They parried and thrust, intent on their silent game. One stumbled, wounded in the arm, and fell back before a fresh onslaught, his mouth open in a wordless shout. Yet then there was an instant like the blink of an eye, and the scene jumped; he was on his feet, whole again, and they thrust and parried as before, fading as the wind drew breath and shimmering brighter as it blasted. This, then, this subsidiary impression left over from physical energy, was what the inhabitants of the Tower called a tableau.

By the time the troupe reached the Owl Postern the unstorm had passed. Lights dimmed and winked out, the skies cleared, and leaves hung stagnant. The flower-laden cart and its followers passed through from the forest into the demesnes.

Later that day, Lord Valerix of the Fifth House in Finvarna and Lady Persefonae of the Seventh House in Eldaraigne were married. And after the long, formal rites, the celebrations began.

At his master’s command the Chief Steward beat a smart tattoo on the traditional stump-drum to command silence in the Greayte Banqueting Hall, and silence obeyed. Five hundred and eighteen nobles and almost as many servants turned to face the dais.

The long table running from one side of the hall to the other was lavishly slathered with fabric; silver and eggshell-blue. Laden with rich and decorative viands, it offered as centerpiece a cake like a cloud of frosted rosebuds bursting with Sugar doves. This glittering white affair was a symbol of the affluence of the House; brought from the highly renowned Confectionery House in Caermelor, it had been created with real Sugar from the perilous canefields of the Turnagain Islands in the far north of Erith. The price of the rare white crystals was exorbitant, for survival was difficult in the Turnagains. Not only were the islands the haunts of the unseelie—the surrounding oceans matched them for treachery.

Thirty-four lords and ladies were seated along one side of the high table, facing down into the hall. The bride wore a satin-lined cloth-of-silver surcoat, bordered with gushes of lace. It was embroidered richly, with a thousand white silk forget-me-nots and four thousand tiny rock crystals. The long, tight sleeves of the kirtle worn beneath ended in long, hanging cuffs worked with wide bands of silver needlework. Her girdle, enameled with intricate designs of silver swans on a pale blue sky and set with sapphires, matched her necklace and the bracelets she wore on her slender wrists, a gift to her from her new husband. On her fingers, wedding rings; on her head, a simple circlet and veil adorned shining chestnut braids bound in a silver net.

Like snow to coal she contrasted with her lord. His Stormrider black was broken only by Fifth House blue. Worn over the silk shirt, his surcoat, which reached to midthigh, was cut from tapestry richly patterned with black on black threads—the many different textures caught the light and showed the heraldic design. At the back, it was pleated down to the waist; the high collar, long sleeves, and hem were edged with sable. From his shoulders hung a cloak of azure and black brocade. His sword-belt was slung at his waist, the ornate scabbard embossed four times with the heraldic shield of the Fifth House. Tight-fitting hose were tucked into black thigh boots whose turned-back tops displayed contrasting azure. Topped by a winged helm, his long brown hair, unbound for the occasion, flowed down his back. Lord Valerix regarded the Lady Persefonae with proprietary satisfaction; she kept her eyes modestly downcast.

They had been married by the wizard Zimmuth in the Upper Hall of Ceremony, a chamber reserved for solemn occasions; then the whole party had proceeded down the wide stairway lit by candelabra, carpeted with tapestries, and garlanded with flowers, to the Greayte Banqueting Hall, where they were now seated at twenty-eight long tables set at right angles to the high table and snowed with white linen, frosted with silverware. The first six courses of twelve had been served and cleared. After the third course Lord Voltasus, the Storm Chieftain of the Seventh House, had made his speech of welcome and insincere praise for the Fifth House, and Lord Oscenis had replied in kind. Eloquent panegyrics had poured from both sides, and all formalities had been seen to be performed with grave decorum. Tradition dictated that it was now time for the bard of the host’s House to speak.

The announcement was made; Carlan Fable, the lean, weathered bard of Isse Tower, rose. He bowed deeply toward the high table and surveyed the scene.

The Greayte Banqueting Hall spread almost as wide as the Tower itself, its ceiling supported by slim dominite columns and sildron strategically embedded within the structure. Wall tapestries depicted historic battles in which Stormriders had overwhelmed their enemies. Beyond the lanceolate windows a flowered sunset flaunted poppy and marigold hues.

Two Storm Chieftains sat at the high table. Turnip-nosed and slab-cheeked, Lord Voltasus of Isse was a massive boar of a man in a black velvet cloak bordered with embroidery in silver thread and lined with the pelt of a silver-white bear from the ice-mountains of Rimany. His dour countenance was framed by a coarse mane of gray hair, which in turn was edged by a high ermine collar. His lady, Artemisia, was dressed in a sleeveless surcoat made from cloth-of-silver and stitched with seed-pearls, showing her long-sleeved black velvet kirtle at the armholes and hem. Silver bracelets jangled at her wrists. Necklaces of pearl and jet swung on thin silver chains about her neck, and her fingers glittered with multiple rings. Beside Lord Oscenis sat the Lady Lilaceae of the Fifth House in figured blue rylet lined with sable. Over the gilt fretwork covering her hair, she wore a fillet overflowing with dyed osprey plumes that infuriatingly tickled the noses of all those seated nearby. Lady Heligea of Isse, sister to Ustorix and Persefonae, sulked in moonlight samite, her eyes forever drawn to the windows and the skies forbidden to the Daughters.

All around the hall the same colors were repeated in the limited designs demanded by current Stormrider fashion, which, here in the far reaches of Eldaraigne, may have lagged behind city trends. Servants moved quietly among the guests, topping up goblets with wine. Judging his moment, Carlan Fable began.

“At this time, when there is news of a dangerous situation developing in the northeast, we must pause and look back upon other times of trouble. For it was then that we of the Stormrider Houses lived our golden days.”

His gaze raked the hall: the faces, the wall hangings.

“During the Three Hundred Years’ Strife, Stormriders were the greatest warriors of all the lands on Erith, and every King and lordling sought their strength and feared their swords. On the wings of the storm they rode, like avenging eagles.”

Fable took up his harp and sang the lengthy “Song of the Storm Warriors.” Outside, the skies faded to lavender and violet over the flawed glass of Isse Harbor. Distant, metallic screeches drifted in from the forest, and a light Summer breeze lifted the festively unbound locks of the guests seated near the windows. Candlelight starred crystal goblets. The song completed, Fable took a deep draft of wine during the listless applause and continued:

“But the lands of Erith were given peace at last, when arose King Edward the Conqueror of the ancient lineage of D’Armancourt—a man of formidable wisdom and enduring strength. The Houses and the lands were united as Empire under one ruler again to live at peace. Thus returned the D’Armancourt Dynasty, whose line had been broken for two centuries.”

The rather more rousing “Deeds of Edward the Conqueror” followed, accompanied by the trumpets and harmonies of Fable’s students. Some of the guests joined in heartily at the chorus.

“Yet what is lost can never be completely regained.” This statement, delivered in tones of thunder, killed the mood of triumph, Hoad-like. A hush fell.

“Much knowledge passed out of man’s keeping, and the Cities were never rebuilt. Yet the Relay Towers and Interchange Turrets remained as sentinels and ports of call in the civilized lands, and the Windships began again to ply; trade prospered, and our strong line of Kings continues to this very day.” He concluded his speech with a song in praise of James the Sixteenth, King-Emperor of Erith, and a toast to his health. Then the seventh course was served.

Two more courses followed. The hall hummed with genteel exchange and soft music provided by a quintet on tambors, lutes, and flutes who stumbled apologetically among the tables. Smiles crossed the faces of the guests, but there was no unseemly laughter.

“My Lord Chieftains, lords and ladies: Zimmuth the Gloved, mighty Wizard of the Nine Arts and Master of Gramarye, begs your indulgence to humbly demonstrate his skills for your amusement.”

The portly steward finished his announcement with an unsteady bow supported by a tucketsonance—a flourish on trumpets. A display of wizardry at any meeting of Stormriders was not performed merely for the sake of entertainment—it was important for the host House to show its strength in many ways. Although now peace reigned and there was intermarriage among the clans, old rivalries remained and there were those who would not let the memory of past feuds rest.

The wizardry began.

Magnolia colors had faded from the west, leaving the high-vaulted hall of the sky where now stars sang of unimaginable distances. Treading softly, servants snuffed out many of the waxen candles in their silver branches. From the corners of the hall came the smooth lament of violins, and on a dais, blue lanterns began to glow. Five masked figures swayed there in the cerulean light; they formed a circle and moved anticlockwise, then stepped back before a loud explosion of yellow smoke that flared within the circle, clearing to show the figure of Zimmuth standing, staff in hand. His birdlike face was heavily creased and slightly scarred. Black eyes sparkled from beneath beetling brows.

“My lords, my ladies, what you shall see here tonight is true wizardry. Many are the imitators, the makers of cheap illusions, the deceivers. Few are those who have mastered the Nine Arts of Gramarye. I, Zimmuth the Gloved of the Seventh House, am numbered amongst those few and have pledged my powers in the service of the Seventh House to ward against unseelie forces and destroy all enemies.”

His demonstrations were truly spectacular. Aided by his five masked henchmen and with many roaring flashes of flame and smoke, he caused a variety of animals and birds to Appear and Disappear or become Invisible. To display the Art of Healing he guillotined a hand from an arm and with a spell restored the bleeding, severed limb to its former status. The Arts of Binding and Levitation were combined with the Art of Disappearance when a prone, silk-covered figure was levitated to a point above his head. When Zimmuth snatched away the covering, only naked air was to be seen. He made iron rings pass through each other, Motivated a wand to dance by itself, Shifted a capuchin into the shape of a mouse and the mouse to a dog and the dog to a dove, and, last, locked one of the masked henchmen into a box and stuck swords into him. By another spell, the man emerged unscathed! After Zimmuth had Disappeared in an explosion of red smoke, the last three courses were served and the dancing began.

While guests in rich raiment arrayed themselves along the dance floor in rows, bowing to each other before beginning a stately gavotte, a contrasting performance was being given many floors below in the sculleries, where stacks of soiled dishes teetered against walls, greasy serving implements filled wooden pails, dogs fought over scraps, and bag-eyed minions danced attendance on Dolvach Trenchwhistle.

The ugliest servant, who had slaved ceaselessly for twenty hours to the tune of conflicting commands, brayed scolding, dinnerware ringing like gongs, and occasionally the crash of porcelain dropped on flagstones, went missing. Among the bustle, nobody noticed.

He ached for peace and sleep, but first he would catch a glimpse of those Above the Dock, so that if perchance he dreamed, which he never did, he would dream of perfumed beauty and sweet music. Torches sputtered in sconces, shedding fitful splodges of light in the stairwell. With taltry pulled well forward to overshadow his face, it was simple to slip from darkness to darkness up the stairs and surprisingly easy to climb swiftly without gasping for breath.

On reaching an outer chamber of the Greayte Banqueting Hall, the would-be spy awaited his moment, then walked quickly through the open door as if on an errand, sidestepping behind an arras.

Under a vaulted ceiling of intersecting arches, long lines of dancers met and parted, crossed and separated again, in a solemn elegance of black and silver and pale blue. Spilled wine and gravy stained white linen tablecloths. Candles burned low, dripping their milky wax onto the silverware. Servants pulled the shutters closed against the cool airs of after midnight and the forest’s weird noises. The lilt of violins and pipes swirled.

He watched, a delighted smile twisting his swollen lips.

Noticing him, a seated visitor gestured blearily for more wine. His glance alighted on a full pitcher; he brought it and was thus drawn into service among the tables until by mischance he found himself at a trestle occupied by several Master teachers of the Seventh House, who recognized him.

He sighed, then faced them squarely, even pushing the taltry back a little. He did not cower. His bold stance was intended to say:

“I have worked my bones to the marrow while you took your leisure. I am tired to my heart, and I am tired of cringing like your cur. Do your worst now—I die with dignity.”

But, intoxicated, they only waved him away, except for Master Mortier.

“Come here to me.”

Mortier put down the pointed knife with which he had been picking at the carcass of a small woodland bird. He beckoned. His surcoat and sleeves were splashed with food, his forehead flushed and beaded with fine droplets. Again he beckoned. The lad stepped closer, defiance in every line of his attitude. The man leaned forward confidentially, unsteadily. His breath stank, and with his soft, pouting lips he reminded the boy of the slimy creatures he had discovered under wet stones in the lower stories of the Tower, where the water-pipes had been leaking for years.

“Lad, fear not, for I mean you no harm. A coin for you if you answer me truly, yea or nay.” The tutor’s eyes narrowed. “Do you fear the shang unstorm?”

The youth began to shake his head, spied a glint in the man’s eyes, and changed to a nod, but too late. Mortier smiled.

“Do not lie to me, lad. You have no fear of it.” He leaned back.

“Most people are nobody, and you are even more of a nobody than most. Be my errand-boy and rise above your station. You are the lad I need. Pod waxes obstinate. From this night, you shall be my page. Go now and wait in my chambers.”

The new page paid him a deep and exaggerated bow, turning his face away lest his rage should be read thereon. His lips shaped the words Mortier, thou slug. To his ears, the music of the wedding feast had turned to a jangling of rusty iron, a clanking of chains, and a screech of hunting owls in the night.

Out of the hall he fled and down the stairs. From the wide flights he passed as he descended, into the narrow spirals where the treads were worn down in the middle. Down and down he hastened, stopping only once, at Floor Five, to collect a small parcel from a niche.

“How do you always find me?” croaked Pod from a hole in the cellar wall where he rolled, inebriated. “I go deeper and deeper, but you always find me. I don’t like you. Mayhap it is you I am hiding from, eh? Something stole your voice, something stole your face and your past. I think some curse shadows you. How do I know that?” he rambled. “I am Pod the Henker, and I know. You understand nothing of this place, this”—he spread out his thin arms in the watery glow of a rushlight—“this world. Hearken, I will tell you.” He leaned forward, somewhat incoherent.

“The Windships they sail the tree-heads, the eotaurs they tread the skies for the twelve Houses, the Towers they rise up over the known lands of Erith, and the lands of Erith be the lands of men, but also of unseelie wights you cannot even dream of, that harm and haunt us. The King-Emperor rules in Caermelor Palace and courtiers all around, and he the sovereign of all Erith, possessing riches beyond telling. The world’s wind blows through the empty courts of ruined cities. The shang wind blows through our heads and makes nightmares for us to look at. But I don’t fear the shang, not I.”

He leaned back, staring at the wall’s utter blackness.

“Some fear it, some don’t. It be like spiders.” He paused. “And some spiders be poisonous, and some be not.” He paused again. The whites of his eyes gleamed. The listener hearkened, trying to make sense of these ramblings.

“My lord Pouchguts fears it. Fears it to the death. And so he tries to rule it, to get power over the shang and over unseelie wights. With his books of lore and black candles and blood. He was to become a wizard, one time, but they threw him out of the College of the Nine Arts. He was caught treatying with unseelie things, trying to buy the power he lacked. He tries to bind me to serve him.” Pod shuddered. “And serve him I do, sometimes, but still his fear grows. Now he prepares me to go down into the forest. To bargain with them. But no, I shall not go, when the time comes. And you, you are no better! You also would make me go there! The shang I do not fear. But the things in the forest, in the dark of night—ah! ’Twould be better to jump from the topmost turret than face them, oh yes indeed.”

Without warning he sat bolt upright. His face sharpened with urgent horror, his eyes clouded like muddy pools.

“Terrible things happen out there! A person could get lost, could pass right out of knowledge. Beware of footsteps in the night and dark wings that beat against the windows. Beware of the Hunt! Beware of water, wind, and stone! I warn you.” His voice cracked and subsided into a kind of droning hum.

Mortier’s potential page made hand-signs. Pod looked vapid. The mute one slapped his hand to his head in a gesture of frustration and flung his sack to the floor. Wrapped food and a leather bottle spilled out.

“Run away? No!” squeaked Pod, abruptly lucid—and then, rapidly, “Well, yes, then. You will never give up. You want to save me, eh? Then follow me. No doubt you mean to try the merchant ship hanging off the dock. ’Twould be a fine night to stow away on board, would it not? And sail away above this accursed forest. Now, while the wedding feast draws to a close and most are sleeping or too busy or too drunk to notice us. Let us go.”

Too weary and grateful to wonder at the other’s sudden sobriety and change of heart, the youth slung the sack across his back and followed Pod up dank and winding backstairs from twenty feet belowground to the wide dock 112 feet above.

It was well past midnight—almost dawn. Strains of melodies still drifted from above. The Tower stood silhouetted against an ice-crystal moon on lavender gauze. Land and sea lay sprawled below, a relief cast in pewter. The Windship City of Gilvaris Tarv bobbed at anchor over the mooring-yard, yellow lamps swinging from her rigging. Baffle bows, mooring-lines, and two gangplanks joined her to the dock. Barrels and crates stood piled beside bollards, but no guards or crew were to be seen. The surplus viands and liquors from the Stormrider feast had proved too strong a temptation.

Pod limped painfully up a swaying gangplank, dragging his foot. Despite his disability he moved quietly. His companion pressed close behind, darting glances into the shadows on all sides. Moonlight behind the masts and yards made intricate cobwebs of the shrouds and stays.

They reached the deck with a minimum of noise and cast about for a suitable hiding place. From an open hatch, a companionway led down toward a lower deck from which a second ladder led farther down to the dark well of the hold.

“You go first,” urged Pod.

The mute youth descended both ladders and waited, looking up. Presently Pod’s voice whispered down through the gloom:

“I am going back. I will not do it. Go into peril without Pod.”

The lad in the hold dropped the sack and began to climb, furiously. Pod’s uneven footsteps thudded on the lower deck, then the upper ladder. Hands grasped his ankles.

“Let me go,” he croaked. “I was drunk—I did not—”

“Hoy, what’s amiss?” a deep voice queried. “Who’s there?”

Pod yelped, felt his ankles freed. He reached the top of the companionway, crawled from the hatch, and made for the boarding ramp at high speed. A commotion ensued, out of which a sailor brought a lantern, holding it high.

“By thunder, there be something unseelie on the gangplank!”

“Catch it! Kill it!”

“Search the ship for others. Check the hold!”

Burly aeronauts began to swarm over the Windship and the dock. But Pod was gone—gone to some secret hole in the Tower wall.

And no intruders were found anywhere else on the ship.

In the morning, the City of Gilvaris Tarv sailed with the wind’s change.

3

THE WINDSHIPS

Sail and Swordplay

The pine grows high, the holly low, the Windships sail where eagles go. A hundred feet above the ground ship’s timbers make the only sound. Our roads have never felt the wheel, the tallest treetops brush the keel. Amongst the spruce and fir we go, while birch and yew lie far below. Like ocean’s reefs the mountains rise, where birds are fishes of the skies. Like foaming billows, clouds roll by, and currents wrack the windy sky. On tides of light we chart our run and ride the highways of the sun—To aeronauts of mist and air, ’tis only fools who live down there.

SKYFARERS’ SHANTY

Out of the pale predawn light emerged the rim of the world, painted with the hasty brushstrokes of clouds. It was suddenly split by the rearing bowsprit before sinking out of sight altogether. A moment later it soared up once more as the Windship struck an air pocket and dropped suddenly. Blinking away sleepiness, able aeronaut Ared Sandover felt his innards rise with the familiar thrill of falling, as if the deck left him momentarily suspended, and the surging lift that followed when it scooped him up again. The sun’s first rays gilded a vast and endless view of undulating greenery, of tossing treetops.

Bells clanged to signal the half hour. Sandover took the wheel, pulling back slightly to tilt the elevator and lift the prow. Beside the wheel the aileron levers were locked into position. The sails cracked taut, bellied full of wind, and to the steersman it felt as if the spoked wheel beneath his hands were the heart of some spirited thoroughbred. Elated, he stood firm at his task despite the bucking timbers beneath his feet, keeping one eye on the compass, glancing at the rise and fall of the terrain and the approaching line of cumulonimbus building up along the nearby coast. The City of Gilvaris Tarv lifted gracefully over the surging foliage, elegant as a white swan. The taller trees rose so high alongside that Sandover could look straight in among their branches. On the bow the forest canopy fanned out, while overhead on top of the masts the ensigns of Eldaraigne and the Cresny-Beaulais Line fluttered in the morning light.

At seven bells the relieving watch came out of the fo’c’sle and a savory tang drifted from the galley. Scanning the approaching weather, the captain gave orders to reduce sail, and the first mate cried, “Haul away on the clews! Sailors clewed and bunted up the sails from the deck.

“Main upper topsail it is, lads,” shouted the first mate. “Aloft and stow!”

Oblivious of the fickle gulfs of air below, Sandover climbed the ratlines. After reaching the futtock shrouds, he swung out and over, stepping on up the topmast. There was no chance to look down; the boots of the man in front of him were disappearing quickly, and the man below was wasting no time, either.

As he stepped carefully from shrouds to yard, the sail boiled and bounced around his face; he and the other hands leaned over and lugged it up in great folds. Embracing it with both arms, they shoved it under their bellies and sprawled across it to hold it there until it was lashed. Over the curve of the yardarm Sandover caught a giddy glimpse of a forest lake far below. The ship’s reflection was trapped in it.

Belowdecks, among the bulk of stacked cargo, the stowaway adjusted the bale-cloth he had rigged to hold him in the angle of a massive wooden rib curving around the hold. A couple of loose casks rolled; wine gulped in them. Stone jars knocked and rattled inside crates. Footsteps drummed on the deck overhead; beams creaked, rope slapped. His bundle of belongings sculled about. He dozed in snatches, ready to take evasive action should he hear the sound of boots descending the companionway.

His body ached from the tension of the hours of search, when he had wedged himself up under the hold’s ceiling, arms and legs braced against the supports. They had searched the deck area thoroughly but, as he had hoped, had not thought to look up to where he sweated and strained right above their heads. To relax, even for an instant, would have been to drop down on top of them, and now his sinews felt the aftermath of the effort. Stowaways were not looked upon kindly. If he were to be discovered, the punishment would likely be severe. Thirst troubled him, but he dared not drink more than a few sips from his leather bottle, not knowing where to find more water or how long the voyage would take to wherever the ship was bound. Not even scummy bilge moistened these decks; no waves slapped the hull, no spray rattled into the sails—the only waters that would caress this ship were the rain, the mist, and the cloud-vapor that condensed in her moisture-scoops, collecting in the ballast-tanks.

A dragon figureheaded this three-masted clipper, full-rigged with square sails on all masts. Four stubby wooden wings projected from her hull. Mounted in their cases below them, small but strong sildron-powered propellers whirred. Ailerons occasionally tilted along the following edge of each wing as the helmsman made small adjustments to the ship’s course. The ailerons were not the main source of stability, since sildron remained at a constant height above the ground and the ship would not roll unless driven above a steep incline; but they were required, along with the rudder, to make changes of direction.

A Windship could sail swiftly in the same direction as the wind or steadily across the wind. But like its cousins on the water, it could not sail directly into the wind’s eye and had to tack. As powerful as the propellers were, they could not fight against the wind; their role was to impart maneuverability and added speed under the right conditions. Iron being anathema to sildron, these engines were held together with cordage and glue; they were incapable of undergoing the strain of high speeds or large loads without bursting apart.

Her rig was what harnessed the wind’s power to drive the vessel forward, and the working of it through the changes of wind and weather required skill, hard work, and constant attention, for the wind was always altering course, and higher up the masts, it blew from different directions.

She sailed a predetermined course at an altitude of 150 feet, this height having been set by the amount of andalum shielding rolled back from the sildron inside the double hull. As cargo was unloaded or loaded at various ports of call, the shipmaster would ensure that the shields were rolled in or out to compensate for the changes in the ship’s weight. It was every shipmaster’s desire to sail as close to the designated altitude as possible and to reach each destination as fast as possible, without deviating, at least officially, from the legal trade routes. Windship routes and altitudes were carefully chosen by the Sky Moot to enable vessels to voyage with maximum efficiency and safety. Many mountain peaks jutted up well over four thousand feet. Around them the Tarv would have to navigate; to travel at lower altitude would mean more and wider obstacles, but she could not rise much higher without the purer-grade sildron used by swifter and more expensive Windships. There was also the Law of Quadrants, which dictated that Windships of her class bound in a certain direction must maintain a particular altitude to minimize the risk of collision. So, at 150 feet she sped along with a bonnetful of wind, sometimes brushed by the tops of pine, alder, and spruce as she crossed the Greayte Western Forest on her voyage southeast, bound for the city, her namesake.

The winds of the cold front escaped into the northeast without much hampering the Windship’s progress, and by sunset she soared out over the edge of the forest and began to pass over the meathenlands, a prosperous region of farmed countryside and small villages. Sheep scattered like thistledown before her shadow. A thick layer of altocumulus tesselated the skies like acres of teasel-tufts, reflecting hues of peach and amber.

These lands were patch-counterpanes of meadows and tilled fields edged with the green brocade of hedgerows and winding ribbons of lanes. The ship sailed through the night and docked next morning for half a day at Stockton Wood Interchange Turret for fresh water and cargo to be brought on board—grain, cheese, wool, salt beef, and beans. At that time the stowaway had to hide again, wedged among the supporting beams of the overhead deck.

Naught saw he of the Turret with its few inhabitants—little more than a slender column with landing platforms set at each level and each direction. Naught saw he of the village of Stockton Wood or of the green fields and patterned red soil that passed below. He knew only the restless twilight of the Windship’s distended belly. From time to time, aeronauts would be sent below to check that the cargo was shipshape and had not come loose from its lashings, and that was what led, inevitably, to his discovery.

Able aeronaut Sandover dragged him up the companionways past several faces screwed up in astonishment. He stumbled, blinking, onto the quarterdeck and stood transfixed, looking up at the monumental wooden trees that rose forever above his head, tapering into a dazzling sky and decorated by the cordage of sailing; fathoms of standing and running rigging; halliards, sheets, foot-ropes, ratlines, tackles, shrouds, stays and braces, buntlines, clewlines, and downhauls. Sails bellied from the yards, and the flags of the Cresny-Beaulais Line fluttered from the mastheads.

With a contrary wind, she was close-hauled. The yards were pulled in as far as possible against the shrouds, and she was sailing at some sixty degrees to the wind with the propellers halted.

“Captain, sir …” Sandover saluted the stiff-backed, lean man who stood with feet braced against the rocking deck, flanked by the bosun and the cabin boy. Captain Chauvond waved him away impatiently without taking his eyes off the tossing treetops below. There was a ship to be sailed—discomfited stowaways must bide. Chauvond spoke to the bosun from the side of his mouth.

“Wind’s veering now. Prepare to tack.”

Orders were shouted: “Ready about!” Sailors in yellow uniforms rushed to their stations, threw the coiled lines off the pins, and checked that they were clear to pay out. Lee braces were flaked out on deck, free to run.

“Foremast manned and ready!”

The ship was eased off the wind to build up enough speed to help her turn through the wind’s eye. The propellers sprang to life, groaning and rattling as they woke to the full force of the wind. Then, as the wheel was slowly put hard over, the ’tween mast staysails were dropped. The yards on the main- and mizzenmasts spun around as the orders were given, and now came the critical moment. Headsails clattered as they went aback. She was turning, with the jibs, staysails, and sails on the foremast aback to help push the bows around, and the decks a web of ropes. For a long moment she slowed, with the sails flapping backward.

“Mainsail haul!”

Sails on the main- and foremasts were braced around as soon as they began to fill. Then the mizzenmast was braced around, jibs and staysails sheeted home, ’tween mast staysails reset, course steadied, and the spanker eased off. Aeronauts busied themselves recoiling lines and hanging them neatly on their pins. Now the captain directed his attention to the business at hand.

“Stowaway, Cap’n, sir,” Sandover announced unnecessarily, still gripping the lad by the elbow. Captain Chauvond grimaced. He was not an unkind man, but he ran a tight ship, in complete accordance with the rules and regulations of the Sky Moot, and had no time for those who broke them.

“Shall I clap ’im in leg-irons, sir, or give ’im six of the best?”

“In truth, Mr. Sandover, I have half a mind to have you throw him overboard,” the captain said testily. “What say you to that, lad?”

The lad shook his head miserably. The cabin boy scrutinized him with intense curiosity.

“Think ’e ’as a wooden tongue, sir,” said Sandover. The captain turned away, hands clasped behind his back.

“Aye, well, we shall have to put him off at the next port of call, that’s the correct procedure—hand him over to the local authorities. Until then he is to be adequately fed and put to scrubbing the decks and whatever else he can do to work for his ticket. And make sure he keeps his taltry tied on!”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

For the rest of that day and all of the next, the lad was set to polishing the brass binnacle and the fife-rail around the mainmast, scrubbing the mess deck, and scouring pots and pans in the galley, where the cook was preparing a pungent stew. The aeronauts, at first uncertain as to whether he might be some eldritch wight about to curse the ship, were too busy to take much notice of him. More widely traveled than the parochial inhabitants of the Tower, they were accustomed to strange sights and thus more tolerant. The lad pondered bleakly on what might happen to him in Gilvaris Tarv and whether he would be sent back to the House of the Stormriders. Until now his only ambition had been to leave the Tower, as if somehow simply roving out in the wide world would give him the answers he craved. He dreaded being sent back to the Tower even more than he dreaded a beating for stealing illegal passage on the Windship, but if he were allowed to remain in the city, would he not merely end up as a drudge, toiling in sunless chambers for the rest of his life, polishing aumbries, bleeding, broken? Yet at least in a city, through which strangers passed, he might meet someone who could help him find out his name.…

Topside, the ship was a bee’s nest of activity—yellow-jacketed men spliced and coiled ropes, mended and trimmed sails, and ascended and descended the rigging; orders were shouted and bells were rung; canvas strained against rope and every eyelet was a slit pierced by the red needles of the sinking sun as the Windship sliced through the sky with her sails heaped up like storm clouds.

They dropped anchor on the third evening at Saddleback Pass. The sheer and purple walls of the Lofty Mountains loomed up far above the masthead on each side. Below, wooded clefts lay in deep shadow. The next part of the voyage, through the steep, uninhabited ranges, would be difficult and dangerous, but it was the last leg, and the captain expected to reach Gilvaris Tarv on the following afternoon.

The lad took his meal with the aeronauts but was unable to stomach the stew, making do with hard bread and water and small, sweet apples. They sent him to the cargo hold to sleep and closed the hatch lest he escape and walk among them like a night-fright, disturbing their dreams.

During his watch, Ared Sandover could see far away a tiny glow shining through the darkness—a Lightship that was moored, eternally, at Cold Crow Peak.

Through the night, a sound reverberated through the mountains from some indiscernible point—now near, now far—the weeping of a heartbroken woman.

From time to time, an anguished keening gathered into a long, rising wail before breaking again into wrenching sobs. Indescribable sorrow communicated itself in those wordless cries. None of the crew slept. The skin crawled on their backs. They stayed silent in their discomfiture, tense as stretched shrouds; a strange, cold heaviness weighed them down, slowing every movement, even breathing. For it was the cry of a weeper, a harbinger of doom to mortal men. Three times it echoed forth, and then in the night fell an almost unnatural silence.

Someone, soon, would die.

First light was cool and blue, like the sea. High-level cirrus wisped in curls softer than swan’s down. It was the hour to call all hands to man the capstan and raise the iron anchor from its bed somewhere in the mold of the forest floor 150 feet below. White fog lay low in the deep vales, and cloud wreathed the mountains’ heads. Bringing up the massive chain was a lengthy task; the shantyman’s tune echoed among the hills as the great iron flukes rose in time to the tramp of the men marching around the foredeck pushing the capstan bars before them.

A light wind was breathing down their necks, and conditions were fair for climbing the rigging as the men went aloft to cast off the gaskets that lashed the sails to the yards. Soon ropes were flaked out neatly on deck, and buntlines and clewlines were ready to be eased out. The hands aloft by the mast at the upper staysails stood on the cranlines. Looking up at the yards, Sandover could see the loops of folded cloth, sails not yet set, as all around the decks aeronauts checked the layout. Orders were awaited. Not much canvas would be unfurled today—the Tarv must cruise slowly in this precipitous region.

Whistle blasts signaled commands along the length of the ship. Propellers spun into action, and the ship began to make headway. Gradually, as more sail area was displayed, speed increased.

The sun was not yet visible behind the peaks, and great swaths of lavender shadow fell from steaming crags into blind depths. Skillful navigation was crucial here. Uneven ground exerted unequal pressures on the sildron in the hull, which caused pitching and yawing. The steeply rising landforms forced the air currents to break up into strong turbulence; a run through this part of the country was always bumpy.

The Windship floated between giant castles of escarpments like a fragile moth, lit once or twice by stray shafts of light spearing between the eastern tors. Toward the middle of the morning, the lad’s skin prickled. Fine, pale hairs on his arms stood on end, and excitement drilled through him like a silver auger. He shivered with expectancy—an unstorm was approaching.

The day-star climbed beyond the Lofty Mountains at last, and it seemed that the ship was making fair headway, when a minor solar eclipse occurred. Startled, the crew looked up to see, silhouetted against the morning sky, a brig, her two-masted rig laden with sails, floating across the fiery path of the sun.

The Tarv’s bell clanged fiercely.

“Sail ahoy! Black sail! Black brig fifty degrees high to starboard! All hands on deck!”

“Plague and madness! Where did that evil hulk spring from?” bellowed the first mate, letting fly a stream of curses. Confusion ensued, escalated. Men raced to load the mangonels and arm themselves. A black sail meant a pirate vessel—here in the mountains they could not outrun her; nor could they outmaneuver her. The black brig was smaller, leaner, built for speed. Their only chance was to fight.

But the brig, long and sharp as a knife, had the ally of surprise. Preceded by her iron-shod ram, she had glided silently from behind a high rocky wall where she had lain in ambush, and now, from her position overhead, a deadly hail of arrows and stones came clattering onto the merchant’s decks. Two or three men fell, wounded.

“Captain, sir, I suggest flaming arrows,” the bosun panted.

“And would you have burning debris rain upon us? Order the mangonels to prepare to fire.”

The bosun’s shouts were drowned in the broadside that exploded from the black ship’s own mangonels, expertly aimed. She was so close that her shotmen could not miss, and with a splintering roar the mainmast crashed down onto the deck, bringing the foremast with it. Sailors who had been clinging aloft were hurled overboard. Their cries tapered off into deep mountain gullies, lost in the booming echoes of destruction. The stern wing on the starboard side was smashed off and tumbled down to vanish in the abyss while bits of sildron from the propeller floated away. With one blast, the City of Gilvaris Tarv had been disabled.

Her decks erupted into scenes of chaos, rolling and bucketing as the ship wallowed. Broken spars and yards rolled, sliding within a tangle of ropes. Orders were shouted in a desperate attempt to salvage the situation, but Ared Sandover, hanging on to the railing to stop himself from sliding, could see the brig swinging close alongside and knew they were doomed. The long arm of one of the Tarv’s mangonels, released from torsion, was flung up against its transom to hurl forth its heavy missile. The ship recoiled, slewing around like a dying thing, and the ball went wide of its target, slamming into the mountain wall, where it blasted a hole.

The nameless youth stood, unheeded, by the bridge, feeling the unstorm coming closer. There was no fear, only numbness; he felt detached from the scene, as though watching a play. Besides, there seemed nothing he could do; he had no training in bowmanship or working catapults or sailing. He gripped a tangle of ropes and watched the rugged horizon seesawing. In the next instant he regretted his lack of voice more than ever he had before; oh, to be able to scream a warning! Now his heart burst into pounding life at what he saw. Iron grappling hooks erupted over the railing, cast up from below, and thudded into wood. He flung himself down the canting slope to where able aeronaut Sandover struggled for balance.

“What? Leave hold of me!” They scuffled briefly, then the man turned his head and saw, too, the row of heads appearing up over the poop rail; the dark shapes of men swarming over, leaping down to the deck, knives glittering. More and still more came up the ropes from the longboats that had slid silently in under the hull while all attention had been diverted to the brig.

With shrill cries and bull-bellows the reivers thronged over the clipper, wielding their long, curved blades with expertise. The fighting was fierce; the merchant sailors had been trained to defend themselves and their ship, but there had been few pirate attacks on record in recent years, and they were ill prepared. Standing side on with feet braced apart and knees bent, duelists fought desperately up and down decks that soon ran slippery with blood.

A battle-hardened, scar-faced pirate advanced within a sword and arm’s length of his adversary. Grinning, the cutthroat swung his scimitar from right to left in front of his chest. The aeronaut extended, trying desperately to deceive, knowing he was outmatched. Scar-face repeated his playful action several times, advancing and retreating. All at once their weapons engaged, Scar-face’s scimitar deflecting the other and coming in over the top to scoop up the blade and fling it aside. A ring of metal on metal, a rainbow in the air. With a thud, the aeronaut’s severed hand hit the deck, followed a moment later by his torso.

Another pirate, a stringy fellow with no teeth who had been attacking, parrying, and riposting in a rapid rhythm, suddenly rapped sharply on the boards with his forward foot. His adversary, distracted from the scimitar, let down his guard. It was only for a fraction of an instant, but that was all the time necessary for the point of Toothless’s cutlass to slash the aeronaut’s forearm, slicing through the sinews. The sword fell from the impotent hand, and with a swift forward thrust Toothless skewered him to the heart.

One brave sailor crept up behind a roaring brigand who had bodily lifted one of his shipmates and was hurling him overboard. As he finished his business with a grand yell, the canny pirate positioned his scimitar along the underside of his left forearm. In a lightning movement he stepped back with his left foot, thrusting the scimitar straight out behind him and twisting his body to the left. The sailor, advancing with upraised weapon, was taken unawares and fell, cut almost in two. With a vengeful cry, one of his fellow aeronauts attacked, lunging with sword outstretched. The still-bellowing pirate retreated out of range. As he had hoped, the aeronaut shifted his weight backward to recover. In that moment of vulnerability, Roarer jumped forward and cut him down.

A bald, one-eared reiver hacked his way through the fray, naming his cuts and thrusts as he gave them: “The Hedger! The Reaper! The Thresher!” His blade clove the air with a rushing, hissing sound; it clove flesh with the succulent smack of an axe through cabbage.

When the shang wind came on them it seemed to increase the ferocity of the fighting, as if it got into the blood of the men. Smoking clouds boiled across the sky. Twilight glinted with strange, rainbow fires like ice, like jewels, like frosted stars. The brig’s rigging was a dew-beaded cobweb giving off stabs of diamond light.

“Make her a ghost-ship!” cried a dying aeronaut, his last breath bubbling away in the crucible of his breast. The combatants, their heads bare of taltries in the heat of battle, danced to the rhythm of life and death in a soft radiance that burned their images on the air. Where they had been, a moment ago, their shapes remained—translucent, shimmer-edged, and slowly fading. A sailor swung a knife, and a fan of ghost-knives hung dissolving. A man fell, and his numberless ghosts fell again, many times. Phantoms and men leaped from deck to deck, their cries and the clash of weapons underpinned by a faint chiming of crystal bells.

The clipper, still staggering with the momentum of her dismasting and the counterthrust of the mangonel’s firing, lurched sideways into the mountain wall. There, tall, dark pines clung, deep-rooted, glittering, growing straight up out of land that fell almost straight down. A wild-eyed pirate jumped back as his adversary moved forward and lunged with a cruel upward cut that opened his belly; the man fell forward uttering a gurgling cry. Another invader chopped at a sailor, missed—his scimitar sliced through rope. Sandover, who had been pulling hard at the other end of the rope for leverage while fending off blows, shot down the deck and out over the side. He crashed through the branches of a tree that gave way forgivingly and brought him up, scratched but living, against the trunk. The Windship spun away and left him. Foreseeing the ship’s doom, many aeronauts slashed through ropes depending from the yards and swung themselves over the side in long arcs to throw themselves on the mercy of the trees and take their chances with whatever beasts and wights roamed the pathless slopes below; but not all were as lucky as Sandover.

When it was over, the pirates took some prisoners and threw the rest of the crew overboard. They plundered the Tarv, loading chests of precious things into the longboats to be ferried to the brig. Little of the less valuable cargo they stole—there was too much to take all; it would have weighed down their ship and slowed them. Then they scuttled the white bird of a clipper, driving her into the mountainside and wrecking her on the rocks, raping her of as much of her sildron as they could get. She hung broken there, her lacerated timbers red-stained. The ghost-tableau faded out as the shang storm passed away over the mountains to the north and the sun shone, croceate, in the late afternoon.

When the next unstorm blew, the Tarv’s ghost-image would fly again, in memoriam.

In the wake of the unstorm the black Windship fled among the peaks. Patrol ships would come looking for the Tarv when she missed her rendezvous at the docks of Gilvaris Tarv, and the captain wanted to be far away by then. His ship was fast and maneuverable and had been drastically modified to enable her to change altitudes quickly, gaining or losing height ear-burstingly as the slatted andalum linings shielding the sildron were rolled back and forth inside her double hull.

The merchant sailors taken prisoner had been selected from among the unwounded for their size, strength, or nimbleness. Now they were shackled and manacled with iron, lest rope-chafe damage their appeal to prospective buyers. They were given food and limited room to move. Hale workers fetched worthwhile prices in this illegal trade. One of these captives was the stowaway.

The pirate’s crew were thieves and cutthroats recruited from the dregs of cities, or simple country lads who had been seduced to piracy by tavern talk and could not now go back, or disillusioned soldiers; men who looked for rich rewards preying upon the Merchant Lines or who sailed in the sky for their own reasons. One of these stood now before the prisoners, his feet braced apart on the planks, his brawny left arm roughly bandaged where he had sustained a wound from a poniard. The lad squinted up at the head outlined against the sails. Tangled red hair like stiff wire had been randomly knotted with thin braids; in the thickets of it, a gold disk winked from his left ear. Blue eyes squinted over a ginger mustache that, although bushy, was clipped short. A copper torc clasped his bull-neck, from which also hung a tilhal of amber with two coupling flies trapped inside. A stained taltry hung from his shoulders. His barrel chest was swathed in a torn shirt that had once been white, overtopped with a rabbit-skin jerkin, and he wore olive-green breeches belted with gold-worked, purple leather with a wicked-looking skian scabbarded at his side. His feet, ginger-tufted and sporting dirty nails like goats’ horns, were bare and tattooed with scorpions. The nameless youth had a good view of these feet because he was lying in front of them. To his left lay Captain Chauvond and the cabin boy. To his right reclined half a dozen merchant aeronauts, also bound with ropes.

“Deformed!” proclaimed the red pirate. “Twisted, ugly, and deformed!” He leaned closer to the youth and said confidentially, breathing garlic, “Hogger has one eye, Kneecap’s got a wooden leg, Black Tom is missing three fingers, Fenris be earless, and Gums ain’t got a tooth in his head. A man has to be ruined to sail on the Windwitch. Fires of Tapthar! You’ll fit in well here, mo reigh, you’ll fit like an egg in its shell!”

He laughed, revealing gaps in his dentition that seemed to go through to the back of his head.

“Me, I’m physically perfect. See that?” He flexed bulging sinews in his right arm, which was tattooed with ravening birds, their toothed beaks gaping, looking faintly ridiculous.

“I wouldn’t like to meet me in battle, mo reigh. It’s the brain—the brain that’s twisted. I’m mad, see?” His jutting eyebrows shot up and down rapidly. “Sianadh the Bear, unconquerable in battle!”

He roared, a wide grin splitting his weather-lined face. The cabin boy whimpered.

“What is the matter, tien eun? See, I unbind you and your reigh friend.” Squatting, he did so. “You two lads are to join us! You shall be buccaneers on the upper drafts. Every now and then, such as today, we lose a few hearty hands. Captain Winch needs to replace ’em with young ’uns nimble in the rigging. Don’t look so sad! ’Tis better than being sold as slaves in Namarre like these shera sethge shipmates of yours here. And you, Captain, are to be ransomed to your Cresny-Beaulais Line.”

Captain Chauvond groaned, licking blood from his lips.

“Now, don’t bleed all over the clean deck. You lads, see that keg over there? Go and fetch water for yourselves and your shipmates. Make yourselves useful or Winch will notice you and you’ll taste the lash. We sink anchor at dusk, then we eat and suffer. ’Tis a shame we left your cook in a tree—ours is a sadist and poisoner—’twould have been kinder to our aching bellies to have swapped one for t’other. Look lively there!”

The two youths hurried to obey.

The brig was a lean, streamlined ship, but run on more slovenly lines than the merchant clipper. The crew, less disciplined, were more careless and prone to unprovoked outbursts of violence. Captain Winch, however, ruled with a steely hand.

Having risen, the wind was blowing hard.

“Aloft and stow the top-gallants!” Winch’s stridor, with all the power of a gale behind it, burst over the decks like a hailstorm. “You new lads, get aloft before I kick yers aloft.”

The cabin boy looked frightened and opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. He and the deformed youth followed some of the hands up the thrumming ratlines on the weather side of the rigging, not having the least idea of how they would do the job demanded of them. Although the ship moved in relative harmony with the wind, its speed and direction deviated somewhat. The wind beat the lads down against the shrouds and banged at them. Climbing over the overhanging futtock shrouds was not for the fainthearted; their feet and legs disappeared from sight, and all their arm power was needed for the last heave onto the tiny platform. Once over that hurdle, the climb to the second platform with its smaller overhang was easier. The black top-gallant sails leaped and slatted among the clouds. Ropes and rigging tautened on all sides. Far below, perhaps a hundred feet down, they could see the men working on the decks. The massive yards slanted perilously over the wild tors and scarps, crevasses and clefts that stretched in every direction like crushed lime velvet tossed over a table setting. Trees raced by below, each leaf sharply delineated in every shade of green and gold.

They must step resolutely from the ratlines to the thin foot-rope festooned beneath the spar, which shuddered as the draperies of flogging canvas cracked the wind like whips. The foot-rope sagged under the first man’s weight so he sank almost below the yard, but it lifted as more men stepped on it and, finally, the two lads. There were now about four sailors on either side of the yard. The sail hit the lads in the face and knocked off their taltries. The brig rocked in its passage along a rocky crevasse, the masts swinging in long, graceful arcs. They were clinging to an erratically swiveling pole a dozen stories above the deck. The cabin boy’s face was pale, and his teeth clenched. The nameless lad did not look down again. Panic ebbed and was replaced, gradually, by exultation. Up here, he felt like a King. Had he possessed a voice, he would have shouted.

The sail had already been partly gathered in from the deck, the clewlines drawn to raise its corners and the buntlines pulling in the bulk of it up to the spar. The men leaned over the yard, seeming to hang on with their own belly-muscles so as to leave two hands free. They reached far down to grasp a ruck of wind-shaken canvas. It beat back at them and blew from their hands. The wind pinned them flat against the yard, tearing at their clothes.

“Heave, you laggards!” an angry voice brayed.

The lads copied the men. After pulling the sail up, they jammed a pile of it under their bellies, then grasped some more. When all the sail had been bunched up, they flattened it along the crosstree, then rolled and lashed it. Then they must descend, climb the foremast, and do it all again. There was no tuition for new crewmen on this vessel; it was “learn or die.” Most of the buccaneers had learned that way and were prepared to give as much quarter as they themselves had received: namely, none.

At sunset, the Windwitch anchored in a deep and narrow ravine. Lurid light speared between almond-shaped clouds standing in the lee waves of the land formations, reddening a mountain peak shaped like three old men standing in a row. When the Windship was snugged down for the night, sails furled and lines coiled, the crew partook of their meal on the mess deck, so aptly named, slopping it into their mouths, wiping their greasy hands on their hair or clothing or any other surface that tended in any way toward absorbency.

The two lads drooped, almost too exhausted to eat. After a few bites they huddled together where some of the wounded pirates lay at the side. There they dozed, oblivious of the gibes halfheartedly hurled their way. Adversity had created a kind of comradeship, despite the fact that neither knew the other’s name and never a word had passed between them.

Hawking, swaggering, elated by their recent victory, the hale crew-members argued about the division of the spoils.

“Let’s have it now, I say. We’ve worked hard for it. Let’s see the color of the gold in them chests.”

Cheers and the banging of pewter tankards greeted this oratory.

“If we divvy it up now,” said a horse-faced rascal, “where should we stow it on this bucket? In our hammocks? In our ship-bags? To have them made lighter by some sneak-thief such as Spargo as soon as we turn our backs and go aloft?”

Spargo, who had just then buried his nose in a jar to take a deep draft, thumped the jar down, spluttering. Rum splashed out of it. Also, carelessly, he had thwacked it right in the middle of his dish. Grayish gravy flew up, splashing his face and nearby diners, who snarled aggrievedly.

“Did I hear you aright, Nails?”

Nails leaned closer to him, lips curled back to show the remains of his teeth. Spargo did not flinch.

“Blow me down,” Nails invited, thrusting forward a stubbled jaw like a fist.

Spargo’s eyes slid from side to side in his frozen face. Most of the crew had stopped eating and were watching.

He pushed Nails’s shoulder.

Laughing, Nails playfully shoved him back, harder. Spargo’s face turned purple. He thrust against Nails with all his strength; Nails barely kept his balance, then returned to land a blow squarely on Spargo’s jaw. They rolled together across dinner plates loaded with boiled cabbage, charred mutton, and flour dumplings in gravy, to the chagrin of their shipmates, who instantly joined the melee in revenge for the ruining of their dinners, no matter whether the fault had been the brawlers’ or the cook’s. The lads from the Tarv prudently removed themselves as far as possible from this storm of flailing fists, cabbage, and pewter.

A sharp crack split the air along a black seam, and silence gushed out. Winch stood, whip trailing negligently from his paw. Beneath his horsehide jerkin he was shirtless. His bare chest sported a pattern of snakes and the usual tilhal, dangling on a thong. Wide leather bands studded with iron adorned his wrists and tree trunk waist. His brown hair was shaved to stubble on one half of his head and hung in long greasy braids on the other. He wore a necklace of sharks’ teeth, and gold rings flashed in his earlobe and one nostril.

“Reef it, you puke-stocking rabble of misbegotten dung-eaters.”

Growling, sullen, the crew scraped dumplings and gravy off themselves and began to eat the larger chunks. Still standing, the captain surveyed them with a surly visage, adding for good measure:

“Anyone care to have a conversation with Lady Lash?” He grinned then, bulge-eyed as a lunatic, but received no reply.

As the men settled back into order, or a semblance of it, red-haired Sianadh said conversationally:

“Dung-eaters? Now why should he call us dung-eaters? What does Winch know about Poison’s secret recipes?”

“Poison don’t use no recipes, ’e makes it all out of ’is own ’ead.”

“That explains the texture”—Sianadh nodded wisely—“but don’t be concerned, Croker—you ought to be used to eating things other people would scrape off their boots.”

Croker, an irascible giant with an enormous blue-veined nose, jumped up and pulled a knife out of the cutting laughter. In answer, Sianadh sprang to his feet facing him, one hand gripping the top of his scabbard.

“I’ll slice out your foul tongue, stinking Ertishman.”

“Don’t be so certain, mo gaidair. I have a long, wicked weapon to trounce ye with.” Tension mounted again, so soon. Winch devoured mutton noisily, seemingly unperturbed.

“Do not be so quick to provoke me. All my foes run when they see me coming!” the giant thundered.

“Really, Croker? Even before they smell you?”

Veins stood out on Croker’s brow. “Toad-spotted scum! I have never been defeated.”

“Well, ye must run swifter than we gave you credit for.”

“You think you’re so clever. I’ve seen donkeys with more wit than you.”

“Aye, someday I’ll meet your brothers.”

“I’ll kill you!”

Sianadh rolled his eyes upward. “Ye’d be doing me a favor, me bucko.”

“Draw yer weapon!”

Croker sliced runes on shadow parchment with the flash of his knife’s blade. Responding with one fluid movement, Sianadh whipped a large sausage out of his pocket and flourished it triumphantly. Guffaws galed back and forth over the mess deck. Tension was released like the spring of a fired mangonel as Croker caught the sausage tossed to him, dropped his knife, and clapped a meaty hand on Sianadh’s back.

“Ah, you be not such a bad jack for an Ertishman, Bear.”

“And I’ve always loved ye, Croker. The rain shall never fall on me while ye are my shipmate. There is always ample shelter beneath your nose.”

Croker joined in the laughter, his cheeks swollen with sausage. A moment later he looked puzzled, then shot a frowning glare at Sianadh, but it was too late. The red-haired man was by then seated in the middle of a circle, clutching a tankard in one hand, telling a story.

“This be a tale from Finvarna, my home in the west. The hero, Callanan, when he was a youth was trained by Ceileinh, the famous warrior-woman.”

“Ha! Only the Erts of Finvarna would have women warriors!”

“That is because the least of our women is mightier than most Feorhkind men,” was the seamless reply. “Do ye want to hear the tale or don’t ye?”

“Aye! Aye!”

“To continue—Ceileinh held a stronghold in the mountainous country, wild and lonely. It was built atop a high plain surrounded on most sides by a sheer drop hundreds of feet down. From up there ye could look out across the heights and deeps to distant mountain peaks. Those who ventured there had to be stalwart and stouthearted. Ceileinh’s fastness was renowned far and wide. All youths who wished to learn fighting skills went there for their training, which was arduous but made the best warriors of them, in the end—the best with spear and sword and bow, the best at horsemanship.

“One day as Callanan’s training was nearly finished, sentries came riding in at a gallop, shouting that an invading army was pounding up the mountain path. It was headed by the infamous she-warrior Rhubhlinn, Ceileinh’s fiercest rival, in her winged chariot. They swept away all who stood in their path, until they reached the cliff-top plain where Ceileinh and her company waited, forewarned, armed and ready, some on foot, others on horseback or in their chariots. Then a battle began. Rhubhlinn’s mightiest heroes were slain single-handed by Callanan, but there were heavy losses also on Ceileinh’s side. Both armies drew back for a breather, with neither side having gained the upper hand, and the leaders, despising this waste of their best champions, challenged one another to decide the outcome in single combat.

“But young Callanan demanded to take the place of his instructress. Knowing the measure of his keenness and valor, she agreed but warned him of Rhubhlinn’s renowned ferocity. He only said. ‘Tell me what Rhubhlinn cherishes most.’

“‘She loves above all things her chariot, her horses, and her charioteer. Such a team they are, skilled, experienced, and peerless, her pride in war.’

“‘I shall not fail you, my Chieftain,’ said Callanan. He saluted and went forth to battle.

“The watching warriors kept vigil in a wide circle on the dusty, gore-spattered plain while those two combatants met like thunder-giants in the middle. First they fought with spears, but they were closely matched, and the spears shattered without doing harm. Their swords were brought forth, then. But Rhubhlinn was the more seasoned in this play, and soon she disarmed Callanan, breaking off his sword at the hilt. A great cry arose from the throats of the watchers. Rhubhlinn bared her teeth, seeing victory within her grasp, and drew back her arm for the fatal blow. But Callanan was no fool and had prepared himself.

“‘Your chariot and horses have stumbled at the top of the cliff and are in peril of slipping over!’ cried he.

“Rhubhlinn, tricked by this hoax, turned her gaze for one instant. In that instant, Callanan seized her in his arms. His grip was like steel—he threw Rhubhlinn down and pressed his skian to her neck, demanding surrender or death.

“Then she yielded to him and promised that she would never again fight Ceileinh. See, this tale goes to show that it is not strength alone that wins battles.”

“This tale goes to show that Ertishmen tell improbable stories,” commented Black Tom, who was immediately gifted with an eye to match his name.

The night wore on; the fights wore off; the tankards were refilled. This was a celebration of another victory. Talk turned to the day’s battle, then to other ships, the ships of the ocean. The legend of the Abandoned Seaship was told, and tales of the terrible shang unstorms and waterspouts in the northern seas, past which no ship could sail. Nothing lay beyond the Ringstorm—it was a barrier around the rim of Aia to stop ships from falling over the edge into nothingness. They spoke of the lands of the south: cold Rimany, where the Icemen dwelled with their milk hair, snow skin, and magnolia eyes, and of the known lands of Erith, where warriors slept for centuries deep beneath the hills while eldritch wights stalked the green turf above their heads. And, in whispers, these ruthless cutthroats mentioned, shuddering, the Nightmare Princes of the Unseelie Attriod.

They spoke, too, of strange tableaux they had seen in various parts of the world, left by the shang winds to repeat for centuries, gradually fading over time. They talked of the sailor who, among these very mountains, had been ordered to climb down the outside of the hull to effect repairs on a moving Windship but had been so terrified that he had stolen sildron to put in his belt. Strong winds had snapped his safety-rope, and he was cast adrift, helpless in the air and blown into tall gullies where ships could not go. Aeronauts claimed to have seen his decomposing body flying past at twilight, even when his bones must have dropped to the ground long since. A scoop net was kept ready by the helm in case that sildron belt was ever spied.

“Stormriders have flying-belts,” said one of the crew, “but you never hear of that happenin’ to them!”

“Of course not,” said another, “they are not so stupid as to put high-grade around their middles. Their flying-belts are personally made to their weight, see, so that if ’n they fell, they would be brought to a halt ten feet up from the ground. Then they unbuckle and drop down.”

“Aye, but that do not ’elp them much if a tree gets in their way!” someone chuckled.

“Pig on a spit!” the first offered wittily.

Once, Red-Hair heaved himself to his feet, swaying out of synchronization with the ship. Gravely he called for attention, raising his tankard high; his audience responded with an expectant hush.

“I would just like to say, me buckos,” he slurred, “that at no time in my life have I ever”—a pause for emphasis—“ever”—another ripe pause, during which the crew focused on him with difficulty and enormous expectation—“had any idea …” The red-haired man looked up with a confused air as he trailed off.

“what I was talking about!” he finished, thumping himself down and smiling benignly all around. The crew cheered weakly.

At the last, one of them sang a song—not a bawdy song, for once, but a ballad about a maid who dressed herself as a boy in order to follow her true love into battle. The pirates listened, hiccuping and belching. Soon, sentimental tears salted the rum.

At various times during these tales, the deformed youth floated in and out of uneasy sleep. Snippets of stories concerning unseelie wights, monsters, and legendary warriors mingled with the whistling breath of the cabin boy, adrift in slack-jawed slumber on his shoulder.

He woke fully, later, to find that most of the lanterns had gone out or been extinguished. Men reclined or slumped, snoring, in a variety of positions about the patchy dimness of the sweltering deck, which was redolent with the reek of their bodies and rancid fat. The cradle of the ship rocked gently, incessantly, in crosscurrents.

The big, red-haired sailor called Sianadh was sitting opposite, his back to the hull’s timbers. A lantern spilled a rose petal of light on a paper he held in his hand. He was gazing at it intently. The youth did not move a muscle. He studied the sailor’s face, alert to any twitch that might indicate the man was turning his head. Could pirates read? This one must have that ability. Or was it a map he was holding so carefully? At last the man folded the paper and slipped it inside an inner pocket of his rabbit-skin jerkin. The crinkle-edged blue eyes slid sideways and pinned the lad. He started, jolting the somnolent cabin boy’s head, which slumped down onto his knee.

“Oho, so ye be awake, be ye, mo reigh? Ye did not see that,” the pirate said softly, soberly. “Foolish of me to bring it out here. But it is gone now, and ye saw nothing.”

The lad shook his head vigorously. The blue gaze did not leave him. It studied him as intently as it had studied the map. “Ye be mute, be ye not?”

A nod for reply.

“I had wondered. I never heard ye cry out, even when we came in over the rail—even when your shipmates were slain. I thought ye were too tough, too tough to cry like a babe. And I still believe that, now. There’s more to ye than meets the eye, mo reigh. Ye do not wear the uniform of the lemonlegs. Ye be not one of theirs, are ye? Ye did not belong on that benighted clipper. And that straw-thatch I saw when your taltry blew off, aloft—ye be Talith, be ye not? Color like that, so bright, right to the scalp, cannot be false. Talith—that be rare. Where be your people?”

The lad shrugged.

“Ye wear the brown of a drudge. Topsy-turvy are ye—brown garments, lemon hair! Topsy-turvy in more ways than one. Ye be not what ye seem, eh? I knew that as soon as I clapped eyes on ye.”

The youth gazed back helplessly. Aside from the young servant Caitri, nobody had ever spoken to him like this before—not that he could remember—not even Keat Featherstone, so personally, as though he were worthy, worthy of notice and opinion. It was stirring and frightening. What did this bull of a man see when he looked at him? What in Aia was he talking about? Suddenly he wanted to reach out and clutch that knotty shoulder, to shake him, shake answers out of him. What is Talith? What do you see? What am I? Who am I? But he restrained himself, staying as rigid as canvas in a stiff wind.

And that did not go unnoticed, either, but was misinterpreted.

“Do not distress yourself. I shall not give away your secrets if ye do not give away mine. Shake on it.”

The red-haired man held out a calloused palm, and they shook hands.

“Good.” But Sianadh looked troubled.

“As thick as most of this sgorrama crew is, this be a Windship, mo reigh, and quarters are cramped.… You should get away, if you have a chance.”

Spargo rolled over in a hammock and fell out on top of Hogger. The ensuing racket distracted the lad’s attention, and when he looked again, Sianadh was nowhere to be seen.

The crew of the Windwitch woke like thirty soreheaded bears to a breakfast of lukewarm spike, ship’s bread, and half-cooked, stolen bacon doled out by Poison—himself not in the best of moods from having had to get up earlier than the rest. Captain Winch and the first mate, the purple-veined Cleaver, shouted orders. The two new lads were sent aloft, where they were kept busy.

In the stillness of predawn, the mountains rang with the liquid warblings of magpies, heralds of morning in the wilderness.

As the sun’s first ray edged between the three pinnacles to the east, a tremendous noise of crunching reverberated through the ravine, as of massive grindstones grating against one another. On a nearby crag towered a pile of gigantic, flat rocks. The topmost rock was turning around by itself. Three times it wheeled laboriously around its own axis, and then it ceased and gave no other sign but seemed an ordinary stone, unbudging. The lad from Isse Tower glanced at his companion for confirmation that his eyes had not deceived him. The cabin boy, however, with his eyes tightly shut, was engaged in vomiting over the yardarm.

Down on the decks a large party unwittingly mimicked the action of the queer stones, toiling around the capstan to raise the anchor. Soon the Windship was under way. Morning came on still and hot—it was Grianmis, the Sunmonth, and almost Meathensun. Clotted-cream clouds sailed past, level with the ship. Higher up, puffy pillows floated. Sometimes the ship would pass under a cloud archway or between two towers; sometimes she would sail into them, and then cold, clammy mist would fold in closely, blanketing out sunlight and bringing the world to an end at the taffrail. There seemed not a breath of wind, and all the power of the propellers was needed. As soon as the brig was under way, the two boys were sent to attend the prisoners and clean the fetid mess deck.

The first mate sauntered by.

“No talking to the prisoners,” he rasped, spying the cabin boy handing tankards to the men from the Tarv. His piggy eyes snapped wide as he seemed to notice the other lad for the first time.

“By my pizzle! What manner of beast is this? Poison, do not let it near the galley again. It is not only ugly, it is filthy.”

The lad looked down at himself. His clothes and arms were stiff with dried blood and gravy. It was the blood of the Tarv’s crew. Captain Chauvond and the others were in the same state, but Cleaver ignored them. He sneered, spat at the lad’s feet.

“You insult the eyes of Captain Winch with your ugliness and dirtiness. At least wash! There is a pail in your hand. Use it!”

The lad blinked. It was a pail of lukewarm spike, but he did not feel inclined to argue. Then he froze, the pail still in his hands. Formless dread gripped his heart like a black hand. He dared not turn his head but hunched himself imperceptibly farther into the thick, baggy folds of his tunic, as if he could curl himself up inside it and disappear. Grethet’s voice in the back of his head said:

Don’t let them see you. You are deformed. There’s no knowing what might happen. Do not let them see you.

“I said wash! Are yer deaf as well as dumb and ugly?”

Behind the lad’s back, the cabin boy coughed nervously. Captain Chauvond, straining against his chains, shouted his fury. They were all behind the lad’s back, the crew of the Tarv. Only Cleaver stood before him. The lad set down the pail, undid his belt. Slowly he began to raise the hem of his tunic over his head. Cleaver’s sudden intake of breath hissed in the silence like a flaming arrow plunged into water. The lad could not see his face through the brown fabric.

“Stop! Cover yourself!”

Obeying, the lad could not fathom the strange look in Cleaver’s eyes. It might have been shock or horror. It might have been the look of a wolf entering its den to find a rabbit waiting there. It might have been delight. He walked around the lad in a circle, viewing him from all sides as a buyer might view a slave in the market.

“Back straight! Shoulders back!” The first mate gave a bark of laughter. “Get topside, you!”

Avoiding the poorly aimed kick, the lad dropped the pail and fled up the companionway. Cleaver followed, crowing.

The air was pure up there—like pale blue wine, its crystal cup made to ring with bird-chorus from all sides. Majestic folds of land clothed in dark green plunged toward mist-filled hollows. The Windwitch sailed, straight and level, on a white thistledown ocean among island mountains, but the lad could not see their beauty now. He saw only scarred and bearded faces gathering around, staring dourly at him without an ounce of compassion. Searching frenziedly for Sianadh, he saw him standing by the taffrail, curiously idle. And what could one man do against twenty-nine, even if he had taken pity on a peculiar waif?

“What have we here, me buckos?” the first mate crowed triumphantly.

“We know not, Cleaver. What have we here?” The crew, unenthusiastically diverted from their soreheadedness, peered at the lad.

“I seen worse sights than that in the city,” said one.

“I seen worse sights than that when Fenris gets up for first watch,” said another.

There was a clear line of sight to Sianadh at the taffrail. He was taking something out of a knapsack and buttoning it in a back pocket of his belt. He wore a long leather tunic over his shirt.

“You ain’t seen this at first watch,” said Cleaver, gleefully savoring the suspense. “Haul up your tunic, dogface.”

All at once the past two days of terror and humiliation culminated. Hot, white hatred gushed through the lad. He struck Cleaver a blow across the face and darted through the wavering crowd to the side of the deck away from Sianadh, climbing up to perch on the rail and gripping a rope for balance.

Two hundred and fifty feet below, the rumpled forest swayed dizzily and white birds flew. Mauve whales of mountains swam on the horizon. It would be so good, when he flew. He would spread his wings and soar to greet those whales. But no—to breathe the air of such freedom brought breathlessness. Losing all could not be worth that fleeting moment and never would be.

The passing moments seemed to slacken speed. Cleaver opened his mouth in a long, enraged bellow, crimson snakes streaming from his nose. A man had climbed up on the opposite rail. Another laughed that this was good sport. The crowd, fleering and braying like farmyard animals, surged forward. The lad prepared to jump. At the same moment, something huge out of the sky smacked into him and knocked him overboard, and he was not flying. He was falling.

4

THE FOREST

Tree and Trickery

Pale rings of smoke come floating through the trees,

Clear voices thread like silver on the breeze,

And as I look towards the west I grieve,

For in my heart, I’m crying out to leave.

MADE BY LLEWELL, SONGMAKER OF AURALONDE

Like the waters of a narrow channel gushing out into a broad river, time slowed. Falling seemed to take a long while and evoked imperative, primeval responses; his limbs flailed in a vain quest for a hold on solidity; his blood surged in a dark tide, and the bellows of his lungs worked to suck in the air stolen by the vertical gale that tried, too, to steal flesh from bone.

The thing from out of the sky that had knocked him overboard was falling with him. It had somehow hooked itself around him and was bawling in his ear, but the sounds soared out of reach as soon as they left its mouth and were lost in the scream of air. The lad grabbed hold of it. It was solid. He kept his eyes tightly shut lest they should be blown from their sockets or lashed by the hair whipping around his face. He abandoned himself to utter terror.

A pressure began to evolve in answer to the pull of the ground—a gradual, inexorable push, strengthening. The deafening rush of air softened. Its thrust from below slackened off. The descent was slowing. The lad opened his eyes just in time to see a mass of foliage rushing up, the forest-sea, to drown in.

“Take hold! Take hold!”

And then there were cold leaf-needles and stinging twigs giving way, snapping and cracking, but the sky-divers were slowing yet and bouncing down through the higher branches. The lad clung to the red-haired man with his left hand and reached out with his right, grasped a bough, and felt it wrenched up from his hand, grasped another, let go of Sianadh, and dangled there, then fell sprawled on top of a third bough and hung on grimly to its corrugated rind.

Having lost ballast, Sianadh, cursing, was now lifting skyward, towed by his belt. Crashing up through arboreal galleries he shouted and thrashed; every spray or sprig he grabbed broke off, for he was too far from the trunk and too near the top to reach durable sprouts. Needles tumbled in a green rain.

The lad’s perch swayed gently, rocking him comfortingly. Gazing up, he saw the Ertishman come to a halt six feet above the topmost fronds of the tree. There was no sign of the pirate vessel.

“Spikes and spurs! I cannot reach the knapsack on my back. I stowed a rope in there, for all the good it will do me.”

Sianadh kicked like a drowning swimmer and drifted slightly to the right.

“This belt will cut me in half. I’m hung like a carcass on a doch butcher’s hook!”

A soft updraft, rich with the clean tang of resin, brought a traveling cloud of fluffy white seeds. It blew the struggling man yet farther away, out into an airy lacuna where no trees reached. From the bluest of skies, sunshine prickled in gold pins. Birds warbled and chirruped. Rocked in a perfumed bower, sheltered within bearded curtains of greenery far above the ground, the lad felt rinsed through by waves of relief and tranquillity, the legacy of aftershock, marred only by his concern for the man to whom he owed his freedom.

“Bide where ye be!” Sianadh’s voice called. The upper airs had pushed him toward the cupola of a towering fir. He waited until he was directly above it, then unfastened his buckle and dropped, hanging by one hand from the belt. His boots flicked foliage.

“Curse Cleaver and his sudden fad for cleanliness. I won this wormhide belt at Crowns-and-Anchors, in Luindorn, and I’ve never owned a better. The buckle’s a dragon, real silver—only one I’ve ever seen like it. If I could save it, I would, not to mention the moon-slag stowed in it, but—”

He interrupted himself with a mighty roar as he released his grip and hurtled down. After a few splintering crashes, silence came down like a steel weight. The purple belt, having bobbed higher, pirouetted away.

A volley of murmured oaths issued from the direction of the fir. Then, louder, “Climb down as far as you can go without setting foot on the ground. Danger lurks below. Wait for me.”

The mumblings resumed, emanating from farther and farther down.

The lad sighed, gave up his perch, and began to negotiate a way to descend, aware for the first time of the stinging scratches and bruises donated by his introduction to the spruce. His clothes hung in tatters. The tree whispered and swayed. Its boughs sprouted at arithmetical intervals from the stem—regularly spaced, if a little too far apart for comfort. The climber passed an empty bird’s nest. Farther down, a second nest cradled three young rosellas who watched him quietly with round, enigmatic lenses. Squirrels scampered.

So this was freedom.

But, being free of overseers and sharp tongues, should he now place himself within the power of this stranger who kept company with cutthroats and was likely one himself? The lad hesitated, looking down. The ground was too far away to be seen. What a giant of a tree! Surely it would reach a third of the height of the Tower. His hands were sticky—here and there resin had exuded from the bark and solidified into dripping chunks of honeyed amber. He began again to descend.

This Sianadh, whoever he was, had risked his life and deserted his ship, for obscure reasons. It would be well to reach the forest floor early and elude him, vanishing into the understory. But then, the understory was probably monopolized by creatures with their own ways of making things vanish. Be the man trustworthy or not, throwing in his lot with Sianadh seemed the safer plan, if he stayed wary. Perhaps this was not freedom after all. Perchance that vision was only a vanity.

Butter-yellow bundles of feathers darted after clouds of tiny flies. The presence of insects perhaps meant that he was nearing the ground. It was harder. here, to keep from falling; the lower boughs were so much fatter, impossible to grip, wider than the yardarms of the Windwitch. And twenty feet from the forest floor, the stair of horizontal boughs came to an end. Cascades of perfumed lilacs grew all around, flowering pale mauve, white, and dusky pink. The lad crawled along a great arm of the spruce until its tapered point dipped politely beneath his weight, lowering him until he was able to jump down into the lilac-sea, whereupon it sprang up out of reach and waved farewell. Beneath his feet, the ground sloped steeply and seemed to pendulate like the deck of a ship.

“Where be ye, chehrna?”

It was not difficult to judge the man’s direction from the sounds of snapping twigs as he pushed through long, fragrant clusters of starry mauve flowers.

“Lilacs blossoming in Summer,” he said worriedly when the lad found him, “’Tis not lorraly. Something of eldritch taints here. Are ye hale. chehrna?” The blue eyes squinted under bushy brows. His skin and clothing had not been gently treated by his descent, and he looked to be a wild ruffian just emerged from a tavern brawl. Remarkably, the knapsack remained intact.

The lad nodded. Sianadh took the rope from his knapsack and, using the skian, cut a length of it to use as a belt. The lad’s own pathetic bundle of belongings had been confiscated upon his discovery on the Tarv, and he had never seen it again.

“I took a good look at the lie of the land whilst I dangled above like a great gawping fish on a hook. We must strike out northeast, keeping the high ground to our left. Come, let us not linger here. Already we will have attracted too much attention.”

He stepped out decisively; the youth followed. Sweat dripped from beneath his taltry, irritating his scratched face.

There were no paths. Or, if there were, they were false—narrow and winding, backtracking, leading nowhere, petering out. Insects droned in the humidity. Green light filtered through multilayered leaf screens, shutting out the sky.

Once they had left the lilac thickets the undergrowth became sparser and the straight columns of trees crowded closer together, their tops soaring out of sight. A curious twilight reigned. Sianadh consulted a compass often and muttered to himself, his eyes darting from right to left. Bushes rattled. Sometimes small animal shapes started up nearby and fled, squeaking. Orange toadstools squatted. Tiny, bright-eyed birds squabbled among low shrubs, and a spiny echidna dug among the fibrous roots of an ancient mountain ash. Painted honeyeaters upside down in mistletoe said, “George-ee,” and, “Kow-kow-kow.”

But there were other sounds and other sights.

Presently, from away to the right, there came the sound of something running. Nothing could be seen, but the footsteps sounded like the feet of a deer. The sound came up and passed them, but still they could see nothing, only hear the sound of drumming hooves, fading.

“Never show fear,” Sianadh said in a low voice, “no matter what happens.”

Farther on, an ululation of hundreds of voices came out of the trees—some crying and the others laughing—but the travelers passed them by without looking to right or left, although their skin crawled. Later, a wooden tub rolled along ahead of them for a time. Sporadically, pinecones dropped from the upper tiers like scaly fruit, too green to have detached themselves yet.

Here and there tiny streamlets threaded their way downhill. Underfoot, cushion plants, damp mosses, and dwarf brackens jostled against clutters of fallen logs, which made walking difficult. After plodding for a long time, a despairing anger overcame the lad, that he must have been so stupid as to have donned iron boots that morning. He tried to think back to his last sip of water, but the world, already on a queer angle, inconsiderately turned upside down and fell on him.

“Flay me for a cova donni, what was I thinking of? Drink this.”

Supporting the youth’s head, the man brought a leather bottle to his lips. He drank and fell back, watching as the man took a swig.

“Rest now. Aye, I need the rest, too, and some tucker. But we have not much longer before what’s left of the light fades. I think we will not walk farther this day—I shall look for a place to spend the dark hours out of reach of night-stalkers.”

Gazing upward, he walked away and the forest quickly closed in to swallow his bulky form. Alone, the lad fought panic. He could still hear the faint, regular crashes that marked Sianadh’s progress.

The drone of insects seemed louder now and the trilling of birds shriller. So innocuous the forest seemed. Then, piercing through the natural babble, a strangely beautiful music; the dim skirl of distant bagpipes and the thud of drums rising from below the ground, filtering up like an invisible, audible mist. Indeed, its cadences evoked a land of mist; vaporous cobwebs through which tall and glittering ferns could be glimpsed; a land of mountain and cloud and of somber lakes lying close under dark skies. Nearer these sounds traveled, until the wild melody rose up all around, blocking out all else, it having halted right beneath the lad’s feet. As if carved from stone the listener stood, at a loss. His fingernails bit into his palms. The vibration of the drumbeats rattled the ground. Stately, the music moved away, evaporated.

Sianadh came racketing back, oblivious and triumphant.

“I have found just what I was looking for, chehrna—a tyrax’s nest, halfway up a weather beech. They are easy to climb, those weather beeches.”

A sobbing wail sounded, like a lament, far off. Almost human. The music’s spell dissipated.

“There is no time to lose. Come quick.”

The weather beech’s lower branches were within easy reach. Sianadh coiled his rope around one shoulder and swung up, then dropped an end of rope down. His companion tied it to his own belt and ascended, half-hoisted.

The tyrax’s nest was a huge, messy weaving of sticks, twigs, mud, and dead leaves, more than roomy enough for two people. It was lined with dry grasses; there was no sign of feathers.

“Their reek has gone,” said Sianadh, sniffing. “The big fliers have not occupied this for a long time.”

He took food from his knapsack, ship’s bread, cold mutton, some dried figs and raisins. They ate in silence as daylight drained through an unseen rent in the western sky and the oppressive heat faded to balminess. Great flocks of dinning birds came in to roost, bringing uproar to the forest, but none settled in the weather beech.

Sianadh’s hair gleamed copper in a last blink of light. He put away the few remnants of food and busied himself with changing the makeshift dressing on his wounded arm.

“Give me a hand with this, would ye, chehrna?” he said between clenched teeth that held one end of a strip of clean cloth. His companion obliged, tying on the fresh bandage carefully. The man stowed the bloodied cloth in the knapsack.

“’Twouldn’t do to drop that overboard here-abouts. The whiff of blood, even dried blood, attracts many things fell and foul. Here, wet this cloth and wash those scrapes. ’Tis not wise to leave wounds uncleaned in the wilderness.”

Sianadh tossed his companion a linen square and a hip-flask of some potent spirit that stung when applied. After tending his hurts, the lad lay back with his head on the woven rim, eager for sleep in the aftermath of terror and exhaustion.

“What be your name?” the man asked, settling himself comfortably. “Can ye tell me in the speech of signs, the handspeak?… No? Then it must be that your tongue has but lately been tied, for none could live long in company without parlance. My sister learned the handspeak when she was no more than ten Winters old and taught it to the rest of the family. She became mute on Littlesun Day in the year she turned sixteen. If ye like, I shall teach you something of this, maybe tomorrow, in daylight.”

Delight leaped in the lad. He nodded, smiling.

“But ye must have a name, chebrna, mute or not,” continued the man. He was answered with a shrug.

“Do ye mean that ye have forgotten it? That I cannot believe!”

The lad shook his head. He pointed to himself and shrugged again. The man stared suspiciously.

“Ye’re not having me on, I can tell that. And ye be a bright one as I took ye for, not some half-wit. And I do not think ye be scothy, that is mad, although I could be wrong. Well then. If ye’ve lost your name, yell be needing another, until ye find it. I cannot go on calling ye chehrna forever, and we may have a long road to go together. Have ye a preference in names?”

That word, chehrna. It seemed significant. Before that night on the Windwitch, the Ertishman had called him by a different kenning—what was it—something sarcastic? Mo reigh. Why had Sianadh changed his form of address and his manner? An irritant scrabbled at the lad’s thoughts. Something was very wrong—he had known it for a long time. He had known it in the Tower. He pushed the scrabbling thing away again.

“No? I have many spare names that folk have given me over the years, but none fit for the likes of ye. I usually save them to hurl at my enemies. Nay, I have it! When I saw them flitting in the forest they brought me to mind of something … an Ertish name it shall be for ye, until ye have your own one again, and a fair name and honorable it is. Imrhien. Shall ye be pleased with your new name, Imrhien?”

Sianadh cocked an interrogative eyebrow.

Imrhien. As a name it had a good ring to it, a sound of lightness and color. The lad showed his lack of objection to it with a smile. Sianadh nodded. “Imrhien,” he repeated, as though hanging the name on the walls of the world and stepping back to admire it. The lad began to drowse—content, named, promised, protected.

Sianadh cleared his throat loudly and spoke again, hesitatingly, fidgeting. The words he uttered thrust a lance of ice down the listener’s spine and jolted his eyes open.

“Ye need not fear,” said the man, his features barely visible in the dregs of twilight, “I shall not take advantage. I have never harmed so much as a hairstrand of a maid or woman yet, and nor do I intend to. Besides, I’ve a sister who’d box my ears if I did.”

The youth sat bolt upright.

“What—hey!” Sianadh lunged forward to seize the slender form scrambling out over the side of the twiggy platform. Hauling in the struggling figure, the man took one look at the dismay-filled eyes and cried, “Oghi ban Callanan, what have I said now?”

The figure pinned between his hands quivered, aghast. Sianadh must be crazy—mad in the worst possible way, seeming sane on the surface but dangerously unbalanced at the core and not to be accompanied a moment longer.

“Peace, chehrna, peace! Knock me down with a belaying pin, what have I done to deserve this? Think ye that I would allow ye to throw your life away down there after all the trouble ye’ve given me saving it?”

The newly named Imrhien became as still as a block of glint-flecked dominite. That which had been plucking and wearing away at the edges of thought was knocking more loudly now. It was bashing deafeningly, threatening to splinter the doors. For the moment there was no escape from the madman’s clutches. Perhaps, after a false lull, he would sleep, then the one called Imrhien could slide away quietly and the doors would remain intact.…

Sianadh’s grip loosened slightly. His brow knit.

“’Tis turnabout now, I see. This time ye think I am scothy.” He shook his head. “Ye have me foxed. I cannot fathom it. I do not know what is eating at ye, but I can guess what would be eating ye should ye go down to the ground at this hour. I mean ye no harm, I swear it. Can ye not see that, lass?”

His companion jerked violently away, almost eluding him. Sianadh’s grasp tightened again. His visage cleared, and a look of amazed enlightenment dawned on his blunt features.

“Ah. Can it be? I have heard tell of this. Mind-rinsing, they call it, or thought-training or some such. Can it be that ye yourself do not know? There was a tale in Finvarna of a baby whose parents were lost at sea, shipwrecked. He was given to his grandmother in a distant village, to be raised, but she had no fondness for boys and she got him up as a girl. He went about in skirts with his hair in ribbons. Not having any other way of knowing, he grew up believing what the cracked old biddy told him. The truth found him out at last, but I do not know what happened to him in after days.

“And ye with your forgetting—it makes sense … if ye had forgotten what a girl is like, ye wouldn’t know of your being one. Stranger things than that I have seen and heard, yet … it is strange. Someone has made ye believe what is not true. I heard it has best effect on folk in a weakened and sick condition. Ye, so wasted and gaunt, a slight shape not obvious beneath those rags—what have ye suffered? Starvation? Is that how ye were weakened? And aye, that answers another question. I heard it said by my sister that maids who starve lose the moon’s blessing; some call it the curse. My sister, the mute, she is a carlin. She knows these things. Someone has drawn ye into a lie, cheh—Imrhien, I do not know why. Mayhap to protect ye. It protected ye on the pirate vessel, indeed, for a time. Nay! Do not weep!”

But his protests were in vain. The doors had fallen in with a roar, and light had burst through. Great, silent sobs racked the girl’s body with uncontrollable spasms.

Oh yes, it was true. It was all plain, now, looking back. The songs told of such things. There was the maiden who could not be parted from her lover and had dressed herself as a soldier and gone to battle, to be by his side. And in truth, there had been a scullion in the Tower who had pined for a sailor-lad from a Windship, and would not take food, and had worn to a shadow and lost the moon’s blessing before she died. There was a young girl who had once been fair but had grown old knowing misuse at the hands of men, and her name was Grethet. And there was another maid who had forgotten and been tricked, to spare her just that.

To be a maiden, a lass, a wench. To be born in second place in the world’s favor—from what he—she had seen at the Tower, she knew. To be subjugated, idolized, preyed upon, used, and pampered. To be judged on appearance by all men, and in her case to be judged and found wanting, worthless, guilty; to be condemned. To have one’s essence dismissed and overlooked because of the vessel that contained it. To be forbidden the opportunity to ride sky. To be forbidden the rights of the heirs of Erith. That was to be a maiden, she understood.

But she did not weep for that. She did not weep for the sorrow of losing that one fragile status, that illusion. She wept for joy; for joy, because at last, here was a Truth.

A cat of a wind sprang up during the night, playing with the forest giants as if they were skeins of yarn. It battered them this way and snatched them that, now gentle, now suddenly cruel. The sturdy beams of the weather beech did not flail in panic, they merely rocked the tyrax’s nest: a mother lulling her babe.

It might have been the fading of the wind’s deep-throated choir or the easing of the branches’ protesting creaks or the cessation of the lullaby swaying that roused the transformed refugee. It might have been any of these things, but it was not. Uneasiness had pervaded his/her restless half-sleep. The erstwhile lad opened her/his eyes to see that Sianadh, who had volunteered to keep the first watch, was asleep, twitching and snoring intermittently. Some inner prompting caused her to remain motionless—only her eyes slid laterally, like oiled buttons. Sloughing the last shreds of drowsiness and redundant self-image, she became aware of the effect that had woken her—a high-pitched whine, thin and unbroken like a wire stretched taut against the darkness, an ill-boding humming, dreary and remorseless, that set the teeth on edge.

What it was she could not guess, that narrow, winged form flying very slowly, as if searching, into the rift in the leaves. Sidereal light illuminated the diaphanous membranes, devoid of color, the delicate antennae, the feminine waist and long, improbably spindly legs and arms that shone as if covered with tiny scales, the face with its bulging, faceted eyes, and the attenuated tongue, still searching. The whine’s volume increased. The creature could not turn her head much from side to side, and indeed, it seemed as though she hardly needed her eyes to hunt. The antennae flicked responsively. Elegant, fragile, she drifted closer.

A slight movement told the girl that her companion was awake. He, too, had seen it.

“Culicida,” he breathed. “They travel the path of living breath and target the warmth and sweat of flesh. Burrow into the leaves.”

Cold leaves abounded, shredded drifts of stained and twisted parchment in the deserted nest. In their depths, infinitesimal spores bedded, each mycelium a gangling hair, a frail, inexorable agent of decomposition. Into this mold the cuckoo’s nestlings dug themselves, until they were completely covered, not daring to breathe the fungous atmosphere. The monotonous song of the hunting Culicida came and hung right over them, piercing their ears, drilling into the marrow of their bones. A long time the creature hung there, sensing, while those she sought, with burning lungs, endured the scarlet flashes of oxygen depletion vivid against their eyelids.

The predator moved away, droning off into the night. Her would-be prey exploded from the heap of leaves and melancholy yeasts like corks from ale-jars, gulping fresh air. Panting like a hunted fox, the Ertishman scanned their surroundings.

“I’ll warrant she’s foretasted something she liked better. Ha! Here are dry leaves of pennyfoil and elder, which the tyrax used to line its bower, praise be! Those herbs and some others may drive away her kind. For the moment, we are out of peril. I never thought to see Culicidae here—their clans dwell mainly in Mirrinor, where they lay their egg-rafts among the bulrushes in the long lakes and the swamps. They can only fly short distances and that only in still airs. But winds can blow them hundreds of miles. You do not know of them … Imrhien? Mosquito-folk, they be, cousins to the insect swarms. Their prettiness belies their strength. They be not eldritch wights, aye, but they be deadly evil. Vectors, like the one we saw, be the worst among them. Their pricking tongues bring diseases and plagues the like of which have wiped out countless numbers of mortalkind, and they know that. Yet they have no conscience, none at all.” He fell silent for a time, craning his neck up at the nets of white stars framed by the trees.

“There, ye see? That is the Swan—the constellation of the Swan. Nine stars. Ye can see them at this time of year, here and at home in Finvarna.” He traced out the bird’s shape with a stubby finger, then began to pick leaves and a small caterpillar out of his mustache.

“Sleep now. I will watch.”

Shaking her head, his companion jabbed a thumb at her own chest. Sianadh shrugged.

“As ye wish, then, chehrna, if you be so set on it. But first let me teach ye to say that in handspeak.”

He pointed to himself, then held out his left hand, curled in a fist.

“This be the slegorn rune, the dragon, that hisses like a snake. With the right hand ye make the vahle rune, that is the valley, with the index and middle fingers extended. These fingers be the two eyes watching. Rest the heel of the right hand on the back of the downturned left hand. This be the sign for watching with the eyes, the dragon watching under the valley. Now ye have had your first lesson in the handspeak.”

He yawned and then fell asleep almost immediately.

She could not sleep. She walked on the edge of oblivion but could not have let herself drop into it, even had she tried. For danger she watched, all the while the salt of self-doubt rubbing on the raw graze of confusion. All the hidden embers of defiance had been doused now. How had she prevented herself from knowing that Truth? When Grethet had pulled tight the straps confining her chest and hissed warnings in her ear, how had she snapped spontaneously into apathetic acceptance?

Because, she told herself, Grethet was all and only. And you were new, bruised, needing guidance. The crone had seen too many wenches suffer. It may be supposed she herself had been violated. Ill-tempered and selfish, she was, but she saved you. She gulled the rest, too. Do not condemn her for gulling you.

But she condemned herself. To be gullible was to be adrift on the world’s sea at the mercy of tide and current.

Search your heart, fool. You knew in there, all along. Plunder your heart for the Truths therein and cleave to what you find.

An owl “boo-booked” across the scufflings of Summer night, and the quenched firedrake’s eyes kept watch under the valley.

The quicksilver notes of a magpie struck the bleaching air like a bell-hammer. Dawn’s alchemy transmuted the canopy’s edges from blue gray to green gold. Sianadh snorted awake.

“Time to go, chehrna. ’Tis not wise to stay in one place for too long.”

They climbed down the whispering weather beech. Not far away, a freshet sprang from sphagnum mosses. There they drank and bathed discreetly, tending their various hurts. The Ertishman rummaged in his pack and produced food.

“Pah! This mutton’s rotten. The heat has sent it off. I took it but yesterday morning from the ship’s galley, even before Poison had tampered with it—this other provender, the dry stuff, I have had stowed in readiness since before I boarded the Witch. No matter, there be plenty.”

After eating, Sianadh brought out a battered compass.

“Needle’s swinging all over the place. These things be never reliable when eldritch creatures be close by. Never mind, I can find the way. We continue to follow the line of this ridge. Wights and wild beasts may be about, but we both wear tilhals, and what’s better, I have the skian. I never miss when I throw a knife. Still, ’twere prudent to go quietlike.”

He bounded ahead like a firecracker, twigs snapping and bending before his broad shoulders and flailing back in the face of his follower. After they had walked for a time, a white hare started up and ran beside them. When it loped ahead they saw a woman in white moving before them among the trees, but when they came up to her she was gone, having been no true woman.

“Doch shape-shifters,” grumbled Sianadh. “Not a mortal man or woman for miles about, yet with these shifters I feel crowded!”

Here, the forest canopy was thinner and the travelers could look out through the parallel stripes of tree-boles, through a tapestry of nodding foliage and long cascades of leaves, a green-gold cochineal flickering embroidery; across steep-walled valleys to where layer upon layer of ridges marched into the distance in ever-deepening shades of blue. The long folds of the mountains’ mantles rolled against a sky scratched by the wind’s fingernails—a blue sky paling to silver at the horizon.

It was hard going, but in the middle of the morning they came upon a faint trail of sorts, leading in the right direction. Now that they could proceed more easily, Sianadh began to talk.

“And now ye most likely want to ask me some questions. Why did I jump overboard with ye, and where are we going? Truth be known, I b’ain’t no pirate. I be a trader, see, a traveler and a trader. I have turned my hand to many things—crewed on merchant ships, sold wares in city stalls, labored in the fields and byres—but I be my own man. There’s some as envied me my successes, some with power who brought it against me. I have been hounded and harried across most countries for one thing or another, never my fault. I’ve had a wife. Two children I have in Finvarna, but I cannot go back there now. They be grown and flown anyhow, older than I reckon ye to be.

“I never lifted steel against your shipmates, believe me or not, as ye will. I b’ain’t never been a pirate, never killed a man, though I could do it easy, and I have fought enough fights and beat them all within an inch of their lives. See, chehrna … Imrhien, there was this guardhouse, and I was inside it. Locked me up they did, the black-hearted skeerdas, and I was in there with a man who was dying. I did what I could to ease him. I be not a heartless man. Gave him part of my water ration and covered him with my jacket … he gave me this here map before he faded.”

From an inner pocket he drew out the crumpled parchment he had been looking at on the mess deck of the Windwitch.

“Do not laugh.” He smoothed it out. “In tales, pirates always have these. ’Tis a map to find buried treasure. He said it was the location of a sildron mine.” He looked sideways at her, and she merely nodded.

“Funny thing about ye, Imrhien. Ye do not seem surprised by that. Most folks would have stopped in their tracks and swooned. A sildron mine! Do ye ken what untold wealth would be buried there? A man could be a King. A man could be many Kings.”

She repeated the nod. He refolded the parchment and replaced it meticulously.

“A long-abandoned, sealed, and forgotten mine, he said, still loaded with ore. Loded! Ha ha! Anyhow, I suppose the stuff must be layered with andalum or else stashed high in a mountainside. Else it would not be a mine at all but a doch great chunk of ore blundering about the sky. I wanted to search for it alone—there are few who can be trusted these days, and those who can are too precious to be risked on a venture that might prove worthless. So I paid the last of me savings to a wizard to put extra wards of protection on my tilhal so that I could go alone. How to reach it was a riddle, for it was stuck in the wildness of these inaccessible Lofties.

“There be a river running out of these parts to Gilvaris Tarv, but I could not get aboard a boat, could not afford passage, and besides, there be not one river-boat captain trapping in and out of Tarv I would trust as far as he could toss me, which be not an inch. Even if I got a boat, the map was not clear on which tributary to follow—there be many unnamed and unmapped streams in those parts.

“So I found out through means too twisted and tangled to describe that the outlaw Winch planned for to sail these remote areas in the Summer, and by further devious means I got aboard as crew. I sailed with ’em and put up with ’em and their foul methods, all the while waiting until the ship should come over the right spot. A few words in the captain’s shell-like ear about the best course to take did not go astray, I might add. We were almost there, lass, almost there, when ye were discovered. I had some king’s-biscuit, that is, sildron—the stuff has many names—which I had managed to get hold of. A small piece. I had planned to go overboard in the night, quietlike, but when I saw ye trapped by the rail I just upped on the mainsheet and swung over like a capuchin on a vine. Chariots o’ fire! Ye clawed me like a gray malkin as we fell! So here we be, a day or two’s journey from the mine. I can see ye be brimming with asks. Let me teach ye the hand-signs what, why, how, who, when, and where. Also yes and no for good measure.”

He taught her. She had to be shown only once. She signed, <<Why me?>>

“Why do I bring ye? Ye can help me carry the treasure, of course, strawgirl!” He chuckled.

A bolt of excitement went through her—not because of this supposed wealth waiting around the corner, but because she had spoken with her hands and made herself understood! The greater treasure apparently lay already in her hands, waiting to be brought to light.

<<How? How?>> she signed urgently, flapping hands.

“How what? How shall we find it, carry it?… No? Peace, chehrna, I cannot read your thoughts. How to handspeak? Aye. I will show ye more as we go along. Ye learn quick. Wait—where has our talk taken us?”

He halted. The trail had led them under ancient trees clasping oddly dark places between them, shuffling with their ropy roots in the mosses. Beneath, silent rainpools lay in the wide angles of their toes. Their boughs spread wide, rich with scalloped leaves. Young saplings had sprung from the trunks of felled trees, and the coppice floor was misted with hooded flowers, blue as sapphires.

“A bluebell wood! Imrhien, we must away from here at once!”

Leaving the path, he plunged down the slope to the left, the trees hemming them in. Seeing the Ertishman begin to run, the girl did likewise, seized by unreasoning panic. Roots tripped them up; branches billowed around their ears.

Suddenly Sianadh’s boots left the ground. His eyes bulged. An intermittent snorting left his mouth, followed by no sound at all. His tongue lolled out, purple, like the protruding head of some internal worm.

A branch of holly had whipped around his neck, and he was being hanged. As he dangled, strangling, hacking at the branch with his skian, another prickly bough swung lazily out at the girl’s neck; she ducked under it and danced away. Sianadh’s blade sliced through. He fell heavily to the ground. The girl seized the skian from his limp hand and slashed at the wicked branches. Thorny leaves sewed her skin with fine red embroideries. With a shuddering gasp, the Ertishman heaved himself up and rolled out of reach of the holly-tree.

Laughter rose on one side, then another. Queer voices called out mockingly in words that could not be understood. Unseen things came on behind the travelers on silent feet, only their squalling and guffaws indicating their proximity. Sianadh staggered to his feet and stumbled on, clearing a path for his companion, but as fast as they sped, they could not shake off these pursuers. At last the Ertishman balked before a thicket of interlocking thorns. He flung the knapsack into the girl’s arms and snatched the skian out of her hand.

“Imrhien, delve out the salt—’tis in a wooden box. And the bells, Imrhien—rattle them!”

She obeyed. The brace of bells jingled, a jarring sound here. Other sounds ceased.

“Ahoy!” Sianadh bellowed hoarsely, his flaming auburn mane plastered to his sweating brow. “We have cold iron. And salt! Hypericum, salt, and bread, iron cold and berries red, by the power of rowan-wood—harm us, and we’ll burn ye good! A plague on ye skeerdas. If ye come near us, we will make ye suffer!”

With a jerk of his head he indicated that his companion should follow him. Warily they walked along the edge of the thorn thicket, she ringing the festive-sounding bells, he with a clump of salt in one hand, the dagger in the other. He was whistling. Something small and gnarled hooted, grabbing for his boot—he dashed salt on it, and it fled, shrieking. Sudden spears of hoots and howls stabbed out from every direction. Once, she thought she glimpsed a grinning face, a grotesque caricature of humanity.

She clutched the heavy knapsack, hoping the charms would prove ward enough. The prickly bushes thinned and dwindled on one hand, the oaks on the other. After what seemed a year, the wights’ quarry burst out from the coppice’s precincts to find themselves amid stands of beech. The sounds of pursuit could no longer be heard. Stilling the bells, the girl cocked her head and stood listening. Silence ruled, heavy and thick as paste.

“Make haste,” Sianadh said grimly. Like the juice of ripe plums, blood ran from deep scratches on his neck and arms. He sheathed the skian and shouldered the knapsack, striding forward with a determined look. As they marched beneath the beeches, birds began again their arias.

When a safe distance stretched between themselves and the oaks, Sianadh stopped.

“Time to rest.” Soberly he began to shrug off his burden. “The Barren Holly,” he said. “A murderous tree. Yet when hollies grow in pairs they bring good luck! What were the wights that hunted us, I wonder? Not oakmen—they be guardians of wild animals. I haven’t killed any beasts lately. Spriggans, maybe. Ach, it matters not. Imrhien, we must both watch out for fey places.”

<<What? Which? How?>> Her hands, speaking.

Exasperatedly he hurled the pack to the ground.

“Eldritch sites! Obban tesh, girl. Fey places, I said. What be the matter with ye? Do ye do this to harass me, or do ye not know anything?”

<<No!>> The pinch-beak hand-sign and the shake of the head together, vehemently, repeatedly.

He grasped her by the shoulders. She returned his stare unfailingly.

“What mean ye?”

His puzzled gaze flicked over the ruined face, trying to read something from its lumpish landscape.

“No? Ye do not know anything? Ye be new to Eldaraigne, then, a foreigner?”

<<Yes, no, yes, no.>> Hands fluttering. Like a bird in a cage, the meaning could not free itself.

“Obban tesh,” he exclaimed again. “I wish to the Stars that ye could parley the handspeak. It is impossible that nobody taught ye signing—how did ye get along? Ye learn so quicklike, how could ye have … forgotten?”

<<Yes. Yes, yes, and yes.>>

His eyes widened in realization. He released her.

“Forgotten, eh? Forgotten, is it? Ceileinh’s spear!” He groaned, sat down, covered his face with his bloody hands. “No voice, no doch memory. I have saddled myself with a right mor scathach here.” He continued to curse, softly, in Ertish.

She stood watching him. Here was her rescuer—large, grimy, and bedraggled, his left boot torn. Many things he had risked—his life, a treasure—many things he had given: freedom of sorts, a name, language. And somehow she had let him down. Sinking to her knees, she held out her hands, palms up. She waited, motionless. Eventually he raised his shaggy head and sighed.

“No, it is this.” He made a fist, the thumb sticking out, and rubbed his hand over his heart in a circular motion, “Atka, the thorn, pierces the heart with sorrow. Meaning, ye be sorry. And,” he added feelingly, “if ye be sorry, how d’ye think I feel?”

Later he said, “There be benefits in your loss. Many try to lose it at the bottom of a winecup or by other means. Memory be the mother of grief.”

They drank some water, there under the pale green-haired dancers of beeches, and made a frugal repast supplemented with creamy, frill-petticoated fungi discovered by Sianadh. He examined his boot, thanking the hand of fate that the thing that had clutched him had not pierced his skin with some fungoid poison. He then reminisced about the way his grandmother used to cook black-ear fungus, smothered in lard with a pinch of salt and pepper, as a sauce over a juicy slab of tripe and bacon with a rind of fat this thick. And there were the fried onions, the crispy chicken’s feet, the sheep’s eyeballs in batter, the gravy.…

“She be still living, my grandmother. A century old. Goes to watch the chariot races twice a month. Now if I am not mistaken, I believe we have somewhat lost our way by courtesy of those cursed spriggans or whatever they were.”

He consulted his map, squinted up to where the leaves hid any suggestion of the sun’s location, and after much muttering and casting about decided on a direction and set off again.

For the remainder of the day they tramped upward through open forest, crossing steep, fern-fringed gullies stitched with water-threads, ascending rocky inclines. The lands of Erith had always been sparsely peopled and this was one of many places as yet never trod by mortal feet. Treetops on the opposite slopes caught flecks of sunlight here and there. A breeze sprang up. When it got caught in the blowing hair of the trees, it roared like the ocean. Once, they saw smoke coming out of the ground—doubtless an eldritch phenomenon.

In wary murmurs Sianadh informed the girl about fey places—bluebell woods, mushroom rings, especially under moonlight, rings of standing stones, mushroom-circuses known as “gallitraps” and the grassy circles folk called “Faêran Dances”; the turf-covered hills known as raths or knowes or sitheans; oak woods, wells, especially those overhung by trees; rings of hawthorn and certain trees such as holly, elder, willow, apple, birch, hazel, and ash; bushes of broom and thorn.

“Eldritch wights, both seelie and otherwise, gather in these places.”

He taught her more of the handspeak. “For my own safety,” he said.

They had climbed high among the mountains, leaving the forest-lands below. Trees were sparse here and stunted by lofty winds. As evening drew in, without warning the weather turned. A gray, chill wind sharpened itself on the rocks, and the travelers tied their taltries on tightly to keep it from snipping at their ears.

“Unseasonable weather,” Sianadh grumbled suspiciously.

The ground steadily became treacherous. Quagmires and bogs appeared suddenly in hollow places between the rocks. Darkness made it impossible to see these traps until the travelers were almost upon them.

“This country be not safe for those what are not familiar with the territory,” muttered the Ertishman. “If I was not an outdoorsman, I’d be afraid of losing our way or perishing in the cold. Best look for somewhere to shelter until the morning.”

The night became bitter, but all that they could find was a rock to crawl under—until they spied a faint light in the distance. Cautiously they moved toward it and found, much to their joy, a small hut such as foresters used when traveling. A fire was burning brightly inside, with a large gray stone on each side of it.

“Flay me! A woodmen’s hut of all things!” Sianadh said enthusiastically. “If this be what it seems, we shall be spared the discomfort and peril of a night in the cold. The axemen build these huts from rowan-wood. Not a wight will go near them.” Yet he examined the place warily before he set foot inside.

“Nobody’s here, but surely the bloke what made this fire cannot begrudge us a little warmth. Come in, chehrna. We’ll toast ourselves while we wait for him to return.”

Trusting her mentor’s good judgment, the girl sat beside him on the stone to the right of the fire to warm herself. Both travelers rubbed their chilled arms, stamped their feet, and kept their taltries tied on. In front of their feet was a pile of kindling, and on the other side of the fire lay two big logs. Sianadh added a little of the kindling to the fire, and as the warmth began to creep into their bones they became drowsy, sitting there on the stone. They woke with a start when the door burst open and a strange figure came stamping into the room. He was a swart dwarf, no higher than the travelers’ knees, but broad and strong. A coat of lambskin covered his back, and he wore breeches and shoes of moleskin. Upon his head was a hat fashioned from ferns and peat moss, adorned with the plume of a ptarmigan.

“A duergar!” Sianadh hissed as the door slammed shut noisily. The Ertishman spoke not another word, and silence clamped down like a metal claw. The manifestation glowered at the visitors but did not speak, either, and sat himself down on the other stone.

The girl knew that duergars were of the race of black dwarves. They hated Men. In the Tower, stories of their bitter cruelties had been rife. She trembled but was determined to brave it out alongside Sianadh. To show fear or run would be to invite attack—the Ertishman had assured her that was one of the rules with wights.

So there they sat, staring at one another. After a time the flames began to die and an unbearable chill came back into the room, so, greatly daring, Sianadh leaned over and put the last of the kindling on the fire. Then the duergar, in his turn, bent and picked up one of the two huge logs lying to the left of the fire. It was twice as long as the dwarf was high and thicker than his waist, but he broke it over his knee as if it had been a twig and cast it on the flames. The duergar looked at the man scornfully and tilted his head with a sneer as if to challenge him to do the same with the other log. Sianadh steadily returned the look but did not budge—the girl knew that he suspected some trick. The fire flared up once more and gave out great heat for a while, but again it began to dwindle. The duergar’s expression mocked the Ertishman, inviting him to pick up the last log, but Sianadh would not be tempted, even when the glowing fire ebbed so low that the bones of the two mortals felt turned to ice and darkness pressed in. So they sat on in silence, like three statues in the gloom.

At last came the first vague light of dawn and the far-off warble of a magpie’s salute to sunrise. At this sound the duergar vanished, and so did the hut and the fire. The travelers were left sitting on the stone, but first light showed that the stone was in fact perched at the top of a precipitous crag. On their left was a deep ravine—if Sianadh had taken up the duergar’s challenge and leaned over to pick up the last log, he would have tumbled over the cliff and ended up a heap of broken bones at the bottom.

“As soon as that uraguhne walked into the place I kenned we were in no ordinary hut but some conjuration of glamour,” the Ertishman muttered. “No wight save the very greatest can pass over a true threshold uninvited.”

They hastened from that place as soon as there was enough light to show their way. After turning downhill, they walked throughout the day making little conversation, tired and uneasy, jumping at every sudden sound. On the lower slopes the trees began again to crowd closely. As they descended from the heights, the chill of duergar country gave way to Summer’s balm once more, and the travelers found themselves back in the forest.

Toward evening the trees thinned. A light appeared, moving about over the treetops. Other lights materialized among the branches. The forest was full of twitterings and mutterings.

The hair stood up on the girl’s head. Dread seized her. Something walked beside her, but it was not to be seen. She dared not turn her head to look; her pupils sidled, looking through an emptiness to the trees on the other side. After a time she and Sianadh forded a little stream; then the fear left her, along with the sense of a nearby presence.

“Me granny used to say, ‘Put fear aside, for only then will ye see your way clearly,’” Sianadh murmured.

The lights vanished, the ground leveled out, and a clearing opened out between the trees ahead. Here, forest giants had been felled years ago and taken away but new growth had begun and proliferated. In the center stood a rusting four-legged tower of iron struts and girders, stretching up to the sky, so tall that it overtopped the trees by far.

“An abandoned Interchange Turret.” Sianadh grinned in relief, wiping his sweaty forehead. “Fortune has shown favor. Plenty of iron here. No duergars.”

Then his face fell.

“Although,” he added, “no Interchange Turret be marked on this here map.”

He brightened again.

“’Tis a crudely drawn thing and smudged somewhat. Mayhap this mast was left out in error or blotted out by the greasy stains on it. It don’t make no matter. We shall roost up on its heights this night.”

The wooden top half of the Interchange Turret was missing, having been dismantled for the retrieval of the sildron cunningly embedded and concealed in the upper timbers. Mooring Masts and Interchange Turrets had to reach so high that an impracticably wide-spreading base would have been necessary to support the weight, were they entirely made from iron. Sildron lifted the weight off the base and was redeemed by the builders when the operation of the mast was no longer necessary. Massive lengths of timber lay at the tower’s foot where they had crashed, some leaning against the structure. Sianadh tied one end of his rope around a stone and flung it high among the girders. It fell back. He tried again, and this time it hooked around. The weighted end came down, pulling the rope behind it as Sianadh paid it out. Triumphant, he made it fast.

“Now, Imrhien, ye tie this to your belt, hold this part in both hands, and use it to help ye walk up these here slanting supports to the body of the mast. When you reach them struts where the rope is looped around, make yerself secure and throw the rope’s end down to me.”

The ascent was not easy, particularly since a hot, gusting wind had arisen, punching through the trees to shove the climbers off balance.

The mast’s ribs sloughed eroded scales of rust in their hands. The wind and the tremor of their climbing caused orange decay to rain in their hair, their eyes, the taltries hanging from their shoulders.

A rotting encrustation gave way beneath the girl’s boot; she slipped, was brought up by Sianadh’s hand on her arm with an iron grip of its own.

“Hold on there, chehrna. This be harder to climb than a tree, but safer when we get there!”

A ladder began halfway up the remains of the mast, leading the climbers to a wooden platform higher up. It was partly sheltered by jagged pylons. Here they rested, shaking oxidized particles from their hair. The sky flared above from horizon to horizon, overcast and darkling.

“Wind’s got up again.” Sianadh took a swig from the leather bottle, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Could be rain coming, I reckon.” Then a thought struck him. “If it be thunder and lightning, we must get down from here quicklike, Imrhien. I have seen these masts attract sky-bolts.”

Night came on swiftly. The wind pushed and shoved. Below, the sea of foliage tossed this way and that, churning, boiling. They roped themselves to the platform and ate some dried fruit. It was impossible to sleep or converse with the wild airs humming and haunting through the rusty cavities of the mast.

There was no thunder, but the wind kept up all night. Near dawn it ceased, and in the stillness the sky lowered its soft gray blanket down onto the top of the mast and a warm, drizzling rain began. Their taltries, pulled over their heads, were scant protection. Soon the travelers were wet through. Rust particles worked their way under clothing, abrading skin. Grumbling and cursing, the Ertishman led the way down as soon as there was light enough to see by, and they continued their journey under the frondescence of the mountain forests.

Water chuckled in rivulets, rolled its glass beads along glossy leaves, strung necklaces on spiderwebs and silver chains down from the drooping ends of branches, pattered rhythmically on little feet, whispered soothingly in soft voices. In the rain, the verdure of the forest appeared richer, deeper, stronger, leaping out vividly. Through the drizzle, Imrhien fancied she heard, high and far off, a quaint little piping ditty:

I bring quenching and drenching,

I bring peace and increase,

Filling the veins that net the hills

The silver blood of everything,

I bring. I sing.

Despite the discomfort, Imrhien felt happy and refreshed. Rain was the lifeblood of Aia, after all, as the tides were the world’s pulse. Water was the life-giver, the welcome assuager of terrible, burning thirst. She listened to the rain’s music, splashing along in her wet boots.

A brown-skinned figure about three feet high started up out of the undergrowth and went on ahead of them for a few score paces before disappearing. Later, they saw a little wizened man coming toward them, growing bigger as he went. By the time he passed them he looked like a giant; then he reached a rock and shrank down into it, and there was nothing left of him.

“’Tis all glamour,” Sianadh muttered in her ear, “illusion.”

Farther on, the girl saw a black dog about the size of a calf, standing in the shadows of some blackthorns and watching them go by. His eyes seemed huge and terribly bright. The travelers, grim-faced, strove to show no fear—they did not alter their course, passing closely by the thing. It made no move to attack them or follow.

There were no shadows, no signs of the sun’s progress. Sianadh did not bring out the map for fear the weather might further damage it. After several hours he stopped and threw down the waterlogged knapsack.

“No use going on until I can get a direction. We might be walking in circles. We shall start a fire and dry out, at least.”

By now the rain had diminished. Squirrels alighting on boughs tipped sudden wet avalanches on the travelers’ heads as they searched for kindling.

Sianadh gave a shout.

“What luck! A hefty heap of sticks, nice and dry in the hollow of this here fallen log.” He trussed up the pile with a piece of rope and heaved it onto his back, lugging it around while he searched for some dry moss to start the first flame. His companion had gathered a bundle of wetter twigs under one arm.

“Obban tesh,” groaned the man, “but these here sticks be getting heavy. My back is breaking.” Stooping, he staggered over to where the knapsack lay. “We shall have to make the fire here. I can carry this no longer. Aagh! It weighs like a stone!” He straightened, letting the burden slide from his back.

“Doch!” he shouted suddenly. The bundle of sticks, to his surprise, had risen up and started to shuffle away. Sianadh made a grab for it, but it neatly avoided him and shuffled farther.

“Get around the other side of it, Imrhien. Round it up!”

The two of them chased the dodging bundle around the trees until finally it vanished right before their eyes with a shout and a laugh.

“Cursed tricksy wights!” shouted the man into the spaces between the trees. “A murrain on ye!” There was no reply. He rubbed his aching back. “What be ye a-smirking at?” He glared at the girl.

They lit their smoky little fire with the help of Sianadh’s tinderbox. The rain stopped. Sunlight filtered down and made shadows. Their clothes steamed. Sianadh mixed water with grains and raisins in a small pan and cooked porridge, after which he seemed to be in better spirits and waxed informative.

“Eldritch wights be divided into two kinds—seelie and unseelie. Nay, I should say three kinds, for those that ye might call tricksy are partway between and might be benevolent or nasty, depending on many particulars. Seelie things at best be helpful, at worst be jokers, but the evil things of unseelie b’ain’t capable of affection. They hate mortals. There be nowt anyone can do to make unseelie wights love mortalkind.

“Seelie wights must be treated with care, else they can turn against us, too. Both kinds be often dangerous and deceptive, sometimes helpful, but they have their rules that they must abide by. If ye know these rules, it helps ye survive. Like, if ye see an unseelie one and ye don’t show fear, ye get a degree of immunity. If ye meet their gaze, they get power over ye, but with some of them, like trows, as long as ye keep looking at them without meeting their eyes they cannot vanish. Or if ye tell it your true name, ye’re instantly in its power. It be an unwritten law never to speak the true name of a man aloud in eldritch places—unless he be a foe!

“But if ye can find out a wight’s name, seelie, tricksy, or otherwise, ye can have some governance over it. They have other rules, too, strange ones that betimes ye can only guess at. But one thing’s for certain—they never lie. Aye, they never can tell an outright, spoken untruth of words—’tis not possible for any of them. Mind, but they be not above equivocating and may twist the truth, mislead, and deceive in all other ways if they can, with their shape-shifting and false sounds and twisted meanings. They use the glamour, too, which in Finvarna we call the pishogue, but it be only an illusion, not true shape-shifting.”

He paused for breath, then plunged on loquaciously. Words were wine to him, and here was a steady two-eared jug in which to pour them.

“There be trooping wights with their green coats and solitaries with their red. There be wild ones and domestic. Some be small, some be large, and others be shape-shifters. They dwell on the land and under it, in the sea and in fresh water. Some be nocturnal, and be blasted by the light of the sun, but others not.

“Some wights be clever, some be stupid, same as men. Stupid ones, ye can trick. ’Tis even possible to catch the smaller ones as long as ye keep your eye on them without blinking and never loosen your grip, rough or smooth. They have to give ye a wish, then, or tell ye where their gold is hid. The lesser of the unseelie kind can be warded off with salt and charms and such. Or, if ye have skill with words and rhyming, like the bards, ye can beat them by getting in the Last Word. They do not love the sound of bells, although some say that seelie wights used to ride with the Fair Folk who had bells on their bridles. Truly, as the old rhymes say:

Hypericum, salt, and bread

Iron cold and berries red.

Self-bored stone and daisy bright,

Save me from unseelie wight.

Red verbena, amber, bell,

Turned-out raiment, ash as well,

Whistle-tunes and rowan-tree,

Running water, succor me.

Rooster with your cock-a-doo,

Banish wights and darkness, too.

“But the greater of the evil wights cannot be put off with simple talismans and jingle-bells. Nay, that needs a greater gramarye, which is why we have wizards. But even wizards would hold small sway against such as the Unseelie Attriod.”

The Ertishman finished his porridge.

“Be not fashed—we shall find our way through these wild places. Why, not even a stray sod can lose me. What? You have not heard of the Foidin Seachrain? Ha! Those who step on one of those eldritch turves lose their way, even if they have traveled that very path a hundred times before. But a canny man can protect himself against it by whistling. A woman, too,” he added as an afterthought.

The girl clutched at Sianadh’s sleeve, pointing urgently up to where the sky showed through the leaves. A horse and rider galloped overhead and were gone in an instant.

“Stormrider! Well, I’ll be flayed for boots. I guess that was an outrider or scout come looking for the missing merchant ship that never reached her dock at Gilvaris Tarv. The main Stormrider runs do not pass over these remote places … unless we have been puck-ledden farther astray from our course than I reckoned. Aye, lass, we are a little off course—not lost—ye will never be lost with Sianadh the Bear, chehrna. I have my bearings now, and northeast we must go.”

If his companion harbored misgivings, she did not show it.

They stamped out the fire, despite their clothes being still damp, and went on their way, putting fatigue aside, straining all their senses to detect approaching danger. Presently Imrhien heard distant music ahead. Sianadh cocked his head and listened.

“Harpstring trees—a rare find. They be not perilous in themselves.” The music became louder as they neared the groves of harpstrings—melodious notes of liquid gold, as of a million tuneful harps plucked by gentle fingers.

Rows of thin rootlets or tendrils grew down from each leafy branch to fasten themselves to the branch directly beneath. Glittering insects flew among these stretched cords, alighting momentarily, to leap off, leaving the string twanging. The man ran his fingers along a set of filaments, causing a cascade of notes like bubbles, a flurry of sequined insects.

“Pretty, ain’t it. I always wanted to play a musical instrument.”

<<Look!>> signed the girl. Sianadh followed her gaze. The trees a little farther away gave on to a path—not a faint trail like that which had led to the oak coppice, but a fair, broad way paved with stone. The travelers approached it with caution. Around them the air rang, tinkled, thrummed.

Sianadh’s brow furrowed in thought.

“If this means what I suppose, then we be on the right track. Aye. We shall follow this road. This b’ain’t made by no wightish paws, though they may likely tread it.”

Together they stepped out along the path.

It took them higher and higher up the slope but remained smooth and unbroken. No weeds poked their fingers up through the seamless joins in the pavement. Late primroses bloomed by the wayside. The lilting harpstrings dropped behind, and larches crowded close. It began to get dark, oppressively gloomy.

As the travelers passed a big tree, slowly the hairs rose on the girl’s neck. Presently a man and a woman—or what seemed to be a man and a woman—came out and began to accompany them. The strangers did not speak but walked along on each side of them, she dressed in a gown of gray and wearing a filmy white veil over her head, he garbed also in the color of stones. The cold sweat of horror prickled the girl, but she followed the Ertishman’s example and continued to march on as if nothing had happened. The tense line of his shoulders showed the strain. From the corner of her eye, the girl saw that the woman’s face was comely, but her ears were long and pointed like those of a horse. The man was ugly, his hindquarters sprouting a cow’s tail that he switched back and forth as though swatting flies. Eventually the woman-simulacrum went away, and the man-thing seemed to go, too, but his footsteps remained with the travelers until they crossed a footbridge over a stream.

Sianadh sighed like a deflated bellows. He fingered the faintly obscene amber tilhal at his neck. “Praise be to Ceileinh’s blue eyes—the protection holds. This trinket may well have been worth the wizard’s price. Still, the sooner we be out of here the better.”

The shadows lengthened. The path topped a low rise, and they found themselves looking out over a shallow valley. The girl stared, amazed.

“Flaming chariots!” exclaimed Sianadh. “’Tis that old city of the map, after all!”

Rising up on the valley’s other wall, tier upon tier, were the crumbling ruins of a once great citadel built of pale stone. The travelers followed the path down to a bridge over a willow-lined stream, crossed it, and zigzagged their way up to the outlying buildings and into the city.

Broken towers and caved-in roofs caught the last rays of afternoon sun. Windows stared, sightless, at dry fountains filled with soil and weeds. Ivy-covered walls surrounded vacant courts and overgrown gardens. Mossy facades peeled, overlooking empty streets whose choked gutters betokened ages of neglect. The intruders walked delicately, as if the city slept and they feared to wake it.

“We must find a stronghold in which to spend the night,” whispered the Ertishman, looking over his shoulder, “somewhere with a roof in case it rains again.”

Even the small sound of their boots on the cobbles seemed to bounce too loudly off disintegrating architecture as they tramped the streets. Every abandoned mansion, every collapsed bothy and gaping hall, seemed to be roofless, dank, still puddled with the morning’s rain.

“There be no choice,” Sianadh said reluctantly. “We shall have to retrace our steps. Near where we came in, not far from that bridge, I saw a building with a roof, beside a pond. It looked to be an old mill. ’Twere too near the stream for my liking, right on it, in fact.” He shrugged. “Anyhow, ye need not fear with me by your side.”

His hand strayed again to the amber tilhal.

Chipped gargoyles watched the travelers return through the echoing streets, now dim in the graying light. The structure beside the green glass pond turned out to be an old mill indeed; the great wheel in the race below the dam had mortified countless years ago. Slime dripped from its flanges. The front door of the mill had long since rotted to dust. Sianadh looked up at a weathered inscription over the gaping doorway.

“Faerwyrd, the key; idrel, the sword; nente, the stitch; ciedre, the moon …” Painstakingly he deciphered the runes. “The thorn, atka; the dragon, slegorn; F, I, N—Fincastle’s Mill. Well then, Fincastle must needs welcome visitors this night.”

Inside, the mill was cool but dry. There were several chambers, but the travelers settled on a small one that boasted a large stone table in the center, as well as a fireplace. Sianadh gave a shout of laughter when he saw this, and it was not long before they had gathered enough wood from a nearby garden, rampantly overgrown—which also yielded onions and ripe passionfruit—to have a fire going and fuel to spare.

“This will keep away wild beasts and cook our supper as well!” the man said gleefully, rubbing his hands. “And we can eat like Kings at our own table. I have strips of dried beef to make an onion stew, thickened with a bit o’ oat flour. That’ll stick to your ribs!”

His companion fetched water from the stream, whose reflections in the evening were now colorless. Willows trailed long withies onto its surface. Sickly stems of paradox ivy twined about the feet of a collapsed bridge.

Their supper was comparatively lavish, but despite Sianadh’s urgings the girl could not touch the meat. The passionfruit tasted delicious. Afterward the Ertishman leaned contentedly back against the knapsack with his hands behind his head and wistfully reflected, in the glow of the fire, on the delights of a drop of whiskey after a meal. The girl, however, wanted to ask questions.

<<What?>>—indicating their surroundings.

“The city? There be many such as this throughout Erith. The Ancient Cities, some call them. They were built many centuries ago at the beginning of the Era of Glory, now long gone. Some gramarye be in them, they say, for the walls of the Ancient Cities still stand and have not been buried beneath layers of dust and silt blown in by the winds of centuries, or cracked apart by heat and cold and living roots. Cities so fair and wondrous have never been made since. But they were abandoned, because they were not built from dominite. Dominite be full of talium trihexide, that metal what the mesh in taltries is made of. The power of the shang wind can pass through all other stone and all other metal, and so it did. The folk in those days were careless about wearing taltries. Nowadays there be severe laws governing that. So ye see, the Ancient Cities became cities of ghosts whenever the unstorms came. Too many ghosts, as time went by, until few had the heart to live amongst them.

“See, the images be the imprints of real folk, stamped forever on the places where they have suffered or had great joy. When we feel strongly and passionately, we make a force. The shang wind stains the air with that force—also it whips up those feelings in us. Some people are afraid of the Shang, and others revel in it. They say the name comes from some old speech, ‘sh’ meaning wind and ‘ang’ meaning the Greayte Star of the south, so it be the Star’s Wind.

“I have heard of another old, forsaken city in the far north, in Avlantia where the Talith used to dwell—but the architecture of that place is different. And there are no ghosts. They say the folk all left that city in a time before the Era of Glory and never returned. It is not known why or where they went, but the most common story is that a sickness or a plague wiped them out, or some terrible curse drove them away. Now the ruins of the old city steep alone in the mull of their splendor, I guess, and only the great gold lions of Avlantia roam there.”

A glister of sparks arced from the fire as he tossed on an extra piece of wood.

<<What? Why?>> She drew her taltry away, pointed to her hair.

“Your yellow locks. Aye, the Talith were a yellow-haired race. Not many of them left now. Still, a few of them do dwell scattered about in different countries. Avlantia was their native home. They say it is a fair country, full of red-leaved trees in the west and overflowing with flowers in the east. The climate be warm and pleasant. But that does not suit the other races, I suppose, else Avlantia would now be overrun with Feorhkind, Erts, and Icemen. But it be not. Few folk visit those northern lands, and fewer dwell there, if any.”

He tilted a red, bristling eyebrow at her. “How far back in your own past do ye recall?”

She conveyed to him as much as she could, drawing pictures in the dust with her finger and using gestures. He showed her more handspeak, which she absorbed greedily. Then he shook his head wonderingly.

“I do not know what to make of ye, Imrhien. Ye wear a poor excuse for a tilhal that looks to be not worth the wood it’s chewed out of—and what be that scar on your gullet?”

Her hand flew to her throat. She had not been aware of a mark there, being in the habit of avoiding looking at reflective surfaces. Indeed, a raised weal of hard tissue striped the front of her neck. It had nothing to do with the beatings she had received in the Tower—those had always been directed at her back and shoulders. She shrugged, frowning.

“Ye have no memory of it? ’Tis like a whiplash. My cousin had a mark like that on his arm he got when he was cracking whips with some of the feckless lads on the farm.” Thoughtfully Sianadh chewed on a twig. “I was born and bred on a farm, see, in Finvarna. ’Twas a good life. We had a bauchan to help us in them days. He and me dad often fought, but the bauchan helped us when we needed it.”

He pushed his toes closer to the fire and stared reflectively at the cracked ceiling.

“One day, for instance, as me dad was coming back from the market, the bauchan pounced out on him and they ended up in a brawl. Then when me dad got home he found out he had lost his best handkerchief, the one he prized because a wizard had put charms in it and me ma had embroidered his name on’t when they were courting. He was certain the bauchan had it, and he went back to look for it. Sure enough, he found the bauchan rubbing the handkerchief on a rough stone. ‘It’s well you’ve come, Declan,’ says the bauchan. ‘It’d have been your death if I’d rubbed a hole in this. As it is, ye’ll have to fight me for it.’ So they fought, and me dad won back his handkerchief. But it was not long after, when we had run out of firewood and the mud was feet deep and me dad’s bad leg stopped him from fetching a birch he had felled, we heard a great thud at our house door and there was the tree, lugged through the mud by the bauchan.”

Sianadh scratched his beard abstractedly. “He was a good thresher, too—I do not know how we would have managed without him at harvest time. But I had no mind to be a farmer, when I grew up. I was too restless. This sildron mine will be the making of me, for sure. Mind, I have told no one else of the map, not even my nephew Liam in Gilvaris Tarv. See, I knew I had to come alone, just to find out if the map was valid or merely a jest.”

He fell silent. Drowsily the girl poked the fire with a stick. It blazed up.

“Time to sleep now.” The Ertishman stretched his arms and settled down with his head on the knapsack. His companion folded the small blanket under her own head and soon fell fast asleep.

She did not know how long she had been asleep when she struggled awake, feeling a great weight pinning her feet down. The fire’s light showed the mountain that was Sianadh snoring nearby. Something very heavy was moving up on her body, breathing heavily. With all her strength she shoved it off and sprang to her feet. Sianadh awoke with a start, and there came the sound of something rolling out the door.

The Ertishman half crouched, drawing his skian. “What was that? Did ye see it?”

The girl shook her head, picked up a stout stick of firewood, and went to the door. Beneath her ribs a rabbit jumped.

Looking out, she could see nothing but starlight on water and the dark outlines of trees, hear nothing but frogs gurruping in the millpond. Sianadh stoked the fire. They sat with their backs to the flames, staring into the shadows. The fire leaped and crunched. The girl’s blood thumped in her temples.

Knockings and scrapings began in the next room, but when the man put his head around the door to look, they ceased. Then came the sound of objects being thrown around, behind the walls, and ringing blows as of hammers on anvils.

“Pah! ’Tis a pack of foliots. They be only trying to scare us,” said Sianadh.

They are succeeding, thought his protegee.

A pitiful howling cranked itself up and abruptly turned into laughter. From various places in the floor and through holes in the walls, flame whooshed high, dazzlingly bright, and was as inexplicably extinguished. Strange lights came and went, stones were flung, chains rattled, doors ostensibly opened and shut, although no doors existed within the premises.

The frightful manifestations continued into the night. Neither of the travelers slept.

Silence had descended and the fire had burned low when a fuath came in through the mill door. Fuathan as a malignant, water-dwelling genus comprised many species—this particular fuath appeared like a small, ill-favored man, about three feet in height, very raggedly dressed in gray-green clothes that were dripping wet.

“Who are you?” it said. “And what do they call ye?”

At that, Sianadh spoke up boldly. “Who are ye yourself? And what do they call ye?”

“My Self,” said the fuath slyly.

“And I am called My Own Self,” the man replied casually. “And my friend be called Me.”

The travelers kept sitting by the fire, and the fuath sat down with them, closest to the flames. Its clothes could not seem to dry; they were still sopping wet, although a puddle formed around it. Behind the walls the noises abated. The girl sat very still. Deep-cored shadows came creeping in from the open door. Undaunted, Sianadh vigorously stirred up the fire. But in the next instant his companion wished he had never done so. Sparks and cinders blew out and burned the fuath, who jumped up and went whirling about fiercely, shrieking and bellowing in a voice quite disproportionate to its size.

“I am burned! I am burned!”

And from under the hearthstone a dreadful voice answered.

“Who has burned ye?”

“Get out of sight!” Sianadh cried, diving under the stone table. The lass slid in behind him, and not a moment too soon. They huddled there in the darkness, shivering, and heard the awful voice ask again, “Who burned ye?”

“My Own Self and Me,” yelled the fuath.

“If it had been any mortal man,” said the voice, “I would have been revenged, but if it was ye yourself, I can do nothing.”

The fuath rushed out, lamenting. A pressing silence folded around, thick and gelatinous.

All night the girl stayed with Sianadh under the table in suspense, hoping to be saved, scarcely daring to breathe. Toward dawn, when the stirring song of magpies beckoned the sun, there came the presentiment of an unstorm.

Then morning gleamed, and with the sun’s first light they were free.

They gathered up the precious knapsack and left Fincastle’s Mill as quickly as possible, heading back into the city. When they had put several streets between themselves and the mill, they halted. The sky was clear and hard, like blue enamel, and the morning was already warm.

“My breath and blood! The nights here be more tiring than the days,” groaned Sianadh. “If I don’t get some sleep soon, I shall be starting to look like Domnhaill’s old bloodhound. Doch, my mouth tastes as if I’ve eaten Domnhaill’s old bloodhound.”

He rinsed his mouth and spat on the ground.

“Pah! This drink’s not much better. For mountain stream water, it smacks of slime. Slimy fuathan, no doubt. ’Tis plain the one that so cannily calls itself My Self be half-witted, which be fortunate for us. It has a mighty protector somewhere under the hearthstone. If things like that be about, ’tis time to take stronger measures. Ah! for a few wizard’s spells and a good broadsword …”

He bade Imrhien go behind a dilapidated wall for modesty, to turn all her tattered clothes inside out and put them back on, while he did likewise. Then he broke two stout, straight branches from a mighty ash tree that overhung the street—“to bash their heads in with”—and trimmed them. With staffs in hand they marched along the wide lanes and byways that crossed one corner of the sprawling municipality.

A sweet, clear ringing started up as if all the bluebells in a wood had tiny silver clappers and trembled in a breeze.

“Uncomber’s on the way,” said the Ertishman, reflexively touching the hood hanging back from his shoulders. “Ha. No matter if we leave off our taltries. What be two more ghosts among many? Besides, I cannot speak for ye, but I be too weary to drum up any excitement, unless a big featherbed appears in front of me.”

Imrhien glanced at him and smiled. With bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes sagging above smutty pouches, he did indeed look like a mournful hound. She wondered what bale-eyed monster she herself resembled.

He took a bite of a piece of hard ship’s bread and handed her another.

“No need to be so cheerful.”

But she felt happy, and the unstorm’s approach amplified that. There were wild herbs thrusting up vital shoots in the creviced shoulders of marble statues and warm breezes sweeping unhindered through necrotic palaces. There were reasons for cheerfulness.

All the leaves in the weed-choked gutters rose up as one; the air swirled thickly with them in the first onrush of the shang, and the blue-black clouds it brought covered the sun’s face. Her hair stood up yet again in justification of one of the wind’s many nicknames.

“Not afraid, chehrna?”

<<No.>>

“Well then, we shall keep on walking and see what we shall see.”

Day became night and sunshine, moonshine. The lights began, and so did the silent tableaux, faint because of age.

In a casement window overhanging the street, two slender lovers wept and parted, each richly dressed in brocade and jewels of an old-fashioned style. His coach and matching four waited below at the door; the horses arched their frosted necks and tossed sparks from foaming manes. Carriage lanterns flickered. The young man turned and looked up for one last glance before he boarded, and she waved with a lace handkerchief. The burnished coach, with escutcheons painted on each door, bowled silently away, suddenly vanishing, and the lovers were back again in the window, the carriage waiting below.

In a wilderness garden a child on a swing flew endlessly back and forth, laughing; the golden ropes stretched up to nothing, for the tree had fallen centuries before.

A funeral procession came up the street, lavishly ornate, the hearse drawn by six shining blacks in silver harness and tall midnight plumes. A chatoyance of flowers covered the bannerol over the coffin. Six tall men in black top hats walked ahead; behind came hundreds of mourners: mounted knights, veiled women, and men in black outfits of a mode long past, their pale faces sagging with grief. They passed so close that Imrhien fancied she could hear the rustle of silk.

Parks and civic gardens must once have existed here, for the travelers saw tangled places where no jagged towers or smashed porticos reigned. Here, two gallants dueled, as in the forest near Isse Tower, dying over and over. There, people with flowers in their hair danced around a bonfire. A translucent youth and maiden stepped from the boles of horse chestnut saplings, to twine arms and kiss, her girdle a lattice of misty emeralds.

A castle had stood on the higher ground. Its many turrets now were crumbled, but a lone piper yet paced far above, where the battlements had been, where now was emptiness. With his bag beneath his elbow, the pipes slung over his shoulder, their tassels swinging as he strode, he played a dirge for some dead and long-forgotten prince. All these passionate joys and sorrows, which had meant so much to those who had lived, which had been the world to them, now were only flickers staining the airs. As dry leaves before the wind, their reasons, their thoughts, their cherished plans, had been long swept away; those who viewed these brief afterimages could never know their story.

The city lived its glory days again, poignant memories pulsating brighter and dimmer with each fluctuation of the shang wind that spangled with metallic fires the overgrown shrubberies and arboreta, that limned with thin streams of molten argentum the fallen capitals, ruined spandrels, decomposing parapets and balustrades: the stairs leading nowhere.

Imrhien had pulled on her taltry, but as they walked together through a square lined with stone dragons Sianadh, unhooded, turned and flung up his hands, crying in a flare of exultation:

“I be My Own Self, and I be here, so look ye, I have gilfed this town with my mark.”

A few moments later, looking back from a tangential boulevard, Imrhien saw the imprint of him standing triumphant.

The wind fled, chiming away to the distance. They crossed the farther outskirts of the city and reentered the forest just as the sun came out.

Sianadh squinted at the map.

“Now we have been led out of our way somewhat, but we be back on the right track now.” He tapped the compass, whose needle spun wildly.

“Reaper’s Pike should be off to our left, and Skylifter rises over there.” His hand waved vaguely. “We be walking on the flanks of Gloomy Jack. These mountains be snow-capped in Winter, but not now, not when Midsummer’s almost here. And well for ye, Imrhien, I might add. If ’twere Winter, ye should have to catch a wolf and skin it to clothe ye in the cold. Look for round stones as we go. With my slingshot I might go hunting later for something smaller for our supper.”

The flanks of Gloomy Jack were dominated by stringybarks and peppermint gums. Brittle twigs and sloughed strips of bark crunched beneath the wayfarers’ boots. There was a sameness about the tall, pale trunks that made the girl feel as though they were getting nowhere. Even in the shade the air shimmered with heat, and from somewhere ahead came the piercing shrill of cicadas.

He could plainly be seen, the lissom brown youth who walked for a time under the leaves a few yards to the left, for he made no effort to conceal himself. He did not look toward the travelers, but Imrhien studied him until he left them. His features were elfin: a turned-up nose, high cheekbones, a sharp chin, and pointed ears jutting from long dark hair that tumbled past his shoulders. His feet were bare and his sylvan raiment gorgeous; a collar of yellow, scarlet-veined leaves of the flowering cherry, ovate and serrated; a long russet-brown tunic of five-pointed plane tree leaves stitched with green thread and trimmed with lace of oak, moss-lined, belted with braided rushes; dagged hell-sleeves of wine-crimson Autumnal foliage that hung to his calves; breeches of velvet moss tied with ivy at the knee; and two folded lily leaves for a cocked hat with a feathery fern frond for a plume. He carried a staff of goldenrod, and at his feet trotted a small white animal with scarlet slippers of ears and crimson garnets of eyes.

“I have heard him spoke of back in Tarv,” whispered Sianadh. “They say he took care of a little girl, Katherine, who was lost in the forest; she was later found unharmed and grew to be a fine woman, and she always did say how kind he had been to her, the Gailledu. I know it be he, for he has black hair and is dressed all in moss and leaves like they say. And if I b’ain’t mistaken, that there little red-eared pig with him be a beast of good fortune.”

At midday they came to a steamy gully overhung by tree-ferns and refilled the leather bottle from a sweet-tasting, tan-colored streamlet. Two ladies in long black dresses had been sitting under the trees, their long dark hair crowned with circlets of blood-red garnets. They stood up and glided over to a little pool in a hollow. A powerful rush of wind roared up from the dell, and with a cry, two black swans rose away through the air.

“We shall rest where we are,” said Sianadh, “and not disturb a pool favored by swanmaidens.” He opened the pack. “This dried stuff be dull to the palate, and I could wish for nobler fare. Plenty of it left, however. Ye do not eat much.”

His companion was by now getting used to thinking of herself as a girl and being thought of as such by this educated gentleman of a rough peasant who treated lads and lasses the same except for an extra degree of mannerliness to the latter and a degree less of badinage and freedom with his language, both of which slipped when he forgot about them. She watched him picking round pebbles out of the stream, pocketing the slingshot he had taken out of his knapsack.

“Bide here, chehrna. I saw turkeyfowl in the brushwood, and I’ve a mind to catch one.”

<<No.>> In panic she pulled on his coat, <<I will not see you.>>

“Have no fear.” Gently he disengaged her hands. “The Bear always comes back. ’Twould take a pretty big turkey to best me. Mind the knapsack, and do not stir from this spot. The ashen staff has power in itself—keep it by.”

Then he was gone, not noiselessly, but the sounds of him were soon swallowed up in the forest and overridden by the pitiless, maddening cicada thrum arising now on all sides.

Listlessly she lay for a time on the cool, scratchy grass of the stream’s bank. Bubbles formed and danced on the water. The insects’ buzzing made her head ache. A small white pig with poppy-petal ears snuffled in the herbage by the water’s edge. It lifted its head and looked at the girl with a pair of holly-berry eyes, then trotted away and stood as if waiting. When she did not move, it advanced a few steps, then moved away again and put its head down in a patch of long grass. Her curiosity aroused, she picked up the knapsack and went to look. Instantly the pig kicked up its heels and scampered off. Where it had stood, not a blade of grass was broken. She knelt and picked a handful of grass. It was full of four-leafed clover. Tucking some in her pocket for luck, she returned to the stream.

It was difficult not to doze; heat and lack of sleep pressed on her eyelids, and Sianadh seemed to be taking a long time. She splashed her face with water to stay awake and stuck her fingers in her ears to shut out the cicadas.

Sianadh burst out of the trees, turkeyless.

“Imrhien, there be a market going on over that rise! Ye should see! A grassy meadow, full of little folk buying and selling just like any town fair. They be dressed in red and yellow and green like proper little lords and ladies—their pretty painted booths have all sorts of commodities for sale. There be pewterers, shoemakers, peddlers with all kinds of trinkets—everything we usually see at fairs be there, including the food stalls. Roasted quails! Raspberries and cream! To my mind, if we step up politelike, we might be so bold as to barter for some of their cakes and pies and glazed hams and custards and ale.… Come!”

He grabbed the knapsack and led the way. When they came almost to the top of the rise, they dropped to their bellies and crawled to peer over the edge.

What Imrhien saw differed vastly from what Sianadh had described. She shot a puzzled glance at him, but his eyes were aglow, and a wide, vacuous grin split his stubbled jaw.

There was indeed a smooth, close-cropped sward and a milling crowd of little folk at their market trade, but the booths were shaky affairs of peeling bark, the garments of the participants were tattered and dirty, the dishes and ornaments they hawked were crudely carved from wood, and the dainty foods of which the Ertishman had spoken were nothing but fuzzballs, weeds, live and dead insects, cuckoo’s spittle and acorns, piled up on leaf plates.

The girl tried to stop him, but ineffectually, as Sianadh rose and went down among them, opening the knapsack to show what he brought to barter. The men and women, no higher than his knee, crowded around, laughing shrilly and talking in some foreign tongue, picking over the oatmeal, the dried figs, the raisins, hazelnuts, bread, and salt beef. Overjoyed at the bargains he struck, Sianadh reached out to take the ghastly victuals they offered him, cramming them into his mouth straight away. At this the girl jumped out of hiding and ran to him, knocking the rubbish aside.

“Hue and cry, girl! There be plenty for both of us,” he growled through a mouthful. She grabbed his wrists; he pushed her away, and then a pricking of a hundred pins stung her calves; the little folk flocked around armed with thorn-weapons to drive her away. It was no use persisting. She hopped out of their hostile reach and waited for Sianadh. Presently he appeared, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The knapsack bulged.

“Full of goodies.” He patted it contentedly. “Ah, what a feast. Did ye try some?”

She frowned. <<Not food.>>

“Ye be too choosy, lass. Come now, we must be off.”

<<Not food. I watch, I see.>>

Sianadh flinched. He took a moment to consider this.

“Ye see?” he repeated carefully. “What did ye see, Imrhien?”

Unable to explain, she flung up her hands in frustration.

“Come back to the fair with me. Put your hand on your hip and crook your arm so that I may look through it.”

To the rise they returned. It seemed the fair was over, for the last of the little folk were hurriedly abandoning the stalls, not packing them up but leaving them as they stood.

Sianadh bent to look through the crook of Imrhien’s arm.

A torrent of oaths and expletives in at least three languages followed. He ran down the slope, shouting and kicking the stalls to pieces. Weed, seedpods, and bits of bark went flying.

“Doch pishogue! Doch, doch skeerda, sgorrama wights with their glamour! Obban tesh, what have I eaten?” He charged into some bushes and was violently ill. Between spasms of choking he raged, “Sun’s teeth, did I eat that? Blast me beardless, I ain’t never seen nothing green like that … plagues of rot, but those look like slugs …”

When he finally emerged he shambled off to the swanmaidens’ pool and jumped straight in. Meanwhile Imrhien emptied the detritus out of the knapsack and watched parts of it crawl away.

“Have ye the Sight, then?” Sianadh: hunched, sour, and dripping.

She shrugged.

“Ye might have warned me.”

She stamped her foot.

“All right, ye did warn me. The worst of it be, those weevilly siofra have taken the best part of our provisions. And I have lost the stomach for hunting—I think it bailed out with them slugs.”

Despondent, she made no reply. In silence they resumed their journey.

Birds came clamoring to their evening roosts. Darkness was already gathering, and they had found no safe nook in which to spend the night, when the Gailledu reappeared with the white pig and beckoned. The travelers hesitated, undecided.

“They say he be seelie, but …”

Imrhien pointed to the pig, jabbed a thumb at herself, and showed the Ertishman the wilted clover from her pocket.

“The pig gave ye what? Four-leafed clover? Ach! So that be what peeled the glamour from your bonny green eyes and not the Sight, after all.” He took some for his own pocket.

“When these dry I shall tuck them inside the lining. The little maggots shall never put the pishogue on me again, and if I ever see ’em, I’ll do more than box their pointy ears. Yon leaf-boy looks the same to me now as he did before I took the clover. I believe he means us well. Shall we follow?”

Imrhien nodded. The Gailledu and his pig seemed different from the other wights they had encountered. Nevertheless they followed warily through the gloaming, Sianadh’s hand resting on the skian. The warm and darkening forest was teeming with presences. Their guide urged them to hurry forward. A sound of galloping horses came behind; the travelers broke into a run, but there seemed only trees and more trees and the Gailledu’s half-glimpsed form and the pig, flitting ahead—then Sianadh stumbled against a great, smooth bole, gasping, and the unseen riders thundered past and away.

“Rowans.”

The girl caught her breath, looked up. The Gailledu had indeed led them into a wood of rowan-trees, the trees of protection, before he and the pig had left them.

Soft mosses made a comfortable resting place. Imrhien’s legs ached. After they had eaten from their depleted rations, she took off her boots. In the safety of the rowans, the man and the girl slept the profound sleep of absolute weariness, sprawled as if dead in the deep leaf-mold.

In the morning they left the rowan-grove and struck out northeast on their journey.

They had not gone more than a few yards when the Gailledu barred their way. Without speaking, he shook his dark head and pointed to the west. Sianadh stopped, planting his staff firmly in the ground.

“Good morrow to ye. Ye led us to good rest last night, sir—now we be at your service. But if it be another way ye’re wanting us to go, that we cannot do.”

With a sharp, chopping movement the leaf-clad youth brought the side of one open hand down into the upturned palm of the other. The gesture could mean only one thing.

Sianadh shifted uneasily.

“He wants us to stop going this way and go around, Imrhien.”

She nodded, feinting a step to the left.

“So ye think he be right, eh? Nay. It cannot be. We must take the direct route. We have already lost too much time, and our supplies be short. Our goal cannot be more than a day away if we keep on. Who knows how many extra leagues we may walk, how many days we may lose by changing our course? Good sir, your advice be gratefully received, but with respect, we cannot follow it.”

Sianadh began to walk around the Gailledu, but there he was, barring their way again. His brown eyes flashed in anger. One last time he shook his head and made the “stop” signal. Then he stepped aside. Uncomfortably Sianadh met Imrhien’s eyes.

“Do as ye wish. I b’ain’t changing.”

From her hair the girl took a blue wildflower she had plucked that morning, not knowing its name. She stretched her hand out to the Gailledu. After a few moments he took the flower from her fingers, turned, and went into the forest. She stared after him, then followed the Ertishman.

There was little communication between them, many an anxious glance over their shoulders and many a jump at wind-tossed shadows. After an hour or two they came under dark pines growing among granite boulders. Roots gripped the rocks like arteries caging hearts. Malice brooded beneath heavy boughs. Queer sights and sounds troubled their passage as before, but this time the travelers knew that they were not being deceived, that what they saw was real. While they carried the four-leafed clover, their eyes penetrated glamour’s masquerades.

The Summer heat thickened, grew stifling. Glad they were to find, in the afternoon, a black forest pool. Although they bathed their feet and splashed their faces, some inner cognition warned them not to drink. The pines had snared a patch of flawless lavender sky between them, high above, but it was not permitted to reflect in the inky water.

Branches swished aside, and a shaggy little horse came to drink. It cocked a friendly eye, shaking droplets from the soft muzzle, snorting softly.

The allurement of waterhorses was such that when they were near, they seemed in no way to be eldritch or perilous—a certainty drew over those who beheld them that here was but an innocent and playful steed, as lorraly as themselves, and that it would be ridiculous to suspect otherwise. Only gramarye or a determined stubbornness could save mortals from this enchantment.

“Put your boots back on quicklike and let’s get out of here,” hissed Sianadh.

The horse trotted over to them, its hooves almost soundless on the pine-needle carpet. Imrhien’s hands were shaking so much that she could not lace her boots. Sianadh’s lips moved silently. The horse nuzzled his shoulder, pranced and frolicked in the most joyous manner, curving its neck enticingly to be caressed.

The more they avoided the pretty thing, the more it played. As they moved away it bounded in front of them, bending its foreleg in a seductive invitation to mount and ride. In and out of the trees it gamboled, the long tail flouncing high—everywhere they turned the horse frisked in their way, its spell drawing its net over them, until in desperation Imrhien brandished her ashen staff in both hands, right before its eyes. The creature reared on its hind legs, neighing, then Sianadh was there, the skian’s leaf-shaped blade glittering cold in one fist, a scoop of salt glittering cold in the other.

“Avaunt!”

Shrilly squealed the horse. It rolled its eyes and pig-rooted. The travelers advanced. It backed off, wheeled, and galloped straight for the pool. In it jumped, smoothly, with hardly a splash. Only ripples were left behind, spreading slowly across the dark face of the water.

A tear stood in Sianadh’s eye. He stared at the pool’s secret waters, shaking his head.

“Ah, but ’tis a tambalai thing, and a rare, or I’m no judge of horseflesh. It went hard with me to repel it. A pity.”

Without waiting to see more, the two companions hastened on their way.

The needle-carpet deadening their footfalls, they pushed through curtains of shadow. There seemed no end to the pine forest. Imrhien’s scalp prickled with the certainty of being followed. Dread of some terrible stalker swallowed her heart.

Light emptied out of the afternoon. Tree trunks loomed like prison bars, and growing darkness made it difficult to see where they were going.

A grayish glimmer ahead, more a decrease of darkness than an increase of light, showed where the trees thinned. In a few more yards the travelers stepped out from the forest under a starry sky. A half-moon was ascending. The Greayte Southern Star lit the landscape palely. To either hand, the forest rows stretched out in an endless picket fence. The companions stood at the top of a slope covered with low bushes: gorse, melaleuca, and broom. The long hillside slanted down to a narrow gorge running from north to south, along the floor of which flowed a swift river. To the north, an escarpment rose to a mountain peak. Faintly discernible on the ravine’s far side there rolled undulating grasslands scattered with trees.

“The river!” Sianadh’s eyes glittered. “At last, the river that runs from Bellsteeple to the south. Ah, but I cannot tell at which point we have arrived at these reaches. We must follow this tributary of the Rysingspill, but whether upstream or down is not clear.”

Undecided, he stood in thought, surveying the scene until frenetic laughter from the forest startled them both into action and they hastened down the slope.

Riddled with holes, Imrhien’s hoots were giving way; they were not as stout as Sianadh’s, not being made to withstand journeys in the wild. Now the sole of the right boot came adrift, flapping. She had to stop and take it off.

“Do not throw it away, lass. Do not leave behind any things ye have used. Fires of Tapthar! What can that be?”

A groove was gouged into the hillside to the right, running straight down from the forest to the ravine. No vegetation grew on its worn and slippery surface.

“This queer slide be too treacherous to cross. We must turn upriver,” said the Ertishman when they had reached the lip of the channel. “And may the Star grant us safe haven this night.”

A pearlescent cloud layer roofed the gorge. Halfway up its slopes, wispy shreds of cloud clung. The river’s cleft was narrow and very steep, the sides plunging straight down from the cliff edge perhaps sixty feet to the water below. Massive boulders humped out of the gushing waters like gray leviathans. The current raced and boiled, churning furiously among them with a sound of torrential rain. The loud voice of the river filled their ears with its hissing roar, threaded with limpid notes like bubbling silver.

The travelers marched along the cleft’s rim. Tiny white moths flitted. Something came hurtling down the hill on the muddy slide, shrieking with laughter, and shot out over the river, leaving only echoes of its madness.

“Obban tesh,” swore Sianadh, quickening his pace, “I could not tell for sure, but it looked as if that sliding thing were headless and carrying its noggin under its arm.”

Imrhien limped after him, lugging her ruined boot in one hand, her ashen staff in the other. The moon rose a little higher. Far below, the river gushed. Then the terrible sound began.

Thud, thud. A rhythmic pounding shook the ground like a giant hammer, then stopped, giving way to an empty silence. From somewhere behind, in the darkness, it had come. Abruptly it started up again: thud, thud, getting nearer. Once more the sound ceased.

A strange lisping sound was emanating from Sianadh’s mouth. He was trying to whistle, but his lips were too dry. Beads of sweat stood out on his brow. Nausea gripped the pit of the girl’s belly like a squeezing fist. Thud, thud; it came again, remorselessly, the vibrations running up through the travelers’ feet. The Ertishman began to run, the girl hard on his heels.

The moon vanished behind a cloud, and Sianadh stumbled; a cry escaped his lips, and his head jerked up toward the greenish light that appeared, bobbing, several yards in front of them. An obscure figure held up a lantern. Long, dagged sleeves draped from its arm.

“Follow me, quickly!” Low and pleasant, the voice was slightly cracked, like that of a youth entering manhood. “Come! There is no time to lose.”

“Who are ye?”

“Have you forgotten so soon your friend and guide of the rowan-wood? Hasten. If you do not, the Direath will get you. The lantern shows the path.”

Thud, thud.

Sianadh opened his mouth to speak, but the lantern bobbed away. He grabbed Imrhien’s hand and scrambled after the light, his breath grating in great shredded gasps, but she pulled her hand free. Something was wrong. She wanted to scream out a warning but could only tug at the receding knapsack. The left shoulder-strap broke and hung trailing. She could hear nothing but the voice calling, see nothing but the lantern dancing away, away, and out over where the cliff edge must surely lie, and Sianadh being lured to it, like a moth to his doom, heedless of her tuggings. She flung herself at his back, managing to catch the trailing strap in the same moment that he lunged forward and, with a shout, dropped out of sight. The sickening crunch of sliding gravel came to her ears and the brief clatter of Sianadh’s staff spinning into the void.

He was gone.

The light went out.

Flat on her belly the girl lay blindly in the dark somewhere on the airy rim of nothing. Blood walloped in her ears. A small wind soughed in the gorse, and the Greayte Star’s light struck through thin altostratus cloud. Peering over the precipice, she spied Sianadh’s brown, stubby fingers clinging to clumps of clay, his shaggy head pressed hard against the rock face. Immediately she twisted the trailing pack-strap around the nearest firm-rooted bush, for the knapsack still hung from his shoulder.

Sianadh looked up, blinking dirt from his eyes.

“The ledge beneath my toes be crumbling. I do not want to die. O Ceileinh, Mother of Warriors, save me!”

His companion leaned over, pulled on the knapsack from above. At that moment, Sianadh’s footing gave way. He reached for the strap and with a jerk was brought up short, his full weight depending from it. The little bush bent sharply. Faithfully, it did not break. Screwing up his face, Sianadh heaved himself up with the strength of his knotty arms—his head, then shoulders appeared over the brink. The girl helped him up by his sleeves and hair. The leather strap snapped apart as he grabbed the little bush. Thus anchored, the man paused for breath, still halfway over the cliff, before levering the rest of his bulk up to safety. The battered pack dropped from his shoulder. Unable to stand, he crawled away from the edge. Something small and wicked shot out of nowhere, kicked the knapsack over the cliff, and fled, repeating, “Tear, tear,” as it went.

Imrhien wiped the filth from the man’s face. He was very pale beneath the grime.

Thud, thud, thud.

The thumping thing was coming after them yet. Sianadh struggled to his feet.

“Ye be the leader,” he gasped. “I am a fool—he only speaks to children, the Gailledu. I should have known that light-man was but a treacherous hobby-lanthorn. ’Tis too late—we have already shown fear. Give me your staff. I shall take on whatever comes thumping at our backs.”

It was midnight. The fishing-boat moon with its one sail rode a fathomless sea, casting star-nets to catch comets. In the vast landscape below, two tiny figures ran along a cliff top pursued by the footstep of some fierce and gloomy specter from a madman’s dream. The land fell sharply, the river’s walls diminishing and the roar of the water becoming louder, until the hunted ones found themselves beside a sluicing torrent in a channel not ten feet below. Loud as it was, it could not dull the approach of the predator, a hunter that seemed to sport with its quarry, now speeding up, now dropping back, driving them on to the limit of endurance.

“If ye can swim, we should try to get over the water. They cannot cross it, especially southward-running. But I fear ye should be swept away.”

It was then that they caught sight of the bridge.

Massive river redgums lined the opposite banks. One had fallen across the river. Half its roots were still buried, and it lived, its green branches spilled in a cluster on the ground on the near side. Spurred on by the prospect, the companions raced for this thicket, but too late. The heavy pounding increased its pace, and with a roar, the Direath was upon them. They turned, at bay.

A monstrosity.

It loomed over them, taller by at least two feet, clad in a close-fitting mantle of dark blue feathers. A single hard and hairy hand grew out of its breast-bone, and a single veiny, thick-soled leg grew from its haunch. Its one eye glared from the center of the forehead. In its bony hand it held a thick club. It poised motionless, as if waiting.

Without taking his eyes off the apparition, Sianadh drew out his knife and dropped it behind him.

“Take the skian, lass,” he said steadily, “it is not much use with this one. I need both hands to wield the staff, and if I get close enough to use the blade, that will be close enough for Lord Handsome to grab me by the throat. Take the knife and get over the water, quick-like.”

She shook her head, although he could not see her. She would not leave now, would not desert her friend.

Then with a bellow, the man lunged forward. Mortal and wight joined in battle.

The Ertishman was quick on his feet, ducking under the swinging club or spinning away from it. The staff’s six-foot length was an advantage, and the monster seemed to hate the touch of the ash wood. But there was no doubt that it was the stronger adversary. On its single foot corded with sinews and bulging veins, it hopped forward, forcing the man to give ground. The eye above the cavernous nose and thick lips rolled from side to side, fixed on Sianadh. Curiously, or it may have been a trick of the moonlight, the monster seemed to move not by swinging through space in the normal manner, but rather by metamorphosing rapidly from one position to the next—a confusing trick that hampered anticipation of its actions.

Giving it a wide berth, the girl dodged around its back and darted in, striking with the skian. Uttering a scream of outrage it turned on her, and Sianadh was able to thwack it a mighty blow across the ear while its attention was diverted.

The heavy club narrowly missed her, but she had drawn blood—black blood; the knife-blade smoked with it. Never could she get close enough to wound it with the knife after that, for it was wary of her. But she did not stop hounding and harrying it, and each time it came morphing after her, Sianadh would attack it and it would turn to assail him afresh.

On into the long hours of night they fought, until the ground was bare dust all around. The river dashed past inexorably; the fishing-boat in the sky sailed away. Now the Ertishman moved more slowly. His adversary carelessly allowed him leeway, as if savoring the drawn-out conflict. Sianadh’s aim had deteriorated. The next time he struck, his staff hit the ground and broke in two.

“I be done for. Run!” he grunted, staggering.

The Direath came thumping at him. In a flash of inspiration Imrhien hurled her boot at its eye—the creature lurched off balance.

In that same instant a light wind ruffled the leaves of the fallen tree, and somewhere in the distance a magpie warbled.

The Direath froze.

The magpie called again, exultantly heralding the dawn. The eastern sky paled to a dishwater taupe; the Direath let its club slump. At the third crow it took one last eldritch swipe at Sianadh, who had lowered his guard; the blow caught him in the ribs. Then it bounded away, thump, thump, toward the forest.

The Ertishman collapsed, clutching his side. Crouching, Imrhien supported his head, helped him to his feet; together they half crawled to the fallen tree and picked a way among the branches to the broad trunk.

Bent double, arms pressed to his flanks, Sianadh edged across the river in front of her. When they had gained the opposite bank he lurched forward a pace or two, crumpled beneath a river redgum, and did not rise. She cradled his unconscious head in her lap, keeping watch while the first light of dawn opened the world’s doors anew.

On reviving, Sianadh propped himself on an elbow and drank greedily of the riverwater Imrhien had brought. He fell back with a sigh and a wince.

“That were like wine to me, even though it tasted of old boots.”

It was, in fact, his own boot in which she had fetched the water, there being no other container available. Her remaining piece of footwear had gone to pieces like its mate, and she had flung it in the river. No boots, no ashen staff, no knapsack with its supplies and tinderbox, no leather bottle.

“The map, the map!” The man fumbled in his pockets. “Aagh, a red-hot knife works between my ribs. The uraguhne has bruised them mightily, or cracked them.”

She drew out the map to show him, then replaced it in his pocket. Reassured, he slept again, and she went to the river to bathe.

On this side, the banks were lower and more gently inclined. After rinsing her ragged garments, the girl spread them on the grass to dry. It swirled fast, the current—too fast to risk immersion. Holding on to a branch that leaned out, she scooped up water in Sianadh’s boot and poured it over herself, gasping at its cold touch. Grethet had told her she was disfigured, but that had been part of the lie. There was no fault, no stigma. White and slender, her limbs, like the smooth-barked boughs of the river trees, clean and hard. Like them, she was tall and elegant, cool to the touch. How lovely were the trees …

She dressed in damp clothes and returned to keep watch over the sleeper.

Sianadh twitched and groaned in his sleep, waking in pain when the sun had scaled its ladder halfway. With difficulty he stood up, rubbed his eyes, and looked around.

“A fair land, this side of the river. It looks to be cuinocco country. May as well be walking, even if my foot be drowned in this soggy boot.”

Equipped with redgum staffs, they set off along the riverbank, still heading upstream, toward the escarpment that bulked ever nearer, rearing its blunt bank against the clouds.

The skyscape, as if under the hand of a dissatisfied sculptor, kept re-creating its cauliflower fields, snowy mountains, foamy forests, and lakes of mist. The free airs of open country, rich and invigorating as green-apple cider, rippled across acres of short-cropped grasses dotted with stands of peppercorns, bay trees, and flowering jacarandas whose piercingly blue blooms mocked the sky.

They rested often. Sianadh spoke rarely and did not complain of pain or hunger, but it was clear that he was suffering. At every halt Imrhien brought him water, her brow creased with concern, and made him as comfortable as possible.

That night they rested under a tree. What would happen in the dark hours the girl could not guess. She tried to stay awake to keep watch but could not prevent herself from dozing in snatches. Nothing assailed the travelers but a dream of a silver-white horse in the trees, impaled on a shaft of moonlight. Then again, the girl never dreamed.

The next day and the one after it were much the same. Tormented by hunger and the desire for sleep, ridden with anxiety for Sianadh, the girl trudged on beside him with bleeding feet, hardly noticing their surroundings. There seemed no hope and no choice but to go on until they fell at last, or were felled.

Jacarandas crowded close in the shade near the base of the escarpment, their petals carpeting the ground with luminous azure. The travelers followed the river’s twistings and turnings; here it ran under overhanging banks dripping with flowers and into clear pools and backwaters; here it chuckled over shallow ledges; there it glided like polished pewter into dark leaf-tunnels.

Dense and secret became the woodlands. Foliage obscured the sky. All around, they could see nothing but trees, straightboled, narrow, or stout, crowding close or scattered thinly. Beyond the trees, more trees, on and on into a gray subfusc. Half-asleep, Imrhien stumbled onward, lending support to her companion’s arm. As dusk approached, thunder, which had been rumbling far off, grew louder. It was a sound that had been audible now for a long time, yet in her dulled state of awareness the girl had ignored it.

By now they had come right under the shadow of the mountain wall. As they rounded a bend in the river, the trees drew back. Pale sunlight poured down from open sky, a hissing roar assaulted their ears, and an awesome sight greeted them.

Filled with rainbows, its millions of droplets appearing to float slowly down from such a great height, a waterfall hung like a silver curtain. Its hem was lost in spray over a rocky pool. Sianadh leaned on his staff and laughed weakly.

“We have found it, chehrna, the sildron mine. We are come to Waterstair.”

5

WATERSTAIR

Candlebutter and Spiderweb

Soft intaglio of light, glinting like a frosty morn;

Armèd with a stalactite—silver white the single horn.

Mirror’d in a forest mere, strangely fleeting, ever wild,

Seen by night when skies are clear, never near, fancy’s child.

Legend that the minstrels spun, sorrow never touched your kind—

Free as air, elusive one. Lightly run—outrace the wind.

Strange and rare, to mankind lost; fairer than the moon above;

Diamonds from your mane are toss’d. Beast of frost, yet warm as love—unicorn.

MADE BY LLEWELL, SONGMAKER OR AURALONDE

Sheets of jade water plunged, hurtling from the heights in a torrent of raw energy. Rainbows bridged its quivering mists. A haze of droplets hung in the air, pearling every leaf and grass blade that fringed the pool, beading hair and eyelashes, collecting in miniature crystals on the skin. The continuous roar pressed around Imrhien’s head, drummed and threshed in her ears like the sound of battle.

The rocky basin receiving the waterfall was cradled in the heart of a dell whose gently sloping sides were clothed with tall, spindly trees. There was no sign of a mine-shaft—no broken ground, no weedy tumescences indicating overgrown mullock heaps. Beyond the basin’s granite lip the grasses grew smooth and green among the trees, dappled with the tiniest flowers.

Hunger must have curdled Sianadh’s brain, thought the girl—until he led her into the core of the water’s tumult, around a slippery path of stone, behind the powerful curve of the cataract’s glassy screen. There reared the great, vaulted hollow of a cave, its rough ceiling reaching high into shadow. And to the rear of the cavern, an outline of something not defined by nature.

Had they not gleamed with a faint light of their own, they would have been barely visible in the misted gloom, but they stood displayed to their full height of about sixty feet—double doors of cast green-gold metal set in an archway, magnificently decorated and uncompromisingly sealed.

In here, between stone and water, the shout of the falling river deafened the intruders. The Ertishman did not even attempt to speak but laboriously led the girl across the slippery floor of the cave’s mouth and out by a path on the other side of the cataract. Pastel daylight greeted them as they exited the cavern. Sinking to a water-polished stone beside the boiling basin he had already named “the porridge pot,” the Ertishman panted heavily.

“Up there,” he shouted, waving a hand at the cliff rising at his back, “is a small tunnel into the mines hidden behind those doors.”

When he had recovered his breath they walked back along the riverbank. A short distance downstream they found a suitable camping place, beside a quiet pool where ancient trees with tangled roots hung over the banks. Here they rested, while he explained further.

“The bloke with the map described the doors to me. I think I can crack them. The old tales tell of such wizardly barriers, which open not to a key such as ye can put in your pocket, but to a rhyme or a riddle’s answer. The clue is written on them, for those who can read it.

“My friend with the map, he and his comrades discovered this place by accident. They had a trained capuchin with them. They could not open the doors, so they delved with sticks and made the little tunnel in the cliff. The creature wormed its way in, bringing out lump after lump of andalum-foiled king’s-biscuit—as well as some of the stuff that was not protected, which flew up into the skies and was lost. The tunnel was too tight for a man’s girth, but they met with stones in its walls and had no picks or shovels to dislodge them and make the passage wider. They departed to fetch equipment from Gilvaris Tarv but met with ill chance. The map-maker’s comrades were surprised by wights of unseelie odor—he himself escaped, only to be later waylaid, and his sildron was stolen. He ended up in a cell, sick with some disease borne by the rats there or possibly by Culicidae’s poisonous tongues. That was where I found him. He spoke truth, it seems, but I had to see for myself. I need proof of this mine. With evidence of its wealth, I can get a secret expedition of trusty stalwarts to return here with me and load up ore by the barrowful. I could not bring a pick and shovel on the black brig, nor a capuchin—the boyos would have eaten it, like as not, and the shovel as well. But if I can crack those doors, we will not need any of that. Doors were made to open—there must be some way.” He sighed and scratched his chin. “By the fires, there stands a portal! Such gates could have been fashioned only by the greatest masters of wizardry!”

That night Imrhien could ward off slumber no longer but was engulfed in the black drowning pool of it and did not surface until middle-day. On awakening she thought she dreamed at last, for a feast was spread beneath the trees. Chewing noisily and dribbling down his beard, her companion tossed a rosy orb into her lap.

“Hoe into it, Your Ladyship. Plenty more where that came from—trees and vines full of fruits, all different colors and flavors. A right banquet. Strangest plants I’ve ever seen, but I have been gorging on them like twenty-eight pigs with no ill effects.

“Yet,” he added, suddenly recalling meals aboard the pirate brig.

The rosy orb had the sweetness of ripe strawberries. The inside of a thick-rinded one was doughy and smacked of new-baked bread. Ere long, a large pile of cores and rinds built up beside the picnic.

Afterward, Imrhien climbed a short way up the vine-hung cliff and easily found the capuchin’s entrance—the passage, dark and small, bored back into the wall of stones and clay. She was narrow-hipped enough to fit through, but the closeness of the fit and the complete lightlessness and mystery of what lay beyond were too terrifying to contemplate. A long branch poked into the tunnel met with nothing.

She clambered down and found Sianadh sitting on the rocky floor of the cave behind the waterfall, his shaggy head tilted back. He was studying the doors intently.

A marvelous eagle with a seven-foot wing-span dominated the archway directly over the meeting of the portals. Proud and regal it was, with eyes that glittered. Every pinion was carved in fine detail. The rest of the arch was covered with all manner of birds and beasts represented accurately, in masterly design. The doors themselves were framed with twining leaves and bore extensive runic inscriptions. These, the man was trying to decipher.

“I be certain that these runes hold the key,” he yelled against the torrent’s rage. “There must be some trick or password to open these doors. I propose we remain at Waterstair for as long as it takes to discover the key.”

At these words, an odd sensation gripped his companion: a shuddering coldness. She ran out of the cave into sunlight, but it was several minutes before the sickness passed. When she returned, the Ertishman was still staring at the doors, oblivious of her erstwhile disappearance.

“The writing on these doors be not Ertish or common Feorhkind,” he shouted, “nor any I have seen. It is some ancient high script, from which our younger languages, mayhap, have derived. Reckon I have a fair chance of figuring it out. I be not unlearned. Then we open the doors, dig out as much as we can carry, and return to the city. We sell what we have brought, deck ourselves out in fine and courtly array, and bring my nephew Liam and his most trusted comrades back here to excavate the rest.”

The city. People would stare, in that place, and revile a deformed waif. But then again, all hope lay there—perhaps a cure for skin poisoning, perhaps yellow-haired folk in the street crowds—relatives, name-givers.

The girl went off to gather fresh food. The unidentified fruits, after being picked, lasted only for half a day before they withered. But they were delectable, and she craved them with a hunger she had never known, as if for the first time she tasted truly nourishing provender, food that made her limbs wake to a tingling strength that penetrated to the very roots of her hair. The closest fare to these delicacies had been the passionfruit near fuath-haunted Fincastle’s Mill.

As she finished piling up the provisions for their next meal, the sound of the waterfall drew her. She walked upstream to look at it again, to marvel at its power and beauty. “Waterstair,” Sianadh had called this place—a name deciphered from the barely legible word scrawled on his map. Imrhien noticed now that above the fall’s lip the escarpment rose even higher. On a cliff above the cataract, long threads of water hung glinting like the tinsel on Persefonae’s gowns. This was indeed a many-stepped stairway. Perhaps there was another entrance up there, behind or beside the higher waterfall. Although Imrhien’s feet were still chafed and bootless, curiosity motivated her. The vine-covered, creviced cliffs would be easy to climb, worth exploring. She found a toehold and kicked into it.

From the top of the cliff, between the sun-washed tops of the trees of the river-vale below, a bird’s-eye view opened. To the east, hills rolled away for miles toward a hazy horizon. In the west, the dark mass of the pine forest marched grimly into a violet distance.

The sky opened out overhead. Six thousand feet high, the clouds that Stormriders called “altocumulus castellanus” were unfolding vertically in towerlike extensions. Above this skyscape of salt-white castles, fibrous cirrus streamed across the sky in feathered filaments, as strong jet streams at thirty thousand feet swept ice crystals from the clouds.

But at Imrhien’s back there was no view, for it was blocked by a rearing face of soil and stone, draped with greenery. It was the second step, rising nearly as high as the first, and the river spilled vertiginously over it on its way down from the melting heights of cold Crowsteeple. A long pool footed this upper cataract, a pool in a granite bowl with sheer sides and no path leading behind the gush. But a glorious vine spilled over the rock face, bearing clusters of perfumed purple pearls. While gathering them in handfuls, Imrhien discovered, behind the cascade of leaves, an opening.

This was no confining, lightless hole like the capuchin’s tunnel, but a tall, clean passage of split rock lit by glowing ears of fungus that clung to the walls. As she followed the corridor’s curve, the sound of applause grew loud in her ears. She had begun to believe that she approached a hall filled with thousands of clapping hands, when it turned out to be merely water, falling from a height. After rounding the last bend, Imrhien brushed past a stone pedestal and came face-to-face with a crowd.

As still as stone, she stood gaping.

As still as stone, they stared back at her.

The cul-de-sac terminated in an airy, high-roofed cavern in the rock beneath the upper falls. Light slanted in through some high vent, in long crystals and golden splinters, and illuminated the occupants—a concourse, a multitude of forms and faces that might have been the source of the applause.

Of stone they were fashioned.

Stark stone, rich jet-black obsidian glossed with highlights—that was the mode of one-half of the gathering. The other half glistened pristine, with a snow-on-snow whiteness. All the figures stood as large as life, and as realistic, for they were marvelously chiseled. Kings and queens, armored knights, tall-hatted wizards, and all manner of foot soldiers—pikemen, bowmen, axemen, others with spears or swords—posed betwixt four crenellated towers only ten feet high. These towers, atop which stone birds perched, stood positioned at the corners of a quartz-mounted stage, a platform faultlessly inlaid with a checkered marquetry of black marble alternating with niveous onyx. Utterly still they posed under the silver hair of the falls. Yet flickering shadows subtly lent them false animation.

After long moments their visitor approached, prowling warily among the statues. She was like a coiled spring, ready to bounce up and flee should any unseelie activity erupt.

Oddly attractive, the figures possessed some indescribable alien quality in the sense that the sudden, swift movements of birds and the breathing of fish and the navigation of migratory seabirds are foreign to humankind yet also closer to the world’s elemental forces. Perfect were they in every detail, and although there clung about them an invisible breath or emanation, an intangible quality that betokened great age, no sign of age defaced them; no water-blur, no chipping, stain, or growth. To touch them was to touch cold silk, so fine-grained and polished were the surfaces.

Each profile, each trapping and ornament, stood out as crisply as a carving that had been finished only an hour since. One would have expected to see the cavern’s floor littered with stone-dust in flakes and slivers, yet it remained as clean as though it had been freshly swept.

So exquisitely delineated was the hair of their heads, the pointed petals of the rowel spurs, the thong-lacings on sword-belts, every ring and rivet of the chain mail, the pinnacles and crockets ornamenting the kings’ scabbards, the long graceful draperies, the pointed shoes, the jeweled cauls covering the hair of the two queens and the veils fluttering down their backs like translucent sheets of water—so lifelike it all was that, save for their immobility, the figures might not have been stone at all, but frozen in death.

No giant doors frowned upon this rough-hewn cavity, but glassy quartzlike pebbles studded the walls at random. By the archway opening onto the passage from which she had just entered, there rose a pedestal in the shape of a salmon. On its head, the fish carried a waterlily, and in the centre of the open flower lay three left-handed gauntlets, unpaired, and—like the statues—unimpaired. Intricate runic patterns flowed over the overlapping metal joints on each finger. The fish-scales of the cuffs shone as if newly oiled. At odds with such extraordinary craftsmanship, they had been fashioned from cheap metals—red copper—miraculously untarnished—blue andalum, and yellow talium. Imrhien picked up the copper one, examining it with a half-formed intention to take it back for Sianadh to see. A sidelong glance at the centuries-wise stone multitude made her think better of the idea. She replaced the cold metal thing and departed.

<<I watch. I see. What?>>

These signs, among the few Imrhien had learned, were the closest approximations to the message she was trying to communicate. Yet they were far from satisfactory.

“I swear, chehrna, that my next task after these doors open will be to teach ye every word I know of handspeak. What ails ye? What have ye found?”

By dint of drawings in the dirt and copious, extravagant gestures, the girl eventually described what she had seen on the cliff top.

“Kings-and-Queens?” Sianadh’s eyes lit up. “Big statues on a game-board? What were they made of—gold and jewels? I must climb up and see.…”

His companion shook her head, intending to convey they were not golden or bejeweled and that he, with a cracked rib, should not risk a climb. The latter point he realized soon enough when, with a roar of agony, he gave up his mountaineering attempt, having achieved no greater altitude than eight feet.

Imrhien made a hand-sign of doors opening. Surprisingly, he grasped her meaning.

“Aye, of course, lass. Ye’re saying there might well be another entrance up there—doors hidden in the walls, to open for whosoever moves the game pieces rightly. Aye, that’s it! I reckon ’tis a test of worthiness for those who would open the doors to the treasure. Only the cunning deserve to succeed. Winning must be the key. Can the pieces be moved?”

They were too heavy. She shook her head, then remembered the gauntlets. Her thoughts churned. The statues would move if prompted by a hand that wears one of those gloves. The obvious solution!

Frustrated, unable to give expression to her inspiration, the girl stamped a foot in an uncharacteristic display of temper. Eloquently she appealed to Sianadh with her eyes.

He grasped her chin in his hand, gently.

“Ye have my word on it—I shall teach ye the ’speak. But first I be wanting to teach ye the playing of Kings-and-Queens. Fortunate ye be, for ye’re looking at the best Kings-and-Queens player in all of Finvarna, which bountiful country—may I tread her green turf once more afore I die, and may that death be by drowning in a barrel of vintage Lochair Best—which country be renowned for the skill of its inhabitants at the Battle Royal. Unbeaten, I be. If ye get those pieces in checkmate, then by some clever mechanism a door may open in the side of the cliff, and ye and I shall soon be rich beyond our wildest dreams. And I cannot speak for ye, but my dreams be wilder than a creel full of fur-spitting gray-malkins.’

Sianadh took a cake of ocher clay and drew some squares on a flat rock beside the river. Sticks and pebbles masqueraded as sovereigns and battle-hardy warriors.

“This be a checkmate layout,” he said, setting the pieces in position to demonstrate. “The woods have captured the king of the stones.”

<<How?>>

“Nay, ye do not need to know how it is arrived at. Only move the pieces from each army into this position that ye see here. Memorize it. It should suffice.”

<<No.>>

“But up there on the cliff ye have no opponent. Ye cannot play Kings-and-Queens by yerself.…” <<Yes.>>

“Yes what?” Exasperated, the Ertishman flushed to his ears. “Are ye telling me that ye have an opponent up there?”

<<Yes.>> It was an intuitive guess. A powerful spell has been woven about the game pieces. Success will not be gained easily.

Sianadh expelled a capitulary sigh and rolled his eyes.

“The object of the contest,” he began, “be to knock off the other person’s king before he knocks off yours.…”

Hours elapsed. Absorbed in strategies there in the faded jade shade of the glade, the two companions were not aware how swiftly time fled by, as silent as a silver horse on dainty cloven hooves. Night overtook them, and they must sleep.

The next day, Imrhien climbed the cliff and made her way to the gallery of the stone figures. The waterfall’s applause seemed fainter, a muted hush as of the wind through distant woodlands. Why this should be so was a mystery. It was as though something had caught the attention of the water, which, having for centuries hurtled carelessly over the cliffs, had now focused its awareness on its surroundings—as though Waterstair had drawn breath and were waiting. Timidly she stepped to the fish pedestal and took up the gauntlet of talium, cold and ganoid. Its casing slid over her slender hand like a shell encompassing some pale and vulnerable sea-creature. The game pieces watched, with mineral eyes.

The girl expected that at any moment something shocking might occur—the crowd would come alive and attack her, rend her to shreds with their blades, run her through with their spears—or the cavern wall would gape and a ghastly hand would whip out and snatch her up to be devoured, or the roof would collapse, entombing her forever in the dark, with the statues pressing in on her, leaning hard against her rib cage until the last breath was crushed out.

Drawing courage like a sword, she walked across the tiles to an infantryman in ice-white mail who, spear in hand, stood guarding the alabaster queen. There was no face for her to look at, only the bleached visor of his sallet. At his back the tall lily-queen, proud-visaged, stared ahead as at some distant cloud-palace—a formidable lady.

An impulse to beg for indulgence, if not mercy, welled up in the girl, but she bowed in lieu of that and, with her gauntleted left hand, pushed the queen’s guard in the back. At once a slot opened in front of him, with a slight sound of stone scraping on stone, barely audible over the sigh and silk-rustle of the falls. He slid along it with a faint clockwork whir and halted at the next square. The slot closed smoothly and clicked.

Imrhien had not been slow to react. She had gone flying off to the side of the cavern. Braced against the wall, she fixed the game pieces with a wide-eyed stare. After a pause, another grating noise eventuated. The black queen’s infantryman had matched the white’s move. Almost it seemed the two repositioned soldiers glared balefully, brandishing their weapons as though they would lift them, strike, and lift again, and then the ringing clash of battle would commence. Would they bleed milk and ink?

Imrhien held herself ready to flee.

Yet frozen the warriors remained. Not another move was to be had out of them.

After a few minutes of the same, the girl stepped forward and pushed another soldier in the back. She had begun to lead the charge—the wintry army’s attack against night.

That afternoon, down in the twilight Cave of Doors, she came upon the Ertishman. The lower cataract shouted white noise. If you stared at the racing water for too long, you felt as though you were falling upward. Imrhien gazed at it gloomily, stumbled, and steadied herself against the wall, grazing her elbow.

“So,” shouted Sianadh over the shouting, “ye lost the game.”

Morosely, the girl nodded. The black army had beaten the white. After the game concluded, the combatants had moved back to their original positions and the discarded gauntlet had corroded to nothing, in a rain of blackish flakes. In horror she had flung it from her hand even as it decayed.

Sianadh sourly scrutinized the rune-doors one last time. They left the cave and sat together in the leafy shade along the riverbank. Ferns overhung the water. In the clear depths, the long leaves of water-plants stretched and swayed languorously along the current. The river eddied against fallen branches, bubbled around rocks, sang to itself.

“No matter, no matter,” muttered Sianadh, half to himself, “I have solved much of this runic riddle, methinks. The symbols over those great doors be like Ertish in some ways, and the words I have deciphered have an echo of meanings known to me or guessed. But I do not know enough of them to make sense of it. See what ye can build of them—there is something about ‘quiet raiment,’ and ‘rising up.’ Then the words speak of the ‘houses of champions’ and something else about ‘strength’ and ‘singing melodiously,’ and a good deal about ‘water.’ Can ye fathom it?… Nay?” He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Below this riddle be written a set of twenty-nine runes that form no words at all. Alas, I need further clues. But I’ll not surrender, I’ll strive all the harder for this setback. Now, let us practice the Battle Royal with our set of wood and stone, and mayhap ye will win your game before I solve my puzzle. Remember now—ye strategically position the pieces and then strike. When ye can fight using tactics as cunning as my own, almost, ye shall climb Waterstair again.”

She climbed Waterstair again. This time she picked up the blue gauntlet, the gauntlet of andalum. Night versus day, shadow against light, the carven armies struggled in the age-old contest, yet there was a dance to it—the one side the shadow of the other, the other the reflection of the one, as perhaps is true of adversaries of flesh.

Yet in the second conflict, the andalum gauntlet failed also. Like the talium, it aged swiftly to dust in the aftermath of defeat, as chalk-white matrix and coal-black matrix rasped softly back into formation. What would happen if the challenger lost a third game? Would the last glove merely crumble and no opportunity be left for adventurers who came in later days? Perhaps the rocky corridor might bar itself against the loser alone but remain open to others, while three new gauntlets climbed the stone pedestal with their fingers and lay there like waiting armadillos. Perhaps a sudden rock-fall would, after all, crush the failed challenger, as punishment for lack of cunning and for the temerity of challenging the clever makers of the statues.

“One chance left.” Sianadh sucked his teeth again. “Yan, tan, tethera. Third time lucky, as they say.”

For three days they played Kings-and-Queens, hour after hour. How pleasant it was, at night, to sink into dreamless sleep where no warriors of light and dark slew one another in the ballet of silent, civilized, symbolic warfare.

Sunrise washed the treetops with dilute gold.

“May all fortune be on your side, Imrhien. And if ye do not win this time, I shall never forgive ye!”

The Ertishman’s strong bellow, proving his lungs undamaged by their cracked cage, reached to the cliff top. Imrhien waved back, then threw aside the vine-curtain and slipped down the rock passage, eager yet dreading the last attempt.

This time I shall command the black army.

The glove slipped easily over her hand. Red gauntlet, with you my dark warriors shall win. She lifted her head and regarded the black host. Grimly they stared straight ahead, as always—at least, it was to be assumed that the knights whose faces were obscured by helms were also gazing blankly into the distance. Coal-ebony-sable lady, warrior queen of night, go with fury into battle. Shadow, eclipse light.

There would seem an inevitability about this last trial. Third time lucky …

She pushed the black queen’s wizard’s spearman.

The game, slow and subtle, tense and attenuated, stretched from morning to afternoon and then to evening. Imrhien pondered every move, plundered each one for its utmost variety of possibilities. She sustained herself with water from the river, fruit from the vine, thoughts of hope for Sianadh and his optimistic plans.

On the walls of the statue-cave, the luminosity of the quartzlike embedded gems and the fungous growths increased. Night had drawn its dim veil. The girl took it as a good omen. Yet she knew that even then, victory might go either way.

Night dragged on. Through darkness the game progressed. The challenger allowed herself no sleep, although the grass was soft and inviting and the heat of Summer high. Instead she sat cross-legged, her clouded eyes masking inner visions of a thousand scenarios, a thousand thundering battle-plains. The snow queen proved herself a canny adversary, Winter of course being a hardened veteran of many battles. Prisoners of war lay scattered on the border tiles around the platform, their prostration revealing the swivel hinges under their bases that had attached them to the board’s hidden mechanisms and would probably do so again. Morning saw Imrhien and her swarthy battalion hard-pressed, defending against a brutal assault from the white host. Night was retreating now, both within the cavern and without. Winter closed in around the tall, dark king, threatening to freeze him to death.

Late afternoon suffused the hollow with an amber softness, like tufts of saffron-dyed wool. Imrhien’s head swam with weariness.

And suddenly, the black king lost his lover. The queen of night was taken, and he was left undefended, threatened on all fronts. There was nowhere to run. Doom had descended on the battlefield, and there could be only defeat for the tall dark monarch.

Imrhien’s shoulders tensed. Her hair tingled on her scalp. She waited for some final blow, some catastrophe to sweep away the unsuccessful challenger. They stood, the game pieces, their visages changeless. No smile of triumph warmed the ice-pale faces, no look of despair weighed down the polished black brows. The slender snow-lily regina and her knights held the dark lord prisoner.

Nothing happened.

The red gauntlet, the copper, began to fray upon her hand. She threw it down, relieved, tired, dispirited, fed up. Third time unlucky.

From the cavern she fled, and cast herself on the grassy apron at its mouth. Such foolish ambition, such presumptuousness! How could she, a novice, hope to defeat the wisdom of ages? Let her leave this place. Let Sianadh forget his foolish dreams. The concept of wealth easily gained was but a madman’s cipher. Reality was only poverty, ugliness, and homelessness. Beneath this cliff, under the very ground on which she lay—and overhead also—existed nothing but dirt, cold stones, blind worms, and sunless hollows, fathoms deep.

She rolled over and lay sprawled on her back, summoning the strength to climb down and face the Ertishman. High in the rich mazarine blue of the evening sky, the first stars were pricking through. Some sparkled more brightly than others. The girl’s thoughts strayed. Sianadh had said he could see these same stars in his home country. What constellations described themselves up there in the daisy fields of the sky, and how were they named? One group of stars stood out, white points so brilliant that they were like the dazzle of sunlight on water.

She counted them—yan, tan, tethera times tethera. These stars burned with a brilliant silver-white flame in contrast with the fainter garnet-red and topaz-yellow sparkles in their vicinity. Even their positions seemed significant—a line joining the bright stars might form a curve here, a point there—

It came to the star-gazer that a marked resemblance existed between the gemmy scatters on the cavern walls and the starry patterns in the sky. Those bright shiners now—what had the Ertishman once told her concerning them?

Abruptly she leaped to her feet and ran back into the cave.

Nothing had altered. The fallen lay where they had crashed. The statues that remained standing loomed gray in the waning light. Reaching up, Imrhien touched the glowing gems of the wall, each in turn. The point of a beak, a ceres, an avian head, an eye—now her hand swept down the long, graceful neck to the curve of the wing. The nine stones gleamed like white fire caught in globules of water. One after the other, she brushed them with her fingertips, confirming, in awe and wonder, that they matched the constellation pulsing overhead, the sign of the Swan. She fancied each one sank a little into its socket and sprang back. These stones had been placed just so.

This, this at last was the key.

Had it been so simple, all along?

The grumble of heavy stone was a phenomenon she had expected, but its source was not. It had split in half, the tessellated game board, and was sliding apart. Jumping back to a safe distance, the girl watched the crack widen to reveal broad stairs spiraling down under the ground. An entrance—but where might it lead? To a treasure hoard or to some ancient dungeon, long inhabited by monsters or unseelie wights? The hammering of her heart filled her senses, drowning all other sounds. Sianadh—she must go back for him. She could not venture down there alone, could not go at all into that well of cold stones, blind worms, and sunless cavities. She stood still, unwilling to leave what had been so hard-won and might vanish if she looked away.…

In subterranean darkness, the walls of the spiral staircase shone softly yet were not studded with the same bluish phosphorescent fungi as the stone passageway. This glow was mellow gold, like the leaves of poplars in Autumn. It radiated up from below.

Something lurks down there, for certain, to make such a shining! It seemed not an eerie light—rather, it looked benign yet somehow untamed—like the shine of a lamp in a window at night, but not as domestic; like the glimmer of candlelight upon ripe bullion it was perilous to covet; like the soft light of a harvest sunset or long, low shafts of morning at the waning of the year.

Sianadh was unfit to climb. He could not help her. Was she to go back to him now and confess cowardice, in the face of his blustering bravado? After he had risked his life for her more than once, could she not do the same in the cause of pursuing his dream? A sudden recklessness seized her. She bowed low to the statuettes made of moonbeams and the figurines wrought of captured shadow. Before she could change her mind, Imrhien plunged down the stair beneath the stair.

Here where the sun never shone, a bone-coldness permeated—the intense frigidity of stone that had never quickened to the touch of the daystar. Yet even though the river flowed somewhere high above, no dampness reached out clammy fingers or slid weeping down the walls. The air was not dank or musty or tinged with the odors of subterranean centuries—soil, stone, roots, pale, soft-bodied things that hid from light—instead it was as sweet as the free and blowing airs of the upper world, which carried the scent of flowers and leaves and the subtle freshness of clear skies. Whoever had designed the system of ventilation shafts had achieved a wondrous feat—it was surely an efficient arrangement, built to last. The engineers of this substructure could only have been masters of their art.

Knowing little of mines, the intruder treading the stairs understood enough to suspect that this was not one at all. Exactly what it was, beyond a long, terraced spiral bathed in dim golden light, could not be guessed.

It was hard to estimate how far down the stairway took her. She was wondering whether the corkscrew drove headlong forever into the deeps when an archway opened before her and her skin prickled as though an unstorm were rolling in. After leaping down the last few treads, she stepped through the opening to behold a staggering, muted glory.

The arch gave on to a gallery halfway up the wall of an immense, high-vaulted chamber. On the floor below, thousands of baffling shapes gleamed faintly. They were piled high and crowded as far as the eye could penetrate. From them emanated the pale golden shining. Imrhien’s hand flew to her pocket. The four-leafed clover remained reassuringly there—this was no glamorous illusion. The stairway now led her down the inner wall. Slowly she progressed, scarcely breathing, her hair crackling and lifting of its own accord as though she moved under water, her gaze caressing the mass of treasure, of incalculable wealth, revealed in this cold subterranean shining. Around the trove pulsed an eerie force like the unstorm and the world’s storm combined, dangerously exhilarating, invisible, but already dissipating up the stair as if fleeing through this new rupture.

If a cornucopia of gorgeousness had been spilled at her feet, all sense of time was snatched away in exchange. How long she wandered in the treasury, she forgot to remember. At every turn, some new and wondrous object appeared to hand—gold cups and plates ornamented with jewels, silver-gilt candlesticks, ornate nefs, porringers, cast-gold aquamaniles shaped like lions with their tails arched across their backs to form handles, all manner of tableware, carven chairs inlaid with ivory or gold and silver wire, richly chased and engraved caskets filled with jewels, ropes of pearls, bracelets, rings, torques, gold-mounted cameos and intaglios, fine chains and gem-crusted girdles, shirts of mail, gauntlets, helms, greaves, cuirasses floridly engraved, etched and embossed with gold or silver—an entire armory—and weapons of an unknown metal, honed spite-sharp; damascened swords with ornately pierced or chiseled guards and mounts, gemmed scabbards fretted with precious metals, battle-axes, halberds, partisans, glaives, spears, pikes, lances, and jewel-pommeled daggers—a complete arsenal. Among these were many curious artifacts whose purpose could not be guessed. All possessed the same virtue as the statues at the overhead entrance, a supernatural beauty that could not possibly have been wrought by the hand of man. And all remained untouched by dust or decay, as if Lord Time were powerless here.

Garments were here also, folded in chests. It was not until her teeth began to chatter that Imrhien became aware of the aching cold eating at her bones like poison. She donned a sleeveless shirt of some lightweight gray fabric, a garment that seemed narrow enough to fit. In a moment of panic she thought her stair lost and sought it wildly, for it was out of view on the far wall. While she searched, her gaze came to rest upon the wall close at hand, in which was set a pair of double doors about sixty feet high.

She approached them and put out her hand. At a light touch they swung open, outward.

Beyond lay an even greater cavern—so vast that its ceiling and walls would have been out of sight even had they been lit by a conflagration of torches. What towered there surrealistically, like white flame, made the treasure in the first cave seem almost mundane by comparison. Mounted on shadowy crosshatchings of gantries, stanchions, transoms, and davits, a marvel shimmered; a thing out of legend. Fashioned in the shape of a swan, gleaming, ready to unfurl and fly across the water with her sails and rigging all in place, here loomed a full-size threemasted barquentine.

She was all white, except where she was silver. Her beams of bleached wood were everywhere carved like feathers, each pinion white-enameled. Taffrails, binnacle—every article of metal that would have been made of brass on another craft was here fashioned of polished silver, untarnished. Sails lay heaped along the yards like snow. The figurehead was a swan, and it lent the only color to the white ship. The ceres was a startling band of garnets like drops of blood, and almonds of jade formed the eyes.

Beside this queen of ships, the girl felt herself diminished to a child’s toy. Caged in supporting fretwork, the aero-keel rose in a perfect curve far above her head, to where the great hull opened out like a giant lily. The graceful lines of the long planks were sculpted into feathers, as streamlined as the flanks of a bird.

Walking beside this vision of splendor, gazing up in awe, Imrhien saw that the elegant swan figurehead faced a second set of tall doors. These also gave under the slightest pressure of her hands and swung back to admit a blinding blare of light and noise and a roaring, living giant brandishing a spear, his arm drawn back, ready to strike her down.

Beside a river that clove its way through miles of wilderness, far from human habitation, peppercorn trees spread their boughs, dripping swaths of long leaves over a glade carpeted with springy turf.

Here stood a chair.

High-backed, this incongruity was fashioned from some dark, rubicund wood—possibly mahogany—inlaid with hammered red gold, embellished with garnets, studded with blushing rose-crystals. The feet had been carved to represent sprays of leaves, but the arms and sides and three-pointed back blossomed with a relief of poppies.

A second piece of furniture faced the first—another chair, this time of blanched pearlwood. It was the twin of the first in size and design, but ornamented with green enamel and diamonds, sculpted with lilies. Between them squatted a low table of small dimensions; it was fashioned of walnut with silver and amethysts, and its motif was the cornflower. The table was laden with a motley array of silver dishes and golden bowls—and cups, each one hollowed from a single burning crystal, and chalices twined with gold-leafed grapevines whose fruits were emeralds. Among these fake fruits, a cocktail of real fruits had been heaped. Their juices filled the cups and also filled an upturned helm that lay under some bushes next to a standing armor of lustrous yellow metal damascened with fine silver foliates.

From the open mouths of exquisite boxes and caskets and gable-lidded arks with cock’s-head hinges, jewelry spilled out across the grass. Red gold in alloy with copper, yellow gold, and pale electrum had been used to produce the effect of different shades of gold, thin layers that were chased in relief and carefully inlaid to create contrasting patterns over the sides and lids of many containers. On others, a gold or silver ground had been elaborately carved out, then filled with transparent enamel to give the appearance of intaglio gems. The rest were decorated with lavishly ornate combinations of mother-of-pearl, ivory, amber, horn, bone, leather, lacquer, silver, and precious stones.

Handfuls of coins, flung in childish glee by Sianadh, lay glinting in the ferns like leaves discarded from metal trees, bright argentum, and scalding gold.

Seated on the poppy chair, the big red-haired man now tossed over his shoulder an empty goblet of chased silver and leaned toward lmrhien in the lily throne. His hands danced, portraying every word.

“We” (indicating himself and her) “are as rich as” (beginning with both extended index fingers pointing forward apart from each other, he brought them together, then raised his right hand up from the left and ended with a claw hand, palm down) “all” (making a large loop with his right hand) “the double-dealing” (pushing his index finger across his chin) “filthy” (with the knuckles of his hand under his chin, he wiggled his fingers) “fat pigs” (rocking his thumb and little finger on the opposite palm like a fat person waddling, then holding his downturned right hand under his chin and moving the fingers simultaneously up and down) “of Luindorn merchants” (forming the L-rune, followed by the miming of counting money) “put together.” (His fists made a clockwise horizontal circle.) Throwing back his head, the Ertishman roared with laughter. Then he settled himself back in the chair—which was padded with torn grass for comfort—and took up a brimming cup, sampling it with a satisfied air and watching the girl over the gleaming rim as she repeated every sign, almost to perfection.

“Ye left the fat out of the pig part.”

Having corrected his student’s error, he went to check on the helm of fruit juice, which, optimistically, he was trying to coax to ferment into something stronger. Imrhien remained reclining in the priceless chair, reveling in the glow of success. Idly she flipped gold coins in the sunlight. They winked light and dark as they spun. She had never even touched gold before—not that she could remember.

There had been one appalling moment, when she had opened the rune-doors from within and stepped out under the lower waterfall, only to be mistaken for an unseelie wight and almost killed by the startled Ertishman. In her fright she had mistaken him for a spear-wielding ogre. But since that time, joy had reigned—peppered with the odd frisson of alarm, a feeling that had become almost familiar to the girl during her journeyings with Sianadh. Now Imrhien recalled with amusement the astonishment written on his features, as she emerged from the opening portals of the “mine.” In the instant of recognition he had frozen like a rough-hewn copy of a game piece, arm upraised, mouth gaping. Then the staff had dropped from his hand, accompanied by assorted Ertish expressions dropping from his lips. It was several minutes before she could get any coherent conversation from him, and that had been barely intelligible.

Then he had surged between the open doors at a limping run—a gait that (he grudgingly admitted later) had been caused by his climbing the bluff in search of her, passing out owing to the effects of the exertion on his damaged ribs, and waking to find himself lying flat on his back with a swollen ankle. Fortunately, the sight of abundant wealth seemed to act as an effective remedy for agony. Sianadh, crowing, lost himself for most of the day in the ship-cavern and the inner storehouse beyond. Infected by his excitement, or perhaps by some innate quality of the treasure, his companion forgot her weariness and joined him.

There had been another terrifying instance when, emerging with a silvery candlebranch in hand, Imrhien had been wrenched off her feet, to hurtle into the air at a breathtaking rate. Too late she had realized that the silver was, in fact, sildron. On releasing the object, she had fallen instantly some ten feet, to be clumsily caught by Sianadh, who deposited her on the ground in a careless heap.

“The caves be floored with andalum, girl! Be careful what ye bring into the open. Oghi ban Callanan, ye nearly broke my back to match my ribs and foot—ye’ll be the death of the Bear!”

She frowned, misliking his choice of words.

Now a nine-branched candlestick would he floating somewhere in the upper layers of air, to be scooped by the salvage nets of some passing trade-ship or pirate jackal.

By the end of the day they had wedged open the doors with stones, furnished and redecorated their campsite, and gathered a conglomeration of fruits. It was time to feast in celebration of success.

“Two days and two nights, Imrhien, ye were away up there. And ye wonder why I went looking for ye! What a laugh—to think the doors would open to anyone who pressed the buttons in sequence. The game-board must simply have been set there for the door-makers to amuse themselves! Seems odd to me, but as they say, other races, other customs—eh, Imrhien? Ah, but no matter. All that stuff be irrelevant now—’tis the time for reveling.”

Thus began under Waterstair a happy period, a kind of golden era. Imrhien and Sianadh explored the trove, sometimes wandering awestruck in the caverns, at other times bearing chosen pieces into the sunlight. Their camping spot took on the effect of a splendid palace interior, sumptuously furnished, stamped in rich colors against a green backdrop of fern and foliage. Grass-heads tufted against inlaid mahogany table-legs. Precious stones glittered, heaped carelessly upon gray river-rocks. Birds alighted on crocketed chair-backs and on damasked helmets of war. Painted beetles crawled up the stems of chalices worth a peasant’s lifetime of labor and sometimes halted, looking as if they were part of the exquisite decoration thereon. Flowers bloomed like dyed silks in the same mosses that couched golden torques with eyes of ruby. It was indeed a surrealistic pageant.

The armors shone with the nacreous colors of seashells—gleaming greens, opalescent blues, silvers swift and pure, lustrous moon-gray, and the soft golds of sunrise.

“Do ye see these armors, d’ye see from what materials they be fashioned?” asked Sianadh, fascinated. “Not so much as a steel rivet amongst them. Many of these metals I have not before seen, but I have heard of such—the platinum and iridium so beloved of the Icemen, here in alloy silver white; chromium, gold, and silver; copper as bright as Muirne’s hair, dimmed by no patina of verdigris; yellow bronze and talium. I know not these even rarer types—here a metal as green as the ocean and there another blue as the evening sky—perhaps cobalt salts have been used—’tis a glasslike surface and seems like ceramic, yet is not brittle. No iron or steel can be found anywhere in this trove. Its makers misliked it for some reason.…”

He scratched his head deliberatively.

“I can only reckon on one reason.” He looked up. “Doch, there’s a wasp in the wine!” Distracted by concern for his fermenting fruits, he hurried off without elaborating.

During these days of leisure, when there seemed no need for much haste, Sianadh was wont to recline negligently among piles of gold and jewels, telling stories of his travels in the Known Lands of Aia, various scurrilous escapades—into which he had been drawn as an unwilling, innocent, and wrongly suspected participant—and of his sister, Ethlinn, who at the age of sixteen had fulfilled her ambition to become a fully fledged carlin, to their mother’s sorrow. On Littlesun Day in her sixteenth year, Ethlinn had received her carlin’s Staff from the Coillach Gairm, the eldritch hag of Winter. She had given up her powers of speech in return for the ability to wield the Staff. Sianadh spoke often of his youth in Finvarna. When he talked of his native land, a light would come into his eyes and a lilt entered his voice. His eyes misted, and he would gaze as if at some far-off place.

“The gaunt cliffs along the west coast of Finvarna be the westernmost edge of the Known Lands. There the gulls scream and crowd like snow on the heights. Beyond them, thundering, the terrible ocean stretches out darkly westward and northward to where the Ringstorm rages. All of Finvarna borders upon the ocean. In the west my land be wildly beautiful, desolate, a land of mountains, lakes, bogs, and rivers. Often ’tis shrouded in low curtains of cloud. Isolated, inhospitable, and rugged be the west—mysterious and wight-haunted. The people of that region work closely with seelie dwarves in metalwork: gold, silver, bronze, and copper. The land is as harsh as the folk are kindly, generous, and hospitable. We Erts welcome everyone into our homes—members of the family, friends and acquaintances, strangers, all alike. In Finvarna we do much visiting, for we be fond of news—and we dress for the occasion, and there might be a song or two when there be visitors. Above all else, we value eloquence and music. And playing Kings-and-Queens,” he added, and after a reflective pause, “and hurling. That’s a sport to live for. It is said the game was taught to my countrymen by the Strangers, in times long ago, before that race disappeared from the world. D’ye know of the game?… No? Here’s the sign for it. See, it is hitting a ball with sticks, like this.” He demonstrated.

“Not that I be overpatriotic, mind. Patriotism be the cause of many a young life lost on the fields of war. I be the King-Emperor’s man—an Erithan first, a Finvarnan second. Yet a place can call to ye, it can beckon to your very blood.” He sighed.

“In other parts, forest covers Finvarna, or wide-open rolling grassland, never enclosed by fences or walls. There the mighty herds of giant elk graze, and their antlers branching as wide as trees. Here and there ye might spy the ruins of small castles and tower-houses. South of the river lie rich farming lands, and that is where my mother’s folk came from. So fair, Finvarna. So far. Will I see it again? Ach! Why should I he getting meself heartsick for me home? Homesickness be a scourge—it devours the life that feeds it. Me grandmother allus used to say, ‘There be two days ye ought never to fash yerself with—yesterday and tomorrow.’”

Sometimes the shang wind blew. reviving no tableaux in this place where humankind rarely passed. Once or twice, at dusk, the girl glimpsed, on the edge of vision, a wild, white horse etched like ivory on the forest, its single horn a lance of moonlight—one of the elusive creatures that Sianadh called cuinocco.

At their leisure the treasure-finders discovered and rediscovered the secrets cached behind the rune-doors—treasures that, among their complexities, often seemed to shift position unaided. They examined and puzzled over them and chose what to take when they departed for the city. In the course of these incursions, they came upon a third and smaller side-chamber heaped with sildron bars and objects, some wrapped in andalum. To this the capuchin’s tunnel had penetrated.

But the fascination that drew them most was the swan-ship, mighty and beautiful. It was a ship fit for royalty. They left her until last, then hesitantly, with profound awe and respect, boarded her via the spidery ladders and catwalks supporting the deep scoop of her hull, to tiptoe across her gleaming decks and trace with trembling fingertips her immaculate fittings. Every separate feather was delineated on the folded-back wings. They were enameled in white and outlined in silver. Except for the jeweled eyes and ceres, everything glimmered moonshine and alabaster—glistening masts, white silken sheets, and shrouds.

“What a joy, to fly this queen of swans!” Sianadh gazed up at the yardarms. “The masts be too tall to fit her out of the doors. They would have to be dismantled before she could be rolled out, and ’twould be a task for many men.”

There were other joys. Sianadh had demanded to know where Imrhien had obtained the spidersilk vest.

“For”—he elaborated in his role of tutor—“spidersilk be twelve times stronger than iron and incomparably light. ’Tis stronger than a mail-shirt and more comfortable, but the cost of one would feed a common family for ten years. It all comes out of Severnesse—that country be full of spider-farms, but ’tis not a lucrative trade—so much silk is needed for just a square inch of fabric, and spiders be so unreliable.”

The trove revealed a veritable wardrobe of spidersilk. Sianadh carefully selected a suitable vest, then exclaimed, “Ah, to the fires with it. I deserve an entirely new outfit.”

He disappeared in a frenzied cloud of apparel, like a dog digging up a bone, and emerged clad in gray from head to ankle: a dagged doublet and full-sleeved shirt, a pleated jacket, ill-fitting hose cross-laced at the ankle, a kerchief tied rakishly over his head, and a long cloak fastened with a gold brooch. Not least, he sported a new belt of linked silver serpents’ scales buckled with an ornate clasp. Each scale was intricately engraved. Over this regalia he battened an armor of ridged lamellae in which he swaggered for half a day until the heat became unbearable and, rather irresponsibly, he abandoned his outer casing under a tree like some drab cicada reaching adulthood. Of his old clothes he retained only the habitual taltry and the stout boots.

Accordingly, the girl swapped her rags for spidersilk, too, folding a swatch of it into a soft-draped gown cinched at the waist with a girdle of beaten gold. In a fit of rashness she added gold rings, bangles, a filigree collar, and a circlet for her hair.

“Ye look fine! Gold be your color. Ye were right not to choose the silver.”

Embarrassed, sensing an odd discomfiture in Sianadh, she turned from the man and caught her own image reflected in a bronze mirror. Her belly knotted. A slender incarnation: narrow-waisted, exquisite as a doll from the neck down, the shoulder-length hair spilling thick and heavy as raw bullion, the face hideous as a gargoyle—such an obscenity seemed familiar, in a way that shocked her.

The rings and baubles clinked, landing in a heap, shucked quickly from her limbs. She exchanged the gown for baggy male attire.

The upper trapdoors, the two halves of the Kings-and-Queens game-board, had closed by themselves, quietly and (somewhat sinisterly) without warning. The pieces had returned to battle-ready formation, but no replacement gauntlets had appeared. Wishing to take no chance of being unaccountably and irreversibly locked in, the adventurers ensured that the lower portals in the Cave of Doors remained firmly wedged open.

The weather turned sultry.

Long gray lines of scud rolled in rapidly, ragged and low, driven by the South Wind. They blanketed the sky, pressing it down under their weight until it seemed that the firmament was supported only by the treetops. At first, the clouds released a spattering of warm raindrops, then it began to pour in earnest. Imrhien and Sianadh took shelter in the swan-ship cavern, where the rain’s patter was drowned out by the muted roar of the swelling waterfall. Sianadh took this opportunity to teach handspeak and to recite the history of the world, learned by rote, embellished by a few of his own amendments.

“Since ye don’t know anything, I’d better learn ye. Beginnin’ with the years before the Year 1, when the countries of Erith were not united, that was when they used to fight against one another,” he instructed. “As the tribes grew more numerous, these fights became wars—Eldaraigne, Namarre, Avlantia, Finvarna, and Severnesse were the main combatants, for Rimany and Luindorn had no central ruler like the others. Indeed, Luindorn was not then inhabited by men.

“At this time the Talith yellow-hairs, your own folk, were the most civilized and stately—far more so than the other three peoples. Their armies were efficient and well-equipped defense engines, but the Talith, they had no wish to extend their lands by invasion. They wished only to remain and flourish in Avlantia. My folk, the Erts, were always farmers in Finvarna. The white Icemen of Rimany, they were deadly fighters in their own country but like the Erts and the Talith had no desire to steal the lands of others. Icemen can thrive only in cold, sunless climates. If they come north, they must hide from our sun, so ye see, other lands are not much use to ’em.

“The Feorhkind, the brown-hairs like your sailor friends and those dogs of pirates, they be a warlike race. Over the span of many decades, or centuries—I forget which—they populated Eldaraigne, Namarre, Luindorn, and Severnesse, using Namarre as a penal colony at first. Some of the colony’s convicts escaped imprisonment to roam the weird regions of that northern country—which is why Namarre became a haunt of brigands. All of that happened a long time ago, before the Year 1.

“James D’Armancourt the First, he was called the Uniter, and he was a powerful and wise King of Eldaraigne. He united the countries of Erith by force and by wisdom, made of them an Empire. He seized power over the other countries by clever strategy and greater numbers, both by war and by treatying with their Kings. The first King-Emperor was he, in the period called the Uniting of the Kingdoms of Erith, or ‘Unity.’ There came to be peace under his reign. It was decided to use a new system to number the years, whereby the Year 1 was the Year of Unity. Before this, each country had used its own reckoning and all years were numbered differently.

“Long-lived and late to marry were the Kings of the House of D’Armancourt. The son of the Uniter, who succeeded him, was wise—but the son of his son seemed to be too impulsive and reckless to hold on to this fragile balance of power. Nevertheless, he changed for the best, as youths often do when the shrewdness of maturity has grown on them, and he ruled wisely from then on. Indeed, he became known as William the Wise.

“The Year 89, during the reign of William the Wise, was a terrible year. It is said that this time marked the passing of the Faêran, the Secret Race—or at least the vanishment of most of them—to the places beyond the Ringstorm or else to the hollow hills, or wherever immortals go when they tire of our world. There were fierce storms. It was then that the shang winds arose for the first time. The people did not know how to deal with these winds until William the Wise issued laws about the making of chain mesh hoods out of the talium trihexide and the Wearing of them. Also in this year of turmoil, sildron was first discovered and became, immediately, royal property. The Houses of the Stormriders were founded, and the Windship lines as well. Although a harsh year, it also marked the beginning of the Era of Glory, when, so they say, the few Faêran who remained worked together with the Talith to design and build the cities in every country, great cities such as the one we passed through in the forests of these mountains. The first men of the Dainnan also were gathered together, the King-Emperor’s special company—peacekeepers in those golden times, warriors in later days.

“The Faêran, like wights of eldritch, could not abide the touch of cold iron. And like wights, they never left an image on the shang whether bareheaded or no. The Feorhkind in their arrogance had taken to leaving their taltries off in an effort to imitate the Fair Folk. They tried to deny their passions so that they could pass through the unstorm without leaving imprints. It is said that ye can be in a shang storm without a taltry, but only if ye curb your passions, which is why Stormriders and others value control over anger and laughter and such. In backwaters and outliers like the Relay Stations, where they are so much in awe of the Fair Folk that they will not name them, or even speak of them aloud in company. many folk still think themselves noble if they show no passion.

“In the middle decades of the millennium came a time of terrible plague and war, beginning around the Year 561. It was called the Dark Era. This came about when the last of the Faêran who still lingered, perhaps growing weary of Erith, disappeared out of the world. The Faêran have not been seen since the beginning of the Dark Era. The remaining Talith dwindled rapidly, and their culture passed away, simply fading into the grass that grew among the ruins of their cities.

“It was then that the D’Armancourt Dynasty faltered. The King-Emperor was toppled from the throne of Eldaraigne and indeed of the Empire, and he fled into hiding with his family and retainers. Lawlessness spread throughout the lands. Weakened by pestilence, the countries were vulnerable to attack from Namarran raiders and outlaws, and evil wizards who had grown strong and formed rank alliances with things unseelie. It was then that the Stormriders and the Dainnan became warriors and remained so for three centuries.

“During the Dark Era, the Feorhkind took over the Ancient Cities. What with sickness and strife and unshielded heads, the Ancient Cities came to be haunted with afterimages and were eventually abandoned in favor of the older, less elaborate cities. Caermelor remained, having been built of dominite and the Wearing having been enforced there.

“More than two hundred years ago, the rightful heir to the High Throne arose, emerging from self-imposed obscurity. The D’Armancourt line, although hidden, had remained true throughout the long years. By then Edward the Eleventh, who was later called the Conqueror, had grown to a strength like unto his forefathers. Calling to his side the wisest men of Frith, a council of seven known as an Attriod, he amassed a great and powerful army. After a successful campaign he regained his throne and pushed the outlaws back to Namarre. Eight hundred and forty-nine was the Year of Restoration, two hundred and forty years ago.

“The D’Armancourt Dynasty first came to power over a thousand years ago, and today its strength is greater than ever. The wisdom and justice of its King-Emperors is undimmed through the generations—if anything, it seems to increase. Order was restored by Edward the Conqueror, but by then many of the secrets of the Era of Glory had passed out of mortal knowledge.

“This cache of treasure here, this be of Faêran make, no doubt. I reckon they left it here when they went away. And those fruits that grow hereabouts, they be not the germ of Erith—I would chance that they spring from seeds brought from the Lost Realm, sown or carelessly scattered centuries ago.”

The tale-teller fell silent.

A thousand unaskable questions seethed in the listener’s mind.

Sianadh deliberated long over what items he should select to take with them to Gilvaris Tarv.

“I cannot bear to leave any of it behind,” he announced despairingly, sitting on a pile of gold pieces and clad from head to toe in yet another armor of resplendent design, “but we must soon leave this place. I need meat. I cannot go on eating this Faêran fruit forever, no matter how tasty it be. My palate craves flesh.”

His attempts at river-fishing and juice-brewing having failed, the Ertishman mused wistfully and at length upon his grandmother’s cuisine and the various liquors of Finvarna.

“But first and foremost, ’twill be a delight to front up to my sister’s family with pockets full of candle-butter for them.”

<<What?>> signed the girl.

“Candlebutter? ’Tis another name for gold—gold is warm and ripe and yellow, like butter—and it buys candle-fire and hearth-food. Ach, I can behold their faces now—Ethlinn, my sister, the boys, Diarmid and Liam, and their sweet sister, Muirne. They have lived in poverty since Riordan was slain. Uncle Bear will soon change that!”

Ultimately and with regret, he decided to take some gold neck-chains, a few modest daggers, and three small caskets, one filled with antique gold pieces and a scattering of silver, one loaded with jewels, and the last, made of andalum, containing sildron bars.

“Small enough to smuggle through the streets under a cloak, unmolested,” he explained. “Heavy, but not unmanageably so. And—heark ye, Imrhien, we shall not have to carry them through the wilderness being chased by wights, for we shall build a raft!”

He paused expectantly, while the girl tried to force her hideous features into some semblance of an admiring expression.

“This scrawl of a map—such as it is—shows that this river goes on to marry the Rysingspill, which flows on right to where Gilvaris Tarv presides at its mouth like a great rotten carbuncle. We shall sit like lords and ladies on our raft and merely ride to town! What say ye?”

<<Unseelie wights.>> This sign, the representing of horns with hands touching temples, crooking the extended index and middle fingers, was one of Imrhien’s latest acquisitions.

“Nay! They cannot cross running water—although,” he amended, “some do dwell in water. Fuathan and the like, and drowners. The most dangerous, Jenny Greenteeth, Peg Powler, and those sorts, dwell near human habitation since it is their chief delight to wreak mischief on us. But never fear, the Bear shall deal with any water wights. We have, er”—he cast about—“these tilhals still on our necks, and while we possess nothing of iron, we may yet whistle. I have been known to whistle the very birds out of the trees. Wights flee by the thousands when they see me pucker my lips! We shall find staffs of rowan-wood or of ash, the powerful trees. The Bear has defeated them once and can do it again!”

Whistling a jolly tune, the Ertishman shouldered a fine-honed, splendidly decorated war-axe and went to cut saplings to build the raft. The girl helped him lash them together with lengths of spidersilk fabric, the local vines being far too fragile for the task.

“We shall build it stout and strong in case we meet with rapids on the way,” the Ertishman proclaimed enthusiastically. “With any luck we shall encounter no waterfalls—aye, but should we, that would be a ride to speak of!”

His strewn toys Sianadh removed back to the caves so as to leave no evidence.

When for the last time they swung the rune-doors together in the lower cave, the travelers wedged a precautionary stone sliver to keep them apart, just a crack, awaiting their return.

“Never trust an apparatus or an enchantment to work the same way twice!”

The waterfall flung miniature water-prisms, fracturing daylight into seven colors. An evanescent spectrum was entangled in its hair.

The raft, as shipshape as could be managed, had already been launched. It waited, bobbing on the river beside the campsite, tugging at its mooring-rope: four long-sleeved spidersilk shirts knotted together. On this craft lay the three full caskets, firmly tied on, which would also serve as seats, plenty of spidersilk ropes of various gauges, some boughs of yew in case the raft needed repairing along the way, clumsily woven rush baskets filled with pennyfoil leaves to repel Culicidae, and a small mound of fruit that would wither if not consumed at their next meal.

The spirits of the travelers were high. Whether owing to some property of the Faêran fruit, the cold purity of the riverwater, or some other factor, their various wounds and scrapes had healed quickly during their eighteen-day sojourn at Waterstair. Imrhien could have sworn her locks had grown a full inch or more. Sianadh had lost his limp, and his chest-pain had eased.

They stepped aboard, two gray-clad figures seeming clothed in twilight, and shoved off from the bank with long wooden poles. High on the escarpment at their backs, hidden figures made of light and dark faced each other, staring silently into the approaching years.

The current took the raft around a curve in the river. Looking back, the girl could not see the perpetual curtain beyond the bend, but her ears caught its long sigh receding, and between the trees she glimpsed a flicker of silver that might have been the mane or tail of a horse made of starlight.

At the journey’s beginning, the river chivvied its way between low, gently sloping banks. Succulent grasses fringed it, and long-haired casuarinas, and azure jacarandas whose fallen flowers, like broken pieces of sky, were drifting in the current. The sun hammered white flints off the water. Songbirds strung glassy notes together like strings of beads.

“This little flood has no name, to my knowledge,” Sianadh expounded. “It was marked on the map as merely ‘a river.’ I name it Cuinocco’s Way. Did ye see it, the white horse with the long horn like a javelin? I thought I beheld it for one instant. Ach, we can speak of it now, but ’tis not wise to speak of such creatures when in their domains, even though they be seelie. It be not proper to name them where they might hear ye. Its presence was strong—it haunted my dreams, which was a nice change. Such majesty and strength, such beauty—I would give much to possess a creature like that. We have been fortunate. Few folk have ever caught sight of it, or of them—only one cuinocco or many, who can guess? Many have hunted the beast, but none have captured it. ’Tis known to frequent this kind of pleasant country, with galloping hills and secret glades, and where the cuinocco is, unseelie things do not go.”

He began to hum a tune.

The water bore them along on its back. Cautious of the not entirely stable nature of the raft, they pushed away from banks and protruding rocks with twisted branches of bay-wood.

Gradually the banks rose higher until the raft was bowling along through the shadowed cleft of the ravine past the wighthaunted forest and riding south on the tipsy waters.

Their fruit withered at the end of the first day, but they did not put ashore to search for more. Sianadh refused to leave the safety of running water until the haunts of the Direath were far behind. When dusk inked the air, dimming vision, he threw a mooring-rope over an outlying branch of a willow that leaned far out over the river. The long evening stretched into a lute-string plucked by the penetrating drone of cicadas, who lurked unseen in the trees.

Now that they had passed beyond the borders of the country of the horned horse, Imrhien felt the eyes of other things, invisible eyes, watching. An uneasiness crept upon her—she began to think of the unseelie water wights Sianadh had described. The river glimmered gray under the light of the moon, and the trees gathered along the banks like black sentinels. All through the night, the travelers remained damp but afloat, scarcely daring to sleep for visions of thin, bloodless hands reaching out of the water, trailing weed, and cold eyes the color of limes, unblinking, lidless. Once, a scum-dripping horse’s head emerged partway above the water and regarded them out of the pits of its skull for some while before slowly sinking underwater again.

It seemed that during the night, Sianadh’s good spirits had been stolen away. The next morning, bleary-eyed and grumbling about the aching hollow in his belly, he fought to untangle the spidersilk rope from the willow’s clutches while his companion moved back and forth to balance the violently rocking craft.

“I’ll make a longbow this very day to shoot our dinner, or me name ain’t Sianadh Kavanagh!” The Ertishman’s voice rang, unnaturally loud on the still airs, skipping off the water like a pebble. “I care not if we have to eat the kill raw—and that we shall do, ye ken, unless ye be a master of that Dainnan trick of spinning wood on wood to make fire.”

Imrhien shook her head. She too was gnawed by hunger but would refuse meat, cooked or uncooked, since she couldnot abide the smell or taste of dead flesh. In any case, it seemed doubtful whether Sianadh would be able to fashion weapons out of spidersilk and the few thin boughs of willow and yew on board, but he had made up his mind. He fell silent and sat whittling with a horn-hilted dagger inlaid with gold. The raft drifted downstream.

As they passed among celadon curtains of willow withies near the western bank, Sianadh muttered, “I wish I had not shouted out me true name back there. If there weren’t pointy eldritch ears a-listening, I’m an Iceman.”

Daylight welled out of the sky with the amber mellowness of honey-mead. Otters frolicked and splashed beneath trees along the riverbank. In placid backwaters, fish leaped up like silver spear-blades. Secretive holes among the roots at the water’s edge indicated the presence of platypus or water-rats. A line of ducks rowed upstream. The Ertishman inaccurately projected stones at them from a makeshift slingshot, expressing a fervent wish for a baited fishhook or a bird-net. He whittled so savagely that he was in danger of cutting off his fingers, and he caught duck-feathers floating on the water with which to fletch his crude arrows.

They gathered handfuls of watercress that did nothing to assuage hunger. Imrhien leaned out over the raft-side and looked past the dapple and satin gloss of sunlight on the surface, gazing far down into the depths into a world of waving weeds. Abruptly she recoiled, almost upsetting the pallet.

Feminine forms as pale as corpse-wraiths were gliding, swooping, diving beneath the raft. Their hair was long and green, like fine seaweed. Membranous robes wafted gently around their slim white feet. Sianadh peered over the side.

“Asrai,” he grunted, “seelie. Wights cannot be eaten. Do not bother with them.”

By the afternoon, he had fashioned a yew long-bow strung with spidersilk cord and three off-balance arrows. Imrhien had occasionally been witness to the butchering of domestic animals for the Stormrider tables, had seen injuries resulting from various accidents in the servants’ quarters, and unwillingly viewed aeronauts being run through with pirate scimitars. Considering she had managed to conquer an initial squeamishness at the sight of blood, she felt oddly disturbed at the prospect of some wild creature dying, impaled on one of those barbless, sharpened shafts.

<<Wait. City.>>

“The way this ditch wanders about, it might be four or five days before we reach Tarv. I should fade away to a mere shadow of my former self if I waited until we arrived in the city to get food. Would ye be wanting to turn up in town beside a shadow, chehrna? Now, we must tie up and go ashore. I’ll not risk losing arrows in the water, shooting at river-rats from this unriverworthy craft. Besides, there shall be better game off-water.”

By now, Cuinocco’s Way had meandered out from among the parklike hills on the one hand and the dark uplands on the other. On both sides, ferny banks rose sharply toward ridges densely wooded with silver birches. The trees were misted with cucumber-green and steeped in cool shadows amid the heat of the month of Arvarmis.

Long ago, an old willow-tree had fallen into the river. Most of its roots had failed to hold on to the crumbling banks, yet some were still embedded therein. Silt had built up along the half-submerged trunk, and a backwater had formed. A quiet pool gleamed there, into which flag-lilies lowered their blue reflections. The travelers secured the raft to a branch jutting from the trunk and disembarked. Halfway up the slopes, Sianadh found himself hampered by his spidersilk cloak. Impatiently he unpinned it and let it fall to the ground. The girl caught at his sleeve, gesturing back at the raft.

<<I watch. Unseelie wights.>>

Sianadh pondered.

“Ye may be right, lass. Wights be full of mischief. As soon as our backs are turned, they are likely to turn our craft upside down, or cut the rope and let it drift away with our wealth on board, to break up against some snag.” He scratched his beard, furrowing his weather-beaten brow. “Yet I will need your help up there in the timber. By rights ye ought to go upwind and beat the bushes, to flush the game toward me. Ach! What a two-headed puzzle! Shall I risk my future as a rich man for a feed of raw flesh? I shall,” he added quickly, hearing his stomach growl. “But ye, stand at the top of the ridge where ye can keep an eye on the raft. If anything comes near, run down and knock its head off. If any true and lorraly beast comes blundering out of the forest, wave your arms and scare it back toward me, so I can make breakfast of it. If owt unseelie-looking comes out at ye, get down to the running water. But never fear—either way, the Bear shall win out.”

It was Imrhien’s turn to frown. This idea seemed confused, harebrained, and risky.

<<You scothy. Not kill.>>

“Scothy, eh? Well, perhaps ’tis true.…” The Ertishman nodded philosophically. “Howbeit, I have come this far, and I will go on.”

Taking a firmer grip on the makeshift longbow, he climbed up over the cliff’s lip and was soon out of sight.

Imrhien clambered in his footsteps, the wiry bracken-fern springy beneath her bare feet. She stood and waited, looking around warily. Below, the river flowed past and the raft tugged lazily on its tether. Above, the birches stood silent on the ridge top. When had such a hush fallen on the leaf-roofed landscape, such a breathless stillness? No birds sang, no leaves jostled. Even the chuckle of the river seemed to have faded.

And it seemed to Imrhien that some kind of pressure was building, that a mighty weight was crushing her like an ant, pinching her between land and sky. There was a wrongness, a flaw, in the surface of this natural world. Horror seized her by the throat, and she could not move. She stood alone, more isolated than ever she remembered, waiting for a killing to occur.

From somewhere in the birches’ green fog, a shout burst the silence. Something that was moving too fast for a man crashed through the woodland, snapping twigs in its haste. As the invisible menace approached, the girl gathered her courage and braced herself, staff upraised, ready to defend or flee. Several yards away, the crashing burst out from the cover on the ridge top, then whatever had caused it dashed back in. The noise of its progress ceased abruptly.

It had been a young doe.

Imrhien went after it. She followed the deer’s short trail to a small glade where the animal had fallen. She lay struggling to get up, her flanks heaving, eyes dark with fear and pain. Long red streaks striped her side, welling from where the arrow’s fletched end stuck out from the shoulder. A swish of leaves announced death’s arrival. Sianadh shouldered out of the undergrowth and stood with dagger drawn, triumph blazing like beacons from his blue eyes. In the same instant he looked across the body of the wounded creature and met his companion’s level stare.

Her hands hung limply at her sides. Her eyes spoke.

After a long moment, the Ertishman reached down with a smooth, practiced movement, the movement of one who had been raised on a farm and knew how to use a blade cleanly. But the knife was no longer in his hand. He had sheathed it, and when he straightened, he held the red arrow. He stepped back.

A pressure split down the middle and fell aside in two halves like a walnut. Birds sang, the river gurgled. A fly went by.

With some trouble, the doe heaved herself up and stood shuddering on her long legs.

“Get along, then.”

Sianadh turned away, cursing under his breath. The doe melted into the forest, leaving only crimson blossoms on bruised grass.

“She will live.” The man glanced sourly at his companion from beneath beetling brows. “The shaft did not go deep, and they know where to find the healing herbs.”

Imrhien tried to smile at him. Then she recalled the raft.

Made fleet by panic, she turned and ran through the trees to the cliff top. The high vantage point afforded a glimpse of the river—and of creatures crowding among the flag-lilies around the raft—creatures that had chewed at the spidersilk mooring-rope, freeing the raft from its tether. Already the vessel was beginning to depart from the banks of the leafy backwater. The girl flew down the slope to the water’s edge. With a mighty effort she sprang, leaping through the air across the widening gap between rocky shore and wooden platform. At the last moment the raft swung out from under her feet. She made a desperate, useless grab at it. Water slammed up into her face, and down into a weird, breathless world she plunged.

There was at first only a close roaring—the thundering of blood in her temples and the surge of currents against her eardrums and the terrible pounding of her heart as it slaved to pump blood to flailing limbs. But the hue of that blood was darkening, and her lungs strained for air, and down here there was none—not for her.

As she sank, tiny bubbles went up in straight lines all around, as though threaded on wires. The galloping of her heart accelerated. She could think of nothing but fighting for breath, straining for breath, dying for breath. All instinct screamed at her to soar upward. But upward she could not soar, because there was a lid, hard and black, clamped overhead. Her fingers scrabbled at this cruel roof, seeking an edge, while the red night of agony roared in her brain and darkness closed in at the borders of sight, until she was looking down a long tunnel at a fading pinprick of light.

Then miraculously her fingers found purchase, and she was bursting upward, tearing through a slow and clammy viscosity, clawing free of the water’s loving embrace and hanging on to solidity—a corner of the raft, now no longer a lid but a buoyant ally. With rasping gulps she drew in the gases of life, and as soon as she was able, hoisted herself up and onto the platform once more, where she lay on her side, breathing hard, coughing up water. Sunlight blocked out her eyes like white chalk.

The raft had floated well away from the shore. The winged toads that had worked it free with their little sharp teeth now leaped about on top of the water, their skinny, barbed tails lashing like whips. Sianadh was running along the shore, helpless, roaring like a bull, waving his fist. Still dazed, the girl could not understand what he was saying. By now the rickety craft had reached midstream and was being swept along in the thrall of the current. The wayward wights skipped on and off it, flopping their slimy bodies among the treasure chests. She chased them away. The banks began to rise more steeply. Soon the river rounded a bend and passed through a narrow cutting, overhung by perpendicular cliffs. Here it became impossible for the running man to find a foothold near the water’s edge, and he was forced to climb higher, looking for a path. Picking up pace in the swift-flowing channel, the raft quickly outstripped him.

It rocked and spun like a leaf in a flooded gutter. Imrhien clung on grimly, gripping the lashings that held together the leaky craft. As she was whirled around another bend, a greater peril was revealed, lying directly in her path.

Straight ahead ranged a long ramp of semisubmerged rocks like low stairs—waterstairs—not high but many. Between them the water boiled, lathered with white froth.

This was unlooked-for. Would the crudely made stage slide over the top of these gray, humpbacked behemoths of rocks? Would it slew around the heads of the greater boulders and slip between them? Or would it simply bounce up on the first one and crash down, tearing itself apart? Imrhien’s grip tightened. The current picked up the raft and whipped it down a teeth-jarring stony incline, at the bottom of which the platform spun on its axis and shot to one side, crashing into a rock wall. Letting go with one hand, the girl slid her bay-wood staff out from among the knots that had tied it on board. She had the measure of this water-path now; had seen what it might and might not do. It was rough, but maybe it would let her pass if she worked with it, precorrecting the raft’s course, using the confluences and divergences of the flow to negotiate the worst of the obstacles. With jaw clenched in concentration she labored: a push here, a shove there, now rebalancing, now waiting for the moment—riding the bucking platform like a horse-breaker.

It tossed her into the air, but she was tenacious. And she miscalculated many times, but the timbers bore the brunt of it. On and down she rode in the seething foam, until with a final sickening lurch the raft dropped, battered but floating, into a smooth, quiet stretch of water, white with flowers drifting down from overhanging trees.

The treasure remained on board.

Placidly the raft floated downstream, listing slightly. There were no oars. There was no way to get to shore. Hours drifted past.

The sun began to sink into the forests and mountains. Here, where fantastic dragonflies and glittering midges played, more of the little wide-mouthed toads with bat-wings were skipping over the water’s surface, making free among tall rushes growing along the shore. They were quite lovely in a loathsome way, their froggy hides spangled gold and green, their tails long and thin, barbed at the tips. So translucent were the veined vanes of their wings that light shone through them. Their eyes were great, glowing, amber jewels, their teeth numerous, tiny, and pointed. The girl looked at them from beneath her tangle of dripping hair, now threaded with long leaves of eel-grass. She fingered the tilhal at her throat. The winged toads did not attempt to trouble her. They were juveniles. At that age their only threat was mischief.

Finally the raft bumped against a sandy spit. Its passenger tied it to a fallen tree that lay along the slender promontory. Then she rested, not wanting to sleep. Someone must keep watch over the treasure, and now there was no one else to accomplish the task. Hunger, too, never gave her peace, but in the dozing trances that slipped fitfully over her that night, she was half-aware of finely drawn faces, their eyes slightly upswept at the outer edges. The owners of these faces rose half out of the water to peer at the mortal girl from among tresses of long green hair that floated on the river like harps strung with weed. Dreams, they were not.

By the time gray dawn drizzled out of the sky, a deep chill had seeped into Imrhien’s flesh. Still slightly damp, her spidersilk garments afforded her little comfort. She shivered, trying to chafe warmth into her upper arms. Lethargy slowed her down. She was lost and alone. There was, for the moment, no cause to go on, no reason to make decisions. Her head drooped. Now, at last, she slept.

The sun was hovering overhead when she was woken by the sound of a heavy body crunching through undergrowth. Quickly she unslipped the knot of the mooring-rope, but before she had a chance to pole the raft away from land, a voice yelled:

“Obban tesh! I have never been so glad of the sight of—of treasure in all me days!”

The Ertishman strode down the riverbank, grinning out of a filthy face, his hair a rat’s nest. Of bow and arrows there was no sign, but he was cradling something close to his chest, wrapped in his shirt.

“So, here’s where ye be, messing about in boats while I strut through the jungle on me pins, avoiding things that bite. Ye’ve led me a merry dance, that ye have! The treasure, is it all here? All safe?”

She nodded, smiling with relief. He ran along the spit with surprising surefootedness and thumped himself down on the raft beside her.

“Ye did well in that white water. I passed it a way back, expecting to see the raft smashed to smithereens somewhere on the rocks. Ye’re not strong of arm, nor do ye have wizardly powers, but by harp and bow, chehrna, ye have sharp wits, and that’s what saved ye.” He patted the treasure chests lovingly. “Ye’ll be ready for some breakfast by now, no doubt! I found eggs back there, up in the trees—big ones. I ate ’em, sucked out the insides. Brought some back for ye in my shirt—here. Ach, obban! One’s cracked and ruined me good spidersilk smock.”

<<No, thank you. We go.>>

“Ain’t ye hungry? Suit yourself—I’ll eat ’em, then. But bide a moment—did ye leave this on my cloak when ye ran back to the raft to skitch the ’leapers?”

He held up a flower, its petals as blue as a mountain tarn cupped close under the sky. Imrhien recognized it as the same flower she had given to the Gailledu when he had warned them against danger—not merely the same kind of flower, Imrhien was certain, but the same one. There had been a notch in two of the petals where some insect had bitten it. Yet the bloom looked as fresh as if it had just been plucked. In wonderment, and also in response to the Ertishman’s question, she shook her head.

“Nay? I thought not. I’ll guess our leafy friend the guardian of woodlands has been here. Mayhap he has been following us. Why should he gift me with this weed?”

Their eyes locked, briefly. At once, they both knew the answer.

The travelers moored the raft while they effected repairs to the damaged parts and constructed a pair of makeshift oars. When all was as well knit as they could manage, they cast off and continued their journey.

Sianadh did not again mention hunting, but the problem of feeding themselves had not vanished. The next few days were a season for hunger. To distract their thoughts from victuals, they used this time to practise handspeak and relate stories. Sianadh remained typically optimistic.

“When we get to the city, my sister, Ethlinn, may be able to heal ye with her carlin’s lore. Or, if not, there be wizards and dyn-cynnils in Gilvaris Tarv who could do it—mighty men of powerful gramarye. Their services do not come cheaply, but that matters not, now. Ye be rich. Ye can spend what ye like on cures, garments, the best of everything. Your life be changed now. The good times be here at last.”

His companion was not convinced. A feeling of foreboding grew, as every day the current bore them closer to the urban precincts.

The river widened slightly, passing through densely wooded country. Behind the trees, cliffs rose high against a brilliant blue sky. To the south, a few clouds swirled like flocks of silver gulls.

The raft drifted on.

The Ertishman turned from telling stories to expounding history lessons, but Imrhien suspected his ramblings were a way of dulling the edges of craving. For herself, the hunger pangs had died now, leaving a curious light-headedness and an inability to concentrate on what Sianadh was saying.

She thought she had heard some of his anecdotes before, at some time, but could not recall the occasion.

“Our good King-Emperor, James the Sixteenth, be both wise and strong. He rules well, but even royalty be not beyond the reach of the unseelie. Aye, ’twas a pity, the terrible misadventure that befell his Queen. D’ye know of it?… Nay?”

Sianadh rambled on in subdued tones, saying something about a dangerous wight that had, some years ago, slain the Queen-Empress, leaving the King-Emperor bereft and young Prince Edward motherless. Imrhien drowsed. Clouds of small insects droned. The sun’s rays danced on the water.

Tranquillity was torn apart by a shrill scream.

It broke the spell of the gently rocking raft. A great shrieking and splashing arose farther downstream. Imrhien’s eyes widened in horrified amazement. In the water, a young girl was thrashing about.

“Kavanagh!” the young girl cried. “Kavanagh!”

Sianadh spat out Ertish curses, expressing his bewilderment. He stood up. The raft pitched and yawed.

“Obban tesh, ’tis Muirne,” he grated, hoarse with shock.

Instantly he began to fling off his cloak. His companion grabbed his arm, shaking and pinching him.

“What are ye at, Imrhien? My sister’s daughter is drowning, can ye not see? Let go.”

Violently Imrhien shook her head. The man strained wildly toward the struggling figure.

“Kavanagh! Kavanagh!” A beseeching voice, trembling with panic, choked off by mouthfuls of water.

“Muirne! I come!”

Imrhien’s open hand smashed across the side of the Ertishman’s face. He swore a violent oath and turned on her, wearing an ugly expression, his fist raised as though he were about to slam it across her head. At the last instant he hesitated and blinked, shaking his head as if to clear his brain of cobwebs.

“Oghi!”

Taking a deep breath. the Frtishrnan sat down. He was shuddering. His lips moved, soundlessly at first. “Iron blade and rowan-tree save me from the likes of ye,” he muttered, and then he began to whistle. Turning his head, he averted his eyes from the sight of the screaming girl. The veins on his neck and temples stood out like snakes. Sweat rose in a dew on his forehead. The water-girl wailed and sank. The river closed over her head. She did not reappear.

The raft floated over the place where she had gone under. Sianadh did not utter a word but sat motionless, his countenance ashen. When they had passed the spot, the voyagers forced themselves to look back.

A feminine manifestation rose, to the waist, out of the water. This time she did not flail about—indeed, she did not paddle or swim at all, and it was impossible to deduce how she managed to keep afloat. Instead she remained poised like a waterlily, with water flowing like silk about her lily-stem waist and her thin white arms reaching toward the mortals. The drowner, cheated of her prey, did not scream in rage. No recognizable expression crossed her delicate features. She reacted in no human fashion.

“Kavanagh, Kavanagh,” she called, or chanted,

“If not for she,

“I’d have drunk your heart’s blood,

“And feasted on thee.”

Having spoken, she subsided gracefully, leaving a faint turbulence.

“I shall not be bathing hereabouts,” Sianadh said shortly.

They drifted on, the riverscape unfolding around them. Frogs croaked among forests of feathery swamp-grass. Tall trees leaned overhead, their roots protruding into the water, vines dangling from their boughs.

“Doch!” exclaimed the Ertishman, slapping his brow. “I left the four-leaved clover in my old shirt when I doffed it and took on this spidersilk. No wonder I could not see through the drowner’s glamour. Being rich has addled me brains. Your wit has saved us again, chehrna—ye saw fit to bring along some of the leaf. Can ye spare a bit?”

Shaking her head, the girl tried to explain that she too had neglected to bring the spell-warding plant—that, like him, she had been beguiled by glamour, but that common sense had won out. It had been too coincidental, too unlikely, for Sianadh’s city-dwelling niece to appear right in front of her uncle in the middle of the wilderness. Her store of hand-signs was barely adequate to convey this to Sianadh.

“Ye’re certain ye have not got the Sight?” he demanded suspiciously.

Vehemently she nodded.

A shang wind, not fierce, came and went one evening. Brief showers of rain also passed over. Cuinocco’s Way eventually joined up with another flexuous stream, which later flowed into a yet wider waterway. This ran at last into a proper river, the Rysingspill, which would take them on the last lap of their journey, to the city-port at its mouth. Steep cliffs and mountain gullies had given way to hills that humped ever lower under a porcelain sky the color of Sianadh’s eyes.

The river neared its destination.

“Now that we have gained the Rysingspill, ’tis likely we shall begin to see river-traffic,” the Ertishman warned. “Fur-trappers sometimes come this far upriver—savage uraguhnes who would risk other folk’s lives—and their own—in eldritch haunts, for profitable trade. We could not outrun their fast boats if they took an interest in us, so we must keep an eye out and make ourselves scarce if we get wind of them. They would think nowt of scuttling a couple of gray drifters and making off with our goods.”

They kept the chests covered under Sianadh’s spidersilk cloak.

Gilvaris Tarv, he told her, was a colorful sinkhole of a seaport city where riffraff and brigands walked the streets, mingling with the citizens and the nobility. It was a city with no walls or guarded gates or curfew; a festering, interesting venue where fortunes were made and lost; an ebullient, belligerent center of brisk trade. The very rich dwelt there, while the very poor hung on at the fringes and sometimes fell off. Being on the east coast of Eldaraigne, Gilvaris Tarv was a popular port of call for ships out of Namarre, whose stated business was not always genuine. Port officials turned a shuttered eye to shady dealings and thrived for it.

“No use our floating into Tarv Port on a craft we can barely steer. Some merchant would run us down. Besides, it would look suspicious, and I want no questions asked. If word got about that we carry treasure, even so much as a shilling piece, our lives would be forfeit. Nay—we shall go ashore before we reach the outskirts of town and traipse in on foot, like peddlers.”

They met no trappers’ vessels. On the fifth day since the departure from Waterstair, the trees thinned. A low mist rose from the water. The river, now broad and lined with slate-green casuarinas, carried the raft into rolling lands. Here and there, thatched cottages squatted in groves of rowans and fruit-trees. Stone walls enclosed paddocks where a few animals grazed, or fields rippling with ripening oats and barley.

It was getting dark. The Ertishman appeared jittery.

“We are close now. ’Tis too risky—we might be seen by farmers or fishers along the shore. And what would two strange-looking folk be doing floating down out of the Lofty Mountains? To be sure, we should be taken for wights.”

Using their rough-bladed oars of whittled yew, the voyagers directed the raft to the west bank. It grated against the gravel of the shallows, and they came to land under a belt of casuarinas, whose skeins of long, drooping needles cascaded like unbound hair. After unloading the three caskets, the travelers untied the ropes holding the raft’s logs together, pushed it away, and watched it drift downstream, slowly breaking up.

There was an indefinable sadness in this.

“Now,” Sianadh said briskly, rubbing his hands, “we be peddlers out of Tarv, come to try our luck in the countryside. And now, at last, we sleep dry!”

It was indeed pleasant to nestle in fragrant fallen needles but difficult to get used to the motionlessness of land. Imrhien lay awake in the darkness, listening to the river’s sighs. She thought about the city and its probable horrors.

Come morning, Sianadh was no longer beside her.

Imrhien drank from the river, washing her face and hands. Magpies chortled their euphonic greetings. Beyond the trees, the sun’s morning light lay long on fields of grain, weaving a pattern like tapestry. The caskets remained where Sianadh had stashed them, shoved far back under some myrtle bushes for concealment. The Ertishman would not be far away. She waited. When he returned, cackling with pride, he bore half a loaf under his arm.

“Tuck into that, Your Ladyship! Ye’ve got to keep your strength up—I cannot carry the tambalai treasure into the city all on my own!”

She tore the bread into two pieces and began to eat, offering him the larger chunk. He pushed her hand away. “Who d’ye think ate the other half?”

Who would have thought that a simple cob could taste like joy, sweeter than a feast? Imrhien could have eaten twice as much. Her friend’s weathered eyes followed the chunks of bread to her mouth like the eyes of a despairing lover. For all his protests, he could not hide the fact that half a loaf had not staved off his hunger. When the first piece was devoured she feigned satiety and watched him fall like a starving wolf on what was left.

He tossed a handful of coins into her lap. She examined them closely—they were small disks made of copper. One side bore a numerical inscription she could not read, while the other was stamped with a face seen in profile. On every coin the side depicting the face was worn and blurred, lacking in detail.

“Put them jinglers in yer pocket!” Sianadh trumpeted.

<<How coins? How bread?>>

“I took a silver florin from amongst the treasure. Gold or jewels would give us away, of course—a silver piece was the least thing of value I could find. Ha! The least thing of value—and to think it is more than I had in the world at one time! The loaf, I bought from a penny-pinching farmwife.”

Still hungry, but somewhat fortified, the travelers tied the caskets on their backs, beneath their cloaks, and set off like a pair of two-legged tortoises. Soon they struck a road leading south, a rutted track whose high banks were overgrown with hedges on each side. Ripe blackberries dotted the briars, and these they picked as they walked.

They passed several cottages. Now and then a horse-cart trundled by, bound in the other direction.

Imrhien kept her head down, pulling her battered taltry well over her face, while Sianadh greeted the drivers with a cheery wave.

“Keep your taltry tugged forward,” he murmured from the side of his mouth. “One look at ye, chehrna, would set the tongues of the whole countryside wagging. We must not draw attention.”

Her load seemed heavier by the minute. Lack of food had weakened her, and walking seemed like wading through mud. At midday they rested in a beech grove off the road. Sianadh used the pennies to purchase food and drink from a farmhouse. This time he was given richer fare. As soon as she had eaten, a strong desire for sleep surged over Imrhien, but she rose to her feet and they trudged on. Toward dusk they reached the outer sprawl of Gilvaris Tarv and passed through, into the city.

6

GILVARIS TARV

Pain and Perfidy

I am the Wand and the Wand is the Tree.

The Tree seizes the Wind in its hair,

Holds Fire within its bones, pumps Water through its veins,

Grips soil and stone with its long toes.

The Tree stands between sky and ground.

The Tree is the Wand and the Wand is I.

CHANT OF THE CARLINS

Silence is a spell.

ARYSK SAYING

A sparrow jumped along one of the warped black rafters, flicking its head from side to side as if searching. It paused, fluffed up its feathers smugly, and issued a small “cheep.” Then it took wing and flew a quick circuit of the room before darting out through the half-open shutters into sunshine. Dust motes and a downy feather slid soporifically down a chute of chartreuse light, in past the flowering chamomile springing from the window-box, and onto the foot of the bed, bringing with them the sounds and odors of the street below.

It was not a large room to waken to. The walls were built of timber, daubed with some hard, whitish substance like clay. Here and there they were covered with stretched sackcloth that had been nailed to the joists showing through. The bed, which was wide, took up most of the space—on a stand against one wall stood a chamber-stick with a candle-end stuck in it, an unmatched ewer and basin, a wooden hairbrush, and a long-handled looking-glass. Under the window squatted a stool of birch. Everywhere, the scent of lavender permeated. From behind a thin partition drifted the rumble of familiar snoring.

A real bed—a luxury beyond belief. Imrhien could not recall ever having slept in one. Lying back against creamy, lavender-scented linen, she visualized the events of the preceding night, turned them over, and examined them from all angles.

Of the city, all she recalled were impressions—squares of yellow light from mullioned casements, revealing a bewildering mixture of movement, smells, sounds; a forest drowning in its own undergrowth, whose trees were the stanchions, pillars, and roof beams of buildings, whose overflow was the boil and surge of humanity—fair flower and fetid fungus. Upper stories overhung crooked tunnels of streets. Lines of pegged washing flapped like ensigns, and gutters reeked. Like bulls in a distant field, hawkers bellowed, extolling their wares. The evening was noisy with the jingle of harness, the rumble of wheels, the smack of whips, shouts, dogs barking, snatches of music. Smoke from glowing braziers thickened the air, mingled with fragrances of pastries and perfume. Armor glittered in lamplight. Dominating all loomed the light-pierced Tower of the Tenth House of the Stormriders.

The girl had walked among all this noise and glitter and stench, staying as close to Sianadh as his shadow, keeping her taltry pulled well forward and her cloak drawn across the lower half of her face. She scarcely glanced up, except to avoid tripping over street detritus or losing sight of her mentor in the deepening shadows. Along twisting streets and lanes he led her, until she lost all sense of direction. Then with the words “Here it be—Bergamot Street,” they had turned the last corner into a narrow, dark thoroughfare. A few yards farther on, the Ertishman had knocked on a door. It opened. With the noise of a bell jangling, a heavy block of light fell out on the cobblestones.

Then Imrhien had shrunk back, turning her face away, but Sianadh took her arm in a firm grip, propelling her forward, and without knowing how, she was inside, in the house with the door shut at her back, surrounded by moving hands, exclamations of delight, shouts of welcome.

At this point, recollections became somewhat blurred. There had been three faces—the goodwife with the calm, searching gaze and, escaping from her wimple, a wisp of copper hair graying too much to match Sianadh’s; on her forehead a painted blue disk. The broad-faced young man, perhaps twenty years of age, with the look that questioned and the ready smile, his hair rufescent as glowing embers. The lass, of a similar age to herself, with the coloring of her brother and the eyes that, when they alighted upon the newcomer, could not help revealing stark disgust and fear no matter how she endeavored to conceal it. Her smiles did not reach her blue eyes.

“How fare you?” they had asked Sianadh searchingly, between embraces.

“None of your business,” he had shot back, roaring with laughter the while, lifting the red-haired lass and whirling her around so that she shrieked with genuine delight.

Then Imrhien’s burden had been taken from her, and she was too weary to care where it was set. She found herself seated at a table in front of a bowl of pottage. Sianadh was eating and talking with his mouth full on the other side of the table, waving his spoon in one hand and a hunch of bread in the other. There was firelight and candlelight and a tankard of some warm liquid thrust into her hands that, when sipped, coursed down her throat and through her veins like green fire, refreshing and soothing. Someone led her upstairs to this room, and as she fell, clothed, into bed, the last words that came drifting up from below were Sianadh’s: “Nay, it ain’t got fleas, and ’tis a girl.”

Downstairs in the morning, Sianadh’s sister, Ethlinn, was drawing off water from a kettle over the fire and pouring it into a linen-draped wooden tub behind a curtain of heavy cloth in the corner. She wore shades of blue and gray—the colors of a carlin. Turning as the guest descended, she smiled, then placed the jug on the table and wiped her hands on her apron. The hands flew in intricate gestures. Imrhien shook her head. The handspeak was too fast, and there were signs she had not learned. Smiling as if she understood this, too. Ethlinn gestured toward the bath. Something about fleas rankled in the guest’s mind, but she thought this goodwife had not been the one who had asked about them, and the bathwater, scented with apple-blossom, was inviting. Soon she was immersed in warm water behind the drapery, reflecting on the only other bath she could remember, feeling the long, burnished curls, once stubble, resting wet on her shoulders.

Surely this house was the best place in Erith, and if only she could find herself a face, an ordinary face at which nobody would look twice, she could live here forever, bathing in apple-blossom and slumbering in lavender.

A cure would cost dearly. Struck by sudden concern as to the security of the treasure caskets, she climbed out of the tub and dried herself, reaching for clothing Ethlinn had left folded on a stool. These were not her gray spidersilk garments but peasant garb, clean and patched, probably belonging to Ethlinn’s daughter, Muirne of the disgusted eyes, who was similarly slight in build but not as tall as she. There was a linen kirtle, tight-fitting, with sleeves buttoned from wrist to elbow, a calico surcoat with a fuller sleeve reaching to the elbow, a plain girdle, a peplum for her hair, her old taltry with a newly stitched cover replacing the stained, worn one, a woollen cloak, her cracked old rooster tilhal. Girls’ clothes. There was no choice, no option, but to face reality.

By the time she emerged from behind the curtain, she could hear Sianadh’s laughing voice filling the room with Ertish banter, and his nephew Liam’s quick replies. Muirne, setting pancakes and redcurrant sauce on the table with small, neat hands, did not raise her auburn head. Seven thin braids, like rats’ tails or sleeve-lacings, had been randomly plaited into the carnelian tresses around her face. Tiny colored beads adorned the length of them.

The room was spacious, clean, and filled with a fascinating assortment of things. On the flagstone floor, fresh rushes had been strewn. Overhead, a horn lantern swung among bunches of dried leaves and flowers that dangled from low, smoke-blackened rafters. Wall-hooks supported a row of dented saucepans. Beside the oven and fireplace at the back, a door and a sunny window gave on to a courtyard. In the opposite corner, the foot of a bed showed from behind another curtain. Along one wall, benches and shelves were laden with a profusion of assorted objects and pungent ingredients: mortars and pestles of several sizes, spoons, sieves, a rack of knives, string, squares of cloth, stoppered bottles and jars, labeled, a small hand-mill, jugs, measures, cruets, a funnel, bowls, tongs, balances, scales, and other artifacts of the same ilk. Among this farrago crowded mounds of vegetation fresh and dried; leaves, stems, roots, berries, bark, flowers, seeds, nuts, fungous growths, grasses, seedpods, stalks, and grains.

Central to the room stood a large table, well scrubbed, upon which a fair proportion of the bench’s contents had encroached at one end, the other presumably being kept free for dining. Along each side of it, settles of unplaned oak provided ample seating. A partition screened the room’s front end, which could be penetrated through a curtained aperture to reach the tiny shop and the front door, which opened straight onto Bergamot Street with a clang of a bell.

Ethlinn’s hands wove signs.

“My mother asks if ye will be seated at our table to break your fast,” said Liam, bowing slightly, stiffly. There was no hint of sarcasm in his bearing, nothing but respectful curiosity in his gaze. What had Sianadh told them of her? What, indeed, did he know of her?

“Now, chehrna, just for your sake, we shall use only common tongue and handspeak,” said her companion of the road, “but not until we have downed a goodly portion of this fine fare. A quiet table be a busy table, and by me the cooking of Eth and Birdie here was ever beloved.”

But the Ertishman’s high jollity could scarcely contain itself, and it was not long before he was regaling the diners with the tale of his embarrassment at the hands of the little folk—the miniature siofra, or fanes, as they were sometimes called—at their glamour-fair. The story lost nothing in the telling, and soon all diners rocked with mirth. Then a bell rang and Muirne rose swiftly.

“I shall see to it, Mother.” She went behind the leather curtain to the screened-off front of the room. Presently she returned carrying an apron full of plums.

“A scald,” she said. “I made up the poultice.” <<You did well,>> her mother signed.

“And how long did it take ye to make the base for that poultice?” asked Sianadh. His sister shrugged.

“I’ll wager it took hours, gathering, washing, drying, pounding, brewing, straining, and suchlike, and look what it got for ye, tambalai—a few plums. Nay, Sparrow-Bird. I be not at odds with ye, I know the fees your mother sets—ye were just abiding by her wish. But she charges far too little, allus has, and works too hard.” He sighed. “Ah, but all that has changed now, and it be time for the telling.”

Muirne deposited the plums in a dish.

“See, Imrhien here,” said Sianadh, leaning on the table confidingly, “she be a lady of means. She was traveling to Tarv to get a cure for paradox poisoning, but her bodyguard met with some misfortune. Luckily I chanced along, and here we be. Ye do not have to go telling all and sundry about her visit, she wants no song and dance, just a cure.” Imrhien nodded. Sianadh had a unique way of framing his explanations.

Ethlinn signed a complicated message to her daughter.

“At once?” the lass asked. The carlin nodded. “My mother has asked Muirne to go on an errand,” explained Liam. Muirne removed her apron and took up a basket and some coppers from a crock on the mantelpiece. Then she was gone, pulling on her taltry. The inevitable bell signaled her departure.

“Now we can really talk,” said Sianadh. “Meaning no offense to the Sparrow, but what she does not know cannot harm her. Ethlinn and I spoke together last night when ye young ’uns were abed, and by the end of it we agreed that ye, Liam boyo, and ye only, should know the full truth of the matter.”

“Ye do me a kindness, Uncle.”

“Never. I know ye can make yourself useful, that is all. The rest of the matter that concerns ye be this—I came upon a lost treasure out there in the Lofties, a treasure of moonrafter and candlebutter and baubles so busy, ye cannot even dream of it. Imrhien kind of opened the doors to it, and we brought some back with us. Half of it belongs to her—we saved each other’s hides at whiles all along the way—but believe me, a tenth part of it, a thousandth part of it, would keep us all in luxury all our born days.”

“Mother of Warriors!” exclaimed Liam. “So ’tis to be rich, we are, is it?” He jumped up and danced a little jig around the room, his mother and uncle smiling on his enthusiasm. “Rich at last!” crowed the young man. “After being dirt poor for centuries. At last we shall have all the good things we deserve.”

“Deserve!” Sianadh barked. “Deserve! Boyo, did your mother never tell ye what our granny’s wise words were on that matter?”

Liam ceased his hopping and eyed his uncle inquiringly.

“She used to say nobody deserves aught in this world,” said Sianadh. “Naught, neither good nor bad. Ye get what ye get, and that’s the way of it. Those who talk of deserving or not deserving only end up with a chip on their shoulder.”

“Ach, whatever,” Liam said lightly, sitting himself down again. Sianadh winked conspiratorially at Imrhien.

“Hearken, boyo, point yer lugs this way. I be going back with an expedition to get more, a big haul, and I need your help. Ethlinn tells me that since last I was here my old cronies have drifted away—there be only one left of the trusty few, but he be crooked with a broken shoulder from some scrape with mercenaries in an alehouse. So I need your strong arms, boyo, and half a dozen trusty lads.”

“But if ’tis sildron, then surely it belongs by rights to the King-Emperor?”

“Now, do not go getting like your brother, Liam, this be the Bear you be talking to. Sure and the King-Emperor’s got more Rusty Jack’s Friend than ye could think of and would not be wanting more. But after we take all we want, we will let the King-Emperor’s Royal Court know that we have suddenly discovered a stack of riches and we ain’t touched a penny. They may claim the rest, barring the reward they would give us, of course. There be some things too big for us to take, and besides, I would rather these riches fell into the right hands, the hands of ourselves and good King James and the Dainnan, not into the clutches of bloodthirsty reivers. Ain’t that right, chehrna?”

“By all means, Uncle,” Liam interjected eagerly. “I can drum up the boys we need for such an expedition, in no time at all!”

“Aye—good lad. But before we set out, none of them must know the treasure exists. It be vital that there be no chance of word leaking out into the city, and no matter how trusty your comrades may be, they be only mortal, and the tongues of mortals may slip. Tell them that ’tis a rich foreigner’s hunting expedition and that we are to meet this sporting noble somewhere upriver.”

“Ye ask me to lie to my comrades?”

“I demand that ye lie to them, or else there shall be no expedition. None but we four here at this table must know about what lies under Waterstair—not even your brother or your sister must know. Later there shall be time enough to reveal all, but not until we have taken all we need for ourselves. Now swear to secrecy, Liam.”

The youth looked at his mother, who nodded.

“For ye, and for riches, I swear it,” he said. “When do we start?”

“As soon as ye have gathered a company and provisions have been purchased.”

“And are ye to accompany us, Lady Imrhien?”

She began to nod her head, but Sianadh cut across the gesture with a word.

“Nay! Chehrna, the wilderness be no place for lasses. Remain in safety—I shall bring back your share, to be sure.”

The girl frowned, shaking her head.

Gently he said, “Remain here and undergo the cure ye have wished for. Ethlinn, can ye give her back her rightful face?”

Imrhien held her breath. She saw the woman’s shoulders sag slightly, as though Sianadh had placed a burden on them. After a moment she signed to her son.

“My mother says that she cannot help. Her Wand is powerful, but it may not safely cure such a bad case of paradox without possibly causing scarring,” Liam interpreted.

<<You must go to the Daughter of Grianan, who sees with one eye,>> Ethlinn signed.

“A Daughter of the Winter Sun, that means a Carlin,” explained Sianadh. “The Carlin of whom my sister speaks is very great, perhaps the most powerful of all carlins, Maeve One-Eye. But where might she be, Eth? She travels, does she not, and is never in one place for longer than a season?”

Ethlinn’s hands danced.

“Every Autumn, the dame abides near a small village by the name of White Down Rory,” Liam translated, “near Caermelor.”

In sudden anger, Imrhien thumped her fist on the table. Wearily her head sank into her hands. Had she come all this way across the girth of Eldaraigne, only to find that she must cross back again?

Presently Sianadh spoke.

“Mayhap there be some other healer we could try in Gilvaris Tarv—a dyn-cynnil or something?”

Ethlinn’s hands said, <<No. The healer men are no use.>>

“Well then, there be nowt for it but to use our riches to organize a road-caravan to take our lass safely toward the Royal City, to see the carlin Maeve at White Down Rory. No need to worry—the cure will just take a little longer, that be all. But ’twill come—aye, that’s it! While Liam and I be upriver, loading our packhorses with king’s-biscuit and gold, Imrhien shall be journeying westward in comfort and safety. The best of conveyances shall be found, and in no time at all ye’ll reach the other side of Eldaraigne and your face shall be restored to its former beauty—I will not recognize ye when ye come back to see me living in my golden palace!”

Imrhien forced a smile.

<<Yes, I will go.>>

But the prospect of traveling without Sianadh seemed bleak.

With that settled, the Ertishman briskly turned to business.

“Now, my young nephew—how many comrades can ye muster, who be strong of arm, worthy of trust, and able to keep their mouths shut?”

The doorbell jangled. Ethlinn rose to go to the shopfront, but before she could leave the table, the leather curtain was thrust aside and a man entered the room. He was tall, dressed in a guard’s military uniform of studded leather; his brown hair was worn long, pulled back tightly into a club in the style of the Stormriders.

“By the Star,” he exclaimed, “’tis Uncle Bear!” Sianadh leaped to his feet, embracing the newcomer with bearlike hugs and matching growls. Still slapping one another on the back, they returned to the table. Liam poured another tankard of ale and set it before his elder brother.

“Imrhien,” said Sianadh, “this here be Diarmid, my other nephew.”

It hissed through the room, Diarmid’s sharp intake of breath as his eyes fell on the wrecked face. Ethlinn signed to him. He looked down at his cup, then said formally, with a quick nod, “Your servant, my lady.”

She made the greeting sign.

“Well, soldier,” Sianadh said heartily, “what brings ye here? How does the art of the mercenary suit ye?”

“It suits me well, Uncle.” The voice was grave. Diarmid’s face resembled Muirne’s with its narrow, pointed look; like his sister, he was comely. His jaw was clean-shaven, and the roots of his hair were dark red. “I make a living and have learned much.”

“Still want to join the Dainnan, eh, Boldheart?”

“Aye. More than ever, that is my goal.”

<<My son wishes to travel to the Royal Court when his training is complete.>>

“So, that be it? Learn as much as ye can of warrior skills amongst the hired muscle of Gilvaris Tarv and then leave them and head west.”

“Aye.”

“Ye’ve always been a King’s man, through and through. And the finest of the warriors of Erith would be proud to count ye amongst them.”

The front bell jangled annoyingly. Ethlinn left the room to attend to the shop, while the three men fell deep into serious conversation. When her patient had departed, Ethlinn held the leather curtain aside and beckoned to Imrhien to enter the shop. The girl now noticed that a stag’s head was embroidered in dark blue on Ethlinn’s left sleeve.

The state of the cell-like room was similar to that of the larger one, but more ordered. Ethlinn showed Imrhien some of the concoctions, ointments, pastes, cordials, and powders and tools of her trade. Her hands signaled slowly, clearly.

<<Let me show you something of my craft. This is the Wand of the carlin, a living thing.>> Ethlinn held up a stick of wood some two feet long, plain and smooth save for three nodes near the top, each facing in a different direction and each at a different level. She indicated the nodes.

<<Nourishment, Healing, Protection. The Wand must be planted in the soil when it is not being carried. From the ground it draws its power.>>

She slipped the Wand back into the sheath hanging from her belt.

<<I have cures for many ailments of the mortal kind—cures that are used by the Daughters of Grianan, all over Erith.>> She touched her fingers to the painted blue disk on her forehead. <<They are powerful cures, but not powerful enough for the weals you bear.>> The same fingers touched Imrhien’s face softly, with a mother’s caress, as nobody had ever touched that monstrosity.

<<The swellings on your face are an ailment of the lorraly kind, but most severe. It is possible the one-eyed carlin might be able to heal such lesions. You may well ask, what of your voice and your remembering? Sianadh told me of that. I would give you rosemary for remembrance, to keep under your pillow and waken you to your past—I would give you gentle remedies if it were of any use. But these two afflictions, the loss of speech, the loss of memory, they are not of the lorraly kind. They are eldritch, and have been brought on you by gramarye.”

A rat scuttled down Imrhien’s spine.

<<Tell me more.>>

<<I know no more. Only that you have been touched by gramarye, and that, deeply. But go not to wizards for help. Despite what most folk believe, their pretense of wielding gramarye is all an illusion. True gramarye lies only in the hands of immortals, and of a few special mortals who have been given it. Eldritch wights use it, although their powers do not compare with the great forces once wielded by the Faêran, who walk no more in Erith. The one-eyed carlin trafficks with seelie wights, more so than I, who dwell in the city. She might bring benefits to you thereby.>>

<<Is she then my only hope?>>

<<Aye. Well, perhaps there may be one other chance, to find your memory, at least …>>

The carlin’s hands slowed. For a moment her eyes went blank and she stared sightlessly at the shelves laden with bottles and jars.

<<My husband …>> Unfamiliar hand-movements followed. <<You will not know the sign for his name. In his youth he went to sea, on a merchant Seaship, sailing from port to port. But one night he spent too long singing in a Luindorn tavern—he had such a voice—and when arrived back at the docks it was too late—for his ship had sailed with the tide. He found himself work in Luindorn until the next ship should come by. Meanwhile, he taught some of the local lads how to play a game called hurling.>>

Imrhien recognized the sign for this and nodded. The carlin continued:

<<It happened that during a game, he was bowled over by an opposition player, and his head knocked hard upon the ground. When he awoke to consciousness he could remember naught, not even his own name.>>

The girl leaned forward, watching intently, hardly daring to breathe. She knotted her hands around her knees.

<<Sometimes in such cases, all it takes is for the sufferer to come upon something familiar, and then the memories slowly begin to filter back into the mind. But everything around my husband was strange to him, for he was in a foreign land. Yet he did eventually recollect the past, and can you guess what sparked off this cure?>>

The girl shook her head.

<<It was the smell of baking bread!>>

Imrhien’s hopes crashed again. There had been many times when the fragrance of new-baked loaves had floated around the stairs and galleries near the kitchens of Isse Tower. Apart from causing her mouth to water, it had had no discernible effect.

A movement at the leather curtain made them look up. Sianadh was passing through with Liam. He winked at Imrhien.

“We have business to see to.”

As they went out the clanging door, Muirne came in, her basket on her arm, and disappeared into the main room.

<<You have been through much,>> the carlin signed. <<Rest while you are here with us, while preparations are made for your travels. These will take time—as a wealthy lady, you will need hired guards, provisions, a carriage—and you must wait for a road-caravan to set out, so that you may go with it for protection. The roads are not as safe as they used to be. Of late, unusual numbers of unseelie wights are on the move.>>

<<May I not travel by Windship?>>

<Indeed, you do not know the world! The Merchant Lines carry no passengers. Of civilians, only nobles ride the sky, in private Windships or sometimes upon eotaurs. Neither do they take passengers. The ground road is the only way, for you.

<<For myself, I do not yet know what to do with all this wealth you bring us. I have yet to foresee how it will change things. The three caskets are safe in our cellar, under the trapdoor near the hearthstone. If you wish, I will unlock it and you may go down and see them.>>

<<No. I trust.>>

A knock at the street-door; it opened peremptorily. Imrhien hurried back into the main room, beyond the view of the incoming patient. Glancing over at the table, she saw Diarmid sitting there with his long hair unbound, raining down his arms and back. Muirne was rubbing a brown paste into his scalp. Where the roots had been red, they were no longer so.

Diarmid was gone again soon after, back to his quarters at the barracks, and it was not until the evening meal had been set on the table that Sianadh and Liam returned. Then the talk was all concerning the growing militancy in Namarre, of which Sianadh had found out much during his comings and goings that day.

“I have been out of touch for too long. Smoking bones of the Chieftains, I had no idea things had got as bad as this! Unseelie wights mustering from all corners of Erith to join forces with barbarian upstarts in the Fastnesses of Namarre! They say the rebels want to overthrow the King-Emperor—what madness has gripped these sgorramas? And what wizards must they have amongst them, to call unseelie things to their command? How can it be possible?”

“Indeed, it is curious, Uncle, but I should say we have no cause for concern here in Gilvaris Tarv,” said Liam. “The Kings of Erith be loyal, and they would send their armies to fight alongside the Royal Legions and the Dainnan if needed. But I cannot see that they would be needed. Surely the Dainnan alone might quell an uprising of mere brigands and wights.”

<<I am not sure,>> his mother rejoined with furrowed brow. <<I feel there is something else behind this rebellion—something stronger than is supposed.>>

“What might that be, sister?”

She shrugged, palms upturned.

“The Dainnan ought to be out looking for pirate Windships,” said Muirne. “Did ye hear, Uncle Bear, a merchant of the Cresny-Beaulais Line was attacked and wrecked not far out of Tarv some weeks ago or more? ’Twas a terrible thing. A patrol ship found a man clinging to a treetop—Sandover was his name, he was quite the talk of the town for a while—and he told them the whereabouts of the other survivors. By then the buccaneer Windship had disappeared completely, and they were never able to trace it.”

“Aye. Terrible. But—but mayhap not all pirates be that bad, ye ken,” stuttered the big Ertishman. “Mayhap there were some just along for the ride, like.”

“What a strange thing to say, Uncle Bear. Of course they all be evil men!”

“Anyway,” deflected Sianadh, “Namarran uprising bai doch. ’Twill drain all the best talent from this city. Already rumor is rife that Caermelor will be calling for new recruits if the forces gathering in Namarre continue to swell. Eager young folk all over town be talking of leaving for Caermelor to assay for the Dainnan, or else to volunteer for the Royal Legions, if the Dainnan will not take them. The pay is meager—’tis said a man-at-arms gets a shilling a day, a mounted archer sixpence, a foot archer threepence, and a spear-man tuppence. ’Tis the glory they want, and the honor, the excitement, and mayhap vengeance. The lives of many folk have been made dark by wights.…”

Muirne said, “Why should ye care if the braves of Tarv leave this city, Uncle Bear?”

“Er … why, Liam and I want to round up some help for a small expedition we are planning. Exploration. I mean, hunting.”

Sianadh’s niece stared hard at him. Then she nodded.

“I see.”

Brazenly, Sianadh changed the subject.

“Sparrow, would ye like me to help ye with your archery practice in the courtyard tomorrow morning, just like old times?”

“Thank ye, Uncle Bear, yes. But methinks ye will find that my aim has improved since last ye tutored me. I shall outshoot ye now.”

Sianadh guffawed. “Outshoot me! I’ll lay bets on that!”

That night Imrhien retired early to bed. She could not sleep for thinking about her prospective journey to Caermelor and Sianadh’s planned expedition. She also wondered when Muirne was going to come in. Ethlinn slept downstairs so that she might be at hand if a customer called in at night on some emergency. Liam and Sianadh slept in the space beyond the upstairs partition. Last night Imrhien had been too weary to take note, but these sleeping arrangements must mean that she had been given Muirne’s bed and Muirne was expected to share. How she must hate that.

When Sianadh’s niece came in, Imrhien feigned sleep. No sheets rustled, and when she opened one eye she saw Muirne rolled in a blanket, lying on the floor. Resentment and bitterness rose like bile in her throat. She sprang out of the bed, tapped its owner on the shoulder, and indicated the bed’s emptiness, then took a blanket and lay on the floor in the opposite corner.

Muirne, obviously, was stung. Hospitality was a matter of Ertish pride.

“The bed be for ye. Ye be the guest. Please, take it.”

<<The bed belongs to you.>>

“I do not want it.”

<<Neither I.>>

“If ye sleep on the floor, my mother will be angry with me.”

<<I not tell her.>>

Muirne gave the guest the same hard stare she had given her uncle.

“If ye sleep in the bed, I will sleep there, too.”

<<Yes.>>

Muirne rolled to the farthest edge and lay like a stick of petrified wood all night, even when the shang storm came and banged open the shutters, lighting the chamomile flowers in the window-box like yellow and white stars.

Sianadh and Liam bustled constantly to and fro during the next few days, making preparations for their own journey and for Imrhien’s. Using gold from the caskets, they bought all kinds of equipment and provisions until the carlin’s house was so full that there was hardly room to move.

Ethlinn examined the spidersilk garments with great interest, drawing from the lining of Sianadh’s cloak the wilted remains of the Gailledu’s blue flower.

<<This be a thing of power.>>

Ethlinn preserved the faded flower in an egg of resin and returned it to her brother.

“A flower of souvenance,” observed Liam.

Muirne always behaved civilly toward the guest, but it was plain that she found her looks offensive. Knowing this, and not daring to venture out in public, Imrhien felt the burden of the disfigurement too heavy to bear.

Then one afternoon Sianadh spoke to her alone.

“I met with an old acquaintance today, old Tavron Caiden. Years ago we were comrades, when he was working for a master-dyer here in Tarv. Always takes a little white dog with him wherever he goes—a perky little whippet. Tavron owns a chandlery now, down on Rope Street, and he be doing right well for himself and his family, I may say, especially considering he used to be poorer than a churl and living far off on some wight-infested sea-cliff. Some say he did a good turn to a wight and was given gold for it, a change of fortune—but to get back to what I was saying, I asked him whether he knew of a cure for paradox, seeing as how I trust him, like, and he was slow in coming out with it, hesitant, rather, but he said there might be some hope with the wizard Korguth the Jackal, who be the greatest wizard in Tarv, and the one who charges the most, needless to say, but his reputation has spread far and wide, and in high places they say he be the equal of Sargoth of the Royal Court, or greater.”

<<Indeed, a mighty wizard he must be.>>

“Aye, chehrna. The family of Korguth has long prospered in this town, ever since his father, when a lad, somehow acquired a set of strange musical pipes. The whereabouts of those pipes are no longer known—Korguth claims to possess them yet, but it is said they have returned to the true owner, whoever that may be. With those pipes, the sire of Korguth was held in fear by the whole town in bygone days, and none dared speak against him.”

At the mention of “strange musical pipes,” a shadow of fear seemed to darken the day, and a dreariness took hold of Imrhien like the ache of an old wound. Between fascination and abhorrence, she felt driven to find out more.

<<Where did the father obtain such an instrument?>>

Sianadh’s blue eyes crossed slightly as he delved into memory. Recalling the tale, he settled into storytelling mode.

“His name in those days was Jack, which is where ‘the Jackal’ comes from, ye get my meaning. The story goes that the family were poor farmers, living a few miles from the city, and Jack—the father of Korguth, that is—would go out to the hills to watch the sheep. His stepmother gave him his dinner, which he carried with him in a cloth, but the fare was wont to be sparse and stale. On one day the fare was so bad that he had no lust for it at all, so he wrapped it up and put it away. As he sat there on the hillside an old, ragged man came along begging for food. Jack obligingly gave him all his dinner, and right glad the old man seemed of it. When he had eaten, the beggar gave thanks and offered to give Jack some gift in return for his generosity. Jack was not too unwise himself, and he suspected this old man might be some wight or other. Knowing full well how many wights rewarded kindheartedness, he asked most merrily and humbly if the old man might give him a small pipe whereon he could play a tune for the entertainment of others.

“The old man gave him a curiously fashioned set of pipes, saying, ‘These have strange properties, for whosoever, save yourself, shall hear them when you play a jig must dance to the music perforce.’

“So Jack took the gift, and with it he played such pranks on his stepmother and the neighbors that they were all soon in a sorry state. After one episode a passing merchant was so bruised and battered from falling from his cart when he heard the music that the sheriff was sent for and Jack was summoned before the judge.

“The day arrived for the hearing, and Jack was there with his poor old stepmother, and the judge was in his place, and there was a goodly gathering of people besides, for news had traveled, and besides, there were many other cases to be heard. There was a fire burning in a hearth at one end of the chamber, for the season was Winter and the hour was early.

“‘Here be a lad which has brought grievous trouble and sorrow upon the goodmen of the shire,’ proclaims the sheriff. ‘It is held he is in league with unseelie wights.’

“‘How has he done this?’ asks the judge.

“‘My lord, he has got himself some pipes that will make you hop and dance until you are well-nigh spent.’

“The judge looks at Jack, who smiles up at him wide-eyed, like some injured innocent child. The judge, mayhap seeing some echo of his mischievous boyhood self before him, gives a chuckle. He allows no credit to the sheriff’s story, so he wants to see the pipes, and then he wants to hear them played.”

At this point, Sianadh aptly mimicked the voices of the characters.

“‘Marry,’ says the stepmother in a fright, ‘prithee say not so until I am out of hearing!’

“Play on, Jack,’ says the old judge indulgently, ‘and let me see what you can do.”

As the Ertishman warmed to the tale, his smile grew broader and he began to shake with mirth.

“Jack sets the pipes to his lips,” he enthused, “and the whole room is instantly in motion. All begin to dance and jump, faster and higher, as though they be out of their wits. Some leap over the tables, some tumble against the chairs, some fall into the fire. The judge springs over the desk and bruises both his shins, and he shouts to the lad to cease for the love of peace and charity. In the uproar he is not heard, and next thing Jack is out the door and on to the streets, and they all follow him, capering wildly as they go. The neighbors start at the sound and come out of their houses, springing over the fences, and some that had been still in their beds jump out and hurry into the streets, naked as they are, to join the throng at Jack’s heels. A frenzy is upon them all, and they bound into the air and look not whither they plunge. Some that could no longer keep their feet for lameness dance on all fours!

“‘Give over, Jack!’ yells the judge, and this time Jack hearkens.

“‘Well,’ he says, ‘I will, if the citizens of Gilvaris Tarv will promise me that they shall never do me trespass so long as I live.’

“Then as many as were there swore before the judge that they would keep peace toward the lad and help him to their power at all seasons against his enemies. And when they had done so, Jack bade the judge farewell and proceeded merrily home. From that time forth he prospered and kept everyone in the city in his fear. He rose to a prominent position and gathered much wealth, which, when he died in old age, was passed on to his son, Korguth.”

The Ertishman scratched his beard. His brow knitted.

“What did they call those doch pipes? Ah, I have it—the Pipes Leantainn—the Follow Pipes. Anyhow, they’ve not been seen for years.”

The instrument’s name struck a chill through his listener. Unaware of her dismay, he continued.

“So there ye have it, chehrna. Now, for the sake of peace, say nothing to my sister about wizards—she cannot abide the caste! Now hearken well, for I have not been idle. As soon as Tavron Caiden gave me the good word, off went I to Korguth’s palace—for a palace it be, mark ye—but his retainers said the great man is so busy that it was not possible to see him for months. When I slipped them an encouragement they said he could see us in another two days. They also mentioned his price, which was so high that I nearly fell over backward, but no matter, that be chickenfeed to us now.

“If this Korguth can cure ye, ye need not travel across the countryside but can remain here with Ethlinn until the return of our expedition. Then I will set ye up in a palace of your own—new face, new palace—the lads will be flocking around ye! What more could a lass wish for? So what say ye, chehrna? Be ye willing to give it a try?” He grinned.

In the light of her friend’s enthusiasm, the shadow of fear fled. Infected by his joy, Imrhien felt her mood lift. <<Yes! Yes!>> She could have kissed him, hedgehog of a prickly red beard and all.

Yet with the visage she wore, she would not insult him so.

In anticipation of this venture, Sianadh brought in a tailor to make new clothes for Imrhien. By then he had purchased new clothes and presents for the whole family.

“So, what exactly are you after, dear?” inquired the tailor, eyeing Muirne (who was the model for the eavesdropping guest) with a disparaging air and tapping his teeth with a tape measure. “Something for evenings? A ball-gown, perhaps? I assume the style would be Finvarnan?”

“Something … er, simple but nice,” ventured Muirne.

“Two gowns for the goodwife, four for the lass, and two of those to be worn with high heels, so make them longer,” interjected Sianadh, who had vowed not to interfere in women’s matters. “Day wear. Plain cut but rich fabrics—aye, Finvarnan, of course, what d’ye think, sgorrama? Measure them, and make it quick and accurate. There be plenty of others who’d like the job.”

He and Liam had appeared that morning in full traditional Finvarnan regalia: sheepskin boots laced crisscross from ankle to knee, calfhide surcoats sewn with copper scales, leather kilts, heavy gold torcs and bearskin cloaks, somewhat impractical at the time of year. Sianadh sported an open-faced bear-helmet, Liam a helm like a snarling hound.

Word having escaped that the carlin had recently made generous donations to several destitute families, a steadily increasing trickle of beggars began to accumulate at the door.

With all this activity, the neighbors in Bergamot Street were starting to talk. Sianadh put it about that their reclusive visitor was merely a cousin of considerable means, who was grateful for their hospitality.

Ethlinn signed, <<There will be jealousy here, in this poor quarter of town, when we are seen to rise. We must consider removing elsewhere, if trouble comes.>>

For such a long time, her facial deformities had invoked nothing but censure, revulsion, and ridicule. The possibility of being healed breathed life into Imrhien, stirred the dull embers of hope to a flame. Impatient to receive the cure, she could not rest, simmering with perturbation, pacing fitfully. She yearned anew for the human companionship that seemed to come so readily to those whose looks were deemed acceptable. Her eyes studied the faces around her with a desolate hunger. When the swellings were removed, would she be fair, plain, or ugly? How much of the damage was permanent, unable to be erased? In this ferment of excitement she soldiered through the remaining hours. It seemed two years, not two days, until at last it came time for her appointment with the wizard and her first venture into the city in daylight.

Sianadh had hired a carriage and driver, which contraption was ogled by the neighbors when it stopped at the door, carriages being a rarity in Bergamot Street. Pedestrians were forced to sidle past it, the street being so narrow, and many of them flung imprecations. Flinging them back, the Ertishman ushered his elegantly clad and deep-hooded charge on board and took his seat beside her. Shortly they were off, rattling jarringly along the cobbled streets.

“Lords and ladies!” chortled Sianadh. “Lords and ladies!”

Do I dream at last? In truth, do I ride in a coach, clad in a satin gown like the petal of a violet and a mantle of brocade like a flower garden—or shall I waken and find myself in the Floor Five soap room in Isse Tower? And if all is as it seems, will the wizard have a cure?

With her richly embroidered taltry pulled forward, Imrhien peered out of the window. A knot of apprehension twisted inside her belly. Between the hemming roofs the sky was strung like a canopy, pearled with an early Autumn haze. A flapping speck crossed it—a Relayer bound for the Tower of the Tenth House.

This city was such a motley medley of sights that it was hard to know which way to look. People passed hither and thither, dressed in ways she had never seen before. Among the peasants and craftsmen in their drab doublets and leather aprons strode merchants with their signatory broad-brimmed hats, and sun-freckled Ertishmen in leather-paned kilts, with auburn manes and mustaches. Sailors in rolled-up breeches, striped kerchiefs tied across their heads, traded rivalrous gibes with the “lemonleg” aeronauts of Merchant Lines. Most striking of all, hard-faced men with clawed gauntlets and wide sunray collars of linked metal strips stalked the streets in heavy jewelry and weapons. Bright tattoos swirled over their bodies. Some wore striped head-cloths hanging to their shoulders, others were crowned with tall helmets like winged birds.

“Namarrans,” commented Sianadh. “Outlaws, like as not.”

One went past leading a bear on a chain.

The city’s architecture metamorphosed as the horses pulled the carriage from the poorer quarter to the rich. Blacksmiths, saddlers, coppersmiths, weavers, tanners, cobblers, and carpenters gave way to fishmongers, fruit vendors, and inns, then jewelers, spice-sellers, and cloth-merchants. Blowing silks and rainbow satins shone like bubbles in the breeze as it tossed hot sunlight from hand to hand.

In the better quarter, pedestrians were less numerous, vehicles more common. Like rows of gnarled old graybeards, eucalyptus trees lined the streets, richly encrusted with red velvet flowers. A wizard rode by in his whites and tall, pointed hat; a peripatetic minstrel strolled with his lute across his back and a capuchin crouching on his shoulder. With a jingle of spurs and weaponry, several mounted knights of some nobleman’s retinue clattered over the cobbles. Erect and disdainful they sat clad in chain mail overlaid with ornate tabards, accompanied by their squires. A group of fashionable gentlemen hastily retreated as they passed, lest their garb be besmirched by filth kicked up from the horses’ hooves. They wore pied, knee-length cotehardies and mantles whose hems were dagged to fully eight inches deep. On their heads, loud-colored taltries tapered to ludicrously long liripipes, which they draped about their shoulders like quiescent vipers.

Ladies stepped from carriages, in long cotehardies fitted tightly to the waist, the sleeves furnished with rows of small buttons reaching from the elbows to the wrists, and tippets dangling from the upper sleeves. Wide bands of embroidery bordered the ladies’ otherwise plain surcoats, and instead of wimples or peplums, the heads of older ladies were adorned with nebules: cylindrical cases of woven wire passing across the forehead and down each side of the face, allowing the hair to flow down from each opening, until the ends were confined in small mesh bags. The visible hair was usually black, sometimes brown. Glimpsed through the window of a carriage pulled by a matching team, a noble widow in her black silk mourning-mask, only her eyes showing. Tottering by on the arm of a gentleman, a simpering young lady sniffing a silver pomander, apple-shaped …

A bolt of lightning slammed Imrhien in the chest. She fumbled with the door-latch, shaking it violently when it refused to unclose.

“Ho there, driver—halt! Why, chehrna—tell me!” Sianadh’s large hand held the latch firmly shut. She grasped great handfuls of her hair, shook it in his face.

<<Gold. Gold-hair lady.>>

The Ertishman peered out at the maiden who had passed by, her heavy curls like ropes of marigolds down her back.

“Aye, gold. But not Talith gold, chehrna, if ’tis what ye be thinking. If ye looked closelike at that hair, ye would spy that it grows out a different color. Many of the nobility dye their hair—it be the fashion. They dye it yellow or black, so as not to look like common Feorhkind. Never red—they consider themselves above us Erts, the sgorramas. Diarmid now, he has his locks dyed brown to fit in with his Free Company mates. ’Tis all false. Ye will not see a true Talith in Gilvaris Tarv, that I swear, for I have put about questions on your behalf. But ye will see many straw-heads, whether wigged or dyed.”

Deflated, the girl fell back in her seat. The carriage jerked into motion. It bowled on until, reaching the wealthiest quarter of the wealthy quarter, it stopped before a pair of bronze gates in a high wall. Stone jackals crouched on the gateposts. After some exchange between Sianadh and a couple of guards, one of the gates swung open.

Slim cypresses and columns lined the driveway. Jasper dragons coiled around the columns, and obsidian jackals snarled atop them. This broad, paved road swept around to the front steps of a magnificent stack of masonry: the wizard’s palace.

A steward conducted the visitors through high, echoing halls, across mirror-surfaced marble floors. More sentries, in Korguth’s black-and-white livery, were stationed at frequent intervals.

“There be a good deal of heavy security,” scowled Sianadh, who instinctively disliked enforcers of authority.

Bent over a blackwood escritoire, an elderly scribe or scholar took the full payment from them in advance and wrote something in a ledger. His quill pen scratched away, a tiny scratch like an insistent mouse eating out the hollow drum of the palace. The scribe shook powdered resin over the paper from a brass pounce-box with a domed and pierced cap.

Sianadh’s boot tapped on the polished floor.

“Wait here, you.” Without looking up, the scribe used the quill to indicate a chair, thus dripping ink over his sleeve and the escritoire. “The Ineffable One administers to his clients alone.”

Sianadh started to say something.

“Alone,” repeated the scribe, turning his gaze on the Ertishman. His hooded eyelids blinked, once.

Cursing and fuming, Sianadh sat down.

<<Good luck,>> he signed to Imrhien with flamboyant gestures, to the utmost perturbation of the nonhandspeaking scribe.

<<Thank you,>> Imrhien signed in return, being led away down the hall.

A servant bade her be seated on another chair, outside a door.

“Aren’t you the fortunate girl, having a rich uncle to pay for your visit,” she said primly, disapprovingly. “My master is the most charming man and the cleverest wizard in Aia.”

Imrhien lifted her face. The servant flinched. Her eyes scurried away like two cockroaches.

“The Ineffable One is always very busy,” she stated, sidling away. “You understand, you will have to wait until he can spare time for you. People are always clamoring to see him. Mind you, behave yourself now. People who are lucky enough to see him ought to be nice and polite.”

Imrhien sat, nicely and politely, on the chair, and time labored on. Eventually the door opened and another maidservant beckoned her to enter.

The charming man’s dim workrooms were as unlike Ethlinn’s as night from day. Copper tubes, retorts, and round-bellied crystal containers loomed out of purple shadows, filled with colored liquids, some steaming. Little red-eyed fires glowed in braziers. A myriad of jars in neat rows held preserved eyeballs, tiny birds’ hearts, embryos, and the internal organs of a multitude of species. A cluster of fox skulls hung from a hook over a dish of livid crystals. The complete skeleton of a horse stood in a corner, fastened together by brass rivets. Cases of polished wood with velvet linings lay open to display scalpels, lancets, needles. A row of bleeding-bowls stood on a shelf alongside a thaumatrope and a cautery, a variety of apothecary jars, glazed gallipots inscribed with runic labels, and large, spherical vessels footed with taps.

Some walls were mirrored, others were hung with tapestries depicting magical symbols, runes, stars, and moons. On a massive oaken desk a huge tome lay open. Across the pages slumped an intricately embroidered silk bookmark terminating in gilt tassels. Shelves embraced more dark, leather-bound volumes, books in cases of fretted and pierced silver so intricately wrought that they looked like fine point lace, and parchment scrolls tied with purple ribbon. A display case imprisoned stuffed lizards and snakes, which looked out through jeweled eyes.

The effect was of some ominous cave filled with dead or inanimate things that somehow retained a counterfeit life, so that they harbored a mechanical ability to rend, tear, slice, burn, and puncture.

A stone slab table, long and narrow, stood in the center of this grand chamber. It was raised some four feet off the floor. A spill of something caustic had pitted one of its edges. Beside it on a bench, a neat arrangement of honed instruments, knives and needles, gleamed softly in the diffuse twilight. And the smell … The odor of incense, masking the whiff of bad meat.

A third attendant told the new client to remove her outer garments and don a gray linen robe.

“The Ineffable One will appear soon,” she said. Judging by her extravagant black-and-white livery, she was more exalted than the first and second. “He is a very busy man. You are fortunate he has been able to find time for you.”

Imrhien nodded. If by now she did not understand how fortunate she was, she must be stupid. She was about to turn and flee when another door opened and the wizard entered, flicking crumbs from his lips.

If the abode of Korguth the Jackal was impressive, the wizard himself was more so—a tall, deep-chested man, not far past his thirtieth year, well-favored. Alternating bands of black and silver striped the long, thick hair falling to his shoulders. So white were his magnificent robes that they seemed to be made of light, and he imbued with that light like a being from another, higher realm. When his eyes lit on the deformed face he showed no surprise but began speaking in a voice like a honey-cake stuffed with raisins and figs, reassuring in its mellifluous richness.

“Paradox ivy poisoning will not cause difficulty. I have had many successes with it. All you must do is mind what I tell you. Cooperate, and there shall be results. You will be as you were before the poisoning—an ordinary, somewhat plain face, I fear. I can tell from the rustic and somewhat coarse bone structure.”

His eyes flickered past his client to the mirror. It was then that she realized that he had not flinched when he’d first set eyes on her because he had not seen her. Absorbed in himself, he perceived only a symbol, a source of income and lauder.

Yet she had almost been charmed.

The arrogant windbag sees only himself, and the adoration of these gullible sycophants, she thought. But I cannot let that matter to me. He can give me what I want, and I must endure.

“Above all, you will not complain or make screams and moans. Do you understand?”

He winced slightly, as though the very thought of such uncouthness pained his ears.

She nodded.

Then there was a drink, cold and blue like death, killing rational thought with a hard tide of paralysis. Paralysis, yet only partial numbness. They laid her on the cold stone slab, in her gray robe, and then it began: the pain, the blades, the hot needles, the searing acids of the pastes, turning each nerve to a severe metal filament that conducted along its path a charge of agony most exquisite.

It went on and on. Imrhien would have cried out, many times, if she had possessed a voice. Agony sang with a piercing, high voice of its own: a paean to pain. The whole length of her body quivered, arching in torment. Through a miasma of fire, the rich voice said smoothly, “It is necessary for it to become worse before it can get better.” But it just worsened, until a time when there had been no suffering was unimaginable and all there had ever been were needles and burning. Just before the blackness came, the voice said, far off, “Tell the red uncle to come back tomorrow.”

There was blood on the pillow, fresh blood and black ichor, but it was difficult to see. Her face was an inferno. With numbed fingers, the patient reached up to touch it, meeting only bandages. Somewhere, a fig-cake said contemptuously:

“It is your own fault. I’ll warrant you cried out in the night, after the procedure was completed. I had expected better return of you. Now the treatment will not be effective.”

Later she was lifted and carried along. A bellowing burst through numb silence, like a red blister rupturing.

“What have ye done to her?”

Uproar exploded all around, after which there came enclosure within a carriage. Hoofbeats dropped like long lines of clay cups, and the swaying of the upholstery sent scarlet veins of lightning through a thickness that choked.

When the cool, green relief washed over her and put out the fire, she lay and soaked in it until it turned to tears.

“’Tis your eyes,” said the voice of Muirne. “Mother says your sight be in danger. We must keep your face covered for seven days. I will be bathing the skin and changing the dressings twice daily. You be scarred now beyond repair. Why did ye go to this wizard? My uncle rages like a wounded bull. He went back to the wizard’s palace and demanded to see him, but the sentries would not let him in. He has threatened to ruin the mage’s reputation and to kill him.” Angrily she added, “They have told my uncle that if he says a word against this charlatan, he and his kindred will be hunted down!” She paused. “This man is powerful. I guess that even if we should keep silent, he means to revenge himself on us for this threat and to prevent us from ever speaking out against him. I think he means us ill. I have observed strangers watching this house. You have brought trouble on us.”

What she says is true, thought Imrhien, lying desolate in her cage of darkness. It is true, and I must leave this house as soon as possible lest I bring further harm. I have been a fool. In seeking public acceptance, I have lost many things far more precious.

At night, Muirne’s weight pushed down the other side of the bed as she slid in with barely a rustle and never a word. In the dark hours Imrhien would lie awake, listening to the slight scuffling sounds of the domestic bruney busy at its surreptitious housework below-stairs. By day the sparrow sometimes cheeped and scuttered, pecking the crumbs Muirne left for it on the washstand, and there were the sounds of comings and goings in the room below, and voices floated up the stairs—often the voices of unfamiliar folk who were gone in the evenings. Then the family would converse.

Liam’s voice: “Aye, Mother, I ken that Eochaid would be the best lad for the job, but he cannot come with us. His father lies ill, and he must stay to keep his stepmother and young brothers. But I tell ye, the lads we have chosen be strong and skilled enough to provide defense in time of need. Uncle, Mother says she feels we are going into deadly peril with this treasure-seeking, and although she trusts the Sulibhain brothers, she mislikes the three east-side lads we be taking along.”

“Hush, boyo, not so loud when ye talk of treasure. And ye should not be so freely a-spending of it in the city as ye are, gifting to your friends, buying drinks for all and sundry—the wrong folk might be getting the idea that ye have stumbled upon a good thing. I like the look of those riversiders right enough, but I trust your mother’s judgment. Let us choose three others.”

“But—there be no others. I mean, if we do not take those three, there will be trouble.”

“Why would there be trouble?”

“Well, ye see, they be right fond of hunting, and I promised them good pay. I had to promise that, else they would not even have considered coming here to meet ye and Mother. They be stalwart, and good fighters. I thought they would be just right—I could find no fault with them.”

“I can find fault to begin with—that they threaten trouble if they do not get what they want!”

“We have no choice now, Uncle.”

“Obban tesh! Of course we have a choice! We tell them the departure has been delayed, then we leave earlier than planned, and in secret, taking only the three worthy Sulibhains. Danger there might be, but those Sulibhains be renowned for their prowess, and they b’ain’t no milksops.”

“Aye, but what will the eastsiders do when they learn we have given them the slip?”

“Ach, a crew of patches like those can do naught. They’d have trouble enough just pulling on their breeches. Still, I b’ain’t leaving here until those wrappings come off her face for good and I see if she be all right.”

When the bandages came off for the last time, the patient’s sight was intact, if blurred. The puffy flesh of her face was too sore to touch. She avoided reflective surfaces. Ethlinn, bathing the wounds with a herbal wash, advised that the skin must be left open to the air, to dry out.

<<I shall do as you say. But I must leave this house as soon as possible. I have brought you ill luck. I have been punished for my vanity.>>

<<Think you that? No. Not true.>>

<<I will not go to the one-eyed carlin, but to some other place.>>

<<The one-eyed daughter knows the ways I do not know. She may be able to help you in some way. Promise that you will go to her. For the sake of all I have done for you, for the sake of my brother’s heart. Promise.>>

Dully, Imrhien nodded.

All travel preparations were complete. It had been arranged that Imrhien, in her own coach-and-four with a driver, a personal maid, and two footmen—all of whom were to start no sooner than at the beginning of the journey—was to join with a road-caravan that was at that time forming up to drive west along the Caermelor Road. Serrure’s Caravan promised to be an extensive column; as well as the usual small merchants who cooperated with each other in such journeys for the sake of the protection afforded by numbers, its ranks were being swelled by farmhands, apprentices, and town gallants who were fired up to join the Royal Legions or the Dainnan. For the armies of Eldaraigne were now mobilizing, in the face of the slowly growing threat from Namarre, and they were making preparations for battle. Playing soldiers was all the rage now in Gilvaris Tarv, and in the town squares youths practiced their fighting skills on one another, to the entertainment of the onlookers. “For D’Armancourt!” was the cry, and, “For Eldaraigne!”

Storms of both kinds hammered on the anvil of the city’s roofs from time to time; these phenomena, combined with thrilling tidings of forces gathering in the northeast and the restlessness of the inhabitants, forged a sense of change in the air, as though a signpost had been passed that could not be revisited.

Diarmid blew in breathless, one dark glittering shang morning, to announce that he was wasting no more time—he was also going to accompany Serrure’s Caravan on its journey westward.

“I shall hire on as a guard—an outrider. I have learned all that I can, here. If I do not go now, all the best places will be taken.”

Sianadh clapped a hand on the shoulder of his tall nephew. “’Tis good news, Diarmid my young cockerel. By good fortune, Imrhien is to travel with Serrure’s Caravan, too—ye can keep her company and watch over her.”

Diarmid stiffened almost imperceptibly.

“With all my heart I wish to do so,” he said. “But meaning no disrespect to the lady, I shall be riding as a paid guard and thus shall not be able to leave my duties.”

“Ah, codswallop,” Sianadh snorted. He was interrupted by Muirne, who had come running in when she heard the news.

“Oh, take me with ye, Diarmid! The Royal Company of Archers would have need of a good markswoman, would they not?”

Her brother shook his cinnamon head. “I’ll not take my young sister into battle. Besides, Mother needs you here.”

“‘I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow,”’ sang Sianadh. “And a doch good shot ye be, too, Birdie—ye won that gold brooch off me with your marksmanship, not that I wasn’t going to give it to ye anyway—but a little lass like ye in the King’s army—it just wouldna be right!”

“That is not fair!” chided his niece. “I would do better at court than those farm churls from hereabouts who are going to the Royal City. Why, they would not even know how to behave at the dinner table. I have heard about all the manners of gentlefolk. I know.”

“Eating be eating, b’ain’t it, Birdie?”

“Nay, Uncle Bear. In Caermelor, at the Royal Court, they be so—oh, so much more advanced than anywhere else. ’Tis not done to wipe your fingers on your hair or the tablecloth, or belch, or speak with your mouth full of food, or scratch, or pick your teeth at table. Ye have to use little forks to pick up the food. Ye be not allowed to pour wine for your betters or for yourself, but to wait for them to deign to pour it for ye, if they be feeling generous. And the carving of the meats must be done a certain way, and as for the toasts—it would take ye a whole day just to learn the complications.”

“Takes the fun out of eating,” observed Sianadh. Turning to Diarmid: “I be glad ye be going to Caermelor, soldier, and not me!”

“And I would rather be going, too,” Muirne said bitterly.

Ethlinn signed to her eldest son, <<Muirne and I will soon be leaving this house. It is no longer suitable for us to stay here—beggars harass us, and the house is spied on. We shall lodge for a time with our cousin Roisin Tuillimh, in Clove Street—you know the house—until we find a new place, perhaps in the middle quarter. We shall send word to you by the Yeoman Stormriders, and you must send us news also—let us know whether you have been accepted for the Dainnan testing and whether you will be sent to Namarre. For, while I am proud of you for choosing to serve our King-Emperor, I’d as lief none of my children would go to the battlefront.>>

Her eyes told more than her hands.

Imrhien’s sight gradually cleared. The pain decreased to a throbbing ache. The looking-glass revealed scars and tattered flesh, a disfigurement far worse than before the treatment at the wizard’s hands. She withdrew under her taltry, a snail into its shell.

A carriage arrived at the end of Bergamot Street—Roisin Tuillimh had come to visit Ethlinn. She was a tall, spare woman with a long face and bright eyes watching out from above jutting cheekbones. Her faded hair, once the shade of ruby wine, was coiffed in simple fashion. Her garb was well tailored without being ostentatious, its style unashamedly Ertish. She cared little for beauty of countenance and much for beauty of spirit. Her mode of speech was rhythmic and unusual.

“Now, lass,” she said to Imrhien, “you scarce have seen the city’s sights. Since first you came here, it’s indoors you’ve chiefly bided. Yon Bear leaves upon the morrow, but today is the first of Uvailmis and I invite your company on a jaunt—to Uvailmis Market-Fair we go—perchance you’ll see something you wish to purchase, some useful item for your forthcoming journey, or what you will.”

Reluctantly Imrhien allowed herself to be persuaded to accompany the three women to market.

Roisin’s carriage rattled to a halt in a wide square choked with a confetti of stalls and crowds. She and Ethlinn stepped out, followed closely by Muirne and Imrhien. They walked among the canvas booths and awnings, examining, haggling, purchasing. Imrhien stared at the wares spread out so enticingly.

“Do not let anyone get a good eyeful of ye,” Muirne reminded her with a nudge.

Keeping her face in the shadow of her taltry, Imrhien toured the nearest booths. A commotion drew their attention; bystanders began to gather around as a man, touting at full volume, led a small horse into the square.

“No finer steed in Erith! A waterhorse of eldritch, tethered securely by a rope around its pretty neck! Ladies and gentlemen, this fine beast will run like the wind for you, work like a slave for you, carry and draw weights that would kill an ordinary hack. What price am I offered?”

Some among the bystanders now recognized the horseseller as the proprietor of the Picktree Mill, a man known for his ability to drive a hard bargain. The miller received a mixed reaction to his offer—some drew away, muttering that it was ill luck to meddle with unlorraly beasts. Others surged forward—it was a rarity, the capture of something eldritch, and many folk were curious just to look. The little gray waterhorse was indeed a pretty steed, and in fine fettle. Its legs were long and sculptured, like those of a racehorse. The hooves were delicate, the neck proudly arched. Strangely, the tail curled up over its back like a half-wheel. Fluted water-leaves like thin, green ribbons twined in that glossy tail and in the mane. But the eyes rolled with indignant fear, and the nostrils flared like two wild roses, for it had no choice except to succumb meekly to whatever the holder of the rope laid upon it. It neighed its rage and sprang back as if burned when the miller shook a pair of iron stirrups near its face.

“What am I offered! The finest beast in Erith! Immortal! Tame as a pup!”

The crowd murmured warily. Few of them had ever set eyes on any wight at all, for it was unwise to look in on domestic bruneys, the wights that most commonly inhabited certain fortunate houses in the cities of men. “Is it really a waterhorse? What kind is it?” they asked among themselves. They had all heard of the Each Uisge and wanted no part of anything with a reputation for such savagery and mercilessness.

Someone knowledgeable spoke up. “Judging by the tail, ’tis only a nuggle—I mean, a nygel,” he said. “Not one of the killing-horses. ’Tis harmless.”

“There must be some trickery, miller,” said one of the bystanders. “How could you catch so slippery a beast?”

“Do you doubt my veracity sir? Fie! No trickery—no, indeed! The wretch has plagued me this many a night, for it is fascinated by water mills, and if the mill was working during the hours of darkness, it grabbed the wheel and halted it. The only way I could drive it off was to ram a flaming torch or a long iron blade through the vent-shaft of the mill. Its other prank was to dawdle along the millstream and lure people to mount it, whereupon it would dash away into the millpond or the sea and give the unwary rider a sore ducking, half drowning him. This trickster deserved to be taught a lesson, and that’s just what I have done.”

“Did it ever eat anyone?” asked a nervous man.

“Never! My wightish friend here did not, like the You-Know-What, the Prince of Waterhorses, tear its victims to pieces—after it rid itself of its burden, it used to set up a great nicker and a laugh and next be seen galloping and plunging off into the distance.”

“That does not explain how you come by it,” another objected.

The miller had been waiting for an opportunity to describe his clever feat.

“I was but a-walking down by Millbeck Tarn, searching for my chestnut mare. This creature came up to me all friendlylike, so pretending I did not know what it was, I got on its back, but I held on with only one hand. When it galloped off with me for a joyride, I slipped my free hand in my pocket and took out the rope halter I’d been keeping for my mare and slipped it around its neck. Then it was mine! Leave the rope on, ladies and gentlemen, and the thing will do as you bid forever!”

Various offers began to be shouted.

“Two sovereigns!”

“Three!”

Excitement surged through the throng like wind through a cornfield. The waterhorse, far from its natural surroundings, shuddered, looking desperately for escape, bound inexorably by the lorraly fibers of the hempen rope encircling its neck.

As they bid, the faces of the onlookers were stamped with the smug superiority of those who beheld a symbol of their fear brought to its knees. All creatures of eldritch were baffling to them, alien and therefore frightening. They presented a constant threat against which most mortals felt impotent. Imrhien saw the cruelty in the faces and the trembling of the waterhorse, which was only a nygel after all, a practical joker by nature, but not a monster. The creature was guiltless, having merely been obeying its own fun-seeking instincts. Through its own naiveté it was now enslaved and reviled. Imrhien understood its situation perfectly.

The bidding rose to six sovereigns, then seven guineas. There it halted.

<<On my behalf, offer him an angel,>> Imrhien signed.

“Oh, no,” Muirne protested diffidently.

“She signs too quickly. What wishes she to know, Muirne?” inquired Roisin. On being told, she threw Imrhien a measuring glance. “Be ye certain?”

A nod.

“A pony for the pony!” called Roisin.

There was general laughter, but the miller who held the rope said, “Is that a genuine offer?”

“It is.”

Imrhien began rummaging in her purse.

“What? Be ye turning scothy?” hissed Muirne.

<<No. Please, show him the money.>>

Nobody outdid the offer. People stepped back, gawping in amazement—few had ever seen a coin of as high value as an angel, otherwise known as a pony. The Picktree miller made sure they didn’t get much of a look at it. As soon as he had bitten the heavy golden disk to test its authenticity, he pocketed it, handed the rope halter to Roisin, and disappeared swiftly into the crowd, doubtless afraid he might have become a target for cut-purses or less subtle robbers.

The transaction completed, the bystanders now focused their attention on the new owners, calling out advice and questions. Imrhien stepped up to the terrified wight and slipped off the rope. Instantly the crowd scattered. The little waterhorse reared up on its hind legs, whinnied and dashed away, mane and tail streaming, bursting through the multitude, causing it to split and roar and curse like some many-headed monster.

“What have you done?” cried Muirne.

<<I paid for its freedom.>>

As the nygel galloped off, a movement overhead caught Imrhien’s attention. A Windship passed high above, departing from Tarv Tower under full sail, coursing through the cloudless skies like a lean greyhound. Imrhien felt her taltry fall back as she tilted her head for a quick glance. Swiftly she pulled up the hood once more and turned back to the carriage. As she put her foot up on the step, she paused, sensing someone watching her. She glimpsed a short figure, with squinting eyes gleaming from the shadows of its own cowl. An odd face—very odd; disturbing.

Ethlinn followed the direction of her gaze. <<Danger. Quickly—we must go.>>

Hurriedly the four of them reembarked, Muirne fuming about folk who not only throw away good money, but also insist on making a show of themselves for all the world to see. The carriage rattled off out of the marketplace. Ethlinn, whose eyes had been fastened to the rear window, signed, <<We are being followed.>>

“My driver knows the hidden ways and the devious,” said Roisin, and she called instructions to the man. The passengers were jerked violently to one side as the carriage slewed around a corner on two wheels and bounced down a side-street. In the next instant they were thrown to the other side. Passersby scattered. Buildings flashed past.

“Be not affrighted—we will not overturn,” Roisin shouted over the racket of the wheels, “Brinnegar knows well what he is at.”

<<They follow yet. They are gaining on us. Stop at the next corner.>>

Roisin shouted to the coachman. As soon as the vehicle stopped, Ethlinn was out of the door with a movement surprisingly swift and lithe for her age. Leaning from the window, Imrhien saw her draw out her carlin’s Wand, planting it firmly in a muddy crack between the cobbles, in the middle of the street. Then the carlin’s hands moved in an unfamiliar gesture. It seemed to Imrhien that the living stave began to sprout with unnerving swiftness—that toothed briars, sharp nettles, and gorses budded and whipped out from its rind, tangling tentacles, weaving in and out betwixt walls and street, growing higher until within a few blinks of the eye they had formed a shadowy trellis of thorns. When the carlin snatched up the Wand, it broke away and the barrier remained in place. She hurried back to the carriage. As the team pulled away, a group of figures rounded the corner and ran full-tilt into the black ensnarlment. Some fell back—others became hooked and began writhing among the dim briars. The coachman’s whip cracked, the horses leaped forward. Soon the stymied pursuers were out of sight.

Safely back at Ethlinn’s house, Imrhien could not rid herself of the memory of the odd face in the marketplace. It seemed branded on the inner surface of her lids; every time she closed her eyes it sprang vividly before her. The mouth had stretched wide, the nostrils had been broadly flared. The hood rested on the head in a peculiar fashion, tucked up into points just above the ears. From beneath that hood, the slanting eyes had stared directly at her, with a look that seemed to come from somewhere dark and wild, somewhere alien. And the stranger had stood no more than four feet high. There was no doubt in her mind that this curious onlooker was eldritch and, furthermore, that it was malevolent.

<<I can protect myself from harm,>> signed Ethlinn, <<but I may not always be able to protect others. Amongst the group that pursued us there were those with a wightish look—strange, since they do not love the day. I have underestimated the powers of this wizard Korguth—for I think it is he who sends these creatures after us in revenge.

<<Muirne, for safety you must go with Diarmid and Imrhien to Caermelor, at least until this madness has run its course. Until then, be careful. Tomorrow we make the move to Roisin’s house, with all discretion. It is to be hoped that any pursuers will not know where we have gone. After that, do not venture out of doors until it is time to leave with the caravan.>>

Elated, her daughter began to pack immediately.

Before dawn the next day, at the threshold of the house in Bergamot Street, Sianadh and Liam said their farewells. Three laden landhorses waited, held by Sheamais, one of the trusted Sulibhain brothers. The other two members of the small company were to meet them at a prearranged rendezvous outside the city.

An ache of grief churned inside Imrhien’s chest.

“I do not know when we may meet again,” the Ertishman said to her awkwardly. “By the time I return ye will be well away on the Caermelor Road, with Serrure’s Caravan.” He gave her a rakish grin. “We went through it together, did we not, chehrna? We went through it and ye opened the doors for me and I gave ye a name. There be an old saying in Finvarna, ‘Inna shai tithen elion—We have lived the days.”

She nodded, swallowing the tightness in her throat.

“Good speed to ye, and all luck. I hope ye may find what ye seek.”

<<For the last time, Sianadh, I beg you not to go,>> his sister urged. <<No good shall come of it. My heart tells me some doom awaits you on that path.>>

Sianadh kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Never worry, Eth. Doom has waited for me before. It can keep on waiting. The Bear will prevail.”

He kissed Muirne on the back of her hand. Imrhien, he embraced clumsily, thumping her on the back like a drinking partner.

<<What does it mean, the name you gave to me?>>

Her eyes searched the rough landscape of his face. The very intensity of her gaze was a fine chain linking the two of them together.

“Imrhien—it be the Ertish word for butterfly.”

Without another word, Sianadh turned abruptly. The chain snapped. He swung himself up into his saddle and rode off with the young Sulibhain. Liam, having taken his leave, followed.

Tears glistened on Muirne’s face. “Mother, shall we see them again?”

Ethlinn stood with her hands pressed together, gazing down the street.

Stormriders on ’tween-city runs reported that an incoming road-caravan—many of whose members were to join up with Serrure’s—had been delayed by harassment from large numbers of road-haunters. Not only was it late, but once the convoy arrived, time would be needed for repairs. This put back the departure date of Serrure’s Caravan. It would not, now, leave for another week or perhaps two. From time to time other, smaller convoys were leaving—however, these being less reputable and less well guarded, Ethlinn deemed them unsuitable for her children and Imrhien.

Meanwhile, the move from Bergamot Street to Clove Street had to be made quickly—to this purpose, everything had been boxed in advance. The cart arrived late on the same night of Sianadh’s departure, its wheels muffled with straw. Quickly and quietly they loaded their belongings. Ethlinn locked the door, and they drove away with a minimum of fuss. All seemed to be going well, but as the cart turned the corner out of Bergamot Street, Muirne abruptly jerked bolt upright.

“The brooch!”

<<What brooch?>> her mother asked.

“The gold brooch Uncle Bear gave me for my marksmanship—I have left it behind, hidden for safekeeping behind the wall-linings!”

<<Leave it,>> Ethlinn insisted, <<let it be. You have gold enough with the portion he bestowed upon you.>>

“But it is a prize for my skill at archery! It is special. And he gave it to me. I would trade all my gold for it.”

<<I forbid you to return to the house. The danger is too great.>>

Muirne shuttered her face like a window.

Welcoming lamps shone softly from Roisin Tuillimh’s large, comfortable abode. Efficiently, swiftly, the cart was unloaded and driven away.

“Weariness sits heavy on you all,” said gray-haired Roisin. “Come rest awhile, partake of milk and honey to refresh, before your heads meet pillows. Some commotion I heard just now, perhaps your seelie helper the bruney. From your luggage it unloaded itself, methinks. If it stays, ’twill find ’tis never idle within these walls, I trow—my servants’ hands were erst full enough with but one mistress to wait upon—oh, and of course the lynxes, my pampered pets. The maids shall be told to leave your wight unmolested and not to spy, lest it should take offense and depart. And, dear Eth, a grounding-place for your Wand has been prepared beside the rose that grows in the front court.”

That night, when all were abed, Imrhien heard the soft sounds of Muirne moving about in the next room. She lighted a candle and stole in like some pale haunter of the marshes. Muirne, fully gowned in her emerald velvet, was about to descend the stair. She started guiltily, one hand on the banister, a dark-lantern in the other. Shadows enfolded her face like a mask.

“Go back to bed,” she whispered.

Imrhien fixed her candle in the socket of an empty holder. <<You go to fetch the brooch. Do not. Go in daylight.>>

“I cannot go in daylight. People would see. I might be followed.”

Muirne started to go down the stairs. Imrhien grabbed her elbow.

<<Wait. I go with you.>>

Muirne hesitated, then nodded, relief flashing across her features. She waited while Imrhien dressed herself hurriedly in her magenta brocade, throwing across her shoulders a cloak the color of the evening ocean. Together the two damsels went silently out of the front door, crossed the tiny courtyard, and passed through the gate into the obscurity of the street.

At night, the city seemed to be another world. Angled roofs pitched and seesawed, black cutouts against the smoky veil obscuring the moon. Soft-footed the girls went, with covered lanterns, hugging the pools of inky shadow that flowed under walls. Straw blew down the street in dry wisps. A tame lynx ran along a wall and dropped down on the other side. In the distance someone screamed. A dog yapped, several streets away. Rowan tilhals hung over every door as a traditional precaution, even though wights seldom roamed in cities. Bruneys and such seelie domestic solitaries habitually remained indoors—their natural abodes were human shelters.

As the two girls drew near their destination, a knot of drunken revelers passed across the end of a street and caroused off down some lane, flinging back aberrant echoes of their incoherence. There were no nightwatchmen in this part of Tarv, to swing glaring lanterns into the faces of late loiterers and ask questions.

Bergamot Street seemed empty. There was no sign of movement. Soundlessly Muirne turned the key in the door of the deserted house. The irritating bell failed to ring, having been removed. All was quiet. Uneasily Imrhien wondered whether it was too quiet—she could remember no night stillness as profound as this, not in this street. Usually one could detect someone coughing in an upstairs window, the susurration of voices from a back room, the thin wail of an infant. The back of her neck tingled, as at the approach of the unstorm. She listened for a footfall, for any sound to crack the hard silence, but a numbness pressed on her ears like wads of wool.

The interior of the house felt unfamiliar in its emptiness. It seemed sad and somehow eerie, like an abandoned ship found drifting on the tide. With the lanterns partially uncovered, the intruders ascended the creaking stairs. The bare room above still held the lingering scent of lavender and something more, undefinable. Muirne groped behind the sackcloth on the walls.

“Here it be.”

She fastened the brooch to her gown, beneath her mantle.

They took up their lanterns again, making their way down to the front door. Shadows fled before their feet. The back window of the lower room stared: a blank eye.

The oppressive feeling grew stronger when they entered the street. It felt like a warning. Imrhien wished Muirne would hurry—she was fumbling with the lock, having trouble with the key.

Then the key clattered to the cobbles with a sudden noise like the riving of a muted bell. Cold on the stones, it lay alone, and no hand reached to retrieve it. The abductors had sprung from behind, clapping one hand across the mouths of their victims, twisting an arm behind their backs and dragging them to a cart waiting around the corner. In vain the girls struggled. A whip cracked twice, and the cart clattered away.

On the street, the key floated in a pool of shadow.

The house sprouted like a toadstool down by the river, in a dilapidated section of the city. Oily water glinted between ramshackle edifices bereft of paint and tiles. The area stank of mold and rising damp.

Little did the captives glimpse of their new surroundings before they were thrust roughly through the door, divested of their jewelry, dragged to a small, cheerless room, and locked in, alone. For a long time, Muirne sobbed quietly. Her companion prowled the room. It was furnished only with a straw pallet, a couple of rough woollen blankets, and two buckets, one empty and the other full of water. In the gloom, none of these objects was easy to discern. Weak illumination was provided by pale moonlight through a barred window, high in one wall. From beyond the window came the lapping and gurgling of the river. An eldritch tingle raked Imrhien’s spine—the faint sounds of scuttling overlaid the water’s music. The room was also furnished with rats. The cellars of Isse Tower had harbored such rodents—she hated them with a vehemence far out of proportion to their few transgressions against her.

The rats stayed out of sight. Eventually Imrhien curled up at one end of the pallet and fell asleep.

She woke, stiff and cold, with Muirne lying red-eyed beside her. Daylight the color of gruel was leaking in between the window-bars.

“Ye,” Muirne said scornfully, lifting her tearstained face, “how could ye sleep? Have ye no mind as to what has happened, to what shall happen?”

Imrhien shook her head. This she had pondered, as slumber overcame her. It seemed obvious that the wizard’s minions were carrying out their threat to harm Sianadh’s kin if he damaged Korguth’s reputation. But if so, why had they imprisoned herself and Muirne and not simply thrown them into the river? And if the abductors were indeed the wizard’s henchmen, why had they not made their move as soon as Sianadh had threatened their master? Why had they waited until Ethlinn’s house was empty? It made no sense.

Muirne said, “They were after ye, the uraguhne wizard’s roustabouts, and they took me by mistake. I heard one of them say, ‘Which one is it?’ to which another replied, ‘I know not. Take them both.’ Now we shall both suffer the same fate, which, most likely, is to be taken to Namarre and sold as slaves. Ah, my poor mother!” She began again to weep.

A key rattled in the lock, and the door banged open. A burly man with a pockmarked face stood beyond it. Another, clad in servant’s drab, lugged in a second straw pallet and threw it on the floor, followed by a couple of blankets and a dirty loaf of bread.

A third man strode in, his face almost invisible beneath a bushy brown beard. He wore merchant’s yellow.

“Stand up and give us a look at you.”

Then he swore a violent oath as the prisoners obeyed.

“So, Weasel—this is what you fetch for me out of the gutters—a henna’d queen and a bleached hag.” He studied Imrhien from head to toe.

“A form a man could worship and a face from out of his worst nightmares.”

Imrhien shivered. The man had Mortier’s stench.

“This could be better than I had hoped. Two for the price of one! ’Twill make for a fine show and a fine bidding after. Make sure you keep the little dancers well fed, Weasel—they shall need to be light on their feet.”

As though this were a clever joke, the man outside the room laughed.

“Aye, Scalzo,” grunted Weasel, the drab servant. The bearded man stamped out of the room, followed by Weasel, who slammed the door.

<<We live. Have hope.>>

Ignoring the impassioned signals, Muirne turned her face away.

Like all caged animals and incarcerated mortals, they took to pacing up and down. Their footsteps marked the passage of seconds, minutes, days. Seven short strides were the measure of their prison; that, they learned well. Once a day Weasel came bringing food that varied little—bread, pickled fish, and sometimes apples. He would stare at them with blank eyes, offering no conversation—completely devoid of compassion and fellow-feeling. Each morning Imrhien scratched the tally of the passing days on the wall with a piece of broken brick. As the row of marks lengthened, Muirne’s silences became shorter and her antipathy crumbled.

To pass the time they played games—Cloth-Scissors-Rock, guessing games, charades. They planned escapes. Muirne extended Imrhien’s knowledge of handspeak, and in return Imrhien related, as well as she could, her adventures with Sianadh among the mountains. Muirne wanted to know why she had been traveling there, but Imrhien avoided the subject, having promised Sianadh not to reveal the truth of the treasure at Waterstair. Nevertheless, out of the seed of the Ertish girl’s interest, sympathy grew.

Except for the passing of a mild shang wind that raised hazy specters of mist, there was scant distinction of one day from the next.

“Why do they keep us here for so long?” mused Muirne. She answered herself: “Likely they wait for a Seaship to arrive in Tarv Port—a slaver to take us to Namarre. We have missed our place in Serrure’s Caravan. It will have departed by now. Yet why should I be concerned about caravans? We shall be lucky enough to stay alive.”

On the fourteenth day, bickering voices arose beyond their door like angry wasps.

“We can wait no longer. Each day that passes brings more danger of discovery.”

“Soon it will come! It might well be today. Why waste what we have?”

“We have delayed far too long already.”

“What are you afraid of? The blue-faced crones? Poor Weasel, frightened of the grannies!”

“I say, get them out of here.”

“No. A good strong ghost-maker will come this night. I feel it.”

The voices faded as the men moved away, still arguing.

“Oh,” said Muirne in a small voice, “how hreorig. No doubt this be an unshielded house, and we are to be used as gilfs before we are sold.”

<<What means that?>> Imrhien’s hands demanded.

“Gilfs—performers in shang. Folk who choose, or who are forced, to bare their heads in the unstorm and become part of some act or event that, during later unstorms, be shown to a paying audience. These shows, these unshielded houses, be illegal. The black-hearted skeerda criminals who run them charge a high fee for viewing and be always on the lookout for some new act to draw back old customers—new gilfs, more exciting stunts.”

<<How must we perform?>>

“I know not, but I dread to imagine. I have heard these things spoken of in quiet corners when older folk believed I could not overhear. The gilf-shows in these illegal houses—men are made to fight one another to the death or to wrestle wild animals. Sometimes they must jump through fiery hoops or walk upon hot coals, barefoot. Always they must perform acts of great daring. Through their fear, their images burn brighter on the shang.”

<<Happiness burns.>>

“Oh, aye—great joy burns brightly, too, but it is easier for such uraguhnes as these to inspire fear than joy. And not the kind of gray, sweating fear that turns folk to stone, but the full-blooded terror that pushes them to deeds they could not normally do—that makes for better entertainment. It seems we are to be used for this, when the next shang wind comes, Ceileinh save us. There be worse things than death.”

No unstorm came that night, to turn the city into a jewel box—or the next. But Weasel came in, drunk, and spoke to them.

“This used to be a busy house with a profitable gilf-room upstairs,” he confided with uncharacteristic garrulity, “until one night during a ghost-maker, when the audience was packed around the walls, watching the shows, there came a loud voice saying, ‘Where is my golden eye?’ and a great hairy Hand or maybe a Foot came down the chimbley and groped out into the room. The onlookers fled in terror. Since then, every time there is a ghost-maker the Voice says, ‘Where is my golden eye?’ and the Hand comes down the chimbley, grasping and seeking. It drove away all the customers. Scalzo has tried many ways to get rid of this Thing in the Chimbley, but with no success. So he keeps a watch-worm locked in the gilf-room in case the Thing comes down the chimbley one night, and then slides down the stair to these lower rooms where we sleep. Still, we do not rest easy in our beds, and we cannot open the gilf-room to trade. Now we find ourselves with two prisoners who have no better fate in store than the slave-ships. What chance—you both have eyes! Are they golden?”

“Manscatha!” hissed Muirne.

“You will both be sent to the gilf-room as soon as the next ghost-maker comes. When the Thing in the Chimbley asks for eyes, it can take its pick of the two of you—the gooseberry eyes of the bleached hag or the robin’s eggs of the henna’d queen.” He shrugged. “Who kens—mayhap the Thing will not know the difference, or care. Then maybe it will be content and leave us in peace. If one of you remains unmarred, she shall be taken away to be sold.”

Corpse-pale, Muirne clenched her fists until her nails bit her flesh. She could not speak. Weasel, suddenly as wooden as always, made his exit, remembering to lock the door.

Imrhien had scratched the twenty-second mark on the wall when she felt the first premonition of it—the same prickling thrill that accompanied the buildup of any massive thunderstorm. Through that day the precognition grew, slowly. As evening deepened, Muirne nervously clutched at her companion’s arm.

“The unstorm! Imrhien, it comes this way!”

With that awakening, a sudden wail broke out from beyond the walls, a wild and tragic cry of grief.

Muirne shuddered. She lapsed into silence, and they both hearkened. Once, twice, three times—at the third cry, the long, grievous lament trailed off brokenly on the evening breeze. The Weeper of Tarv had dwelled by the river long before the first buildings of the city had sprung up on the banks. Rivers were the age-old haunts of weepers. If they were to be perceived at all by mortal eyes—which might happen perhaps once in a hundred years—they would be seen kneeling at the water’s edge, apparently washing the bloodstained garments of those about to die. Their grim warnings were distributed among townsfolk and countryfolk alike, and they were always accurate.

Who would die this night?

Stars grilled themselves to white cinders on the cold grating of the window. With a metallic clang, the door opened. Men stood in the frame, outlined by flaring torches. An order was barked. A short man stepped forward. Sores clustered at the corners of his mouth.

“Time for the show,” he remarked. He pulled the taltries from the heads of the captives, then pushed them out through the door and up some stairs. Their escort parted ranks and closed in behind them.

At the top of four flights, a man unbolted a door and kicked it wide. Two others thrust blazing torches into the darkness of the room beyond, a chamber opening out long and broad.

“Back! Get back there,” they barked at something beyond the door. They jabbed forward their brands. Flickering light flooded the corners of the room as more torches entered. The captives were pushed through the portal.

A scream rose up in Muirne. It snapped from her mouth like a whipcord. She and Imrhien tilted back their heads, staring in wonder.

The flat, wedge-shaped head of a giant snake towered over them, rising out of a spiral of coils. The snake was a rainbow taken out of the sky and twisted into the shape of a corkscrew and covered all over with flattened water drops that refracted the rainbow’s living light, glinting iridescent like the inner lining of an abalone shell. As thick in the girth as a man’s body, the watch-worm made a hiss like steam, flicking out its forked tongue from between the wide jaws. Its eyes were fathomless, multifaceted crystals. Evanescent colors rippled down its convolutions: zircon, ruby, emerald, diamond, sapphire. The men swung torches at the creature, driving it up one end of the room, where it began to gather its coils in a coruscating slither of sequins and pearl buttons.

This chamber, this gilf-room, occupied the entire upper story. At one end gaped a blackened and toothless maw of a fireplace, hooded by a stone chimney. At the other squatted a massive chest, with open lid. Bits of smashed walls jutted, showing where the chamber had once been divided into smaller rooms. It was painted all over—walls, ceiling, floor—with brightly colored, amateurish murals crudely representing battles and acts of wizardry. The window shutters hung askew, the wall-murals flowing over them uninterrupted.

One of Scalzo’s men was shouting: “Pack away the watch-worm—the ghost-maker’s coming!”

A jinking, chinking sound was approaching, as of a million tiny bells. Imrhien’s hair bristled like a sunburst, crackled like ice. Fear and elation filled her. Muirne held her arm in the grip of a steel trap. A black post stood near the center of the floor, and to this the two gilfs were now efficiently roped.

“Now don’t you try to get free,” the short man declared, “or it will be the worse for you. I won’t have chits like you overlapping with my other tableaux and getting things all confused. There’s been an old, half-baked one there where that pillar is—it’s always looked a bit faded, so tonight we’ll overlay it with something better, eh, Golden-Eyes?” Cracking a whip he had been holding at his side, he stepped back. The victims shivered.

The watch-worm was darting its huge head toward the torchbearers. Scalzo’s men stabbed forward with torches, passing the flares across the sliding metallic hide of the massive boa. It jerked and thrashed as if it were in pain and opened its fanged mouth to emit a hiss as loud as an arsenal of white-hot weapons being plunged into cold water. The dorsal spines, which had lain quiescent along its backbone, lifted like a crest, like a row of shot-silk fans, their flaring membranes radiating colors from angry carmine to violent violet. The men must leap and dodge now, flying like birds in a whirling cage, to avoid the flogging tail. The worm lunged for the door, and the short man’s whip bit into its neck, just below the fins.

“Get that thing into the chest quick, or I’ll millstone the lot of you! Hurry—then get out of here!”

With flaming brands, the men tried to chase the creature toward the cramped chest that was its prison. At that moment the shang storm struck with full force and the theater of horrors sprang to life. Imrhien was too intent on watching the snake to concern herself with the terrible scenes that had awakened throughout the length and breadth of the unshielded room.

Muirne had begun to tremble violently, her face a wooden carving of terror. Somewhere, a muffled drum, or possibly a heart, began to pound. Swept up by the ecstasy of the shang, Imrhien had no room for fear.

Then the mad roaring, down through the vent over the fireplace, into the room:

“Where is my golden eye?”

Terrible was the Voice, bitter and ancient, harsh with menace. Muirne’s screams mingled among the yells of the men.

Beyond the screams, beyond the gold-limned cameos of the unstorm shimmering in random repetition, and the flowing scintillas of the watch-worm’s gyrations—behind the backs of their tormentors, the disjointed shutters of a window fell open and two figures entered, jumping down from the ledge. At first, Imrhien thought them part of yet another ghostly scene, but when she looked again she realized that they had attacked two of Scalzo’s torchbearers, taking them by surprise. Bearers and torches already lay sputtering out on the floor in a puddle of blood as dark as spilled wine. Circling amid the chaos of images, the intruders managed to catch two more men unawares. As these men fell, run through by short-swords, their accomplices realized what was afoot and turned in fury to fall upon the unexpected assailants. Swords flashed from scabbards, men went flying across the room. Now freed from the ring of fire, the watch-worm careened about the walls in lightning loops of illumination. Three of the torchbearers flung down their brands and leaped for the door, wrenching it open and disappearing down the stairs. The avenging watch-worm followed them at greater speed. Another man, in terror, jumped out of the open window.

Then a shadow fell on the hearth, a dark reflection of something moving farther up inside the chimney. It seemed to be the shadow of a loathsome claw or a hideous and gigantic spider. Scrapings of soot rained out of the core of the funnel.

A man bellowed, “Muirne!”

The Voice rumbled louder, more venomously, “Where is my golden eye?”

Flourishing bloody swords, Liam and another young Ertishman dashed out of the melee of shang wraiths. They slashed the ropes binding the captives.

Four men lay wounded or dead on the floor, beneath the translucent afterimage of the watch-worm, a wheeling vortex. Some of Scalzo’s men were running about as though they had lost their wits, too terrified to leave the room in case the watch-worm should be waiting outside, yet afraid to remain and face certain peril. Shang images repeated themselves everywhere—even high in the roof-cavities, where sildron belts had been used on past gilfs. At the other end of the room, the blackened smoke-shaft began to vibrate. Bits of dislodged mortar dropped out from between the stones, building up along the mantelpiece. A pylon rammed straight down into the fireplace and stood there. It looked like a giant chicken’s foot blasted by fire or struck by a thunderbolt.

“WHERE IS MY GOLDEN EYE?”

“Shut up about yer golden eye!” a wounded man shrieked hysterically.

A wind swept through the room, followed by an eerie vacuum. The short man with the whip began to slide. He shot at speed, still standing upright, toward the hearthstone. As he entered the fireplace he let out a yell and dropped the whip. In the next instant he was gone, as if something had closed on his head and pulled him upward. As quick as thought, he had simply vanished up the chimney, like a cork jetted from a bottle, his arms and legs dangling as loosely as the limbs of a wooden doll. One moment he had been rooted to the spot, a look of horror spreading across his features, and the next he was nowhere to be seen. No sound, no scream, marked his disappearance—only a small rain of soot from the flue.

“Hasten!” someone shouted.

The queer wind began to blow again. The vacuum sucked at the eardrums of everyone in the room. Another man began to slide.

The erstwhile gilfs, accompanied by Liam’s comrade, jumped out of the window, with Liam bringing up the rear. As they slid down the sloping roof, the shanged night-roofs of Gilvaris Tarv spread out before them, the soft brilliance of their frosting reflecting a clover-field of stars above. Ahead of Imrhien, the young man helped Muirne to jump down to a lower roof. From behind Imrhien’s shoulder, Liam lent a hand to steady her.

The riverside dwellings had been built higgledy-piggledy, with no attention paid to planning. Jammed up alongside each other, their roofs reached a multiplicity of heights, like some staircase constructed by a madman, randomly punctured by the burning towers of smokestacks. While the unstorm rolled away over the housetops, the foursome slithered down each canting slope and leaped across to the next, until at last they landed in a narrow laneway where two horses were tethered.

“Make haste,” said Liam, untying the reins, “before they can raise reinforcements.”

Even as he spoke, it was too late. Shouts, the clamor of hooves, and the crunch of booted feet erupted at the bottom of the lane, and saffron torchlight splashed the night.

Muirne was up and onto one of the horses with one practiced swing. The young Ertishman jumped onto the other steed, then leaned down and reached toward Imrhien. Liam tossed the girl up in front of his comrade. She grabbed a handful of mane and hung on grimly.

“Liam!” cried Muirne. Agitated, her horse pranced and sidled.

“Go!” her brother shouted. “’Tis myself to blame. I shall hold them off until ye get away.”

“No!”

But Liam slapped each horse hard on the rump. Startled into flight, they took off up the lane at a gallop, leaping over the now gray and plumper shape of the avenged watch-worm wending its way down to the river.

Far behind, cries arose. The pursuers closed in on the man who stood alone against them.

Along winding lanes and through tunnels beneath overarching tenements the horses dashed, until they reached the outskirts of the river district. There, in a square whose center was marked by a well with a small, steeply pitched roof, their deliverer called a halt. The steeds stood breathing hard, their flanks steaming in the starlight. Sparrows, disturbed by the clatter, twittered from the eaves of a house.

“I must go back for Liam.” The young Ertishman leaped down to the cobblestones. “Ye both, go on back to Roisin’s. Muirne, ye ken the way from Farthingwell Square.”

“I will come with ye, Eochaid,” Muirne sobbed in a low voice.

“Nay. What if they should take ye again? If he lives, I will bring him back. If he does not, would ye risk that the lad should have given his life in vain?”

In a cool, calm manner, Eochaid confirmed directions for finding their way to the house of Roisin, and then he was gone, running lightly down a lane between two buildings.

Many windows overlooked the square. The shutters of one of them now opened.

“Who goes there?” a belligerent voice demanded. “Is that you, Pardrot?” Other voices began to join the first.

“Come,” said Muirne in a tight murmur. She cantered out of the square, pulling Imrhien’s horse by the reins.

They hammered on Roisin Tuillimh’s back gate. Roisin and her coachman, Brinnegar, admitted them, bundling them indoors. After that, everything seemed to happen at once.

On hearing that Liam was in danger, Ethlinn lost no time. With the Wand at her side, she ran out to the stables. She was mounted and off down the street at a gallop while the rescuees were still being bandaged and embraced and endeavoring to answer Roisin’s barrage of questions.

“But what was Liam doing back in Tarv?” Muirne kept asking. “Why was he not on the expedition with Uncle Bear?”

Roisin explained that she and Ethlinn had not seen Liam since his departure with Sianadh’s company. When the two girls had disappeared, the alarm had been raised across the city by a network of neighbors, friends, and carlins. Swiftly and efficiently, Diarmid had assembled a band of mercenaries to join the hunt, but all attempts had been unsuccessful. Serrure’s Caravan had left without him—he had given away all thoughts of leaving the city until his sister could be found.

Word had arrived from the neighbors in Bergamot Street. Odd-looking characters had been seen snooping around the empty house and asking questions as to the whereabouts of its previous occupants. Their questions were in vain—those who knew the carlin and her family loved them too well to betray them. Lately, Roisin’s house also had been watched.

“Each and every time we leave this house, we catch a sight of some ill-favored thing spying from some angle or roof’s top,” Roisin said. “I’ve no doubt they are the minions of Korguth, and it is Sianadh they are after. But we have not let them deter us—in sooth, we have been trying to catch one of these watchers, in case they might give information leading us to you.”

“I saw no spies when we arrived just now,” said Muirne, fretful and distracted.

“Had Ethlinn not just come in the moment before you arrived, you would not have slipped past them. She has been out after them, with the Wand. In trying to elude her entrapments, they relaxed their attention. Meanwhile, upon our very doorstep you appear, all praise to the Lord of Eagles! Brinnegar has gone just now at my despatch, swiftly, with word to Diarmid of your safe whereabouts, bidding him make haste and comb the river district in strong company, to aid Liam and Eochaid. How came Liam here to the city, we know not. Back from the expedition and all by himself—’tis a mystery, and one that smacks of foul play.”

“I cannot bide here,” Muirne burst out, wringing her hands, “I must go back to my brother. Alone, he was, against them all.”

“Bide you must,” replied Roisin. “You are overwrought. Swallow this draft—it will make you sleep. Swallow it, I say.”

Fretfully, Muirne obeyed and was led upstairs, protesting, by one of the maids.

“Stay you, Imrhien, and keep vigil with me. I need company on this fell night,” said Roisin. She stared out of the window. Dark roofs reared in blunt wedges against a distillation of stars.

Minutes slowly dripped by, eroding night as water wears away the marble of an antique fountain. Imrhien sat with her head in her hands.

They guessed the truth at once when they spied the slow procession coming up the street. Roisin uttered a sudden cry of pain. She stood motionless. There was Ethlinn, leading the way, bent over like an old, defeated woman, her hair hanging about her face. The Wand had grown as tall and thick as a staff, and she was leaning on it. Next came Eochaid, bearing Liam’s broken body across his arms. At his back, Brinnegar and a score or so of other men, battle-grimed and grim-faced.

Eochaid, pale and drawn, laid his friend ever so gently on Roisin’s table, covered him with his cloak, and spoke to his comrades.

“Go home now, my friends,” he said. “Bravely have we fought this night. We meet again on the morrow.”

“Brinnegar, I pray you keep watch,” said Roisin to her coachman.

The men departed in silence. The four people who remained stood with bowed heads around the table where Liam lay, and Eochaid, in a flat monotone, said:

“Liam is gone. He follows Sianadh and the Sulibhain boys to the grave.”

Nobody moved.

Eochaid’s voice cracked. “Liam, my friend, be assured, those who slew you paid a high price for the deed. Five for one, we made them pay.” He turned to Ethlinn. “The morning of this very day, Liam came to me. His horse was in a lather—he himself looked half-gone, all covered with scratches and wounds. He came to me for help. It seems the great treasure-getting expedition was ill-fated and had come to a wretched end. He told me the story of its downfall. The company was but a day out of Tarv, he said, when a couple of travelers out of the city overtook them and, hailing Liam, drew him aside. Riversiders, they were. They showed him a brooch—a brooch of gold, shaped like a dragon, which belonged to Muirne.

“‘Ye caught our leader’s eye, Liam Bruadair,’ they said to him, ‘with your free spending and high living. Where does a poor lad like ye get such amounts? Our leader, he found out ye were planning a sortie, and he reckoned ye were going back for more. He wanted a share, too, and our three eastside boyos were going to get it for him, but ye betrayed our lads and stole away without giving them notice. Have ye seen your sister of late? We have. Do as we say and she will meet no harm. If we do not return to Tarv with the goods by the end of this month, she is doomed.’

“So, it appears the abductors were not the wizard’s men after all,” Roisin commented dully, “but some riverbank gang of thieves and slavers. Yet those watchers have an eldritch look.…” Her spoken thoughts petered out, overtaken by grief. Eochaid continued the story, his face showing the strain of effort.

“Liam protested that he did not know the way to the treasure’s hiding place, that he himself was being shown the route. They bade him secretly blaze marks on the tree trunks at intervals along the way, so that the rest of their riverside band, who followed stealthily, would be able to find the way.

“‘When your company reaches the destination,’ they said, ‘ye must steal the weapons of your comrades so that we may imprison them without unnecessary bloodshed. If we find them armed, we will kill them.’ They assured him that no one would be injured—that they would merely fetter his friends, load up a share of the treasure, and ride away.

“‘Do not try to return now to the city to find your sister,’ they warned, ‘for a greater part of our band rides behind, and will prevent ye. And if ye betray our purpose to your comrades, we will overpower ye all, for we have ye far outnumbered. ’Tis your choice—we be giving ye a chance to save the lives of your sister and your friends. Will ye take it?’

“And so, with the brooch as proof that Muirne was in their power, Liam had no option but to agree to their ploy. When these strangers galloped out of sight of Sianadh and the Sulibhains, Liam, in agony of mind, at first excused their visit by telling his four comrades that they had been after him for some money he owed, which he had lost at dice. But later that same day he bowed to his conscience and revealed the truth.

“Liam wanted to leave the expedition straightaway, to go back and search for Muirne—I can tell ye, he suffered something dreadful, wondering what had befallen her. Knowing that any turning back would be prevented, the company decided to keep going and to pretend to fall in with what the blackguards had demanded. Sianadh led them upstream for eleven days. Some unseelie things troubled the company from time to time—they were but minor wights, and the lads were able to deal with them using iron and salt and charms. Liam blazed marks on the trees along the way, but did it falsely, trying to mislead the followers. In fact, the company believed they had succeeded in this, for eventually the signs of pursuit disappeared. Then Sianadh turned their steps to the place he called Waterstair, but Liam prepared to return alone to rescue Muirne.

“On the night they camped before the doors of Waterstair, the brigands crept up and set upon them. Our boys fought hard, but they had little chance against so many. Of course, the manscathas were treacherous. Two of them pressed blades to Sianadh’s throat. ‘Tell us who else knows the way to this place,’ they said, ‘and we will spare your life.’ But he would not tell, and they threw him down with the dagger in him. One or two of the Sulibhain brothers got away into the forest, but Liam never saw them after. He slew one of the attackers with a skian, but four came after him. Wounded, he had to flee. Eleven days it had taken to ride upriver, for the way is pathless—ten it took him to ride back, even through the wilderness, and injured. In his haste he gained a day, for he scarcely rested.

“If ever I saw a man in torment, it was Liam after that clahmor ride. He blamed himself for the loss of those good men, and the single thought that burned in him like a flame was to rescue Muirne.”

Eochaid fell to his knees and wept. “Ah, but if I had been at his side, this would never have happened! Before he left, Liam gave me a bag of gold to keep my family. He was always generous. But my stepmother is lame, a cripple, and ’tis not only gold my family needs, but my strong arms. I could not leave them. I could not go with him.”

Ethlinn gestured.

“She says the guilt of it is not with you,” Roisin said quietly. “Pray tell, how were you and Liam able to find Muirne?”

Swallowing his tears, the young man replied, “Liam knew … certain men. He never caused trouble, you understand, but he drank and diced with some who did—some whom Diarmid would never mix with. As soon as Liam told me what had happened, we went straight to them. Rumor spreads quickly among the dregs. The gossipmongers had it that two midcity damsels were being kept by Scalzo’s men in an unshielded house near the river, a house with a gilf-room on the top floor. An unstorm was hitting the city when we reached the house, so we went straight to the top room, with the idea of covering our entrance in the confusion of ghost-shows. And we found them there. Ye know the rest.”

Ethlinn raised her head. Her face was milk-gray, deeply graven. She signed to Roisin, who translated to Eochaid.

“Ethlinn wishes to know if Liam informed anyone else about the existence of the treasure cache in the cliff, this ‘Waterstair.’”

“I can assure ye, my dame, he told me only, and the Sulibhain brothers who went with them to Waterstair. They are slain now and will never speak—and I have passed the knowledge on to no one.”

“Did he describe how to reach the place?”

“Nay.”

“So, the secret of the treasure’s house resides with Imrhien and with this band of racketeers and their leader, this Scalzo. I doubt they’ll broadcast the information any farther, if they can help it.”

Again, Ethlinn’s hands flew into motion.

<<Soon Diarmid will come here. He was with us when we found Liam lying in the street. He and his party went hunting after revenge on those who did this. Diarmid and Muirne must not be told about Waterstair. They must not learn the true reason, the lawless reason, for Sianadh’s expedition. Give them only part of the truth. Let them believe that a small group of racketeers stole the lasses for slaves, and that Liam heard of this and turned back, and in the course of battling for their freedom, he fell.>>

<<But why not tell Muirne?>> Bewilderment and disbelief wrapped Imrhien in a temporary cocoon against sorrow.

<<Muirne cannot keep secrets. She would surely tell Diarmid. I know my son—he is unable to restrain himself—he and his mercenary comrades would be hot for revenge upon the larger band of eastside brigands, those who attacked Sianadh at Waterstair. Diarmid would try to wipe them out. But if Scalzo has houses in the river quarter and links to the Namarran slave-trade, his hand is evidently powerful and well organized. Diarmid’s crew is not equal to the task—it would take the Dainnan to break them. Besides, it would burden my children’s hearts to know the part my darling Liam played in their uncle’s undoing.>>

Lightly she brushed her son’s cold brow with her fingertips.

<<Diarmid must never seek this treasure. It may be that it is accursed—all who have sought it have met with evil chance. As for these things that have been spying on us—I know not whether they are Scalzo’s or the wizard’s, but I suspect they are connected with something else only to be guessed at, for they are unseelie and perilous. No mortal man commands the wights of eldritch—not for long.>>

Beyond the window, darkness was beginning to seep from the city. Above walls and roofs emerging in glimmering gray, the stars were fading. Far off, a rooster crowed. Another answered. The carlin turned her gaze upon Imrhien.

<<Diarmid and Muirne wish to be part of the gathering of royal forces in the west. As earlier planned, they must leave this city with you, when you travel to visit the one-eyed Daughter of the Winter Sun. I want my remaining children to be safe, far away from here. I have lost a brother and a son.…>>

The carlin’s hands fell to her lap like dying leaves. Her dark pools of eyes gazed out beyond the walls, beyond the city, to a green hill where peppercorn trees let down the veils of their soft and dusty tresses.

It was there they brought Liam at the dawning of the day.

7

THE ROAD

Thicket and Thorn

The sea’s a road—a waterway that’s rolling

To ev’ry far-flung country of the world.

Scant landmarks grid its restless, billow’d surface—

Chaste, lonely isles and jutting rocks, shell-pearl’d,

Sly reefs and green-tress’d banks at ebb of tide

Where sirens sing and armor’d fishes hide.

The sky’s a road—an airy course unfathom’d,

And overlooking ev’ry other track.

Below, great lakes and mountains stand as signposts

For birds, and those who ride on sildron’s back.

The cloud-wreath’d paths, the highway of the swan,

Are routes that boots can never tread upon.

All land-bound paths, from thoroughfares to byways,

All winding strips of rutted soil unsow’d,

All avenues and Seaship routes and skyways

Are intertwined. The universal Road—

One line to draw you under hill and o’er,

One fare to bear you homeward to your door.

SUNG BY A TRAVELING MINSTREL

The Caermelor Road had threaded its way through farmlands, past garths and granges, crofts and byres, alongside hedged meadows where cattle pondered or shepherds with crosiers in hand followed their flocks, past pitch-roofed haystacks, ponds teeming with ducks, tilled patches of worts in leafy rows, and burgeoning fields of einkorn, emmer, and spelt where hoop-backed reapers toiled, by vineyards glutted with overflow of clammy juice and moss-trunked orchards already ravished, the last windfalls rotting on the ground, their sweet decay choired by sucking insects. It had passed from these tamed lands to rolling country, where trees stood in lines or clustered in holts and spinneys. Stained copper, auburn, xanthe, crimson, and bronze, their leaves fled down lightly in glimmering showers, to form deep-piled carpets.

Serrure’s Caravan having departed long since, Chambord’s now wound its way along this road: a score of covered wagons, some tarpaulin-shrouded carts piled with merchandise, a few coaches, horsemen, and patrolling outriders. Archers perched on the tailboards of wagons and on the box seats of coaches. Everything bristled with protective accoutrements—bells, red ribbons, rowan, horseshoes, ash, iron.

Across bridges the column went jingling, following the Road over little brooks bubbling like apple-cider, skirting the shoulders of hills. The pale grasses by the wayside nodded with ripe seed-heads the color of rose-wine; the meadows were hazed with their pink. Filbert thickets burst with rich bounties of nuts. Overhead, the soft hue of the sky paled into mist at the margins. Dandelion-puff clouds raced past, their fleet shadows rolling like ocean waves across the land. The sun glowed as warm and golden as a ripe pumpkin. From the south, a crisp wind brought the high and lonely cries of dark birds riding the thermals effortlessly, their wings stretched to full span.

Imrhien sat beneath a wagon’s canopy, wearing a widow’s veil of mourning for concealment. As the wagon jolted along, rocking her with sudden lurches from side to side, she toyed with the new stone tilhal Ethlinn had given her, strung on a thong of leather about her neck. Her thoughts turned to reflections on all that had passed. Of her original quest, begun when she had left the Tower, what had she achieved? Now that her facial features had been rendered irredeemable, how could she hope that any who had known her before her amnesiac days would recognize her again? Of all the goals for which she had set out in search—a less uncomely face, her birth-name, memories—she had gained none. Yet the world was no longer such a mystery, now that its delights and terrors had been tasted. She had found true friendship. And lost it. That did not bear thinking of, and she quickly turned her thoughts elsewhere, lest the ache of despair overwhelm her.

On that morning, that terrible morn after the night of disaster, Ethlinn had taken her aside. Her hands had trembled, faltering often.

<<Imrhien, there is danger in Tarv for you now. You must leave without delay. It is only a matter of time before the leader of the eastsider racketeers, this Scalzo, finds out that Sianadh came to Tarv accompanied by one answering to your description, and deduces that you are likely to know where the treasure lies. It is well that they were not aware you possessed this knowledge while they held you prisoner, for it is certain you would have been slain. You have, now, a quest to undertake. It is for you, Imrhien, as the one who has set eyes on Waterstair and knows the way—it is for you to go to the Royal Court at Caermelor carrying news of this treasure to the King-Emperor. The law of the Empire must be set in motion. Then these black-hearted men who, even now, with bloodstained hands, are despoiling the cache may be undone.>>

<<Do you bid me go before the King-Emperor himself? Had you not charged me with this commission, mother, I would have vowed to do so on my own. My thoughts concur with yours. Justice must be done.>>

<Journey first to the one-eyed Daughter of Grianan. Her wisdom is deeper and stronger than my own. She may be able to restore your face or she may not, but perhaps she can shed light on your history, and I feel that this is of great importance. You must be as well prepared as may be for your encounter with the Royal Court.>>

Gone were the plans for the coach-and-four and the servants. Their departure must be made as unapparent as possible. Thus, on the following day, the three of them—Imrhien, Muirne, and Diarmid—had taken the next road-caravan out of Gilvaris Tarv, Diarmid riding patrol with the guards while Muirne traveled in the wagon with Imrhien and a few women and children. The Ertish lass sat silent, brooding, now and then fingering the wooden, sparrow-shaped buckle carved by Eochaid, which he had given her as a parting gift.

It was more than eight hundred miles in a straight line across the breadth of Eldaraigne from Gilvaris Tarv to Caermelor, but farther by the winding Caermelor Road. Usually caravans took four weeks to complete the journey. Northward, another road led west out of Gilvaris Tarv toward Rigspindle, there to join the King’s High Way running along the coast to the Royal City. The Rigspindle Road was said to he safer than its southern counterpart but was avoided by many merchants—that coastal road, with its convolutions, added too many miles.

Among the caravaners, talk was widespread concerning the steady stream of unseelie creatures that, according to report, were passing through the countryside, heading north and east, toward the Nenian Landbridge joining Eldaraigne with Namarre—creatures that, when crossing the Caermelor Road, worked wickedness upon any travelers they encountered. Only hours before their departure, news had reached Gilvaris Tarv of a caravan making its way out of Caermelor that had been totally destroyed upon the Road. Its guards and passengers had vanished or been slain, its vehicles cracked apart like ripe filberts, its merchandise and belongings strewn unheeded across the highway—wights had no use for them. Then many folk doubted the wisdom of Chambord’s decision to use this Road, and some would-be travelers had turned back, but Chambord had ordered the guard to be doubled and pressed on. He had deadlines to meet.

Every night there were sounds, sometimes lights, glimpsed ahead of the caravan or behind, Occasionally figures dwarfish or grotesque, manlike or formed like beasts, alone or in troupes, fled furtively out of the trees and across the Road. So far, none had troubled the cavalcade—the charms they carried were protection against wights of the weaker sort, although it was whispered that such petty wards had negligible effect on the mighty.

A wightish encounter, Sianadh had said once, bore little similarity to attacks by human aggressors, which were usually direct confrontations involving brute force. Wights, he had told Imrhien, must perforce obey their own natural laws. Just as men could not become invisible or shift their shape in the manner native to wights, so wights—save, perhaps, for the most powerful—could not move against mortals unless certain conditions were fulfilled, certain actions taken or words spoken. If fear was shown, or if a mortal should be foolish enough to let his senses be tricked, or should he break certain silences or reveal his true name or answer questions ignorantly, or if he should transgress against wights by trespass or other means, then the creatures of eldritch could strike. Then the unfortunate man might be torn apart, drained of blood, crushed, hung, or slain by any manner or means, or he might simply die of fright. Yet even then, there was a chance he might still be saved by fleetness of foot, quick-wittedness, valor, intervention from others, or pure luck.

The caravan was a week out of Gilvaris Tarv when scouts came galloping back to report that the Road ahead, passing through a narrow gap between hills, was obstructed by fallen rocks. Men on horseback or on foot were able to get through, but there was no chance for wagons and coaches. At the head of the convoy, Chambord’s captain, mounted on a black gelding, raised his hand. Drivers reined in, and the caravan ground to a halt. The merchant spoke to his captain. Orders were relayed down the line.

“We are to detour off the main Road. We are to take the side road that runs through Etherian and loops back to the highway.”

A ripple of excitement ran through the caravan. Not wishing to rouse Muirne from her reverie by asking questions, Imrhien clasped her hands and sat still. Beside her, two women held converse.

“Etherian! Well, I never thought to see that land. I wonder if ’tis as strange as the tales report. I should like to see those queer little folk what live there.”

“I hope its entertainment makes up for the extra miles on this journey,” grumbled the other.

Soon after, the lead wagons turned aside to the south. Trees thinned, then dwindled and disappeared. The sky opened out, a hemisphere of rich lapis lazuli lightly frosted with cirrocumulus in vast, sweeping bands so thin that the sun shone through like a giant dahlia.

The day wore on. The dying sun colored the uplands with glowing rose and hazed them with somber gold. Late in the afternoon, the cavalcade rounded a knoll to behold a sudden, majestic sight.

Spread out before and below them lay a massive canyon, some three miles across, slashed deeply into the surface of the land. So far away was its opposite end that it disappeared into a veil of motes and dust. The sunken floor was lost in shadow. Half a mile away on the rocky wall to the left hung a silver ribbon twined with streamers of mist. The roar of this towering cataract was lost in the vastness of the gulf its waters had created.

Yet, in sculpting this chasm, the river’s power had not been enough to erode certain formations—cores of adamant, resistant to water and wind. These cores now stood by the tens of thousands, tall and spindly columns scattered throughout the canyon. Their flat tops, two hundred feet or more from their roots, were level with the gorge’s lip and the surrounding countryside. It appeared like a giant forest of thin and limbless trees, all cut off at the same height.

A precipitous path had been hacked into the sides of this monumental cavity. As the caravan snaked its way down this road, it could be seen that dwellings existed atop the columns; angular houses of pebbles and clay, and these were linked to one another by spidery suspended bridges and attenuated ropes.

Channeled by the rocky walls, the wind here was strong, an almost palpable force. The canyon’s shape scooped up its currents, forcing them to rise against the cliff walls and throwing them skyward with a plaintive whistling. On these ascending airs, dark forms hovered and swooped. They were not birds, that was plain to see by their shape—some looked like pointy triangles underwired by struts in which manlike shapes were cradled, others appeared to be large bats.

“There they are—the Clanneun,” said one of the women, pointing them out to her child, “the bat-winged folk. Do not be afraid, they will not harm us.”

That night the caravaners made camp by the river that flowed through Etherian, lighting their fires and setting guards to watch. Darkness fell swiftly in the depths, and the singing of the silver waters, fed by a thousand filaments down the cliffs, rang louder.

From the conversation of the other passengers, Imrhien gleaned that the Clanneun, being diminutive of stature and possessing membranes attached between arms and body, could stretch out their arms to glide for short distances, like bats and flying foxes. When they needed to carry their children or other burdens, they used the kitelike contraptions or the bridges or ropes with pulleys, to traverse from column to column. It seemed they lived mainly on cliff-side vegetation and on flying insects, of which there were many in the darkling air. These they captured in fine nets strung between columns or plucked out of the air as they glided from platform to platform. They collected their water from the rain and the dew or from the tops of the cataracts. Never did they stoop to the canyon’s floor, where unseelie perils sometimes lurked. Not much else was known about them. Their culture and language were their own—they did not mix with other peoples but lived apart in their strange land, neither molested nor molesting, safe in their aerial abodes.

“Do not throw stones, or loose arrows,” came the orders. “Leave the Clanneun to themselves, that we may pass through their domain swiftly and in peace.”

Diarmid stopped at the fire beside Imrhien’s wagon to inquire politely after the welfare of his sister and her companion, then disappeared as quickly as he had arrived. He ate, slept, and worked with the other guards. His words were sparse and his appearances sparser.

The next morning they broke camp early and thus were able to cross Etherian and climb out at the other end of the canyon before the end of the day. The difficult cliff path with its hairpin bends brought the convoy up into thick and gloomy forest.

“Word is that we shall not reach the main Road again before dark,” said one of the women in Imrhien’s wagon. “We must soon stop in the nether fringes of Tiriendor for the night. I mislike these lonely backwoods, far from the main Road. I’d as lief be back in Etherian—queer it was, but it did have a more comfortable feeling.”

Indeed, a sense of disquiet and fear emanated from the woods. Horses and hounds were restless. Children whimpered peevishly. Folk turned their heads to the north, then glanced quickly back over their shoulders. Imrhien guessed she was not alone in sensing some kind of pulling toward that direction—a leaning, as of grasses bowing beneath a northbound jet stream. The air strummed like a taut wire at breaking point.

“The glades of Tiriendor have a wightish feel,” someone muttered. Someone else tried to begin a song, but the words and tune fell flat and trailed into nothing.

The caravan rumbled to a halt in the middle of the road, with the half-leafless boughs of elms trembling overhead. Wheels were chocked, horses were unharnessed, fires were lit. After rechecking their protective gear, the caravaners snugged in for the night.

Around midnight, strange knocking sounds erupted from among the trees a short way off the road. From another approach, a great, shaggy black dog, nearly the size of a calf, appeared at the verge of the firelight. It stood staring at a group of guards, its large eyes like flaming coals.

Not a man spoke. They stood like propped cadavers. Their own hounds growled, hackles raised, but would not attack. One man slipped away to fetch the caravan’s wizard. When he arrived, the black dog turned and padded back into the forest.

The wizard trotted up and down on a gray palfrey, chanting incantations. A barrel-chested cockerel flapped on his gloved hand. The guards whistled tunelessly, eerily, well into the night.

The period just before dawn, which the Erts called uhta, brought an intense shang wind. Chambord’s captain ordered the caravaners to stay put until it had passed over. The unstorm engendered the usual colored lights, but no tableaux.

“Nobody ever passed this way to make ghosts,” said a traveler. “I am surprised there is a road at all.”

“’Tis an old byroad,” said her companion, “very old, made in the times when they knew how to make ’em last forever.”

As soon as the last light and chime had died away, the caravaners bestirred themselves. Although gray-shadowed leaves partly concealed the sun, the knowledge of its rising cheered most people. Toward noon they struck the main Road again, now past the blocked section. From here it began to slope steadily down—more and more often it crossed bridges. The Forest of Tiriendor, however, refused to be left behind and crowded as closely to the edges of the Caermelor Road as it had to the Etherian back road.

That afternoon, livid clouds swarmed in from the northeast and covered the face of the sun. The trees locked their branches together over the roadway. Shadows congested. The premonition of danger that had taken root the night before now intensified. Muirne sat beside Imrhien on the wagon’s tailboard, her gaze darting from right to left. She had strapped her quiver to her back, and now she drew an arrow from it, nocking it to the bowstring.

“I saw something just now, by the wayside. It ran away. I want to be ready.”

Grief and loss seemed to have hardened the Ertish girl. Some of her diffidence had evaporated, and so had the antipathy she had shown to Imrhien. Grateful for the friendship that had existed between them during their time of imprisonment and knowing that after all, the wizard’s patient had not been to blame for it, Muirne had come to regard her Talith companion with friendship. For her part, Imrhien respected and admired Muirne’s skills at weaponry and horsemanship.

Imrhien touched her arm and pointed. <<See!>>

“What?… Aye, I saw. It was another like the first. They move quicklike.” She narrowed her eyes. “Nasty little skeerdas, I’ll warrant.”

Diarmid cantered past.

“Be aware, Muirne,” he called. She waved acknowledgment.

“’Tis curious for wights to be sticking out their noses so much in daylight hours,” she mused, watching her brother ride on down the line. “Their glorytime be the night. Either there be something after chasing them, or they simply be about in great numbers. Or both. No matter—the guards say we shall be clear of these woods by nightfall.”

As she spoke, a commotion erupted from up ahead, a splintering crash and the neighing of frightened horses, shouting, the dire clash of iron. Some guards sped past, others held to their stations in case this was a planned diversion, the tactics of ambush.

“The second wagon has gone down in a rut,” called a voice. “The axle is broken. None of the others can get past.”

The disabled cart was past mending. Its contents had to be distributed among the other wains before they could go forward, and the detritus cleared from the Road. This caused a delay, which meant that the caravan was still plodding among the trees when darkness gathered. Greenish phosphorescence winked on all sides, misleading the eye. Horses blundered off the roadside and into tree trunks invisible in the murk.

Orders were shouted.

“Halt and make camp on the Road.”

Once again the drivers stationed the line of wagons, coaches, and carts along the middle of the thoroughfare. The horses were taken out of the shafts and tethered alongside. Campfires burned rosy between the wains, chasing away the shadows for a few feet around. Beyond these globes of light the silent darkness pressed heavily, a wall. Guards moved along the camp’s perimeters. After the evening meal, some caravaners lay wakeful within their wagons, others sat by the fires, speaking in hushed tones. Save for the random jingling of harness and the crunch of boots, all was quiet; no hunting owls or melancholy night-birds cried.

Seated in their customary place on the wagon’s tailboard, Imrhien and Muirne stared into the profound shadows interlaced between the trees.

“Mother of Warriors, save us,” Muirne whispered. “Last night was bad enough. I’ll not sleep this night. This has the feel of an ambush.”

They stoked up the fires and, with the cold certainty of doom, kept vigil.

The encounters began at midnight.

It was as dark as blindness. In the total silence, not a whisper or a sigh could be heard. Eventually, somewhere in the deeps of the Forest of Tiriendor, a wind went through, rustling the leaves like the sough of the ocean. And then the firelight lit up a pearly Something coming down the Road. It was not fog. Alive, woolly, like a cloud or a wet blanket, giving off a terrible coldness and a stale smell, it slid up and all over the wagons, the carts, the coaches, the horses, the hounds, the caravaners, in every nook and cranny, and then was gone, rolling and bowling and stretching out and in, down the Road.

Nerveless, aghast, the caravaners leaned together in a lethargy bequeathed by shock.

Shortly thereafter, sounds of bubbling laughter and cheerful conversation flew out from the trees like a flock of brilliant birds. Alerted, shaken to their senses, the guards drew out their blades, the ringing rasp of their steel cutting briefly across the darkness. The other travelers stiffened, bracing themselves, grasping their charms, and muttering incantations. Lights shone out from between the trees, accompanied by strains of music and snatches of song. The rhythm of the tune was so rapid, the cadences so lilting and compellingly harmonious, that those who heard it felt their toes twitch in their shoes, tapped their fingers in spite of their dread, and quickened to the beat. There came into view, where the lights shone forth, a large circle of dancers—charming young damsels, it seemed, skipping with grace and delighted abandon, laughing, singing, breathless in their exuberance. Their filmy robes flew about them like banners of mist, green, gold, and silver; their hair was snagged with sparkling flowers; and each face was comelier than the next.

“An old trick of the baobhansith,” murmured Muirne. “All folk know of it, and none would be foolish enough to fall.”

But they were oh, so guileless, those damsels—so lighthearted and innocent, the music utterly enticing, the movements of the dance thoroughly alluring. A thrill, akin to the exhilaration of shang yet not it, roused in the pale-haired watcher. Against all reason, it seemed that what she desired urgently in that instant was for Diarmid to come galloping up, so that she could jump up behind him, her arms about his waist; then they two would ride to join the circle, escaping the fear and dreariness of the stolid wagons.

Uproar broke out farther down the line.

A report rippled down the column. One of the younger guards had slipped into the forest before he could be stopped—for a better look, he had said over his shoulder as he departed—not to enter the circle, oh no, he was no fool—but just to see the pretty creatures at closer range. Knowing too well what fate awaited the bedazzled youth, two of his comrades had plunged in after him. The captain had issued orders that on pain of flogging, no more should leave the Road, but it was too late for the three. All the caravaners could see them clearly, dancing in the lighted circle, their feet scarcely touching the ground, whirling their delectable partners in time to the piped reel. They were grinning like death’s-heads.

“See how they laugh,” said someone in horrified fascination. “The baobhansith have done nothing to them.”

“Yet,” added another.

Stung to a restlessness of yearning by the music, Muirne’s companion sprang down and walked, barely noticed, up the line. The attention of the caravaners was directed outward.

Something moved in from the side of the Road to where two guards were standing. Instinctively Imrhien shrank back into shadow. She saw a shining of wet leaves after rain, a moonbeam—it was not one of the caravan women approaching. Such loveliness was never of mortal ilk.

Metal pealed. The blades of the guards flashed to the ready. Stepping back a pace, and with a small gasp like the cooing of a dove, the object of their attention held out a reproachful hand, soft and white as the poisonous spathe of the arum lily.

“Do not affright me, Han! Will you not conduct me across the Road, that I may join the Dance?”

“Hypericum, salt, and bread …,” began one of the men.

Her pale, narrow hands flew to her ears.

“Oh, sir,” she sobbed, “do you take me for some wight? I had thought you a gentleman, alas. Well, then I shall try my own way if no help is to be found.”

She turned away a little too quickly, but the guard who had been silent sheathed his sword and moved to her side.

“If you are no wight, what do you here?”

“Have you not seen me, Han? I am a traveler.”

“I have not seen you before. But as a traveler you may not leave the Road.”

“Oh, but my sisters are in the woods—how shall I reach them?” she sighed, looking at him from the corners of eyes that glinted as green as jealousy.

“Weep not. I shall help you find them. Wait for me, Greb.”

The other stood uncertainly, dazed, his blade lowered and forgotten.

“But …”

The couple vanished among the trees. A moment later the second man followed. Unable to shout a warning that might bring back their ability to reason, Imrhien ran after them for a short distance. The tree-boles rapidly crowded in between her and the Road until, on reaching a spot where only one thin blade of firelight sliced through them, she halted. Her hair stood up. A great horror squeezed her throat, and she began to retrace her steps, but it was hard going, as if something heavy dragged at her legs, as if she were wading through the deep and treacherous mud of the fens.

At her back, a terrible scream ripped through the night.

Imrhien regained the grassy verge. Muirne was there, pulling her onto the Road.

“Daruhshie! What be ye a-thinking of?”

A man staggered out of the trees, corpse-white, silent, shivering convulsively.

“’S death!” cried the guards. “It is Greb! What has happened, and where is Han that was with him?”

Greb collapsed into the arms of his comrades and was borne away. At that moment, the lights that had been glowing away under the trees suddenly went out and the music stopped dead, cut off in the middle of a bar. The same heavy blanket of silence descended, muffling even the caravan’s bells, which hardly dared to chink.

“Come back to the wagon with me. There be more evil things abroad here than could be dreamed of in a thousand years.” Muirne had firm hold of her friend’s arm.

A far-off rumbling began, as of something approaching swiftly out of the east.

“A wickedness! A wickedness be coming this way!” The Ertish girl moved faster.

“Sain us! Aroint thee, unseelieness!” the folk among the caravans cried desperately. “Avaunt, avaunt!”

With a rattle of wheels, a crack of a whip, and a clatter of hooves, a macabre vehicle passed through the trees on a course parallel with the Road. It was a coach-and-four, lit by a lurid, flickering light of its own. Dimly through verdigrised windows could be discerned a trio of occupants. The driver wore a three-cornered hat.

As the rumor of the coach’s passage faded, Muirne whispered:

“Oghi ban Callanan—there be no road for wheels out among those trees. No road at all.”

Before she had finished speaking, the sound of bitter weeping began afar off. The sobs, like those of a grieving woman, were filled with despair and depthless anguish.

Dismay infected the caravaners like plague.

“It is the first cry of a weeper,” they gasped. “We are surely doomed!”

The mournful cries broke out afresh, closer this time, not as loud but far more sorrowful, as if the weeper were heartbroken and could never be consoled. And again, for the last time; the lamenting seemed closer, almost in the wagon with them, and soft.

“Tethera. The third cry,” said Muirne, tonelessly, unnecessarily.

Some of the horses began to jump and snort as if pricked by invisible spurs. Somehow they had worked loose from their pickets. Around and between the wagons they raced, kicking up their heels and bucking, scattering the caravaners and their fires. Soon all the horses had been contaminated by this frenzy. Imrhien thought she could spy, through the haze of dust and sparks, small dark things sitting astride their backs, grinning with malicious glee. Pointed caps adorned the riders’ oversize heads, jammed between sharp, upstanding ears. Their legs were skinny and their feet grotesquely large. They appeared like caricatures of little men, parodies sketched by a humorous artist.

The caravaners’ hounds set up a yelping and a barking. They leaped crazily in and out between the kicking hooves, snapping at the riders. The archers yelled that they could see nothing to shoot at. Men ran, shouting and swinging lanterns, trying to catch the frantic animals; others rang bells, crying advice and warnings. The whole caravan had betrayed itself in the throes of pandemonium.

Screaming and frothing, the wizard’s palfrey hurdled the remains of a campfire and hurtled away down the Road as if whipped mercilessly, with all the other horses in fervid pursuit. Some of the men ran after them and, like the horses, were swallowed up in darkness. None returned.

Orders were relayed down the line.

“Keep your lanterns lit. Stay in the wagons. Turn your clothes.”

Diarmid swung himself up into his sister’s wagon. The lanterns shone on his pale face. His eyes were caverns of shadow.

“What report, Diarmid?”

“No need to fear, Muirne,” her brother said loudly, for the benefit of the other occupants, who craned forward to hear. “The wains are built of rowan and iron. They are solid protection as long as we stay within them. Come cock-crow, we shall go forth to find the horses. They will not have strayed far.”

“In truth, Diarmid, how fare we?” said Muirne in a low voice. “Tell me softly.”

Her brother hesitated, then spoke in a murmur.

“Badly, in faith, badly. Many men are lost—how many I cannot reckon. The horses—mayhap we shall never find them. My hope is that the worst is yet over.”

But it was not.

To keep the silent night at bay, the caravaners continually jangled bells and droned incantations. They whistled until their lips were as dry as the wizard’s rooster’s throat was hoarse. For a time, this appeared to have effect—eldritch sights and sounds died away, retreated.

As though gathering their strength.

The waiting was unnerving—the total lack of any sign of activity, of any clue as to what might happen next, or when.

Fear grew steadily on all those who sheltered among the wains, a dread so heavy that they could scarcely lift their leaden hands to shake the bells or force their numbed mouths to shape the rhyming words. A groping horror came down the Road, reaching out to seize them. In every breast a great need arose, to dash away from it, away up the Road out of its clutches.

“Hold fast! Stay in your wagons!” bellowed the guards.

Several of the caravaners wrenched themselves from the grasp of their fellows and fled, gibbering, unable to endure any longer, driven from their wits by terror. Those left behind leaned from the wagons, calling in vain entreaty, straining their eyes against unrelieved darkness.

From far away reverberated the dismal “holloa” of a Hunter.

Other things issued from the dark then, and it was the signal for the onset of Chambord’s Caravan’s doom.

They barreled in with a wild and eldritch uproar, the hound-pack of the Hunter. Baying and howling, they rushed in with the power of a windstorm and the fury of thunder, snorting fire. Too numerous were they to be stopped by the hail of arrows, for when one fell another two took its place. Blood lust boiled in their eyes. Bone-white glistened their coats and fangs. Their tongues and ears burned with an inner radiance, crimson as fresh gore. As for the caravaners, gone was all thought of protection, all thought of resistance—this was the final reckoning, the last grasp at survival. The hour of destruction was upon them.

Lanterns were flung away, shattering like broken flowers on the Road. The night exploded with the deafening howl of the pack, which drowned the noises of flight—the crashes, the running feet, the appalling cries, the bloody rendings.

When pallid dawn glimmered reluctantly, its light washed down over a strange scene. Twenty-eight abandoned vehicles stood in a row. About them, nothing moved. Nothing at all.

When the tumult of the hounds had first reached the ears of Imrhien and her two friends, Diarmid, grim-faced, had reacted swiftly, saying, “That sound—’tis either the Wild Hunt or the Dando Dogs. Either way, the end is nigh. These we cannot withstand. Now ’tis time to fly or perish. Leave behind all chattels. Come.”

<<The other passengers—we must help them!>> “A man will be hard put to save his own skin.” Diarmid had then raised his voice so that all might hear. “As you value your lives, fly now, for death approaches! Make your own ways—each man for himself.”

Panic ensued. Someone had pushed Imrhien from behind and she had fallen onto the Road. Picking herself up, she narrowly avoided being trampled by those who, in their heedless terror, jumped down from the wagon. By the light of the remaining lantern swinging on the wagon’s side, people ran hither and thither, uncertain which direction to take, lest they run straight into the maws of the unseelie dogs. Some were knocked to the ground in the confusion. Some called out, “Avaunt!” Others yelled, “Bo Shrove!” Through this milling group they struggled, Diarmid with his sister on his right arm and Imrhien on his left. Two guards collided with them, breaking Diarmid’s grip and separating the trio. In the dimness Imrhien could not find them again. Faintly through the din, she thought she heard their voices calling her name and each other’s. Imagining she saw them diving headlong into the trees, she picked up her skirts and ran for her life.

There in the Forest of Tiriendor, a kind of blindness sealed her eyes, and she lost all sense of time. Eerie howls issued from all around. The flesh crawled and shivered at the back of her neck. She stumbled on, not knowing which way she was going, certain that at any moment grisly jaws would seize her. But as she lurched forward, crashing into hard objects, impeded by her garments catching and ripping on things unseen, the cries of the pack became dimmer and drew away. Eventually they faded altogether. The pursuee stopped, unable to go any farther. Exhausted, she sank to the ground and passed involuntarily into a twitching half-sleep, like animated death.

Never had morning been more welcome. Dawn, to banish the evils of night.

The light of day revealed Imrhien’s surroundings to be no murky wood of gnarled and snarling trees. It was an ordinary forest, though very beautiful. She looked around in growing awe. To waken here was to waken in the heart of a great jewel shot with vermilion, amber, topaz, chartreuse, russet: the blazing hues of maples touched by Autumn’s artistic gramarye. Strung between the finer twigs hung thousands of spiderwebs that, having caught the dewdrops, shimmered like starry nets, refracting the light, now winking silver, now violet.

The return of awareness brought memories of loss like a blow, with redoubled force. Now, once more, was she alone. The grieving for Sianadh that was ever present, at this time extended to embrace the entire caravan, draining her initiative and leaving a hollow emptiness. There was only one hope to cling to—that Muirne and Diarmid, or some of the others, had survived.

The dew, so eye-catching on the webs, was cold and clammy on the skin. Shivering, Imrhien moved stiffly from the red-gold drift of leaves into which she had fallen, brushing herself off with bruised and aching hands. Her aimless, panicked footsteps of the previous night had plowed a path through the forest carpet. She retraced it until it lost itself among ferns. Still she stumbled on in the same direction, hoping it would take her back to the Road. Of course, there was a strong possibility that she had been running in circles the night before and therefore might strike off in the wrong direction—parallel to the Road or even toward the heart of the forest—but there was no way of knowing. She had to do something, to search, however despairingly—to move her limbs so that warmth would return to them. Had she been able, she would have called out a greeting to whoever might be near. For surely someone from the caravan must be within earshot.…

In a little glade, tall flowers glowed—crimson lilies whose cups had filled with dew. She tipped them and drank nectartinct water. High above, birds twittered, cheeped, chirruped, and whistled from every branch. Oh, to put on a sildron harness, to be able to go glissanding as nobles did for sport—as, it was said, the Dainnan sometimes did. At a height of fifty to seventy-five feet, clearing the smaller vegetation and about halfway up the taller trees, glissanders would take hold of a branch and propel themselves forward to the next. Momentum carried them a long way, down in the shelter of the trees where there was little air turbulence, but if glissanders found themselves suspended helpless, stationary, with no branches nearby, they would use the ropes they carried, throwing an end to the nearest bough, then pulling themselves in, hand over hand. Sildron repelled the ground but would not, of itself, propel—no wizard had yet been able to invent a suitable bladed rotor for personal propulsion in glissanding, and the idea of it had been discarded long ago. Imrhien considered the sildron she owned, which was now sitting uselessly in a box in the valuables-coach of Chambord’s Caravan. Special tools and expertise were needed to shape the metal, none of which had been available to Ethlinn’s family—otherwise she would have had a flying-belt made in Gilvaris Tarv, with an andalum cover to slide over it.

A crackling of boughs over to the right arrested her musings. Something pushed through the foliage—a giant, covered in dusky fur. The bear passed by, ignoring her, and lumbered away.

Strangely heartened by this sight of a beast that was not eldritch, the girl pushed on.

At her back, the sun rode higher. From time to time there came distant sounds that might have been the barking of some creature. Not knowing whether the Road was to the right or to the left, the wanderer decided to continue heading west, merely because her original destination lay in that direction; to keep going until the Road swung around and crossed her path or until she perished from hunger or from assuaging the hunger of some other creature.

A second disturbance in the lower boughs made her heart knock. An icicle of fear lanced between her ribs. Another lorraly beast or some apparition of unseelie, come to finish a task?

A branch moved and a head appeared, turning to scan the surroundings. A man’s head, brown-haired. She might have wept for joy, for it was Diarmid. He had not caught sight of her, apparently, and began to move away quite swiftly. Distracted, she tried to call out, but only a sigh issued from her throat. A half-formed warning floated in her thoughts but was drowned by the need to catch his attention before he disappeared.

She snatched at a dry branch and swung on it with all her might. With a resounding crack it broke off. In the instant she tumbled with the branch, Diarmid’s skian flew past her ear and stuck, quivering, in the bark of the trunk. The warning, belated, formed itself clearly across her vision: If you take him unawares, he will think you a creature of unseelie.

An outline blocked out the leaf-framed sky, the silhouette of a man with sword upraised in both hands. As she flung up the broken bough to defend herself, he cried out in amazement.

“Obban tesh!” Ertish—a lapse.

His sword lowered, he helped her to her feet, gazing upon her with eager relief.

“Is Muirne with you?” His face fell when she shook her head.

“Which way did she go? Did you see her? Which way is the Road?”

His visage regained its remote and grim expression as he received her negative answers.

“I have called her name many times.…”

Finally he said, “There be nothing for it but to go on westward until we find her, or discover the Road, or both. Black was the day I first heard the name of Chambord.”

He pulled the skian out of the tree trunk, and together they went forward.

The leather harness of an outrider fared better in harsh environments than the Autumnal traveling raiment of a wealthy city lady. Stout though the broadcloth fabric of Imrhien’s outfit was, it had been pierced and rent in many places. Her jacket, kirtle, overgown, and petticoats hung in rags. Her mantle was gone, but miraculously the taltry had survived. Some of the gold coins that had been sewn into the linings had fallen out, but the small traveler’s pouch that hung concealed under her ripped bodice was still safe. It contained a key, a ruby, a sapphire, a bracelet of pearls, and an emerald. She and Muirne and Diarmid had all donned these pouches as a precaution against robbery. The remainder of their wealth lay within locked caskets inside the reinforced valuables-coach of the abandoned caravan.

“I have studied woodcraft,” said Diarmid as they pushed through thickets of orange foliage, “in readiness for the tests for admittance to the Dainnan Brotherhood. With my knowledge, we shall survive.” These statements were most reassuring, and it was comforting to think of them later that day when it began to rain and the two lost wanderers sheltered under a dripping tree, their stomachs gnawed out with hunger. Diarmid stared silently out at the steady, pattering stream. Certainly he was a more taciturn companion than his boisterous uncle.

Ah, Sianadh, thought Imrhien, if rain were the sky’s tears, it should be weeping for him. The steely face of the man beside her barely masked his own grief—his brother, his uncle, and now his sister had been torn from him.

When the showers tapered away, Diarmid started to dig a pit-trap in the middle of a track made by some animal, but the sticks he used to penetrate the soil kept breaking off, and he was forced to stop.

“I have not the right tools,” he said.

He rubbed two more sticks together to start a fire so that they could dry their garments.

“The wood is too wet.”

Imrhien helped him search for wild fruits. “These crab-apples are not edible. They are too bitter.”

That night they slept in a pile of leaves, taking turns to keep watch, huddled together for warmth. Diarmid remained stoic against the fact that his strong sense of harmony and symmetry was injured every time he was forced to glance in her direction. Despite his kenning-name “the Cockerel” among the mercenaries, which he insisted was because he was a favorite with the ladies—but which some said was more to do with the resemblance of a cockscomb to the roots of his hair—a coldness existed between them that went deeper than the chill of the flesh. To Diarmid, all folk were either friends or enemies, men or women; she properly fitted none of these categories in his eyes, and he did not know truly how to behave toward her. She would not have wished it otherwise, except that some comradeship might have been pleasant.

In the morning, Diarmid said, “Today is the fifth of Gaothmis. If we go on at this rate, we shall not reach Caermelor until early in Nethilmis.”

Flagging, his companion admired his optimism.

That day he made a noose-trap with his belt and strips of broadcloth slashed from Imrhien’s over-gown. They waited in silent concealment for hours, but no untame thing was so obliging as to ensnare itself, save only five wine-red leaves. The sight of them almost plucked some deep string of remembrance in the inner core of Imrhien, but at the last, it failed. She retrieved the belt and makeshift rope, and they went on.

“Hunting and trapping wastes time. We shall gather as we go.”

The ache in Imrhien’s stomach felt familiar. Should I ever regain civilization, I shall learn how to survive comfortably when forced to be far from it. Reality was so different from the tales heard in the Tower kitchens. Fictional wanderers always discovered food with ease along the way, fruit and berries dropped into their hands; no matter what the season, they habitually slept on the ground without suffering from damp and dying of cold. All utter myths.

Stumbling across deep brakes of hazel seemed a stroke of good fortune. Eagerly they began to raid them for ripe nuts that lay scattered on the ground. The thicket gave a frantic heave and exploded. Its wild heart burst out, wearing a malevolent face, and the face shrieked:

Gin tha’ steal or gin tha’ beg,

Tha’ll get no cobs from Churnmilk Peg.

A green-skinned, ragged, haggard crone grew out appallingly at the marauders. She careered forth like some preposterous weed, brandishing a knopped hazel-club in a knobbled hand. Her sly, upswept eyes were the shape of narrow leaves and as hard and brown as hazelnuts. She had a furfuraceous chin, a parasitical gall of a nose.

Peg shall beat tha’ if tha’ stay—

Nut thieves, nut thieves, go away!

Her rictus of a grin exposed lichened teeth, but Diarmid stood his ground. The guardian wight ground her teeth and lifted her hands. Splintery slivers of fingernails extruded like thorns from her sticklike fingers. Confronted with this evidence of vegetable malignity, Diarmid revised his plan and stepped back.

“You wicked old thing—have your way, then.”

Hastening from the hazel brakes, the wayfarers continued on their journey. Sounds of rhythmic churning came grinding from out of the wight-protected thicket, receding as distance increased.

“Not a powerful wight, but too much like an old woman in looks. I never strike women.”

<<Much like an old woman, but not much of a poet.>>

Stone as usual, Diarmid did not smile.

They went hungry on that second day, and the morning of the third showed every sign that their plight would be no different. Furthermore, the night had been cold—so cold that the wayfarers, in their damp garments, had hardly slept. With chattering teeth they had walked to and fro during most of the dark hours, too sleepy even to keep a proper watch for peril.

But as they plodded through that morning under a misty roof of leaves, Imrhien knew that they could not continue much longer in this manner. It had been different when she’d traveled with Sianadh; then it had been high Summer. Now the seasons had turned, bringing the danger of perishing from exposure. Cold and hungry, she desired only to lie down and sleep. Stubbornness and pride drove her on.

Although lack of nourishment made them lightheaded and scattered their wits, it did not dull their senses. If anything, it sharpened them, so that when the fragrance drifted to their nostrils it seemed the most piquant and mouthwatering scent they had ever inhaled. Their wits assembled themselves promptly. Simultaneously, the walkers moved in the direction from which allurement drifted.

“It might be a trap. Keep watch in case we are surrounded. Have you the self-bored stone tilhal my mother gave to you?”

Imrhien nodded. Self-bored stones were eagerly sought. Pierced by a central hole worn by the natural action of a flowing stream, such a charm was an invaluable asset if confronted with shape-shifters or the glamour—to look through the hole was to strip away illusion. Imrhien drew out the tilhal, in readiness.

Their senses drew them to a little sunny clearing. At its edge, they peered warily out from behind flaming leaf-curtains.

Springy turf ran down to a small, reed-fringed pool. A short distance from its mirrored surface, a pile of sticks burned on a flat stone, the flames ethereal in the sunlight, sending up a slender column of blue smoke.

Between water and fire, a man reclined on his elbow, carelessly flicking a stalk of grass. That is to say, one who looked like a man, but since humanlike form was the true shape of many eldritch wights, Imrhien could not be certain. She was not close enough to see whether there was some defect, the inevitable sign of eldritch. She held the self-bored stone to her eye. Through it he appeared unaltered.

“Dainnan!” breathed Diarmid. “He wears Dainnan gear. Not a wight, then?”

<<Maybe not.>>

“Good morrow.” The stranger’s voice carried clearly across the clearing: “In fellowship, come forth.”

Startled, the spies glanced at one another. Diarmid nodded, squared his shoulders, and assumed the watchful demeanor of a guard. “Stay behind me.” He let his right hand fall to his side, setting it lightly on his sword-hilt.

They emerged into the open and approached. The stranger did not move from his position. He smiled up at them, a dark smile that struck within Imrhien like the note of a great bell. A dazzle ran straight through her like a silver needle.

“Sit you down by the fire,” he invited, “unless you prefer your teeth chattering in your heads.”

In that brief glimpse, it came to Imrhien that to describe this stranger as “handsome” would be doing him an injustice. It would be as inadequate as applying the word pretty to a sable sky jeweled with stars, and those stars lowering their reflections like glimmering nets into a wintry sea.

Lean and angular was his face, the features chiseled, high-boned. Beneath straight eyebrows his dark eyes seemed to burn with a cold fire, piercing. His jaw was strong and cleanshaven, although brushed with rough shadow. The hair, glossy black as a raven’s wing, was swept carelessly back from his brow, the front locks pulled loosely back and knotted together behind his head and falling, bound, nearly to the waist. Unfastened—she imagined—it would be a cloud of soft darkness, a cascade of shadow.

As young and yet as long-enduring as Spring he seemed to Imrhien, and all in that flash she had noted he was tall and broad of shoulder, with the hard-thewed look of a warrior. There had been no defect.

Quite the reverse.

The warmth of the fire reached out welcomingly to penetrate the chill flesh of the wanderers. They moved closer to the blaze but remained standing. Imrhien did not know if she breathed.

“Thank you,” Diarmid replied guardedly, “we are but passing by. Have you seen other travelers these three days, perhaps a red-haired lady?”

“Do you enjoy giving your host a crick in the neck?”

They seated themselves.

Reaching her hands out to the flames, the girl stared fixedly at them, avoiding the stranger’s eyes. The pounding of her pulse was a choir of a thousand voices, as low as the rumble of stone shifting beneath the foundations of the mountains, as high as the birthplaces of the stars. Her thoughts were so vivid, she felt that they could be read easily by a blind beggar. She blushed, like the fire.

When she had first come near, she had imagined this lone traveler might be one of the ganconers, the Love-Talkers, male counterparts of the beautiful, ruthless baobhansith. Soon the tone of his comments put her mind at rest.

“Have I recently seen other persons as half-perished as you two? I cannot say that I have.” He spoke in a musical baritone, his words clearly articulated.

Imrhien’s mind was numb. As from a distance, she thought, His voice is as beautiful as the rest. Surely he speaks with extraordinary power.

“I pray you, speak more plainly,” said Diarmid, bristling like a hound at bay.

“You wish me to give a direct answer, to prove I am no wight who has destroyed those whom you seek?”

“Yes.”

“Then, no.”

After a perplexed pause during which both Imrhien and Diarmid wondered what kind of validation his answer implied, the Ertishman parried, “What proof have you that we are human?”

“The obvious signs.”

“Such as?”

“The new beard out of match with the rest—a human mistake.”

Diarmid’s hand flew to his red-sprouting chin.

“And she?” he demanded, nettled.

“She.”

Another pause. Imrhien burned in the knowledge that the dark, thoughtful gaze was bent upon her. She dared not look up.

“Lady,” the voice said gently, “will you speak?”

“I speak for her. She is mute,” interjected the Ertishman.

“Well, lady, is that so?”

She nodded, eyes downcast.

The stranger took a stick and raked a pile of coals heaped by the fire, uncovering four ash-coated lumps in the shape of small, flat loaves. Their savory fragrance burst out like an assault. The girl wanted to reach her hand through the translucent flames and snatch them out.

“What bakes there?” Diarmid’s voice had an edge to it.

“Enough to share.”

With deft precision, the Dainnan hooked the loaves out of the embers onto a waiting dish formed from a scoop of bark. Beside the bark dish lay a leaf plate holding several varieties of fruits and berries. The Dainnan took up an orange-red pomegranate and sliced off the top.

“You may not speak, but perhaps you will eat.”

<Thank you.>> Automatically she made the sign and accepted the fruit with trembling hands. He passed another to the Ertishman.

Diarmid had devoured his portion when Imrhien had scarcely begun. The presence of the stranger killed her hunger. The scooped-out pith and seeds of the pomegranate tasted sweet, but she could only nibble at them.

“Do not stint yourselves.”

The famished Ertishman needed no second invitation. He reached for a loaf and broke it open, heedless of burnt fingers. Steam jumped from the pale gold dough inside, like shredded cloud.

When all the food was gone and washed down with clear water from the spring, he sighed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “A noble repast. I am indebted, sir.”

“Perhaps you are in my debt, but it is only your names you owe me, guests, in good courtesy.”

“Captain Bruadair of Chambord’s Mercenary Guards, at your service.” Declared with a seated bow.

By this, the giving of his family name, Imrhien knew that Diarmid had put behind him any doubt about the stranger’s humanity.

“This damsel, the companion of my lost sister, is called by the kenning of ‘Imrhien.’ And you, sir?”

“My Dainnan name is Thorn.”

“You are Dainnan, yet you travel alone?”

The stranger smiled. “How much do you know of the Brotherhood? Alone, in pairs, in groups—the Dainnan travel as needs must. In my case it is expedient—one alone is often overlooked, giving him a better chance to gather information unobserved. I travel on the King-Emperor’s business.”

“We were journeying to Caermelor when our caravan was waylaid by unseelie wights on the Road. All folk were driven from it or destroyed.”

“Wights?” the Dainnan said sharply. “What was your reckoning of their number?”

Diarmid told him.

“So many and so strong.” He looked grave. “My undertaking—about which you are doubtless vexed—while royal business, is no secret. It is to measure the strength and numbers of unseelie wights pouring up from the south in this strange new tide. As it happens, I am near the end of my mission and on my way back to Caermelor. Join me and teach me this intriguing speech of hands you have between you. I will show you how to find food.”

Imrhien now noted that no rucksack was in evidence—only a bow and quiver lay nearby on the grass. The stranger journeyed lightly burdened.

“Sir, food-gathering is a skill I already possess,” Diarmid said, simmering with pent-up resentment.

The Dainnan shrugged. “As it please you.”

<<You do not speak for me!>>

Diarmid added hastily, “But in courtesy we will go partway, at least, in your company.”

“If only in courtesy, let me assure you there is no obligation. I travel faster alone.”

Thorn rose to his feet, lithe as a great cat, and kicked the fire out. Tall and straight he stood. Imrhien studied him from the corner of her eye, cataloging every detail.

He wore a shirt of fine wool with wide sleeves gathered at the shoulders and rolled up to the elbows; over this, a tunic of soft leather reaching almost to his knees and slit on both sides along the length of his thighs, to allow freedom of movement. Beneath the tunic, leather leggings. At each shoulder, the Royal Insignia was embroidered—a crown over the numeral 16 with the runes J and R on either side. Around his right forearm was wrapped a supple calfskin bracer laced with leather thongs. From a baldric swung a silver-clasped horn, white as milk, and a smaller, sun-yellow horn mounted in brass. At his belt, a water-bottle, a couple of pouches, and a coil of rope. From a weapon-belt depended a sheathed dagger and a smaller knife, as well as a short-handled axe.

He picked up a second baldric, heavily embossed, slinging it across his chest from his right shoulder. A longbow and quiver protruded from behind that shoulder now, and arrows crested with bands of green and gold, fletched with dyed goose-feathers.

“May we accompany you, in any case?” Diarmid asked, his face set, stonily trying to betray no emotion, no weakness.

“Would this arrangement please you?” This was addressed to Imrhien. Again she nodded in response to Thorn’s question, again without meeting his eye. Something was knotted in her, hurting. If only she did not have to besmirch those eyes by presenting them with such a face to look at. If only she could shape-shift and become the wind, unseen to tug those strands of black hair.

Thorn picked up the cloak on which he had lain and whistled softly. A goshawk flew down to his shoulder.

“Come, then.”

He strode from the clearing, and they had no heart but to follow.

Imrhien called to mind all that she had learned of the Dainnan. An elite brotherhood of warriors were they, a company of men who were more than royal bodyguards, for their role was as peacekeepers in these times, and they had been soldiers in times of war. When they were not at court they roamed throughout the lands. In Summer they lived in the open, in Winter they sometimes billeted with the people. Their leader was the famous Tamlain Conmor, Duke of Roxburgh, who was sometimes called the greatest warrior of Erith. Most youths aspired to the ranks of the Dainnan, but those who wished to join had to pass strenuous tests. The first prerequisite was expertise in Erithan historical sagas and poetry, yet this was easy compared with the famous tests of fighting skill and valor, of swiftness, agility, and fearlessness, that the Dainnan demanded. Only the cream of the candidates succeeded.

He traveled light, this Dainnan. Obviously, woodcraft stood him in good stead to survive in the wilderness. He went swiftly but with astonishing silence, causing neither twig to snap nor leaf to rustle. Although revived by the mouthfuls of food she had swallowed, Imrhien had difficulty in keeping up—her tattered skirts hampered free movement. Before her, Diarmid crashed along like a berserk bull, occasionally turning impatiently to offer her his arm—had they both always been so clumsy?

Thorn paid no heed to their noise but drew them aside now and then to reveal the secrets of the season—the shriveled, twining tendrils that must be tracked with patience as they wound through rocks to the point at which they entered the ground, indicating the presence of tubers, which he dug up with a sharpened stick; the white-barked wild fig-tree, its slender branches extending from the crevices of a rocky outcrop, bearing clusters of long, dusty green leaves and reddish orange fruit; in moist gullies, the tree-ferns with their “fiddleheads,” or unopened fronds, never to be eaten without first being roasted to remove their acids.

Once, he pointed to a liquidambar tree, alone in a clearing: 150 feet of brilliant ruby, gold, and deep purple.

“What can we eat of that?” Diarmid asked.

“Nothing.”

“A man cannot draw sustenance from beauty.”

“I can.”

Foods, medicines, dyes—all could be obtained from the wilderness, Thorn informed them in his beautiful voice, and Autumn was the richest season, in other ways as well. The gorgeous hues of the Forest of Tiriendor hung festooned on all sides like jeweled curtains. Spreading tupelos boasted bright red leaves and vivid blue fruits. The flat, fanlike sprays of the white cedars’ aromatic foliage were turning from dark green to orange gold. High above, crimson glory-vines climbed rampant, sunlight shining through their stained-glass leaves.

The sun was sinking when they came to yet another rill—there had been no shortage of watercourses along the way; indeed, it seemed they had been leaping over them constantly. Along the banks of this one, among a profusion of fishbone ferns and sword-leafed irises, grew grass bushes, heavy with seed-heads.

“Panicum grass.” Thorn, on bended knee, stripped the tiny seeds off the stalks. Following his example, Imrhien soon had a skirtful of seed. He held out the leather pouch for her to pour it into, then brought the fingertips of his open hand, palm facing inward, down and forward from his mouth.

He smiled, as he often did, and Imrhien imagined how that breath-stopping, white, wolf-smile no doubt made slaves of every lady of the court. So—he had already learned “Thank you” from her earlier inadvertent gesture.

“See,” said Diarmid, indicating with outflung hand, “that tree is leafless, yet it bears bunches of yellow berries, like beads. Beauty that can be eaten.”

“Taste them and die. Melia’s berries are poison. Sometimes the most beautiful things are the most ungentle,” replied the Dainnan. “And conversely.”

The goshawk flew off from time to time, but always it returned.

“No jesses, no bell, no hood,” Diarmid remarked, “yet surely at night the bird must be tethered?”

“Not by me.”

“It is trained well. An imprint?”

“No.”

When chill evening drew in, they made camp by a rocky pool formed by the streamlet. It was overhung by red-gold maples whose discarded leaves floated, suspended on its glasslike surface. They piled up dry sticks collected along the way, and Diarmid used the Dainnan’s tinderbox. Flames budded along the dark twigs like luminous flowers. Beside the fire, Thorn excavated a hole a foot deep and a little more in diameter.

The Dainnan showed them how to rub the grass-seeds between their hands and let the breeze winnow the outer glumes away. He used a stone to grind the seeds into a thick paste with water in the hollow of a rock. This he poured onto the hot ashes in six small flat loaves, covering them with glowing sticks. By now the fire had burned low, forming coals. He lined the cooking pit with these, placed the washed tubers inside, and covered them with coals and warm soil. When the upper surfaces of the loaves had been toasted, he turned them over, heaped hot ashes over the top, and left them to cook through. While they waited for the baking to be completed, Diarmid and the girl roasted fiddleheads and feasted on figs. Thorn unstrung his longbow and stood rubbing it down with wax.

The goshawk watched them from the branch of a she-oak. He had caught a quail and was mantling its limp form, covering it up with the twin fans of his outspread wings. After a time he folded himself together again, stood on one leg, gripped his prey in the talons of the other, and began to thoroughly pluck the little corpse. Efficiently he tore the skin away and drove his hooked upper beak into the flesh, closed the two halves of his beak like a pair of scissors, and tugged off a bite-size chunk of bloody meat, gulping it down whole.

“Your hawk—you do not fly it?”

“Errantry does not hunt at my command, only to feed himself.”

“And he comes back to you? Does not return to the wild? It is extraordinary.”

Thorn made no reply. Somewhere in the dusk, crickets whirred their last memories of a lost Summer.

“Had we a vessel of clay or metal,” mused Diarmid, “we might have collected the sap of maples to boil on the fire. And with your arrows, we might have brought down a squirrel or two.”

“Why chase after one’s supper when there is plenty to hand that does not flee? We do not starve.”

“And save the steel barbs for wights, eh?”

“I prefer my hide in one piece.”

“Your longbow—I have not seen its like before.”

“It was made under my direction, by the Royal Bowyer to the Dainnan.”

“May I see it?”

Thorn passed the bow across, and the Ertishman studied it closely.

“An unusual design,” he said. “The limbs are not round, but rectangular in section.”

“Yet wide enough to compensate against torque as the bow is drawn.”

“Not straight-limbed—a recurve bow, with a sculptured handgrip and arrow-rest.”

“Made to fit my right hand.”

“This material fitted along the bow’s back—what is it?”

“Laminations of horn and whalebone behind the yew. They improve performance and prevent it from breaking. It draws a hundred and forty pounds to twenty-eight inches and will send a broad-head over seventeen hundred and sixty yards.”

“A land mile—good sooth! Impressive indeed. In Tarv they tell of a champion of old who could achieve nine hundred, but I thought it a mere wives’ tale. I should envy to see this done.”

“Maximum flight is only a measure.” Thorn held up an arrow more than a cloth-yard long and squinted along the shaft to check for warping. “The effective range of this bow as a weapon is no more than two or three furlongs.”

“But it must be over six feet in length—is that not overlong for a hunting bow?”

“Its height matches my own—two inches above six feet.”

“Surely it must prove difficult to carry through the tangling trees.”

“Its measure is a personal preference.”

“I thought the Dainnan used crossbows.”

“For weaponry in dense-wooded country, aye. But the longbow is lighter and more rapid in fire. In open country, archers may stand shoulder to shoulder, needing much less room than crossbowmen.”

“And I note your darts are balanced with goose quills. Is it true what they say, that the arrows of the Royal Family and the Royal Attriod are fletched with the feathers of peacocks?”

“It is true.”

Diarmid digested this information in silence, caressing the polished moon-crescent of the mighty bow with gentle hands. Then he said:

“How long is it, sir, since you were at Caermelor? What can you tell me of the preparations of the Royal Legions to do battle with the northern hordes, should they push down into Eldaraigne?”

Thorn seated himself between his companions with his back against a tree-bole, and stretched out his long legs toward the fire.

“I can tell you that the King-Emperor does indeed intend to send battalions northward as preparation against invasion. The Dainnan are everywhere at this time—even scouting in Namarre to pick up what information they can regarding this Namarran brigand Chieftain who is said to have arisen, who seems to have the power to unite the disparate factions of outlaws and outcasts—indeed, it is thought that he must be a wizard of great power, to draw even the fell creatures of eldritch to his aid—that, or he promises them great reward, such as the sacking of all humanity, save only his own supporters. If so, he is sadly deluded, for unseelie wights would as soon turn on him as on the rest of humankind.”

“Never before in history has man been allied with the unseelie,” Diarmid said gravely.

“Never.”

“And are there as many as it is rumored, sir, answering to that northern call?”

“I know not the numbers of which rumor speaks. But yes, there are many. The Forest of Tiriendor was ever a favored haunt of things eldritch. One of them watches us now.”

Diarmid stiffened, motionless as a stone’s shadow.

“’Tis only a urisk,” said. Thorn, smiling, “a seelie thing. It dwells by this pool, as it has dwelled for many lives of men.”

They followed his gaze across the water. The remains of the day reflected up from the mere into dusky shadows, forming an outline of a slight, goat-legged manlike creature with stubby horns protruding from his curly hair. He sat with his arms about his hairy knees, staring at his observers with a mournful look.

“They crave human company,” Thorn explained dismissively, “but their appearance drives men away.”

<<The Dainnan says the wight has lived here long. Does the Dainnan then know these lands well?>>

Diarmid relayed Imrhien’s question. She was rewarded with Thorn’s attention, which caused her heart to flop over like a gasping fish.

“I do,” he said.

<<Does he know how to reach the Road?>>

“The Caermelor Road lies some two miles to the north of here,” the Dainnan replied to Diarmid’s translation. “Lady, do you think it would speed our journey to go that way, along a clear path? For certain, your skirts receive too much attention from bushes and briars. But the main Road holds added peril for mortals—it is a focus for unseelie spite. Besides, my work is not yet quite finished, and it takes me from the beaten track onto other roads, those that may not be so obvious at first—animal trails, watercourses, the paths of the sun and stars.”

“I’ll warrant the eye of a Dainnan sees many roads,” said Diarmid.

After about twenty minutes, the tubers were lifted out and put on a platter of leaves to be peeled and eaten, after which the loaves were ready also. Firm and nutty, their substance was satisfying.

“If we stay south of the Road, we must pass through Mirrinor,” Diarmid said between mouthfuls. “I fear it may be more perilous than the Road itself.”

“Mirrinor, Land of Still Waters—perilous, yes, but I have passed through it before, unscathed, and intend to do so again. My business takes me there. Also, it is a land of great beauty.”

After she had eaten, an irresistible drowsiness overcame Imrhien. The fire’s warmth seemed to soften her very bones. With one last glance at the mossy place where the urisk remained sitting in his loneliness, she lay down on Thorn’s cloak and instantly fell asleep. The last words she heard were Diarmid’s—“I shall keep first watch.”

Discordant sounds began the morning—shrill whistles, plaintive screams, and ear-piercing cackles. Errantry was greeting the sun. After calling, he began to preen on his perch, arranging his contour-feathers neatly with his bill. His tawny plumage was strikingly barred and mottled, his eyes gold-orange disks ringed with black, centered with darkness like twin eclipses of the sun.

A silver-clasped horn lay on its side in the grass. From its mouth spilled fat blueberries. Beside it, a rich tumble of golden-orange persimmons, their glossy leaves still attached. Two leftover loaves lay on a curl of bark, dark with wood-ash. The sun was sailing, sending diagonal shafts down through the trees. The urisk was gone, and so was Thorn, as she had known he would be. No one had woken Imrhien to bid her take a turn at keeping watch. She considered it very gentlemanly and guilt-provoking of them and went downstream to bathe. When she returned, Diarmid was sitting up, yawning.

“Fair device!” he exclaimed, his eyes alighting upon the container of blueberries. “This horn is wrought more cunningly than any I have seen.” He picked it up, turning it in his hands. Berries scattered like beads of lapis lazuli. “Its aspect is antique,” he murmured to himself, “yet it is as unblemished as if newly made. Such curious and exquisite craftsmanship! Methinks this is some family heirloom, perhaps fashioned during the Era of Glory.”

After he and Imrhien had broken their fast, Thorn returned. He looked unweary. Stepping out of the woods dressed in the subtle green brown of Dainnan garb, he seemed part of the Autumn morning, and as comely.

“Good morrow, sleepyheads. Half the day is gone—we shall have to run like the very deer to catch up with the sun.”

He broke some seed-pods from boughs overhead and passed them to Diarmid, along with his knife.

“The seeds of the tallow tree have a waxy coating that lathers in water like soap. My blade is sharp enough for a close shave. The tree does not grow everywhere—pods should be carried.”

Foam-faced, Diarmid leaned over the pool, trying to see his wavering reflection. He nicked his chin and cursed.

<<I can help you.>>

Imrhien took the knife from the Ertishman’s hand and scraped his jaw clean. They buried the blackened remnants of the fire in the cooking pit and set off.

Motes of sunlight pelted down like sparks. Flames of trees tapered upward. The three travelers were dwarfed by these towering, heatless infernos, like tiny salamanders crawling through a blaze of glory. Always, Imrhien’s thoughts dwelled on Thorn, their intensity tempered only by an ever-present thin blue trickle of grief for loss, which ebbed and flowed at random, as grief will.

For the next few days, Thorn was rarely to be seen. At one moment he would be walking beside them, matching their strides with his long legs and explaining the forthcoming section of the route or pointing out some new source of food. At the next he would be gone, melting silently into the woodland, not to return for hours. It seemed to Imrhien that when he was present, the sun smiled and the breeze laughed, and when he was gone shadows hung drearily on the trees and, in desolation, no birds sang. At times the goshawk Errantry rode at his shoulder—at other times the bird could be seen through the filigree of leaves overhead, a dark speck high up and far away. Errantry was a brilliant aerobatic flier; like all raptors, a proficient hunter.

Like jewel boxes were the tall trees of Tiriendor, like towering cones of variegated glass. Now and then a gust would release all the loose leaves simultaneously from their many tiers. Snapping free at the same instant from upper and lower ranks, they would shower down at a constant rate, a curtain of falling scraps of color. In the midst of flying leaves, Imrhien tilted back her head and gazed in awe.

Thorn said, “There is a word for that—fallaise.”

Would that my mouth could utter it.

“A useful term,” he said, caught ethereally in a shaft of amber light. “It might describe a fall of gauze, jewel-stitched, or a flock of bright birds descending, or a mantle of wind wafting stars, bits of a rainbow caught in a torrent, a burst of fiery sparks against the night, a thrown scattering of gems …”

And glints of sunlight netted in blowing hair.

This close, there was about him a fragrance of hyacinths, blue as the quintessence of evening, wild as the sky before a storm. Again Imrhien turned away lest he recognize the consuming intensity of her emotion.

With fierce determination, Diarmid noted everything the Dainnan taught them, taking pride in locating the fruits of the forest and delight in collecting them, to eat along the way or to be tied up in Imrhien’s voluminous overskirt and shared later. In this, at last, a tenuous link formed between Imrhien and her reluctant companion.

“Mark you the quandion tree,” the Dainnan instructed as he strode along, “its red fruits and their kernels may be eaten. An infusion of the roots is used against travel weariness, decoction of the outer wood is drunk for sickness of the chest, bark shavings are soaked and the liquid applied to itches, paste of the seeds is rubbed on wounds.”

Thorn often pointed out certain useful plants growing among others or certain birds of beauty in the trees. More often than not, Imrhien and Diarmid would stand puzzling at masses of seemingly undifferentiated or uninhabited foliage until the Dainnan plucked a leaf or the bird hopped along a branch. After that, they would perceive what he had indicated, and it became easier to do so as their eyes became attuned to the shapes and colors of the forest.

“Many things are hard to see unless you know how to observe. You will learn. The forest at first seems empty to many folk, but after a time your eyes will be drawn to plants that can give you sustenance—they will seem to leap out at you.”

And that was true enough.

A fierce thunderstorm struck, but the bruising of the air had forewarned of it. Thorn was away on one of his reconnaissances. Diarmid and Imrhien sheltered together under an overhanging rock in a hillside, the Ertishman uneasy with this ungentlemanly proximity, his sense of propriety offended.

When the rain abated, Thorn appeared, dry save for some droplets caught in his hair like crystals in a web of darkness. He offered his hand to Imrhien, to help her out of the shelter. Unexpectedly, lightning seared along her arm. Thunder roared in her temples. The storm that had raged outside seemed as nothing to the one within.

At nights, by the fire, she and Diarmid demonstrated the handspeak to their mentor. An eager student, he only had to be shown each sign once and he would remember it. Then the Dainnan and the Ertishman would often fall to discussing the relative merits of archery equipment, the complexities of design, and the finer technical points.

Wights, half-glimpsed and surreptitious, snuffled through bushes or darted across their path by day and glared from beyond the circle of firelight by night—mostly trooping wights, seelie and unseelie: gray trows, tiny siofra, hyter sprites. There were deer or goats with an uncanny look of knowingness in their eyes, and some solitaries—puckles and madcaps. Once or twice the sound of spinning wheels came from somewhere beneath the roots of trees, and strange singing.

“In your wanderings, do they not trouble you, the wights?”

“I know all their tricks. All of Roxburgh’s knights must know their nature and, in particular, be able to have the Last Word. It is part of the Dainnan Trial, to be well learned in eldritch lore.”

“The Trial—is all they say about it true? Is it so difficult?”

“No man is accepted into the Dainnan who does not know the lore of medicinal plants and survival in the wilderness. He must know in advance the location and identity of food plants, and the seasons and conditions of their ripening. Eldritch lore, Erithan history, the Twelve Books of Rhyme, tests of skill and strength and endurance, knowing the stars’ names and how to tell the time by them as well as by the sun and moon—all these are part of the Trial. I surmise ’twould be not unpleasant to you, to become one of the Brotherhood.”

“Indeed, sir. Prithee tell me more—I would hear about the Nine Vows to which the Brotherhood is bound.”

“Even so, my friend. As you surely know, a Dainnan warrior must never lie, and must remain faithful to his pledged word even in the face of death. He must honor and protect women. He must take no property by oppression, or fall back before nine fighting men. A Dainnan must not look for personal revenge, even if all his kindred were to be killed. But if he himself were to harm others in the course of his duty, that harm is not to be avenged on his people.

“Before any man is taken into the Dainnan, he must leap into a hole in the ground, up to his middle, with a shield and a hazel rod in his hands. Nine men stand at the distance of sixteen paces from him and hurl their spears at him all at the same time. If he is wounded by one of them, he is not thought suitable to join with the Dainnan. If he passes that trial, his hair is fastened up and he must run through the woods of Eldaraigne with the Dainnan knights following after him to try if they can wound him. Only the length of a bough is permitted between himself and themselves when they start out. If they catch up with him and inflict injury upon him, he is not allowed to join them, or if his spears have trembled in his hand, or if the twig of a tree has undone the plaiting of his hair, or if he has been sundered from something of his own flesh—a torn piece of skin or a hair caught on a twig—or if he has cracked a dry stick under his foot while running.

“After that again, he will not be accepted among the Dainnan until he has leaped over a staff the height of himself, and ducked under a barrier the height of his knee, and taken a thorn out of his foot with his fingernail, all the while running his fastest. But if he has done all these things, then he is fit to be given a name from the wild places of the land, and to join Roxburgh’s knights.

“It is good wages the Dainnan get, and a great many things along with that. The Brotherhood is served by a great retinue of bards, physicians, minstrels, messengers, armorers, falconers, austringers, bowyers, cooks, door-keepers, cup-bearers, and huntsmen, besides the best serving-women in Eldaraigne, who work year-round making raiment of dusken at Sleeve Edhrin. But as excellent as the pay is, the hardships and the perils to be borne are greater. For it is the duty of the Brotherhood to prevent strangers and robbers from beyond the seas from entering Eldaraigne, and it is exacting work enough in doing that. An active life it is, full of delights and dangers.”

When he had heard this, Diarmid fell quiet and thoughtful.

Images of the tall Dainnan would not let Imrhien sleep easily, after the first night. The knowledge that he lay on the other side of the fire was a torment that kept her wakeful despite an aching need for rest after a hard day’s walking. At first she had been shy with him, afraid to meet his eyes lest she should read the familiar disgust there. But when at last she braved a glance, she witnessed no disgust, only perhaps a hint of guarded curiosity and eyes that were, more often than not, crinkled with good humor. After that she had continued to avoid his gaze lest he should read what lay in her own thoughts. How he would laugh, should he learn she was under his spell. How even Diarmid the grim-faced would laugh.

Yet, a creation such as he, how could he but know he was admired by all who beheld him? Surely he must be accustomed to it.

When he was not with them, she would curse herself for acting like some simpering palace courtier, some silly, smitten wench. What did she know of him? Only that he was, to the eye, like water to the desert. This was not love—it was infatuation. She would not be shy, she would not go to the opposite extreme, either, and be cold to him, a game played by many a lusty lad or lass among the Tower servants—she would play no games at all. Never had she done so, and there was no reason to begin now.

When he returned, all rational thought lay in ruins, all plans in confusion, smashed by one slow turn of his raven-black head. Then she cursed the day she had first set eyes on him, the day the worm of hopeless yearning had begun its gnawing and all promise of peace had fled forever.

The land sloped ever downward. Brooks and streams became more numerous, and after four days they came to Mirrinor.

8

MIRRINOR

Wights of Water

We’re calling. Come hither, we want you to follow

Down where we dance in the water-green hollow.

We’ll sweep you to carelessness, wrap you in dreams and

Your land-chains we’ll sever. You’ll stay here forever.

Fair dancers, sweet voices you gleam and you glisten.

Don’t call me, don’t beckon, I’ll turn and not listen

You’d trap me and drown me and wrap me with bindweed,

Sink deep in green hollows. Don’t call me, I’ll not heed.

Your dancing’s entrancing, my feet must start gliding

Out to the green water where lilies are riding

In your arms entwine me, come take me I’m crying,

My breath leaves my body, I’m sinking, I’m dying.

“THE DROWNERS,” A FOLK SONG

Mirrinor—it was the Place of Islands, the Land of Still Waters, where every lake was strewn with islands and every island strewn with lakes. Indeed, it was hard to tell whether the region was mostly above water or below it. Tall snow—mint trees grew profusely in Mirrinor, evergreens reflecting deep into the sky-filled lakes, slender white pillars rising straight up, two hundred feet high, their streamers of peeling bark draping down to touch the ground. Festooned were the snowmints with long vertical blue-green leaves, volatile with peppermint. And leaning out from the rims of meres, golden willows wept golden tears to drift among waterlilies and rushes. Frogs loved Mirrinor, and blink-fast dragonflies in resplendent livery, and small midges and gnats and shy green water-snakes and Culicidae and strange, strange things that lived underwater and sneaked around its margins.

The travelers came to the shore of a sheet of water and looked out across its mirrored surface to the far islets.

“We cannot cross all this water,” Diarmid said. “We shall have to go back to the Road. It passes through the northern fringes of this land, crossing over stout bridges.”

Thorn did not reply. He had paused for an instant beside a plant growing out of the water in a dense, tidy clump. Its sturdy, erect stems each carried a heart-shaped, shiny green leaf, and the flowers, vivid blue, were packed densely on a spike growing from the base of each leaf.

“Spargairme,” he murmured, reaching out and lightly brushing a spike. “Pickerel weed, in the common tongue. A fair bloom of the water gardens.”

There did not appear to be anywhere to go, besides along the lake’s willow-lined shores, but soon Thorn was leading the way seemingly on top of the still waters, along a narrow, natural causeway hitherto concealed: a grassy path raised just above the level of the lake. The Dainnan, surefooted, soon outstripped his followers. Imrhien had picked up her ruined skirts and was endeavoring to walk as swiftly as possible without losing her balance and falling among the swaths of silver silk spreading wide on either side. How deep was the water? As deep as the sky was high? Looking down, she could see only the blue heavens, where clouds drifted. It seemed she walked between two skies. And what lurked in those depthless depths? What wights waited there, flexing long, cold, bony fingers? At her back, Diarmid impatiently muttered something under his breath. Ahead, the Dainnan had already disappeared among the leaves of an island. Her hands being occupied, Imrhien could not speak to the Ertishman.

In the next instant there came a mighty splash, and she whirled, wide-eyed, to see that Diarmid had disappeared. Ripples spread out, sparkling, across the lake. Imrhien dropped to her knees, straining to see past the shining surface, plunging her arm in up to the shoulder, fingers outstretched, searching.

Suddenly he burst upward in an explosion of spray, gasping, shaking weeds from his hair and eyes, spitting muddy water. Then, to her astonishment, he actually stood up and waded back to the causeway. Rising to her feet. Imrhien turned and saw that Thorn had returned and come up with them.

“Some of these meres are quite shallow,” he remarked, “fortunately.”

“Doch!” cursed Diarmid. “The money-pouch slipped from my neck and is lost in the mire.”

“Do not distress yourself,” said Thorn.

Not wishing to increase Diarmid’s discomfiture, Imrhien did not stare at his dripping hair and clothes. Instead she hastened along the causeway in Thorn’s wake, hiding her amusement—Diarmid had made a comic picture, after all—and they reached the small island.

There grew paper reeds, whose tall, graceful dark green stems were topped by mop heads of pendulous threadlike foliage. Concealed among them, a boat. Carvel-built, clean-lined, and painted green, she was an exquisite little craft. Her high prow bore a modest carving of a winged toad, and a name was written on her side, but Imrhien could not decipher the runes.

“She is called Llamhigyn Y Dwr,” said Thorn, as if he could read Imrhien’s thoughts, “Waterleaper.” His marvelous smile pierced like a spear straight through her heart, only more painfully. She wondered how long she could endure.

They launched the boat and climbed aboard. Diarmid seized the oars and began to row mightily, as though the water were his foe and he were beating it. His sodden clothes stuck to his back. Seated in the bows, Imrhien snatched a glance over the mercenary’s heaving shoulders, toward Thorn, standing spear-straight and relaxed at the tiller, scanning the waterscape with hawk’s eyes.

As softly as breath, the goshawk Errantry glided in to alight on, the carven prow, gripping the carved wooden waterleaper with his strong, scaly feet and spreading his wings to their full span for a moment before folding them. The momentum of his flight gently rocked the boat. He rode with them, his eyes shuttered by the milky translucence of his nictitating membranes. A long, vaned primary molted from his wing tip and drifted down to lie lightly on the water.

Now and then, Thorn spoke quietly to the rower. “Pull a little to port.… Now straight.… A snag there—to starboard.” He scarcely needed to touch the tiller. In this manner, the little boat moved across the waters of Mirrinor with her silver wake trailing after in an ever-widening V.

A matching V of wild geese went honking by overhead, and then the boat entered a network of leafy channels among wooded islets. Here, in backwaters, the small bright green disks of duckweed floated decoratively on the water, a short root hanging from each disk. Pillarlike snowmints soared straight up on either side. Beneath the long, pale curtains of their bark the dark fronds of brake-ferns pushed up, crowding to the edge. Willow leaves floated like the torn and jaundiced pages of antique books. Dragonflies, blue and gold, skimmed over the bright yellow flowers of brass buttons spreading on the surface. Leapfrogging juvenile waterleapers kept pace with their namesake, then scampered away as though they tired of the game.

From time to time the trees parted, and through gaps between islands, wider expanses of water could be seen. Like great mirrors lying on their backs, or windows looking onto some deep, upsidedown world, they imaged black swans drifting on their reflections in perfect symmetry, high above drowned cloud formations. Lying back against the lofty curve of the prow, Imrhien trailed a fingertip in the water and felt the wonder of this beauty like an ache in her bones, for all beauty was Thorn’s, and all she saw seemed part of him.

The Dainnan took a turn at rowing. Diarmid stood stiffly at the tiller, determined to steer faultlessly if it became necessary. Thorn was so close now to Imrhien, an arm’s length. To distract her thoughts, she turned her gaze away and looked out over the side of Waterleaper, as she had often gazed from the raft with Sianadh. The oars moved rhythmically, making scarcely a sound. Here, the water was very deep. She had been looking down at them for the space of several heartbeats before she saw them, as if viewed through clouded green glass, looming out of obscurity—the towers and belfries and gables of a drowned city far below. The boat glided over the dim rooftops, a bird in the city’s refracted skies, and it seemed to Imrhien that from out of the depths she heard the profound tolling of a bell.

On they voyaged, and there came never a breath of wind to ruffle the surface of the lakes. All was still and calm. Later, Imrhien volunteered to take a turn at rowing, to prove she was no useless encumbrance of a passenger—and, for a space, to have Thorn at her back, lest he should come to read too much in her eyes and his kindness turn to contempt. Diarmid refused her offer, affronted, as if it were in had taste that a girl should presume to a job he considered a man’s, as if this reflected on his own ability to propel the boat. Thorn overruled him.

“Take the oars if you would, lady.”

She was clumsy at first, but the skeptical glances of the Ertishman at the tiller hardened her resolve. Soon she had mastered the art of it and sent the little boat sculling along, if slowly, at least in a straight line. Long-legged insects walked over the water, held up by surface tension, and concealed frogs began a bink-tonk chorus, calling to mind the moss-frogs spuriously or genuinely bettering the wine in the cellars of Isse Tower. Gelatinous whiteness gleamed from reedy inlets; great, silent rafts floated there, woven from bulrushes. Packed tightly into these rafts lay scores of semilucent eggs, each as large as a melon.

The sun began to subside in the west. Birds piped from every bush. Errantry spread his wings and sped aloft with a hushed whirr.

A sagittate flock of swans winged its way out of the south and alighted on open water. With arched necks, admiring their reflections, they paddled to an island nearby and climbed out, waddling up onto the sedges to shake themselves. It was difficult to see them under the curtains of leaves, but they appeared to cast off their feathers like cloaks. Soon a flock of dark-haired girls clustered where the swans had stood. They moved off together into the trees, the echoes of their voices wafting like music out over the water.

“Mortals also must find a roosting-place for the night,” said the Dainnan. “If you have blistered your hands to your satisfaction, lady, you may allow me to take the oars now. Captain, stay on course. We make for that craggy tor, the Isle of Findrelas.”

Imrhien shipped the oars and exchanged places with Thorn. The boat rocked—he steadied her, catching her by the waist with an arm of steel and whipcord. From the points of contact between them, the jolt of energy seared her again. Her face burned, but then, whichever side of her was turned toward Thorn was always suffused with heat and the far side was always cold—it was as though he were a fire to her.

The saw-toothed crag of Findrelas was a larger island than its neighbors. Waterleaper made landfall on its northern shores.

After they had disembarked, Thorn tied the boat’s painter to the bole of a snowmint.

“Made fast, she’s more likely to be here in the morning,” said Thorn, hoisting his baldric over his shoulder. “There are thieves about, over lake and under.”

“Should we not haul the boat right out of the water, to make the task less easy for thieves?” asked Diarmid. “We might conceal it beneath these bushes.”

“A boat like this must not be left high and dry. If she were to leave her element, her timbers would shrink. The next time her hull entered the water, it would leak.”

“In sooth, sir, my knowledge lies not in nautical matters. But this may prove useful,” said Diarmid, retrieving a wooden, brass-studded bailing-bucket from stowage under one of the seats. “We must make camp farther inland,” he went on, “away from the water’s marge. Many egg-rafts lie anchored there. Culicidae Vectors will appear in great numbers at dusk.”

“What you say is true,” Thorn acknowledged, “but no place on Findrelas, in Mirrinor, is far from water.”

They trod now on a mosaic of fallen leaves like painted tiles in tints of richest ocher, terracotta, copper, and bronze. Again Thorn led the way, stepping lightly, stopping at whiles to break off certain seed-bearing stems or leaves or strips of bark, which he tucked in a belt-pouch.

“Quandion, star boronia, the resin of snowmints—medicinal plants. And guardians against mosquitoes.”

His students took careful note of the characteristics of the plants, for later identification. A campsite was found on a low rise, surrounded by russet thickets of golden abelias.

“Here shall we make our fire,” said the Dainnan, “but there is much to be done first.”

The fernlike foliage of the surrounding swamp cypresses had deepened to rich bronze-red at this season. Among their twisted roots, bright leaves lay like sparks smitten from Autumn’s anvil. Farther from the campsite, the trees opened out on a wide pool edged with bulrushes and the ensiform leaves of water-flags. The pool was choked with blue, pink, and white waterlilies and a water-fern whose shiny leaves, spread flat on the water like four-petaled pansies, were stamped with a scalloped center of umber, bordered with bright green and limned by a thin line of scarlet.

“In the water, supper awaits,” said Thorn, throwing off his tunic and shirt. “Corms of waterlilies, rhizomes of bulrushes, spores of nardue.”

“That is women’s work,” Diarmid objected. “Lend me the bow, sir, and I will hunt for meat.”

“If by ‘women’s work’ you mean it is not dangerous,” replied Thorn, “then you are mistaken. Be aware of what might well lurk beneath this pretty surface.”

“I do not fear water wights. And I have been beneath Mirrinor’s waters before, without trouble.”

“What, then, would you hunt? Eldritch beasts cannot be eaten.”

“There is lorraly game in Mirrinor.”

“The only game worth the chase are deer—and they are not to be found here.”

“I have seen otters. I am told they make good stew.”

“You would hunt otters? Then let me not hinder you.” Thorn thrust his unstrung longbow and quiverful of arrows into the Ertishman’s hands. “Go.”

Although he smiled, the Dainnan’s tone, always hitherto laughing and lighthearted, had turned cold like a sudden storm, and as perilous—yet it held not anger, but contempt.

Diarmid hesitated. “I would not leave you weaponless, at the mercy of the unseelie.”

“Fear not for me, my friend—I do not need weapons to survive.”

“And the girl …”

“I have two arms.”

Diarmid met the other’s cool stare, then dropped his gaze.

“Tomorrow. I shall hunt tomorrow.” He relinquished the longbow and arrows.

“As it please you.”

Thorn pulled off his boots and was soon up to his middle in the icy water. So smooth, so perfect, was the musculature of his arms and shoulders that he seemed not to be of flesh, but carved of wood the color of honey. With the midnight shower of his hair cascading down his back to meet the water, and the quatrefoil leaves of nardue brushing his sides as he waded among the bulrushes, he appeared like some eldritch incarnation that had arisen to entrap maidens with his beauty and drown them in long, tangling weeds. For one chilling moment, the watching girl felt terror. Diarmid plunged in after the Dainnan. Her fear past, Imrhien did not linger but left them to dive for these delicacies and went off carrying Thorn’s hatchet to gather firewood and bring it to the chosen site.

Her shoulders ached from the unaccustomed effort of rowing, and the oars had blistered her hands, but the wooden bailing-pail from Waterleaper made it easier to carry small kindling. Placing it on the ground beside her pile of wood, she caught a movement at the corner of her eye and looked up to see an unexpected sight so far away from farmlands—a white cow ambling out from a stand of golden abelias. A lovely little cow she was, with round ears, very friendly looking, but Imrhien was taking no chances. She continued chopping wood with the iron hatchet, showing no unease, feigning unconcern. The cow lowed softly, halted, and regarded her reproachfully with large and liquid eyes, its udder distinctly distended. Since it stood between her and the pool where her two companions were diving, Imrhien was considering whether to remain where she was or throw the pail at the cow and make a dash for safety, when Thorn returned with Diarmid.

“Do not keep her waiting too long,” smiled the Dainnan. Dripping wet, he threw down his shirt, which was tied in a bundle and full of lumpy objects. “She is in need of milking.”

<<Seelie?>>

“She is of the Gwartheg Illyn. Her milk will be sweet.”

As soon as Imrhien put down the iron hatchet and emptied the pail of kindling, the white cow approached, as though offering herself to be milked. Imrhien had milked goats at the Tower—this was not much different. The creamy liquid jetted forth easily, and before long the pail was brimming. Meanwhile Diarmid, using his new-learned Dainnan trick of fire-making, had caused a few flames to begin to flicker among the kindling. The Dainnan carried a tinderbox, but Diarmid had entreated him to demonstrate the stick-twirling art of making fire without flint or steel and now practiced it at every opportunity. Imrhien had mastered it also.

Tentatively the girl stroked the neck of the little cow. Then a voice called, clear and loud through the twilight. A tall figure in green stood on a crag above the lake. She chanted out:

Come thou, Einion’s Yellow One,

Stray-horns, the Parti-colored Lake Cow,

And the hornless Dodin,

Arise, come home.

At the first sound of the seeming-lady’s call, the white cow had pricked up her round ears and trotted off. As the song went on, other cattle emerged from various places and moved up the hillside toward the singer, gathering to the summons. They surrounded the green lady, who formed them into ranks and led them down into the dark waters of the lake surrounding Findrelas. Only a cluster of yellow waterlilies marked the spot where they disappeared.

Diarmid, as if waking from a dream, turned his attention back to the fire, coaxing it to take hold blowing life into it.

“The herds of Finvarna are said to have the blood of elf-bulls,” he said between breaths.

Thorn had disappeared again, but soon he came back, singing in full and mellow voice:

’Tis the thrill of the chase with the wind in your hair

And the riding to hounds with a company fair

’Tis the thunder of hooves over meadow and hill,

’Tis the song of the arrow that flies to the kill,

The hunting of the stag, O! The hunting of the stag!

’Tis a soft Summer’s eve with the moon in the trees

And the glimmer of stars and a rose-scented breeze

’Tis the laughter and music that ring through the night

And the feet that move swiftly in patterned delight

Dancing on the grass, O! Dancing on the grass!

“A trivial ditty to which no salt-worthy bard would admit,” he concluded, “but what it lacks in poetry it amends with gaiety.” He bore armfuls of vegetation, including a small, perfumed flower which he dropped in Imrhien’s lap. Hunger, which had been troubling her since she recalled they had eaten nothing since dawn, abruptly disappeared in the standard manner for lovesick fools, leaving only the soreness of shoulders and the sting of blistered hands.

“Waterlily corms and bulrush rhizomes must be roasted under the coals,” explained the Dainnan, seating himself by the fire. “The seeds of waterlilies are sweet—as are these, the seeds of wild ginger—eat them raw. Nardue is not so palatable. And if not prepared rightly, it starves instead of nourishing.” He scooped foaming milk from the pail, using the silver-clasped horn. “This instrument is stoppered now, but there is more to its purpose than a drinking vessel.” They shared the warm drink around their circle of three. Sedge corms had been harvested, too, and there were peeled waterlily stems and the very new, white shoots of the bulrush, to be eaten raw.

“Can the roots of water-iris be eaten?” Diarmid asked, noticing that Thorn had brought a handful.

“No—they have other purposes.” Thorn tucked the bulbs away in a pocket of his tunic.

The goshawk returned after a long absence and went swooping after crickets. His master ignored him, intent on crushing leaves of star boronia.

“The wood of white-leaf crackles in this corner of our fire. Its ashes, mixed to a paste with water, are a treatment for blisters. Crushed leaves of star boronia, steeped, wash away soreness of the sinews. So, you both may sleep comfortably this night. The smoke of quandion leaves drives away mosquitoes and similar winged pests. Throw them on the fire when you hear the Vectors’ whine. The nights are cooler in this season, which is not to their liking—yet, sensing mortal breath, the Vectors will come.”

It was dark by now. The goshawk perched on a high branch, dining on something limp and ratlike. The fire crackled. Imrhien raked the cooked food out of the coals. A loud, harsh cry like the roar of an angry bull funneled out of the dark distance. Three times it came. Diarmid peered into the shadows, his hand on the longbow.

“’Tis the call of the boubrie only,” said Thorn.

Diarmid’s wariness dissipated. “Boubrie birds—I have seen them. They eat only sheep or cattle. It is far from its usual haunts, this one, unless it can stomach eldritch cattle.”

“Mayhap it simply passes by.”

The cry sounded again farther away, plaintive, anguished, and lonely in the night.

Supper finished, Diarmid and Imrhien soothed their hurts with the infusions and pastes prepared by the Dainnan, who, wilderness-hardened, needed no cures.

“Errantry shall be the nightwatchman and shall awaken us at the slightest hint of peril.”

As if in reply, the hawk uttered, “Swee-swit, swee-swit.” He flicked his tail, scratched the side of his head with a talon, then sat hunched on his bough, one leg tucked up inside the apron of his panel.

They stoked the fire and lay down to sleep.

It was a clear night. All over Mirrinor, frogs were chorusing. Acutely conscious of Thorn reclining nearby in idle vigor, the archetype of male beauty, Imrhien lay looking up at the stars. “The Uile” was the name she had once heard Sianadh give to that vastness: the All that cradled Aia, the boundless ocean of suns, moons, and strange worlds. Far above, the Swan constellation unfurled its wings protectively over Erith. A myriad stars above, a myriad frogs below. The stars drew down so low that she could have reached up and touched the nearest; and the deeps of the star-filled sky were so dizzying that she might have fallen into them.

The whine of a Vector penetrated her reverie, and she sat bolt upright. Errantry gave a warning whistle and began to chatter in shrill anger. The fire was still bright—she tossed leaves on it, and pungent blue smoke billowed up. The Vector was close, and others were closing in behind the first, stretched waifs on wings of starlight. The bizarre, almost human look of them was eerie. Improbably thin were the attenuated, delicate dancer’s legs—the ankles no larger in diameter than the thickness of a man’s thumb, the limbs twice as long as a woman’s.

They were human in form, yet not in proportion. And not in movement, either, for they could not turn their heads at all; their large-eyed faces were directed straight ahead, their fragile flower’s stamens of arms terminated in innocent, tiny hands. Their childlike and gossamer appearance belied their nature. They could alight on a sleeping man without waking him and insinuate their poisoned needles deep into his flesh, sucking his blood, injecting itches, fever, the parasitic worms of filaria, and slow death. Devoid of human emotions, they resembled engines of clockwork going about their business, patient, ruthless, relentless, maddening.

Where they met the smoke the Vectors moved away, but they always returned, drawn by their senses. In a circle they hung in the still airs, their piercing, high-pitched drones unceasing. More of them gathered. Diarmid threw extra leaves on the fire.

“’S death—they’ll have us at any moment!”

“The leaves must last us until morning,” said Thorn.

<<Unless the wind comes to blow away these vampires.>>

“Does the wind ever blow, in Mirrinor?” asked the Ertishman. He had drawn his skian and was slashing futilely at the Vectors, who gently drifted out of reach on every air current engendered by his vigorous movements.

“Rarely.”

But even as Thorn spoke, the air stirred. A light breeze arose and strengthened. The Vectors were thrown together, then torn apart. They hovered as best they could on their weak aerofoils, but the breeze caught them up and carried them away, and the night became still again.

“They will return.”

Diarmid and Imrhien huddled down to sleep, uneasily. The girl dozed sporadically. Whenever she opened her eyes, they were filled by the white light of stars that stippled the sky like a glimmering net thrown from one horizon to the other. Against the stars, the tall, dark figure of Thorn stood quiet and vigilant.

Sometimes she would study him covertly from under her lashes, marveling. His was not the comely regularity of the classic statue carven to the measurements of ruler and quadrant and the laws of arithmetic. His was the lawless beauty of the cloud-crowned mountain, the violent ocean, the blowing stars—a wild beauty, in that it was impossible to pin down, to describe, or to measure.

Vectors came and went in the night, always heralded by Errantry’s cries. With scented smokes, Thorn warded off their blood-seeking tongues. By dawn, the quandion leaves were all gone. As were the Culicidae.

At uhta, in the insipid light of before-day, Imrhien raised her head. White vapors from the lakes curled through tawny abelias and soaring snowmints, settling in fine droplets on their leaves. All the trees seemed to be floating free of the ground, suspended on a sea of pale cloud. Away eastward, the sun would soon be rising crimson out of the mists to paint the Autumn trees with gilded rose. Errantry began his raucous morning oratory. His master was already awake and moving about—she wondered whether he ever slept. Diarmid was beginning to stir.

A noise nearby startled them. Something huge came crashing through the golden abelias, and a head reared over the top of the bushes. Like a gigantic black waterbird it appeared—the neck was almost three feet long, the bill half as long again and hooked like an eagle’s. Webbed were the feet and armed with tremendous claws. This creature gave a deafening bellow. Two small white forms shot out of the trees and across the clearing. Thorn had the longbow in his hand and an arrow nocked before the girl could blink. The great bow sang, and the first arrow was scarcely on its way before a second whined after it, and two hares tumbled on the ground, rolling over and over, a shaft through the heart of each of them. The boubrie crashed off toward the water’s edge, bellowing.

“Here is your breakfast,” said Thorn, retrieving the hares and slinging them on the ground beside the smoldering fire. He placed his booted foot on the still twitching carcasses and pulled out the arrows. “They were doomed. Had I not taken them, the wight would have done so.”

Diarmid, with difficulty, mastered his amazement.

“I thought you did not hunt hares, Sir Longbow.”

“Never did, never shall.”

“Then, these are eldritch things?”

“Think you I cannot tell the difference? No. That was not hunting.”

Thorn took the bloody arrows and went off toward the waterlily pool.

The Ertishman turned to Imrhien. “Know you how to dress these?”

She shook her head, not untruthfully. Let he who would eat them, prepare them—she would be no scullion, not any more.

The boat was found where they had stowed it. Spiders had spun sticky, glistening webs all over its sides. As the travelers put out from shore, Thorn commented on the fact that the small island on which the swanmaidens had landed the night before was no longer to be seen. Only an empty shining sheet of water stretched there now.

“’Tis one of the floating isles,” he said, “of which Mirrinor has many. Findrelas, however, has its roots firmly planted beneath the lake.”

Diarmid took first turn at rowing, his hands bandaged with strips torn from Imrhien’s petticoat.

Bridges linked some of the isles of Mirrinor, although they were few in number and varied in design. One or two were ancient constructions of greenish stone, moldering and crumbled. Three or four were rickety wooden pontoon-bridges, and others were simple affairs suspended across the water, attached at either end to tall trees.

“Few men ever dwelled in this region,” said Thorn. “None have dwelled here for more than a few years. Only some edifices of stone remain, which once they built. Other creatures made the wooden bridges. Those builders cannot cross running water, but the waters of Mirrinor stand still.”

Here in this place forsaken by mortalkind, wights and other wildlife were numerous. A pony’s head broke the water’s surface and stared steadily at the occupants of the boat. Weeds were tangled like green ribbons in its mane. The waterhorse swam to a northern shore and heaved itself out, disappearing from view into a clump of trees. In the time it takes to draw one breath, its alternate shape of a rough, shaggy man emerged on the other side of the thicket and trotted away into the distance. Close at hand, naked little folk no more than twelve inches high, thin and pale as the sickle moon, dived off lily pads and gamboled in the water. Startled by the boat, they fled with melodramatic cries of dismay. Mallards quacked in the reeds.

A sparse shower of rain passed over, leaving an archway of pastel colors in the skies. Thorn disconnected the bowstring and thrust it under the front opening of his shirt to keep it dry. At evening, mists arose languidly from the meres. Through them, the haunting strains of solemn music came drifting to the ears of the voyagers. A shadow loomed. The white haze thinned and drew back for a moment, revealing the mouth of a channel between two islands. On either side of this waterway tall, funereal trees stood in rows. From this gap a light barge emerged, propelled neither by oar nor by sail. Its smooth passage stenciled two glimmering furrows along the water’s surface. Folds of rich cloth-of-silver were draped over the barge’s sides, the hems trailing in the lake. Cradled within lay a knight, clad in armor the color of moonlight. His hands were crossed upon his breast, his helm was open. Dark were the lashes of his shuttered eyes against the pallor of his face. In the bows of this vessel a shrouded figure stood, motionless. As the barge glided on, the veils of mist closed in, hiding the vessel and muffling the haunting melody, which faded slowly into the ageless quietude of the water-world.

Diarmid broke the hush.

“By my oath, what was that which passed yonder?”

“It was An Bata Saighdear Ban,” said Thorn. “The Boat of the Pale Warrior.”

In response to the Ertishman’s puzzled frown, he added, “Forever, that vessel glides upon the waters of Mirrinor.”

“Once, was that fair knight a living man?”

“No, never.”

“And he who rides at the prow?”

“Neither.”

Water gurgled softly beneath the timbers of Waterleaper’s hull.

“How long should it take to cross this place?” asked Diarmid.

“Ten days, maybe eleven.”

Their course took them along channels through water-meadows luxuriant with hog-bean and sharp-flowered rush and the golden kingcups called marsh-marigolds. Their vessel swam through flooded jungles of coppiced trees: alder, willow, casuarina, and poplar, where birds, otters, and beavers flourished. A pair of lynxes came to the water’s edge to drink, majestic and aloof.

At nights, viridescent lights, ringed by pale circles in the mist, bobbed beyond the flicker of the campfire. The vapors would swirl apart to reveal black waters and close in again. Then they would melt and the sky could be seen overhead, thickly encrusted with twinkling white stars like seed-pearls sewn on a velvet cloak. Sometimes Diarmid spoke softly of Muirne, trying to regain her with memories, certain—he said—that she had survived and would be found again, safe and well, certain that they would be reunited. Culicidae Vectors always came, lured by breath and warmth. They whined for blood all night at the edges of the smoke. Once, one of them hovered very close to Diarmid, and he woke to Errantry’s shrill scream, lashing out instantly. The frail, venomous Vector dropped from the air, and he crushed it with a stone. It flattened out to nothing, a mere spindly outline with a crimson splash at its center. The other Culicidae droned on monotonously as though nothing had occurred, as though they cared naught for their own kind, which indeed they did not.

One bright morning, busy filling the water-bottle at a limpid spring, Imrhien caught Thorn’s smile as he rinsed his knife farther downstream, and she flicked a tendril of water at him by way of reply. He returned the splash. Caught up in a sudden spontaneous joy whose founts she had not guessed, she dropped the bottle and scooped water at him with both hands. Fine droplets flew back and forth like diamonds, catching the light, in a game such as children play. They both returned to camp shaking their dripping hair. She, between shock and shame and delight, could not name her inner turmoil.

On two nights, shang winds came and blew the Vectors away, without much disturbing the surfaces of the lakes. Mirrinor then glittered gorgeously, like a million green-and-silver candelabra, like fires of burning emeralds and ice crystals.

The shoulders of the mercenary and the girl ached from daily rowing and were nightly soothed with herbal balms. At times Thorn revealed to them much lore of the wilderness. At other times he would fall silent for hours, looking out across the water-plains and myriad eyots of Mirrinor as though he saw beyond, to a place no other eyes could see. It seemed some secret sorrow existed deep within him, hidden behind the mirthful gray eyes, although no word betrayed it.

Once, after they had tied up the boat and were making their way along the shores of some islet, danger came on them from an unexpected quarter. All had seemed peaceful, until the trees began to roar and toss before a blasting wind. A huge shadow obliterated the sun’s pearl, and with a scream as of seven hundred madmen, something came down at Imrhien on leather wings twenty feet in span, sharp-taloned on their leading edge. The force of its wing-beats tore leaves from their stems. The long, pointed beak gaped red-gulleted, showing double rows of teeth. Small, pushed-in eyes blazed from beneath bony ridges. Feet like bunches of scythes extended to rend its prey. Next the scream rose suddenly to a new height, like a metal auger puncturing the skull, and the tyrax lurched across the sky, crashing down into the undergrowth. The feathered shaft of an arrow protruded from each eye, and the twang of a bowstring stayed on the air like a memory.

Thorn stood, straight as a spear, and watched the great reptilian flier fall. The end of the longbow he held in his hand rested lightly on the ground. The beast thrashed for a few moments, then stilled.

Diarmid moved warily to look at it and returned, shaking his head incredulously.

“I thought our days were numbered. Two shots, and both dead accurate.”

“’Tis the best way to slay them—shafts through the eyes.”

“Aye, Sir Longbow, but I have never seen such marksmanship.”

“A Dainnan must be skilled in archery.”

“Such skill is beyond measure. It seems that in all things you can never fail.”

Thorn threw him an odd look, almost angry. “Fail? Oh yes, I have been known to fail. I have failed at crucial moments. And for that, I have paid dearly.”

He slung the bow over his shoulder. Diarmid found courage to speak again.

“Shall I retrieve the arrows?”

“Leave them.”

They moved off together, Imrhien glancing over her shoulder at one long wing tip of the tyrax, devoid of feathers.

“Is the bow, then, the chief weapon of the Dainnan?” Diarmid asked, intrigued.

“No.”

“The sword, then, is it the sword?”

“It is not the sword.”

Diarmid fell silent, at a loss.

“The finest weapon of a Dainnan is his own being,” said Thorn. “His mind and body, wit and brawn. When deprived of all other weapons, he is yet able to survive and carry out his duty to the King-Emperor. Had I not been armed, I would have found another way to confound the assailant.”

They moved beneath tall golden poplars standing straight as candle-flames and as radiant.

“When threatened,” the Dainnan said, “a Dainnan must look to see if there is anything lying around that he may use as a weapon, such as a stone or a stick. If an attacker carries arms, he may be relieved of his weapons in many ways.”

“An unarmed man against a knife-wielder? ’Tis hard to credit.…”

Impatiently Thorn halted and sloughed his equipment. “Draw your skian.”

Readily Diarmid obliged. The two stood facing one another, poised, watchful. Around them, sun-colored leaves rained down like torn silk, a radiance burning from within.

“Now, try to use it.”

The mercenary’s knife arm moved a fraction of an inch. That was all the time permitted it. Thorn’s left hand grabbed it by the wrist, striking its owner on the chin with his right elbow. Diarmid’s head fell back.

This happened within the space of three heartbeats. Instantly the Dainnan pushed the knife hand back and away from him, forcing his adversary to bend forward, whereupon he reached over Diarmid’s shoulder and, controlling the mercenary’s elbow with his chest, applied a reverse bent arm-lock, all the time pushing the knife up and away from him. A strong nudge with the knee in the pit of the stomach caused Diarmid to double over farther. Thorn pushed down on his shoulder, using the arm-lock to throw him forward and off balance, simultaneously stepping across to block Diarmid’s left foot. The mercenary fell forward onto his face and left hand. Mounting pressure on his right wrist forced his fingers open—he dropped the skian. Thorn picked it up, released him, and stepped back. Diarmid stood up, breathing hard.

Five slow heartbeats passed. The Dainnan offered Diarmid the weapon.

Sheathing it, the Ertishman grimaced.

“I should like to learn that trick.”

Thorn nodded. He said to Imrhien, “Women may learn also. Even those possessing no great strength may be trained to defeat an assailant using Dainnan techniques. The method turns an adversary’s own strength against him.”

As they traveled on together, the Ertishman’s resentment gradually dissipated. He listened with close attention to the Dainnan’s words. At odd moments, Thorn taught him some of the precepts of the Dainnan Brotherhood and showed him basic methods of weaponless fighting: holds and blocks, kicks, throws, and locks.

In reply to Diarmid’s petitions for use of the bow, Thorn said, “No man can shoot with another’s bow, any more than he can fight with another’s sword. Besides, mine is made for a left-handed archer. Howbeit, if you are so zealous, I will teach you a little, and you shall practice and mayhap there will be some gain in it for you.”

The Ertishman took every opportunity to accustom himself to the bow.

So near to each other were these three voyagers of different peoples—so near in presence, yet vast gulfs separated them. He was rare, this warrior of the wilderness—extraordinary. That, Imrhien knew well. Oh yes, he was of the finest.

A thought took shape.

<<Think you,>> Imrhien signed, <<that Thorn has wizards’ powers of gramarye?>>

She and Diarmid, upon the sixth evening in Mirrinor, were alone together. They were helping each other to set up at an island encampment, the one to whom she alluded having disappeared on one of his forays.

Diarmid looked startled.

“Powers? I see no reason to think so. He is skilled, yea, more than any man I have met in the flesh—hut not more skilled than a man may be. Yet”—he scratched his chin thoughtfully—“it might be so. Mayhap he has studied somewhat of the Nine Arts. Wizards, or part-wizards, may become Dainnan as well as any.”

<<The elder race, the …>> She had no sign for “Faêran.” <<Fair Folk, the immortals. Is it possible he is of their blood?>>

“The Fair Folk? Ha! The Lords of Gramarye passed into legend long ago. Besides, like wights, they could not stand the touch of cold iron. Sir Thorn wields a steel blade, steel-barbed arrows—his belt buckle, too, I’ll warrant, is of the same metal. Nay, I’ve no doubt he is a mortal man, but such a man—one of no ordinary ilk. A man for men to follow. Perhaps a wizard, I know not. But ’tis not couth to speak of him this way, behind his back, as it were—I will not discuss this further.”

Later that same evening, the mercenary took Thorn’s longbow, slung the baldric and quiver over his shoulder, and went hunting. While he was away, Imrhien remained beside the fire with the Dainnan, who had asked her to teach him more handspeak. He coaxed her to smile with his satirical portrayal of the upper classes—including his peers—by feigning to guess the signs for “duchess,” “wizard,” “Relayer,” “Storm Chieftain,” “Dainnan.” If she could have laughed aloud, she would have done so. He inspired her to devise lampoons of her own—she could not remember when she had felt so free of spirit as now, delighting in his company, except for the angst of knowing it would not last.

Diarmid was long away and still had not appeared by the time Errantry flew down to his master’s shoulder and interrupted the game. Early darkness had closed in. Imrhien was struck with sudden concern.

<<Our friend has not yet returned.>>

<<I search,>> the Dainnan signed. He rose to his feet. <<Remain.>>

<<I will go with you.>>

He threw her a quizzical glance, then gave a quick nod and snatched up a flaming brand from the fire to use as a torch.

By its light, Diarmid walked unlooked-for from the outer darkness.

“Good morrow, cirean mi coileach,” said Thorn. “We are glad you could join us.”

“Ah—good morning.” The Ertishman stared blankly. His face looked as pale as the night mist that now coiled up from the waters. “I was lost, for a time. I found my way back again,” he added unnecessarily, handing the longbow and quiver to Thorn.

<<Are you hale?>>

“Aye.”

He would say no more, and soon they lay down to sleep.

Magpies glorified the sunrise with their crystalline warblings. Imrhien opened her eyes in the misty morning to see Thorn standing guard by the sleeping mercenary. Diarmid lay in a twisted position, with arms outflung, as though he had met with violent death. His face was still drained of color; only the rise and fall of his chest betrayed vitality.

“In the dark hours he walked,” said Thorn. “I brought him back, with some force. He would not come of his own accord. Wait by him. If he should wake and escape, sound the yellow horn, which is here at hand, unstoppered. I go now to stock the boat with provisions.”

He made the hand-sign for “I return soon” and departed silently.

Diarmid slept as if he had breathed of the fumes of poppies that had lulled him into blissful unwariness. When he did awaken, it was so abruptly and noiselessly that he was gone before Imrhien noticed. Too late, a rustle of leaves alerted her. Holding the brass-mounted horn to her lips, she blew as hard as she could. A single, brazen note sounded, warm and warning, as penetrating as strong wine. As the note seeped away into the mist, she cast the instrument to the ground and ran in pursuit of Diarmid.

Following the direction in which he had headed, she soon found herself running along a shoreline bordered with ancient alders. Streamers of vapor curled slowly over the lake and twined through the black tree-stems. She saw the Ertishman standing a little way off, knee-deep in the shallow margins of the lake where slim rushes trembled. He was not alone. He was speaking earnestly to one who stood in the water before him, and that one was the essence of all Mirrinor’s fairness fashioned into feminine form. Slender as reeds, pale as mist, lovely and delicate as waterlilies, was she. Emerald hair dripped down the length of her body. Her clinging gown of lettuce green was convoluted and scalloped as if it were made of watercress and eel-grass and duckweed, which perhaps it was. Slyly, shyly, she reached out to the young man, took hold of his hand and began to step backward, drawing him into the lake. The frail tissues of her emerald gown spread out and floated on the water. Without taking his eyes from her, Diarmid followed meekly. Imrhien’s feet flew across the strand and splashed through the lake toward him. She closed her arms about his waist and hauled hard. It made no difference—he was too strong for her, or the watermaiden was too potent, or both. In an effort to bring him to his senses, she tugged his hair, slapped his cheek—but it seemed he was in a trance, oblivious of all she inflicted upon him.

Not so the drowner.

She bent her jade gaze on Imrhien, and her pale hand shot out, imprisoning the girl’s wrist in a grip like the jaws of a steel trap. With Diarmid, Imrhien was drawn irresistibly down. She struggled and splashed, beating at the wight with her free hand, but the water rose to their waists, to their shoulders. Long grasses sprouting from the deep mud tangled their feet, pulling them farther into the depths. Before the water closed over her head, the last sights Imrhien saw were the slanted, unblinking eyes of the drowner and her verdant tresses spreading gracefully on the surface, a cloud of fine silk threads.

Underwater, Imrhien tried vainly to kick away the gulping grasses, to wrest free of the inhuman grasp. All the while her last life’s breath, and Diarmid’s, bubbled up in front of their eyes like an ascent of tiny pearls. Thin strands tightened themselves about her neck. A terrible pounding began in her head, and a pain spilled like molten metal in her chest. Her own hand waved before her eyes, pale and thin like the drowner’s, nerveless now as vigor failed.

Then a blade glittered, cold and bright. With a mighty heave and a gut-wrenching surge of propulsion, Imrhien felt herself being thrust up into the air and the sunlight, gasping and choking. All was confusion for a time, until her head cleared and she found herself outstretched on the shore. Beside her lay Diarmid, his body racked by spasms of coughing and retching. Kneeling on one knee close by, the Dainnan wiped his dagger clean. Water streamed from his clothes and dripped from his occult hair.

“When you have both rid yourselves of your lungs,” he said, “perhaps we may resume our voyage.”

Diarmid’s wits returned in full immediately after this ordeal. He and Imrhien were left with no other legacy of the encounter but aching purple bruises around their wrists—the imprint of the Fideal’s fingers—and thin weals about their throats. For it had been the Fideal herself, none other, who had tried to lure the man toward his doom. Of all ancient eldritch things that dwelled in water, and were the bane of men, she was among the most feared.

“I was too easily gulled,” Diarmid berated himself.

“She is powerful, the Fideal,” said Thorn.

“Yet I should have known. When I first sighted her she was sitting on the surface of the lake, combing her hair. I thought her one of the Gwragedd Annwn, then doubted and came away. But I could not forget.…”

“Forget now.”

The Ertishman looked at the Dainnan with a mixture of respect, dread, and wonder. “To slay such a wight is beyond the power of mortal men, Longbow.”

“The Fideal lives.”

“You did not slay her?” Diarmid was taken aback.

“Only did I sever the waterweeds that held you both submerged. With the dagger I slashed them. The Fideal is of the weeds, the weeds are of the Fideal. But she lives on, to bide in Mirrinor or perhaps to travel along the secret subterranean waterways that flow beneath Eldaraigne until she finds some other pool or tarn to haunt. During untold lives of Kings she has bided in her sequestered retreats of ooze. Mayhap she will leave them soon and, like the rest, be drawn by the Call from the North. Who knows?”

For five days more, the Waterleaper clove the meres of Mirrinor. Many strange sights and sounds came to the voyagers, but they avoided further peril until they reached the farthest shore. Leaving the trusty vessel beached among crab-apples and firethorns, they stepped ashore on marshy ground.

Brilliant yellow flowers peeped from acid-green turf. Ahead of them, to the west, lay a tumble of low hills that curved around in the south but dwindled in the north. The sky was softly veiled from the brink of the horizon right back across Mirrinor. A soft breeze sprang up and ran naked among the grasses.

“Mirrinor’s edge,” said Thorn. “From here the land begins to rise. A day’s walk shall take us well into Doundelding. Once through that region, we shall be almost at the gates of Caermelor.”

The sound of the city’s name rang like a death knell in Imrhien’s skull. Thorn would be claimed by the city, and rightfully so. He was a King-Emperor’s man, one of Roxburgh’s warriors. For Imrhien, then, Caermelor would mean the termination of color, passion, and light, and no matter what else it offered, their journey’s end must bring days as desolate as wastelands, doomed to be scoured eternally by hungering winds.

9

DOUNDELDING

Secrets Under Stone

Precious stones, buried bones, roots and rivers, caverns cold.

Clay and sand beneath the land, silver, tin, and shining gold.

Dig and sweat—don’t forget—danger lies in sunless halls.

Miner brave dig your grave, far below the mountain’s walls.

“WIGHT WARNING”

A long and winding path of stepping-stones led the travelers across the boggy ground to the foot of a hill, where it petered out among groves of stunted walnuts, ten or twelve feet tall. Through the leaves a dark fleck could be seen high above, circling. The goshawk Errantry was never far away. The ground underfoot became rough and stony.

After a time they reached the top of the hill. Round pouches of green velvet hung from the boughs of the walnuts; some had split into segments at the lower part, releasing the stone-like fruit within. Peering out through the gnarled trunks, the travelers could see across the folds and valleys of a gray and rocky region, rather barren. It was scattered with piled boulders like crouching monsters and misshapen mounds and indistinct forms resembling pointing fingers, which might have been towers. Yet it was not an unlovely land.

Its slopes rolled away toward a jumble of low hills, mauve-hazed, among which one mountain stood out higher than the rest. Steep was its peak, gaunt and sharply pointed like the tooth of a predator.

“There rises Thunder Mountain,” said Thorn, “and its utmost pinnacle, Burnt Crag. A perilous place, especially when storms gather about the heads of the hills.”

On the hilltop they stooped to gather walnuts from the ground, which they cracked with stones, stowing some in the pouches for later. Diarmid raided some of the sticky outer casings for any contents that had not yet been spilled.

“Whence came this?” He stared in surprise at the dark brown juices staining his fingers.

“The green purses of the walnut render a dye that is well-nigh indelible,” Thorn explained.

Halfway down the slope a spring ran out of the hillside. They drank from it, Thorn refilled the water-bottle, and the Ertishman pointlessly washed his hands.

“I have heard tell that mining men dwell in the far west of this land,” he said, shaking dry his stained fingers, “and only in the far west, for in all other regions, Doundelding is empty of human life. But it is said that the whole length of this land is riddled with hollow galleries and caves from one end to the other.”

“Then it is said truly.”

“It is also told that these underground tunnels and chambers are the province of many strange creatures. Should we not strike north for the Road?”

“We walk aboveground, not below it, at least, for now. At this time, the Road is most perilous of all. With the passing of unseelie forces toward the north or northeast, many more than usual are crossing it. Since the Road is a traffic-way for Man, their ancient enemy, it has become a focus for their malevolence. My knowledge is that few caravans are getting through unscathed. Here, we are south of the Road. Already many things that would wreak mischief and harm will have departed from this place.”

“What summons them, sir?”

“I cannot say.”

“Might we not entrap one and make it tell us—one of the petty wights?”

“That I have done—aye, and the not so petty also. Yet they themselves do not know what calls, only that they are beckoned northeast, out of their caves and pools and ruined keeps, and they must go, in troops or alone, causing harm to any Men they encounter along the way. If the migration continues, in a few months the southern lands will he empty of all but the most witless or stubborn or puny of unseelie wights.”

“Then Men shall walk free of fear at last!”

“Until the malevolent tide now mustering in Namarre finally bursts its banks and spews forth, united, led by a commander.”

“But surely no wights have ever submitted themselves to a leader?” questioned Diarmid. “To my knowledge, they have never, as a race, formed an alliance. The trooping wights obey the orders of their own Chieftains, the Hounds hearken to their Huntsmen—but eldritch allegiance extends no farther than that.”

“Yet once it did,” replied Thorn, “but that erstwhile Lord of Unseelie is now no more than a shade and can never rise again. It seems that another has arisen who has mastered the wicked ones, whether they will or no. Whether wight or wizard I cannot say, but he must be a mighty one indeed.”

By evening the travelers had reached a grassy dell. A silver fox ran across, paused and looked at them for an instant, then raced on into the darkness. Birches pressed in, patterning a black lacework against pale sky. Here they made camp. Lacquered beetles medallioned the ropy roots and trunks, reflecting in amber the glow of the campfire. Some way off, a crow croaked harshly.

Moonrise came early. Beside Burnt Crag the night orb came up like a copper cauldron and seemed to hang suspended over the hills, at the lip of the horizon. It was then that the music started up—thin music like the piping of reeds but backed by a rollicking beat made by rattling snares, and the deep thumping thud of a bass drum—music to dance to under the face of the moon.

And, in a clearing not far from the campsite, were those who danced to it—a circle of small gray figures moving awkwardly, without grace.

Thorn laughed softly.

“Come—let us see the henkies and the trows,” he said. “They might bring us joy this night.”

Diarmid demurred, but Imrhien stepped out bravely beside the Dainnan, and they walked together to join the dance.

The quaint, dwarfish folk were silhouetted against the towering shield of the rising moon, black intaglio on burnished copper. Some capered in a bounding, grotesque manner, others danced exquisitely, with an intricate though uneven step. From tales told in the Tower, Imrhien knew a little about trows and henkies. They were relatively harmless seelie wights, and their dances did not lure mortals to their deaths in the way of the bloodsucking baobhansith and others. Whether they would take offense at being spied upon was another matter.

The Dainnan did not try to conceal their approach but moved openly across the turf. Tall against the moon’s flare, graceful and lithe as a wild creature, he seemed at that moment to belong more to the eldritch night than to mortalkind.

The dancers, engrossed in their fun, did not seem to notice the arrival of visitors—the pipers continued to pipe and the drummers to drum. Not as stocky as dwarves, these wights ranged in height from three to three and a half feet. Their heads were large, as were their hands and feet. Their long noses drooped at the tips, their hair hung lank, stringy, and pallid. Rather stooped was their posture, and they limped to varying degrees. Imrhien was reminded of club-footed Pod at the Tower—Pod the Henker, he had named himself. All the wights were clad in gray, rustic garb, the trow-wives with fringed shawls tied around their heads. In contrast with their simple clothing, silver glinted like starlight at their wrists and necks.

The Dainnan turned to Imrhien and swept a bow worthy of a royal courtier.

“Lady, shall you dance with me?”

She wanted to run and hide, but she stood, unable to move, ashamed. It came to her with full force how ugly she was, how unworthy. Besides, she could not dance, did not know how. But could she deny him? In an effort to purchase time, her hands formed a sign.

<<Now?>>

“It is more difficult if you wait for the music to stop. We shall not dance as they dance—the gavotte is more suited to this rhythm; do you know it? In the gavotte, couples must move together without making contact. Follow my lead.”

His voice, his glance, were compelling. With hammering heart she followed him into the circle of movement. Were it some spell of the trows or some memory rekindled, suddenly dancing seemed easy. Her feet skipped almost of their own accord. She lifted her ragged skirts above her ankles and found herself stepping to the music as lightly as if her toes were not touching the ground. The knot of anxiety that had bound her now sprang apart and was thrust aside by an upwelling of joy. This sequence through which Thorn led her was a courtly dance of dignified gestures, although not slow and ponderous. It was a dance of curtsying and exchanging places with one’s partner and pirouetting in a stately manner. Soon the little gray folk were imitating the two tall figures in their midst, producing their own limping version of the gavotte. Imrhien would have been inclined to smile at their antics, had her heart not been filled with terror and joy in the knowledge that she danced with Thorn.

The melody and rhythm altered, and the tempo increased. Another dance had begun as soon as the first had ended, without even a pause for the traditional courtesies. Imrhien stood aside with Thorn to see what sort of choreography the trows were practicing this time. A musician struck up energetically on a fiddle, as though he meant to saw it in half. The music moved on apace. One small trow-wife stood apart from the others, gazing at the revelry. She could be heard singing a pathetic little song to herself:

Hey! co Cuttie an’ ho! co Cuttie,

An’ wha’ill dance wi’ me? co Cuttie.

She luked aboot an’ saw naebody,

Sae I’ll henk awa’ mesel, co Cuttie.

The trow-wife began to dance alone, if “dance” were the correct term for it. Her limp was so pronounced that she seemed only to be staggering about, teetering on the edge of balance. I know how she must feel, Imrhien thought sympathetically, scorned and outcast.

Forcing her heart to slow its pelting, she signed:

<<It is a shame that the little trow-wife must dance alone.>>

Thorn laughed. “Who could dance with such a clod-foot?”

<<Yet it is not her fault!>> The girl was indignant now, astounded at his inclemency.

“What must be, is. Her plight is her own.”

<<Have you no pity?>>

“Why submit to fetters when one might be free and joyous instead?”

<<I shall dance with her!>>

Thorn bowed with a flourish, but when he looked up she saw bemusement in his eyes. As she hastened forward, Imrhien wondered whether it was life at the court or life in the wilderness that hardened men so.

She approached the trow-wife and held out a hand. The wight turned her funny little face up to Imrhien’s, then reached up a big, bony paw to rest lightly on her arm. They began to sway in time to the music and then to step, the trow-wife clumsy and the girl agile, then Imrhien pulled her into the whirling circle. New life entered into the other dancers. They bounded higher and higher, giving little yips and yelps of excitement.

This was a wild, stamping dance of rural origin—there was nothing courtly about it. The girl could not copy the henkies’ grotesque squatting goose-step or the trows’ intricate hobbling, but it mattered not—each capered in his own manner. Partners were tossed from one to another, progressively around the ring. Faces blended into a blur, and the excited cries reached a new pitch. How long the dance went on, Imrhien could not say, but at the end she felt refreshed instead of tired, and warm with a tingling of the blood.

Thorn’s white wolf-smile flashed out of the darkness. Little folk milled around their tall visitors, bowing deeply, speaking in a strange tongue. They did not appear at all irked by the presence of strangers in their midst—quite the contrary, it was evident they were delighted.

<<One more dance,>> Imrhien signed, glowing.

“One more. With one partner.”

At his words, Imrhien was moved with a joy beyond understanding.

In their enthusiasm, the musicians had recruited a second fiddler to play harmonies. They danced, then, the Dainnan and the girl—so close, so very close, but never, ever touching. Neither did a lock of his hair flick her shoulder or the hem of her dress brush against his boot; that was how precisely they danced. Later, looking back on this night, Imrhien could not clearly recall the slow beauty of the inhuman harmonies or her wonder at the clear eyes that smiled down on her, only the way the wind lifted his long dark hair like spreading wings.

As they were leaving the revelry, a lone trow-boy wandered up to them, weeping sadly. He spoke in the common speech, but with a thick brogue, as though his tongue had difficulty getting around the words.

“Hae ye ony sulver, ma’am? Hae ye ony, sir, Your Lordship?”

“Go—get along to the dance,” said Thorn, not ungently.

“An it please ye, they will na’ tak’ me back, sir! They will na’ let me in. I be banished frae Trowland and condemned to wander forever among the lonesome places.”

“Why were you banished?”

“Och, an’ I stealed summat, sir, but I meant no harm, and it were sae bonny, all o’ sulver. But it were the King’s spoon, sir, the King o’ the Trows. I gived it back, I did, but they’ll nae let me in again, save for once a year on Littlesun Eve when I be allooed to veesit Trowland for a peerie start—but a’ I gets is eggshells tae crack atween me teeth followed by a lunder upon me lugs and a wallop ower me back. So I wanders wanless, poor object!”

“But so it must be, for that’s your law.”

The trow-boy went away, weeping afresh.

<<Poor little fellow. The trows have indeed a stern code of honor—>>

“When it comes to themselves!” Thorn interjected. “Trows are no paragons of honesty—they will steal from other races. Yet their ethics dictate that they must never thieve anything from one of their own kind. It is a precept more far-reaching than any statute of mortal men. Laws can be made and unmade. They can be disputed by those who are bound by them. Like all wights, trows may break their code, but they are unable to disbelieve or challenge it. Their code is in their making, as natural and immutable as the laws that govern the tides and the phases of the moon, the rise and fall of the sun, and the budding of blossoms in Spring and the blossoming of frost in Winter. And trows are partial to silver,” he added. “If Diarmid has not been watchful, he may find that the hunting-horn is betrayed.”

They returned to the grassy dell to find that the silver-clasped horn had escaped being stolen. Diarmid related how Errantry had hurtled screaming from the trees to attack the sly gray hand that had reached down to snatch it. Frightened off, the thief had fled.

The goshawk kept vigil all through the hours of darkness, sparing the travelers the duty of taking turns at the watch, but Imrhien harbored more than a suspicion that Thorn scarcely slept and that if he did, it was only lightly. If ever she woke at night, she would see him sitting with his back to a tree, gazing up at stars thick as frost overhead, or perhaps standing outlined against their incandescent glory and looking out across the distant hills while a soft breeze lifted streamers of his hair and spread them out in a great, dark fan. Or he would not be there at all, but she would know somehow that he was not far away and that his watchful eyes would spy any danger, and that she and Diarmid were safe with him, for now. Beyond that, there was also a knowledge that under certain conditions they might not be safe with him, and that if aroused, his ire would be terrible, his retribution swift and sure. Like fire, he was a powerful ally but would be a dangerous enemy.

Often she wondered about Thorn. She had glimpsed the mote of callousness in him, born of a kind of amorality. Deeply he cared for beauty and for honor. He was kind, and he loved laughter—but he could find no sympathy for cripples or outcasts. Save for one. Then perhaps he did not consider her to be a cripple or an outcast. If not for pity, then why had he danced with her? She was not foolish enough to believe that one so proud and comely, so enamored of beauty as he, could enjoy looking upon her face—or that one accustomed to the witty repartee of courtiers and cityfolk parrying with their fine-honed words like rapiers could enjoy the company of a mute. What, then? Only that maybe it was a game to him, to play with hearts like hers and drag them on a string.

The sun rose incarnadine. Its early rays tinted a creeping Autumn mist that softened the landscape, hiding in secret rifts, smoking from secluded valleys like rows of cottage chimneys.

For breakfast there was nothing except a handful of walnuts and clear water from a rocky rill. The travelers set out soon after waking. The sky was a sheet of bleached satin. In its luminous heights a hawk circled. Suddenly the bird folded his wings and fell out of the sky with a speed that made the air whistle through his pinions. The thump of collision was borne to the travelers from three hundred yards away. A sparse drift of feathers hung where once a pigeon had flown. The wind teased them out like the tail of a kite, scattering them across the sky. Errantry lifted on the crescents of his wings, carrying off his kill.

“Hawks dine well, but we have left the lands of plenty behind us,” sighed Diarmid as they reached the crest of a long, windswept shoulder. “These lands are barren. Here I shall seek wood-pigeons, grouse, and rabbits.”

“Look down there,” said Thorn, indicating with a sweep of his hand. “Bunya pines and lillypilly trees grow in the valley. Upon Alderstone Edge, apple-berry vines climb over the ruins.”

A ridge on the other side of the valley ran for miles, from north to south. At intervals along its top stood crumbling pele towers. Nowhere near tall enough to be Relay Stations or Interchange Turrets, they were square and stubby structures of ancient stone, in various stages of disrepair.

“I’ll warrant those are the old Watchtowers of the borders,” said the mercenary, “built long ago, when Doundelding was divided east from west. The borders are long since blurred and forgotten, but the Watchtowers remain. Their foundations are said to delve down a long way, and to be rooted in eldritch places.”

“Our path lies over that ridge,” said Thorn.

The going was difficult, for the ground was uneven and the grasses grew thick and tussocky. They reached the first stand of bunya pines about midmorning. The Dainnan threw down his gear, took off his boots, and began to drag strong vines off neighboring bushes. Above their heads, the bustling bunyas reared some three hundred feet into the sky, seeming to topple against a backdrop of scudding cloudlets. Their topmost boughs, like skinny outstretched arms ending in leafy hands, stirred the wind.

The Dainnan placed his dagger between his teeth and slung a vine around the nearest trunk. After knotting the rest of the creeper around his waist, he ascended without apparent effort. He would lean back against the vine, take two steps up the side of the tree, then lean in to take the pressure off the vine and simultaneously shift it farther up. By repeating these actions, he reached the heights where the huge cones grew and threw them down as he cut them. When they hit the ground, thumb-size nuts exploded out across the grass.

Once he had belayed the vine to a stout bough, Thorn passed it under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder so that it could be paid smoothly and gradually as he rappeled down.

“Bunyas are always prolific,” he said, springing down to land on the grass, “but every three years they are more so. Fortunately, this happens to be one of those years.”

They feasted until they could feast no more, then packed the pouches full of nuts and went on their way. Soon they encountered a sunken path winding between grassy banks. It led them to a line of stepping-stones across a stream and then up a slope scattered with lillypillies. Great, luscious bunches of fat pink berries dripped among their dark glossy leaves—these came easily to hand when the harvesters reached for them.

The little path wound uphill, toward the summit of Alderstone Edge. It was after noon by the time they reached the highest point. On the other side, the land dropped sharply away to a sparsely wooded valley pitted with craters. Huge boulders lay on their sides and in piles, some cracked open as if they had been flung carelessly by some giant hand.

“Emmyn Vale,” said Thorn. “Once its slopes were fair, covered with pine and sloe and heather. Now they are bleak, the seasonal haunt of felhens and other wights.”

The barren slopes of Thunder Mountain loomed closer now. To left and right, the line of ruined Watchtowers marched at wide intervals along the spine of land. The wind was strong up here, and cold, galloping out of the southwest. Heavy clouds obscured the sun, darkening the landscape. They seemed to bode ill. Far off, a bird of prey, possibly Errantry, folded its wings and plummeted like a stone. A cawing of crows or rooks came creaking on the breeze.

“This is too steep,” declared Diarmid, looking down. “We must find another place to descend.”

The smoking clouds thickened. It was as though a shang storm were on its way, but without the sensation of fizzing in the blood. Yet no glimmering airs of gramarye came rushing to scatter powdered lights over the landscape—instead there came a lull in the susurration of the wind.

Thorn stopped and stood quite still, as if listening.

“What is it?” Diarmid presently asked.

“Dunters.”

“Dunters?”

“A noise of them issues from the old towers.”

Roofless, jagged, the nearest pele tower stood open to the sky, its window-holes watching.

“Walk staunchly past the tower walls,” said Thorn. “Do not stop or show fear.”

Imrhien began to hear a constant noise, which swelled as they approached the ruin—a noise like the beating of flax or the grinding of barley in a hollow stone quern. Closer to the tower, it grew so loud that it was almost unbearable. It vibrated in Imrhien’s ears and fibrillated in the cavities of her skull, it trembled in the very ground and the bones of her feet. As they drew level with the ruins, the grinding stopped abruptly.

A thick dough of silence fell, heavy and deafening.

<<Keep walking.>> This she signaled to Diarmid, who had hesitated, his hand on his skian. They moved on.

The pele tower stood still and quiet. There was no sign of movement from its blank windows and overgrown walls, except for the nodding tendrils of apple-berry vines. Whatever lurked inside made no sound, but Imrhien sensed a watching and a waiting so intense that it suffused the surrounding airs with a tension as brittle as dry leaves. As soon as the travelers had moved a few paces past the building, the noise broke out anew, as loud and constant as before. The tension abated. The girl breathed a shaky sigh of relief.

With distance, the dunters’ grinding gradually died away.

“What do they look like, the dunters?” asked the Ertishman.

The Dainnan raised one eyebrow. “No mortal has ever seen them.”

The ground beneath their feet began to drop away rapidly toward the valley floor.

“Can you climb down here, lady?” Thorn asked Imrhien. She shook her head doubtfully. The slope was precipitous. Hampered by ragged skirts, she was uncertain whether she could negotiate it.

“Then we shall go farther on this downward path. We shall bear north along the land’s spine and make for that squat tower yonder. If I read its shape aright, that is the Twenty-ninth Keep. Once past it, the fall to the lowlands on the west side is gentle—you shall have no trouble there. But if we must pass through the Twenty-ninth Keep, beware. For years a redcap was wont to skulk therein, and he maybe lurks there still. If so, then doubtless his cap is by now quite faded. In this unoccupied region it must be a good while since he colored it with redcaps’ favorite dye, and he will welcome the sight of mortals.”

They turned then to the north and followed the ridge top until they came to the next pele tower. The wind had risen again, and wisps of dark cloud began to move in from the southwest. Under a marbled sky, the Twenty-ninth Keep loomed, a square, buttressed fortress of verdigrised stone. At its top some crenellations still remained—perhaps even some part of its roof. Certainly the south wall, facing the travelers, had well withstood the ravages of time and tempest. Starved arrow-slits squeezed themselves between massive stones, some of which, higher up, jutted out to form slight ledges on which entrepreneurial plants had taken root. The stonework was fretted all over with vines.

The Twenty-ninth Keep straddled the narrowest part of the ridge. On either side of it the ground fell away in a sheer drop—the only way past was through.

The travelers halted at the doorless archway, which was curtained by vines that had lost most of their foliage. Only shriveled, dry leaves remained clinging and small oval fruits—apple-berries. The wind rattled the vine-stems and soughed eerily high in the chinks of broken stone. There was no other sound.

The Ertishman squinted up at a weather-blurred inscription over the entrance.

“By My Name Shall Ye Know Me,” he read slowly. “Could this be some riddle?”

“No riddle,” Thorn said. “Those who built the towers were wont to scrape epigrams above the doors. Such sayings are scribbled upon every border keep.”

Diarmid eyed the broken threshold—a garden of weeds, strewn with rubble.

“I shall go first,” he said, a little too loudly and quickly.

Drawing his skian, he stooped under the curtain of basketwork and entered. Imrhien came after, with Thorn following at her back. She saw him glance briefly over his shoulder.

The interior was gloomy and bitterly cold. Shafts of gray light emanated from places where mortar and stone had fallen away to reveal the outside world, a vista of racing sky. The vines had run rampant overhead, growing and dying over many seasons, falling in under their own weight so that they formed a dense network of desiccated, blackened sticks and yellowing tendrils. Untidy birds’ nests, abandoned, decorated the walls.

The pitted floor displayed decorations of another sort—it was scattered profusely with human skulls and dismembered skeletons. These lay, pallid and stained, on top of the dark red-brown splashes that covered the floor and streaked the walls. Stepping carefully among the bones so as not to rattle them, the intruders came warily to another archway that gave on to an inner room decorated similarly to the first.

On the far side of this yawned a further opening, dark enough to be black even against the twilight of the inner chamber. A stench oozed from it, and a sense of a presence, a consciousness brooding, knowing.

Diarmid stepped through.

Imrhien had scarcely set foot beside him when a hoarse yell cracked the silence like an egg, and a yolk-yellow brilliance flooded their eye sockets. When their vision adjusted they made out a short, thickset old goblin with long, prominent teeth. His skinny fingers, armed with talons like eagles, were wrapped around a spitting firebrand in one hand and a pikestaff in the other. Grisly hair streamed down his shoulders. He glared at the intruders with large eyes of a fiery red color. His feet were clapped into metal boots, his domed head jammed into a dull red cap. They saw, at his back, a sooty fireplace, a chopping block, and an axe. On a stone table, a bantam rooster crouched dismally in a wicker cage.

“An Ertishman!” cried the wight. “And me cap in need o’ new color! All the redder for’t, carrot-beard.”

Veins bulged on Diarmid’s neck and temples. He thrust his chin forward, aggressively. With a few well- or ill-chosen words, the goblin had aroused the mercenary’s ire. This seemed to bring out a formidable and hitherto unrecognized talent in the taciturn young man.

“Why cam’ ye by my door?” The redcap brandished his pikestaff menacingly.

“It lay in my road,” Diarmid replied evenly, weighing the skian in his hand and the words in his head. The wight spat contemptuously at the knife.

“Yer cold iron afears me not. I sha’ fling stones upon ye.”

“I’d rather you flung loaves,” countered the man.

“I wish’t ye were hangin’ up on yonder battlement!”

“And a good ladder under me,” Diarmid parried instantly.

“And the ladder for to break!”

“And for you to fall down.”

The advantage was, for now, with Diarmid—he had pronounced the Last Word. The wight gnashed his teeth, fuming and stamping, at a loss for utterance. Inspiration dawned on his filthy brow like a marsh-light rising from the fens.

“I wish’t ye were in the sea!”

“And a good boat under me.” The Ertishman remained undaunted.

“And the boat for to break!”

“And for you to be drowned.”

“But I wish’t ye were in the lake!”

“And I swimming,” said Diarmid, his zeal blazing now.

“And the water frozen.”

“And the smith a-hammering at it.”

“And the smith to be dead!”

“And another smith instead!”

This was a master-stroke—the Ertishman’s line had rhymed with the wight’s, beating it hands down. The redcap’s face transmuted from scarlet to puce. His chest swelled as if it were about to burst. It was obvious that despite the apparent imminence of defeat, he was still scratching for words. Like overripe plums, his eyes popped and rolled in his head, finally alighting on his axe. Brutality was ever a ready defense for the slow-witted.

“I will hack you with my axe!”

“You’ll only chop stone,” said Diarmid with a sudden sidestep to show how swiftly he could react.

“I will fight ye anon.”

“Aye, and not long till I defeat you.”

The goblin stood stuttering, openmouthed, dribbling and dumbfounded. Vanquished.

The Ertishman could not resist this opportunity to add one final triumphant insult.

“Giff, gaff, your mouth’s full of chaff.”

It was too much. His malignant adversary gave a bellow of rage ending in a hysterical shriek, and the torch went out. In that last gleam, Imrhien had seen Thorn striding forward. She thought he spoke a word, but she could not be sure. As soon as the light vanished, Imrhien made for the wicker cage. She could see nothing, but her seeking hand fell upon it. She tucked it under her arm and ran for the far wall, where an exit surely must exist. Heart-stoppingly, she came up against cold, slippery stones and felt along them blindly, colliding with someone.

“’S death,” swore Diarmid, “is that you, wench?” His hand closed around her arm, propelling her sideways.

Whether it was having the Last Word that saved them, they did not stop to discuss. Moments later they pushed past a heavy drapery of foliage to emerge on the north side of the Twenty-ninth Keep. The sun was beginning to descend. Forty yards farther on, the three travelers followed its example—for here, as Thorn had indicated, the gradient was amiable. As they slithered down the slope, the bantam rooster jounced and jolted in its cage under Imrhien’s arm. When they reached the valley floor, the travelers did not pause but put as much distance as possible between themselves and Alderstone Edge before nightfall.

The wind had buffeted them all the way down the ridge side, and it did not cease its gusting. They found shelter on the lee side of a stack of boulders and soon had a fire going whose vigor matched that of the turbulent airs. There they reclined in relief and great merriment.

Diarmid recounted his battle of words and the way he had triumphed He waxed eloquent in front of the responsive half of his audience of four. The cockerel, a black one with copper and green tail-feathers, sat glumly in the cage. Imrhien was loath to release it until they were farther from the Edge. Errantry sat with hunched shoulders, eyeing the rooster with utmost contempt. With a slight spasm, he regurgitated a pellet of unrecognizable parts of rodents.

“You should have seen his face, Longbow!” Diarmid enthused. “And you might have heard the clashing of those teeth from miles away! I can only surmise that his previous victims panicked at the sight of him and could not collect their thoughts, for ’tis not hard to outspeak one with the wit of a flea. Besides, I am practiced at that sparring—when I was a lad, I used to trade words with my—with my uncle.” He sobered at his own words, remembering.

<<Once I heard Sianadh word-fighting against some wicked men. He won.>> Imrhien, too, remembered.

“He always won. Ertishmen are famous for their skill with words; Finvarna is the birthplace of most of the greatest bards. But the Bear could outspar even his own countrymen.”

“This man you speak of is lost to you?” asked Thorn, regarding their faces gravely.

Diarmid nodded, his heart too full now for words.

After a few moments, Thorn said, “As we entered the keep I looked back and saw in the sky nine Stormriders, far south, heading west. It is unusual for so many to ride together. There are momentous stirrings in the world—the sooner we reach the city, the better.”

Not the better, the worse—for I shall lose you then, thought Imrhien, and she recalled also the vengeful wizard’s henchmen and the eastsiders who might hunt her for her knowledge of Waterstair. Might these pursuers have found their way to Caermelor by land, sea, or air? Or might they have sent messages to spies already in the Royal City?

For supper there were bunya nuts, lillypilly berries, brown-capped mushrooms that had pushed up between the roots of trees, and apple-berries that the travelers had plundered in passing, up on Alderstone Edge. On greenwood spits, the mercenary roasted two pigeons he had brought down with the longbow—for the loss of three arrows, to his chagrin.

“We ought to dine on the cockerel,” he mused, eating a pigeon’s heart. “What did you save it for if not for that?”

Imrhien pushed a few grass-heads and luckless worms through the cage’s slats.

<<For its own good.>>

She would not let him have the bird.

Beyond the shelter of the rocks a tide of leaves swept past in a sudden gust. Above the towering summit of the Edge thunderclouds were building—turbulent currents boiling within their dark hearts. Tenebrous and menacing their roots, brilliant white their heads, where the strong winds blew away the ice crystals to flatten the tops and make anvils of them. To the west, Thunder Mountain’s lofty peak seemed to have accumulated its own mass of grim, iron-gray vapors.

A long drawn howling came down the wind, treacherously switching directions—not a howling of hounds, but a deep ululation that might have been generated in the throat of some unimaginably immense, wild creature. Like the boubrie’s bellow it was clearly not human. It carried its own complaining unharmonies, to raise the flesh on one’s scalp like fingernails scraping on slate.

“The Hooper?” Diarmid asked overcasually as the howling faded.

“A brother of it. In this part of the country it is the Howlaa that helpfully warns of storms. Also belatedly, in this case.”

In the gloom to the west, a jagged thread of white light like molten wire appeared for an instant, linking the roiling clouds with the tip of Burnt Crag. Thunder rolled and crashed in the distance. A blast of wind hooked around the boulders and snatched at the fire, sending fountains of sparks into the night. Plump raindrops fell, one or two, and expired in a hiss of steam.

“We must seek shelter,” said the Dainnan, kicking dust onto the fire. With a practiced movement he detached the bowstring and slipped the coil beneath his shirt.

Sky-hammers boomed on nearer cloud-anvils, and the ground trembled. A bloom of sheet lightning illuminated the land with stark blue-white. In that instant, it revealed an unexpected and ghastly sight. Not a hundred paces away from their encampment, a mighty boulder hung in the black sky, as though frozen in the very moment of its flight. Lightning’s illusion was shattered when, with a deafening blast, the chunk of mountain crashed down almost upon the travelers. Dirt and pebbles sprayed everywhere. The ground quaked.

“This way!” Thorn shouted. Imrhien’s ears rang with such clamor that she could scarcely make out his words, but in another flash-frozen moment she saw him with all his gear, and the goshawk on his shoulder, moving away. She grabbed the rooster’s cage and went after. The Ertishman was not far behind.

A swath of crackling blue light showed that the first gigantic missile had burst apart, and a second was being hurled up into the air from a distance. Dangerously close, a third crag crashed, along with a hail of smaller ones the size of human heads. Rain began to fall in sparse, heavy drops. The travelers made haste, dodging among outcrops and weedy hillocks and piled slabs until they struck a track, deeply cloven into the ground, that led downhill. On either side, the banks rose up, high over their heads. The walls of rock blocked out the storm’s flares, but not the tremendous blasts of thunder and thrown rocks, and not the deluge. Still the track burrowed down, narrowing, until the walls arched over, forming a tunnel that dived under the hill.

It was pitch black.

“Wait! I can see nothing,” said Diarmid, to Imrhien’s intense relief—in the dark, she was truly mute.

“Halt here,” Thorn’s voice, reassuring, from shadow in shadow. “Soon, you will see.”

Vision slowly cleared. They stood in a roughhewn tunnel inclining down toward the innards of Erith. That they could see at all was a mystery, until Imrhien noticed the luminous ears of fungus growing on the walls, the same kind she had seen growing at Waterstair.

“We must penetrate deeper,” said the Dainnan, “in case the inaccuracy of the Foawr collapses the entrance over our heads.”

They walked several yards farther down the adit and then stopped to rest. Through the rock walls, the bass vibrations of the battle outside could be felt. The ground thrummed.

“The Foawr.” Diarmid slumped wearily against a wall. “Who can outspeak those giants? For they have heads of granite and tongues of basalt, the wit of a flea upon a flea and, I surmise, the knowledge of no more than three words—and those most likely in some thick and cloddish language. Not that a man could get close enough to speak to them.”

“Not that they are much aware that Men exist,” added Thorn. “This vale is one of their battlegrounds. Storms rouse them to fight, but they do so for no reason other than that they have always done so.”

“Then, Longbow, when the storm passes, will they make peace?”

“Maybe.” Another crash brought pebbles showering from the ceiling. “Maybe not. They are blind to reason and may rouse at whim.”

The cold of underground, where sunlight never reached radiant fingers to warm stone and rock and bring dawn to endless night, seeped out of the clammy walls and into Imrhien’s blood. The rooster looked half-dead in its prison. Somehow, the spontaneous act of rescuing it had engendered in her a burdening responsibility for its life; she ardently desired that it might live. It kicked feebly when she took it from the cage and held it wrapped against her body. The icy, oddly reptilian feet scratched her, but after a few moments its struggles subsided and it lay quiescent. Thorn’s cloak seemed to have qualities of gramarye, for she fancied its fabric radiated warmth. Its owner drew the garment around her shoulders, flicking a fold over the bird.

“Chanticleer has the best bed of all, this night,” Thorn said with a swift smile that twanged Imrhien’s senses like bowstrings.

The bird stank of stale fowl-manure. Her arms, enfolding it, were grimy and scratched, wrapped in ragged sleeves. Her dress was nothing but dirty tatters, and her face and hair must present a spectacle similar to Diarmid’s—smudged, bedraggled, unkempt. The last time she had washed had been days ago in Mirrinor, splashing cold water over herself, for it was not safe to plunge into those eldritch pools to bathe. How Thorn remained unbesmirched—by some Dainnan trick or perhaps some wizard’s art—was a conundrum.

“Take a drop of this.” The Dainnan unstoppered a red crystal phial and offered it to Imrhien. “It will keep the cold from you.”

She tasted the contents and passed the phial to Diarmid. The Ertishman swigged and nodded.

“That’s a draft to warm the cockles of the heart, no doubt of it. What is it? For it is neither ale nor mead nor sack nor malmsey nor any cider or spirit that I have tasted.”

“It is nathrach deirge, called also Dragon’s Blood—an elixir of herbs.”

“What tongue is it that sometimes you speak, sir? I have never heard it.”

“It is an ancient one.”

“Ah, yes of course. A Dainnan must be learned in many tongues.”

Time stretched out through the darkness. Wrapped in Thorn’s cloak, with the elixir coursing warmly through her veins, Imrhien began to drowse. Just as she was about to drift away she thought she heard a knocking or tapping some way off. Too tired to care, she was soon asleep.

Her slumber was profound—a deep black pit that sucked the light out of its surroundings, so that no dreams could float above the chasm; a fathomless mine-shaft sunk into the hard layers separating the sunny, living, wind-tossed world from the carious world of grave stillness, eternal silence, and unrelenting cold.

Imrhien’s eyes flew open.

The long call that had jolted her to wakefulness dwindled away, then broke out again. Harmonics bounced off the limestone walls and ran up and down the adit, crossing and recrossing each other in a cacophony of ear-splitting reverberations.

The rooster was crowing.

Imrhien clapped her hands over her ears.

“Cursed fowls!” groaned Diarmid. “Is a man not permitted some rest?”

The girl tried to hush the cockerel. It fluttered from her grasp and leaped onto her head, where its feet became entangled in her hair. It crowed a third time, then quietened, making little noises in its throat. In pain, the girl batted at the bird, which jumped awkwardly to the floor. Blood ran down her forehead and into her eye, from where its spur had pierced her scalp. A couple of feathers descended lazily in the light of the fungi.

“What ails the fowl? ’Tis the middle of the night!” Diarmid complained.

A tang of wood-smoke and a savory scent drifted down the tunnel. Imrhien looked around for Thorn, but he was nowhere to be seen. She struggled to her feet and made a grab for the rooster, which eluded her. Leaving it to its own devices, she walked with the Ertishman back along the tunnel’s rising floor, through the entrance, and up out of the culvert into the open air. The cockerel followed several paces behind.

The sun had not yet lifted above the horizon. A gray predawn pallor washed over Emmyn Vale. Once again, uhta was on the world—that breathless hour between the marches of night and the threshold of day when nocturnal incarnations paused in their business, turning their eyes to the east, pricking up their ears; when birds began to stir sleepily in their nests, chirping tentatively as they made ready to greet the sun; when unseelie shapes and nightmares went skulking back to crannies and subtle places, there to hide from the solar glare and wait for nightfall.

There was no sign of the Foawr other than the aftermath of their battle—splintered trees, twisted bushes, gaping raw wounds in hillsides, gleaming facets of new-broken rock. Black mouths gaped from hillsides and under boulders, the entrances to the myriad caves that riddled the ground on which they stood. Daylight revealed that the adit ran into the side of a small grassy hill. The sight of this portal leading underground disturbed Imrhien, stirring a queer mingling of horror and excitement.

A fire sprang like a red lily in a stony clearing among the heather. Thorn stepped silently from the dusky trees, holding a brace of bunya cones. Errantry was perched on his shoulder. The Dainnan knelt by the fire and began to skin a dead rabbit that lay there already.

“The Foawr have done us a favor,” he said cheerfully. “A bunya pine lies shattered, its cones rolling—easy pickings.”

The bantam rooster scratched vigorously in the dirt, throwing dust over Diarmid’s boot.

“First the bird wakens me, then it befouls me,” the Ertishman said grimly, unaware of his pun. “It desires a short life.”

“Such birds can be useful,” said Thorn. “Even in dark places they can tell when dawn arrives in the world outside. Many wights fear the sun, including the Foawr. At a cockerel’s proclamation of the sun’s imminence, even powerful wights may flee in dread.”

As she sat warming herself by the flames, Imrhien cast her mind back to her old tilhal, the wooden rooster. It had been falling apart. She had lost it to the eastsiders when she and Muirne had been abducted—Ethlinn had given her the self-bored stone tilhal to replace it. The wooden rooster had been of no value, but the racketeers had taken it anyway, probably using it to fuel their fire. How much of Waterstair’s treasure had they plundered by now? Where did Sianadh’s body lie—had they possessed the decency to bury him, or had they left his remains to be devoured by wild things? That great treasure lawfully belonged to the Crown. What would the King-Emperor do when he learned of its existence?

Imrhien was tempted to tell Thorn of her mission. As a warrior of the King-Emperor he would be able to help—perhaps he might secure an audience with His Majesty. She was only a tattered wanderer with a maimed face. What chance would she have of speaking personally with the King-Emperor himself? At best, her information would be relayed up to him through the hierarchy of courtiers. Yet that mattered not in the long run, she supposed—for as long as the King-Emperor received word of Waterstair and of the evil deeds of the eastsiders, her mission would be complete. She need do no more, for then the Dainnan Brotherhood would be sent forth to dispatch justice.

<<Trust no one. Tell no one of your mission,>> Ethlinn had insisted, <<until you reach the court. Then, speak only to the King-Emperor or to his two most trusted men.>>

Imrhien had made the “promise” signal, and thus she was bound, if not to her word, then to her sign.

Behind the ridge the eastern horizon was now brushed with orchid-pink, but the sun’s first ray was not yet visible when from behind a hillock came a grunting and a snorting as of a wild pig. Something lumbered over the hill and stood still for a moment, as if sniffing the air. It was a giant, barrel-chested man-thing, with a black pig’s head and two great tusks like a wild boar’s. This formidable apparition started to travel down the dark slope, lifting its feet high with its thick ham-hocks of legs. The feet were large and blunt, all the toes, however many there were, arranged in a straight row. Although it was ponderous. it moved swiftly, grunting and snuffling all the while.

Thorn remained unmoved by this apparition. “He has not seen us,” he commented. On his shoulder, the goshawk stood on one leg and nibbled a strand of his hair. Presently the pig-man moved off among the hummocks and was lost to view.

“Now you have beheld Jimmy Squarefoot,” said Thorn. “When he is a giant pig he is ridden over land and sea by the Foawr. In his present form he is a stone-thrower, like them, but he does no great damage. He is out late—before the first sunray touches the land he must find shelter—”

He broke off and leaped to his feet. Errantry flew up with a whirr and a clap of wings. Imrhien and Diarmid lifted their heads, alert for danger.

“Longbow, what approaches?”

Thorn silenced the Ertishman with a gesture. A noise grazed the edges of hearing. After a moment the Dainnan lifted the brass-mounted horn to his mouth and sounded a long note. Then he said:

“From the north I hear the winding of a Dainnan horn. One of the Brotherhood calls for aid. I must answer.”

He turned toward his companions, speaking with urgency.

“That call comes from a long distance. I must travel swiftly, and so cannot bring you with me. I may be gone for several days. It is not safe for you to remain here—you must press on by yourselves. Without my company, you must travel under the ground for this part of your journey. This region of Doundelding’s surface is an eldritch crossroad. Numbers of unseelie wights may pass through here on their way north, but belowground you will encounter mostly the seelie. Follow the adit down and then straight ahead—it winds through many mines, up and down—whenever it branches, take the left-hand path, save for the third and seventh branches. If you follow these directions, you will emerge in the west of Doundelding. If not, you will lose yourselves in the labyrinth and perish. Now, I must make haste. Drink only flowing water, never water that stands. Provision yourselves well and light no fires in the mines. Take these.”

He thrust the red phial, the cloak, and some other gear into their arms. Placing a hand lightly on Diarmid’s shoulder, he looked down at him—for the Dainnan was the taller by an inch or two—and said gravely:

“Captain, I would enjoin you to protect this damsel, but where native wit is of more use than a strong arm, she may prove the protectress. Yet, guard her with your strength, I do charge you. Both, come safely through.”

Diarmid opened his mouth to protest, but again Thorn silenced him.

“There is no time. Already it may be too late.”

<<Shall we meet you again?>> The girl’s hands fell to her sides, palms turned outward, empty. He stepped so close, then, that the pine-fragrance of him infused her senses. His glance pierced like a shard shawled in velvet, for there was a gentleness to its edge. Softly he spoke:

“May our parting not be for long, Gold-Hair.”

Errantry rose on his pinions with a sound like rushing wind. The Dainnan tilted back his head, his eyes following the bird’s flight. His profile was drawn finely against the blushing sky of sunrise.

Then he was away.

As the sun lifted itself up over the blasted vale, Imrhien and Diarmid breakfasted in morose silence. Morning brought with it the first stirrings of a shang wind. The rooster pecked and strutted around authoritatively, obviously in charge now that the goshawk had departed. It had taken a liking to Diarmid, who kept pushing it away with his elbow and elaborately refraining from cursing it, to prove himself gentlemanly. Imrhien hardly noticed. She thought she must have swallowed a stone during the night, and it had lodged in her chest, just above the heart. She had become aware of it only after Thorn had gone. Her throat constricted, and she could not eat.

Few birds called from the surrounding countryside. A cold wind was blowing—the place seemed cheerless. As the travelers picked around the fallen boughs of the bunya pine, collecting as many nuts as they could cram into the pouches, the tinkling of a million miniature bells came over the hills. It was as though a meadowful of snowdrop flowers with tiny clappers were bowing under a breeze. The strange clouds of the shang blotted out the sun. Soft airs plucked at their clothes. Imrhien wanted to run on the hilltops, to spring into the air and see if the wind would buoy her up, would lift her into the sky and away from the ache of loss. Diarmid would disapprove—not that she cared.

Instead she tied on her taltry.

Rocks glittered with points of silver light. On a hillside a bloody skirmish was taking place between two bands of see-through warriors in old-fashioned mail and plumed helmets. They were up to their knees in turf, the ground level having altered since their day. Closer still, a young couple in peasant garb ran up a slope, he dragging her by the hand—she was exhausted. Fear was written on both their faces as they stared back over their shoulders at whatever had pursued them, long ago. Who they were and what they were running from was now lost and forgotten.

By the time the unstorm had passed, the travelers had packed and were ready to leave. They looked about for the entrance to the adit, and that was when consternation first set in. For there were numerous underground entrances puncturing the hills, and most of them were adits with cuttings running down into their mouths.

“We are left to ourselves for half an hour and already we are lost,” Diarmid expostulated as they searched. “Perhaps any one of these would do … I surmise that all are interconnected.”

Imrhien shook her head. Thorn’s directions had been specific—the wrong entrance could lead them in the wrong direction, into peril.

Eventually they sat down, at a loss.

“We shall have to find it before nightfall,” the Ertishman said grimly. “That Jimmy Squarefoot will be abroad, and who knows what else may roam after sunset.”

The girl gave a start and looked around wildly.

“No need to be troubled yet!” he said.

<<No, no. Where is the rooster?>>

“I know not. I care not.”

Imrhien went looking for the rescued bird and saw it sitting on a hilltop. When she approached, it scuttled away down the other side of the hill. Following its trail, she came to the very entrance of the sought-after adit—she recognized it by a jutting limestone protuberance resembling a giant’s nose. The rooster was already inside, darting after flies. The girl climbed back to the hilltop and waved her arms to hail her companion. In a moment he was beside her, and she led him to the tunnel where the bird was pecking.

“Then it has a use after all, the witless fowl,” he grunted, but his smile revealed his gladness.

Imrhien gazed for one last time toward the north. Then, saying farewell to the open skies, they walked down into the dark.

Gradually their eyes adapted to the dim luminescence of the fungi. The rooster shortsightedly blundered about and crashed into a wall. Grudgingly Diarmid rescued it, setting it on his shoulder with deep misgivings. It pecked his ear affectionately.

Imrhien tapped on Diarmid’s arm. <<We must beware of pits and count the intersections.>>

Diarmid squinted. “I can barely see your hands. Say you that we must watch our step in case we fall down some winze or ventilation shaft to a lower level? Aye, I’ll not disagree. And we must look for branching passages. What was it now—take the left, except for the third and seventh?” She nodded.

An hour later they had not yet passed one side-opening, and still the tunnel descended. From afar off, the sounds of tapping and knocking started up again. There being no night or day in this worm’s abode, the travelers at last halted when they had agreed it must be around noon. Snail-trails of water ran down the walls—it was difficult to find a dry place to sit. Brown mud smeared their faces and hands, caked their hair and garments. Rummaging in the food-pouches, they found little more than bunya nuts, with a few withered lillypilly berries, overripe apple-berries, and crumbled mushrooms. The nuts were rich and sustaining, but Imrhien knew they would tire of them before long. She crushed a few for the rooster to peck, which it did, peevishly.

“Those knocking sounds,” said Diarmid, his voice loud in the still darkness, “they would drive a man mad.”

Behind his back the rooster gave a sudden screech. Both travelers jumped. The bird shot off down the passageway.

<<The crumbs of nuts—they are gone.>>

“Aye, and there was quite a pile of them on the ground here. The fowl could not have eaten them all in such a short moment. Mayhap we have company.” The Ertishman’s voice dropped to a whisper.

They peered out into the gloom but could see no moving thing.

<<It seems we are alone.…>>

Diarmid gave a shout and grabbed the food-pouches off the floor.

“I left a handful of bunya nuts right there. They are gone! Leave no food on the living rock. Let us get out of this place.”

A screech issued out of the darkness ahead and the rooster came running back. Imrhien scooped it up. Its eyes, usually wide and indignant-looking, were more so.

They walked on for a minute or two, then placed a couple of nuts on the limestone floor. Nothing happened until they looked away. Then, a faint scraping of stone on stone and the food was gone. A dim drone of bagpipes came to their ears from somewhere to the left and below.

<<Under this floor, things are dwelling. Doubtless, every stone is a trapdoor.>>

“Let us hope that they are not after food other than the vegetable kind.”

It seemed wiser to eat and drink as they walked. The drone of the pipes drew nearer. Such underground piping was not unfamiliar to the girl, for she had heard similar dim upwellings somewhere in the forests north of Gilvaris Tarv. The music crescendoed, rising from beneath the feet of the listeners to send cold thrills juddering through them.

The unseen subterranean piper moved along some sublevel crosscut to the right and passed farther away into distant labyrinthine reaches. After the music had faded, even the knocking ceased. Silence pressed more heavily than before.

The passage forked.

“That’s one!”

They took the left-hand path.

The rocky floor ramped down more steeply now. On the slippery, uneven surface it would have been easy to lose one’s footing. Down here, far from human aid, a broken limb could eventually prove fatal. This passage twisted and turned until those who followed it had lost all sense of direction. After what seemed hours it led them to another intersection. There, they rested, for surely it must be evening, somewhere far above their heads, and the first frosty stars opening in the sky.

The tappings had resumed as they walked. They rang louder now—instead of one or two knockers there seemed a multitude, all banging at different rhythms and tempos, some in the walls, others underfoot or overhead. They might have been nearby, or far off in some other section of the mine, their tappings amplified by some echo-chamber effect along a conduit. The travelers sat down on the cloak, abruptly realizing how weary they were.

“If anything can keep us from the thieves beneath the floor, ’tis this Dainnan cloak,” Diarmid muttered, “with whatever wizardly qualities it is endowed. Mayhap it is woven of wight-spun yarn.” To be completely certain, they let no crumb fall. The rooster refused to set foot on the ground under any circumstances and ended up perched on Imrhien’s knee while she fed it from her hand and cupped water for it.

“The tin mines of Doundelding are ancient workings,” Diarmid mused with a yawn. “Digging has been going on here for centuries. The old mines, now hardly ever worked, intersect with the new on many levels, and the whole lot is laced with natural caverns. Back in the Tarv barracks, Sergeant Waterhouse used to tell tales of this place.”

There was no doubt that the Ertishman had become more informative and agreeable since the advent of the Dainnan’s company. However, Imrhien’s eyelids were so heavy that she could scarcely follow what he was saying.

“You sleep,” she heard him say. “I shall take first watch.”

It was hard to waken when Diarmid shook her to take her turn at the watch. The cockerel, having slumbered peacefully, skipped from her hip to the man’s, sank its neck into its feathery chest, and closed its eyes smugly. Imrhien struggled to stay alert in the eternal gloom, listening to the sporadic tap-tap, now near at hand, now far off. Sometimes she paced up and down, longing for an end to this timeless night.

Deep in the ground, with miles of limestone hanging over their heads, they had only one timepiece to mark the rise and fall of the sun. The cockerel opened its affronted eyes, extended its neck, shook itself, glared all around, and puffed out its chest by way of ritual. Opening its wings and pointing its beak to the ceiling, it let fly with its fanfare. Such a crowing would have carried a long distance, had it been blasted forth over fields and farmlands. Here in this enclosed place it rolled around, making the rocks ring with its echoes.

When the triumphant cry finally faded, all sound ceased. The rooster fluffed up its feathers and shook itself.

Bleary-eyed and now wool-eared, the travelers breakfasted and continued on their way.

The path always ran downhill, always lit by fungus, always slicked with damp. Occasionally it would narrow, or widen, or turn this way or that, or the ceiling would soar away out of sight, or the walls would be streaked with layers of color, or the way would suddenly widen into a cavern, its roof supported by pillars of living rock, or the sound of rushing water would come chuckling and gurgling from behind the walls.

At the third branch they took the right-hand passage and the floor leveled off, no longer descending. The passage ran straight for many miles, without a turnoff. They dined while on the march, unwilling to rest on these treacherous floors and eager to reach the end of this journey as soon as possible.

In this long, straight hall the travelers felt vulnerable. If danger approached from ahead or behind, there would be no choice of escape route. Besides, the stark walls offered no caverns or niches in which they might take shelter. Often they glanced back over their shoulders, fancying they could hear following footsteps.

“Anything that dwells down here knows exactly where we are,” grunted Diarmid. “Our modest friend made sure of that.” Yet he allowed the bird to ride on his shoulder.

They were beginning to despair of ever finding another branch when they came upon two in rapid succession.

“Four and five! After the seventh, how many until the end, I wonder?”

Discouragingly, the way sloped downward again. The sixth fork appeared, and they entered the tunnel on the left. Everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan until they reached a section of the passage where, high in the right-hand wall, a small opening gaped, large enough for a man to crawl through. Dimly discernible by the glow of the cave-fungi, it was partly concealed by jutting rock. No steps led up to this hole, only several rough-hewn footholds. Perplexed, Diarmid stood scratching at the itchy new growth of his beard. Imrhien tugged at his sleeve and pointed.

<<That is the seventh branch,>> she insisted.

“I am not so sure. It is not like the others. I suspect it is some exploratory drift, leading to some old stope, or simply a dead end.”

Vehemently she shook her head. <<Thorn would have told us.>>

“No—he would expect us to choose the obvious path. This passage leads straight on.”

<<That passage is the left-hand branch. I choose the other.>>

Diarmid’s jaw tightened. “I do not.”

They had reached an impasse. Presently Imrhien began to scale the wall. She had not climbed more than three feet when Diarmid’s hands seized her around the waist and dragged her down.

“Foolish wench! You will not go that way.” She tried to pull free, but he would not release her. White anger flared in her skull, and she slapped her open palm hard against his cheek. He released his grip abruptly, and she fell back against the wall.

“Go, then.” His clenched hands trembled. They were dark with walnut-dye and mud. “But you will go without the water-bottle or any food.”

Although she guessed he was bluffing, she knew also that he had the upper hand. If she called his bluff, he might easily force her to accompany him, dragging her along by the hair if he so desired. Struggling to cool the boiling of her rage, she pushed past Diarmid and strode down the path he had chosen, hoping against her own conviction that it might be the correct way after all.

The passage inclined downhill. In antipathetic silence they marched for an hour or so. As ire dissipated, Imrhien became aware that she had heard no knockings for quite some time. The only sounds were the echoes of their own footfalls and the occasional melancholy drip-drip of water from the ceiling.

A barrier loomed before them: a rusted gate of thickset iron bars, like a portcullis. It blocked the whole passage.

<<What now, Captain?>> Mockery flashed in Imrhien’s eyes.

The Ertishman did not reply. With his hands and eyes he searched the crevices of the surrounding walls and floor. He found a lever and hauled hard. Somewhere an ancient mechanism stirred. With a squeaking and creaking of moribund pulleys and springs, the portcullis began to lift. It clanged into place above their heads, leaving the way clear. At this, the rooster balked and set up a tremendous racket, hissing and stretching out its wings. Diarmid regarded it with a baleful stare, as though it were a traitor, and strode forward. Taking a deep breath, Imrhien followed.

Farther along this path, the luminous fungi dwindled and disappeared, to be replaced by small blue lights emanating from a species of glow-worm clinging all over the rock like encrustations of gems. The air thickened and became stuffy. The travelers had for so long trodden upon a firm surface that they had become careless about where they put their feet. This proved a mistake.

Diarmid’s booted foot stepped out into empty air. After that, it seemed time slowed down. A shaft was gaping in the floor in front of them, and the young man was falling into it. He tried to throw his weight backward, teetering on the brink. Imrhien thrust out her hand, so slowly, she thought in terror, too slowly as he wavered there between life and death. She felt as though her hand passed through flowing water instead of air, or as if time’s current moved backward, retarding her actions. He was gone, almost, hovering there in the gelatinous liquid of suspended moments, and all she could reach was an outflung fold of his jacket and his flying hair. Grabbing a handful of both, she braced herself and then jerked back. The force was enough to swing the fragile balance, and the Ertishman fell backward to the floor.

The continuum resumed its normal flow. Diarmid lay, sobbing for breath. After a moment they both crawled to the shaft’s edge. Nothing could be seen down there. It might have been as shallow as a wine vat or as deep as a well.

A ledge ran between the abyss and the wall.

<<We must turn back.>>

“No. The ledge is the path.”

He would heed her signs no longer, would not even look at her. Keeping his back firmly against the wall, he began to negotiate his way past the shaft, sliding his feet sideways along the narrow shelf. The cockerel took to Imrhien’s shoulder. Yet again, she had no choice but to follow the Ertishman.

Once past the shaft, they went on slowly and cautiously. The air grew stuffier, the glow-worms more plentiful. They had traveled some seven hundred yards when they rounded a bend to find themselves confronting a breathtaking scene. Here loomed a mighty cavern hung with fantastic stalactites. The slow erosion of water on limestone had produced shapes of curtains, giant birds’ wings, and organ pipes. Some of the pendant formations had joined with stalagmites to form fluted pillars. Like the interior of some surrealistic palace built by a mad King, the whole scene was pricked out with the jewels of billions of silent glow-worms dreaming sapphire dreams. Imrhien touched her companion’s shoulder.

<<Where lies our path now?>>

He pointed to the ground.

“See, there is a channel, worn in the floor. From this door it leads across the cave.”

Indeed, a curious groove had been gouged into the cavern’s floor. Measuring perhaps three feet across, it was defined by parallel sides and an inner surface that was perfectly concave, smooth, and polished. Imrhien looked around. They had unwittingly been walking along this arcane incision—it continued back the way they had come. There was something unsettling about it.

However, Diarmid’s mind was made up, and he struck out again. They crossed the coldly glittering limestone cavern, dripping with its sculpted drapery and frozen swans’ wings. The groove led straight into an opening on the opposite side, and soon they found themselves back in a passageway. The stuffy air gave out a prickling feeling and a curious metallic stench.

<<Death lies ahead.>> Imrhien was smitten with a sudden premonition. <<Turn back.>>

The Ertishman ignored her.

Another cavern opened out before them. Its roof was low, hanging just above their heads. In the center sprawled a great black lake, a sheet of polished obsidian mirroring in its depths the azure stars clinging above. The chamber was like the hollowed interior of a dark crystal shot with flecks of lapis lazuli. Faintly illuminated, the floor-groove ran to the left, curving around the shore. As they pursued it, Imrhien thought she saw a dark shape hump itself out of the oily waters and slowly subside.

Utter horror seized her. What were they doing here? Diarmid was leading them to certain doom—why had she not fought him with greater stubbornness, perhaps somehow stunned him with a rock and fled?

But he was pressing on. She looked back, into the shadows, and it seemed more terrifying to fly that way alone. In a foment of dread, she followed close on his heels.

Past the lake-cave, the bitter-tasting stink intensified. They were both gasping for breath. A low vibration came humming through the rock, a deep, whining drone of pent-up energy punctuated by crackling sizzles and the smell of something charred. The hair stood up on the back of Imrhien’s neck. Iron-clawed spiders tiptoed down her spine. Ahead, from around a corner, issued sudden flashes as brilliant as shards of pure sunlight struck off a glacier. A zigzag bolt of energy hit the wall, gouging a crater of melted slag. Diarmid turned to his companion. His eyes were sunken wells in a face drained of color. His lips parted, and a strangled whisper issued from them:

“This is not the way.”

They began to retrace their steps, running. Yet they had delayed too long.

Beyond that last bend, something large and mailed began to move, something that had gouged the long groove into the rock floor over countless years of passing to and fro.

Far beneath Doundelding, an ancient secret had lain curled at the root of a rich vertical lode that stretched all the way up through Thunder Mountain to the summit’s surface. High on that summit jutted Burnt Crag, a toothed pinnacle that sucked in the veined flares of lightning from any storm for miles around. The crag was a focal point redirecting the energy down through the conduit of ore, down to a prehistoric sentience that attracted levin-bolts from the atmosphere. Deep beneath the ground it stirred, for it had been disturbed. It moved to seek the source of the disturbance. The body unraveled sinuously. The leading terminus swayed a little, blunt and glowing. It gathered speed.

In its path, two small figures fled. Having reached the worm-lit cave of the lake, they dashed along the water’s edge with a recklessness born of panic. Out of the wet shadows of the subterranean cistern reared an amorphous vitality. It lunged at them in passing. The two figures ran on, one sobbing with terror, the other gasping soundlessly. Their backs were intermittently lit with a blue-white glare. By the time this following light drove past the lake, searing its reflections into the water, the surface was flat, blandly innocent, save for a lattice of ripples.

Through the mortified splendor of the stalactite cave ran Imrhien and Diarmid, along the smooth curve of the serpent’s track. A metallic, slithering rasp roared through the underground halls, the sound of a thousand habergeons of chain mail being dragged rapidly across riveted sheet iron. It was punctuated by crackles and fizzing hisses like hot fat spitting in water. Smoothly their pursuer gained on them.

Almost, they had not remembered the shaft. It seemed to spring open deliberately at their feet, as if to catch them unawares. Now must they slow down and move with agonizing precision. Diarmid thrust the girl in front of him.

“You first.”

He breathed in hoarse gasps.

Holding herself flat against the wall, she sidled across. The flow of minutes and seconds seemed once more to decelerate. Diarmid came after, moving as though in syrup, straining against some invisible pressure that turned his sinews to lead. A whine of energy spiraled down the tunnel. Bluish brilliance brightened on the walls. Mailed coils grated across polished minerals.

Diarmid was halfway across when a bolt sizzled the air, breaking off a chunk of limestone from above the pit. It hurtled past his ears. There was no echoing crack from below to indicate it had reached the base of the shaft. The Ertishman, with a great leap, now cleared the chasm. After landing awkwardly on the other side, he rolled to his feet, then winced and stumbled. As they sped toward the iron portcullis, they finally heard a dim echo of the broken-off rock hitting the pit’s floor.

Any hopes that the pursuer would be hindered by the shaft were soon dashed. The roar and hiss of its passage slowed for a heartbeat, then surged forth afresh, closing in. How they managed that final sprint to the iron gate was later a source of amazement to Imrhien. Their lungs were inflamed bellows, exploding. With every step, Diarmid cried out in agony. As they rounded a bend the gate came into view, hanging high above their heads. It snapped into blue-white relief. Light flashed. The air thrummed and fried. They threw themselves past the gate, and Imrhien reached for the lever. Diarmid flung her aside and grabbed the handle in both hands, bearing down on the mechanism with all his might.

Driven by an engine of rusted cogs forced into action, the portcullis began to descend, squeaking and clamoring with the reluctance of old age. It was halfway to biting the floor when, like an outrageous firework, a force came roaring around the bend and slammed into it. A current surged. Sparks exploded in a blistering snarl, and Diarmid was flung backward up the passage, where he lay motionless.

Rent and twisted, metal screamed. The passageway was described by a jerky sequence of utter darkness and scalding brilliance, each flicker and instant of blindness lasting no more than a heartbeat. An ominous hum of power reverberated through the walls and floor.

By degrees, these phenomena began to fade. Incredibly, the gate had descended and held, according to its age-old purpose. The avenger had been thwarted. With the sound of ten wrecked chariots being hauled over rocks by spans of oxen, it departed.

The girl’s eyes were dazzled by retinal afterimages. She could barely discern the man where he lay. He did not move. But she touched him and discovered a pulse, light and rapid. Now, in the twilight, she could see the dark blood welling from his forehead, the blackened hands, already swelling. She untied the pouches from his belt and ransacked them, careless of the food spilling across the floor. The bandages for the rowers’ hands had been washed and rolled up. After tearing off a length, she wadded it and applied pressure to the head wound, moistened his lips with a couple of drops of water, bandaged his hands.

Survive, she begged in her mind. Sianadh, Liam, and Muirne are gone. Do not go, too—you are the last of Ethlinn’s kin. The last of my people.

Lovingly, the dark chill of underground embraced them. Diarmid would not waken—she was alone. The scattered food had already disappeared; not a nut remained. Where was the rooster? Had it been left behind? As if in reply, a slightly singed bundle of feathers jumped from its perch on a high shelf to her knee. She held it close. Its small company would be welcome during the long hours of vigil.

And long they were, those hours, sitting beside Diarmid, hoping for a word or a sign. His face was flushed. She applied wet cloths to it. He was burning. His breath came in shallow gasps.

Imrhien had forgotten how loud was the dawn call of the faithful cockerel. In the end, it was that which woke Diarmid. He sat up, muttering, dazed. The last reverberations of the bird’s clamor sent bits of gravel scurrying down the walls.

A rumbling began. Somewhere, some delicate balance, dependent on bits of gravel, had shifted. The walls and floor began to shake. Imrhien seized Diarmid’s arm and tried to pull him to his feet. Pebbles were falling. The ground muttered as she led him up the tunnel, he limping badly. Where had it been, the little opening high in the wall? Had she gone past without noticing it?

But there it was, the seventh branch. Or possibly not.

<<Climb,>> her hands commanded.

Torment showed in every line of the man’s body, every twitching muscle of his face. He did not speak, but clambered up the rough ledges to the aperture, which was not tall enough to allow him to stand. With a pitiful cry, he forced himself in, headfirst. As the girl and the cockerel scrambled in to join him, the ceiling of the passage below collapsed with a roar. Dust puffed in at them. Coughing, they crawled away on hands and knees.

This will be aptly named, should it turn out to be a dead end.

The passage went on, however, with a purposeful air, rising on a shallow gradient. Soon the walls fell back, the ceiling flew up, and they were able to stand. By the soft light of glow-fungi, Imrhien saw that Diarmid’s bandages were soaking red. The Ertishman had crawled over stony ground on burned and blackened hands.

His fortitude was impressive. He propped himself against a wall, allowed her to hold the nearly empty water-bottle to his mouth, and shook his head when she asked if he wanted to rest. He was resolute. They shared the last drops of water and marched on.

It was a relief to hear the knockings again; the girl felt certain now that they had regained the right path. Diarmid’s ankle had been injured, and he could put very little weight on it. They were forced to halt several times, but they had covered a surprising amount of ground by the time they reached the freshet. Clear water sprang out of the walls, ran noisily down a narrow gutter beside the floor, and disappeared through a chink in the rock. Gratefully the travelers and their bird drank of it. They bathed and refilled the water-bottle.

“Unlace my shirt for me, said Diarmid, “please. ’Tis so hot here.” The air was chill, but he was aflame. Carefully, so as not to touch his wounded hands, she helped him remove his mercenary’s jacket. She rinsed his hair with cool water. The roots were growing out red.

“You are kind.” His eyes were bright, feverish. They seemed unfocused.

She put on his jacket—it was easier to carry it that way, and the rooster seemed to like perching on the epaulets. There had been refreshment but no relief for Diarmid at this stop. Stubbornly he pulled himself to his feet, and they continued on their way.

To Imrhien it felt like late afternoon, a time when aboveground the sun’s rays would be lying in long bars of bullion across the meadows and woods, and the rooks would be flying home to roost. Down here there was no reason to feel this, no indication of the sun’s invisible journey in the outside world.

The knockings amplified in volume and number, and as the travelers climbed the rising floor, they came to where the walls of the passageway were no longer featureless and unbroken. Small caves and diggings honeycombed them. Hope burgeoned in Imrhien, for she detected the sounds of miners hard at work in drifts nearby, separated perhaps only by a thin partition of rock. Yet she could not call out to them, and Diarmid was almost past speech.

The rumor of their industry was everywhere: hammerings, blastings, the squeak of wheels, the rattle of a windlass, shoutings of orders, a burble of voices, and laughter. The travelers picked up their pace. Even through the mists of pain the Ertishman seemed encouraged by the evidence of human aid close at hand. But within another hundred yards or so, their expectations crashed into ruin.

They came upon a side-cavern lit by dozens of tiny lanterns in the hands of diminutive manlike beings who milled to and fro. Each of these wights was about eighteen inches in height, dressed after the manner of tin-miners, and grotesquely ugly. Their faces were cheery, however, as they bustled back and forth with picks and shovels and crowbars across their shoulders, or pushing barrows, or carrying buckets on poles. One of them rounded a corner quite close by and stopped in his tracks. His jaw dropped as he confronted the two mortals.

“Methinks,” wheezed Diarmid to Imrhien, “they are seelie.” He fixed his gaze on the tiny miner. “Can you”—the Ertishman paused for breath—“show us the way out?”

“Ooh, Mathy, what’s that behind ye?” exclaimed the little fellow, pointing over their shoulders, his quaint eyebrows popping up with surprise. In their weakened condition, the travelers fell for the trick. They took their eyes off him. When a split moment later they turned back, not one of the miners was to be seen—only their tiny tools lying where they had been dropped and a lingering echo of tittering and squeaking.

Disheartened, the travelers moved on. They could hear the wights emerge behind them, even before they were out of sight, and return to their scurryings. It would have been useless to round on them, trying to catch them unawares. The wights were apprised of their presence now and would be gone in a puff of dust before the mortals could try to seize them, or draw breath, or even blink.

These small folk seemed very preoccupied with the business at hand, but the girl had seen no ore in the buckets and barrows, and despite all the wielding of picks and shovels, not one of the little miners had been actually digging. Despite all their great show of labor, she could find no palpable trace of their work. They were, in fact, performing nothing.

Imrhien’s head ached and she could not remember when she had last slept. Leaving behind the scenes of pointless industry, the travelers drew into a side-cavern and lay down. Diarmid fell asleep instantly. Imrhien tried to keep watch but eventually succumbed to slumber. The singed rooster dozed, with one eye half-open.

Another sunless dawn arrived without altering the stasis of time in the realm below roots and foundations and graves and riverbeds. After the dying harmonics of the cock-a-doodle-doo—more starved and feeble now—there came no answering rumble, no shifting of unbalanced rock into undercut interstices. The supports held strong in this section of the mines.

All their food had been stolen, or buried under the rock-fall with the pouches and Thorn’s cloak, but Imrhien still had the phial of Dragon’s Blood tucked into her belt, and there seemed to be some kind of sustenance in this elixir. She shared it with Diarmid. Its warmth warded off the eternal chill of underground.

Drearily, the bird pecked about. Eventually it found a few stray glow-worms, which it swallowed. Imrhien shook Diarmid awake and spilled water into his mouth. His condition had grown worse; his lips were cracked and caked, his eyes glassy. He spoke no word at all. She propped herself under his arm to provide support. Thus they went haltingly forward.

The passage still sloped straight up, arriving among more and larger side-chambers. The small tinners could be glimpsed flitting elusively here and there. Farther on they became scarce, until they vanished altogether.

The hubbub of mining continued, dimly, behind and ahead. After about an hour the passage went past an aperture lined with crystals. Lights glimmered from within. Overcome by exhaustion, Diarmid sat down to rest against the wall outside this niche. Curious as to the source of the light, Imrhien looked into it and spied three wightish miners—yet they were different from those they had first encountered; not so ugly, they had the faces of hearty old diggers. These were real mine-workers. The one in the middle was sitting on a stone, his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Between his knees he held a small anvil, no more than three inches square, yet as complete as any ever seen in a smith’s shop. His left hand clutched a boryer about the size of a darning-needle, which he was sharpening for one of the tinners, while the other was waiting his turn to have the pick he held in his hand new-steeled.

Diarmid groaned. Imrhien turned to check on him. When she looked again, the trio had, not unexpectedly, vanished.

But it was certain that they had now come into the working levels of the Doundelding tin mines. Sometimes they caught sight of a small railway running parallel with their course, on a ramp at about knee height. Wooden trams rolled along it, propelled, it seemed at first glance, merely by flickering azure lights that had hold of the rope traces and drew the vehicles up the incline with ease, despite the fact that they were loaded with shining ore. These lights were tricksy; if one did not look directly at them, it could be imagined that they centered around small figures wearing bright blue caps—but it was hard to be certain.

The hearty wightish tinners, all with their sleeves rolled up, were chipping and hacking away at the lode with their picks. Their yellow lanterns shone on piles of freshly excavated tin ore. It was as useless to approach them as it had been to approach their unproductive mimickers farther back. As soon as Imrhien took her eyes from them for an instant, or even if she blinked, they were gone. Their elusiveness was severely frustrating; often she was on the verge of tears, begging them with her stained and blistered hands to come back, to help, to show them the way out. Only one fact gave her courage—surely, with those miniature trams rattling up and down so frequently, she and Diarmid must now be close to the surface.

At one point, the floor of the passage ended in a narrow stair leading upward, and they had to climb. Several flights later they could drag themselves no farther. Rolling into a side-cave to rest, they sipped a drop of Dragon’s Blood and were overtaken by slumber so swiftly that they had no knowledge of the transition.

The rooster crowed hoarsely, as if it had an ear of wheat stuck in its throat. It seemed to have little heart for crowing, merely going through the performance out of a sense of obligation. Imrhien lay on her back, the unyielding floor of cold adamant pushing up against her shoulder blades. Shivering slightly, she stared up at the fungus-lit roof. The warming effects of her drink from the red phial were wearing off. Had it been five days since they had left the world of light and air? Had it been four, or six, or twenty?

Dutifully she struggled to her feet. Without the elixir’s fire in her blood she must keep moving to ward off the cold. It was becoming harder and harder to waken the Ertishman. After much shaking and splashing, he revived. He did not ask for food, merely water—then he heaved himself upright and set forth. There was a strong will driving him, but it would not be enough to keep him going for much longer.

The stair wound on and up, hour after hour, then became a steep ramp, then a short stair followed by a shallow incline. By now their path had diverged from the straight rail-track of the trams, and the miners’ knockings had contracted to the right. Suddenly a breath of sweet air met the travelers, filled with a fragrance of leaves and grasses. On its perch, the rooster lifted its drooping head. Imrhien turned excitedly to Diarmid, but engrossed in the struggle to stay on his feet, he had noticed nothing.

Eagerly Imrhien dragged the dazed Ertishman forward. She expected at any moment to encounter a portal giving on to the world’s surface, but once again hope dissolved into disappointment.

Unpredictably this slope ceased its climb, leveling out to the horizontal. The sides of the passageway were no longer formed of solid rock, rough-hewn. Here, the great, twisted roots of trees intruded, forming archways over the tunnel and twining in and out of the walls. Worms glistened like tubes of pink glass, antlered beetles lumbered along crannies. The cockerel attacked these small beasts voraciously. A rat skittered into a rock-mouth. At the sight of it Imrhien felt sick.

From up ahead issued a whirring and a whizzing. It was mingled with a chorus of song in treble-pitched and bass voices: euphonious singing, high and sweet like starlight, deep and cool like a mountain lake. The sounds seemed to be emanating from behind a wooden door set in the wall of the tunnel. When they reached this door, Imrhien pushed it open a crack and peeped in cautiously.

She saw a wide cavern, well lit, in which numbers of queer old wives sat spinning, each on a white marble stone. Every shape of deformity was upon them, and they all had long, long lips with which they held the yarn. One old wife was walking up and down, directing them all. Approaching one spinner sitting a little apart from the rest, who was uglier than all of them, she said, in hardly intelligible tones:

“Bundle up the yarn, Scantlie Mab, for ’tis time to tae tak’ it wheer it belongs.”

The watcher closed the door softly so as not to disturb the wights. There had been no sign of an exit from that chamber.

<<Can you go on?>> she signed to Diarmid. The young man’s glazed glance alighted on the hand-signs without seeing them.

They went on.

Ahead, light glimmered—not the luminosity of lanterns or underground life forms, but the mother of all radiance—the light of day.

It strengthened, blotting out the fungi, whitewashing the walls, stabbing at their eyes. The cockerel ran forward with a strange cry. To Imrhien, it seemed that they were stumbling forth into a blaze of glory, an inpouring of pure whiteness beyond which there was only more whiteness, brighter and more brilliant.

They had reached the surface.

10

ROSEDALE

Briar and Bird

How far is the Vale of the Rose?

Not too far, as fly the Black Crows.

She is there, who waits at sunrise—

Ever her gaze turns to the skies.

How far is the Vale of the Briar?

The Black Rook is a swift flier.

He is there who waits at twilight

Until the day has fled into night.

THE SISTER’S SONG

The tunnel emerged under a flat rock protruding from a hillside, where bracken-ferns and sweet-briars overgrew the entrance. Above and behind loomed the hilltop. To the right, a green slope rose to obscure the view. To the left and straight ahead stretched a belt of scattered birches. Directly over the trees, a dandelion sun fell toward late afternoon in a floss of clouds like thistledown. A ragged line of birds winged its way across the landscape. Atop the birches, rooks perched in rows like untidy black fruit. They uttered their rasping calls and suddenly took to the skies.

A breeze, heady and sweet as any wine, tweaked fronds and made them nod agreement. The cockerel pecked and strutted about the travelers’ feet. The Ertishman’s weight sagged a little more on Imrhien’s back. She had thrown his arm about her shoulders in order to support him. She braced herself. Slowly they made their way down the hill, with the fowl in tow.

There was no path or track, but their eventual goal lay toward the west, so they followed the sun’s path down into the trees, their boots swishing through piles of bronze and gold leaves. The gaps between the slender, papery stems afforded a view of a land sculpted into unnatural formations beneath its grassy mantle: flat-topped mounds dropping steeply away on all sides, giant pyramids, broad stairs cut into the sides of hills, sunken pits with straight sides, filled to the brim with rainwater. Once, as they halted for a brief respite, Imrhien looked back. Thunder Mountain reared against the sky, its sharp peak mantled in cloud.

Faintly, so faintly that Imrhien had to hold her breath to catch it, a familiar grinding noise came rumbling down the wind. On a rise to the south of the birch-grove stood an old wooden gravity-mill, overgrown with rambling briar-roses in faded profusion. So smothered in prickly stemmed vines was the old mill that it was scarcely recognizable as an edifice. Long, symmetrical mounds stretched out beside it. The ground appeared to have been whipped out from under the northern half of the building, for on that side the walls sagged and a rusted railway track that had risen on a transomed ramp to its top floor had half collapsed. Most of the supports were broken, and the remaining section hung in midair. Below, other rails, still attached to their sleepers, leaned in suspense over sunken hollows. Over all these walls and roofs and through the windows trailed the wild roses, rich with orange-red hips and patterned with the last lingering leaves of Autumn. This place was the source of the steady thrum of dunters.

More fortuitously, a cottage peeped from a clump of trees nestled on the slopes and banks below the abandoned mill. A rutted lane ran toward it, between hawthorn hedges twined with dog-roses. Thin blue smoke twisted from the chimney—a welcome and enticing sight. Toward this, the travelers bent their erratic steps, summoning the last of their strength.

As they approached, a soft, clear tinkling came to them in gusts. The thatched roofs of the cottage and outbuildings looked out from among spreading rowans bubbling with coralline berries, from whose boughs small bells of bronze depended. They rang prettily as the breeze swayed them. A stone wall meandered in and out of the borders of this coppice, and a wide wooden gate opened out of the wall into the lane. It swung open easily, giving on to a stone-flagged path edged with rosebushes. This path led to a second gate in a low hedge, over which rambling roses had been trained in an arch. Beyond a trellis stood the house, covered with wisteria and columbine and climbing tea-roses whose green leaves were barely touched with the burnish of the season, plump rose-fruits pendant on their stems like ovoid lamps. Sunlight through the rowans damasked the brick chimney on the western wall, although rainclouds were by now boiling up from the east. Iron horseshoes hung on nails over the front door and every window.

Diarmid staggered, steadied himself with one hand against a porch-post, and regained his balance. In his eyes, Imrhien read the determination to achieve one thing—to stay on his feet until they found a haven.

Prithee, she silently begged the occupants of the cottage, do not turn us away. Do not despise the ugliness of my face. Give us shelter.

She knocked three times on the door.

From within there came a sound as though someone pushed back a stool or chair. A voice called, “Is that thee, Da’?”

Diarmid moaned, almost inaudibly.

A bolt slid back with a click. And another. The door opened and a young woman’s face appeared. With a short scream, she slammed the door. Presently she reopened it, wide-eyed.

“Who are thee? What’s thane business?”

The man swayed. “Please—”

With an exclamation, the girl flung the door wide.

“Tha be ’urt! Why didn’t tha say so!”

And with that, she put her small shoulder beneath Diarmid’s free arm and helped Imrhien to half carry him indoors. The cockerel barged past, jumped on a spinning wheel, and flew up to the rafters.

They laid the sick man on a bed in the corner. The girl locked the door and bustled about the room, hanging a kettle of water over the fire, bringing clean bandages, setting food on the table. Kneeling beside the Ertishman, Imrhien watched her. She appeared to be about Muirne’s age—perhaps twenty Winters old. Beneath her red head-scarf, her hair flowed walnut-brown and glossy. A dozen string-thin braids were twined decoratively among the tresses. Her cheeks and lips blushed with the tint of roses. She wore a well-laundered kirtle the color of oatmeal, covered with a spotless white pinafore apron tied in a bow at the back. Setting a bowl and a pile of clean linen before Imrhien, she said:

“Wash thane man’s ’urts now and I’ll give tha some salve afore tha binds ’em up.”

Imrhien made the sign for “Thank you” and began her task.

“Tha doesn’t talk. Wha’s the matter wi’ tha, my dove? Got a spell on tha?”

Diarmid cried out inadvertently as the old blood-stiffened bandages were peeled from his hands. Doggedly Imrhien continued her ministrations.

“Talk now, sir,” the brown-haired girl said gently, “and tha will nae feel it so much.”

Diarmid, stung to confused wakefulness, began to babble. Somewhere in the clutter of words, he managed to force out his own name and Imrhien’s before he fell back, groaning.

The girl handed the salve to Imrhien, and she finished her work.

“Let ’im sleep. ’E’s too hot, anyway. Somethin’s got at ’im.”

Imrhien nodded.

“Come to table, my dove. Tha look ’alf-starved, don’t thee? Anyway, they call me Silken Janet and tha’s come to Briar Cottage, in Rosedale. Welcome to thee.

To lie, bathed, with clean-rinsed hair, between utterly clean—if coarse—sheets, with a belly full of warm bread and milk—this must surely be close to contentment.

Yet tired as she was, Imrhien could not sleep. Thoughts of the dark-haired Dainnan would not leave her in peace. She watched the fire-glow and candlelight flicker on the spinning wheel, under-lighting the rafters where the rooster slept in a small, self-assured bundle. In another corner, Diarmid tossed and moaned. Silken Janet had swept the hearth with a goose-wing and set out a saucer of milk by the doorstep “for ’edge’og what comes by at nights,” but she had not gone to bed; indeed, only two beds were to be seen in this one-room cottage.

“I’ll make meself a bed o’ bracken and hay,” their hostess had explained—but she had not done so, and she seemed restless. She paced up and down, stopping sometimes at the shuttered windows as if listening and then kneeling by Diarmid’s side to dab his forehead with cool water in which mint leaves had been sprinkled.

Raindrops had begun to patter on the thatch. Farm animals mooed or bellowed or clucked at intervals from somewhere out in the night—this did not perturb Silken Janet. She smoothed her hands down the front of her apron, picked up the goose-wing, and swept the hearth for the umpteenth time.

The wind took hold of the shutters and rattled them. Janet’s head jerked up.

“Is that thee, Da’?”

There came no reply.

Imrhien raised herself on one elbow.

“So, tha’s awake. Good. I’m goin’ out.” Janet untied her apron. “Tha can mind the house and yon man, and keep the fire a-goin’.”

This damsel would entrust her home and hearth to strangers, thought Imrhien. Is she perceptive, or merely naive?

Janet removed some neatly pressed clothes from a chest.

“Tha canna put yon dirty rags o’ thane on tha back. Take these o’ mine. If anybody raps at door while I’m gane, don’t let ’em in. After sunset, in these parts, tha might hear strange noises. There’s some rum creatures roamin’ these parts—nor rowan nor iron nor tinker-bells can fritten ’em off. Tha might chance to hear a sound like a child cryin’, or some such, but if tha opens the door to help it, a girt black bull or a shadowy goblin dog might rush across the threshold, or worse things. And if tha hears a flappin’ as of wings against the window, do not open the shutters or look out. Wicked creatures can have mickle fair voices. But they canna get in if tha don’t lift the latch to ’em.”

After giving these warnings, she lit a lantern and drew a hooded cloak around her shoulders. “But if anybody raps thrice, that will be me or me da’, so let ’em in. ’E’s been gane too long, me da’—’e went out after ’em bullocks what got loose out o’ stalls today. Busted t’ fence and went a-rovin’, they did, and ’e went after ’em. Ain’t come back. Musta got hisself strayed. I’ll find ’im.”

She picked up the lantern and took hold of a staff that had been leaning behind the door.

“It’ll be cold out. Keep fire stoked and mind what I said—do not open door unless tha hears a three times knockin’. Like wha’ tha did. No wight can cross over threshold uninvited.”

<<You must not go out in the dark and the rain. It is too dangerous.>>

“I canna hear tha hands, my dove, and by t’ look in thane eyes, I think if I could, I wouldna heed ’em. Fare tha well and lock t’ door now.”

Janet drew back the bolts and with a swish of her cloak was gone, closing the door carefully behind her. Her footsteps hurried away down the path.

Imrhien thrust the iron bolts home on the inside of the door, dressed herself in Janet’s calico gown, and knelt at Diarmid’s bedside to bathe his feverish brow.

When his fretful movements ceased and he had eased into a deeper sleep, she opened the small traveler’s pouch she had carried on a thong about her neck all the way from Gilvaris Tarv. Throughout her arduous journey it had remained intact. The key to the caskets of treasure, the three jewels, and the bracelet of dove-white pearls gleamed in the flame-light. She took out the rope of pearls, placed it in Janet’s clothes-chest, and shut the lid. Then she threw a stick on the fire and seated herself on the stool by the fireplace, stirring the embers with the poker, listening to the song of the rain.

Flames filled her vision. The fleeting shapes within them were castles on crags, twisted forests, shimmering dragons, crowds of ethereal beings. She tried to recall Thorn’s face, but his image floated beyond her grasp.

The night advanced, and Janet had not yet returned. Lulled by the warmth and quietude, Imrhien began to feel sleepy at last. Once or twice she trickled water into the sick man’s mouth when he half woke. He would gaze at her, saying, “Muirne?” and drift back into delirium. Only the plink of raindrops and the soft jinking of the rowan-bells disturbed the night’s peace now.

Imrhien leaned the poker against the chimney corner. She fought the desire to close her eyes. Silken Janet had trusted her to “mind the house,” so she must not betray that trust; must not lie down on the soft bed and succumb to the urgent need for sleep that now oppressed her.

The rain drummed. Diarmid lay helpless and insensible, his mouth ajar. Sweat-beads stood out on his forehead, and his fingers twitched feebly.

There was a knock at the door.

Imrhien jumped.

Three times the blow fell on the painted wood.

The girl did not run to the door straightaway. She could not call out to whoever stood on the doorstep, could not ask them to speak their name. It must be Janet’s father giving the prearranged signal. Or Janet herself—but then Janet would call out, surely. Strange—there had been no sound of footsteps coming down the path.

A sudden thought made her hesitate. By chance, she herself had knocked thrice when she and Diarmid had first arrived.

What if—by chance—some malevolent visitor did the same?

Instinctively she drew her taltry over her head, pulling it forward so that her appalling visage was blotted out under a cowl of shadow.

Again the three blows landed on the door—louder this time—demandingly, insistently. Imrhien came to a decision. This was the signal about which Janet had tutored her so earnestly. She must not fail her hostess. Taking a candle with her, she walked toward the threshold. The iron bolts hammered into their brackets as she drew them back. She opened the door.

A dark-haired man strode in, shaking a glittering spray of water drops from his cloak.

Thorn.

Imrhien dropped the candle. It guttered out.

But no, he was not Thorn—her eyes, made inventive by longing, had deceived her. Here was a man less in stature, a stranger, drenched and dripping. Young and comely he was, with curling hair, and he spoke to her in some foreign tongue. He seemed to be asking to be allowed to warm himself at the fire. This struck a chord in the girl.

Only hours ago it was I who sought shelter, I who could not make myself understood. Janet has shown me such hospitality—should I not do the same for this man, even though this is not my own house?

Bread and milk still stood on the table, but he would eat nothing she offered him. He merely lay down by the fire and fell asleep. She resumed her seat on the stool. The candle and the lamp had both gone out, but Imrhien blew up the fire—quietly, gently, so as not to disturb the sleepers. Its light flared, ruddy and cheerful. She glanced at the stranger.

His appearance was striking, unusual. His hair must be dyed, and freshly so, for the roots were as black as the rest—but the structure of his face did not seem to fit the Feorhkind mold, nor did he seem to come of any other race she had yet seen. By the fire’s brighter illumination she now noticed a sight that paralyzed her. Half-hidden among his dark curls were fine, pointed ears.

So. He—it was a waterhorse.

So.

And it had come by night—doubtless it was one of the nocturnal kind, which could not bear the light of day.

A long, cold shudder rippled through her.

At any moment, this thing might take its horse’s shape and drag her out into some nearby lake or pool to devour her beneath the waters. If only dawn would come, she would be saved—but how far off was sunrise?. She sat as still as ice on the stool by the fire, and that was not an easy thing to do. Diarmid lay silent—for how much longer, she could not guess. Any movement or groan from him might waken the malignant thing. The night grew darker. She remembered that she had left the door unbolted, but it was too late now.

The rain drew away and left her alone. Outside the windows, the eaves dripped monotonously. The rowan-bells gave no sound. Every moment was stretched taut, to its limit. Imrhien had no way of reckoning how many hours remained until dawn. She dared not move a fingertip. If only he would stay asleep until then …

Too soon, a log cracked and flared, and the stranger roused. He sat up and drew from his sleeve a long string of emeralds, which he dangled enticingly before Imrhien. His slim fingers beckoned her. His twilight eyes were fraught with liquid reflections of desire and death: panes staring out from some remote and drowned place. She pushed his hand aside, and he caught her gown. She jerked away, knocking over the poker, which clattered loudly to the hearthstone. At this sound, the little black cock sitting on the rafter woke and crowed. The unseelie thing dashed out the unbolted door. Horse’s hooves trampled the path outside, rushed through the gate, and galloped away down the lane to the west.

In the wake of the unseelie being, a sudden, violent wind gusted. The door swung wide on its hinges and banged against the wall. She ran to close it but stopped with her hand on the latch. A glimmer of light was bobbing down the lane from the east. Two figures with a lantern held high were approaching swiftly. In at the garden gate they entered: a woman and, at her side, a tall man striding toward Imrhien in haste.

Lamplight flowed over the broad shoulders of the tall figure and struck ruby glints in the mazy skeins of his midnight hair. Behind Imrhien’s ribs, a storm raged. At the sight of him, a scintillation flared through her flesh, branching out to sear along every nerve, snatching breath.

“Did it harm you, the Glastyn?” asked Thorn, lifting the lantern so that its ruddy glow flooded Imrhien’s face. “We saw it race from here as we came to the gate. Did it harm you?”

She shook her head, could not make any other sign, could only look at him, drinking in the sight as a parched wanderer slakes his thirst at a desert well. She noted every detail over and again: the diamond plane between the jawline and the high cheekbones, the firm set of the mouth, the eyes whose cold fire seemed to penetrate all, the natural grace of his stance, the hand, long and strong, which held the dark-lantern. Indeed it was he.

“Turn around,” he said.

She spun on her heel.

“Yes, you are hale, I see. And the Glastyn runs from you as though horsewhipped. Remarkable. The captain—is he in the house?”

<<Yes, but—>>

“Wait indoors.” Without further explanation he was away, rounding the corner of the cottage.

Silken Janet laughed and accompanied Imrhien into the house. She shook out her wet cloak by the fire.

“Close door, me dove, ’e will be back in a trice. ’E’s just gone tae ’elp me da’ put the bullocks tae bed. Found me da’, I did. At any rate, thane ’andsome Dainnan found ’im and then brought us both ’ome, bullocks and all. Dainnan were seekin’ tha. Asked if we ’ad seen tha. Said both o’ thee would be comin’ out o’ mines. Is tha unscathed?”

Imrhien nodded.

“Is tha certain?” Janet peered anxiously at her guest. “Tha might be shock-shaken now. Sit here at table. ’Tis white tha be, white as me pinny. That wicked ’orse-wight might ’ave ’ad tha in another ring o’ the bell. What must tha go openin’ doors for?”

Wearily Imrhien tapped three times on the table. Then she leaned her elbows on her knees, resting her head in her hands.

“There I go, axin’ too many questions,” said Janet. “Never mind, I’ll leave tha be. ’Ow fares me dove?” She bent over Diarmid’s sleeping face. “Nae good, nae good. Janet’s come now. Janet’ll take care o’ thee.”

She threw some sticks on the fire and swung the kettle over it. As she busied herself with preparations for a midnight supper, she kept up a flow of chatter.

“Glastyn were right ’ere, eh? Wicked thing. Is tha carlin, then, tae get rid o’ sich a wight?… Nay? I thought tha carlin. Carlins ’ave tae give summat in return for their powers. I thought tha gived tha voice or tha face. But tha got nothin’ in return, eh? ’Tis a wicked world. ’Ow dreadful—that unseelie thing in me own ’ome. Gives me the shudders. Da’ and me shall ’ave tae choose a better signal than three knocks—folly o’ me, that’s anybody’s!”

Boot-heels crunched down the path. Preceded by a gust of cold wind and a swirl of dying rose-leaves, the two men entered, Thorn ducking his head to clear the low lintel. Janet’s father bolted the door in a practiced manner. Snow-haired, his grim face tanned and creased by windblown sunshine, he yet retained a measure of the good looks he must have possessed in his youth, except that he was a little stooped, as though he had struggled for years to carry a heavy burden on his shoulders. He was clothed in a faded red cap, stout boots, breeches tucked into gaiters, a tartan waistcoat, and a matching worsted jacket. His hair was shorn just below his ears. He held an iron-shod staff, and on his finger gleamed a thick gold signet ring. A lean, restless hound trotted at his side.

This man held out a hand to Imrhien, palm up. She gave him her own, and he bowed over it, speaking with a mixture of the cultured accents of a gentleman and a country burr.

“I bid thee welcome, my lady Imrhien. Sir Thorn has told me of thee. Roland Trenowyn, at tha service.”

Thorn had gone at once to Diarmid’s bedside.

“How can this be? He has the mark of the Beithir on him!”

He placed his hand on the Ertishman’s brow. “He burns. But the fever has turned already, and he has the strength to fight. I judge he will be well by morning. If this is the brand of the lightning serpent, then you took a wrong turning in the mines. I’ll warrant it was not your heart, lady, that led you to the serpent’s lair.”

“Beithir!” exclaimed Janet, kneeling by the Ertishman’s side. “So that’s what struck ’im. Ain’t seen anythin’ like it before. Poor dove.”

“Come, Janet,” said her father, “if Sir Thorn says he will recover, let us not keep our guests waiting for their supper. Pray, do us the honor of joining us at table, sir and my lady. Our fare is humble, but all that we have is at your disposal. Whatever you ask for shall be provided, have we the means.…”

All voices faded. The floor tilted, and the room went black at the edges. Imrhien made a grab for the corner of the table for support, but it swung away. Overwhelmingly, the past few days had come crowding back—the attack of the Beithir, she half carrying Diarmid through the mines, the long nights on hard beds of stone, the narrow escape from the Glastyn, and now meeting again with Thorn.

It was as if a great wave of terror, despair, and joy had been gathering itself together as she sat at the Trenowyns’ table, rising ever higher over her head. All at once this accumulation reached breaking point.

A darkness came roaring in from the perimeters of her skull. The wave came thundering down.

The rooster crowed. Deep in the cobwebs of sleep, Imrhien heard Silken Janet speaking.

“Now, me dove, tha can come out wi’ me tae the ’en’ouse. That’s the place for thee, instead o’ wakin’ folk with thane racket. Come on, tha goosegog, I got a ’andful o’ corn for thee!”

After some squawking and fluttering, quiet resumed. Long, long waves of black slumber came rolling over.

It seemed that not a minute had gone by when Imrhien was woken by a rattle at the window and opened her eyes to see Janet flinging wide the shutters. Long diagonals of sunlight streamed in, and sweet birdsong, and the earthy smell of moist loam and wet leaves. On the eaves above the windows, doves repeated, “Coo-coroo-coo.” Somewhere outside, hens were cackling and something mooed. Imrhien felt refreshed in mind and body. A whiff of baking bread scented the air.

“Good mornin’ to thee” Janet smiled—“and a fair mornin’ it is. Thane captain said so, too, not long since.”

Diarmid pushed aside a curtain in the corner and stepped out, without any sign of favoring his leg. He was freshly scrubbed and shaved, dressed in some of Trenowyn’s clothes—woollen breeches, leathern gaiters, a linen shirt, and a twill jacket, looking quite the country squire, except for the hair that fell past his shoulders, red and brown.

Imrhien jumped up and ran to him.

<<How hale you look!>> Indeed, he did look well. Although the gash on his forehead was still scabrous and puffy, a rosy hue stained his cheeks—not the flush of fever, but the bloom of health.

<<Show me your hands.>>

<<They are healing,>> signed Diarmid. <<It is the fairest of mornings, and I am forever in your debt.>> He bent his knee, kissed the back of her hand, and stood again, palms outstretched. The ruined tissue had been sloughed. Over his palms new skin had already formed, pink and fragile. Only, on each of them, was emblazoned a white mark like forked lightning. <<The unguents of our hostess are marvelous!>>

He stilled his hands and asked in a low voice, “I have heard that you were in danger last night. How is it that you escaped from the Glastyn?”

<<The rooster crowed untimely. Thinking dawn was nigh, the wight fled.>>

“’S death!” Diarmid said in astonishment. “Then the raucous bird has repaid its debt in full! Where is it now?”

<<In the henhouse.>>

Laughter and footsteps came up the garden path. Silken Janet leaned out of the window.

“So, there tha be! Did tha ’ave a comfortable night in ’ayloft?” She unbolted the door. Her father entered. Thorn stood outside on the path with Errantry on his upraised wrist, the fierce talons clutching the leathern armband. The goshawk spread his wings wide to keep balance; the great draft of their movement sent his master’s unbound hair tossing like long grasses underwater.

Janet eyed the bird with some alarm. “Do tha bird fly at rooks, Sir Thorn?”

There was an edge to her voice.

“Not if I forbid it.” The Dainnan looked directly at Janet and smiled. Then he turned his attention to the goshawk. “So-ho, Bold-and-Fearless!” He threw his arm upward to help the bird take off, watching him rise with a whirr and a clatter of wings and fly over the trees. Then he stepped indoors.

The five of them sat down to a hearty breakfast. There being only four seats, Thorn elected to sit on the window ledge. He leaned his back against the frame, one booted foot on the sill, the other swinging. At his back soared a washed blue sky—often he would turn his head to look out at the wind-driven clouds scudding over the treetops, as if to be between walls made him restless.

Janet had set before them ripe blackberries, gooseberry tart, rhubarb and pink quinces in honeyed syrup, bread and butter, scrambled eggs, cream and honey, green cheese flecked with sage, frothing milk, mellow, yellow mead, and dandelion wine. The guests complimented her on her table and did full justice to it. There was so much to eat and so much to tell that the sun had climbed toward its zenith before they were finished.

The travelers had immediately asked for news. Trenowyn reported that the King-Emperor’s Legions had gathered in full strength at Caermelor, while recruits for the army and for the Dainnan were being summoned now to rally at Isenhammer. It was widely held that conflict was imminent, for the gathering forces in Namarre had grown strong in numbers, and while they had not yet mobilized, it seemed certain that they would soon strike south. At these tidings, shadows of concern darkened the faces of both Thorn and Diarmid.

Upon returning from his mission the Dainnan had searched for Imrhien and the Ertishman—they had remained longer in the mines than he had reckoned, and since the underground ways led to many openings, he had suspected they had taken a wrong turning. While seeking them, he had first encountered Roland Trenowyn, whose beasts had strayed far. He had helped the farmer drive them home, and on their way they had encountered Janet.

Diarmid questioned Thorn about his unexpected errand in answer to the call of the Dainnan horn.

“It was Flint of the Third Thriesniun who sounded that call,” replied the Dainnan. “He and a scouting party found themselves in dire peril, caused indirectly by certain wights who dwell beneath the ground. What do you know of the Fridean?”

“I know plenty,” put in Trenowyn. “Doundelding is as riddled as a worm’s nest with underground tunnels and caves. The Fridean delve them, as they are wont to delve beneath many remote regions of Erith. He who stands above Fridean diggings might betimes catch their music rising from beneath his feet. He who unwisely lingers above Fridean diggings when a boulder falls nearby might well find himself undermined. For the Fridean do not delve with accuracy in the manner of eldritch miners. My friends the knockers shore up the walls of their tunnels and secure the ceilings with crossbeams. The Fridean merely dig in straight lines without reference to consequences. When they encounter a hard substance they cannot penetrate, they turn a corner and continue in a straight line in another direction. In this manner they build labyrinths, sometimes close to the surface. Should their tunnels collapse, as often happens, they are never troubled.”

“And should tha go intae the hills and sit upon a bare rock tae tak’ a bite, and should tha let fall a morsel or two,” declared Janet, “then t’ crumbs will be gone afore tha can say Jack Robinson.”

“Then we have met the Fridean in the mines!” said Diarmid. “And was it those wights who threatened the lives of Sir Flint and the men of his thriesniun?”

“No,” said Thorn, “for they do not harm mortals. But at the dawning of the day, one came nigh whose joy it is to destroy creatures that live, and that was the Cearb, who is called the Killing One. Where the Cearb walks, the ground quakes. The Dainnan were unaware they traveled above a hollow maze the Fridean delved long ago. Great cracks opened beneath their feet, and as they fell, struggling, the Cearb came at them, for it is one of the Lords of Unseelie and has no fear of the sun’s rays. Yet it may be outrun by the fleet of foot—lured away by a decoy so that others may escape.”

“Wert tha able to save ’em?” asked Janet, agog.

“Indeed. The call was sounded early, and I was able to reach them at the crucial instant,” Thorn said. Enigmatically he added, “This time.”

He would say no more on the subject.

Thorn and Trenowyn having spoken, it was Diarmid’s turn. Having dined with a prodigious appetite, he related the tale of the sacking of Chambord’s Caravan, of their meeting with the Dainnan and subsequent wanderings through Mirrinor and Doundelding, and all that he could recall about the mines, prompted by Imrhien’s handspeak. Silken Janet sat silent throughout, wide-eyed, too rapt to think of bringing a morsel to her lips. Few travelers ever passed through Rosedale—the words they were prepared to spare were fewer.

“Well!” she exclaimed when the tale was told. “Ain’t never ’eard nothin’ like it in all me born days! So, tha saw trows beyond Emmyn Vale, did tha? Ain’t never been that far afield, but there’s lots of trows ’ereabouts, ain’t there, Da’?”

“Here? In Rosedale?” asked Diarmid.

“Aye, sir. Once, Da’s cousin’s family came to stay ’ere unexpectedlike, and there’s six o’ ’em, with four growed-up lads, and I was in such a tither findin’ places for them to bed down and food for table that I clean forgot tae do some o’ me tasks. The trows ’ave it that every hearth shall be swept clean on a sevennight, that no one shall be found near it, and above all that plenty o’ clean water shall be found in ’ouse. All these things were neglected—I was dossed down near fireplace, ’avin’ given me bed away, and when the trows paid their usual visit that night they got mighty enraged and made such a noise that I awoke. The guests were so drunk, they kept on sleepin’, and Da’ was snorin’ away after ’ard day’s work.

“Anyway, I wake up and what should I see but two trow-wives seating themselves not far from where I lay, and one with a lovely little baby on ’er knee. The one without t’ baby sought for clean water but found none and revenged ’erself by takin’ the first liquor she came across, which chanced tae be a keg o’ swatts I ’ad a-steepin’ in t’ corner.

“Now, Sir Captain, tha would know what swatts is, bein’ from Finvarna and all, but ’tis not a common drink in Eldaraigne.” Janet turned to Imrhien. “Da’ and me, we ’ave a dish called sowens, which we make by steepin’ oat-husks in water. When ’tis fermented a little, we boil it to make it ready to eat. But the water that covers sowens is called swatts. The trows poured some o’ swatts in a basin and washed their baby in it, and then baby’s clothes, and then poured the mess back into keg, sayin’, ‘Tak ye dat for no haein’ clean water ae da hoose.’ They then sat down close by fire, hanging baby’s clothes on their big feet, spreadin’ their toes out before fire to dry t’ garments in that way!”

Even Trenowyn’s somber visage lightened at the picture Janet painted. Diarmid smiled and Thorn laughed; at his laughter, Janet’s cheeks flushed. She resumed her tale with renewed enthusiasm.

“Now I was watchin’ all this, and I knew that if I kept me eyes fixed on them, they could not go away. So I kept starin’ and listenin’ to their conversation in ’opes o’ ’earin’ somethin’ worth rememberin’. But the trow-wives began tae fidget, bein’ desirous o’ departing before sunrise, and at last one o’ them stuck tongs in fire and made ’em red hot! As soon as tongs became glowing, she seized ’em and, approachin’ me, pointed a blade at each eye, grinnin’ in the most ’ideous manner, while she brought t’ tongs closer to me face. O’ course I blinked and screamed, and the trows, takin’ advantage of the moment when me eyes were closed, fled. Next mornin’ when we all went to take sowens from the keg for breakfast, there was nothin’ left but dirty water!”

“The trows are quick to take offense when housework is not done,” commented Janet’s father, “but that is the only time such a thing has happened, and ’twas not the fault of my girl.”

“Tha’s got to be careful with trows,” continued Janet, “for they’ll sometimes carry off animals, or even men, women, or children, and leave in their stead some semblance, a seeming-thing. That ’appened ’ere once. One fine day, me da’ got up to see ’ow the sun rose, for by that ’e can tell if ’twill be a fine day for the cartin’, and goin’ out to the side-gate, ’e saw two gray-clad boys traipsin’ along the lane below the ’ouse. ’E thought they were with some travelers come by the mines, but when they came benigh ’ouse they left t’ lane and went up to where our brindle cow Daisy was lyin’ on grass. They walked up to Daisy’s face, then turned away again, running, and cow ran, too, following as far as her tether would stretch. I came to t’ gate then, and I swear I saw all three run up the ’ill and right over top. But when we went to look on the grass, Daisy was still there. She died that same day, so ’tis clear the trows took the real one and ’twas but a Seeming that was left to die.”

“Aye,” said her father, “but there was worse than that from the hill-tings, before.” He and his daughter exchanged glances. Janet nodded, shuddering. “One Winter night,” said Trenowyn, “I was away from home on a short journey. When I was returning across the hills in the darkness and had got down close to the outer gate, I met a gang of trows carrying a bundle between them. I had a kind of strange feeling as I looked at that bundle, but I allowed them to pass and hurried on toward the cottage.

“As soon as I entered the door, I saw that Janet was gone, and that the trows had left an effigy of her in her accustomed chair. Quick as thought, I seized the trow-stock, which looked like Janet in every way, I assure you—and flung it into the fire.”

“’S death!” exclaimed Diarmid. “How could you be certain ’twas not your daughter?”

“Well,” said Trenowyn, “if a man cannot know how his own child greets him, then what kind of father be he?” He turned away his head for a moment, and they could not read his expression.

Presently Thorn said, “What happened next?”

“The effigy at once took fire,” said Trenowyn. “It rose into the air, flaming, amid a cloud of smoke, and vanished up the chimney. As it disappeared, Janet walked in at the cottage door, safe and sound. Soon after, we bought some potent charms from a wizard in Isenhammer, and the trows have never been back in this house since, of which I am glad.”

“Conceivably you earned their respect,” Thorn suggested.

“I … don’t know about that, Sir Thorn,” Trenowyn stammered, embarrassed. “Mayhap I have earned the respect of the knockers, but I never thought of that with the trows.”

“And what manner of wights are knockers?” Diarmid asked.

“They are small seelie miners,” replied Trenowyn, “those you spoke of, Captain, which you saw dwelling beneath Doundelding and under the hills on the marches of Rosedale. And they be bread and butter to us, good sirs. Not like those thick-headed coblynau, who do nothing. The wee knockers—some call them bockles—know where the rich lodes be. They dig it out and pack it into the trams. The bluecaps are the tram-putters. They bring the ore to the surface every night, up to a place behind Tinner’s Knoll—you canna see it from here. They tip their loads into my wain, which commonly I leave at the mine’s entrance. When it is full enough I hitch up the bullocks and drive to Isenhammer to sell the ore. Isenhammer, where the big furnaces be, is five days’ drive from here—two days out from the King’s Cross. I shall be making a trip three days from now, if tha wants a ride in. Once a fortnight I go down the mine and leave payment for the knockers and the bluecaps in a solitary corner, keeping a bit back myself for cartage. That’s how we live, by that and the farm-beasts and Janet’s bit o’ garden wi’ the roses. I never cheat the knockers, and they always do right by me. Doesn’t pay to try to cheat wights. They be industrious and require, quite rightly, to be paid for their work. If I should leave a farthing below their due, they would get mighty indignant and would not pocket a stiver. If ’twere a farthing above their due, they would leave the surplus revenue where they found it, and I can tell thee they would be just as angry about that!”

“Perhaps the lodes are still rich,” said Diarmid, “but small wights cannot dig out great quantities. Why do men not delve the mines of Rosedale and Doundelding for themselves? By the look of this valley, methinks the diggings are long abandoned.”

“You are not mistaken, sir. Men used to mine here, long ago, but no more. Mining men will not go near where bockles are delving, no matter how much payment is offered. There used to be an old gravity-mill in Rosedale, too, for concentrating the ore. The underground creeping got to it, not long before the knockers and bluecaps moved in—so they say—and the mill subsided, but that was before we came here.”

“I bring in a few extra coins,” interjected Janet. “In Summer when the roses bloom I ’arvest ’em and brew attar of roses to perfume the fine ladies of Isen’ammer. I make rose vinegar, rose ’oney, rose oil, and rose-petal beads. This cot smells so sweet all Summer, don’t it, Da’!”

Diarmid was charmed. “How may beads be manufactured from flower petals?” he asked. “Surely ’tis not possible!”

Janet laughed. “Ain’t tha never seen it done? Tha mun put the petals in a pan with a few drops of water, and add a rusty nail to give t’ beads a better color. Tha must heat ’em once a day for three days, and they turn to pulp. When ’tis cool, tha mun roll pulp with thy fingers, press out drops, and shape ’em into beads around a darnin’ needle so that there be an ’ole through the center. Then tha mun leave ’em to dry, turnin’ ’em twice a day. Rose-petal beads smell sweetest when worn—the warmth of skin brings out t’ perfume.” She showed them the necklace of rich red beads she wore about her own white neck.

“A pleasant Summer task,” commented Diarmid, “working amidst flowers.”

“Janet is always busy throughout the year,” her father stated.

“At other seasons I spin nettles that grow around ’ere,” Janet said, “or flax for folk in Isenhammer. Da’ brings it home in wagon, big sacks o’ lint, and I spin it into skeins, then ’e takes it back to town when ’e goes.”

“Do you dye the yarn?” Diarmid slid in another question.

“Aye,” Janet said, “when there be call for ’t. Got some nice woad growin’ in me garden, for the blues, and some madder for reds. Canna grow worts or herbs in me patch, but woad and madder do well.”

“Do you have any, er, brown dye?” the Ertishman asked casually.

“Ain’t got call for brown. Might be able tae get it from oak—”

Thorn drew something from his pocket and tossed it across to Diarmid. “The root of iris,” he said.

“That makes black, don’t it?” said Janet. “Ain’t never used it, but I’ve ’eard. ’Ow is it mordanted?”

“With an iron mordant, to which salt and elder has been added,” Thorn said.

From beyond the window came the grating calls of a flock of rooks, like groans of agony. Thorn turned his gaze toward the windy sky; Janet and her father also. A flock of birds rushed up from the boughs of a tree and flew away, long stitches of black thread unraveling. In the sudden silence, a sad look crossed Trenowyn’s face.

“Got beasts to tend,” he said gruffly. After excusing himself, he called the hound to him and went out. Silken Janet got up and went to stand beside Thorn at the window.

“’Ow many rooks were in that tree?” she asked softly.

“Seven.” Thorn glanced at her sharply.

The merry breakfast had come to an end on a strangely jarring note.

Imrhien and Diarmid helped Janet to clear away the breakfast dishes, a task that was evidently unfamiliar to the Ertishman. He seemed preoccupied.

<<You should go and see how our friend the cockerel fares,>> he signed. He was using hand-speak more often now, out of politeness to Imrhien, since he owed her his life.

“What’s all that flappin’ about? What are tha sayin’?”

“The cockerel—see?” Diarmid wagged his hands.

“Oh, aye, ’e’s round in the ’en’ouse. They be all bantams in there. Do ’im good. Our other one died two months ago; pretty old ’e was. So thane black rooster ain’t got no rival. I let ’em out in mornin’, tae ’ave a peck round garden.”

Imrhien indicated that she would perform this task today.

<<You may keep the rooster if you wish,>> she added.

Diarmid conveyed the message to Janet, who clapped her hands, overjoyed.

The rooster did indeed appear unrivaled. Imrhien opened the door of the henhouse and watched him strut out into the garden, bossing the fussy hens, snatching caterpillars from under their beaks, ignoring her, his rescuer, with the air of a preoccupied patriarch. When she passed by the cottage and glanced through the open window, Imrhien saw Janet washing Diarmid’s hair in a bowl of black water. She continued on and went to sit on the well-head’s coping, in the sunshine. Stone frogs goggled from the well’s mossy wall, and the slates of its pitched roof were furred gray green with lichen.

It was a fine Autumn morning. Behind the cottage, steep, grassy shoulders of land climbed to the softest of skies. To the west, beyond a sunken fence, a meadow rolled down to a little glad brook that ran chuckling through it, coming out of the hills over cold gray stones. There, a cow and two bullocks grazed. Northward, a gentle combe overgrown with sweet-briars sloped to a timbered height on the other side. The miniature silhouette of a ship sailed up there, distant, lost in the clouds, for an outer Windship route crossed Woody Hill.

To the east lay the mine hills. Tall chimneys of brick or stone like pointing fingers stood in groups, the wood of their miners’ houses having burned down or been taken for firewood long since. The sound of dunting carried in the still air from the old gravity-mill. Dull red berries spattered the stark hawthorns along the lane and bordering the fields; poplars reached skyward, their stripped boughs trimmed with the yellow lace of lichen to match the flowers of the gorse. Lorikeets flashed like emeralds as they flew up, startled, from long cream-colored grasses, and the afternoon light in the meadow glowed on the coat of the curly brown cow.

The open air invigorated Imrhien after the stuffiness of the mines. She drank it in great cold drafts. Her old traveling taltry was pushed back, and the breeze from the north lifted her hair about her face in strands of shining gold. It had grown rapidly and was now as long as Diarmid’s, reaching halfway down her back in soft crimps and ringlets like rippled sea-sand strewn with copper corkscrews.

She would wimple her hair for the journey and for entering the city. Ah, the city, she thought. Caermelor was so close now—White Down Rory even nearer. This face with its dreadful knots and bulges—the skin and flesh had been distorted for so long. How long? How could it ever heal? Her goal had been to find a history, a voice, a presentable face. Deep in her heart, now, something mattered more, but that was a vanity of vanities, an ache, a wound that could never heal.

The source of that pain came walking lightly toward the well with the goshawk on his shoulder. He was singing the second part of a familiar ditty in a clear voice, flawlessly modulated:

’Tis the voices in unison lilting and clear,

And the weaving of harmonies sweet to the ear

Sung to a melody stirring and keen

And the music of harps in the woodlands so green!

Singing ’neath the trees, O!

Singing ’neath the trees!

’Tis the smoking hot platter of meats heaped on high

And the dishes of pastries that gladden the eye

The fruit of the forest, the wine in the cup

Good cheer and good appetite—long may we sup!

Feasting one and all, O! Feasting one and all!

With his customary grace, he swung down beside her, his presence igniting a keen and strange delight. His shirtsleeve brushed her wrist. She did not know if she fell into the well and it was a well without nadir or whether she remained seated on the stone coping.

“We are close now to our destination,” Thorn said, patently oblivious of his effect on her. “Trenowyn leaves in three days’ time with a cartload of ore for Isenhammer. If we wish to ride with him, we can wait. I prefer to leave tomorrow on foot—too much time has been lost already.”

<<I also.>>

“What is it that takes you to the Royal City?”

The girl hesitated, torn between keeping her pledge of secrecy to Ethlinn and confiding all to this dark enchanter whose laughing eyes now rested on her. There could be no harm in telling everything to Thorn, yet a promise made must not be broken. Regretfully she sighed.

<<I seek a village close by the Royal City. Its name is White Down—>> Would the Dainnan understand? The sign Ethlinn had taught for “Rory” was the sign for the roar of a bull, there being no other equivalent in handspeak.

“White Down Rory? Why then, our ways must part at the King’s Cross. There, the Bronze Road crosses the Caermelor Road, coming up from the south from White Down Rory, and wending north to where the blast furnaces stain the skies with their smoke. Have you ever been to Isenhammer?”

She shook her head.

“At night, the visitor who approaches that town sees the sudden glow of liquid orange as pots from the furnaces are tipped over, emptying the molten slag down the hill like lava from miniature volcanoes. There is a certain splendor to it.”

Thorn took from around his neck a golden locket on a chain. The size of his thumbnail, it was curiously wrought in filigree. The detail of the intertwining leaf-patterns and the quality of the workmanship were beyond anything Imrhien remembered seeing.

<<What is kept inside?>>

He smiled, but this time there was little joy on his countenance.

“Only this.”

He unsnibbed the tiny clasp and opened the locket. A fine, dry dust lay there. Thorn gazed long upon it with sightless eyes, as if stirred by some memory. The substance looked like ordinary sand or powdered clay, but, as her own eyes rested upon it, Imrhien was seized by a terrible longing or hunger, the like of which she had never known. She reached out to touch it, but too late, for with a quick breath, Thorn had blown it away. The breeze took up the light burden and scattered it over the garden, over the rooster sitting on a trellis, over the hens. As they flew, the fine particles sparkled in every color, glorified the air with a rainbow, and faded with a sigh as of a myriad voices. With a mighty spring, the goshawk flew up from Thorn’s shoulder and disappeared in the sky.

“Janet shall have no trouble growing the finest herbs this year, and every year after that,” the Dainnan said softly.

He closed the locket and hid it again beneath his shirt.

The rooster fell off the trellis, very ungainly, in front of the hens.

For no reason that she could fathom, Imrhien was left with a deep sense of loneliness and bitter loss. Thorn regarded her gravely. His hands shaped the language of signs:

<<Come, walk with me to the orchard while the day is yet sunny.>>

All sorrow lifted. Willingly, light-footed, she went beside him, past the cramped stone dairy that had been built half under the ground for coolness, past the byre, out through a side-gate in the yew hedge, past the humming bee-skeps to the little orchard. The grasses of Autumn were toast-colored, the last of their clinging seed-heads as fine as sprinkled powder.

In the orchard, a few withered pippins still clung to the branches or lay windfallen in the grass. The quince and apple trees stood almost leafless now, the pear boughs had long since stretched naked against the sky, but beside them, as a windbreak, stood a line of ancient candlebark gumtrees, as green as ever.

Thorn’s voice rose in song once more, as strong and warm as spiced wine and as intoxicating:

Autumn is mellow, a lady of leisure

Dew in the morning, that’s Autumn’s treasure.

Red on the maple, gold on the willow,

Dress’d in bright colors, Autumn is mellow.

Bonny, bonny Spring is a lassie fair,

Flowers at her feet and blossoms in her hair,

Lambs in the pasture, birds on the wing,

Rain on the leaf-buds—bonny, bonny Spring.

Merry, merry Summer is a maiden gay,

Sun on the cornfield and heat in the hay.

Tawny-tressed Summer is brown as a berry

Through the long evenings, Summer is merry.

Winter is wise, with hair like the snow.

Under her mantle the wild creatures go.

Frost on the hillsides, clouds in the skies,

Rest and find peace, for Winter is wise.

“Are you then the personification of Spring, Gold-Hair?” he inquired.

Lowering her deformed face, Imhrien let the pouring glory of her hair curtain its hideousness and parried his question with another.

<<If Spring is gold-tressed and Summer brown, then Autumn ought to be red-haired, red as the vine. The song says Winter’s hair is white, but which season is akin to you?>>

This was a chaffing question, since it was obvious he garnered the roots of the wild iris wherever he found them and carried these vegetables with him, in order to rinse his hair with black dye when the color grew out. He had chosen the midnight shade, one of the two colors most popular among the pedigreed citizens of Gilvaris Tarv, who copied the trends flourishing at the King-Emperor’s Court. Doubtless, even the Dainnan were not immune to the vagaries of fashion.

In reply to her banter, Thorn only laughed. They stood together beneath an antique apple that leaned out with twisted boughs like yearning arms. A breeze rustled its leaves and made dapples of sunlight dance on the lichened bark.

“The changes of the year are worthy of song,” he said, gazing up at the tree. “They lie fair on the lands. Each possesses its own rare beauty. To those who understand them, the wild lands and the seasons are generous, providing shelter and sustenance of spirit and body. There is no need to hunger or thirst in the lands of Erith.”

<<Not all wanderers are such proficient gatherers and hunters as the Dainnan. Many starve.>>

“As you have starved? Allow me to advise you, Gold-Hair. When all else fails, there is always Fairbread—Wayfarer’s Loaf, Farbrod, or Hob’s Cob, as it is also known. It is a victual with many names—some call it the Bread of the Faêran. Have you heard of it?… No? Most folk fancy it no more than the subject of old wives’ tales. It is real, but hard to see unless you know how to look. You understand that if folk step upon a stray sod, they cannot find their path? With Fairbread, it is as if the eyes of all men are under such a misleading spell all the time, unless they cast it off. It is the fruit of a mistletoe that loves only certain trees—apple, alder, hazel, holly and willow, elder, oak, banksia and elm, birch and blackthorn. Never does it grow on other trees, and not always on those I have cataloged for you. But if moss or lichen loves the tree’s bole and clings to it like a tight-laced bodice, then there is a good chance of Fairbread. These fruits can only be seen in certain lights—in the first and last rays of the sun, and never when the wind blows from the east. You must stand beneath a tree, such as this apple, and look to the left. In the half-light your eyes may trick you—but if you glimpse, at the edges of sight, leafy sprouts and amongst them small spheres like softly glowing lamps, then you may reach up and pluck them. This is the Fairbread and provides much sustenance. But touch it not if you see it by night. Washed with starlight or moonlight, it may intoxicate the blood, and perilously.”

<<This is useful knowledge for travelers!>>

The greatest of the orchard’s windbreak trees had, in its youth, grown three main stems; over time they had thickened to massive girth. One had fallen long ago and lay on the ground, yet it thrived still. It had turned its new sprouts up toward the sky, sending out boughs that overarched to form the roof of a living bower. The branches of the other two trunks spread wide and wept downward. Their ends lay along the grass like many-fingered hands, tufted with verdant hair, the younger shoots yellow green against the dusky jade of their elders. Leaning on its elbows, the whole tree formed a natural chamber, thatched and walled with long leaves, and from the outside it resembled a leafy knoll.

An old rope swing dangled from one of the branches that reached like a rafter across this green hall. Imrhien seated herself on its wooden plank, but Thorn climbed into the branches above. He lay sprawled across the boughs, hanging on by some Dainnan art or gramarye, and pushed on the ropes.

“Unless you wish to fall, you cannot speak while you hold fast. Thus, I must sing to you.”

But the lyrics of the song he sang were shaped by a language she did not understand. It sounded like no Ertish dialect or any other tongue she had ever heard spoken, save only when Thorn had named the Dragon’s Blood or identified certain trees and flowers. The timbre and cadence of the words possessed a potent loveliness. Alien they were, but harmonious, thrilling. Although Imrhien could not know their meaning, they fell on her ears like sweet rain from some cloud-borne realm of crystal palaces a thousand feet tall, intersected with shafts of clear radiance and purple shadow. They whispered beckoningly to her, deeply stirring. They gave her half-glimpsed visions of wonder and lured her among stars larger and brighter than any that lit the skies of Erith, to a country beyond the shores of the known lands that was filled with peril and delight unguessed. Her imprisoned memory dragged at its chains, straining to be free. Slowly Thorn swung the ropes that lifted her, and then faster, higher, and his song changed like a swift river leaping and dancing down from high mountains, like a free bird, swooping and soaring, riding the back of the wind.

Imrhien swept back and forth through the sunlit air. First it would pour into her face like a gush of transparent mountain water, dragging her hair and garments backward; then for a heartbeat she would be weightless before falling backward with a rush, her hair billowing about her face in streamers, her skirts a flurry of fabric folds flapping at her feet. The exultation made her breathless. Through the long falls of leaves she flew, as though borne by sildron or upon a shang wind. She kicked her feet and would have laughed aloud, had she been able, but Thorn laughed for her, perceiving her joyousness as she tipped back her terrible face and let her hair swing out, careless as a child, until the tilting of the world made her dizzy and she clutched hard at the ropes, not knowing or caring whether sky and ground were above or below, because she would fly forever, as long as those hands held the ropes and she was holding them, too.

When Imrhien returned to the cottage, Silken Janet was clucking disapprovingly around Diarmid, holding up a little burnished bronze mirror for him.

“I’ve dyed thane eyebrows but will not do thane lashes—the dye can blind ’e. Black, ’e says, so black ’e gets, but it don’t suit tha, beggin’ thane pardon, sir. Thane own shade’s so comely, so rare. I’ve always thought, ’ow nice ’twould be tae ’ave Ertish blood and that lovely ’air like polished copper. I’d swap it for mine any day.”

“Do I appear Ertish now, madam?” said Diarmid, taking the mirror and peering into it so closely that his eyes crossed.

“Not at all, without that lovely red—the bone-shapes o’ your folk and mine bein’ much the same.”

The answer seemed to please Diarmid. Janet added:

“O’ course, tha has got them lovely blue Ertish eyes, like forget-me-nots.” Abruptly, Diarmid slammed down the mirror. Outside the window, startled rooks cawed contemptuous accusations among the trees.

Trenowyn came in carrying two longbows, his highly strung hound trotting at his heels.

“Thought I might get us a partridge for our supper.”

The Ertishman picked up a bow, examining it. “I should like to shoot those blasted rooks that are racketing by your gate.”

A crash made him jump. Janet had dropped a bowl. It lay in rocking shards. Trenowyn’s face was deeply graven stone, gray and haggard.

“Never shoot a rook,” he rasped, as if his throat had withered and dried, “never.”

Diarmid shrugged, clearly bewildered. “I jest.” He replaced the longbow on the table.

Slowly Trenowyn’s glare faded. He took up from where he had left off, as though nothing untoward had happened. “I also want to check on the wagon—to see how much ore the little miners have put in it by now. Don’t want it too heavy for the bullocks. Is it to your liking, sir, going after game fowls?”

It was to Diarmid’s liking. The men went off hunting together.

Toward evening, Imrhien was walking in the garden when she heard voices. Between the rowans she could see Silken Janet standing before the tall Dainnan, twisting her apron in her hands as though troubled. The tiny bells intended to ward off wights tinkled on the rowan boughs like the shang unstorm. Mellow light glowed on the western halves of the trees, casting blue shadows. Limned in sapphire and amber, these two made a pretty pair. Imrhien’s heart lurched. She hesitated in the shadow of the trees, unwilling to disturb their conversation yet fearful of what it might portend. They did not glance her way. On the breeze, their words were carried to her.

“I thank thee, sir, I thank thee with all my heart,” Janet was saying earnestly.

“You must be brave and steadfast,” said Thorn, looking down at the young woman with a curious mixture of mockery and gentleness, “but I’ll warrant you are that.”

“I shall try, sir, I shall. I cannot tell tha what this means tae me!”

She curtsied awkwardly but sweetly.

The Dainnan reached into Janet’s hair and pulled a silver piece from behind her ear. “An odd place to store money,” he said.

“’Tis not mine, sir!”

“No?” He tossed the coin in the air, and it vanished.

“Oh, sir! How did you do that?”

“Lose it? No matter—’tis easily found.” He plucked a coin out of the air. And another coin, and another. Cupping both hands around the silver pieces he said, “Blow on my fingers.”

She did so; he opened them, and a white dove flew up into the rowans.

“How swiftly money flies from our grasp!” exclaimed Thorn.

The girl clapped her hands. “That’s clever! Such pretty gramarye! Art tha wizard?”

“Call me wizard if you like.”

With a smile he left her, striding off among the rowans. Janet came hurrying back to the cottage and caught sight of Imrhien.

“Oh, me lady, come indoors now, me dove. ’Tis getting cold, and fire’s lit. I’ll ’ave some supper on table soon—rose-hip tart, if tha does like it.”

Janet would not hear of her guest lifting a finger to help. She sang as she busied herself in the larder, and when the table was laid and they were waiting for the men to arrive, she drew up a stool near to Imrhien and sat down, clapping her hands. Her eyes shone.

“Me lady, me dove, I ’ave tae tell somebody, I do, I’m fair burstin’ with me tidin’s. But I’ll start from the beginnin’.”

Then Silken Janet told a strange tale.

Many years ago, her father and mother had lived on a large estate outside Isenhammer. By the time they had been married seven years, they had seven sons. Despite their accumulation of expensive wizard’s charms, no daughter had been born to them. A daughter was what they craved, however, and when at last Goodwife Trenowyn gave birth to Janet, their happiness knew no limits.

In those days, Isenhammer’s most famous wizard sold a special water that, if used to bathe a child, promised lifelong protection against unseelie wights. It was most costly, but Janet’s mother and father were determined to have it for her.

“Take this gold, all our savings, and go to the wizard’s house,” they said to the seven boys. “Get the precious water of gramarye to bathe your sister.” The boys went off together and bought the water, but on the way back they dropped the vessel containing it, and it broke. Fearing to return to their parents’ house without the water, they loitered in the road, unable to decide what to do. Meanwhile their parents had been wondering what was keeping the boys. Their father’s annoyance increased, aggravated by the accusing cries of some rooks outside the window.

Evening closed in.

Trenowyn stood at the gate, looking up the road. He bade his servants to throw stones at the black birds and they flew off, but the sun was going down and still his sons had not returned.

“Where are those boys?” he raged. “How dare they delay like this! I wish they would all turn into rooks and fly away, curse them.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth he regretted them, but it was too late. Something wicked had been passing by in the road at that very moment, or perhaps lying in wait. There was a nickering in the hedgerows that might have been laughter, and seven big black birds came flying toward him. The servant made to throw stones, but Trenowyn stopped him. The rooks alighted on the fence, gave a cry of sorrow, then winged away into the south. Janet’s father knew at once that they were his boys, transformed by his own fault.

Over the next few years Trenowyn hired every wizard of any repute, begging them to put forth their powers and locate his sons. All their attempts failed, and Trenowyn’s fortune was soon whittled down to nought. His wife could never forgive him for his hasty ill-wrought curse, and in some oblique manner she let her blame spill over onto Janet, for whose benefit the boys had been bringing the water. She lost all joy in life, and after a time she went away, leaving both husband and young daughter. At last Trenowyn had to sell the large empty house. He and his daughter came to live as common carters and spinners in Rosedale.

“When I set eyes on thane ’andsome Dainnan, I bethought to meself, Now, me dove, there’s one who is wise. I might ask ’im if he knows ’ow tae get me brothers back. And so I did.”

Thorn had told Janet to take her father’s golden signet ring and journey to the southern shores of Eldaraigne. There she must board a Seaship to take her across the straits to remote Rimany—for he knew of a mountain in that land, well out of the way of Rimanian Windship and Stormrider routes, and on that mountain, it was said, stood a castle wherein dwelled twelve black birds, served by a dwarf. Only within the castle walls could these birds become human, for an hour a day—after that they must fly out the windows. Only if they walked out through the door could they stay in human shape, and only a maiden could unlock the door. So smooth and clear, so polished and gleaming, was this mountain that it seemed to be made of glass. This had earned it the name of Glass Mountain, but in truth it was a great frozen cliff of water, a glacier in the snowbound wastes of the southern land.

“’Ow should I get up a glass mountain?” I asked, and thane Dainnan told me I should go tae t’ old Arysk carlin as dwells near the foot of it, and tell ’er Sir Thorn sent me, and she would give me a pair o’ shoon, all made o’ iron, with spikes, and with them I could climb up! Ain’t that a wonder!

“When I reach the castle, I mun go carefully. Sir Thorn says the seven birds will be quite wild now, after eighteen years. They will not recognize their sister and, thinking me a stranger, they be likely tae set upon me and tear me tae pieces.

“I mun go quietlike tae t’ castle door, which will be locked. Then I mun blow three times intae t’ key’ole and stick in t’ little finger o’ me left hand. Door will open, Sir Thorn says. ’Tis a finger-lock on that castle door, see, me dove. Once inside, I mun use me wits tae ’elp me brothers. By the ring they will know me, but if they see me before they see the ring, I will be killed.” She waxed pensive. “Ah, but I wish tha could speak wi’ me, lady me dove, an’ tell me thane thoughts, for I never ’ad much company ’ere, an’ I would so love a good chat. I be all keyed up now and ready to go. That cold land, Rimany where the Arysk folk do dwell—Sir Thorn told me about it, an’ I fain would fly there at once, if I ’ad wings.

“Sir Thorn said I mun go alone to t’ Glass Mountain, me dove,” she continued, “and ’e knows the lore of the wights, knows all their rules. So I shall not tell me da’. I never ’ave deceived ’im afore, but if I told ’im, ’e would want to go by ’imself, or at least go along wi’ me. Meanin’ no disrespect, if any were to go with me, I’d as lief it were Sir Thorn. Ain’t never seen ’is like before.” She sighed. “And never will again, I ’spect. Now there be a man tae make thane ’ead swim and thane ’eart bubble like a brook.”

Trenowyn and Diarmid arrived at the cottage with a brace of gorcocks. Later, Thorn came in and they all sat down to dine together. It was a merry meal, even more so than breakfast; Janet’s eyes were bright and rested often on Thorn. Her laughter joined frequently with his, until even dour Diarmid and her grim father had to smile, blaming it all on the strong mead. They sang many songs and told many tales. Imrhien could only listen and watch, but she made the best of it and tried not to feel shut out, alone in the darkness of silence.

The next morning, all were up early. The rooster was crowing madly in the hen house, and from the treetops, magpies were warbling their strangely poignant bell-calls. Clouds rested on the heads of the hills. Janet, having milked the curly brown cow, sat astride its back and rode out to the meadow, singing at the top of her voice. Imrhien said goodbye to the cockerel, in handspeak. It looked at her with a glassy eye, surrounded by hens.

Janet and her father pressed all kinds of food and drink and spare clothing on their guests. “And if you would wait two days more,” said Trenowyn, “you might ride with me when I drive to town. But there is not yet enough ore in the wagon to make the journey worthwhile, and if I take it now, the knockers will be angry.”

“Good sir,” said the Dainnan, “your hospitality knows no bounds, but now that we are rested we are eager to be on our way. We can stay no longer.”

Diarmid said, “Since I heard of the recruiting for the Dainnan Brotherhood at Isenhammer, all my thought is there.”

Imrhien merely nodded.

“Then,” Trenowyn said, “good speed, and the fruit of errantry and valor to you in the mouths of poets forever.”

“And to you,” returned Thorn.

Morning mists still lay upon the hilltops, and dew sparkled on the grass. Leaves, dark and glossy, dripped liquid silver. Glittering cobwebs laced the garden-hedge.

By the gate in the lane they took their leave of Silken Janet and her father. Their breath turned to vapor on the biting air. Overhead, the goshawk swooped and gave a piercing cry that startled all the magpies. They rose out of the trees like smoke. In reply, the cock crowed defiantly from behind the cottage. The sound rang between the hills. Over Woody Hill a Windship sailed, an alabaster leaf in a wide, cloud-daubed sky tinted lilac and mauve.

The lane became a track that took the travelers winding up the hill and over it. They stopped on the brow for one last look back at the two small figures waving by the gate, then stepped forward. Briar Cottage disappeared from view.

Like fish’s scales, mosaics of cloud rippled across a turquoise sky. The last of Autumn’s leaves rained like shreds of opalescent silk to become part of the mold underfoot, for it was the first day of Nethilmis, the cloud-month, and Winter had already begun to settle her chilly mantle over the land. Through undulating, lightly wooded country, the three companions followed the track; over little wooden bridges and around the skirts of hills, with Errantry following above, Thorn singing, and Diarmid whistling like a blackbird. The Ertishman’s wounds had healed with remarkable speed—all that remained were the lightning marks on his hands and a small white scar on his brow.

They went with good speed and spent the night in a deserted shepherd’s hut, made cozy with beds of dry fern and a blaze in the fireplace. Thorn’s cloak remained buried somewhere in the mines along with his other gear that had been lost, but Janet had provided other cloaks, thick and tightly woven, which proved almost as warm. A shang wind passed through the region during the dark hours. Imrhien half woke to its tingling spell.

On the following day the track met the Road, but it was not the Road as they had left it. Last seen, it had been overshadowed by trees, hemmed in by wight-haunted forest. Now it was open and clear, rolling away over gentle slopes under a fleecy sky. No traffic could be seen in either direction. They struck out, Thorn setting a cracking pace, impatient to make up for lost time. Late in the day, they found shelter in a shallow cave under a hill and made camp.

In the afternoon of the third day, with the sun a bonfire in a smoky haze, they came to the King’s Cross. Here the Road swept around a central square, from which it branched in four directions. In the middle of this square squatted a massive plinth from which a stone column thrust skyward. It was topped by a statue of a horseman wearing a crowned helm, facing west to Caermelor. His chiseled tabard was emblazoned with the crowned lion device of the Royal House of D’Armancourt. On the pillar’s base were engraved the distances to towns and cities in all four directions.

The Crown and Lyon Inn stood at the northeast corner of the crossroads. Its half-timbered upper stories, high pinnacled gables, and numerous chimneys commanded a good view of the countryside and the junction. On the topmost gable, a weather-cock swung to the west. As darkness fell, lamplight streamed out between the windows’ mullions.

“In Gilvaris Tarv the mercenaries speak of this establishment,” said Diarmid. “It has long been haunted by a buttery wight, one of those creatures that has power over all ill-gotten gains and dishonestly prepared food. Years ago the wight was thriving. Word got about. Folk started to talk about the old taverner’s deceitful ways and how he watered the ale and served dog-pie. The wight grew fat and bloated. Patronage declined, until at last the old taverner departed. The new landlord now keeps a good, clean table, and the Crown and Lyon’s reputation is restored. Here we should break our journey one last time before we part.”

“I would not tarry, but for the sake of friendship,” replied the Dainnan. At these words, great desolation overcame Imrhien, but resolutely she set her shoulders, pulled her taltry well forward, and entered the common room of the inn with her companions.

It was not crowded, but such occupants as it possessed were milling around a table where a speaker was holding forth at length, captivating his audience. It was impossible to see him through the press. The three newcomers sat at an unoccupied table near the window and ordered ale. Imrhien kept her face in shadow. At the next table, two rustics were involved in an eccentric exchange; a yokel was stubbornly trying to impress his sweetheart’s father.

“Sir, might I buy ye a double john-barleycorn?”

“Nay, thank ye. Naught for me.”

“What about a single?”

“No, gramercie—naught.”

“Ale? Dandelion wine? Lemon-water?”

“No, I’d as fain not.”

“What about a posset?”

“Nay, for certain.”

“Ptisan? Gruel?”

A shake of the head.

“Well then, a triple grape-brandy?”

“Oh, aye, that I will.”

When the serving-girl returned, Diarmid said to her, “They say these premises are troubled by a buttery wight.”

For the first time, the girl noticed the Dainnan, lit by the smoky lamplight. She gasped, almost dropping her laden tray. Her hands trembled as she set frothing tankards on the table. Their lids were missing, the hinges broken; they had been well used over the years. Recovering her composure, she answered proudly, “Good gentlemen, the Crown and Lyon has the leanest, most hollow-bellied buttery wight of any tavern in the five kingdoms—too weak to lift even an empty cup.” She was about to elaborate further when Diarmid interrupted:

“Your customer over there has an attentive audience. Pray, what draws them so?”

“Why, sir,” she said with a polite bob, a dimpled smile, and a sidelong glance at the Dainnan from beneath her lashes, “he and a party of other folk have just come in today. Survivors of an attack on a road-caravan some while back—they had been given up for lost—”

With a loud bang, Diarmid’s bench toppled backward as he jumped up. White-faced, he sprang toward the crowds, elbowing them apart. The serving-girl stood openmouthed. Curses flew from the disturbed knot of patrons, then a stream of Ertish from Diarmid, and suddenly he was calling out Muirne’s name over and over, laughing and weeping and clasping his sister in his arms, she shrieking and crying as she clung to him. Imrhien tried to push through to join them, but there were too many broad backs and hefty shoulders in the way. She returned to the table.

Thorn remained calmly seated, his elbow resting on the rough planks of the table. He signed, <<A happy meeting.>>

When the chaos had died down somewhat, Diarmid extricated Muirne from the melee and introduced her to Thorn. Next, all gentlemanly reserve cast to the winds, the Ertishman felt driven to introduce himself to all and sundry, in great excitement, and to call for ale to be served to everyone in the house. Now that the Dainnan’s presence had been discovered, Thorn became the focus of attention. Dainnan uniform commanded the respect and admiration of all citizens, and they looked upon him as though he had stepped out of legend. The unexpected presence of such an honorable personage in such comely form had disconcerted the serving-girl exceedingly, and she was not alone in her awe.

Muirne beckoned Imrhien away. She was glad to follow. Many folk had commented on her looks, in case she was unaware of them, and she had withdrawn deeper into her taltry.

“I am mighty glad to see you, chehrna,” Muirne said as the two embraced. “I thought you were lost.”

<<Muirne>>—the sign for Muirne’s name was the sign for a sparrow—<<my dear friend. How came you here?>>

“After the attack, when we all became separated, I could not find you and Diarmid, but I stumbled upon a band of stalwarts from our caravan and some other women, and then a few more caravaners found us. Fifteen we were, in all. We salvaged a wagon and caught some of the strayed horses to pull it, and—oh, we had many adventures along the Road, too many to tell in one sitting, but we got through, and only today we made it this far. I still cannot believe it! But come—join the revelry, dear Imrhien.”

Imrhien shook her head—it was not pleasant to be among staring strangers. Thorn, surrounded by awed onlookers competing to buy ale for him, was regaling them with tales of adventure. Diarmid had already ordered a second round and, tankard in hand, was talking earnestly with other men who had got safely through from Chambord’s Caravan. When asked about the terrible scenes they had witnessed after the attack, some looked grim, others turned their faces away. They would not speak of it and were glad enough of pleasant diversion. When Diarmid began his own heroic tales, they all clapped him on the shoulder and told him what a good fellow he was, especially when he called for their tankards to be filled a third time. Some more travelers came in, and there ensued a general party, which looked as though it would last well into the night. In the wide hearth, a fire bristled.

Imrhien signed to Muirne, <<I will retire early to my chamber—the serving-girl told me it is ready.>>

“Oh,” replied the Ertish girl, but you will come with us in the morning won’t you? Diarmid is accompanying me and my companions on the wagon. He and I are going to Isenhammer together. I am going to enlist in the King-Emperor’s army as an archer, and Diarmid shall try for the Dainnan. Most of the other survivors came hither to enlist, too—those that did not will be heading to Caermelor on foot. Where is the Dainnan captain who was with you? The one introduced to me as Thorn? Diarmid speaks of him highly. There he is! I would like to thank him. Obban tesh, but he is handsome—” She broke off at the sound of her name being shouted across the room.

“I must go. Diarmid calls. Sleep well, dear friend, since that is your wish—I shall greet you again in the morning.”

A knot of people opened up to receive Muirne and closed behind her again. Thorn was by now seated on a table, the center of a sea of attentive faces. They hung on his every word. The tavern-girls blushed each time they glanced in his direction.

Guided by the girl who had first served them, Imrhien stole upstairs and retired to bed. She lay for hours staring at the warped rafters, wondering about White Down Rory and listening to the songs and laughter and hubbub from below. She could clearly hear what was going on in the common room. A customer had produced a puzzle-cup in the form of a double vessel, one bowl forming the inverted base of the other, which swiveled between brackets. Several uninitiated applicants were invited to drink from it and predictably drenched themselves, to the entertainment of the onlookers. The jollity increased when someone else brought out a three-merry-boys fuddling cup, a trio of mugs whose bodies were joined and whose handles were interlinked so that they had to be emptied simultaneously to prevent spillage. With the roistering in full swing, the patrons were ordering ale and cider in measures: pottles, noggins, tappit hens, mutchkins, and thirdendales. Rowdy song arose.

Later, oddly, the talk quietened. More sobering tidings were discussed. Hordes of unseelie things had been passing through in the night, and these days the innkeeper made certain his doors were heavily barred with iron at sunset.

As Imrhien listened, half dozing in her bed, ever and anon a tall, lithe shadow moved across her thoughts. The shutters of her window blew open in the breeze. A big black bird flapped out of the night, landed on the sill, and flew away again. When she got up to fasten the shutters properly, there was no sign of it.

In the morning, a wagon stood ready and packed on the cobblestones of the inn-yard. Muirne’s companions were climbing aboard. A stableboy went running, an ostler called out orders. Sparrows perched on posts, watching for crumbs. A green-varnished saurian crouched atop a rain-butt, its spiny tail curling down like a hook. Behind a pile of bags and barrels, someone was whistling. The yard was busy with preparations for travel.

Thorn stood by a side-door. The innkeeper, rotund, rubicund, and balding—as seemed almost obligatory for those who pursued his trade—and swathed in a large smirched apron, stood before him, bowing repeatedly. The man’s voice carried across the yard.

“’Tis an honor, sir, an honor, I assure you, sir. Please accept the night’s lodging and all expenses on the house, sir, if it please you, and all the very best to you and those of your fellowship. We don’t see many of Roxburgh’s knights here, no indeed, sir, even being as we are so close to the Royal City, so to speak—but they’re always welcome any time, at the Crown and Lyon.” He pressed gifts of food on the Dainnan, who waved most of them away, laughing. Many a covert glance was being cast his way from the staff and the inn-patrons moving about. They watched him with awe, not openly but from a respectful distance, feigning preoccupation with their business.

Imrhien had paid Diarmid’s bill. To his consternation, he had recalled too late that his money-pouch lay submerged somewhere in the meres of Mirrinor, and in the heat of the moment he had landed himself badly in debt. Imrhien still retained her own pouch with its three jewels concealed under Janet’s clothes, but she paid the innkeeper with one of the sovereigns that had remained secure in the linings of her old, ruined traveling outfit—for which she received seven shillings and sixpence change. The Ertishman’s discomfiture knew no bounds—to be indebted to a girl was more than he could bear—but Muirne’s money, too, was scarce, and there was nothing else for it.

“To you I owe my life and now my purse,” Diarmid said awkwardly to Imrhien. “I shall repay you, I promise, just as soon as I receive my first wages.”

<<It was nothing. You have been a staunch friend and ally. I am in your debt.>>

“Will you not accompany us to Isenhammer?” Muirne pleaded.

<<I go to the carlin.>>

“I will escort you, then,” Diarmid said heavily. “It is not safe to travel alone, especially for a woman.”

“Go your way to Isenhammer, Captain Bruadair,” interrupted a musical voice. “The road to White Down Rory is fair in all seasons, and I would fain take a stroll along it.” Thorn had crossed the yard to where they stood.

Diarmid’s halfhearted protestations were overruled. He looked constantly toward his sister and the loaded wagon bound for Isenhammer. Plainly he was relieved to be absolved of his perceived duty toward Imrhien.

“Then, I shall go with Muirne,” he said at last. “My lady Imrhien, prithee send word to let us know where you are lodging, and I shall have repayment delivered to you with all speed.” Now that he was taking his leave, he spoke with painful courtesy, unable to meet Imrhien’s eyes. “I … you have been kind …” His words trailed away. Turning to the Dainnan, the Ertishman lifted his head.

“My lord,” Diarmid said, clearly moved, “if I am successful in assaying for the Brotherhood, then I would have only one boon in the world left to wish for—that I might do my duty under your command.”

“That may yet come to pass,” said Thorn. Abruptly, Diarmid dropped down on one knee and bent his head. After a moment, as if bestowing on him some title of honor, Thorn touched him on the shoulder.

“Rise, brave captain, and good speed. Fare well.”

Diarmid stood up. “Fare well, both my companions on the Road,” he said. “May we meet soon.”

He bowed deeply to them both, then, as an afterthought, suddenly enveloped Imrhien in a swift embrace and jumped up onto the wagon. Imrhien’s hands danced urgently.

<<Good speed, Diarmid; good speed, Muirne. Our meeting is short-lived—may we meet again soon, and for longer!>>

Diarmid reached down and helped his sister climb aboard. Then Imrhien tossed up a wrapped package to them. It contained the fire-red ruby. If her friends should not find success in Isenhammmer, at the least they would not have to beg on the streets. Before they had a chance to find out what the parcel contained or even to call out their thanks, the driver gave a shout. With the crack of a whip, a clatter of hooves, and a rattle of iron wheels, the wagon moved out through the archway, turned into the road, and bowled away.

It had rained during the night. Thorn’s and Imrhien’s boots swished through wet leaves. Lacking polish, Imrhien’s allowed water in. Soon her feet were drenched. The grasses by the verge, tall and cream-colored amid new blades of pale wine-green, bowed their heads in obeisance to the faintest caress of air. Thrushes trilled. Errantry soared overhead, scattering the songbirds, then swooped to alight on the Dainnan’s shoulder. He raised his feathers, shook them into place, opened his hooked beak in silent commentary, and snapped it shut.

Sunlight brushed Imrhien’s skin with warm flakes, although the breeze was knife-sharp and bitter. Stamped against a blue enamel sky, the first wattle-blooms of Winter bubbled in bright, soft gilt on the trees and powdered the distance with gold-dust. Oak-leaves yet clung to ancient groves by the wayside, in masses of bronze and saffron that could not outshine the wattles’ glory. But Imrhien might as well have been walking in a black tunnel under Doundelding, being blind to all save the path before her feet and deaf to all save the voice of he who walked beside her.

The road to White Down Rory ran up and down, through trees that parted occasionally to allow glimpses of rolling meadows and wooded slopes beyond and secret, misty dells threaded by streams glimmering like electrum. The way rolled down into one of these dells and ran beside a willow-lined beck that widened into a pool. Dragonflies flickered across its surface—at least, they appeared to be dragonflies until one looked closely. In fact, the forms between those shimmering double vanes were tiny folk, much smaller than siofra. Toadlike waterleapers scattered into the reeds at the approach of the intruders, flapping their fans of wings. When fully grown they would be huge and quite terrible, if they survived to adulthood.

There the travelers stopped to rest, and from a wallet given him by the innkeeper Thorn produced great doorsteps of bread and thick slices of ham. Her heart sickened by the imminence of parting, Imrhien could not bring herself to eat. Presently he put the food away without sampling it himself.

All the way, as they walked side by side, he had laughed and sung and they had made jokes in hand-speak, and she had taught him the sign for “shang.” Travelers coming the other way on horseback had hailed them blithely, without pausing, and he had called a greeting in answer. Now he fell quiet, meditative, watching the still pool with its reflections of bare willow-withes and dormant cloudlets. The goshawk perched on a branch and closed his mad orange eyes.

Where the stream entered the pool, Imrhien found smooth, water-worn stones, flat ones, and skipped one across the water to break Thorn’s reverie. He looked up with his flash of a smile like a piercing blow to the heart and came, surefooted as a lynx, to the stream.

“How many times can you skip a stone?”

Having practiced with Sianadh at Waterstair, Imrhien had almost perfected the subtle flick of the wrist. After a few tries, she achieved an eight. Thorn spun a few pebbles that bounded high, then sank.

<<You must do better!>> she signed.

He nodded and gathered another handful.

Sianadh had been a great stone-skipper at Waterstair—the champion (so he said) of his village in Finvarna—but she had never seen him skip one more than a dozen times. Thorn’s missiles now jumped twice seven, thrice seven, thrice nine times, and though she tried she could not match that and flung away her last pebble, half-vexed, half-admiring. A haggard hand shot up out of the water, caught it, and slowly withdrew. The pool was inhabited.

Thorn juggled pebbles and made them vanish and reappear.

<<Teach me!>>

He let the stones fall. They rolled on the turf.

<<I would, but there is no time. The day wears away. We must press on.>>

The road was pot-holed and strewn with fallen leaves. Wheel-ruts were many, and the leaves looked as though they had been disturbed recently, as if many travelers had passed to and from White Down Rory. They met a wagonload of folk journeying from the village, then others on foot, staves in hand.

The sun wheeled its way to a low Winter apogee behind the clouds, which thinned and drifted northward, leaving only the white scuff-marks of their passing. Daylight sharpened each feature of the landscape, imbuing them with every tint of green, every shade of somber gold. Near at hand, the leaves were etched by their own shadows; far off, pastel chalk-dust overlaid the dozing hills.

Long shadows were stretching to the east when at last the travelers walked over the crest of a hill and saw below, down among the folds of the hills, the roofs of a village. The road ran swiftly down. Thorn turned his compelling eyes on Imrhien.

“To which house are you bound?”

Ethlinn had given clear directions: <<A track leads to the right, at the bottom of this hill. It skirts the village proper, passing over a bridge.>>

Imrhien guessed the Dainnan was impatient to be on the road to Caermelor. He had accompanied her this far out of courtesy—one of the precepts of the Dainnan code was respect for women. But now, within sight of the village, there was no need for her to delay him any longer. Besides, if he continued by her side, there would come a time when her growing distress would well up and show itself.

The road entered a thick clump of trees at the bottom of the hill. It was here that the track branched off. Just past the intersection, it turned suddenly and vanished from sight behind the grove.

<<Leave me here. Turn back for Caermelor. I have not far to travel now. I shall he safe enough.>>

“As you wish.”

Imrhien turned away from Thorn and strove to master her thoughts. Her hands were shaking violently. She heard him step close beside her shoulder, felt his heavy cloak blow against her skirts.

“Change your path. There is yet time.”

He was a dark flame. His nearness was too near—she must die of it.

“Come with me to the court.”

She started, as if stung. What? Go with him among the courtiers? To be made a laughingstock or, worse, to see him made one? To have to bear the pitying glances and the whispered asides? Yet there was that in the intense gaze he bent upon her that might have melted quartz-crystal to milk. Avoiding it, fixing her eyes on the ground, she shook her head.

<<No.>>

“Are you sure of this, in your heart?”

A nod.

Imrhien noticed a small thistle that was growing between two stones in the road, just beside the toe of her boot. Its leaves were dagged like the sleeves of aristocrats. She forced her attention to dwell on that thistle.

“Then we must part,” she heard Thorn say, “for my path lies to the west. Yet methinks it may be long ere we meet again, caileagh faoileag.”

Silence. She dared not raise her head, for he would not fail to observe that she stared with the eyes of madness. Dimly, from far above, the plangent cry of the goshawk was borne down the breeze.

“I must needs ask you—a matter has been troubling me.” On the brink of a question, he hesitated, sighed. “No. It is not possible. But there is something about you, I thought …”

He extricated something from beneath his tunic. “This, a gift for you.”

It was the red crystal phial of Dragon’s Blood that he dropped into her palm. Tears pricked behind her eye sockets. What had she to give him in return? To gift him with one of her jewels seemed paltry and somehow discourteous.

“May I have something of yours?”

<<Anything.>>

Three sudden, sharp pains. Her hand flew to her head. A trio of golden hairs lay in Thorn’s palm. “These I shall take as a token,” he said, twisting the fine filaments together and rolling them into a circle. “Safely shall I keep them.” He placed the ring on a finger of his left hand. “And now, since the phial was nothing, what would you truly ask of me?”

The thought flashed into Imrhien’s head, unbidden: A kiss. She hoped he had not read it on her countenance. In her confusion, her hands faltered, bungling the signs.

<<I would like to tell you with my voice that I wish for your blessing on my enterprise. I go now to the carlin who dwells here in the hope that she might heal my face—restore something of what I was—I ask your good wishes for this undertaking.>>

He nodded and stood a moment as if pondering. Then swiftly, before she understood what was happening, he stepped forward, placed one hand gently under her chin and the other behind her head, and kissed her full on the mouth.

Only twice before had there been direct contact between them. Now, bolts like the Beithir’s, only sweet as ecstasy, went through and through from head to toe, over and over, until she thought she must die; then he released her quickly and strode away up the hill, and she fled, stumbling, weeping, through the trees.

Salt tears coursed down Imrhien’s face, stinging. The footpath in its ribbed tunnel became blurred, swimming in grief and loss. She ran faster, to outstrip sorrow, to leave it behind, but always it followed close at her heels. Away and around and down, over the bridge and up and around again, now slicing between high hedges or under stone walls, now passing across open turf, now through an oak coppice, now beneath the spreading boughs of chestnuts, black in the fading light. Eerie, slitted eyes glared from among tree-roots and winked out. Sudden laughter rattled in outlandish throats. Things scurried suddenly, unseen. A white hare bounded across the path. Something hooted.

Ahead, warm yellow lamplight spilled from two windows and filtered through the trees, growing stronger as she neared it. Her face drenched with salt water, she found herself at a cottage door. The tears would not stop, nor did she care anymore, although they made her flesh itch intolerably. Distraught, she thumped her fists on the portal and slumped against it, dragging in breath with hoarse gasps.

When the door opened she half fell inside, was caught by strong arms, and looked into the face of an old woman. The beldame held her shoulders in an iron grip for a few moments. Her left eye bestowed on the unexpected visitor a searching stare. There was a hollow where her right eye had been. The eyelids were crudely stitched shut. Above the eyes, a painted blue disk on the forehead.

“Great ganders, what’s all this?” exclaimed the woman. “Govern yourself, colleen!”

Shudders racked Imrhien’s body. The crone led her to a straw pallet and bade her lie down.

“It will be a cure for the paradox you’re wanting, no doubt. That much I can see. I shall do what can be done. But first, drink this. ’Twill calm you.”

Imrhien gulped the liquid. The flavor was unusual but not unpleasant, reminiscent of riverside herbs nodding in the rain—cool and fragrant. Tranquillity flowed along her veins. She lay quiescent. Only her face still itched, and she tore at it idly with her fingernails.

“Stop that. It is for me to see to.” The carlin drew Imrhien’s hand away, firmly. Placing her own sinewy hands on her patient’s face, she hesitated, then drew a sharp breath.

The girl cared little. An irresistible desire to sleep had surged over her, and she abandoned herself to it, closing her eyes and drifting. The carlin’s voice seemed to issue from far away:

“Very well, sleep now. That will give me time to mix up the mud.”

Then sleep’s dark current carried her away under the green herbs that overgrew its banks, in a ceaseless rain.

There was a face, once. It had been the first one. But it was more than a face—it was comfort to assuage yearning, satiation to defeat hunger, warmth to drive out chill, cool to calm heat, movement instead of stillness, company against loneliness, sweet sounds to alleviate silence, peace to replace distress. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth—there was nothing else about it—no characteristics of age or gender, yet it was the one face to be recognized above all. It meant the source of life.

Its disappearance had precipitated a void that sucked the light out of that part of existence.

The second face had begun like the first, as beloved, yet differently. It had evolved, over time, and become the countenance of a man of wisdom and kindness, the corners of his eyes crinkled with good humor. Always he had been there, smiling down from a great height: solid, dependable.

The third face had altered, too. It had made its appearance on the edges of the lacuna left by the first, beginning as no more than a blur, an irritation to be dismissed, but evolving to be the sweet visage of a little child: precious, cherished, a friend and companion, a marigold. Apple-blossoms reached over the child’s head. Petals drifted like snow. Small green fruits swelled and ripened on the boughs, like red lamps, and were gathered …

Woman, man, child. A dream?

A churning of thoughts, released by sleep, or, at last, some memory?

For as long as she could remember, the rain had been drumming its impatient fingers. Seemingly it had done so since time itself had begun—but no, it had been raining only during the night, and now the night was over.

Imrhien was lying on a straw pallet among blankets of white wool. There were bunches of herbs hanging from the rafters, a mortar and pestle on a low table, and a boy kneeling, building up the fire. He finished his task, glanced at her, and moved away. She raised herself on one elbow and saw, through narrow slits, Maeve One-Eye sitting in a chair, watching her. The beldame’s shaggy bush of hair stuck out in all directions like spikes of frost.

Imrhien’s face felt odd—very peculiar indeed. It still itched, but not unbearably, and it tingled. Her cheeks were numb to the touch, and stiff; her eyes would not open properly.

“You will not feel a thing under all that mud,” observed the carlin. “I put it on you while you slept. That way, I knew you would, at least, not wriggle about. It is caked on thickly, and it has dried—do not try to smile—you will find it impossible. All the way from Mount Baelfire it is, the blue mud—that’s the only place in Erith you can get the really good stuff. You look a terrible sight, I can tell you. Once it has soaked right into the poisoned areas, the mud will flake off of its own accord and take some of the bad flesh with it. How long that will take, I cannot say—it varies with each case. It might be one day or three, or ten, but you will not be able to eat while it is on, only sip through a hollow reed, so I hope you are not hungry. Look in the glass, over there by the window.”

Light-headed, Imrhien stood up. Immediately the itching returned with redoubled force. The carlin’s long mirror stood by the window. It was made of glass and silver, the frame wrought in the shapes of twining lilies and watermaidens with flowing hair. The surface gleamed like watersheen—an eldritch-seeming looking-glass.

Imrhien viewed in it her reflection, tall and slender, dressed in the country garb of Rosedale. Her long hair cascaded free of the wimple, in ringlets and straight tresses, like skeins of tangled silk, framing a mask with two slits for eyeholes. But the irritation of salt tears under the hardened mud was too much to bear, and she raised her hands to her face. Somehow she must find relief. Her fingers worried at the mud-mask, and it came off in her hands.

It lifted off in one entire piece.

Beneath it, the face.

Ah, the face. The lips formed such a perfect, rosy bow, as though painted upon the smooth, creamy peach of the skin. Clean-molded lines, high cheekbones, a softly rounded chin and small, neat nose, the soft curve of the cheek, arched eyebrows, the great jewels of eyes, fringed with their sweeping lashes—this was the face looking back at Imrhien from the glass.

Scarcely knowing what was happening, not daring to believe, she touched that face with her fingertips, explored it all over, gently, and it did not disappear; only, color like roses flooded it, and the light of morning sprang into the eyes. The lump that had been sticking in her throat ever since she awoke expanded painfully now.

Was it beauty or homeliness that gazed out of the mirror’s frame? She could not tell, for aesthetic perception is subjective, and she habitually assumed the source of her own reflection was repugnant. Only, she knew that it was symmetrical and thus more acceptable than before. More acceptable—that was all she had hoped for.

By her side, Maeve One-Eye gently took the hollow mask of mud from the girl’s frozen hand. The carlin had been gazing in silence. She squinted, as if she perceived a bright light that hurt her eye or a sight she would rather not have seen.

Now she spoke.

“Well. This has worked a wonder. See you, lass? See you?”

The lump broke apart. A force welled up and gushed forth.

“Yes. I see,” softly Imrhien said.

Acknowledgments

Much research has gone into portraying wights as “accurately” as possible—that is, true to their traditional folk origins. It has been a joy to rescue the early written records of these traditions from the cobwebby darkness of out-of-printness. By weaving them into my tale, I hope to bring them into the light of the twenty-first century, as they deserve.

The Each Uisge and the Water-Bull: Inspired by Popular Tales of the West Highlands, by J. F. Campbell. Alexander, Gardner, Paisley and London, 1890–93.

The Duergar: Inspired by Folk-Tales of the North Country, by F. Grice. Nelson, London and Edinburgh, 1944.

The Beulach Beast: Inspired by “The Biasd Bheulach” in Witchcraft and the Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, by J. G. Campbell. MacLehose, Glasgow, 1902.

The Buggane: Inspired by A Manx Scrapbook, by Walter Gill. Arrowsmith, London, 1929.

The Trathley Kow: Inspired by “The Hedley Kow” in Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, by William Henderson. Folk-Lore Society, London, 1879.

Cobie Will and the Sleepers: Inspired by The Denham Tracts, edited by James Hardy. Folk-Lore Society, London, 1892.

The Lake Cow:

Come thou, Einion’s Yellow One,

Stray-horns, The Parti-coloured Lake Cow,

And the hornless Dodin,

Arise, come home.

Sourced from The Four Ancient Books of Wales, by W. F. Skene. Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh, 1868.

The Pipes Leantainn: Inspired by “The Friar and the Boy,” by W. Carew Hazlitt, in National Tales and Legends, London, 1899.

The Trow-Wives and the Swatts: Inspired by “The Trows’ Revenge” in County Folk-Lore III: Orkney and Shetland, edited by G. F. Black. Folk-Lore Society, London, 1903.

The Trows and the Trow-Stock: Inspired by “Da Trow’s Bundle” in County Folk-Lore III: Orkney and Shetland, edited by G. F. Black. Folk-Lore Society, London, 1903.

The Spinner with the Long Lip: Inspired by Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, by William Henderson. Folk-Lore Society, London, 1879.

The Trow-Boy Who Stole Silver: Inspired by Shetland Traditional Lore, by Jessie M. E. Saxby, Norwich, London, 1888.

The trow-boy’s lament, “… when I be allowed to veesit Trowland for a peerie start—but a’ I gets is eggshells tae crack atween me teeth followed by a lunder upon me lugs and a wallop ower me back. So I wanders wanless, poor object!” is quoted from this source.

The Trow-Wife’s Song:

Hey! co Cuttie an’ ho! co Cuttie,

An’ wha’ill dance wi’ me? co Cuttie.

She luked aboot an’ saw naebody,

Sae I’ll henk awa’ mesel’, co Cuttie.

Quoted from page 39 of Shetland Folk Lore, by John Spence. Johnson & Grieg, Lerwick, 1899.

The Lady of the Sorrows

Book Two of the Bitterbynde Trilogy

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

INTRODUCTION

The Writing of The Bitterbynde

In the words of the incomparable Tanith Lee, ‘the story began with a feeling…’

People have asked me, ‘How much of the whole story did you have in mind when you began writing The Bitterbynde Trilogy? Did it grow organically as you wrote, or was it clear from the start?’

I’ve known since around the age of seven, when I read The Chronicles of Narnia, that I wanted to write—one day—a very long story set in a world of my own creation. When I was nine, reading Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time and walking the landscape of Middle Earth in the company of Strider and the hobbits, a flash of utter yearning set this goal in carborundum.

During childhood and young adulthood I wrote many long stories set in fantastic realms. Feelings and inspirations crowded in on me in legions. At some point, one of them began to stand out, to tug at me and demand to be listened to. It was a sense of searching for something lost.

Not merely a lost thing; a lost and beautiful thing, a marvelous, noble, unparalleled thing, or perhaps a place…

That’s how it all began. I, the writer, began at last to construct in words that world. My world.

Yet I myself was lost; as lost and amnesiac as my protagonist. Where was my story going? Where had it come from? I did not know, so I simply kept writing and world-building, luxuriously drawing in objects and emotions and landscapes and scenes I loved. It came to me that this was the story I had always dreamed of writing. And I wrote it for myself, not knowing whether anyone else would ever read it, never showing it to other eyes.

Eventually there came a time when I had to know whither my pen (I wrote longhand, as you can see by the images included in this edition) was taking me, and why. That was when the long hours of cogitating commenced. I’m sure I must have spent hours gazing at nothing while possible scenarios played out in my head. There were many. How did I choose one? Because it felt right. That’s the only way I can describe it. Everything else felt wrong, and only one choice felt right.

The plot began to take shape.

I believed at first that I was writing a novel. Typically (I find it hard to write short stories) it turned into a trilogy, and fortunately that trilogy divided itself naturally into three parts without any conniving from me.

I write not like a bricklayer building a wall, course upon course from one side to the other, but like a child doing (and sometimes undoing) a jigsaw puzzle. I leap ahead, go back, slide sideways, chop out a paragraph here and insert a paragraph there. If anyone had asked what chapter I was up to, it would have been almost impossible to say.

Following are some questions about the Bitterbynde which have been put to me by readers and interviewers, and which do have answers.

Question: ‘Did you have the landscapes and feasting descriptions in your head/heart/psyche before you put the stories together, then link them with the characters you envisaged?’

Yes. If that particular universe exists within my skull, then the world of Aia formed like whirling fragments coalescing to form a planet; fragments of the real world, snatches of things I’ve read, or heard, or seen. The characters arrived later—though even they had predecessors in my early scribblings.

John Berlyne, interviewing me for Science Fiction Review, posed this question: ‘The language used in the writing of this book is very rich—the whole experience is like eating a very rich meal. There is great enjoyment in the digestion. Is this something you employ in all your general style writing or something you’ve used specifically to tell this story?’

My answer: ‘It is my general writing style. I’m interested in art and—I don’t think it’s true synaesthesia—I associate some words and letters with certain colours. When writing The Bitterbynde I wanted to use as many colours as possible from the lavish English language palette, simply because they are there for the taking.’

In my first year at university I entered the library seeking an English dictionary, which I visualised as a single, fat book. Rounding the dusty corner of an aisle, I was gobsmacked to discover the entire Oxford.

I stood gaping at this treasure trove for quite some time, running my gaze up and down the loaded shelves, rank on rank, which—how had I not known?—contained the multiple thick volumes and supplements of this mighty work. I was astonished and smitten at the same time. I felt like some starving beggar presented with a feast, or a painter who had only known ochre, charcoal and chalk, learning that now she could dip her brush into a rainbow.

How many words are there in the English language? A note on the Oxford Dictionary website states, ‘… there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words … of which perhaps twenty per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million…’

The vocabulary of most English speakers is said to be around 4,000 words. Shakespeare’s vocabulary, on the other hand, contained more than 29,000 words.

Few can approach the genius of Shakespeare, but by my troth! he had the right idea. Dive into the multicoloured lake and swim. Splash around words of every flavour and hue, and if you don’t find exactly the right one to fit your meaning, invent one.

Not only the intriguing range of meanings, but the sounds and the shapes of words and letters fascinate me. In written form, some evoke images and colours. The capital letter ‘A’, for example, is one of my favourites. It’s like a powerful bird in flight, a pair of wings, a chevron, a towering mountain peak, the wake of a fast ship. It’s a strong, stalwart, letter and its colour is dark—dark blue or even black. The lower case letter ‘i’ is golden. The dot dances above it like a flower-head on a stem, or like a mote of sunlight. It’s airy and weightless. Certain words and names (for me) take on some of the characteristics of the letters of which they are composed.

Question: How much of the Australian landscape comes into your novels?

Answer: Most of the landscape of Aia is European, but I wanted The Bitterbynde to be set in the southern hemisphere, largely because there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. Most fantasy lands seem to exist in the northern half of their planet, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Some of my favourite trees are Australian wattles and some of my favourite birds are the colourful Aussie parrots, so they had to be included in the setting.

That said, my inner landscape, which is quite beyond my control, is a reflection of Britain/Europe, so it was quite difficult for me not to write of the north as ‘cold’ and the south as ‘hot’. My mental landscape was shaped by my childhood reading material and other British cultural influences. I grew up searching vainly in the Australian countryside for thatched cottages and babbling brooks and with the phrase ‘cold north wind’ coming easily to my lips even when summer’s north wind blew across southern Australia like the breath of hell’s blast furnace. I grew up with the irrational intuition that October was autumn, and therefore harvest month, ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, despite the fact that every October I could see trees and flowers bursting into spring greenery. This incongruity not so surprising, perhaps, when you reflect that in midsummer many Australians still sit down to hot flaming brandy plum pudding on Christmas Day, and it’s only in the last couple of decades that our Christmas cards have depicted anything but snow, holly and red breasted robins. Long live incongruity, say I!

Question: ‘Who are the men who inspired Thorn?‘

I have to smile when I’m asked that question! Thorn. He’s almost perfect…

Physically, he’s pretty much identical to Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye in the movie ‘The Last of the Mohicans’. That’s the image I had in mind when I was writing about him. His personality is a melange of Aragorn as I first pictured him at the age of nine, my imagination, some of Tanith Lee’s most compelling male characters, and a beautiful youth who was my boyfriend when we were teenagers. Tane the God of the New Zealand Forest is also mixed up in there somewhere.

Question: How did you come up with all of the names?

‘Ashalind’, ‘Imrhien’ and ‘Tahquil’ appeared by themselves, demanding to be used whether I liked them or not. Everyone else’s name had to be sought for. Obviously Finvarnan names have an Irish influence and Rimanian names have a kind of South American Native Indian flavour; the names of the Stormrider merchants and teachers have a French ring to them and the Stormriders themselves have Latinate names while the courtiers’ appellations are classically English. It was important to match names to their countries of origin. Fantasy, by its very nature, has to be firmly rooted in the real world in order to be made as believable as possible.

An interviewer from ‘Future Fiction’ said, ‘Thanks for reminding us that there’s more to fantasy than elves, dwarves and goblins!’

My response: In writing this trilogy, I deliberately set out to beat a path of my own. Partly, this stemmed from reading a lot of rather homogenous fantasy that seemed to try to reflect Tolkien but never quite managed it. Partly it evolved from my desire to create a world that was truly different, not merely a caricature of Europe in the Dark Ages populated with 21st century characters dressed up in medieval costume. Professor Tolkien was inspired by Scandinavian mythology with its elves, dwarves and goblins. It is a sumptuous, stirring tradition, but only one of many folk traditions in the world.

Before I started writing The Ill-Made Mute I had, for several years, been interested in the folklore of the British Isles. My reading in the area was extensive. Gradually I came to understand that the world I wanted to write about was teeming with the supernatural denizens of British folklore. By British folklore, I mean the genuine, oral traditions of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All the ‘wights’ in The Bitterbynde Trilogy are drawn from the pages of authentic folk records.

Question: ‘Did you start with the folklore stories and references as a basis and weave the main plot-line through them, or did you start with the main plot and then pick out folk tales that fitted in?’

The answer is, ‘a little of both’. A major section of the plot was inspired by the fairy-story of the Pied Piper, so in that particular case the folklore came first. In the main, however, I started with the plot and threaded various folktales through it.

Many people have perceived a Celtic influence in my stories. Strictly speaking, Celtic legend refers to such famous, tragic and bloody sagas as Cuchulain, The Red Hand of Ulster and The Cattle Raid of Cooley (Tain Bo Cuailnge). The folklore in which I am immersed does not touch upon those legends. Instead, it pivots around the everyday beliefs originating in ancient rural communities throughout the British Isles. Nonetheless there is much overlap between Celtic and British folk tradition—for example, different versions of waterhorses exist in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales—and in Scandinavian countries, as well. What is even more fascinating is the fact that several identical folktale themes exist all over the world. An example is the poignant theme of a mortal man who journeys to Faerie with a beautiful faerie woman, then pays a visit back home under a geas of faerie protection only to find to his sorrow that centuries have elapsed since his departure and everyone he knew is long-gone, after which he accidentally breaks the geas and withers away from old age. This motif is found in cultures as disparate as that of Japan and Ireland.

Katharine Briggs’ collections of folk tales, which she recorded at first hand from storytellers across the British Isles, had a profound effect on me. I discovered in them a diverse range of supernatural creatures who deserved as much of the limelight as elves and dwarves (or dwarfs) and other marvellous Norse/Scandinavian entities.

The Briggs stories have survived for centuries by being passed on orally. In order for them to have survived that long there must surely be a power in them that appeals to the human psyche. It certainly appeals to mine. I wanted to bring them out of candle-light into the electric light of the 21st century so that a wider sweep of readers could appreciate them.

There is a strangeness and a thrill about these raw tales and the eerie manifestations who figure in them. When incorporating folk-fairies, I have tried not to change them, not to touch them too much, not to annul that which gives you a chill down the spine, the inexplicability of them.

As I have said elsewhere, ‘My main aim, when using time-honoured tales as a resource, is to retain their purity. Their purity is their punch.

‘These are stories whose grip on the unconscious mind is so powerful that they have endured throughout many lives of men. They have become immortal; born long ago when humankind lived closer to nature, passed down verbally through the generations and finally crystallized in written form.

‘There is a strong tendency for writers to humanise and contemporise the creatures of myth and legend. In so doing, their integrity is instantly destroyed and their original power is forfeit. “Faeries” in their primeval form share some characteristics with humans of the third millennium, but certainly not all. For example, a drowner, when cheated of her prey, does not rant in anger and frustration. She merely rises out of the water and states (in rhyme, and quite prosaically), that if she had successfully lured her victim into the water she would have drunk his heart’s blood.

‘Evil faeries, or “unseelie wights”, do not assail humankind by grouping together in organised armies. They act in small groups or alone. There are unbreakable laws governing the ways in which they can assail and harass us; for example, most of them are unable to cross a threshold unless invited, and if we do not show fear their power over us is diminished or cancelled.

‘Much of faerie/wightish behaviour is inexplicable in human terms, except by saying it is the stuff of dreams and nightmare. Why should a thing called a “Shock”, resembling a donkey’s head with a smooth velvet hide, suddenly be found hanging on a gate? And why, when a man tries to grab it, should it turn around, snap at his hand and vanish? The Shock’s purpose seems mystifying, but the event has a rightness to it; as if we know, deep down, by something akin to racial memory, or some kind of shared consciousness, or memories of childhood fancies, that a Shock is a thing we might have glimpsed before, and that this is the kind of thing a Shock would do. At the same time we feel a thrill of fear and fascination. The story of the Shock illustrates how inexplicable the world is, and hints at how many weird, unpredictable creatures infest it.

‘When weaving the old tales into my own narrative I go to great lengths to preserve this sense of weirdness and unpredictability. I also want to convey the feeling that faerie creatures are permeating the landscape; that my alternative world is rife with them; that they are, as one reviewer has so succinctly put it, “part of the ecology”. Indeed they are, in a way, part of the ecology, being invariably attached to some element of nature such as water, subterranean caverns, flora and fauna.’

As for finishing a story—for me that is the hardest part. Finishing means losing the potential for change, forgoing the possibility of striving for perfection. This is when I have to discipline my natural inclination to go on forever, by reminding myself that a story is not written until the last word is down on paper.

And even then—as you will see in the next title of the Bitterbynde series, the Special Edition of The Battle of Evernight—sometimes it just keeps going …

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Part of the original, handwritten manuscript of The Bitterbynde.

Some original Bitterbynde notes and calculations, written on the back of yet more notes.

THE STORY SO FAR

This is the second book in The Bitterbynde Trilogy.

Book 1, The Ill-Made Mute, told of a mute, scarred amnesiac who led a life of drudgery in Isse Tower, a House of the Stormriders. Stormriders, otherwise known as Relayers, are messengers of high status. They ‘ride sky’ on winged steeds called eotaurs, and their many towers are strewn across the empire of Erith, in the world called Aia.

Sildron, the most valuable of metals in this empire, has the property of repelling the ground, thus providing any object with lift. This material is used to make the shoes of the Skyhorses and in the building of Windships to sail the skies. Only andalum, another metal, can nullify the effect of sildron.

Erith is randomly visited by a strange phenomenon known as ‘the shang’, or ‘the unstorm’; a shadowy, charged wind that brings a dim ringing of bells and a sudden springing of tiny points of coloured light. When this anomaly sweeps over the land, humans have to cover their heads with their taltries—hoods lined with a mesh of a third metal, talium. Talium prevents human passions from spilling out through the skull. At times of the unstorm, this is important, because the shang has the ability to catch and replay human dramas. Its presence engenders ‘tableaux’, which are ghostly impressions of past moments of intense passion, played over repeatedly until, over centuries, they fade.

The world outside Isse Tower is populated not only by mortals but also by immortal creatures called eldritch wights—incarnations wielding the power of gramarye. Some are seelie, benevolent towards mankind, while others are unseelie and dangerous.

The drudge escaped from the Tower and set out to seek a name, a past and a cure for the facial deformities. Befriended by an Ertish adventurer named Sianadh, who named her ‘Imrhien’, she learned that her yellow hair indicated she came of the blood of the Talith people, a once-great race that had dwindled to the brink of extinction. Together, the pair sought and found a treasure trove in a cave under a remote place called ‘Waterstair’. Taking some of the money and valuables with them, they journeyed to the city of Gilvaris Tarv. There they were sheltered by Sianadh’s sister, the carlin Ethlinn, who had three children; Diarmid, Liam and Muirne. A city wizard, Korguth, tried unsuccessfully to heal Imrhien’s deformities. To Sianadh’s rage, the wizard’s incompetent meddling left her worse off than before. Later, in the marketplace, Imrhien bought freedom for a seelie waterhorse. Her golden hair was accidentally revealed for an instant, attracting a disturbing glance from a suspicious-looking passer-by.

After Sianadh departed from the city, bent on retrieving more riches from Waterstair, Imrhien and Muirne were taken prisoner by a band of villains led by a man named Scalzo. Upon their rescue they learned of the deaths of Liam and Sianadh. Scalzo and his henchmen were to blame.

Imrhien promised Ethlinn she would reveal the location of Waterstair’s treasure only to the King-Emperor. With this intention, she joined Muirne and Diarmid, and travelled to distant Caermelor, the royal city. Along their way through a wilderness of peril and beauty, Imrhien and Diarmid accidentally became separated from their fellow travellers, and also Muirne. Fortunately they met Thorn, a handsome ranger of the Dainnan knighthood whose courage and skill were matchless, and Imrhien fell victim to love.

After many adventures, followed by a sojourn in Rosedale with Silken Janet and her father, these three wanderers rediscovered Muirne, safe and well. Muirne departed with her brother Diarmid to join the King-Emperor’s armed forces. Recruits were in demand, because rebel barbarians and unseelie wights were mustering in the northern land of Namarre, and it seemed that war was brewing in Erith.

Imrhien’s goal was to visit the one-eyed carlin, Maeve, to seek a cure, before continuing on to Caermelor. At her final parting from Thom she was distraught. To her amazement, he kissed her at the last moment.

At last, in the village of White Down Rory, Imrhien’s facial disfigurements were healed. With the cure, she regained the power of speech.

Two of her goals had been achieved. She now had a name and a face, but still, no memory of her past.

1

WHITE DOWN RORY

Mask and Mirror

Cold day, misty gray, when cloud enshrouds the hill.

Black trees, icy freeze, deep water, dark and still,

Cold sun. Ancient One of middle Wintertide,

Old wight, erudite, season personified.

Sunset silhouette; antlers branching wide—

Shy deer eschew fear while walking at her side.

Windblown, blue-faced crone, the wild ones never flee.

Strange eyes, eldritch, wise—the Coillach Gairm is she.

SONG OF THE WINTER HAG

It was Nethilmis, the Cloudmonth. Shang storms came and went close on each other’s heels, and then the wild winds of Winter began to close in.

They buffeted the landscape with fitful gusts, rattling drearily among boughs almost bare, snatching the last leaves and hunting them with whimsical savagery.

The girl who sheltered with the carlin at White Down Rory felt reborn. All seemed so new and so strange now, she had to keep reminding herself over and over that the miraculous healing of her face and voice had indeed happened; to keep staring into the looking-glass, touching those pristine features whose skin was still tender, and saying over and over, until her throat rasped:

‘Speech is mine. Speech is mine.’

But she would discover her hands moving as she spoke.

Surrounding the unfamiliar face, the hair fell thick and heavy, the colour of gold. Lamplight struck red highlights in the silken tresses. As to whether all this was beauty or not, she was unsure; it was all too much to take in at once. For certain, she was no longer ugly—and that, it seemed for the moment, was all that mattered. Yet there was no rejoicing, for she lived in fear, every minute, that it would all be taken away, or that it was some illusion of Maeve’s looking-glass—but the same image repeated itself in placid water and polished bronze, and it was possible, if not to accept the new visage, at least to think of it as a presentable mask that covered the old, ugly one—her true countenance.

‘I kenned you were mute as soon as you fell through my door,’ said the carlin, Maeve One-Eye. ‘Don’t underestimate me, colleen. Your hands were struggling to shape some signs—without effect. And it was obvious what you were after, so I lost no time—no point in dilly-dallying when there’s a job to be done. But ’tis curious that the spell on your voice was lifted off with the sloughed tissue of your face. If I am not mistaken you were made voiceless by something eldritch, while the paradox poisoning is from a lorraly plant. Very odd. I must look into it. Meanwhile, do not let sunlight strike your face for a few days. That new tissue will have to harden up a bit first, ’tis still soft and easily damaged. Tom Coppins looks after me, don’t you, Tom?’

The quick, cinnamon-haired boy, who was often in and out of the cottage, nodded.

‘And he will look after you as well, my colleen. Now, start using your voice bit by bit, not too much, and when ’tis strong you can tell me everything; past, present, and future. No, the glass is not eldritch. Come away from it—there is too much sunlight bleeding in through the windowpanes. And there’s shang on the way—the Coillach knows what that would do to your skin!’

Not a day, not an hour, not a moment passed without thoughts of Thorn. Passion tormented the transformee. She whispered his name over and over at night as sleep crept upon her, hoping to dream of him, but hoping in vain. It seemed to her that he was fused with her blood, within her very marrow. Ever and anon her thought was distracted by images of his countenance, and conjecture as to his whereabouts and wellbeing. Longing gnawed relentlessly, like a rat within, but as time passed and she became accustomed to the pain, its acuteness subsided to a constant, dull anguish.

Late in the evening of the third day, the howling airs of Nethilmis stilled. Maeve dozed in her rocking-chair by the fire with a large, armour-plated lizard sleeping on her lap. Imrhien was gazing at her own reflection by candlelight, twin flames flickering in her eyes. Tom Coppins lay curled up in a small heap on his mattress in a corner. All was still, when came a sound of rushing wind and a whirring of great wings overhead, and a sad, lonely call.

Quickly, Maeve roused and looked up. She muttered something.

Not long afterward, a soft sound could be heard outside the cottage, like a rustling of plumage. Maeve lifted the lizard down to the hearthrug and went to open the door. A girl slipped in silently and remained in the shadows with the carlin. Her face glimmered pale, her gown and the long fall of hair were jet black. She wore a cloak of inky feathers, white-scalloped down the front. A long red jewel shone, bright as fresh blood, on her brow. Maeve spoke with her, in low tones that could not be overheard, then began to busy herself with preparations, laying out bandages and pots on the table.

The carlin’s activities were hidden in the gloom beyond the firelight, but a sudden, whistling, inhuman cry of pain escaped the newcomer, waking Tom Coppins. Maeve had set straight a broken limb and was now binding it with splints. When all was finished, the swanmaiden lay quivering in the farthest corner from the fire, hidden beneath the folds of her feather-cloak.

‘Pallets everywhere,’ muttered Maeve, leaving the dirty pots on the table. ‘I shall have to take a bigger cottage next year.’

‘You heal creatures of eldritch, madam?’ Imrhien’s voice was still soft, like the hissing of the wind through heather.

‘Hush. Do not speak thus, when such a one is nigh. I heal who I can where and when I am able. It is a duty of my calling—but by no means the beginning and end of it.’ Maeve fingered the brooch at her shoulder; silver, wrought in the shape of an antlered stag. ‘Carlin are not merely physicians to humankind. The Coillach Gairm is the protectress of all wild things, in particular the wild deer. We who receive our knowledge from her, share her intention. Our principal purpose is the welfare of wild creatures. To protect and heal them is our mandate—care of humans is a secondary issue. Go to bed.’

‘I have another affliction. You are powerful—mayhap you can help me. Beyond a year or two ago, I have no memory of my past.’

‘Yes, yes, I suspected as much. Do you think I haven’t been scratching my head about that? But it’s a doom laid on you by something far stronger than I, and beyond my power to mend. For the Coillach’s sake, come away from the mirror and go to bed. You’re wearing out my glass. Don’t go near her, that feathered one—she is afraid of most people, as they all are, with good reason.’

The saurian jumped back onto the carlin’s lap. She scratched its upstanding dorsal plates as it circled a couple of times before settling.

‘I would have liked something less armoured and more furry,’ she murmured, looking down at it, ‘but bird-things would not come near, if I had a cat. Besides, Fig gave me no choice. He chose me.’

It was difficult to sit still inside the house of the Carlin, within walls, and to know that Thorn walked in Caermelor, in the Court of the King-Emperor. Now the renewed damsel was impatient to be off to the gates of the Royal City. At the least, she might join the ranks of Thorn’s admirers, bringing a little self-respect with her. She might exist near him, simultaneously discharging the mission she had taken upon herself at Gilvaris Tarv: to reveal to the King-Emperor the existence of the great treasure and—it was to be hoped—to set into motion a chain of events that would lead to the downfall of those who had slain Sianadh, Liam, and the other brave men of their expedition.

Maeve, however, was not to be swayed.

‘You shall not leave here until the healing is complete. Think you that I want to see good work ruined? Settle down. You’re like a young horse champing at the bit. Even Fig’s getting ruffled.’

The lizard, dozing fatly by the fire, adeptly hid its agitation. In the shadows the swanmaiden stirred and sighed.

Three days stretched to five, then six. The weather raged again, battering at the walls of the cottage.

At nights a nimble bruney would pop out from somewhere when it thought the entire household asleep, and do all the housework in the two-roomed cot with amazing speed, quietness, and efficiency. Under Maeve’s instructions the girl feigned sleep if she happened to waken and spy it. Its clothes were tattered and its little boots worn and scuffed. When it had finished, it drank the milk set out for it, ate the bit of oatcake, and disappeared again, leaving everything in a state of supernatural perfection.

Tom Coppins, the quiet lad with great dark eyes, was both messenger and student to the carlin, performing errands that took him from the house, aiding her in preparing concoctions or helping her treat the ailments and vexations of the folk who beat a path to her door; everything from gangrene and whooping cough to butterchurns in which the butter wouldn’t ‘come’, or a dry cow, or warts. Someone asked for a love potion and went away empty-handed but with a stinging earful of sharp advice. From time to time Maeve would go outside to where her staff was planted in the ground and come back carrying leaves or fruit plucked from it—potent cures. Or she would tramp out into the woods and not return for hours.

More and more, the carlin allowed Imrhien to wield her voice; it was exhilarating to converse freely; such a joy, as if the bird of speech had been liberated from an iron cage. Little by little she told her story, omitting—from a sense of privacy if not shame for having been so readily smitten—her passion for Thorn.

When the tale had been recounted, the old woman sat back in her chair, rocking and knitting. (‘I like to be busy with my hands,’ she had said. ‘And it sets folk at ease to see an old woman harmlessly knitting. Mind you, my needles are anything but harmless!’)

‘An interesting tale, even if you have left out part of it,’ Maeve commented. Her patient felt herself blush. Maeve’s perceptiveness was disconcerting. ‘So now you still have three wishes, eh? Isn’t that right? That’s how it usually goes—yan, tan, tethera. No, there is no need to reply. You wish for a history, a family, and something more—I see it in your eyes. Mark you—remember the old saw, Be careful what you wish for, lest—’

‘Lest what?’

‘Lest it comes true.’

The carlin completed a row of knitting and swapped the needles from hand to hand.

‘Now listen,’ she continued. ‘I do not know who you are or how to get your memories back, but I do ken that this house, since five days ago, is being watched.’

‘Watched? What can you mean?’

‘I mean, spied upon by spies who do not know they have been spied. And since they began their enterprise not long after you arrived, I deduce that it is you they are after. Nobody gets past my door without my allowing it—the world knows that. Therefore, these observers must be waiting for you to come out. What think you of that, eh? Are they friends of yours, wanting to protect you, or are they enemies?’

It was like a sudden dousing in icy water. All that had happened to Imrhien since her arrival at the carlin’s house had driven out thoughts of pursuers. Now the recent past caught up with a jarring swiftness. These spies might be henchmen of the wizard, the slandered charlatan Korguth the Jackal—but more likely they were Scalzo’s men who had somehow tracked her down. She had been traced right to the carlin’s door! If they had come this far, across Eldaraigne in search of her, or if they had sent word of her approach by Relayer to accomplices in Caermelor or even at the Crown and Lyon Inn, then it was obvious they were determined to catch her before she went to the King-Emperor explaining her detailed knowledge of Waterstair’s location. Danger threatened. Desperate men might resort to desperate methods to prevent her from reaching the Royal City.

The carlin’s eye was fixed intently upon her guest.

‘How do you estimate these watchers? Take care with your reply. A false decision might bring disaster. What comes next depends on what you say now. Your tongue is new to you. Use it wisely.’

‘I think they are evil men,’ the girl replied slowly, ‘men who wish me ill; brigands led by one called Scalzo, from Gilvaris Tarv, who slew my friends. They will try to stop me from reaching the Court.’

‘That may be the case. I am not in a position to judge. If ’tis true, then it is perilous for you to depart from here unprotected. With this in mind I have already asked my patient Whithiue to lend you her feather-cloak so that you might fly out in the guise of a swan and send the cloak back later. She would not hear of it of course, but it was worth a try—she and her clan owe me many favours. Yet I have another plan. If those who watch are your enemies, then they will know you chiefly by your hair and by your name. My advice is this—when you set out for the Royal City, go not as Imrhien Goldenhair. Go as another.’

The needles clattered. A ball of yarn unrolled. The lizard watched it with the look of a beast born to hunt but restrained by overpowering ennui.

‘Change my name?’

‘Well, ’tis not your name, is it? ’Tis only a kenning given you. One kenning is as good as another. I’ll think of something suitable to replace it, given time. But you cannot go to Court with that hair and not be noticed. By the Coillach, colleen, know you how rarely the Talith are seen? Only one of that kindred resides at Court—Maiwenna, a cousin of the long-defunct Royal Family of Avlantia. In all the lands, there are so few human beings of your colouring that they are always remarked upon. Feohrkind nobles can rinse their tresses in the concoctions of carlins and wizards and dye-mixers as often as they like, but they can never copy Talith gold. Their bleached heads are like clumps of dead grass. No, if you want to mingle unmarked, you must change the colour of your hair as well as your kenning. And for good measure, go as a recently bereaved widow and keep that face covered.’

‘You know best,’ said Imrhien slowly in her whispering tones, ‘for I know nothing of the ways of the King-Emperor’s Court. But who would recognise the face I wear now?’

‘Folk from your past, haply.’

‘Then that would be wonderful! I should meet my own folk, discover all!’

‘Not necessarily. Who left you to die in the rain in a patch of Hedera paradoxis? Not folk who were looking after your interests. Safer to remain unknown, at least until you have delivered your messages to the King-Emperor. And if you cannot tell His Majesty himself, why then you would be equally well-off to confide in Tamlain Conmor, the Dainnan Chieftain, or True Thomas Learmont, the Royal Bard. They are his most trusted advisors, and worthy of that trust, more so than any other men of Erith.

‘If you manage to leave my cottage unmarked and reach the Court, you will likely be richly rewarded, you understand. Gold coins can buy security, or at least a measure of it. When all is done and your work discharged, then you shall have leisure to decide whether to doff the widow’s veil and show yourself, and risk all that goes with being Imrhien of the Golden Hair.’

‘There is good sense in what you say,’ the girl admitted to the carlin.

‘Of course there is. And if you had your wits about you, you’d have thought of it yourself, but I expect you’ve lost them in that glass. By the way, are you aware that you speak with a foreign accent?’

‘Do I? I suppose it is Talith.’

‘No. It is like no dialect I have ever heard.’

‘Am I of the Faêran? It is said that they lived forever …’

The carlin cackled, true to type. ‘No, you certainly are not one of the Gentry. Not that I have ever set eyes on any of them, but there is naught of the power of gramarye in you. If there were, you would know it. You are as mortal as any bird or beast or lorraly folk. None of the Fair Folk would get themselves into such scrapes as you manage. And yet, your manner of speech is not of any of the kingdoms of Erith. Your accent’s unfamiliar.’

‘The Ringstorm that encircles the world’s rim—does anything lie beyond it?’

‘Let me tell you a little of the world. Some say that it is not a half-sphere but an entire orb with the Ringstorm around its waist dividing Erith from the northern half. That is why the world has two names; “Erith” for the Known Lands, and “Aia” for the three realms in one, which comprise the Known Lands, the unknown regions on the other side of the Ringstorm, and the Fair Realm. Of those three realms only Erith is open to us. Many folk have forgotten the Fair Realm. Some say it never existed at all. People believe what they can see. Furthermore, it is commonly held that nothing lies beyond the Ringstorm, that it marks the margins of the world, and if we were to pass further than that brink, we would fall into an abyss.’

‘Mayhap there is some path through the Ringstorm.’

‘Mayhap. Many have tried to find one. The shang winds and the world’s storms are too much for any sea-craft. The Ringstorm’s borders are decorated with broken Seaships.’

‘Mayhap there is a way through to Erith from the other side, from a land on the other side where they speak differently …’

‘Too many “mayhaps”. Let us to the business in hand.’

‘Yes! Madam Maeve, I am concerned for your safety. Should I depart hence under an assumed persona, the watchers will believe Imrhien Goldhair bides yet here, and they may keep watching for a time until they tire of it and assail your house.’

‘A good point.’ Maeve thoughtfully tapped her ear with a knitting needle. ‘Ah, but if they think they see Imrhien Goldenhair leaving and they follow her, then find out it was a ruse and rush back here and see no sign of her, they will think she escaped during their absence. In sooth, she will have. An excellent plan—nay, ask no questions, it will all be clear to you soon. Meanwhile, I had better rouse Tom—he has errands to run for me in Caermelor. We shall need money to carry out this scheme. How much have you?’

‘Madam, please accept my apologies. Your words remind me that I owe you payment for your healing of me, and my board and lodging. What is your fee?’

‘My fee,’ said the carlin, shooting a piercing glance from her bright eye, ‘is whatever those who receive my services are prepared to give.’

‘What you have given me is valuable beyond measure—worth more than all the treasure in the world.’

‘Have I given it, or was it already yours by right? Do not be thankful until you have lived with your changed appearance for a moon-cycle or two. See how you like it then.’

‘I cannot be otherwise than happy!’

‘Ha! The measure of happiness is merely the difference between expectations and outcomes. It is not concerned with what one possesses—it is concerned with how content one is with what one possesses.’

Imrhien had taken out her leather pouch. The pearls she had left in Silken Janet’s linen-chest, the ruby she had given to Diarmid and Muirne, but there remained two more jewels and the few gold coins she had saved when she ran from the caravan. In glittering array she spread the stones and metal before the carlin.

‘This is all I have. Please, take it.’

Maeve One-Eye threw her head back and laughed.

‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you will never survive out in the wide wicked world if you do this sort of thing. Have you not heard of bargaining? Such an innocent. And how would you fare with no money to spend on your way to the City? This I shall take.’ She leaned forward and picked up the sapphire. ‘The mud from Mount Baelfire is costly to obtain. And blue is one of the colours of my fellowship, the Winter shade of high glaciers and cold water under the sky. Leave the emerald out of your purse—it is of greater worth and will fetch a high price. It is necessary to sell it to pay for the purchases Tom shall make in Caermelor on your behalf. But put away the sovereigns and doubloons and the bit of silver. You may need them someday. And be more careful to whom you display your wealth—fortunately, I can be trusted, but not all folk are as honest as Maeve One-Eye!’

Her thicket of albino hair bristled untidily, like a rook’s nest in a frost—her guest suspected that it was in fact inhabited by some pet animal—and she leaned back in her chair, chuckling. The needles resumed their click-clack.

‘True to Talith type, you possess the darker eyebrows and eyelashes—those I will not need to alter. What colour of hair want you? Black? Brown?’

‘Red.’

‘A canny choice. Nobody would ever believe that any clearheaded person would choose the Ertish shade, thus they will think that you soothly are of Finvarnan blood. I take it you will not mind being despised as a barbarian in Court circles?’

‘I have had my fill of contempt! I have been despised enough for twenty lifetimes. Not red, then. What is the fashion for hair at Court?’

‘Black, or straw yellow—save for the salt-haired Icemen that dwell among them; their locks do not take kindly to dyes, nor do they wish to alter them, being a proud race.’

‘It seems I must choose black. But I will not stay long at Court—only long enough to deliver my news, and then I will be away.’

And long enough to find someone.

‘Be not so certain. You may not obtain an audience with the King-Emperor straight away. He is busy, especially at this time of strange unrest in the north. As an unknown, you will be seen as inconsequential enough to be kept waiting—if necessary, for weeks, despite the fact that I am going to transform you into a lady of means for the mission. If you successfully reach Caermelor and then obtain permission to pass within the palace gates, you may have to wait for a long time. And if you are eventually granted an audience, the next step must be verification of your news. They may ask you to lead them to this treasure.’

The carlin paused in her handiwork, holding it high for a better view. ‘Cast off, one plain, one purl,’ she muttered obliquely. With a thoughtful air, she lowered the needlework to her lap. ‘So. A name you will need.’ She hummed a little tune. ‘I’ve got it! “Rohain”. A tad Severnessish-sounding, but it suits you. And you must say that you come from some remote and little-known place, so that there is small chance of meeting any person who hails from there and might betray you. The Sorrow Islands off Severnesse are such a place—melancholy, avoided whenever possible. Tarrenys is an old family name from those parts. Yes—that’s it. Ha! Rohain Tarrenys you shall be—say farewell to Imrhien Goldenhair, Lady Rohain of the Sorrows.’

‘Am I to be a lady? I know nothing of the ways of gentlefolk. I shall be discovered.’

‘Methinks you underestimate your own shrewdness. Hearken. Should a peasant wife arrive at the palace with a story of discovering great wealth, that woman risks her life. There are those at Court who are not as scrupulous as the Dukes of Ercildoune and Roxburgh; those who would wish to take the credit to themselves for such a discovery, and to silence the real messenger. It is possible a commonwife would not be given the opportunity to speak with the Dukes before she was bundled off with a few pennies, maybe to be followed, waylaid, and murdered. Howbeit, a gentlewoman must be treated with greater scrupulosity.’

‘Who, at Court, could be so perfidious?’

‘It will become clear to you,’ said Maeve briskly. She changed the subject. ‘Have you a potent tilhal for protection along the way?’

‘I have a self-bored stone, given me by Ethlinn.’

‘A worthy talisman,’ said the carlin, examining the stone with a lopsided squint. ‘You might well have need of it. Many malign things wander abroad these days. Doubtless you have heard—it is said that one of the brigand chieftains of Namarre has grown strong enough to muster wicked wights in his support. There is no denying that some kind of summons, inaudible to mortal ears, is issuing from that northern region. Unseelie wights are moving across the lands, responding to the Call. With an army of lawless barbarians, aided by unseelie hordes, a wizard powerful enough to summon wights would be an opponent to be reckoned with. They say such a force might stand a goodly chance of overthrowing the Empire and seizing power in Erith. If that should come to pass, all the lands would be plunged into chaos. It would mean the end of the long years of peace we have known.’

A chill tremor tore through the listener.

‘These are uneasy times,’ continued the carlin with a shake of her head. ‘Even creatures which have not revealed themselves for many lifetimes of men have lately re-emerged. It is not long since I heard a rumour that Yallery Brown has been seen again.’

She returned the stone to its owner.

‘What is that?’ asked the girl, tucking the tilhal beneath her garments.

‘Yallery Brown? One of the wickedest wights that ever was or is—so wicked that it is dangerous even to befriend him. Have you not heard the old tale of cursed Harry Millbeck, the brother of the great-grandfather of the mayor of Rigspindle?’

‘I have heard many tales, but not that. Pray tell it!’

‘He was a farm labourer, was Harry,’ said Maeve. ‘On a Summer’s evening long ago, he was walking home from work across fields and meadows all scattered with dandelions and daisies, when he heard an anguished wailing like the cry of a forsaken child. He cast about for the source and at last discovered that it issued from underneath a large, flat stone, half-submerged under turf and matted weeds. This rock had a name in the district. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been called “The Strangers’ Stone”, and folk used to avoid it.

‘A terrible fear came over Harry. The wails, however, had dwindled to a pitiful whimpering, and being a kind-hearted man he could not steel himself to walk on without rendering aid to what might have been a child in distress. With great trouble, he managed to raise up the Strangers’ Stone, and there beneath it was a small creature, no bigger than a young child. Yet it was no child—rather it looked to be something old, far older than was natural, for it was all wizened, and its hair and beard were so long that it was all enmeshed in its own locks. Dandelion-yellow were the hair and whiskers, and soft as thistle-floss. The face, puckered as lava, was umber-brown, and from the midst of the creases a pair of clever eyes stared out like two black raisins. After its initial amazement at its release, the creature seemed greatly delighted.

‘“Harry, ye’re a good lad,” it chirped.

‘It knows my name! For certain this thing is a bogle, Harry thought to himself, and he touched his cap civilly, struggling to hide his terror.

‘“Nay,” said the little thing instantly, “I’m no bogie, but ye’d best not ask me what I be. Anyway, ye’ve done me a better service than ye know, and I be well-disposed toward ye.”

‘Harry shuddered, and his knees knocked when he found the eldritch thing could read his unspoken thoughts, but he mustered his courage.

‘“And I now will give ye a gift,” said the creature. “What would ye like—a strong and bonny wife or a crock full of gold coins?”

‘“I have little interest in either, your honour,” said Harry as politely as he could, “but my back and shoulders are always aching. My labour on the farm is too heavy for me and I’d thank you for help with it.”

‘“Now hearken ye, never thank me,” said the little fellow with an ugly sneer. “I’ll do the work for ye and welcome, but if ye give me a word of thanks ye’ll never get a hand’s turn more from me. If ye want me, just call ‘Yallery Brown, from out of the mools come to help me,’ and I’ll be there.” And with that it picked the stalk of a dandelion puff, blew the fluffy seeds into Harry’s eyes and disappeared.

‘In the morning Harry could no longer believe what he had seen and suspected he’d been dreaming. He walked to the farm as usual, but when he arrived, he found that his work had already been completed, and he had no need to lift so much as a finger. The same happened day after day; no matter how many tasks were set for Harry, Yallery Brown finished them in the blink of an eye.

‘At first the lad augured his life would be as leisurely as a nobleman’s, but after a time he saw that matters might not go so well for him, for although his tasks were done, all the other men’s tasks were being undone and destroyed. After a while, some of his fellow labourers happened to spy Yallery Brown darting about the place at night and they accused Harry of summoning the wight. They made his life miserable with their blaming and their complaints to the master.

‘“I’ll put this to rights,” said Harry to himself. ‘“I’ll do the work myself, and not be indebted to Yallery Brown.”

‘But no matter how early he came to work, his tasks were always accomplished before he got there. Furthermore, no tool or implement would remain in his hand; the spade slipped from his grasp, the plough careered out of his reach and the hoe eluded him. The other men would find Harry trying to do their work for them, but no matter how hard he tried he could not do it, for it would go awry, and they accused him of botching it deliberately.

‘Finally, the men indicted him so often that the master dismissed him, and Harry plodded away in a high rage, fuming about how Yallery Brown had treated him. Word went around the district that Harry Millbeck was a troublemaker, and no farmer would hire him. Without a means of earning a living, Harry was in sore straits.

‘“I’ll get rid of this wicked wight,” he growled to himself, “else I shall become a beggar on the streets.” So he went out into the fields and meadows and he called out, “Yallery Brown, from out of the mools, come to me!”

‘The words were scarcely out of his mouth when something pinched his leg from behind, and there stood the little thing with its tormentil-yellow hair, its pleated brown face and its cunning raisin eyes. Pointing a finger at it, Harry cried, “It’s an ill turn you’ve done to me and no benefit. I’ll thank you to go away and allow me to work for myself!”

‘At these words, Yallery Brown shrilled with laughter and piped up: “Ye’ve thanked me, ye mortal fool! Ye’ve thanked me and I warned you not!”

‘Angrily, Harry burst out, “I’ll have no more to do with you! Fine sort of help you give. I’ll have no more of it from this day on!”

‘“And ye’ll get none,” said Yallery Brown, “but if I can’t help I’ll hinder.” It flung itself into a whirling, reeling dance around Harry, singing—

‘“Work as thou wilt, thou’lt never do well.

Work as thou mayst, thou’lt never gain grist;

For harm and mischance and Yallery Brown

Thou’st let out thyself from under the stone.”

‘As it sang, it pirouetted. Its buttercup tresses and beard spun out all around until it resembled the spherical head of a giant dandelion that has gone to seed. This thistledown orb blew away, disappearing into the air, and Harry never again set eyes on Yallery Brown.

‘But he was aware of the wight’s malevolent presence for the rest of his life; he sensed it opposing him in everything to which he turned his hand. Forever after that, naught went aright for poor Harry Millbeck. No matter how hard he worked he could not profit by it, and ill-fortune was on whatever he touched. Until the day of his death Yallery Brown never stopped troubling him, and in his skull the wight’s song went ceaselessly round and round, “… for harm and mischance and Yallery Brown thou’st let out thyself from under the stone …”’

‘That’s a terrible injustice!’ cried the listening girl. ‘Aye,’ said Maeve. ‘That’s the way of unseelie wights and that one is among the wickedest.’

The carlin gave detailed instructions to Tom Coppins, who went off to Caermelor on a pony and returned three days later laden with parcels.

‘What took you so long?’ Maeve said impatiently.

‘I was bargaining.’

‘Hmph. I hope you got the better of those rapscallion merchants. How much got you for the emerald?’

‘Twelve guineas, eight shillings, and eightpence.’

‘And what purchased you with that?’

‘Shoes, raiment, and trinkets such as you asked, and a hired carriage to be waiting at the appointed place at the appointed time.’

‘Good. Keep half a crown and give the rest to my lady, Rohain of the Sorrows.’

Tom Coppins was accustomed to unquestioningly accepting curious events. That a yellow-haired monster should have entered the cottage and been transformed was no more strange than many things he had seen while in the service of Maeve. He loved the old carlin with unswerving loyalty—whatever she needed, he would fetch; whatever she asked, he would do, and without question. He was an astute lad and warmhearted. In the time he had been in Maeve’s service, he had seen beyond the aspect of a simple old woman, the aspect the world saw. He had been witness to the carlin’s true dignity and power made manifest.

That night, Tom washed Imrhien-Rohain’s hair with an iron-willow mordant. He rubbed in a thick mud of pounded and soaked iris-roots, then rinsed the hair again with the mordant, as Janet had done to Diarmid’s locks in the valley of roses. The black-haired girl shook out her sable tresses in front of the fire.

The swanmaiden’s eyes gleamed from the shadows. Maeve brought food for the wight-in-woman-form, speaking to her in a low, foreign voice.

The next morning, at uhta, the eldritch maiden departed. Before she left, Imrhien-Rohain saw her standing framed in the doorway, her fair face and slender arms gleaming white against the nightshade of her cloak and hair. The lovely wight offered a single black feather to Maeve. Then she slipped behind the doorpost and vanished. A moment later, with a rush and a whirr, dark wings lifted over the house-roof. There came a plaintive, mournful cry that was answered from far off.

Maeve stood on the doorstep, her face raised to the sky.

‘She rejoins her flock at a remote mountain lake,’ she said at last. ‘She could not bear to be enclosed any longer within walls. The limb is not yet properly healed but it might be she will return for my ministrations, now and then, until it is whole. They always know where to find me, in my wanderings. And soon I must wander again—I have stayed here long enough and Imbroltide draws nigh.’

Consideringly she looked at the long black feather, before swathing it in a swatch of linen.

‘Now it is but sixteen days until the turn of the year, the most significant time of all—Littlesun Day. There is much to be done.’

She set a fiery eye on her other visitor. ‘Take this swan’s plume with you. The swans of eldritch sometimes give a feather in token of payment. When the feather’s holder is in need, the swan is bound to help, but once only. Her calling-name, potent only for the duration of the bitterbynde, is Whithiue. This is a gift of high value.’

A bitterbynde. Imrhien-Rohain recalled hearing that term when she dwelled in the House of the Stormriders. The betrothal of a daughter of that House, Persefonae, had been pledged on the day she was born. A vow, or geas, laid upon a subject willing or not; a decree that imposed bitter sanctions upon its breaking, and demanded stringent, almost impossible conditions for its removal—that was a bitterbynde. In the swan-girl’s case, she was bitterbound to come to the aid of whomsoever grasped the feather and summoned her.

‘Now,’ said Maeve earnestly, folding the linen package firmly into the hand of Imrhien-Rohain, ‘it is your turn to go forth.’

So it was that on the fifteenth of Nethilmis, before the early gathering of morning, a cloaked and taltried figure, mounted sidesaddle, rode swiftly from Maeve’s door. White stars arrayed a fretwork of black boughs, and the green star of the south was a shining leaf among them. Thin chains of mist fettered the trees. Every leaf and twig seemed carved from stone. The rider, awkward and uncertain, continually glanced from right to left. The long skirts kept tangling with the stirrups, but, as if in haste, the rider urged the pony on. Not far from the house of the carlin, dark figures sprang from among the trees as the steed cantered past. The rider cast a glance backward, then, with surprising alacrity, threw one leg over the pony’s back and, giving a shrill cry, surged forward. As the pony’s hooves clattered away, other figures ran from the trees bringing up horses with muffled hooves. Soon they were galloping in vigorous pursuit.

The pony, although swifter than an ordinary mount of its kind, could not outmatch the long strides of the horses. Yet for a time it seemed the pursuers did not want to catch up, but merely to follow from a distance and mark their quarry, as though biding their time. Suddenly they rounded a bend and were forced to rein in their horses so sharply the steeds reared on their hind legs and screamed their indignation. Right in their path, the pony had halted. It wheeled, then, and faced them. The rider flung back the hood, revealing the face of a dark-eyed lad. His hand dipped beneath his cloak and he flung out a powder that exploded in the faces of the pursuers with a dazzling flash, followed by billowing smoke. When they finally fought free of the thick fog, he was gone.

Back, then, they rode like a storm. When they returned to the house of the carlin, the windows and doors stood open, sightless. No smoke wisped from the chimney. The place was empty and all trails were cold.

A quarter-moon danced overhead. The Greayte Southern Star hung like an emerald set in onyx, and falling stars peppered the night sky.

Imrhien-Rohain ran along a narrow woodland path leading northwest, clutching her purse of coins to prevent them from clashing together. She had the advantage of a secret start, and carried a potent tilhal of Maeve’s as protection against things of the night that dwelt around White Down Rory. A Stray Sod had been let fall behind her at the beginning of the path to mislead any mortal who stepped thereon, and a sudden, temporary thicket of brambles camouflaged the path’s entrance. Despite these precautions, terror spurred her pulse as she fled through the black trees. The glimmering footpath seemed enchanted—no root reached across to trip her up, no wight crossed it or started up alongside. Without pause, she hastened on, casting many a backward glance, as if the mysterious riders who had watched the house might spring out of the darkness. At last, lacking breath, she slowed to a swift walk.

The money from the emerald had been well-spent. Rohain of the Sorrows, an elegant lady, would become a widow as soon as she unfolded the silk mask across her face to hide her grief, in the fashion of bereaved women. By her ornaments and garments, she would appear a noble widow of considerable means. The silk domino, blue as night, was worked with scarlet. Jet beads sparkled in her long dark hair. Matching needlework, dark red and azure on midnight blue, drenched the full bell-sleeves of her gown, slashed to show contrasting lining, and dripped down the voluminous skirts from below whose picoted hems several petticoats peeped demurely. Her waist was cinched by a crimson leather girdle, housed within silver filigree. A long, fitted, fur-lined travelling cloak, frogged down the front, covered the yards of fancy fabric. A fur-lined velvet taltry topped the outfit.

She went forward. Hours passed. A soft noise like the wind in an Autumn wood came rustling. She thought it strange, for there was no wind, and all around, stark boughs plowed black furrows into the fitful moonlight, unmoving. A tall, pale figure glided past; some wight in almost mortal form. It groaned and soon passed out of sight. The susurration of falling leaves went on and on. Suddenly the moon shone out radiantly and the sounds changed to faint murmurs of laughter and ridicule that continued for a while, then faded.

Down among the tree roots, tiny lights were moving.

The path climbed a final slope and came out on the Caermelor Road as the sky began to pale. Farther down the Road, to the left, squatted a white milestone. It was there that the coach waited, its coach-lamps glowing like two amber flowers. The horses’ breath steamed, a silver mist combed to shreds by the sharp and bitter cold.

The coachman had received an enticing down-payment on the understanding that his services were to be performed with confidentiality—not that the noble lady passenger had held a clandestine tryst in the woods with a bucolic lover, of course. Simply, she desired privacy and no questions. Given his utmost discretion, the pecuniary reward at the end of the journey would exceed even the down-payment.

He saw a slender, cloaked figure materialize out of the darkness, silent as a moth.

Bowing, he murmured, ‘Your ladyship.’ Her name was unknown to him.

She nodded. He could not see her face behind the decorative blind. Handing her into the carriage, the coachman stepped up into his box-seat and shook the reins. His bellowed ‘Giddap!’ harshly interrupted the night.

With a sudden thrust forward, the equipage bowled rapidly along the Road to Caermelor.

Light wooden caskets were waiting in the coach. With a sense of excitement, the passenger opened them. One was filled with sweetmeats and refreshments for the journey, one contained a most risible headdress, another an absurd pair of shoes, and a fourth accommodated an ermine muff and a pair of gloves. With difficulty inside the cramped and jolting compartment, the ‘widow’ added these items to her person.

The wide headdress was fashioned from a thick roll of stiffened fabric trimmed with sweeping carmine plumes, beaded, latticed with silver. It possessed a crown rising to a point draped with yards of azure gauze. Altogether, the dainty, fragile shoes, the voluminous sleeves, the stiff, embroidery-crusted fabric of the gowns, the heavy girdle that made it difficult to bend forward and the wide headdress that made it impossible to approach any wall—seemed most onerous and impractical, not only for travel but for everyday living. These garments and accoutrements would impede the simplest of tasks. Could it be that such strange raiment was truly the fashion at Court? Had her benefactress and the lad been mistaken, out of touch? Quickly she dismissed the thought. Nothing escaped the carlin’s notice—the costume would be correct.

Her heel kicked against a heavy object sitting on the floor—a foot-warmer. Tom Coppins had thought of everything. Housed in its elaborately carved wooden case, the brass container with its pierced lid gave off a welcome warmth from the glowing charcoal in its belly. The passenger propped her feet thereon and sat back against the padded leather upholstery.

Yet the new Rohain could not enjoy the comforts of this unaccustomed mode of travel. She fervently hoped that all she had heard about the Court had been exaggerated—the tales of the refined manners, the complicated rules of etiquette, the forms of speech. Between the fear that the carriage would be overtaken by her enemies, the dread of what was to come, and constant battles with the unwieldy headdress that threatened to slide off, she made the journey in great discomfort and alarm.

Throughout the Winter’s day, the carriage rolled on.

Days were short. At its zenith, the sun had risen only marginally above the horizon, where it glowered from behind a dreary blanket of cloud.

Emerging from the woods, the Road ran through farming lands patched with fields, hedge-bordered. Here and there, a house topped with smoking chimneys nestled among its outbuildings. After passing through a couple of outlying villages, the Road began to climb toward the city walls.

The buildings of Caermelor clustered on the slopes of a wall-encircled hill that rose four hundred feet out of the sea at the end of its own peninsula. To the south, the sea had taken a deep bite out of the land to form a wide and pleasant bay fringed with white sands. The far side of this bay was cradled in the arm of a mountainous ridge reaching out into the ocean to form a second, more rugged peninsula, its steep sides clothed in forest.

Eastward, an expansive, flat-bottomed valley opened out. Through the middle of it ran the river that drained the encircling hills, flowing until it reached the sea to the north of the city-hill. There, salt tide danced to and fro with fresh current. In the estuary, waters ran deep enough for the draught of the great-keeled Seaships. Wharves, piers, docks, and jetties jutted from the northern flank of the city-hill, stalking into the water on thick, encrusted legs.

Atop the highest point, the palace overlooked all—the vast sweep of ocean to the west, the curve of the bay with its long lines of lace-edged waves, the blue-folded shoulders of the ridge dropping sharply to the water; north, the ocean stretching to distant mountains; northeast, the river-port teeming with business, forested with tall masts. Eastward, the city spread out over the plain, dwindling to scattered farms and the backdrop of Doundelding’s hills on the horizon.

But blind ocean was not all that could be seen to the west, for a tall island rose up, perhaps a quarter of a mile offshore, directly opposite the city-hill. At low tide, the waters drained from a causeway that connected it to the mainland. At all other times it was completely cut off by water. Here stood the Old Castle, much like a crag itself, jagged, gray, and gaunt. Of yore it had been the fortress to which citizens had retreated in times of war. Now it stood, stern sentinel, silent guardian, facing the palace on the hill.

Late in the afternoon the coach halted at last before the city gates. There was a knock on the front wall of the compartment. Imrhien-Rohain slid back the little window that opened onto the coachman’s box. His eyes appeared, goggling like a fish’s.

‘Where to now, m’lady?’

‘To the palace.’ Her new voice had crisped to a clear, ringing tone.

‘Very well, m’lady.’

She slid the window shut, like a guillotine chopping off the outside world.

Guards lounging under the portals had a word with her coachman. Through the windows they eyed the passenger with curiosity as the vehicle went by. Imrhien-Rohain drew the curtains against their intrusion. Beyond, voices rose and fell, wheels rattled, seagulls mewed, children yelled. In booming tones a town crier shouted, ‘Hear ye! Hear ye!’

She had come at last to Caermelor.

2

CAERMELOR, PART I

Vogue and Vanity

Euphonic fountains splash, by arbor walls

Where climbing roses, red and yellow, cling.

Proud peacocks strut on sweeping, verdant lawns

And nightingales in gilded cages sing.

Glass carriages with plumed and matching teams

Roll on amid this royal plenitude,

By ornamental lakes where sleek swans glide,

Reflecting on their mirrored pulchritude.

The silk and satin ladies with their fans

Incline upon the marble balustrade.

The night will see them dance like butterflies,

When they attend the Royal Masquerade.

Fair jewels gleam on ev’ry courtly peer:

Bright rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and pearls.

The costliest of velvets, plumes, and furs

Adorn dukes, viscounts, marquesses, and earls.

Prosperity and luxury abound;

Sweet music plays as nobles feast and sport.

The rarest beauty and the greatest wealth

Are found within the Empire’s Royal Court.

FASHIONABLE SONG AT THE COURT OF CAERMELOR

Caermelor Palace had originally been constructed as a castle stronghold and still retained its fortified outer structure. Machicolated watchtowers, siege engine towers, stair turrets, a mill tower, round mural towers, square mural towers, and numerous other outjuttings thickened the twelve-foot-deep walls at varying intervals.

The road into the park-like palace grounds crossed the moat by means of a drawbridge. Beyond the drawbridge bulked the garrisoned gatehouse and the barbican. The main outer gate was constructed of solid oak, studded with iron. It could be barred, if necessary, by an iron portcullis that remained raised in times of peace and was lowered only for the purpose of oiling the chains and maintaining the winches.

When this outer gate was shut, persons on foot might enter by a smaller postern set into it, whereupon they would find themselves in a long chamber set within thick walls, with a gate at either end—the gatehouse, a solid edifice specifically dedicated to the purpose of providing a space between the inner and outer portals. Peepholes in the walls allowed guards in side passages to inspect purportedly innocent visitors. Those approved visitors might pass through a second gate. It opened onto the outer bailey, which in recent years had been filled with walled gardens and leafy courtyards. A third gate led to the inner bailey with its stables, barracks, parade grounds, kennels, pigeon-lofts, coach-mews, and falconry-mews. It was bordered by the King’s Tower—winged with fluttering standards—the arsenal tower, the Great Hall with its pentise, two tall Mooring Masts, the solar, and the keep. The windows of the internal buildings had been enlarged from cross-slitted arrow-loops and narrow arches to gracious fenestrations of latticed glass, and greater opulence reigned within them than in former days. The transformation from fortress castle to residential palace had also involved the creation of ornamental gardens around the keep.

Somewhere within the vitals of that keep, Tamlain Conmor, the Most Noble the Duke of Roxburgh, Marquess of Carterhaugh, Earl of Miles Cross, Baron Oakington-Hawbridge, and Lord High Field-Marshal of the Dainnan—to name only his principal titles—strode into the richly furnished suite he always occupied when at Court, calling for his junior valet and his squire.

‘Ho, John! Where is my lady wife?’

‘The Duchess Alys-Jannetta is at her bower with her ladies, Your Grace,’ piped the valet.

‘So. Have you laid out some clean clouts for the evening?’

‘The scarlet hose or the puce, Your Grace?’

‘I care not, just as long as they are serviceable enough that they don’t split along the crotch seam and let my backside hang out. Wilfred, is Conquest well-polished?’

‘Conquest is oiled and polished, sir,’ replied that young man.

‘Give him here.’ The Dainnan Chieftain stroked the broadsword lovingly; held it up to the light.

‘Good.’ He handed the weapon back to his squire. ‘See that the new scabbard is maintained as bravely. Who’s that at my door? Enter.’

A footman opened the sitting-room door. A messenger ran in, went down on one knee before the warrior and bowed, offering a silver salver on which a leaf of parchment flapped. Roxburgh read the note, scratching his bluff chin.

‘Very well.’ He sighed. ‘Conduct this lady to the Chamber of Ancient Armour. She may await me there. My wife is at her bower, you say?’ Crumpling the parchment into a ball, he threw it at John, who ducked too late. The messenger bobbed his head in answer and ran out.

As the sun dipped, the clouds in the west parted, allowing a gleam of bronze to lance the lofty windows of the Chamber of Ancient Armour. The room overlooked a walled courtyard of fountains and statues. Across the tapestries on its walls, scenes from history and legend spread themselves, all with a bellicose theme. Here, two cavalry brigades charged at one another, pennants streaming, helmet plumes, manes, and tails flying, to clash in a tangled mass of armoured brawn and rearing, screaming war-horses. There, Dainnan archers in disciplined rows fired a deadly rain of darts, the back line standing with legs astride, braced to shoot, while the front, having spent its arrows, reloaded. On another wall, Warships locked each other in combat among a ferment of storm clouds above a city. Farther on, the infantry of the Royal Legion raged about a trampled field. Their enemies lay thick on the ground and the colours of Eldaraigne fluttered high above.

Antique armours stood against the walls. Dark wooden shelves housed outmoded hauberks-of-mail, habergeons, camails, coudieres, padded and quilted armour of fabric and boiled leather, mail coifs, brigandines, conical helms extruding long nasals, prick spurs, knee-cops and aillettes of leather, rerebraces, vambraces, gauntlets, baldrics, helms winged and fanged and halberds from times long past, dull and sheenless, mostly dented, torn or cloven. The high gabled lids of arming chests hinted at more.

Afternoon light spilled like brandy across an acorn-patterned carpet at the daintily shod feet of the visitor who sat waiting in a chair heaped with brocade cushions. A page boy in the livery of Roxburgh, gold and gray, stood stiffly at her shoulder.

Filigree brass lamps hung on chains from the ceiling and jutted in curled brackets from the walls. A servant scurried about, kindling them to amber glows. Disappointed, the last of the sunrays withdrew. As they did so, a white-wigged footman entered, wearing black pumps and an iron-gray tail-coat with gold trimmings. He bowed.

‘Your Ladyship, His Grace will see you now.’

He held the door open. The dark-haired, masked widow passed through and was guided deferentially to a larger chamber; the Duke of Roxburgh’s audience-room. In a loud voice the footman announced, ‘Lady Rohain Tarrenys of the Sorrow Islands.’

The visitor was ushered in.

A hearthful of flames flung warmth into this room, cheerily bouncing their glow off polished walnut furniture and silver-gilt. A pair of cast bronze andirons with eagle motifs supported a burning giant of the forest. They matched the decorated fender, the pokers, the tongs. Crossed swords, broad-bladed hunting knives with deer’s foot handles and other trophies of arms enlivened the walls alongside a mounted boar’s head with formidable tusks and the masks of other game.

The fire’s light was supplemented by three hanging lusters and, atop a table, a bronze urisk holding a massive bouquet of bell-flowers whose cupped petals were candle-sockets. Two more goat-legged wights in marble supported the mantelpiece, which in turn bore a set of equestrian statuettes in malachite and agate. On a bearskin rug before the hearth lay a pair of lean hounds.

Conmor, Duke of Roxburgh, stood by the window. He was still in the field-dress he had worn that day: loose-sleeved shirt, leather doublet slit to the hips, belted loosely at the waist, embossed baldric slung across the shoulder, suede leggings, and knee-boots. Firelight burnished his shoulder-length, unbound locks to dark mahogany.

At her first sight of the Dainnan Commander, a muffled gasp escaped from beneath the visitor’s veil.

Thorn!

But no. Of course not—it was just that she had not been expecting to see a tall figure wearing the subdued Dainnan uniform here in the palace suites, where braided liveries stalked alongside jeweled splendors. This man with brown hair tumbling to his shoulders was not Thorn, although he came close to him in height, and if she had not first seen Thorn, she would have thought the Commander exceedingly comely. He was older, thicker in girth, more solidly built, his arms scarred, his thighs knotted with sinew. At the temples his hair was threaded with silver. Proud of demeanor he was, and stern of brow, but dashing in the extreme.

The warrior leader’s hazel eyes, which had widened slightly at the sight of the visitor, now narrowed. Somewhere in remote regions of the palace, something loose banged peevishly in the rising wind.

‘Go and see to that shutter, will you, lad?’

The momentary distraction allowed Rohain-Imrhien to recover her poise. She curtsied and awaited tacit permission to speak.

‘Rohain of the Sorrows,’ repeated Roxburgh, ‘pray be seated and remove your widow’s veil. Here in the palace we are joyed to look upon the countenance of those with whom we hold converse.’

His guest inclined her head.

‘As Your Grace’s servants have many times assured me, sir. But I am uncomfortable without it. I have made a vow—’

‘I insist,’ he broke in; a man used to having his demands met and impatient with those who would not cooperate. There seemed to be no choice.

She unhooked the mask and drew it aside.

Her eyes never left his face. She read all that passed across it—the look of surprise, the turning away, then the avoidance of her eyes. What could it mean? This was the first test in the outside world of this new face she wore. Was it then so strange?

‘Wear the veil if you must,’ the Dainnan Commander said briskly, throwing his shoulders back as though regaining control of himself after a lapse. ‘Wilfred, have refreshments brought for Her Ladyship and myself.’

Murmuring compliance, Wilfred withdrew.

‘For you must be weary, m’lady,’ continued Roxburgh, ‘after your journey. The message I received from the Doorkeeper indicated that you have travelled to Caermelor on an errand of importance, with news that you will entrust only to the King-Emperor.’

Rohain-Imrhien fastened the mask back in place.

‘That is so, Your Grace.’

She perched on the edge of a velvet-covered chair. Roxburgh remained standing, occasionally striding up and down in front of the hearth.

‘Have you any idea,’ he said, ‘how many folk come knocking upon the King-Emperor’s doors with the same message as you? Petitioners, beggars, would-be courtiers, social climbers—most of them do not get as far as an audience with me. You have been fortunate, so far, due to your apparent station. I have many calls upon my time. His Imperial Majesty the King-Emperor will not hold audience with you. It is a busy time for all—meaning no discourtesy, my lady, but His Majesty has no spare time these days. Our sovereign’s waking hours are devoted to the urgent business at hand. As one of His Majesty’s ministers I am empowered to speak for him and take messages on his behalf. Now, what are your tidings of import?’

A page in gray-and-gold livery came in bearing a laden tray. He set it down on a table with legs carved like sword irises and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, then bowed to his lord and to the lady.

‘Thank you—’

Rohain’s host glanced sharply at her. Obviously she had made a mistake by thanking the lad. It appeared that those born to be served by others did not consider it necessary to show gratitude to the servants here in the palace. She must avoid such errors. To survive here among the denizens of the Royal Court, one must do what all newcomers must do in a strange country—copy the behaviour of the inhabitants. If she observed them closely, if she followed their customs and manners, then she might pass undiscovered.

‘My tidings are for the ears of the King-Emperor,’ she repeated.

The Dainnan Chieftain frowned. He seated himself opposite her, leaning back in his chair. ‘Well, My Lady of the Sorrows, it seems we can discover no common ground. Pray, partake of wine and cakes before you depart. I am sorry there can be no commerce between us.’

Ethlinn and Maeve had said that Roxburgh could be trusted, but it would be better to see the King-Emperor himself. She must try for it.

‘I must speak with the King-Emperor.’

‘And I have told you that it is impossible.’

He handed her a goblet, silver-gilt, enameled in mulberry.

‘To your health.’

‘And to Your Grace’s.’

She raised the vessel, lifted the veil, and drank. The liquor was the essence of peaches, on fire.

‘’Tis a pity to travel so far only to leave with your mission unrequited,’ remarked the Duke conversationally, lifting one mightily thewed shank akimbo and resting a boot on his knee.

‘Yes, a pity.’

‘How do they speak of us, in the far Isles of Sorrow?’

‘Highly, sir. But no words I have heard spoken do justice to the wonder and wealth of the Royal City. The name of Conmor, Duke of Roxburgh, is also famous in far-flung places, of course.’

‘And no doubt many a story is attached to it.’

‘All are gestes of valor.’

‘And honour?’

‘Most assuredly!’

‘If Conmor of Roxburgh is spoken of, perhaps you are aware that he has little time for secret messages, being more concerned with the safety of the Empire. It is no secret that war is gathering on the borders. Our spies reported large movements of armed barbarians in northern Namarre last month near the Nenian Landbridge. Yesterday the Royal Legions began deploying five hundred troops to the north as part of the King-Emperor’s moves to guard against possible military action by Namarre. I am needed there. I sally forth on the morrow.’

‘I know nothing of such matters, sir, but perhaps a show of strength may be all that is required to make these rebels think again.’

‘Precisely. Otherwise, they shall know the fury of the King-Emperor’s Legions.’

‘It is said that they are allied with immortals—unseelie wights of eldritch who are moving northward in answer to some kind of Call; formidable foes.’

‘In sooth, but so-called immortals only live forever unless they choose to die or are slain.’

‘I have heard that if they are wounded so sorely that their bodies become incapable of sustaining existence, they are able to transmute and thus live on in another shape, is it not so?’

‘Some possess that power, yea, but they must take a weaker form, threatless.’

Conversation petered out.

The Dainnan Commander quaffed the remaining contents of his goblet. Rohain-Imrhien sipped her own, replaced it on the inlaid table, and stood up. Roxburgh also rose to his feet.

‘You are leaving so soon?’

‘I will not squander more of your time, sir—Your Grace is a busy man, I know. Thank you for sparing me a moment.’

‘But your tidings …’

‘Will Your Grace take me to the King-Emperor?’

‘Before you stands his sworn representative. Is that not enough?’

‘No, sir.’

She curtsied. Beyond the palace walls, out in the gulf of night, the wind raged, hammering at the windows.

‘Good speed,’ said Roxburgh, smiling slightly.

Rohain-Imrhien guessed he would not truly let her leave without divining her purpose.

She paused by the door, where two footmen of matching height stood poised to escort her. Then she turned and looked over her shoulder. The war-leader stood with his feet apart, arms folded. He nodded curtly. She walked back into the chamber.

Her bluff had not worked.

His had.

‘I will tell you, sir,’ she said, since there was no option.

The wind sucked along corridors. It sang weird harmonies, flinging doors open and shut with sudden violence and setting every hound in the Royal Kennels to howling.

A sleepy young footman went around the Duke of Roxburgh’s audience-chamber, lowering the gleaming lamps on their chains and trimming the wicks, lighting a score of candles slender and white like young damsels, now yellow-haired. In the tall hearth, the flames had simmered down to a wary glow, enlivened now and then by a sudden gust down the chimney. The hounds by the fire twitched, dreaming perhaps of past hunts.

Rohain fell silent, her story told. Long before this night, before she had become Rohain, she had held an inner debate on what she would say, should she ever reach Court. To reveal the existence and whereabouts of the hidden treasure was her purpose, and to uncover the corrupt Scalzo and his adherents so as to be avenged. But to disclose her own identity—insofar as she knew it—was not her intention. In truth, she was nothing but a homeless waif who had forgotten a past that possibly was best left forgotten. She was a foundling, an ex—floor-scrubber, a serf, a stowaway, a misfit, and an outcast. Now a chance to begin afresh had fallen like a ripe plum into her lap. The lowly part of her life could be swept away and hidden. With a new face and a new name, she who had first been nameless and then been Imrhien might indeed become Rohain of high degree.

To begin living a lie did not sit comfortably with her, but so many reasons made it the choicest path. A noblewoman could wield so much more influence than a servant. That power might be used to help her friends. With influence, she had also some chance of finding Thorn again, of at least seeing him, from a distance, one more time. Thirdly, having once tasted dignity and luxury, it would be hard to relinquish them.

And so she had told her story to Roxburgh not as it was, but as she wished it to be heard. He had listened closely throughout, and when she had finished had asked several pertinent questions. He was no fool; she guessed that he perceived some flaws in the web she had woven, but, perhaps out of tact, he chose to overlook them.

The story went that she had left the Sorrow Islands and begun a journey across Eldaraigne in a small, private Windship. A storm had wrecked the craft over the Lofty Mountains. She and a crew member had been the only survivors of the disaster. Wandering destitute and in danger through the wight-ridden forests, they had come accidentally upon a treasure hoard of unsurpassed magnificence, at a place they named Waterstair.

‘A treasure hoard? You say that it contains much sildron?’

‘Vast quantities, sir.’

‘Did you bring any with you?’

This might be a trick question.

‘Knowing that all newly discovered sildron is the property of the King-Emperor, I did not take any from this trove—nor did my companion. But those who discover such wealth are entitled to a share of it in reward, or so I am told. We took jewels and coin, to help us, should we find our way out of the wilderness and regain the lands of men, for we were destitute, as I have recounted.’

‘May I see these valuables?’

‘All is spent.’ She added hastily, ‘We took so very little—we could not carry much.’

‘Spent? Where?’

‘In Gilvaris Tarv, when we reached it. Of course, my first thought was to send a message by Stormriders to the King-Emperor, to inform him of this find. However, I held back at the last moment. I was reluctant to let such precious knowledge pass out of my hands—not that I do not trust our most worthy Stormriders, but accidents may happen. I decided, then, to journey to Caermelor, in person, with the news. As I was preparing for the journey, disaster struck. My unwonted spending, and that of the aeronaut who had helped me survive in the forests, had not gone unnoticed. He was abducted, with a number of his friends, by a gang of perfidious knaves. They forced him to lead them to the trove, and there he was betrayed, slaughtered before the very doors of the vault. One of his companions escaped to tell the tale, but later perished. I barely escaped with my own life. Through adventure and misadventure I made my way across Eldaraigne until I came here, to Court. Even as we speak, those black-hearted murderers, Scalzo’s men, may be raiding the King-Emperor’s treasure at Waterstair—not for the first time—while the bones of brave fellows lie rotting in the grass.’

‘The name of this aeronaut?’

‘Oh—the Bear, he was called,’ she stammered, fearing she might somehow betray Sianadh by revealing his true name.

‘The Bear, indeed?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the haunts of these brigands?’

‘Gilvaris Tarv, near the river. On the east side. I know no more.’

The Dainnan Chieftain called for more wine. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

‘But if all is as you say, my lady, then this is a very serious matter. We are talking of treason.’

She made no reply.

‘Treason, perpetrated by those who have concealed and appropriated the property of the Crown. The punishment for that is severe.’

‘As I imagined.’

‘You will understand, my lady, that you must remain, as it were, under royal protection until your story can be verified. This is for your own safety as well as for reasons of security.’

‘Of course.’

This had been half-expected. Besides, where else would she go? It had been in her mind to ask her coachman—by now no doubt comfortably ensconced in some downstairs pantry with a tankard in his hand, waiting for her—to take her to the nearest reputable inn for the night. Beyond that, she had formed no plan.

‘You must bide here, at the palace, until transportation to the Lofties can be arranged. Since you know the way, you must lead us there. Your reward shall be substantial—more than a few jewels and coins easily spent.’

Untruthfully, she said, ‘Sir, knowing that I serve my sovereign is reward enough. Nevertheless I accept your offer with gratitude. I hope for every success in tracking down the treasoners.’

He laughed humorlessly. ‘So, ’tis retribution you are after!’

Truthfully, she said, ‘Yes, but that was not my primary goal. I came here to fulfil a promise to a friend, and that I have done.’

He shrugged. ‘I will have that wag Wilfred call your servants to bring your accoutrements. Your horses and carriage shall be accommodated in my own stables, your coachman in the grooms’ and equerries’ quarters behind the Royal Coach-Mews, and your maidservant in a chamber off the suite to be prepared for you.’

‘I have no handmaiden. The coachman and equipage are hired.’

‘What? No maid?’

The Dainnan scowled. He left his seat and again paced restlessly before the fireplace.

‘My lady Rohain, you are a most singular noblewoman. You come here, unannounced; nobody has ever heard of you. You come masked and maidless, bearing a most extraordinary tale. You speak with disarming plainness, unlike a courtier or any member of the peerage. Are you in fact a spy?’ On the last word, he spun on his heel and glared at her accusingly.

Outraged, Rohain jumped up. Her overblown skirts knocked the table. A goblet fell to the carpet, scattering its contents like spilled blood. Angry words sprang to her lips in the heat of the moment.

‘Now you accuse me of treason! Indeed, sir, it seems you have been in the King-Emperor’s service for too long—you have become suspicious of all strangers who set foot in the palace. I have come here in good faith, to carry out my duty, only to be called an infiltrator. My mask disturbs you? Well then!’ She tore off the domino and threw it on the fire. Was it a sigh of the wind she heard, or the sudden intake of her host’s breath? The hounds lifted their heads, snarling.

‘If I speak too plainly for your Court manners,’ she cried, ‘teach me otherwise! And as for your treasure, I will prove that it exists. What more would you have me do?’

Her knees trembled. Abruptly, she sat down. The blood drained from her face. How had she possessed the temerity to dare such an outburst? What would happen now—would she be hanged for insolence? She fixed her eyes on the fire. The fragile mask had already been consumed. She was exposed, vulnerable.

Out across the city, a bell tolled. Unquiet fingers of air slid under the door and plucked at the curtains.

‘Your pardon, lady,’ said Roxburgh at length. ‘I stand chastised.’ He bowed. His visage softened. ‘Pray do not think me unkind. It is my way, to test others at first meeting. Surely I have this night learned not to taunt the ladies of the Sorrows, should I ever meet another! Prithee, rest by the fire awhile.’ He paused for another moment, as though savoring some anomaly or bizarreness, then summoned his pages. ‘Lads! See to Her Ladyship’s belongings and pay off the driver. Have lodgings made ready. Find a lady’s maid.’

Two or three young boys hastened to do his bidding.

This Dainnan lord speaks forthrightly to say the least, thought Rohain-Imrhien. He is a man to place faith in.

‘You are His Majesty’s guest now,’ Roxburgh informed her.

And prisoner? What if my ruse were to be discovered?

‘Gramercie. I am weary.’

‘Wilfred—play.’

The multiskilled squire took up a lyre, checked the tuning, and began expertly to coax a melody from the strings.

The wine, the warmth, and the music were sweet. Rohain may have dozed; it seemed no time had passed before a knock was heard at the door. There entered a damsel of her own age, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years, her hair corn yellow, half-encased in a crespine of gold wire. She curtsied, peeping at Rohain out of the corners of her eyes, blinking.

‘Mistress Viviana Wellesley of Wytham at your service, Your Grace.’

‘You are to be servant to the Lady Rohain Tarrenys,’ said Roxburgh.

‘Even so, Your Grace.’

‘Lady Rohain,’ he said, ‘I beg you to dine in the Royal Dining Hall tonight.’

‘Sir, I am honoured.’

Roxburgh again addressed the lady’s maid. ‘Miss, is the suite of chambers ready?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘Then pray conduct Her Ladyship to them with due consideration!’

Accompanied by a footman four paces behind to the right and the new personal maid four paces behind to the left, Rohain-Imrhien was verbally guided through a gridwork of resplendent corridors to her lodgings. The footman waited outside the door, holding it open for them to enter. She caught him staring at her and he blushed to the roots of his powdered wig.

A small, neat woman awaited them in the rooms, a bunch of jangling keys attached to her belt. She curtsied. Her mouth hung open, until she snapped it shut like a frog catching flies. After an awkward pause, Rohain concluded that servants were not permitted to speak first.

‘Speak,’ she offered lamely.

The Chatelaine of the King’s Household introduced herself and indicated an anteroom where a bath awaited. Rohain dismissed her without thanks. The little woman bustled out with a rattle and a clash of stock, ward, and barrel. The footman closed the door and the sound of his steps echoed away.

Sixty candles lit the scene, rising from their brackets like tall yellow flag-lilies. Rohain stood staring. The opulence of the palace suite forced Isse Tower’s decor into insignificance. These rooms burgeoned with decor in shades of emerald and gold, from the patterned carpet like a soft expanse of lawn studded with buttercups, to the gilded walls covered with plaster frescoes and the velvet hangings in apple green and lemon, their lush tassels dangling in bunches like ripening fruits. The bed’s four posts were carved in the likeness of flowering wattle-trees whose boughs soared to a canopy of green brocade fringed with round gold beads above a matching coverlet and cushions. The windows were draped, swagged, and pelmeted in green and gold; daffodil tiles framed a niche wherein a fire blazed bravely, gleaming on a burnished grate and fire-irons. Rohain’s fur-lined cloak, which had been urbanely subtracted by a butler as soon as its wearer had entered the palace, had been placed on a gilt chair next to her few pathetic belongings—the boxes from the carriage and, absurdly, the foot-warmer.

A soft clearing of the throat from the new personal maid drew Rohain’s attention.

‘Ah—what was your name again?’

‘Viviana, m’lady. Vivianessa, in sooth, but I am called Viviana.’

‘Well, Viviana, would you—ah—put away my traveling cloak?’

This was all that, came to mind, on the spur of the moment. What in Aia was she to do with this girl? Were the Court ladies expected to be incapable of dressing and undressing themselves? What a nuisance, to have someone constantly bothering and fussing around!

The young servant folded the cloak carefully into a camphorwood chest carved with woodland scenes. Rohain went into the small room indicated by the Chatelaine. Therein stood a copper tub on lion’s feet, lined with white cambric that draped over the sides like falls of snow. The tub was filled with steaming water tinct with sweet oils and strewn with unseasonable primrose petals like flakes of the sun.

A marble washstand held a matching toiletry set. There was a pair of highly decorated enameled porcelain globes on high foot-rims, pierced all over to allow moisture to drain and evaporate. One contained scented soaps, the other a sponge. These were accompanied by somewhat superfluous porcelain soap stands, soap dishes and soap trays, ewers, jars, pots, candle-branches, and a vase overflowing with hothouse-forced snowdrop blossoms. Incongruously, a shoehorn lay on the floor. Made of pewter, it was mounted in ivory with carved and inlaid handles in the shape of herons.

The lady’s maid spoke. ‘Wishest donna mine that sas pettibob shouldst lollo betrial?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

The girl repeated her strange sentence, twisting a fold of her skirt in her fingers, gazing hopefully at her new mistress.

‘I don’t know what you are talking abdut. Please speak the common tongue.’

The girl’s face fell. ‘Forgive me, m’lady. Methought Your Ladyship might like to practice slingua for this night. I asked only whether Your Ladyship would like me to test the bathwater.’

‘Slingua?’

‘Yes, m’lady—courtingle, some name it, or court-speak. Lower ranks call it jingle-jangle. Does Your Ladyship not have it?’

‘No, I do not have such palaver.’

It had sounded like childish babble, yet the girl seemed to hold great store by it. Could that curious string of quasi-words be part of the social fabric of Court?

‘I will bathe now.’

By this phrase, Rohain had meant to indicate that this Viviana should leave her alone. Instead, the girl stepped forward.

‘Let me unfasten Your Ladyship’s girdle—’

‘No! I can do it myself. Leave me!’

With a look of despair, the lady’s maid rushed from the room. Rohain’s conscience was stricken. The girl had only been trying to do her duty as she saw it—but how annoying and confusing it all was! Rohain almost wished herself back in the woods with Sianadh and the wights. Existence had seemed simpler then: it was life or death—none of these perplexing customs and slangish vernacular.

A sound of stifled sobs emanated from the outer room.

What a featherbrain of a girl! Fancy having nothing better to cry about than a sharp word from her mistress! To one who had faced the Direath and the Beithir, it all seemed so superficial.

Rohain removed her girdle of leather and filigree, and struggled’ with the gown’s difficult fastenings. Presently she peered around the door.

‘Viviana, will you help me unlace?’

The lady’s maid came willingly, red-eyed. Together they battled the endless buttons, the petticoats, the pinching, mincing little shoes.

Timidly: ‘Does my lady wish that I should soap her back!’

‘No. I bathe alone.’ Providence forbid that the girl should see the whiplash-scars.

Nervously: ‘Then shall I lay out Her Ladyship’s raiment for the evening?’

‘I have no other clothes—only what you see.’

The girl’s face crumpled as though she were about to cry again.

Rohain gathered her wits and said quickly, ‘Naturally, I shall require a more extensive wardrobe. You must soon expedite some purchases on my behalf.’ It is fortunate that so much money remains to me from the sale of the emerald.

The servant picked up her skirts and effected a dismal bob of acknowledgment.

Beyond the walls, the wind wailed.

Bathed and dressed, Rohain sat before a many-mirrored dressing-table in which she could scarcely recognise herself, while Viviana brushed out her coal-black locks. The courtier was subdued, doleful. Recalling only too well her own servitude, Rohain’s heart went out to her. Anthills could appear to be mountains if one were an ant oneself, condemned to live among them daily. Softly, she said, ‘I come from a faraway place where Court customs and ways are not known. This seems to trouble you. Why so?’

‘Indeed, my lady!’ Viviana blurted out. ‘It troubles me, more than all the wights in Aia, because it will trouble you, my mistress!’

‘Why should my tribulations be yours?’

‘As I am your servant, your standing reflects on me. I shall suffer for it.’

‘You speak with honesty, if not tact. How shall my plain manners trouble me?’

Viviana spoke earnestly. ‘My lady, there is a way of going on that is not commissioned by those holding office, yet it has grown up in our midst. Here at Court, there is a self-styled elite Set or Circle. The Royal Family and the dukes and duchesses are not part of this courtiers’ game, but many nobles below the degree of duke are counted Within the Set or Out of it, with the exception of the very old and the very young. If one is regarded as being Within the Set, one must fight to retain one’s hold, for if one is Cut, which means cast Out, there is little chance of regaining one’s place.’

‘Is it so terrible, to be Out of this Set?’

‘Indeed, I would say that life is scarcely worth living! Until she witnesses with her own eyes, my lady will not know of what I speak. But by then it may be too late. If my lady is not included in the Set, she will want to leave Court and then I shall be sent back to be maidservant to the unmitigable Dowager Marchioness of Netherby-on-the-Fens! I’d as lief die, in honesty. ’Tis unspeakable, the manner in which the Marchioness treats us. She is continually finding fault and slapping us with her broad and pitiless hand.’

Rohain assimilated this information, staring unseeing into the mirror.

‘Tell me more.’

‘My lady, as the daughter of an earl, you shall be seated amid the cream of the Set at table tonight—the very paragons of Court etiquette.’

‘What makes you think I am the daughter of an earl?’

‘Oh, simply that your finger displays no wedding band, ma’am—despite that I caught a rumour you were a widow—and to be called by the title of “Lady”, you must be the daughter of at least an earl, a marquess, or a duke. Yet since the name Tarrenys is not familiar at Court, methought it must be an earl, begging your pardon, Your Ladyship.’

This was encouraging. Viviana possessed a certain acuity of mind, then, despite her frail emotional state. It seemed that during her stay at Court, no matter how brief, Rohain would need an ally. She studied the lady’s maid in the mirror, seeing a rounded, dimpled face, a turned-up nose, a spot of colour on each cheek, hazel eyes with brown lashes that did not match the bleached hair. A pretty lass, Viviana was clad in a houppelande of sky-blue velvet, with a girdle of stiffened wigan. In addition to the girdle, her waist was encircled by one of the popular accoutrements known as a chatelaine, from which depended fine chains attached to a vast assortment of compact and useful articles such as scissors, needle-cases, and buttonhooks.

‘And I reckoned that my lady came from a faraway place,’ the girl chattered on, wielding the hairbrush, ‘because of the way m’lady thanked the Duke for his dinner invitation.’

Rohain swiveled in alarm.

‘Said I something incorrect?’

‘Yea, verily, m’lady. A dinner invitation from a duke is a command. One must reply, “I thank Your Grace for the kind invitation and have the honour to obey Your Grace’s command.” I don’t know what he thought, forsooth, but likely the lack of form did not irk him, for those of the Royal Attriod are above such matters.’

‘But you say that I will be scorned and reviled by others if I am ignorant of these complicated forms of etiquette?’

‘In no small measure, m’lady! The cream of the Set can hang, draw, and quarter the ignorant, in a manner of speaking. Those they have scathed never prosper in Society. But ’tis not merely the forms of address and the slingua—’tis the table manners and all. Entire libraries could be devoted to them. Coming from a high-born family, Your Ladyship will have all the table manners, I’ll warrant.’

‘Not necessarily.’

Unbidden, images formed in Rohain’s mind; the table at Ethlinn’s house—everyone seated around, plucking food from a communal dish with their hands and wiping their greasy fingers on the tablecloth; Sianadh clutching a joint of meat in his fist and tearing at it with his teeth; thick bread trenchers used as plates, to soak up the gravies and juices and to be eaten last.

Rohain chewed her lip. To be catapulted from shame to glory and back to shame would be more than she could bear. And what if Thorn should attend this dinner, to witness her humiliation?

‘Do the Dainnan attend the Royal Dining Hall?’

‘Sometimes, m’lady, when they do not dine in their own hall.’

‘Are you acquainted with any of the Dainnan?’

‘Not I, m’lady.’

‘Viviana, why do the noble courtiers insist upon this? These dialects, these intricate manners you hint at—why are they necessary?’

‘Marry, I vouch it is to show how clever they are, how much they deserve their station because they are privy to secrets of which the commoners know naught. Yet again, those of the highest degree do not concern themselves with slingua and such codes—they do not have to prove themselves worthy.’

‘Viviana, you are wise. I believe I have misjudged you. Teach me, that I may not be made an outcast this night.’

‘My lady, there is no time!’ From somewhere down the labyrinths of corridors, a hum mounted to a reverberating crescendo—the sounding of a gong. ‘It is the dinner gong! In a few moments, a footman shall come to escort Your Ladyship to dinner. And then we are both ruined!’

‘Calm yourself. Listen, you must help me. When I go to the table, stay beside me at all times. I will do as others do. Prompt me if I err.’

‘But my lady’s hair is not yet coiffed appropriately!’

‘Shall I wear the headdress to conceal it?’

‘No, no—that design is not suitable for evening wear.’

‘Then attend to my hair.’

‘It will take long—’

‘Nonsense! Do the best you can. We have moments, do we not?’

‘Verily, m’lady.’

Determinedly, Viviana swapped the hairbrush for a polished jarrahwood styling-brush inlaid with coloured enamels, its porcelain handle knopped with crystals. She twisted the heavy tresses, looping some of them high on her mistress’s head. Securing them with one hand, she fumbled at the legion of assorted knickknack boxes, bottles, and jars set out on the dressing-table, fashioned from silver, ivory, wood, and porcelain. Rohain lifted a few lids, unscrewed several caps, to reveal pink and white powders, black paste, pastilles, gloves, buttons, buttonhooks, ribbons, decorative combs of bone, horn, or brass inlaid with tortoiseshell, silver pique barrettes, enameled butterfly clasps, scented essences, aromatic substances.

‘What seek you?’ Rohain winced in pain as Viviana in her haste tweaked a strand of hair.

‘I seek pins for the coiffure.’

A carved ivory box fell open, spewing jeweled pins. Viviana snatched them up and began thrusting them ruthlessly into Rohain’s cloud of curls.

‘Ouch!’

‘Forgive me …’

‘What is the purpose of these paints?’

‘They are for the beautification of the face. Kohl for the eyes, creams and coloured powders for the skin; rouge made from safflowers …’

Suddenly panicking, Rohain clapped her hands to her cheeks. In the looking-glass, her new visage had seemed unobjectionable to her, but how could she be certain that this was not merely wishful thinking? Her heart began hammering.

‘Should I be using them?’

‘Many courtiers do, but you need not, m’lady.’

‘Why not, if ’tis what others do? My face—is it acceptable? Tell me truly!’

‘My lady already has the look that others wish to achieve—she needs no paint.’

‘What do you mean?’

Viviana halted her furious burst of hairdressing activity and planted her hands on her hips.

‘Does my lady jest?’

‘No. I do not jest. I wish you to tell me if my features are acceptable. Tell me now, and if they are not, I will not venture into that Hall this night, command or no command.’ Butterflies roiled in Rohain’s stomach.

A loud rapping at the door startled them both. A voice called out imperatively.

‘Yes, m’lady, yes they are!’ Viviana squeaked hastily. ‘Quickly—to be late for dinner is an unpardonable lapse. M’lady would be Out before the first forkful.’

‘Then let us go.’

The decoratively painted plaster walls of the great Royal Dining Hall, here and there covered with tapestries, soared to elaborately carved cornices and a domed, frescoed ceiling. Six fireplaces, three on either side, threw out enough warmth to fill its vaulted immensity. In a high gallery a trumpeter stood like a stalagmite dripped from the plaster ceiling plaques and chandeliers. He was one of the Royal Waits, wearing scarlet livery and the ceremonial chain of silver roses and pomegranates.

Along the walls, edifices of polished wooden shelves lit by mirror-backed girandoles displayed ornamental silverware, tempting platters heaped with fruits and cakes, covered cheese dishes disguised as little milk churns or cottages, silver chafing dishes with ivory handles, and glowing braziers of pierced brass ready to warm food. Liveried butlers and under-butlers stood at attention beside every board. Broad trestles ran down the length of the Hall, draped with pure white damask cloths, lozenge-patterned. The High Table, set up at right angles to this, stood upon a dais at one end. Its snowy wastes were bare of tableware, save for a quartet of surtouts, the seasons personified; grand sculptures in silver-gilt. Spring, her hair garlanded with blossom, caught butterflies. Summer, laurel-wreathed, held out her dainty hand for a perching lark. Autumn, twined with grapevines, dreamed by a corn-sheaf, and Winter, crowned with holly, danced. Candlelight glittered softly from their frozen glory.

The long tables, loaded with dinner service, made the High seem by comparison austere. A myriad white beeswax candles in branched candelabra reflected in fanciful epergnes of crystal or silvered basketwork, golden salvers lifted on pedestals and filled with sweetmeats or condiments, sets of silver spice-casters elaborately gadrooned, their fretted lids decorated with intricately pierced patterns, crystal cruets of herbal vinegars and oils, porcelain mustard pots with a blue underglaze motif of starfish, oval dish-supports with heating-lamps underneath, mirrored plateaux and low clusters of realistic flowers and leaves made from silk.

On both sides a sanap—a long strip of white cloth—lay along the table edges. Individual place settings had been laid along the sanaps at regular intervals, hedged in by an array of gleaming weaponry—knives, forks, spoons, suckett forks, soup spoons, cake forks, dessert spoons, cheese knives, miniature tongs, fish forks; a veritable arsenal, all engraved with the royal insignia, all with matching handles ending in silver scallop shells. Milk-white serviettes in front of each setting had been cleverly folded into sailing ships. Beyond these cutlery fences, gardens of tall crystal goblets sprang up from long, slim stems, like tulips. Several silver table-top Seaships on wheels served as salt-cellars to be rolled along so that diners could help themselves.

Quiet music wafted from an overhead gallery where a trio of minstrels fifed and strummed, ignored by the dour-faced Wait. A stream of noble courtiers flooded through the doors at the lower end of the Hall. At first glance they seemed not to be human, so fantastic was their raiment.

Not one of these ladies seemed to be clad in fewer than three garments at once: a shorter surcoat, a longer half-sleeved kirtle worn beneath, and a full-length tight-sleeved undershift, the three contrasting hems and pairs of sleeves all tailored to be cleverly revealed. Their outer sleeves either fitted at the shoulder and hung in loose folds to be gathered into a tight band at the wrist, or they were tight, with a roll or gathered puff at the shoulder, or bell-shaped, sometimes turned back to the elbow, showing the fur lining, sometimes gathered into a bunch at the shoulder and left to fall in deep folds under the arm. So ridiculously long and full were many of the sleeves that the lower sections had been tied in great knots to prevent them dragging along the floor. Rich embroideries covered every yard of fabric. From the ladies’ girdles and chatelaines, harnessed with silver and gilt, hung keys and purses and little knives in pretty sheaths, to match the armbands, brooches and jewelled pins of these human peacocks. Their headdresses were exaggerated affairs, horned, steepled, gabled, flowerpot or resembling wide, fretted boxes.

Taltries being unnecessary within dominite walls, the lords burdened their heads instead with large beaver hats or generously draped millineries of velvet and cloth, or cockscombs of stiffened, scalloped fabrics. Liripipes of impractical length twined around their owners’ heads and shoulders like strangler vines. There were hats with tippets dangling and flapping about, hats with coronets, hats with bulbous crowns, hats with long and voluptuous plumes and painted hoods. Dagged, jagged gorgets fell in a profusion of ornamented folds over the shoulders of the lords. Wide and embroidered tippets trailed to the ground.

The persons of the lords were gorgeously encased in laced doublets, velvet jackets, embroidered surcoats, cotehardies with bunched shoulders, parti-coloured paltocks, court-pies and striped hose. So small-waisted were the fops among them, they must have been corseted.

With painted faces floating above brilliant damasks, velvets, figured satins, samite, keyrse, tisshew, cloth-of-gold, shot silks, saffian, cambric, gauze, partridge, and baudekyn, this magnificent crowd milled around the trestles and chairs of carven oak. They stood by their accustomed places with their squires and pages and other personal attendants keeping guard at their backs. Some courtiers carried their pet cats on their arms: highly bred miniature lynxes, caracals, and ocelots, trained to sit demurely at plateside and daintily share the feast.

‘An it please my lady, wait behind the doors until the assembly be seated,’ the escorting footman had said. ‘The Steward of the Royal Dining Hall will proclaim my lady’s name as she enters, in order that she may become known to all.’

A trumpet sounded.

‘Bide,’ whispered Viviana, attending close at Rohain’s elbow. She added unreassuringly, ‘Ah, would that there had been time to enamel m’lady’s fingernails—they look so overgoren bare.’

Between fanfares, the voice of a steward or herald announced the arrival of various aristocrats of the upper echelons who took particular precedence. When these were seated, the rest took their places with a scraping of chairs and a murmur of conversation.

‘Lady Rohain Tarrenys of the Sorrow Isles!’

Rohain entered the Dining Hall.

Like a lens concentrating light beams, the appearance of a newcomer drew immediate and intense attention. Aware of the covert glances, the open stares and whispers, Rohain felt the blood rush to her face. The Hall seemed overheated and stifling.

‘This way, m’lady.’ An obsequious under-steward indicated an empty place and helped the new arrival arrange herself and her wayward petticoats into it. Rohain courageously lifted her eyes and nodded politely to those seated in her vicinity. Not one of them met her gaze for more than an instant, although she knew they scrutinized her intensely when she looked away. Her eyes scanned the faces of the rest of the company. Thorn was not among them. The under-steward introduced her to the young men seated on her left and right but she scarcely heard, so awed was she by the dazzling landscapes of the tables.

Another trumpet blast seemed to be a signal. At its sound, ewerers approached the tables bearing fish-shaped aquamaniles with spouted mouths, and proceeded to pour perfumed water over the diners’ hands. The water fell into small porcelain bowls with perforated lids, and was thus hidden from view, being now polluted. Serviettes for drying were proffered, then whisked away along with bowls and ewers. Following the handwashing, a formidable procession of servants carried in massive covered platters that were set down in the few available spaces.

The High Table, with its canopy over the tall chair in the centre, was so far removed that it would have been difficult to make out the faces of any seated there. However, it remained empty of diners and food. The small silver tools chained to Viviana’s chatelaine jingled softly as she leaned to her mistress’s ear.

‘They will now begin the Credence and the Assaying. Your Ladyship need only wait.’

‘Why is the High Table empty?’ murmured Rohain.

‘The Royal Family and the Attriod, and others of the highest degree, frequently dine privately, in the Royal Dining Chamber or one of the parlors. The Lord Chamberlain, the Master of the Horse, and the Lord Steward have joined them this night; also the King-Emperor’s Private Secretary, the Crown Equerry, and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. Many lords who were staying at Court have returned to their own estates, what with the threat from the north and all.’

When the courtier referred to the northern menace, her tone became grim. Her flow of information abruptly ceased. Rohain sensed the undercurrent of apprehension behind the words, and her queasiness doubled. Namarre—that strange, wild land seemed so far away, and yet its very name loured like an airborne pestilence over the Royal City.

‘And the Dainnan?’ Rohain’s gaze roved among the knights in white satin tabards seated along trestles at the far side of the Hall.

‘Their tables are poorly attended. Only one thriesniun dines with us this night.’

One of the courtiers seated nearby shot Viviana a censorious glance. She drew back and stood respectfully to attention as before.

At the top end of the long tables were arranged the earls and countesses, the viscounts and viscountesses, and one marquess. There, among side tables, moved the Tasters, who were commissioned with the job of dying if the food should be poisoned. They swallowed morsels with grace, deliberation, and an air of the utmost insouciance. Assayers touched the food with serpents’ tongues, crystals, agates, serpentine, and jewels from toads’ heads, all of which would change colour or bleed should poison be present.

‘With all these boats at table, one imagines that the Cook has arranged something diverting in the way of marine vittles for the second course,’ drawled the drooping-eyed courtier seated to the left of Rohain. Detached sleeves were tied at his shoulders with the laces they called ‘points’. Beneath them, the sleeve of his doublet was slit up to the shoulder to reveal a third set of sleeves, those of his silken shirt.

Noting the nautical salt cellars, the sailing-ship serviettes, and the scallop-ended cutlery, Rohain forced a smile. ‘One would imagine so.’

‘Does my lady intend to stay long with us at Court?’ casually inquired the long-jawed fellow to the right. He wore a short gown with bagpipe sleeves and a harness with bells attached, slung across his shoulder.

‘I am uncertain, at this time …’

Butlers serenely poured wine; rose, white, and gold. Crystal goblets enhanced the brightness and colour of the liquids. The rituals of Credence and Assaying seemed to be taking a long time. Making small talk was like mincing on a tightrope. Rohain felt that at any instant she might speak a false word and plunge into an abyss of condemnation. Catching her eye, Viviana nodded encouragingly.

‘Ah, the 1081 vintage Eridorre,’ said Droop-Eyes, admiring the wine. ‘A good year. And at last, the Tasters cease. One might expire of thirst.’

Yet another brazen fanfare clove the air.

The elderly marquess at the head of the table levered himself to his feet with difficulty, being stout and dreadfully gouty. Three long thin cords hung ornamentally from the yoke of his gown. Weighted with beads, they became entangled at the back, causing his page utmost concern. Heedlessly, the plum-cheeked aristocrat raised his goblet.

‘Let the cups be charged for the Royal Toast!’ he bellowed. The courtiers rose and looked around, holding high their goblets and drinking horns.

‘To the health of the King-Emperor—may His Majesty live forever!’

With one voice, the company loudly echoed the marquess’s sentiment. Crystal rang against crystal. At a nudge from Viviana, Rohain noted that all the other ladies were holding their goblets by the stems rather than by the bowls. Quickly she changed her grip, but not before someone snickered daintily. All then lifted their drinking vessels, tasted, looked around once more, and sat down.

‘Let Dinner be served!’ boomed the Master of the Dining Hall. ‘The Soup! Green turtle, lobster bisque and cream of watercress!’

The elderly marquess at the head of the tables leaned back slightly. His squire draped a large and luxurious napkin over his left shoulder, it being a breach of etiquette to demolish the starched linen ships. At this signal, the other bodyservants followed suit. Silver domes were whipped off tureens of steaming liquids. The first course commenced.

‘Much good do it you,’ the courtiers wished each other as they fell to, imbibing without a single slurp, with the exception of those at the head of the table where rank obviated the need for manners. By scrupulously imitating. the other diners, Rohain won through the soup course. When the soup bowls had been removed, the top layer of the sanap was taken away, revealing a clean, unspotted layer beneath.

The seafood course was duly announced and launched with applause. It comprised a magnificent sturgeon that was carried around to be viewed before serving, to the accompaniment of a flute and violins played by musicians dressed as chefs. Two kitchen-hands wearing knives carried the horizontal nine-foot ladder upon which the whole baked sturgeon was laid out on leaves and flowers; beside them walked four footmen bearing flaming torches. The procession was led by the Head Porter, marching with ax in hand. After being paraded once around the table, the dish was borne out of the Hall for carving. During the entremet, the diners were entertained by, acrobats and a couple of overdressed mortal dwarves riding wolfhounds.

At the actual serving of the marine fare, the diners picked up their silver fish forks in their right hands. With the edge of the implement, they cut off a small piece, then impaled it with the tines, raised the morsel to their mouths, and delicately closed their lips around it. The fork was put down while each piece was chewed, and taken up again to prepare the next bite.

Rohain had been accustomed only to eating with hands and knife. She had glimpsed forks once, in the Dining Hall of the Tower—more common had been the sight, of the larger versions used to pitch hay up to stacks. Now she picked up the fork and held it as others did, with her index finger pointing toward the root of the tines. So intent was she on managing this with grace that she did not notice, until alerted by tittering, and an agonized whisper from Viviana, that all others held their forks with the curved tines pointing downward. The newcomer had been in fact partly spearing and partly scooping, using the fork like a spoon. It would seem wantonly perverse to deny the fork its useful ladle-like qualities, yet that was exactly what was expected. Hastening to turn it over, she dropped the offending instrument. It clattered boorishly against her plate. Another gaffe. She found it impossible to eat flesh in any case, and only picked at the garnishes.

Across the table from Rohain and a little to the right sat a strikingly handsome lady, surrounded by many admirers. The ornate roll on her head, eighteen inches high and a yard in circumference, was bent around into a heart shape, the front worn low on the forehead, the sides raised to reveal gold-fretted nets covering her ears. Her fur-edged, cutaway surcoat revealed a contrasting, skintight kirtle. Huge quantities of fur had been lavished in the wide cuffs of sleeves that reached to the floor. Having ignored the newcomer up to the middle of the seafood course, she now tossed a flashing smile in her direction, saying,

‘Dear Heart, how well you look, considering the travails of your long journey. Don’t you think she looks well, Lady Calprisia? Isn’t she just the prettiest thing? Lord Percival Richmond thinks so, don’t you, Percival, you’ve scarcely taken your eyes from her all evening! Don’t be alarmed, Dear Heart, Percival shall not bite, at least I don’t think he shall!’ She followed this with a chiming laugh. Others joined in.

‘That is Lady Dianella,’ whispered Viviana. ‘Beware.’

‘Speak up now—don’t be shy,’ continued the Lady Dianella. ‘How do you like our maritime theme for this evening?’ The lady’s smile was as brilliant as the jewels flashing at her throat, waist, and fingers.

‘I—ah, it is wonderful,’ offered Rohain weakly, bedazzled.

The laugh carilloned.

‘Wonderful, is it? Wonderful, she says, did you hear it? Marry, but she does have a word to say for herself after all. Such charming wit—can you believe it, Lord Jasper? I suppose you know far more about Seaships than we poor land-lovers, you coming from the Sorrow Isles. I am given to understand that those unfortunate lands are so named due to the number of shipwrecks which have occurred on their rocky shores, am I not correct? Is it true that the shipwrecked mariners are welcomed into the arms of the ladies of the Sorrows?’

As if this beauty had said something infinitely scintillating, her section of the table burst into loud guffaws, the antithesis of the restraint practiced in the Tower. Tear-eyed with mirth, Dianella added, ‘Do you like sailing, Lady Rohain?’ which provoked a further outburst of merriment.

Rohain burned. ‘I know nothing of sailing,’ she said.

‘La! Of course not, Dear Heart, your time would be devoted to much feater accomplishments, naturally! Do you sing?’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps the Lady Rohain plays a musical instrument,’ put in a lady with fake seashells and ropes of pearls bedizening her horned headdress, her hair having been drawn through the hollow horns and falling in waves from the extreme ends.

‘No, I do not play.’

‘Do you then dance? One would suppose that you dance blissingly! We should like to see it,’ said the one referred to as Calprisia, taking her cue. Her dainty face was framed by a steeple headdress delicately painted with black lacework, from which trailed a starry veil.

‘I am sorry to disappoint you—’

‘Oh come! Do not be so modest! Hide not your talents—we only wish to encourage, in good sooth,’ said False Scallops.

‘I can only applaud the talents of others.’

‘La! What must they do with their spare time in the Isles!’ Dianella exclaimed. ‘One can scarcely begin to imagine!’

‘And do they all wear their hair like yours?’ asked Calprisia. ‘’Tis a most intriguing style, so simple yet so … ah—’

‘Simple!’ said Dianella innocently, and to the amusement of her friends.

Rohain sensed credibility slipping like sand from her grasp. How should she respond—should she meet affront with austere civility? Exhibit disdain or try to match them at their game?

‘Of course you likely find us complete scoundrels, here at Court,’ added Dianella. ‘No doubt you think us utter reprobates! What brings a polished lady like Rohain Tarrenys to our midst?’

‘My business is with the Duke of Roxburgh.’

That set her tormentress back, but the respite was only temporary.

Turning to the lord beside her, Dianella said, ‘Athal selevader chooseth sarva taraiz blurose.’

‘Fie! Aura donna believeth sa mid-uncouthants es,’ he replied, laughing.

‘You must know I do not understand your slingua,’ said Rohain, flustered. ‘Why then do you speak it in front of me?’

She knew at once that she had erred again. Dianella’s smile dropped from her face like a mask. She arched her eyebrows in a look of exaggerated surprise.

‘Marry, because we are not speaking to you, that is why! La! Is the lady endeavouring to eavesdrop on our conversations? How churlish! Selevader taketh baelificence, Lord Percival.’

‘Dianella, really …’ The droop-eyed lord protested halfheartedly.

‘Pash com grape-melt es—sildrillion et gloriana. May aftermath sault-thou, et storfen-thou!’ responded the other tartly. The rest went off into hoots of laughter. Lord Percival sulked throughout the remainder of the meal. Rohain sat drowning in misery.

‘The Roast Beef!’ roared the Master of the Dining Hall. The third course arrived. The Carver, a comely man with his knives in hand, walked into the Hall followed by the Taster, the Assayers, the Cup-Bearer, the Head Butler, and the Head Panter, all flanked by torch-bearers. For the diversion of the company, he carved the meat in front of them, performing with the dexterity and flair of a juggler. He divided the beast into sections and speared entire joints on the carving fork, before lifting them into the air and shaving pieces off with a keen knife. Thin slices of meat fell to the trenchers in organised patterns, slightly overlapping. Swiftly, he used the knifepoint to place final touches to the arrangement. Salt was sprinkled over the dish before it was presented to the potential consumers. The courtiers served themselves from chased oval chafing-dishes of vegetables, side dishes and pates up and down the tables, and boats of thick sauces and gravies. Some allowed themselves a sprinkle from the personal nutmeg-graters they carried at their belts; small silver boxes with a steel rasping-surface and a hinged lid at the top and bottom.

Through the croon and purr of shallow conversation pricked by the tinkle of crystal and artificial laughter, a far-off, eldritch howling sent sudden shivers through the assembly. Then a deeper note growled, so deep that it was felt, not heard. The bass vibration rumbled up through their feet and set the wine to rippling in the goblets. The small table-dogs about the floor began to yap. The pet cats bristled. As exclamations of astonishment flew like angry wasps around the tables, the tall windows snapped alight with a white blaze. Cries of alarm pierced the air, followed by laughter.

‘’Tis only the beginnings of a natural storm,’ the courtiers reassured one another. ‘I heard the cry of the Howlaa.’

But what a storm.

It was as though some great pent-up anger had been unleashed, which threatened to pound the city to rubble and shake the palace to its very roots. The wind sang in a multitude of voices, like the keening of women lamenting lost lovers and the deep groaning of old men in pain, like the yowling of wolves baying at the moon and shrill pipes whistling in the chimneys, or the boom of some monstrous creature of the deep oceans. The banners and standards atop the palace had to be hastily lowered, for fear that they would be ripped to tatters. Slates tumbled from the roofs, smashing in the courtyards below. The trees in the gardens bent low, moaning. Their boughs whipped and cracked. Sudden whirls of leaves gusted by.

In the Royal Dining Hall, servants covered the light-stabbed windowpanes with heavy draperies, but no fabric seemed thick enough to banish those incandescent flashes. Bolts came hurtling out of the sky, one after another. The trio of musicians increased its volume, trying to be heard over the rain, the wind, and the thunder.

A fire-eater and a stilt-walker endeavoured to attract attention. A juggler performed amazing feats with plates and balls and sticks and flaming brands to while away the next entremet. He was largely ignored, except when he dropped something on his foot and hopped about clutching it, squawking. The Court thought it the best part of the act and applauded.

The fourth course, a pair of swans, was brought into the Hall on a silver dish by two comely young serving-girls in plumed costumes. The birds had been flayed carefully so as to leave their feathered skins intact, then stuffed and roasted before their feathers were sewn back on, their heads replaced complete with jeweled collars, and their feet gilded.

Visualizing the swan-girl at the cottage of Maeve One-Eye, Rohain recoiled in horror, then tried to disguise her reaction, dabbing at her mouth with a tiny kerchief presented by her lady’s maid. But wights cannot be slain, she recalled with a rush of relief.

The counterfeit swanmaidens presented their dish to the elderly marquess and it was then expertly divided up into modest morsels by the Carver.

During the dispatching of the swans, Dianella and her friends conversed with each other almost exclusively in slingua. Their eyes frequently flicked over the stranger among them. Sometimes they giggled behind their hands. Rohain toyed with her food, pretending to eat, sick to her stomach. She could think of nothing to say and only wished to leave the Hall and retire to the solitude of her suite.

Out beyond the dominite walls, thunder rolled its iron ball along the metal tunnel of the sky. Wind laid both hands on the palace roof and tried to wrench it off.

In readiness for dessert, the last layer of the sanap was removed to reveal the chaste tablecloth. Now the ladies of the heart of the Set, bored with each other, flung an occasional retort at the shrinking violet in the midst of their convivial bouquet—sweet words, sharp-edged and biting, liqueur laced with poison, swords beneath silk. Airily, they tossed her dignity from one barb to another, until it hung in shreds.

Lucent jellies, glossy syrups, smooth creams and blancmanges, cinnamon curds, glazed pastries, and fruit tartlets followed the last entremet. Rohain pictured the oleaginous scenes necessarily taking place in the sinks of the palace sculleries.

‘When are we permitted to depart?’ she murmured to her handmaiden. She felt nauseous, but not due to fancy’s images.

‘Not until my lord the Marquess of Early has left the table.’

‘I hope he lives up to his name.’

‘Won’t you tell us what you are whispering about with your maid?’ entreated False Scallops, the Lady Elmaretta.

‘Yea, prithee, tell us!’ chorused others, eagerly, eyes shining as they scented a further delicious opportunity to savor somebody’s discomfiture and win one another’s approval.

‘Naught of importance.’

‘Oh, how provoking!’ they cried in tones of astonishment.

‘Fie!’ Elmaretta wagged a gilt-nailed, admonitory finger. ‘You must out with it. No whispering at table!’

‘And besides, Dear Heart, everything you say is of importance to your friends!’ added Dianella sweetly.

‘Well,’ said Rohain boldly, ‘I was merely telling Viviana what the fox said to the ravening hounds.’

‘Oh? And what was that, pray?’

‘When you have devoured me, let the weakest among you look over his shoulder.’

The ladies exchanged glances.

‘Is that intended for a joke?’ queried Calprisia. ‘Marry, ’tis not very amusing.’

‘No, it is not amusing,’ her friends agreed. ‘What a very odd thing to say!’

‘Are you sure you’ve not partaken of too much wine, Dear Heart?’ said Dianella.‘Or maybe not enough! Look, she’s scarcely touched a drop. Butler! Fill up my lady Rohain!’

Several people laughed bawdily.

Rohain held her temper in check. To lose it would be the final humiliation. Having scored, Dianella appeared to lose interest and turned away.

After distending his bloated belly a little farther by way of the inclusion of frumenty, the gouty old Marquess of Early was helped to his feet and made his exit with ceremony. Dinner, mercifully, was over.

Outside, the storm raged on.

The wattle-gold rooms were a haven.

‘The lords had not such viperish tongues as the ladies,’ muttered Rohain wearily. ‘Not one of them said a word to degrade me.’

‘The lords have their own reasons for courtesy, my lady.’

Rohain climbed the steps of the bed and sank into the feather-stuffed mattress.

In a small voice, Viviana said, ‘Your Ladyship ate very little. To be of modest appetite is considered chic.’

‘You are kind,’ returned Rohain, ‘and supported me as best you could against overwhelming odds. But I know how it is. I have failed. I shall never be included now. I am Out before ever I set foot Within.’

It seemed a terrible disgrace, as though the world’s weight had been set on her shoulders.

Having helped her mistress to bed, Viviana went to dine on the leavings, with the other maids of the lower ranks.

A pair of inhuman eyes, red coals piercing the gloom of a drain.

A stench of rotting matter and feces, stifling. A skittering and a chittering and a squeaking in the shadows, which were alive, running, slithering clumps and humps, black shapes climbing over one another and surging forward in a terrible, living tide. They were everywhere, in increasing numbers—under the bed, in the folds of the curtains and the canopy, falling with soft, heavy plops from the damask pelmet and the frilled valance like malignant raindrops, jammed, wriggling in corners, swarming up the elegant brass legs of the firescreen, smothering the matching firedogs, crawling up the gold-inlaid piers of the lacquered table, upsetting the bowl of oranges upheld on its silver pedestal by four winged babies.

They were rats, and they squeaked.

Their stealthy, filthy claws scratched and scratched. As they drew near, she saw that they wore the spiteful faces of courtiers. Soon they would come running up, in long black streams, up the steps of the bed and across the embroidered eiderdown, along her arms to her face. Then they would cover her with their warm, stinking bodies and begin, with those needle fangs, to gouge, to gnaw, burrowing through the newly emptied eye sockets into the brain, until her flesh was devoured and blood gouted all over the silken pillows and ran down to pool on the meadowy carpets and all that remained was a sightless, staring skull.

Screaming, Rohain woke up.

Pale, pearly light suffused the windows. The pillars of the wattle-tree bed grew protectively all around. Her eyes roved the chamber. The fruits in the dish were not oranges but pears, onyx pomegranates, pastel-dyed marzipan plums, enameled porcelain apples, amethyst grapes.

Of rodents, there was no sign. Her hand brushed her forehead. Her breath came and went in shallow gasps, her skin felt damp with perspiration.

Viviana ran in, full of concern.

‘My lady, what is it?’

‘’Tis naught. Only a dream.’

The windows rattled. Viviana went to them and pulled back the lace curtains. Bright sunlight streamed in. The storm had cleared.

Outside on a green hill near the garden wall, albino peacocks swaggered, unaware of their status in the eyes of the Royal Carver. Nannies monitored overdressed children freed from the Palace Nursery, frolicking with their wooden hobby-horses, their whipping-tops, their pet dwarfhorses the size of small dogs. Citizens of Caermelor peered in through the bars of the iron fence, past the shoulders of the Royal Guards, hoping to catch a glimpse of royalty. The sequestered children stared back, equally fascinated. A diminutive son of an earl drove past the window in a child-sized carriage drawn by sheep. Savagely he wielded the whip.

‘What do you fear?’ Rohain asked suddenly.

‘I do not understand my lady’s meaning,’ the court-servant parried uncertainly.

‘I have a fear of rats,’ explained Rohain. ‘A fear most intense and unreasonable. After all, they are only small animals, relatively harmless, easily slain by foxes and lynxes. Why I should hate them so is beyond guessing.’

‘My cousin Rupert is in dread of the sound of tearing cloth,’ said Viviana.

‘How strange!’

‘Methinks it is not strange, m’lady. When he was but an infant, Rupert had a crooked hip. They used to bind it tightly so that it would grow straight. The binding was most painful for him—he used to wail when they did it. They would rip long pieces of linen to use as bandages, and this was the signal for his terror. So his fright remained, despite that he has now grown to manhood. My mother used to say everyone harbours at least one unreasonable dread, for it is human to do so. Mine is fear of spiders.’

‘Spiders? But they are lovely creatures, so clever, so delicate …’

Viviana shuddered. ‘Even to speak of them, ma’am, sets me atremble.’

‘Why must we have these fears?’

‘I know not, m’lady, but it is said they begin early in childhood.’

‘Then,’ whispered Rohain to herself, ‘my childhood was troubled by rats.’

Viviana glanced again toward the window. ‘Was that not the most fearful storm last night, my lady?’ she asked. ‘It has weakened now, but the wind’s still with us, although it is past noon.’

‘Past noon? I have slumbered too long. I would have been better off without those last moments.’

‘It is well that Your Ladyship woke now,’ Viviana said, with the air of one who has hitherto suppressed exciting news for the purpose of surprising her listener. ‘The Duke of Roxburgh’s footman came here earlier, with a message, but I would not waken you. The Duke has already boarded a Windship bound for the north, but he left a message bidding my lady be ready to depart from Caermelor at sunset.’

‘So they are casting me out already?’

‘Nay—my lady is to be taken aboard a Dainnan patrol ship, a swift craft of the air, for a voyage to the Lofty Mountains under the protection of Thomas Rhymer, Duke of Ercildoune. I have been instructed to attend Your Ladyship on this voyage.’ Her voice rose with exhilaration. ‘My lady, I have never travelled on a Windship before. This is the blissiest thing that’s ever happened to me!’

‘I am glad of it.’

‘Your Ladyship, I am utterly delirious to be accompanying you from this palace. I will be well away from the clutches of the Dowager Marchioness, at least for a time.’ The servant-courtier bobbed a small but exuberant curtsy.

‘For longer than that, perhaps,’ smiled Rohain. ‘I will not give you up easily! Let us prepare.’

‘My lady, you shall require several changes of attire, as befits your rank,’ Viviana informed her. ‘I have taken the liberty of notifying the Court tailors, who even as we speak are altering several ready-made garments in accordance with my estimation of m’lady’s measurements. It will be necessary, nonetheless, for you to summon them to a fitting-session at the earliest opportunity.’

‘Well done, Mistress Wellesley!’ said Rohain in admiration. ‘Have they told you the price?’

‘Of course, m’lady! And ’twas not over-high, either. I haggled somewhat,’ she added modestly.

‘I shall straightway give you the money to pay these tailors.’

Despite the frenzy of preparations that day, visions of the rats did not crumble away for hours. Rohain knew it had not been a dream, but a snippet of memory.

The Dainnan frigate clove the air at speed, with a following wind strong from the west, at around twenty knots. Her timbers creaked. The decks rose and fell, lifted by rising currents on the windward slopes of the foothills and tossed by turbulent downcurrents on the lee slopes. The sweet fragrance of wet leaves rose from below, and the twitterings of a multitude of roosting birds. Behind the vessel, across the sea, penduline clouds blackened the long, infernal forge-fires of the guttering Winter sun. The sails’ shell-scoops glowed fuchsia for an evanescent moment before graying to somberness, scoured out by the raw and grudging westerly. Soon the stars would appear.

Clutching the lee rails in one hand and her taltrystrings in the other, Rohain of the Sorrows stood on the open deck. She was looking back through the lower rigging at the dwindling lights of Caermelor on the hill: the buttressed dominite palaces, dark and massive on the heights, their crenellated shapes squatting among their battlement-crowned turrets and spangled with many eyes; the fragile, latticed columns of Mooring Masts like a forest of webby trees; the spires; the sudden skyscraping upthrust of Caermelor Tower, the fortress of the First House of the Stormriders.

In the darkening courtyards and gardens of Caermelor, fountains would be tinkling unheard. Indoors, out of the cold, lords and ladies would be drinking mulled wine by their fires, serenaded by bards with harps and lutes. The watcher’s heart ached with an abstruse longing—but not for them.

The ship having just entered an airflow of a greater velocity, the wind—traveling faster than the ship it drove—swept the dark tresses from Rohain’s face. Long strands fluttered out on the airstream. Aloft in the rigging where shadowy sky-blue canvas cracked taut, Dainnan aeronauts called out to one another. The sails were constantly being trimmed. The men working them from the decks were standing in a snakepit of hemp and manila. The aeronaut on watch at the bows stood by the bell ready to sound warning of any ships sighted to port or starboard, ahead, above, or below. Crewmen coiled rope on the decks, checked gear and rigging for chafing, and often, in the course of their duties, strode past the two passengers at the taffrail; the only women aboard. Others of the Brotherhood voyaged aboard the Windship; a thriesniun, a detachment of seven-and-twenty Dainnan under their freely elected leader, Captain Heath. Thorn was not among them, and Rohain feared to inquire after him lest she besmirch his name by association, or appear to be brazen. And what would she do, should she be brought into his presence? Confess her passion? He had protected her and Diarmid on their journey across Eldaraigne, as was his duty. As a Dainnan he must safeguard the lives of citizens. The journey was over, the task done. The entwined cords of their lives had split and unraveled. But each time a tall olive-green-clad warrior strode by, her heart lurched like a ship windhooked. From sheer habit, the Lady of the Sorrows pulled her sumptuous taltry closer around her face.

The ship heeled. Viviana staggered at her mistress’s elbow. She looked pale.

‘Come into the chartroom, m’lady. If the air or the ground should become bumpier, there is a goodly chance of being tossed overboard.’

The courtier sidled like a crab across the deck, fell against a wall, and tiptoed back with involuntarily quick, light steps. Rohain watched in surprise. Personally, she found it little effort to compensate for the ship’s movement.

The chartroom was lit by oil-lamps on hooks, sunflowers of light that swayed in a rhythmic dance with the shadows. Thomas Learmont, called the Rhymer, the Most Noble Duke of Ercildoune, Marquess of Ceolnnachta, Earl of Huntley Bank, Baron Achduart, and Royal Bard of Erith (to name only his principal titles) scratched his red goatee. He was poring over a map, alongside Aelfred, the ship’s navigator. Lamplight glanced off the Bard’s shoulder-length silken hanks of hair, turning them wine red against the robin’s-egg blue velvet of his raiment. Around his neck coiled a torque of gold with sapphire eyes; the bardic snake-sigil.

At their first meeting, Rohain had almost mistaken him for Sianadh, not having expected to see red hair at Court, after all she had heard of the place. This man with the neatly trimmed pique-devant beard and dapper mustaches was not Sianadh, although he matched her lost friend in height and girth. The features of his freckled face were strong and pronounced, the eyes deepset and hooded beneath bushy eyebrows. Winged keys were stitched in gold all over his costume. A demicloak swung from his left shoulder, fastened by a zither-shaped brooch. True Thomas, as he was commonly called, had not questioned Rohain concerning the story she had told to Roxburgh. He was no fool, either; shrewdness dwelt behind those twinkling eyes. But for whatever reason, he took her at her word, for now.

The Bard’s pale eyes now turned toward the visitor. He bowed and kissed the back of her hand.

‘My lady.’

She curtsied. ‘Your Grace.’

‘Thirty-four hours should see us at the Lofties, given that this fair westerly keeps up. We sail by night and day.’ He turned to his apprentice, a downy-chinned youth in the Bard’s blue-and-gold livery. ‘Toby, is the rosewood lute restrung?’

‘Yes, Your Grace,’ said Toby, handing it over.

The Royal Bard appreciatively stroked the shiny rosewood and plucked a few strings, which gave out soft, bell-like notes.

‘Good.’ He handed the instrument back to the apprentice. ‘See that it is kept tuned. As I do not have to remind you, new strings stretch, particularly in the changeable airs at these altitudes. Gerald, bring supper and wine. Roll up your maps, Master Aelfred—the lady and I shall dine here anon, with the captains. But first we shall stroll together on deck, if that is to m’lady’s liking.’

‘My servant tells me I am likely to be tipped overboard.’

‘There is little chance of that for the duration of the next watch, m’lady,’ said Aelfred with a bow. ‘The ship will be passing over smooth and level territory. Turbulence is improbable.’

‘Then I accept Your Grace’s kind invitation,’ said Rohain, exulting yet again in her newfound powers of speech.

Quarreling over the best perches, the birds settling in the treetops beneath the hull made noise enough for a dawn chorus. The celestial dome arching high overhead glowed softly with that luminous, aching blueness that is only seen at twilight, and then rarely. The rigging stood out in ruled black lines against it. The moon, just over the half, floated, bloated like a drowned fish.

‘What a strange time of night—or day,’ mused Rohain politely as they stepped along the gently canting deck. ‘Is it day or night, I wonder? The moon and the sun are in the sky both at once. Birds carol as though they greet the morning. It is a between time—neither one nor the other; a border-hour.’

Her companion offered her his arm and she reached past the wide perimeter of her petticoats to rest her hand lightly on his lace-cuffed wrist. The Duke of Ercildoune, Royal Bard and Rhymer to the King-Emperor, was a man of courtesy and learning. She had warmed to him at their first meeting.

‘Speaking of borders,’ said the Bard, ‘puts me in mind of a very old tale. May I tell it you? There are few pleasures greater, it seems to me, than indulging in storytelling on such an evening, at such an altitude.’

‘I would be honoured, sir, to be told any tale by the Bard of the King-Emperor.’

He inclined his head in a gesture of dignity and courtesy.

‘There was once a fellow,’ he began, ‘named Carthy McKeightley—a braggart who took to boasting that he could best any wight in a contest of wit. These brash words eventually came to the ears of Huon himself …’

Panic seized Rohain. She struggled to conceal it.

‘And,’ Ercildoune continued, gazing out over the starboard side without noting her distress, ‘being of a sporting nature, the Antlered One challenged McKeightley to play at cards with him, a challenge which McKeightley, to uphold his words, must accept. To make it interesting, the life of the loser would be at stake.

‘“Be certain!” said Huon the Hunter, lowering his great antlers threateningly. “If I outwit you, your life shall be forfeit, whether you be within your house of rowan and iron or without it. If you run I shall come after you with my hounds, the Coonanuin, and I swear that I shall take you.”

‘To this, McKeightley blithely agreed.’

The storyteller paused. Having recovered her composure, Rohain smiled and nodded.

‘Wily as McKeightley was,’ said Ercildoune, ‘Huon was craftier. The game lasted for three days and three nights, and at the end of it the unseelie wight was the winner.

“Now I shall devour you,” he said.

‘But McKeightley jumped up and fled to his house, locking the rowan-wood doors and windows with iron bolts. It was no ordinary house, built as it was of stone, with walls four feet thick. Every kind of charm was built into it.

‘The Antlered One came to the door like a dark thundercloud, with eyes of lightning, and said, “McKeightley, your iron bars will not stay me. You have pledged me your life, whether you bide outside your house or within it. I will devour you.”

‘With that, he struck a mighty blow on the door. Every hinge and lock in the place shivered to pieces and the door burst apart, for Houn is one of the few Lords of Wickedness so mighty that he can thwart the law of gramarye and cross thresholds uninvited. But when the mighty Huon strode in, McKeightley was nowhere to be seen.

‘“You cannot hide,” laughed the unseelie lord. “My servants will sniff you out.”

‘“Oh, I am not hiding,” said a voice from somewhere near the chimney. “After such a long game I am hungry. I am merely sitting down to dinner.”

‘“Not before I eat,” said the Antlered One.

‘“I fear I cannot invite you to join me,” said the voice. “There is not enough room for a big fellow like you here in the walls where I now dwell, neither within my house nor without it.”

‘Huon gave a howl of rage and disappeared with a thunderclap!’

‘But how clever!’ said Rohain with a smile. ‘Did McKeightley spend the rest of his days living in his walls?’

‘No, for he had, in fact, outwitted the Antlered One and so had won the contest. He possessed a sort of immunity from the creature from then on, and his boastfulness became legendary. He infuriated a good many more folk of many kinds, but surprisingly, lived to a ripe old age; overripe, really, almost rotten.

‘The wrath of Huon was, however, formidable, and upon other mortals he wrought vengeance for this trick. I always air this geste when Roxburgh wishes to dispute my tenet that the brain is mightier than the thew. Do you not agree the tale indicates, my lady, that wit wins where muscle fails?’

‘Why yes. The walls—how astute!’

‘Yea, verily,’ said the Bard, nodding his head. ‘Walls and borders and marches are strange situations—neither of one place nor the other.’

Rohain looked up at the sky, now colourless. To the west, cumulus clouds converged, boiling in some disturbance of the upper atmosphere. She half-expected to see dark shapes sweep across them, howling for blood.

‘Pray, tell me of the Unseelie Attriod,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Where I come from, they will not even speak of it, believing that the mere mention brings ill fortune.’

‘They may be right,’ replied Thomas of Ercildoune, ‘under some circumstances; for things of eldritch mislike being spoken of and have ways of listening in. But I’ll vouch we are safe enough here, mark you! In times past the Unseelie Attriod was the anathema of the Royal Attriod, of which I am currently a member, as you must be aware. An Attriod, of course, consists of seven members, one of whom leads and two of whom are the leader’s second-in-command.’

He slid a jeweled dagger from a sheath at his belt and with the point scratched a pattern on the upright panels of the poop deck.

‘This is how an Attriod is shaped. If the leader is placed at the top and the others in a triangle, with four along the base, a very strong structure will be created—a self-supporting, self-contained framework with the leader at the pinnacle, at the fulcrum, from which he can see afar. It may be seen as an arrowhead, if you like. Each member must contribute particular talents to the whole, such that when locked into position, the structure lacks nothing. As Roxburgh and I now stand at the left and right shoulders of the King-Emperor, so, in macabre travesty, Huon the Hunter and the Each Uisge, the most malign of all waterhorses, once long ago flanked their leader.’

‘Who were the others?’

‘They were four terrible princes of unseelie: Gull, the Spriggan Chieftain; the Cearb who is called the Killing One—a monster who can shake the ground to its roots; Cuachag of the fuathan; and the Athach, the dark and monstrous shape-shifter. That is—or rather, was the Unseelie Attriod, whom some called the Nightmare Princes.’

‘What of their leader?’

‘The Waelghast was struck down. They are leaderless now, and scattered. Many centuries ago, the Waelghast made an enemy of the High King of the Faêran, but eventually it was a mortal who struck the deciding blow, putting an end to the power of that Lord of Unseelie.’

For a few moments a thoughtful silence hung between them.

‘Yet these Hunters are not the only scourges of the skies, sir,’ said Rohain at last. ‘Mortal men can be as deadly. Do pirates frequent these regions?’

‘None have been sighted. If we encounter them ’twill be they who have the worst of it, for this frigate is heavily armed and those who sail in her are not unskilled in warriorship.’

‘There is a place …’ Rohain hesitated.

‘Aye?’ prompted the Bard.

‘There is a place in the mountains, a deep and narrow cleft. The sun rises over a peak shaped like three standing men. To the west stands a pile of great, flat stones atop a crag. As the sun’s light hits the topmost stone, it turns around three times. Pirate ships shelter in that place.’

Ercildoune revealed no reaction to this astonishing news, not by the merest facial twitch.

‘A ravine, you say, between the Old Men of Torr and one of those unlorraly formations in stone they call a cheesewring,’ he replied, ‘of which there are said to be several in the Lofties. This knowledge may prove to be of great use. How you came by it is your own affair, my dear. Be assured, it will be acted upon. But let us speak no more of wickedness. Let us to the cabin—the night grows cold.’

Just before they bent their heads to pass through the low door, Rohain saw the Bard glance over his shoulder toward the northern horizon. It was a gesture that was becoming familiar to her since her arrival at Court. The awareness of strange and hostile forces gathering in Namarre was never far away. It was always felt, even if not voiced.

Besides Captain Heath of the thriesniun, another Dainnan sailed aboard the frigate Peregrine. He was the ship’s captain, a skyfarer with the Dainnan kenning of ‘Tide’. These two took supper with Ercildoune and their lady guide, dining in the Ertish manner, with total disregard for forks.

Conversation in the captain’s mess was dominated by the kindly Bard, who was never at a loss for words. As she grew to know him better, Rohain noted some indefinable similarity between him and the Duke of Roxburgh.

‘How describe they us, in the Sorrow Isles?’ he asked her.

‘With words of praise, sir. The name of Thomas, Duke of Ercildoune, is well-known and highly regarded.’

‘And no doubt many an anecdote is told thereof.’

‘All are tales of chivalry.’

‘And musicianship?’

‘Most assuredly!’

‘Since Thomas of Ercildoune is spoken of, perhaps you are aware of the geas he carries with him,’ subjoined Sir Heath.

‘Is it true, then?’ asked Rohain, recalling one of Brinkworth’s histories concerning the Royal Bard. ‘I feared that to ask about it would appear discourteous.’

‘Yes, ’tis true,’ answered the Bard. ‘I never utter a lie. This virtuous practice, if virtuous it can be called, is a bitterbynde I have sworn to, and shall never break.’

‘Such a quality,’ said Rohain, ‘must be as a two-edged sword, for while His Grace’s word is trusted by all, he likely finds himself in an unenviable position when obliged to comment upon the charms of a noblewoman whose aspect has not been graced by nature.’

The Dainnan captains grinned.

How glibly the words came to Rohain’s lips! By rights, she thought, her tongue ought to have rusted from disuse. Wordsmithing came very easily, considering that she had been for so long mute. With the birth of a new persona, she could become whomsoever she pleased. But what manner of woman was she, this Rohain of the Sorrows? Given the power of speech, she had already used it to lie and flatter, to vent anger. Could this be the character that memory had suppressed?

‘Zounds, you are sympathetic!’ The Bard smiled broadly at his demure guest. ‘Indeed, when it comes to flattery, I am not in the contest. As for hawking my own wares, exaggerated boasting is impossible—only in song and poesy have I license to give rein to fancy. Over the years, I have learned to avoid awkward dilemmas. Never was I a liar or a braggart, but I have come to be of the opinion, since I was gifted with this bitterbynde, that a little white lying, like a little white wine, can be good for one’s constitution. Unfortunately, I am incapable of it.’ He reached for the rosewood lute, and as an afterthought added, ‘Of course, there is a curb on truth as there is on every facility of man. That is, one can only speak the truth as one believes it oneself. If you were to tell me a lie and I were to believe it, I should repeat it to another as a veracity.’ He plucked a string of the instrument. ‘I am for some song—what say you? I have one that I think shall please you.’

‘I should like to hear it!’ exclaimed Rohain.

Experimentally, the Bard strummed a few chords, then began to sing:

‘One holds to one’s ritual customs, one’s intricate, adamant code;

One’s strictly correct with one’s manners, in line with the mode.

Real ladies are frugal when dining; to bulge at the waist would be vile!

Their forms must be slender as willows; of course, it’s the style.

One’s speech is quite blissingly novel—’tis far from colloquial brogue!

And common folk don’t understand it; they’re not in the vogue.

One’s raiment’s expensively lavish and drives ev’ry suitor quite mad.

One’s tailors are paid to keep up with each glorious fad.

One’s hairstyles defy all description; each strand is coiffed right to the end.

One needs to put up with the anguish to be in the trend.

We carefully choose whom to cherish with fine and fastidious passion;

’Tis seemly for one to be seen with the doyens of fashion!’

Between each verse he led a facetious chorus of fal-lal-lals in which, after the first time around, everyone joined, masters and servants alike. The song concluded amid general merriment.

Later, talk among the Dainnan captains turned to weightier matters, such as the strength and numbers of the rebels in the unquiet north. Rohain could only listen in growing consternation, untutored as she was in the ways of warfare.

‘And how do their tactics serve the barbarians of Namarre?’ asked Sir Heath.

Ercildoune replied, ‘Reports say they are but loosely organised under their several chieftains. They shun pitched battles. Instead they use their speed and horsemanship to ride swiftly from location to location, assailing isolated detachments, intercepting convoys and plaguing columns on the march. Until they feel confident of winning, they try to avoid fullblown conflict.’

‘I have heard additionally,’ said Sir Tide, ‘that their light horsemen also use the classic tactics of feigned flight, luring our troops into ambushes or doubling back at a prearranged position and charging the pursuers.’

The Bard nodded and went on to describe other maneuvers performed by the rebels in their constant harassment of northern Eldaraigne by land and sea. Of the unseelie wights being drawn to Namarre by a Summons undetectable to mortalkind, little was discussed. By this omission, Rohain guessed the true depth of the men’s unease. The ways of eldritch wights were alien, often incomprehensible. Who could guess what horrors might come of such an unprecedented mustering?

Thus in conversation the evening passed, until it was time for the passengers to retire to their cabins.

The role of bard was one of the most important and highly regarded functions in society. Historian, record-keeper, song-maker, entertainer; a bard was an exalted figure and a good bard a treasured auxiliary to any person of high birth. ‘Second only to jesters in consequence,’ Thomas of Ercildoune himself had drily proclaimed.

He being probably the most learned man in the five kingdoms, later in the voyage Rohain tapped him for information about the Talith: how many were known to dwell in Erith, where they were located, whether any Talith maidens had been reported lost or taken by wights during the past year or so. He gave her many details about the yellow-haired people, yet although he spoke at length, nothing he revealed gave any clue as to her origins.

But he was merry company, and the Dainnan captains, if sterner and more watchful, were also quick to smile and exchange banter. In song, story, and discussion of the foibles and quirks of courtiers, the voyage passed swiftly.

An unstorm rolled across land and sky, casting its crepuscular veil and lighting the dusky forests with jewels of multihued fires. By night, the Peregrine wandered through a cloudscape of long white ridges and blue-gray valleys, smooth snowfields like bleached velvet, frosted mountains, blue abysses and hoary cliffs occupied only by silent towers of ivory and flocks of teased-wool sheep. The rising sun crayoned bright gold edges on them all.

Before dawn on the eighteenth of Nethilmis, the Windship reached the snow-tipped Lofties and was onhebbed to a lower, more perilous altitude so that Rohain could view the dark landscape. The sky, pure violet in the zenith, shaded to pale gray in the south. Northeastward, the low red rim of the sun burned, rayless. The snowy peaks glistened brilliantly in appliqué against the dull sky.

When at last they drifted over the shadowy pine forest wherein she and Sianadh had been lured by the malignant waterhorse, Rohain was able to get her bearings. Rugged Bell-steeple reared its glistening head in the north. Below it, the line of the distant escarpment was dimly visible across the terrain. Westward, wild, wide cuinocco grasslands stretched as far as the eye could see. There was the gleaming slash of the river-gorge, gouged by the Cuinocco Road on its route to the Rysingspill in the south.

On board the Windship, all attention was directed toward Rohain.

‘This is the waterway we called “Cuinocco’s Way”, which springs from Bellsteeple. Where the land begins to rise,’ she stretched out an arm and pointed, ‘that is the Waterstair.’

Now the vessel flew up the river, directly above it, the hull’s sildron repelling the shallow riverbed but unable to affect the water. In such narrow confines, Captain Tide ordered all sail to be furled. The Peregrine ran only on her quiet, well-oiled sildron engines. Progress was slow but inexorable. Below, jacarandas reached crooked fingers skyward, their cyanic glory now vanished. The firmament unrolled overhead like a sheet of beaten pewter.

Every memory of Sianadh threatened to overwhelm Rohain. She saw the river redgum trees lining the western shores where the walls of the gorge subsided; at this season the river, deprived of its lifeblood by ice’s iron grip in the higher altitudes, ran at a low mark. Farther along, the tree-bridge still lay across the channel. There she and Sianadh had fled to safety and she had brought him water in a boot. Her mood grew melancholy.

In silence and despondence the refugee from Isse Tower came, for the second time, to Waterstair.

‘Before daylight grows,’ said Sir Tide, ‘we shall onheb down to fifty feet and bring her in behind the trees. If any keep watch on this Waterstair, this ship shall not be seen by them.’

The wind dropped. Light as ash keys, those winged, wind-dispersed fruits of ash trees, the Peregrine settled down amid tall firs. The port and starboard anchors were tossed out noiselessly in the brittle air. The crew let down landing-pods on unrolling ropes, and Sir Heath led his thriesniun forth. Like shadows they melted into the greenwood.

The sun stepped a little higher, but no rays bristled forth to pierce the greenery of a thousand shades in the cold, leafy galleries where the Peregrine bobbed, camouflaged by her mottled hull.

A Dainnan knight materialized silently below, the sage green of his raiment scarcely visible against the vegetation. After climbing a rope ladder as easily as another man might run up a stair, he presented himself to the Bard and, addressing him by his honorary Dainnan kenning, delivered a message.

‘My Lord Ash, the place is found. Prisoners have been taken. Lookouts have been posted through the forest. The way is clear.’

Now the other passengers descended and made their way alongside the river.

The water’s loquacious tongues muttered softly. Bushes and grasses beside Cuinocco’s Way lay trampled and crushed. Vines lay shriveled at the cliff’s foot. Rohain searched there for any signs of Sianadh—a fragment of clothing, perhaps; a belt buckle or an earring. She found nothing. Scavengers would have dragged away any carcass left aboveground to rot. His bones would lie scattered somewhere. She had heard it said that hair was an enduring thing, that in graves opened centuries after their occupation and sealing, even the bones had crumbled to dust but the hair yet remained undecayed. Would ruby filaments hang upon twigs here and there, blowing in the wind, all that remained—besides memories—of a true and steadfast friend?

She learned from Captain Heath all that had taken place on the ground while she and the Bard had been waiting in the Windship. Scalzo had left perhaps a dozen of his men to guard the doors of Waterstair. Their lookouts had not perceived the approach of the Dainnan, who moved as quietly as wild creatures. Some of the eastside men had been stationed around the skirts of the rocky pool into which the cascade poured—Sianadh’s ‘porridge pot’. There they had lolled unwarily. The Dainnan warriors had crept up unnoticed under the cover of the waterfall’s noise and taken them without trouble.

However, beneath the water curtain it was a different story. Several of the guards had managed to seal themselves inside the cavern, having slipped through the doors when the surprise attack was launched. They had pulled the doors shut behind them.

The massive, decorative portals would not budge. The Dainnan, having discovered the stone game pieces atop the cliff, had as yet embarked upon no course of action. Twelve of their knights stood ringed around the wet stone platform in the cavern facing those impossibly tall doors, which glimmered green-gold under the gaze of the carved eagle. The ever-descending torrent at their backs cast its illusions on the eyes of those who watched them. As they stood braced for action, the knights seemed to be moving upward.

An indication of his calm faith in Dainnan prowess was given by Captain Heath, who allowed the lady passenger to accompany the Bard beneath the falls. Now Thomas of Ercildoune stood before the doors of Waterstair. His eyes, squinting with intense concentration from beneath his embroidered taltry, moved across the motifs of twining leaves to the runes. Abruptly, the solemnity of his mien was broken by a flashing smile. He nodded at Sir Heath, who signaled his men. The Bard’s chest expanded. He shouted out a single word, which rose above the cataract’s thunder. Smoothly, as they had been designed to do, the doors swung open.

Instantly the Dainnan were inside. The tussle was brief; Scalzo’s mercenaries had no chance of matching the King’s warriors. The Dainnan overpowered the armed guards without drawing their own weapons, in a spontaneous display of speed, strength, and force. In a short time, all were disarmed and restrained.

The treasure at last lay revealed.

So mighty was the mass of the hoard that although it had been despoiled, it seemed to Rohain there was no change in its magnitude. There lay the jeweled caskets, the candelabra, the weapons and armour, the cups and chalices, the gold plate, the coffers and chests overflowing with coins, the spidersilk garments. Over everything burned the cold, crystal flame of the swan-ship. Certainly no change had been wrought in the beauty and wholesomeness of any of the artifacts. So much beauty—and so much blood had been spilled for it.

Laying eyes on the preternatural ship, Captain Tide said, ‘Now I have seen the fairest ship in Aia.’ He wandered long on her decks and vowed that one day he would take her into the sky.

‘All this is of Faêran make,’ said Ercildoune in amazement. ‘I trow it’s lain here for many lives of kings—since the Fair Ones went under the hills. The door runes have kept their secret for a long time.’

‘How did you open the doors?’ asked Heath.

‘The password was plain to discover, for those who have studied the Faêran tongue, as I have. Written on these walls is a riddle. Loosely translated, it reads:

“In my silent raiment I tread the ground, but if my dwelling is disturbed,

At whiles I rise up over the houses of heroes; my trappings lift me high,

And then far and wide on the strength of the skies my ornaments carry me over kingdoms,

Resounding loudly and singing melodiously; bright song.

Wayfaring spirit, when I am not resting on water or ground.”

‘The answer? A swan—eunalainn, as the Faêran would say. That word is the key.’

Now that her work had been completed by guiding the King-Emperor’s men to the hidden cache, Rohain was able to withdraw to the sidelines. In the bitter chill of the morning, the captured eastsiders were led in chains to the hold of the Windship. Sir Heath and his Dainnan took over with energetic efficiency, thoroughly exploring Waterstair’s cavities and cliffs, leaving nothing undisturbed, loading objects onto the Windship under the direction of the Bard, with the use of sildron hoisters and floating transport platforms.

‘Behold,’ Ercildoune pointed out to Rohain, ‘no war-harness exists here. All these most wondrous armours are intended for ceremonial purposes only. The Faêran had no need of bodily protection in battle. They loved it for decoration but their fighting skills precluded the need for body-shields. Also, while the Faêran could be diminished, they could never be destroyed.’

Among the booty was a set of thronelike chairs, each adorned with carvings of flowers; marigolds of topaz and crocodilite, roses of pink quartz, hyacinths of lapis lazuli, their leaves cut from chrysoprase, olivine, jade. With a spasm of pain, Rohain watched the poppy and lily chairs being loaded aboard. Visions from memory sprang to mind.

Settling himself back in the poppy throne, Sianadh took up a brimming cup, sampled it with a satisfied air, and watched the girl over the rim of it. She repeated every sign, almost to perfection.

‘Ye left the fat out of the pig part.’

Having corrected this he went to check on the helm of fruit juice, which, optimistically, he was trying to coax to ferment into something stronger. The girl idly flipped gold coins in the sunlight; they winked light and dark as they spun.

‘This brow ought never to be plowed with sorrow,’ quoted Ercildoune as he drew Rohain aside, leaving Viviana alone to admire each new piece being hoisted on deck. They stood beneath the lichened arches of a melancholy willow that wept green tears at the water’s edge.

‘I grieve for departed friends,’ said Rohain, to explain her frown.

‘Who does not? Yet such grief is merely selfishness. Hearken, Lady of the Sorrows, and be no longer of them. What we have uncovered here is as you promised, and more. This is a wealth of vast import. It might have been whittled away at the edges, pilfered by petty thieves over time, but you have rescued the greater part of it for its rightful owner. You have done the King-Emperor a great service and therefore you shall be appropriately rewarded. An it please the King-Emperor, you shall receive honours. I myself shall nominate you for a peerage in your own right. Lands and more shall be bestowed upon you, I’ll warrant.’

‘I have only done my duty.’

‘Do not underestimate your deed. By nightfall, this lusty little bird of a frigate shall be loaded to her ailerons and ready to lumber through the sky like an overfed duck. Then we shall to Caermelor go in haste, leaving a goodly company of Dainnan behind to protect the King’s interests. We shall arrive in triumph and in good time to make ready for the New Year’s celebrations! Now, if that does not make your smile blossom, then you are not the sweet-tempered wench I took you for!’

His jollity being infectious, she smiled.

‘Ha!’ The Bard laughed, flinging his cap in the air. ‘All is well! I feel a song coming on!’

3

CAERMELOR, PART II

Story and Sentence

As warmer seasons wear away and nights begin to lengthen,

The power of the eldritch ones shall waken, wax, and strengthen.

Blithe heat and honest, artless light from all the lands shall wane,

Shadows shall veil what once was clear. Unpleasant things shall reign,

And mortal folk should all beware, who brave the longest night,

Of wickedness and trickedness—of fell, unseelie wight.

FOLK-CHANT

The Dainnan patrol frigate returned to Caermelor with its cargo on the evening of the twenty-first Nethilmis, having waited twenty-four hours in the mountains for a favourable wind and then been blown off course by its fickleness.

News from the north greeted them at the Royal City. Roxburgh had returned already. Tension at the Namarran border had recently eased somewhat. It seemed that for the time being, at least, activity in Namarre had ground to a standstill. Insurrectionary lightning-raids had ceased and no spies had been seen for some time. An impasse had been reached; a breathing space in which the seditionists halted their mustering and proceeded to work only on fortifying their groundworks. As for the Imperial Legions, with most of the heavy equipment already in place, troops were kept busy performing military exercises.

This interlude, however, did not apply to unseelie manifestations, which continued to be drawn, by degrees, to the north. What mortal man or eldritch entity possessed the power to summon them could only be guessed, but it boded ill for the peace and stability of the Empire. A mood of suppressed fear insinuated itself throughout Caermelor, although the practical citizens endeavoured to go about their daily lives as usual.

New Year’s Eve drew nigh. This being the Midwinter festival, Imbrol, and the most important annual feast-time in Erith, the populace spared no effort to realise every traditional custom for the decoration of their surroundings and the entertainment, gratification, and nourishment of themselves. Here was a good reason to set aside their apprehension for a time and immerse themselves in jollity. All over Erith, in hovels and bothies, in cottages and crofts, in cottages, marketplaces, smithies, and workshops, in barracks, taverns, malt-houses, and inns, in manor houses, stately homes, and Relayer Towers, in halls and keeps, castles and palaces, they set holly garlands on rooftrees, ivy festoons around inglenooks, sprays of mistletoe above the doors and strobiled wreaths of pine and fir and spruce on every available projection. They chopped dried fruits, mixed them with suet, honey, and flour, wrapped this stodge in calico and boiled it for hours, then hung the lumpy puddings like traitors’ heads, high in their butteries and spences. These and numerous other things the folk of Erith busied themselves with in preparation for the Winter Solstice and the birth of the New Year, 1091.

This was the season when young lasses, whose hearts were stirred by something beyond the walls of the mortal world, dwelled upon the frightening and attractive possibility of going out into the wilderness during the long, enigmatic nights of Dorchamis in case the Coillach Gairm, the blue crone as ancient as Winter, as terrible and as miraculous, should choose to come silently, unannounced, and offer to them a coveted staff of power in exchange for whatever mortal asset she might wish to take for herself.

But that way was not for Lady Rohain of the Sorrows. She had no desire to wield eldritch powers through the Wand and would rather retain any human powers of which she found herself in possession. Having lived without several, she now valued them all too highly to risk forfeiture. That was for others to choose. Those who would be carlins generally carried that ambition from childhood.

Although Rohain knew where her future did not lie, she was uncertain as to where it did. In the city, festive splendor was the order of the day. Amid the bustle and business of the preliminaries to Imbrol, Rohain learned that Ercildoune’s nomination for her recognition by a peerage had indeed been sanctioned by the King-Emperor. Creation of a new peerage was a long-drawn and tedious affair; first the Letters Patent must be prepared, after which the new title would be posted and proclaimed. The appointment would be complete when she received the accolade personally from His Majesty. The scribes of the Lord High Chancellor were also arranging the handing over of titles to a modest but choice Crown Estate in Arcune, with a return of two hundred and seventy guineas per year, which was to be bestowed at her investiture. Meanwhile she, as treasure-revealer, had already been gifted with eighty golden guineas (most of which lay locked in the Royal Treasury for safekeeping, but some of which already weighed down the purses of city tradesfolk), and a casket of personal jewellery from Waterstair: rings, bracelets, fillets, torques, gorgets, pins, girdles, the value of which could only be guessed. The amnesiac lackey from the House of the Stormriders had become wealthy beyond all expectation, exalted beyond all hope.

The days leading up to Imbrol took on an insubstantial quality. It was all too much to absorb at once. Later, Rohain could not have explained what her feelings were at that time. She was conscious of performing all actions automatically, of being swept along by a tide of events she herself had set in motion, with visits to the tailor’s, the milliner’s, the shoemaker’s, with Viviana fussing and exclaiming, dramatising and exaggerating everything in her joy at knowing that at last she was free of the threat of being relegated to the service of the dreaded Dowager Marchioness of Netherby-on-the-Fens, and as if paying for this sense of relief by means of exerting her imagination, sculpting her mistress’s hair into ever more fantastic designs and decorating it in ever more novel ways. She was well-intentioned and good-natured, this lady’s maid; a lass who had lived a sheltered life, whose most feared hardship was a scolding, whose thoughts skimmed like swallows over the shallows, yet every so often dived deep and shrewdly; whose hands and chattering tongue were always fretting to be busy.

Testing the new powers springing from wealth and recognition, as a youth suddenly waking to manhood would experimentally flex expanded sinews, the prospective Baroness Rohain Tarrenys inquired discreetly after her friends. Messengers were dispatched, returning with the news that both Muirne and Diarmid had been accepted for military service and were training at Isenhammer. Farther afield, of the itinerant Maeve One-Eye there was no sign, which was not surprising, given the current season: Winter was the tenancy of the Coillach Gairm. Inquiries at Gilvaris Tarv resulted in a message via Stormriders that the carlin Ethlinn Kavanagh-Bruadair also had ventured abroad in response to the subliminal call of the Winter Hag, or possibly only from habit. Her whereabouts were unknown. Roisin Tuillimh still dwelt at Tarv, hale and hearty. To Roisin, Muirne, and Diarmid, Rohain anonymously sent gifts. She wished to share her good fortune without revealing a past identity that, certainly at Court, would transform her into the subject of scandal and possibly revulsion.

Of Thorn, she dared not inquire, even discreetly, for she guessed that the Dainnan knights had ways of knowing what was whispered about any of their number. She existed in a paradoxical state between fear of meeting him again and hope of it. While her face had been masked by ugliness and there had been no question of her feelings being reciprocated, to adore him in secret had been the only possibility. She had been able to say to herself, ‘He cannot look upon me with favour; I am not worthy, but if I could be otherwise, he might look again.’ Now that a fairer face was revealed, she was vulnerable. If he should look upon her and dismiss her, it would be a rejection of the best she could be, rather than the worst, and thus the ultimate rebuff.

There was no doubt that Thorn had been kind to her, but kindness was of his nature. Besides, that benevolence had also been extended to Diarmid. Of the meaning of the parting kiss, she could not be certain. Had he bestowed it out of pity or—against logic—out of liking? On impulse, but with enough forethought to do it where no other eyes could bear witness? If the latter, then he would have regretted it afterward, in which case he would not wish to be reminded of his folly by a stranger who had infiltrated Court by means of deception. No: her past association with the dark-haired Dainnan warrior was like a jewel of the most rare and precious kind, but so fragile that should the rigorous light of day fall upon it, it might crack asunder, crumble away. It must be locked away in the darkness of her mind’s vault, to be cherished and kept entire, even though its loveliness could never in actuality be enjoyed again.

Without meeting him, the potential existed for happiness. There could be no risk. Yet she looked for his presence everywhere, as a lost wanderer would scan for any sign of water in a desert wasteland. The first glimpse of long black hair flowing over broad shoulders never failed to make her heart turn over. All sweetness, all joy, all light existed by his side, wherever he might be, and to be without his voice, the sight of him, the proximity of him, was to secretly live in wretchedness.

Sad longing dwelt on an inner level. Only a heart of stone could remain cold amid the festive revelry that day by day ascended toward its height. What was more, Rohain found herself surrounded by convivial company. Chief among these were Viviana, the irrepressible Thomas of Ercildoune, the Duchess Alys-Jannetta, Roxburgh’s wife, with whom she had formed a friendship, and, in a surprising turn of events—or perhaps not so surprising—her erstwhile foe Dianella and that lady’s faddish coterie. Now that she was to become a peer in her own right, was fêted for her role in adding to the coffers of the Royal Treasury, and moreover appeared to be glaringly in favour with the King-Emperor and the greatest aristocrats at Court, Rohain had been accepted Into the Set.

Whether due to this fact or some other, a goodly number of dashing sons of peers both In and Out of the Set seemed to find her companionship to their taste. They were constantly begging her to wear their favours upon her sleeve when they engaged their rivals with rapiers, at dawn, in secluded places. Like fighting cocks they tiresomely challenged each other to illicit duels over trivial hurts to their pride—contests that seldom eventuated. Some excuse was usually discovered at the eleventh hour, some pretext that allowed both parties to retire with dignity and intact flesh. Rohain scarcely had more than a moment to spare for each of these heroes. Invitations from Dianella, Calprisia, Elmaretta, Percival, Jasper, and the rest of the trend-setting circle continually bombarded her. Would she come gathering ivy and spruce in the King’s Greenwood? It would be such an amusing jaunt, with just enough danger to spice it, although only seelie wights were said to dwell there and the excursion would be guarded by outriders and carriage dogs accompanying the barouches! Would she come glissanding there, or hunting? Did she like to ride to the hounds? Would she come and view the new dress Dianella’s tailor was sewing for her to wear on New Year’s Eve? Would she come fishing upon the sea, or ice-skating on the frozen mountain lake where they were going in the Windship of the Lord High Wizard Sargoth? And so on.

Not to appear unsociable, Rohain accepted their entreaties for her company, and they drew her into their sophisticated, butterfly crowd with joyousness, teaching her a smattering of slingua so that she could become truly as they. Their activities, in fact, turned out to be novel and diverting; their chatter boring. Rohain was glad enough of Ercildoune’s frequent presence as an excuse to desert them. Taking advantage of a break in the inclement weather, she strolled away with him in the Winter Garden, their attendants keeping at a discreet distance among the trees. Caermelor Palace boasted a garden for every season of the year, each walled off from the others so that its individual theme could be enjoyed.

‘You shall, of course, remain at Court until well after Imbrol,’ said the Bard. ‘Much time may elapse until your new title, Baroness of Arcune, is invested. Nothing can be done to advance the proclamation of your title and the securing of your estate until after the festive season.’

‘I understood, sir, that one is normally presented to the King-Emperor before residing at his Court. I have not yet been granted the honour of an audience with His Majesty.’

‘You speak knowledgeably, my dear, but these are troubled times. With the situation as it is in the north, with all this to-ing and fro-ing, councils and moots and so forth, normal procedures fall by the wayside. The King-Emperor is busy now as Imbrol approaches, and who knows but that at any time there may be a sudden escalation of belligerence in Namarre, leading to further need of his attention at the borders. Howbeit, it is not necessary for these military matters to hinder the bestowal of honours upon you. The title can be officially recognised merely by issue of Letters Patent granting full privileges of the honour and the posting and proclamation. Still, in good sooth, ’twould be a pity not to receive the peerage from the hands of our Sovereign himself, with all due pomp.’

There were no fountains in the Winter Garden. The walks were lined instead with marble pedestals whose bases, dados, and entablements were richly carved. Atop these pedestals, great bowls of stone cupped living fires whose flames leaped like the petals of giant stained-glass magnolias.

Evergreens spread resinous boughs or stood virgate, as if upholding the sky, or else modestly wept. Barberry and cotoneaster hedges popped with ripe scarlet spheres. Here, too, grew laurels with dark purple fruits, and firethorns with their startling orange.

‘I suppose I shall remain,’ said Rohain after some thought. Like a shimmerfly cloyed with honey, she felt herself to be trapped by a kind of inertia, mired in the sweetness of the luxurious Court environment. Indecision played a major part in her proposal to linger.

‘Marry,’ said the Bard poetically and somewhat whimsically, ‘had you other plans? To return to the Sorrow Isles and tell your people of your fortune?’

‘No.’

‘I confess, I am glad of that,’ he said suddenly. ‘A confirmed bachelor have I always been, and vowed to remain, for I love the fair sex too much to restrict myself to the company of only one of their number. Despite this I find myself half inclined to pay you court.’

His companion turned to him in astonishment.

‘Look not askance, my lady! Am I not but one more in a long line of suitors?’

‘Indeed, no!’ she said emphatically.

‘Then, what say you? Or is your heart already given, as I suspect?’

‘Well, since you ask it—yes, my heart is already given.’

‘Alas.’

His chest heaved with a gentle sigh. Subdued, they walked a little farther along the lakeside path where sharp-eyed robins bounced like plump berries, past a stone gazebo whose pillars repeated their symmetries and patterns in the water. Rohain could scarcely believe what she had heard—that she should have received homage from one of the highest in the land.

‘Then,’ said the Bard, ‘I will not speak of courting again. However, if you should chance to receive your heart again, will you think of me?’

‘Most certainly, sir.’

‘And meanwhile, shall we remain friends?’

‘Indeed! And sir, you honour me too much. I am not worthy.’

‘Alas,’ sighed the Bard once more, ‘I was ever a slave to a fair face.’

Rohain stopped in her tracks, confused.

‘A fair face?’ she repeated.

‘As fair as any I have seen,’ he said. ‘And when animated, so that hectic roses bloom in the cheeks and a sparkle sets fire to the eyes, why, ’tis above all others most comely. ’Pon my troth, you are exquisite in every measure!’ He laughed. ‘Like all women, my lady of the Sorrows loves praise, and it comes sweeter from True Thomas, verily, for ’tis not flattery but truth.’

The girl leaned out over the still surface of the lake. Like quicksilver, it gleamed.

‘Mind!’ he warned. ‘Do not fall! ’Tis not the season for swimming!’

She did not hear him. Her taltry-enclosed face looked up at her from the water, framed by branches of evergreens, backed by the metallic sky.

‘I cannot see it myself,’ she said with a frown.

‘What? Brazen modesty?’

She straightened and turned to him.

‘Nay!’ he said, and it was his turn to be surprised as he read the honesty in her expression. ‘Not false humility. You see no special virtue in your own features. Odd! But charming. Let me assure you, my dear, that you are alone in your opinion. Ah, Rohain, I understated just now, thinking that you would know I jested, but I am too accustomed to the complex cerebrations of courtiers. Let me now do you justice—hearken—for yours is a beauty more radiant than a flame, more perfect than a snowflake, more enchanting than music, more astonishing than truth, and more poignant than the parting of lovers who know not whether they will ever meet again.’

‘You mock me, sir!’

Soberly he shook his head. ‘Not at all. When I look at you, my eyes are filled with a beauty to ache for, to make tyrants and slaves of men, a beauty to beware of. Be aware of it; others are.’

‘Gramercie,’ she stammered, nonplussed.

It was a revelation.

Once, between engagements, Rohain borrowed Ercildoune’s coach-and-four. His coachman drove her to Isenhammer. From high on the hill overlooking the town, the drill, parades, and training exercises of the recruits for the Royal Legion Reserves were clearly visible below. Having descended, she moved among the young cavalrymen, foot soldiers, and archers, escorted by her lady’s maid and two footmen.

The feeling of tension among the recruits was almost palpable. It was like the pulled-back string of a bow, on the point of letting the arrow fly. They executed their drill with extreme dedication and concentration. Sometimes, involuntarily, their eyes slid toward a certain horizon, their heads turning, in the gesture Rohain knew so well. The north: what dire events were brewing there, so far away?

Diarmid and Muirne, in cadet uniform of the Legion, appeared hale and content. They did not know her, nor did she wish that they should. She had no desire to receive thanks for the costly gifts she had sent them, nor did she want to behold the aloofness or perhaps distrust that would appear in their eyes should she reveal her identity.

It was not that she shunned her friends, but that she did not see how she might fit in with their chosen life-paths. It was her intention to ask them to share her new estate when the procedures were finalized. For now, she wanted to ensure that they dwelled in comfort, lacking nothing. She returned to Caermelor without having spoken to them.

Imbrol drew nigh. Meanwhile, Viviana Wellesley seemed to be enjoying her latest role.

‘It is quite a feather in m’lady’s cap, to have been invited to meet the Lady Maiwenna,’ she raved enthusiastically. ‘She does not mingle with many people at Court, for her manner is quite reserved. When I saw the two of you together, I thought you looked almost like sisters in some respect.’

Rohain’s spirits had been lifted by eager suspense when Ercildoune introduced her to the Talith gentlewoman who was said to be the last of the Royal Family of Avlantia. Yet her hopes were shattered. No recognition had registered in the green eyes of that golden damsel.

Her own hair was showing the slightest trace of a buttercup glimmer against the scalp, but this had not yet become apparent to anyone but herself. The elaborate, close-fitting headdresses fashionable at Court concealed her hairline. Her maidservant, busy chattering and clattering about with jeweled combs during the tedious coiffing sessions, had remained oblivious of the colour contrast. By the way she habitually held her hand-work at arm’s length, squinting, Rohain suspected her of long-sightedness or poor vision.

‘Howbeit, no one can compare with my lady, of course,’ Viviana prattled on. ‘Upon my word, if I may take the liberty of saying so, my lady’s face and figure are the envy of the Court. Such elegant limbs—no wider than my wrist, I’d swear—and a waist the size of my neck!’

Rohain ignored these compliments. Her new servant chattered more than necessary, yet she continued to prove herself a cornucopia of information about Court matters.

‘When I told Dianella she would look well in green,’ said Rohain, ‘why did she exclaim, “Odd’s fish, how revolutionary!”?’

‘My lady, the green is not to be worn. Not as a main colour, anyway—only in bits for decoration, and then not the proper leaf green.’

‘Why not? Is it forbidden?’

Viviana was taken aback. ‘Wear they green in the Sorrow Isles then, m’lady?’

‘No, no, but tell me.’

‘It is not forbidden, exactly, but it is not done to wear the green.’

‘The Dainnan wear it—a kind of green, at least.’

‘Begging your pardon, m’lady, it is not exactly green that Roxburgh’s knights wear, but the colour dusken. ’Tis as if a dyer mixed together brown paint, a little grayish, with mayhap a pinch of saffron—’

‘And a good helping of grass green.’

‘—and perhaps a hint of green. Dusken is not truly leaf green or grass green, m’lady, ’tis in the shaded of dusty bracken-fern.’

‘I see. What of green furnishings?’

‘They are allowable.’

‘And what of emeralds?’

‘Green jewels ought to be worn with discretion. Royal purple is forbidden, of course,’ added the lady’s maid warily, anxious not to offend her mistress by implying she was ignorant of such matters.

‘Of course,’ replied her mistress. ‘But royal purple is reserved for royalty. Why should green be held in reserve?’

‘Oh well, it was the colour most favoured by Themselves, and old customs die hard, m’lady. It was unlucky for mortals to wear it. Green was only for the Faêran.’

The subject of the Faêran interested Rohain. For further information she went to Alys-Jannetta of Roxburgh, the wife of the Dainnan Chieftain. The Duchess, a level-headed gentlewoman of assertive spirit, liked to ride and hunt and shoot with a bow. On her chief estate she had a rose garden that she often tended with her own hands, not being afraid to dirty them. Rohain found her bold bluntness refreshing.

‘I will give you one view,’ said the Duchess, ‘and others will give you another. For my part, I hold no good opinion of Themselves—as a race, that is—and I think it well that the Fair Realm was sundered from us so long ago. The old tales tell all. It was one law for mortals and another for the Faêran. A haughty folk they were, proud and arrogant, who thought nothing of stealing mortals who took their fancy. But if you would hear tales, why, there is only one man who knows them all and tells them so well, and that is our Royal Bard, Thomas. Come, we shall attend him.’

It was Ercildoune who opened up the subject of the Faêran for Rohain as never before; he who possessed an inexhaustible supply of stories concerning them, he who awakened her interest in their lore and history and taught her of their beautiful, dangerous, vanished world; the lost kingdom, the Fair and Perilous Realm of the Faêran.

The Bard’s palace suite was decorated to a musical theme. Across the tapestries on the walls of the Tambour Room, scenes from history and legend spread themselves. Here, seven maidens harped beneath flowering horse-chestnuts. There, a youth played a gittern to charm an evil lord into sleep, that the musician might recover his stolen wife. On another wall, a virgin beneath a green oak tree sang a unicorn to her side. Farther along, a row of trumpeters sounded a fanfare of triumph to a flower-strewn parade.

The room was crowded with crested arks and dark cabinets thickly carved with leaves, rosettes and lions. A clear, red fire burned in the grate, beneath a chimney-piece whose side-panels were a carved marble relief depicting the beautiful water-wights, the Asrai, lyres held in their slender fingers. Inscrutable footmen in the pale-blue-and-gold livery of Ercildoune stood to attention at the doors.

The Duke of Ercildoune welcomed his guests and settled them near the hearth. His apprentice Toby strummed softly. A small lynx purred on a ragged appliqué cushion that it had previously shredded with its claws. Five tiny moths flitted along the ornately carved friezes and architrave moldings then fluttered down to the thickets of candles, to dance with death. Viviana arranged her mistress’s skirts. The Duchess of Roxburgh toyed with a tasseled fan, occasionally glancing at the velvet-draped windows that looked out over the Winter Garden, across the city to the ocean. A chill mist was rising from the river. The first star of evening had already punctured a sky both clear and dark. In the still and crystalline air, frost threatened.

To the Bard, Rohain said, ‘Your Grace, during these days I have passed at Court I have heard somewhat of the Fair Realm, and it has whetted my appetite, for I have little knowledge of the place or its denizens. Will you tell me more?’

Ercildoune’s demeanor altered subtly at her words. From being the jovial host, he seemed to metamorphose, to become a stranger, remote, staring now into the fire.

‘The stars,’ he said suddenly. His visage sharpened to a wistful look.

Rohain waited.

After a pause, he continued: ‘The stars. So beautiful, so mysterious, so alluring are they—so unreachable, pure, strange, and glorious that they could only be of Faêrie. Go into the wilderness on a clear night and look up. Look long. Then you will have seen something of Faêrie.’ His voice roughened to an uncharacteristic huskiness. ‘Or behold, at dusk in Springtime, drifts of white pear blossom glimmering palely through the gloom, for the turn of the seasons is evanescent as the beauty of the Fair Realm, which slipped through mortal fingers like handfuls of seed-pearls. The power of the Fair Realm cannot be comprehended.’

He gazed into the fire’s red world. Eventually he added, ‘The Realm is a place with no frontiers.’

‘You speak with longing and love, Your Grace,’ said Rohain wonderingly.

‘Anyone would long and love, who had heard even a tenth of what I have heard.’

‘Yet is it a place? Did it exist?’

‘Fie! Never say that it did not—I will not brook it!’

‘Forgive me! I did not seek to denigrate that which stirs your passion.’

‘Nay,’ the Bard replied hastily, ‘you must forgive me, Rohain—I spoke too harshly just now.’

‘Well then,’ she answered lightly, bantering in the manner she had learned at Court, ‘if I am to forgive you, you must give me a tale about the Faêran, so that I can come to know them better.’

‘Gladly, for this is a subject dear to my heart.’

He drew his chair closer to the hearth.

The Faêran,’ he began, pronouncing the word as if he spoke some ancient, arcane spell, ‘had many names; the Gentry, the Strangers, the Secret Ones, the Lords of Gramarye, and other kennings. Their Realm had many names also. Some called it the Land of the Long Leaves. Before that, it was called Tirnan Alainn.

‘Most of the Fair Folk were well-disposed towards mortals, but there were those who harboured ill-feeling for, dare I say, the deeds of mortals are not always courteous. Of all the faults of Men condemned by the Faêran, they despised spying and stealing most of all.

‘Long ago, before the ways between the Fair Realm and Aia were closed forever, there were places in Erith which the Faêran favoured above others. Willowvale, in northern Eldaraigne, was one of these. At night, the Faêran would ride out through a right-of-way that used to lie under the green hill called the Culver, and go down to Willowvale. There they would bathe in the river and sing in harmony with the water as it flowed over its rocky bed, glinting beneath the moon’s glow.

‘One blossom-scented twilight in Spring, a little girl who was gathering primroses by the waterside heard the sound of laughter and music coming from the Culver, so she walked up the hill to investigate. The right-of-way lay open and she dared to peep inside. There she saw a sight to gladden her spirits: the Faêran folk, in their beauty and their gorgeous raiment. Some were banqueting, others were whirling about in graceful, lithesome dances. The child hastened home to inform her father, but the good farmer could not share her delight, because he knew that the Faêran would come for her. They guarded their privacy jealously. Any mortal who spied on them would either be sorely punished or else taken away to dwell forever with them, and he did not doubt that they would choose to take a little girl so fair and mild.

‘Because he cherished his daughter and could not bear to upset her, the farmer did not tell her what would happen to her for spying on the Faêran. He hastened straight to a wise carlin who knew something of the laws of the Gentry.

‘“They will come for your daughter at midnight tonight,” she told him, “yet they will be powerless to take her if utter silence is maintained throughout your farmstead. When they come, you must ensure that there is no noise, apart from any made by the Faêran themselves. Even the faintest sigh, the softest tap of a fingernail, will shatter the charm.”

‘Away to his house hurried the farmer. That night, he waited until his daughter had fallen asleep in her bed. Then he herded all the geese and hens into their coops, removed the bells from the necks of the milch-cows before shutting them into the byres, and locked the horses into the stables. He gave the dogs such a large dinner of bones and scraps that they lay down to sleep at once, their stomachs distended. He tied down anything that might sway or squeak in the slightest breeze. Then he went indoors, and laid the rocking-chair on its side, that it would not rock, and doused the hearth-fire so that there should be no spitting or snapping of sparks, and he sat down in the dark, cold, silent cottage to await the Faêran.

‘At midnight they came.

‘The latch on the garden gate went click and the hinges creaked as it swung open, then the farmer heard the clopping crunch of horses’ hooves coming up the path. When they discovered the place so soundless and frozen, the riders hesitated. The farmer sat motionless and held his breath, lest they should hear even the slight whisper of the exhalation. The silence deepened, the minutes lengthened. The blood pounding at his temples sounded to him as loud as a blacksmith’s hammer. Then he heard the clatter of hooves turning around—the Faêran were leaving. He let go of his breath with no noise at all, but alas, he had overlooked one thing. At the sound of the Faêran horses beneath the window, the little spaniel that slept at the foot of his daughter’s bed jumped up and barked. The charm was shattered. Instantly the farmer hastened up the stairs, his heart bolting, only to discover his worst fears realised. The bed was empty. His daughter was gone.

‘Devastated by his bereavement, he resolved to try everything in his power to regain her. So wild was he with anguish that immediately, without waiting for the dawn, without eating or drinking, he made haste again to consult the carlin.

‘“Even in this extremity I can give you advice,” said she. “Nonetheless, the challenge will be fraught with difficulty. You must take a sprig of rowan for protection and go to the Culver every night and lie down on top of it. Should they Themselves come to inquire your purpose, you must ask them to give back your daughter, but I warn you, what they may ask in return may not be easily guessed.”

‘The farmer did as she had advised and on the third night the Faêran appeared before him and asked him why he should be so bold as to lie down on top of the Culver.

‘“I am come to ask for my daughter who you took from me,” he said.

‘“Well then, you shall have her back,” they said, “if, before Whiteflower’s Day you bring to us three gifts—a cherry without a stone, a living bird that has no bone, and, from the oldest creature on your farm, a part of its body given without the shedding of any blood. If you come back with those three things, we will give you your daughter.”

‘Hope sprang afresh in the farmer’s heart as he departed. But then, he asked himself, “How can there be a cherry without a stone, save that I should cut the stone out of it? But I am certain that is not what they mean. As for the bird, I could kill a hen and take its bones out, but how shall I find a living bird with no bone? And what of the last part of the riddle—could it mean milk from my old cow, Buttercup? Yet milk is not really part of an animal’s body. What if I cut off the tips of her horns? But wait—is not Dobbin the cart-horse older than Buttercup?” He tormented himself looking for the answers but could find none, and the carlin could not help him further. Unable to rest, he took to roaming through the countryside, asking himself those questions over and over, and querying whomsoever he met, but with no success at all, and Whiteflower’s Day was drawing closer.’

The Bard leaned to caress the soft fur of the lynx. Taking advantage of the interlude, the Duchess of Roxburgh said, ‘Whenever I hear this tale I wonder at the thickheadedness of that farmer. How could anyone not guess the answers to such simple riddles?’

The Bard smiled, saying, ‘Not all folk are as clever as Alys of Roxburgh.’

‘Hmph!’ she returned, feinting a slap at him with her folded fan. ‘Go on with the tale!’

‘Barely three weeks remained before Whiteflower’s Day,’ resumed Ercildoune, ‘when, as he trudged along the road, the farmer met a beggar.

‘“Prithee, sir,” said the ragged fellow, “can you spare a crust? I am famished!”

‘“A crust and more,” said the farmer feelingly. Opening his leather wallet, he generously handed out bread, cheese, and apples. “I know what suffering is,” he said sadly, “and I would alleviate the distress of others if I am able.”

‘“You have succored me,” said the beggar as he accepted the food, “and in turn I will give you aid. The answer to your first question is: a cherry when it is a blossom, clasps no stone.”

‘In amazement the farmer stared at the beggar, but the old fellow just walked away, smiling. Although he seemed to walk slowly he was along up the road in a trice and quickly disappeared around the corner. The farmer ran to catch up with him but when he rounded the bend all that he saw was the long, empty road stretching away to the distance, and no traveller upon it.

‘Marveling, the farmer walked on. He was passing a spinney of chestnuts when he saw a thrush trying to escape from a kestrel, which stooped to kill it. Momentarily setting aside his woes, he seized a pebble from the roadside and hurled it at the hunting hawk. The kestrel fled, but the thrush returned. It fluttered down to perch on the bough of a thorn bush, regarding its rescuer with a bright and knowing eye.

‘Seeing such a look, the farmer was hardly surprised when the bird opened its beak and spoke to him in melodious tones.

‘“You acted in kindness. Now I will reward you with the answer to your second question. If a broody hen sits on an egg for fifteen days, that egg will hold a chicken without a bone yet formed in its body.” The man gaped at the little brown bird, but it trilled three musical notes and flew away.

‘The farmer was vastly encouraged. “Two answers!” he said triumphantly to himself. “Two answers have I!” Then he thought, “But what good are they if I cannot find the answer to the last question?” And he almost despaired.

‘As he tramped on his way, frowning and cogitating about the third riddle, there came to his ears a pathetic wailing. In the hedges bordering the road, a rabbit was trapped in a wire snare. Its crying moved the man to pity. Crouching beside the creature, he gently set it free, expecting it to run away forthwith.

‘Like the thrush, it focused its gaze upon him. This time, he was not astonished, yet a sense of wonder welled in him.

“‘Sir,” piped the rabbit, “you have done me a favour, therefore here is the final answer you require. If you cut off a lock of hair, it will come away from the body without shedding one drop of blood. As for the oldest creature on your farm, why the looking-glass will answer that.”

‘When the farmer blinked the rabbit was gone, but he threw his cap into the air and ran jubilantly home. Hurrying to the chicken coop, he placed an egg under a broody hen. When fifteen days were past he took the shears and chopped off a lock of his own hair. Then he went out into the orchard and gathered a great bough of pink-and-white cherry blossom. Throwing his cap in the air, he whooped for joy.

‘He could hardly wait for night to fall. At sunset, he stuck a sprig of rowan in his cap and went down Willowvale and up to the top of the Culver. There he sat down and bided his time, and the stars came out over his head, and the night was warm and still, and yet he kept vigil. After a time he heard music and laughter, which seemed to be emanating from beneath the hill, and soon the Faêran came. They were annoyed to see him there, but they could not touch him because of the sprig of rowan, and they could not abduct him because he had failed to transgress their code. When he showed them the blossom, the egg, and the lock of hair, they had to give him back his daughter. At first she gazed at her father in bewilderment, as one who has woken from a dream, but then she gave a cry of happiness and threw her arms around him. They returned home together, and never again did she try to spy on the Faêran.’

With a discordant twang, a string broke on Toby’s lyre. At the sound, the listeners started.

The Faêran had their own laws,’ continued Ercildoune after a sidelong glance at his apprentice, ‘as this tale shows. And when those laws were broken, they meted out their own forms of punishment. Yet they were not unmerciful. First, they gave the farmer opportunity to reclaim his kin. Secondly, they tested him to see if he was worthy of reward. Because he showed kindness, they themselves gave him the answers to the riddles. Kindness in mortals was a virtue which they esteemed highly.’

‘Also great courage,’ Alys contributed.

‘Aye, and neatness and cleanliness, and true love, and the keeping of promises,’ added the Bard.

With a practiced air, Toby removed the broken string from his lyre and unrolled a new one.

‘I have learned,’ said Rohain, ‘that they delighted also in feasting, dancing, and riddles—a merry race, it seems they were, but also dangerous.’

Ercildoune, leaning on his elbow, called for a page.

‘Bring piment!’ he said. ‘Does m’lady like piment?’ he added, turning to Rohain.

‘I know not what it is.’

‘A brew of red wine, honey, and spices.’

‘I am certain it would please me.’

The Bard snapped his fingers and the lad hurried away. Toby plucked a rising scale of liquid notes to tune the string as he tightened it.

‘Did they live under the hills?’ pursued Rohain. ‘Was their Realm underground, in caves?’

Ercildoune laughed. ‘Not underground, not under water, not under or over anything. Faêrie lay elsewhere. It was Away. The traverses that linked Aia and the Fair Realm—some called it the Perilous Realm—used to lie in such places as eldritch wights now see fit to haunt. There was an access under the Culver, as under certain other hills. These green mounds were known by many names, such as raths, knowes, brughs, lisses, and sitheans or shians, but passage existed also under lakes, in coppices, in wells, in high places and low. So you understand, Rohain, the little girl gathering primroses did not look into an underground cavern—she looked through a traverse into the Realm itself.’

‘Well,’ said Rohain, ‘abduction seems severe retribution for an unwary glance.’

‘It seems so to us,’ agreed Ercildoune. ‘Howbeit, bearing in mind that the Fair Realm could be a place of delight, the Faêran may have viewed it merely as a way of preventing the child from telling others all that she had seen, and thus pre-empting an influx of human gawkers. Generally, they considered mortal spying to be an outrageous crime and they were swift to avenge, as I shall relate. But first allow me to provide you with a further example of traverses and mortal transgression.’

A hallmarked lore-master, ever enthused by his trade, the Bard launched into another story.

‘There was once a Faêran right-of-way at Lake Coumluch in the mountains of Finvarna. Coumluch is a solitary lake with a mist of white vapors ever on it and lofty cliffs rising all around. For most of the year the lake waters were unbroken by any reef, rock, or isle, but every Whiteflower’s Day there would be an island in the lake’s centre, and at the same time a Door would appear in the face of the cliffs. The Door stood open, and if anyone should dare to enter they would follow a winding stair descending to a long, level passageway. This traverse beneath the lake was a right-of-way into the Fair Realm. At the top of a second stairway, another Door led out onto the island. Fair and stately was this domain, with its long, verdant lawns, its great drifts of perfumed flowers like clouds of coloured silks and confetti, its arbors dappled with freckles of golden light and lacy shade.

‘The Faêran made their bedazzled guests welcome, bedecking them with garlands of flowers. They plied them with dainty viands and refreshing draughts, which were not of the Fair Realm but had been brought—stolen, perhaps—from Erith; for the Fair Folk did not wish to capture their guests, only to entertain them, before letting them go. Neither would they allow the Longing for Faêrie to come over them. Eldritch wights struck up tunes on their fiddles—Faêran musicians rarely played for the amusement of mortals—and the guests were invited to join the dancing. In mirth and revelry the day fled by, and as evening drew in the mortals must take their leave.

‘The Faêran imposed only one condition on their visitors: that none should take anything from the island. Not so much as a blade of grass or a pebble must be removed. The gifts of flowers must all be put aside before the guests went down the stair to the passage beneath the lake.

‘For centuries, this condition was met. Eventually, however, one man’s curiosity overcame him. Just to see what would happen, he plucked a rosebud from his garland before he put it aside, and slipped the bud into the pocket of his coat.

‘Down the stone stairs beneath the lake he went with the rest of the departing crowd. Halfway along the passage he felt in his pocket, but the rosebud was no longer there. At this, terrible fear gripped him, for he guessed that the Faêran had ways of knowing about transgressions like his. He hastened to the Door in the cliff face, and passed through it, and all the jovial crowd with him. As the last guest made his exit from the right-of-way, a voice cried, “Woe to ye, that ye should repay our hospitality with theft.” Then the Door slammed shut and, as usual, not a crack remained to show where it had been.

‘But from that day forth, the island never reappeared on Whiteflower’s Day, nor was there ever again any sign of the Door in the cliff face. The Faêran of the Isle never forgave mortals for that theft. They withdrew their annual invitation and closed that Gateway forever. Thus was one of the traverses to the Fair Realm sealed, never to be reopened, but it was only the first. Later, at the time of the Closing, all the rights-of-way were barred forever.’

‘Why?’ asked Rohain.

‘Mortals have done worse than steal flowers from the Fair Realm. Some of the Faêran were greatly angered by the deeds of our kind. They wished to have no more commerce with us.’

‘And you say that these traverses were barred forever? Can they not be reopened?’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ suggested Rohain. Alys nodded.

‘Never say so!’ cried the Bard, now heated. ‘Aia has lost its link with a world of wonder such as mortals can only dream of. The Fair Realm was and remains a perilous land, aye, and in it were snares for the unwatchful and prison towers for the foolhardy, but it was far-reaching and unfathomed and lofty and filled with many things: all kinds of birds and beasts, shoreless oceans and stars beyond measure, beauty that is spellbinding and dangerous, gramarye both rich and strange, joyousness and sorrow as piercing as any Dainnan blade. In that Realm a man may have considered himself lucky to have roamed.’

A lonely thread of music arose from outside in the night. Somewhere, someone was playing a reed flute. The thin piping in the key of E-flat minor jarred with Toby’s recommenced strumming in some major key. Eventually the swooping notes and trills trailed off into silence.

The Bard said loudly, ‘Where’s that piment?’

Two pages came hurrying in, one with a tray of goblets, the other with a steaming jug and a towel. The fragrant brew was poured. The trio at the fireside drank a toast to the King-Emperor, after which Ercildoune commenced his next tale.

‘If you wish to understand more about the Faêran,’ he said, ‘you must hear the tale of Eilian.’

Rohain inclined her head.

‘Back in those olden times when the ways were still open, an old couple came to Caermelor from the village of White Down Rory, to get a maidservant at the Winter Hiring Fair. They saw a comely lass with yellow hair standing a little apart from all the others and they spoke to her.’

‘A Talith maiden?’ murmured Rohain.

‘Aye, a Talith maiden, brought low by circumstance. She told them her name was Eilian, and she hired herself to the couple and accompanied them to their dwelling. In the villages thereabouts it was customary for the womenfolk to while away the long Winter nights by spinning after supper. The new maidservant used to take herself out to the meadow to spin by moonlight, and some passersby said they saw the Faêran gathering around her, singing and dancing. Springtime came. As the days grew longer and the hedgerows budded and the cuckoo came back to the greenwood, Eilian ran away with the Faêran and was not seen again. To this day, the meadow where she was last seen is known as Eilian’s Meadow, although folk have long forgotten the reason why.

‘The old woman who had been Eilian’s mistress was a midwife, and her reputation was such that she was in great demand all over the countryside, but she did not get any wealthier, because those she tended were as poor as herself. About a year after Eilian’s flight, on a cold, misty night with a drizzle of rain and a full moon, someone knocked at the old couple’s door. The crone opened it and looked up to see a tall gentleman, wrapped in a cloak, holding by the bridle a gray horse.

‘“I am come to fetch you to my wife,” said he.

‘Suspicious of the gentleman’s exceptionally comely countenance and not altogether pleased by his haughty tone, the midwife was about to refuse, but a strange compulsion came over her. Despite herself, she gathered her gear and, getting up behind the stranger on his horse, rode with him until they came to Roscourt Moor. If you have ever been to Roscourt Moor you will have seen the rath they call Bryn Ithibion, the great green hill rising in the centre of the moor. Bryn Ithibion resembles a ruined fort or stronghold, crowned by standing stones, with a large rocky cairn on the north slope. When the midwife and the stranger reached it, they dismounted and he led her through the side of the rath into a large cave. Behind a screen of donkey’s skins at the farther end, on a rude bed of rushes and withered bracken, lay the wife. A smoky wood fire smoldered in a small brazier, hardly taking the dismal chill off the place.

‘When the old woman had helped the wife to give birth, she sat on a rough wooden stool by the fire to dress the baby. The wife asked her to stay in the cave a fortnight, to which she agreed; her old heart pitied the wife, you see, for the birthgiving had grievously worn and pained her, and her surroundings were shoddy. Every day the tall stranger, the husband, brought them food and other requirements, and every day the child and the mother grew more healthy and robust.

‘One day, the husband came to the old woman with a curiously carved little box of green-hued ointment, telling her to put some on the baby’s eyelids but forbidding her to touch her own eyes with it. She did as he bade, but after she had put the box away, the old woman’s left eye began to itch and she rubbed it with the same finger she had used on the baby’s eyes.

‘Instantly she beheld a wonderful sight. The cave had disappeared, and in its place was a marvelous paneled chamber, decorated in green and gold, fit for royalty. Instead of being seated on a wooden stool before a guttering fire in a brazier, she found herself in a high-backed, carved chair near an open hearth, from which a glorious warmth was blazing. Deep-piled rugs covered the polished floor, gorgeous tapestries adorned every wall, and a gold-framed mirror spanned the mantelpiece. Stifling her gasps of amazement, she crept across to where the lady lay asleep, no longer upon rushes, but on a featherbed endowed with sheets of ivory silk, the most luxurious pillows, and the richest of embroidered counterpanes. None other than the lovely yellow-haired Eilian lay sleeping there! The baby, too, who had before seemed a very ordinary little chap, was the comeliest child the midwife had ever nursed.

‘Even more extraordinary was the fact that the old woman could only see all these marvels with her left eye. When she closed that eye and looked with her right, she saw everything as it had first appeared: the rough stone walls, the humble couch of rushes, the crude, unplaned furniture, and the floor of beaten dirt.

‘Prudently, she did not mention her acquired faculty of vision, but while she dwelled in the cave she kept her left eye open during her waking hours, although it was sometimes confusing, and she must repeatedly wink with the right—and in this fashion she came to acquire much information about the Faêran.

‘At length it came time for the midwife to go home. The tall stranger took her on horseback to her door, and once there he pushed into her hands a purse bulging with coins. Before she could thank him he was up on his horse and galloping away. Hurrying indoors she poured the money out on the kitchen table. A hill of gold gleamed before her eyes, and in great excitement she counted it. Soon she realised she had enough gold to keep herself and her husband in ease for the rest of their lives.

‘What with her wealth and her power of seeing through Faêran glamour, the old woman considered herself fortunate indeed. Wise enough to know that having the Sight and the gold would put her neighbours in awe of her and cultivate jealousy among them, she said nothing about it to anyone. Besides, it was well-known that the Faêran would be vexed if any kindness of theirs was revealed to all and sundry. She even concealed her faculty and her fortune from her husband, in case he should inadvertently betray the secrets.

‘Sometimes in Spring she would see the Faêran lords and ladies in the orchards, walking among the apple-blossom, or in Summer dancing within grassy rings under the night sky, and once she beheld a procession of lords and ladies on a Rade.’

‘A Rade?’ interjected Rohain.

‘That is the term for a cavalcade of the Faêran, on their way to some entertainment, or else taking horse merely for the pleasure of the jaunt. The old woman would see them riding through the fields at dusk, with a gleam of light dancing over them more beautiful than sidereal radiance. Their long hair seemed threaded with the glint of stars and their steeds were the finest ever seen, with long sweeping tails and manes hung about with bells that the wind played on. A high hedge of hawthorn would have kept them from going through the cornfield, but they leaped over it like birds and galloped into a green hill beyond. In the morning she would go to look at the treaded corn, but never a hoof-mark was imprinted, nor a blade broken.

‘One day she happened to go earlier than usual to market, and as she went about her business amongst the booths and stalls she rounded a corner and came face-to-face with the tall stranger who had knocked at her door on that misty evening. Trying to cover her surprise, she put on a bold front and said, “Good morrow, sir. How fare Eilian and the bonny young boy?”

‘The stranger politely replied, with favourable tidings of his wife and child. Then he asked conversationally, “But with which eye do you see me?”

‘“With this one,” said the old woman, pointing to the left.

‘At that he laughed. Producing a bulrush, he put out her eye and was gone at once. She never saw any of the Faêran again.’

‘Fie!’ exclaimed Rohain, sitting bolt upright. ‘Another severe and brutal punishment for a small fault. After all, the woman meant no harm—she merely rubbed her own eye, and that without forethought or malice! Why should she be blinded so painfully?’

‘Terrible was the revenge of the Faêran angered,’ said Ercildoune. He swallowed a draught from his goblet.

‘The tale only serves to illustrate my point,’ said the Duchess of Roxburgh.

Ercildoune laughed. ‘Alys views the Faêran race as through a black crystal,’ he said. ‘To each his own thought. Mine is the opposite view.’

‘Ercildoune would discover benevolence in the Each Uisge himself,’ rejoined the Duchess drily.

‘The girl Eilian must have thought well of the Faêran,’ said Rohain.

‘That is likely,’ replied the Duchess. ‘In the end, nonetheless, she was exiled from the Fair Realm for some minor transgression, and pined away to a miserable end.’

‘A harsh fate,’ said Rohain presently.

‘But you must not judge without knowing all,’ said the Bard. ‘That pining was not put on Eilian by the husband, or indeed by any of the Faêran—it was the inevitable effect of the Fair Realm on all mortals who entered it. No mortal could dwell for more than a short period within the Fair Realm and return to Aia without languishing thereafter, yearning ceaselessly to return, being filled with unutterable longing. The longer the stay, the fiercer the craving. This affliction was called the Langothe. Wilfred, bring more piment. Another story will illustrate.’

The lynx on the cushion stood up, yawned, disemboweled its bed, and settled again. Its master began another tale.

‘Perdret Olvath was a very pretty girl who lived in Luindorn. Being from a poor family, she made her living in service. It is said that she was a girl who liked to indulge in flights of fancy, or romance, as some would call it. Conscious of her own comeliness, she was also rather vain. Pretty women have a right to vanity, in this gentleman’s humble opinion, but others would not agree. Perdret would take great care to dress herself as well as possible, in colourful, flattering clothes; she twined wildflowers in her hair and attracted the attention of all the young men, to the envy of the other lasses. She was also highly susceptible to flattery, and, being unsophisticated and without education, was unable to conceal this fact. If anyone praised her looks, her eyes would light up with pleasure.

‘Perdret having been without a situation for some time, her mother was anxious to see her employed. No positions were available in the local area, so she told her daughter that she must look further afield. The girl did not want to leave her village, but there was no choice. She packed her few meager possessions and set off.

‘She walked a long way, and everything seemed to be going well until she came to the crossroads on the downs, when she discovered that she knew not which road to take. She looked first one way and then another, until she felt mightily bewildered; should she choose some path at random or return home or stay where she was? Unable to decide, she sat down on a granite boulder and began in dreaming idleness to break off the fronds of ferns which grew in profusion all around. She had not sat long on this stone when, hearing a voice near her, she turned around and saw a handsome young man wearing a green silken coat covered with ornaments of gold.

‘“Good morrow, young maiden,” said he. “And what are you doing here?”

‘“I am looking for work,” said she.

‘“And what kind of work seek you, my pretty damsel?” said he with a charming smile.

‘“Any kind of work,” said she, quite dazzled. “I can turn my hand to many things.”

‘“Do you think you could look after a widower with one little boy?” asked the young man.

‘“I dote on children,” said Perdret. “And I am used to taking care of them.”

‘“I will hire you,” he said, “for a year and a day. But first, Perdret Olvath”—Perdret gaped in wonderment when she discovered the stranger knew her name, but he laughed. “Oh, I see, you thought I didn’t know you, but do you think a young widower could pass through your village and not notice such a pretty lass? Besides,” he said, “I watched you one day combing your hair and gazing at your reflection in one of my ponds. You stole some of my perfumed violets to put in your lovely hair.”

‘Seduced by his winning ways, the girl was more than half inclined to accept his offer, but her mother had trained her to be careful. “Where do you live?” she asked.

‘“Not far from here,” said the young stranger. “Will you accept the place and come with me?”

‘“First, I would ask about wages.”

‘He told her that she could ask her own wages, whereupon visions of wealth and luxury rose before Perdret’s eyes.

‘“But only if you come with me at once, without returning home,” he added. “I will send word to your mother.”

‘“But my clothes …” said Perdret.

‘“The clothes you have are all that will be necessary, and I’ll put you in much finer raiment soon.”

“Well then,” Perdret said, “we are agreed!”

‘“Not yet,” said the stranger. “I have a way of my own, and you must swear my oath.”

‘A look of alarm spread across Perdret’s face.

‘“You need not be afraid,” said the stranger very kindly. “I only ask that you kiss that fernleaf which you have in your hand and say, ‘For a year and a day I promise to stay.’”

‘“Is that all?” said Perdret, and she did so.

‘Without another word he turned and began to walk along the road leading eastward. Perdret followed him, but she thought it strange that her new master went in silence all the way. They walked on for a long time until Perdret grew weary and her feet began to ache. It seemed that she had been walking forever, and not a word spoken. The poor girl felt so exhausted and so dispirited that at last she began to cry. At the sound of her sobs, her new master turned around.

‘“Are you tired, Perdret? Sit down,” he said. Taking her by the hand, he led her to a mossy bank. Overwhelmed by this display of kindness, she burst out weeping. He allowed her to cry for a few minutes before he said, “Now I shall dry your eyes.”

‘Taking a sprig of leaves from the bank, he passed it swiftly across one of her eyes, then the other. Instantly her tears and all weariness vanished. Perdret realised she was walking again, but could not remember having left the bank.

‘Now, the way began to slope downwards. Green banks rose up on either side and the road passed swiftly underground. The girl was not a little apprehensive, but she had struck a bargain and was more frightened of going back than forward. After a time, her new master halted.

‘“We are almost there, Perdret,” he said. “But I see a tear glittering on your eyelid. No mortal tears may enter here.”

‘As before, he brushed her eyes with the leaves. They stepped forward and the tunnel opened out.

‘Before them spread a country such as Perdret had never before seen. Flowers of every hue covered the hills and valleys; the region appeared like a rich tapestry sewn with gems which glittered in a light as clear as that of the Summer sun, yet as mellow as moonlight. Rivers flowed, more lucid than any water she had ever seen on the granite hills. Waterfalls bounded down the hillsides, fountains danced in rainbows of brilliant droplets. Tall trees in belts and thickets bore both fruit and blossom at once. Ladies and gentlemen dressed in green and gold walked or sported, or reposed on banks of flowers, singing songs or telling stories. Indeed, it was a world more beautiful and exciting than words could describe.

‘Perdret’s master took her to a stately mansion in which all the furniture was of pearl or ivory, inlaid with gold and silver and studded with emeralds. After passing through many rooms they came to one which was hung all over with snow-white lace, as fine as the finest cobweb, most beautifully worked with flowers. In the middle of this room stood a little cot made out of some beautiful seashell, which reflected so many colours that Perdret could scarcely bear to look at it. Sleeping in the cot was the sweetest little boy she had ever seen.

‘“This is your charge,” said the father. “You have nothing to do but wash him when he wakes, dress him and take him to walk in the garden, then put him to bed when he is tired. I am a lord in this land and I have my own reasons for wishing my boy to know something of human nature.”

‘Perdret began her duties and did them well and diligently. She loved the little boy and he appeared to love her, and the time passed away with astonishing swiftness. Strangely, she never thought of her mother—she never thought of her home at all. Dwelling in luxury and happiness, she never reckoned the passing of time.

‘But the period for which she had bound herself finally ended, and one day she woke up in her own bed in her mother’s cottage. Everything seemed unfamiliar to her and she appeared unusually abstracted or foreign to all who saw her. She could evince no interest in meat or drink. At nights, instead of sleeping, she would go out under the stars and gaze up at them. Sometimes she would wander all night, barefoot, only to be found exhausted on her bed in the morning, unable to rise. She grew pale and thin and was hardly ever seen to smile. Numerous wise persons were called in to try to cure Perdret’s ailment, and to all she told the same tale, about the Faêran lord, and the beautiful country and the baby. She being known for her fanciful turn of mind, some people said the girl was “gone clean daft” but at last an old carlin came to the cottage where Perdret lay on her bed.

‘“Now crook your arm, Perdret,” said the carlin. Perdret sat up and bent her arm, resting her hand on her hip.

‘“Now say, ‘I hope my arm may never come uncrooked if I have told ye a word of a lie.”’

‘“I hope my arm may never come uncrooked if I have told ye a word of a lie,” repeated Perdret.

‘“Uncrook your arm,” said the carlin.

‘Perdret stretched out her arm.

‘“It is the truth the girl is telling,” said the carlin. “She has been carried away by the Faêran to their country.”

‘“Will my daughter ever come right in her mind?” asked the mother.

‘“I can do nothing,” said the old woman, shaking her head. “Perhaps she will, in time.”

The Bard having finished his soliloquy, the Duchess added, ‘Anyway, it is told that Perdret did not get on very well in the world. She married, and never wanted for anything, but she was always discontented and unhappy, and she died young.’

‘Verily,’ said the Bard, ‘some said she always pined after the Faêran widower. Others said she pined after the Fair Realm itself. No matter the reason, it was the Langothe that plagued her.’

‘And was that the same Faêran lord who had been husband to Eilian?’ Rohain inquired.

‘I think not. The first tale happened subsequent to the second. I have told them out of order. Over the course of time, more than one fair mortal maiden has been taken away to the Realm.’

‘Did the Faêran steal mortal men as well as maids and wives?’ asked Rohain.

‘Most certainly,’ came the Duchess’s quick reply.

‘Well,’ declared Rohain, ‘it seems to me that the Strangers were a dangerous race, selfish and arrogant, cruel in many ways, excessively wanton and proud in their immortality.’

‘Yet theirs was a conditional immortality,’ observed the Bard sharply.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Age and disease could not slay them, but they could be defeated by violence.’

‘Even then,’ amended the Duchess, ‘they could only be diminished, not destroyed.’

‘Yet what mortal violence could defeat the gramarye wielded by the Lords of the Fair Realm?’ argued Rohain. After a silence, she added, ‘Is it possible that any folk of their blood remained in Erith—perhaps children of mixed races, both Faêran and mortal, like the child of Eilian?’

‘Historically,’ said the Bard, ‘very few Half-Faêran have been born—perhaps a score, that is all. None have walked our world since the Ways were closed. They chose to stay on the other side.’

‘What of their progeny? The children of the Half-Faêran?’

‘There is no such issue. The Half-Faêran were all barren.’

‘Is it possible that one of the Faêran could be stolen by a mortal?’ Rohain asked.

‘Indeed!’ responded the Duchess. ‘There were ways, if one knew how. Many a mortal man has been drawn into desperate love after setting eyes on a Faêran damsel. To see the Faêran was to be attracted to them. In truth, some Faêran damsels who desired mortals—I will not say “loved”, for I believe they were all incapable of love as we know it—allowed themselves to be caught as brides.’ She paused, then added, ‘And it was possible for Faêran brides to be taken by men.’

‘But surely, never against their will!’ exclaimed Rohain.

‘Only once,’ said Thomas, ‘has an abduction like that occurred, and only because, as in the tale of the swanmaiden, foolish chattering wights gave away the secret of how to do it. They revealed the rules to a man of our race who, smitten with the sickness of love, was able to capture a Faêran bride.’ A troubled shadow fleeted in the depths of his eyes. ‘That particular tale is another example of our race stealing from the Faêran—perhaps the most significant example of all. The theft of a Faêran bride by a lowly mortal greatly roused the ire of some of the Fair Realm’s greatest lords. Thereafter, one Faêran prince in particular began to take pleasure in the company of unseelie wights whose delight was to plague and torment mortals.’

‘But how could a mortal man steal a Faêran damsel?’, wondered Rohain.

‘They could not be stolen in the same way as wightish brides,’ explained Thomas, ‘as, for example, power is gained over merrows by taking their combs, over swanmaidens by stealing their feather-cloaks, over silkies by purloining their skins. But there were certain words and deeds which could force the Faêran to remain in our world, at least for a time.’

‘But not for long,’ interjected the Duchess, nodding for emphasis, ‘and after she left him he pined away to, if you’ll excuse the cliché, an early grave. As ever, all love between immortals and mortals was doomed. In the end, all unions between Faêran and humankind ended in tragedy.’

Groups of peasants stamping in the cold went about Caermelor singing traditional songs on street corners and before the doors of townsfolk, to be rewarded with coins or wrapped cakes and common flagons of mulled ale. Carts rumbled along the streets bearing great logs cut from the forest to supply the Imbroltide fires. Marketplace trade rose to fever pitch. Lanterns burned all night in workshops as tradesmen hurried to meet deadlines on orders for the nobility, the exchange of gifts being one of the most eagerly looked-for customs of Imbrol.

Coloured lamps had been strung along the streets, vying with glowing garnets of charcoal in the braziers of the hot-chestnut vendors. Under the Greayte Southern Star, Caermelor bustled late into the freezing nights and scarcely slept, despite rowdy winds that knocked the lamps about and blew out the charcoal fires, despite the lightning that danced like green skeletons all across the western skies.

This was angry weather, uncharacteristic of Imbrol. Some people were blaming it on the gathering of unseelie swarms in Namarre. ‘’Tis their doing,’ they muttered darkly. ‘’Tis but a premonition of the first assault. Wicked wights allied with barbarians! How are such enemies ever to be defeated?’

Beneath the outward merriment, horror flowed through the thoroughfares of the city.

New Year’s Eve.

When the bells tolled the last stroke of midnight, Misrule would reign until dawn on Littlesun Day. The tradition of Misrule entailed the annual turning of the tables that saw lord trade places with footman and lady step into the shoes of chambermaid, so that, for a few hours, the world would be topsy-turvy and Foolery would be the order of the night until cock-crow.

But hours before all that, there was the Feast.

Grander and far more expansive than the Royal Dining Hall, the Royal Banqueting Hall boasted eight fireplaces, in each of which burned a massive tree trunk, the traditional Imbrol Log. Coincidentally, eight Waits stood vigil in their splendor to fanfare the courses. The High Table on its dais was so far removed from the opposite end of the Hall that those who graced it could scarcely be expected to discern the countenances of those seated at the lower trestles, or even the central ones—a state of affairs that, despite the blaze of countless girandoles, lusters, and candelabra, was exacerbated by the soft haze of steam and incense filling the air. Below the high dais lay a second platform, innocent of furniture. Here, some of the entremets would be played out between courses.

All plate was of gold or the harder, more brilliant silver-gilt. White light dazzled over its myriad surfaces. Not a gleam of silver, copper, brass, or bronze winked forth.

For ornament there were golden surtouts in the shape of fruiting and blossoming trees. Cakes had been fashioned and frosted to resemble white castles, cities of dough and Sugar, glittering coaches-and-six, peacocks in full display, sprays of lily-of-the-valley, bouquets of roses, the traditional spinning-wheels of Imbrol, snowy ducks and geese. The sideboards struggled to support pyramids of ripe and luscious fruits from the Royal Conservatory, forced to grow out of season, all surrounded by garlands of evergreens and berries. For the occasion, the salt cellars took the shape of ceremonial snow-sleighs, hung about with tiny gold bells and emblazoned with the King-Emperor’s insignia. The linen serviettes were folded in enchanting forms of snowflakes. Superfluous napkin rings, garlands of holly and other Winter leaves individually crafted in gold, lay empty next to every place setting.

More accustomed now to the dangers of mistaking blade, prong, and scoop, Rohain silently revised the different uses for each piece included in her place setting: the oyster fork nestling in the soup spoon; the marrow scoop; the pairs of knives and forks each dedicated to the fish, the meat, and the poultry; the dessert spoon and fork; the fruit knife; the tiny bonbon tongs. Beyond the boundaries of her place lay the cutlery to be shared: the suckett forks, condiment spoons, Sugar shells, mote spoons, pickle forks, butter picks, nut picks, cheese scoops, horseradish spoons, and various others, not to be confused with the soup ladles, fish slicers, jelly servers, snuff spoons, and wick scissors to be wielded by the servants.

Most of the courtiers were already drunk when they entered the Royal Banqueting Hall—Rohain among them. They had been junketing all day, insisting that she match them deed for deed, and, loathe to relinquish her new status, she had acceded. Unaccustomed to imbibing liquor, she had succumbed to it more swiftly than they. The Hall swam before her eyes.

Everyone was standing beside their chairs. The High Table filled last of all—the lords of the Royal Attriod and the chief advisors of the King-Emperor’s Household entered with their wives, preceding by several minutes the young Prince Edward. When the King-Emperor appeared, an awed hush settled on the assembly, yet in observance of good form, none looked at their sovereign directly. His Majesty took his seat in the tall chair overshadowed by its richly decorated canopy, after which everyone else followed suit.

Now Rohain noted that one of the long tables was occupied entirely by Dainnan warriors in dress uniform: thigh-length doublets overlaid by tabards emblazoned with the Royal Heraldry. She strained to view them. Some were positioned with their backs to her. Of those she could descry, none were Thorn, but her gaze fastened on that table and it was difficult to look away.

Pages and ewerers came to pour scented water for the handwashing. Rohain looked up. The face of the boy holding the ewer for her seemed familiar.

‘You!’ blurted Rohain suddenly, and not particularly distinctly.

‘I beg your pardon, m’lady?’

‘You! Where have I seen you before?’

‘I am sure I do not know,’ stammered the lad, embarrassed.

‘I have seen you. Oh yes, I know now—’

She checked herself as realisation dawned. This was the cabin boy from the merchant ship City of Gilvaris Tarv. He would not recognise her. Joy welled in her heart—he, then, had been saved. What of his shipmates?

‘You were once in the employ of a merchant line, the Cresny-Beaulais, were you not?’

‘Aye, m’lady, but—’

‘Your ship was scuttled by pirates. What happened to the crew?’

Nonplussed, the boy stammered, ‘Some were slain, m’lady. Others escaped. The captain, he was ransomed. Others were sold as slaves, methinks.’

His eyes showed his obvious desperation to ask how she knew so much about him, but he was too well-drilled to question a high-born lady.

‘And you escaped?’

‘Aye, m’lady.’

Rohain peeled a ruby-encrusted bracelet from her wrist. It matched her outfit—tonight she was clad all in crimson and gold, with a hint of jade. Viviana had braided silk rosebuds into her crimped locks. A vermilion plume within the circlet of a band of cornelians nodded over them. Tiny red roses had been appliquéd in lace all over the watered silk of her houppelande. Her bodice was scalloped, edged with appliquéd rose leaves, her waist was clasped by a scarlet-purple girdle harnessed with gold beads and lattice. The sleeves fell in lacy folds to the floor.

‘Take this,’ she said, proffering the bracelet. ‘It pleases me to give it you. Sell it, if you wish. If ever you need help, ask for me. If ever you require a position, ask at the Estate of Arth—Argh—that is, Arcune. I am to be Baroness of it, y’know.’ Unaccountably, her tongue seemed to have thickened. It appeared to be reluctant to shape words.

‘By the Powers, my lady! I thank you.’

‘’Tis nought. You deserve it.’

A lad as acute as the erstwhile cabin boy might have been expected to complete his task in haste, in case his benefactress should sober up and reverse her benevolence. Instead he performed the rest of his duties slowly and wonderingly, then bowed and withdrew.

Servitors ported trays laden with hunches of fluffy white bread up and down the tables, beginning at the top. Each diner was served, with a flourish and a pair of tongs, accompanied by a loud declaration of his title and honour, whereupon he stood up and afterward sat down again. Simultaneously, the Credence and the Assaying took place. Wines were dispensed by footman-bees, filling with nectar the goblet-flowers. Snow floated in the wine jugs.

‘’Tis going to be ever such a capital occasion tonight!’ cried a lady in a turquoise surcoat of figured satin and a lavender kirtle with an upstanding collar of stiffened wigan. ‘I adore playacting at Misrule, don’t you? I intend to be an ever so slovenly scullery maid, and make my footman a prince!’

‘Don’t take it too far, my dear,’ rejoined another in an embroidered gable headdress and an apricot-coloured gown of shot silk. ‘One never knows what a prince may ask of a scullery maid!’

‘Faugh! Jenkin would never overstep the mark with me!’

‘Unless you beg him,’ Dianella said sweetly. Her friends shrieked, to High Collar’s thinly disguised discomfiture. Dianella turned to Rohain. ‘Zounds, Dear Heart, quot wroughtst-thou un sa manfant pove? Mi sugen esprait quill overgrand pash-thou es.’ What have you done to that poor lad? I should say he is mightily in love with you.

‘Ta ferle-fil?’ That page boy? replied Rohain offhandedly. ‘Quot sugen cheyen-mi al ins?’ What should I care for him?

She had learned to answer Dianella’s audacity with stoicism.

That comely doyenne of innuendo, her beautiful head encased in a pointed turban topped with clusters of golden baubles, turned to those seated near her and began to converse in rapid slingua. Shadowy tresses fell loose across her smooth white shoulders to the damask bodice, the heavy diamond necklace.

The Waits trumpeted fiercely. Far across the room, at the High Table, someone rose up from behind the table-decorations to propose the Toast. Rohain could make out a tall, distinguished figure across the tables. When he spoke, his reverberant voice revealed him to be Thomas of Ercildoune. The Royal Toast and the Loving Cup were attended to in due order, after which Rohain seemed to see many more accoutrements upon the table in front of her than had been there previously. She knew she had taken too much to drink, but to refuse the traditional pre-dinner draughts would have been uncouth. This insobriety hampered her efforts to discover Thorn among the Dainnan and her ability to converse in a sprightly manner.

With utmost pageantry, the Soup was revealed and consumed. There followed the first entremet of this Imbrol Feast—a score of dancers in sildron harness, costumed as the cicada-like species of creatures called the Five-Eyed. They had encased their faces in masks with convexities of glass for the large eyes and a triad of jewels for the small. Helmets clasped their heads, bronze cuirasses covered their chests and backs. Wings of gauze and silk like rippled glass, spangled with sequins, expanded from their shoulders in sapphire blue, gold, and emerald green. At their hips they wore factitious tymbals, and their heels were spurred.

To the rattle of nakers and other percussive paraphernalia, these exotics performed a gliss-dance of prodigious gymnastic skill, floating above the heads of the diners, grasping each other by the arms to change direction or pulling on streamers and crosiers; spinning and gliding, pushing off the walls, somersaulting, flying. At the conclusion the diners applauded enthusiastically and the next course was served: golden carp suspended in coloured gelatins and whole baked dolphins on beds of oysters, complete with pearls. The butlers built pyramids of balancing goblets and poured wine into the topmost ones. The torrent splashed lavishly down from layer to layer in a spectacular cascade of pale gold.

A display of swordsmanship next entertained the Court. A hefty purse having been promised to the winner, the combatants treated it as no light matter. Three dueling pairs, all accomplished professionals, fought with foils, sabers and épées. In a fine exhibition, they footed it up and down the lower dais in front of the High Table. Through the milky airs, beyond the candle-flames that shifted and jumped, beyond the gleams that glanced off dinnerware and played ocular tricks, Rohain dimly descried figures leaning on their elbows, watching. At the far-off tables that stood nearest the High Table, the only identifiable faces belonged to the comely Lady Rosamonde, eldest daughter of the Duke of Roxburgh, the balding Dowager Marchioness of Netherby-on-the-Fens in her incongruous and outrageously expensive wig of real Talith hair, and the young Talith noblewoman Maiwenna, her good looks framed by naturally acquired gold.

Nearer at hand, a group from Rimany, born of the Ice-Race called the Arysk, sat like a row of lilies or plumy white birds, wearing the feathers of albino peacocks and ibis. Ivory of skin were they, their locks of pure white silk framing grave faces and eyes of palest blue. Like the trows, they favoured silver for adornment, and as for apparel, they chose only white silk and gauze and cloth-of-silver, ice blue or sea gray. Sudden blood-red, like a stab wound, was the only bright hue of their decoration, deepest carmine velvet edged with sable. They kept to themselves—Rohain had only been introduced to one of their number, the Lady Solveig of Ixtacutl. The candlelight had described in her eyes ice-pinnacles tinged by a flame of sunset.

Blood having been shed, the swordfighting event closed in time for the ensuing dish, which appeared to consist of a bloated ox. In roasted state, surrounded by glazed worts, parsley, nasturtiums, and sausages, the beast was wheeled in on a golden cart drawn by skittish reindeer, to be presented at the High Table. As the cart halted before the dais, Roxburgh stood up. His voice roared out across the Hall. A horrified silence fell abruptly over the assembly.

‘What’s this? An ox for dinner at Imbrol? And look at it! Is this fit to be presented to His Majesty? Has it not even been gutted and stuffed? Are we to chew entrails? Bring the Master Cook. We’ll see him hanged for this incompetence!’

The Royal Cook was dragged sniveling and groveling from the kitchens. On his knees before the High Table he begged for mercy, rolling his eyes hideously.

‘Your Majesty! Your Highness, Your Graces, have pity! I did my best, but there was no time—’

‘Silence!’ roared Roxburgh. ‘I’ll see you gutted instead!’

‘But sir,’ said the Cook, ‘I’d rather show you the beast’s innards than mine.’

With that he drew a long knife from his side and in one easy movement slashed open the ox’s stomach. A cheer went up from the diners as an entire roasted cow rolled out. A slash along the cow’s abdomen revealed a baked doe. Inside the venison was a nicely cooked sheep, stuffed with a pig, crammed with a turkey that contained a pigeon packed with forcemeat. By now the audience was applauding madly. The Royal Cook capered. Roxburgh threw back his head and made the Hall ring with his laughter—of course, it had all been a jest, and planned from start to finish. The Dainnan Commander threw a purse to the Cook. A tribe of footmen rolled away the Seven-In-One to be operated on by a bevy of Carvers.

The next course was roasted peacocks, brought forth with wads of burning camphor and wool stuck in their beaks, spitting flames, to be paraded in their jewelled plumage and then devoured. After that, files of liveried servitors triumphantly brought forth pies which, when their pastry lids were cut, released live birds to fly around the hall.

Barring dessert, there could not have been a more complete repast. Many a noble waistline bulged. Pages, footmen, butlers, cup-bearers, all were kept busy scurrying back and forth at the whims of their masters and mistresses. As the last sanap was removed in preparation for the final collation, all entremets disappeared and an orchestra played soft music from the gallery. The musicians gleamed with their own perspiration. Like a field of burning goldenrod flowers, feverish candles blazed, stuck in wrought brackets attached to the sheet-music stands.

The courtiers murmured expectantly.

The Royal Bard rose from his chair. Beckoning to a group of half a dozen boys who had been waiting in the wings, he strode down from the dais to a golden harp that stood there, its frame formed like a giant fish with waves streaming from its scales. All fell silent once more.

‘I sing “The Holly,”’ he announced, seating himself at the harp.

Backed by the harmonies of the youthful choir, the Bard sang a traditional song of Imbrol. All those assembled raised their voices to join in the last verse, and a grand swelling of sound it was—it seemed to rock the walls and lift the very ceiling.

Thomas of Ercildoune waved the choir away and once more touched the strings of his Carp Harp. In a voice both rich and mellow, which carried clearly to all those seated in the Hall, he began a serenade:

‘My love, though I should never wish that we

Should even by a hair’s breadth parted be,

There shall be times when we must dwell apart—

Then would I keep some emblem to my heart;

A token of thee, lady whom I cherish,

That of the lack of thee I may not perish—

A part of thee which no one else could make,

And yet, that would not harm thee for to take;

A pledge of thy return, a treasured thing

More tender than a portrait or a ring;

A part of thee which of thee shall remain.

Thus, sundered we shall never be again;

So if beside thee, love, I cannot be—

I pray thee, spare a lock of hair to me.’

Tears brimmed in Rohain’s eyes. She forbade them to fall. Had Thorn kept the twist of hair he had stolen from her, or had he tossed it away? The Bard bowed to the High Table and was commended on his performance.

‘My apprentice, Toby,’ said Ercildoune, ‘has been practicing some epic these last days, methinks. Let us hear it now, Toby.’

‘If it please Your Majesty, I shall play “Candlebutter”,’ said Toby, bowing low. The courtiers stirred appreciatively. It was one of those old, well-known songs that, although the words bore no relevance to the occasion, was always thought of as indispensable to Imbrol.

‘For those who are not aware of the manner of speech used in some regions, candlebutter is an archaic or rustic name for gold,’ said Toby in a clear voice. ‘The ballad is made upon the true story of the Dark Daughter, as happened, they say, in days of yore. ‘Tis an ancient song and many a minstrel has passed it down through the years. Now it is my turn. I shall try to do it justice.’ Taking up a lyre for accompaniment, Toby half sang, half chanted a long, strange ballad. As the last liquid notes of the lyre trickled away, the singer bowed. His audience remained, for a time, under the spell of the curious old song.

Hardly had they begun to applaud when a loud explosion and a wizardly cloud of purple smoke from the lower doors heralded the arrival of the Puddings. Upon matching gray steeds, in rode twelve masked equestrians outfitted to represent the twelve months of the Year. Wearing sildron bracelets to bear up the weight, they held aloft flaming spheres of compacted suet, peel, Sugar, brandy, and fruits, whose purpose was to resemble the burning sun in a half-serious attempt to lure the real one back from its Winter retreat in the north. All who viewed these triumphal orbs did so with the anticipation of being fortunate enough to find within their portion one of the lucky silver tokens hidden there. These apparitions jogged once around the Hall, pausing to genuflect to the High Table, the horses having been trained to do the same. They deposited their guttering burdens on the sideboards for subsequent butchery and departed in another burst of smoke and noise.

‘La! Uncle never did things by halves!’ commented Dianella, covering her ears.

The uncle mentioned, being the Lord High Wizard, Sargoth the Cowled, commenced his customary Imbrol Spectacle directly after dessert. The fame of this man had reached to all the corners of Erith, even to the Tower at Isse, where he had been spoken of with awe and excitement. Rohain soon saw that his reputation had not been overpraised. He demonstrated each of the Nine Arts with utmost skill and aplomb, revealing himself as a true Master of Wizardry. Compared with Sargoth, Zimmuth of Isse Tower seemed but an apprentice.

Servants went around snuffing out candles. The darkened Hall became the scene of wizardly lightning, flame, sparks, and smoke. Between thunders the orchestra played. On the dais below the High Table Sargoth transformed maidens into wolves, wolves into tyraxes, and tyraxes to watch-worms. He sawed men in half; the halves walked around by themselves and were rejoined later. He chopped men into little pieces and restored them to life. He made them disappear, only to reappear where least expected. Inanimate objects came to life. In his ungloved hand, water turned to fire and fire to water. He levitated without a sildron harness. He seemed aflame, he walked through fire unscathed. He performed feats of gramarye that left his audience gawping. In short, he was astounding.

A bell tolled eleven. On the eleventh stroke, the wizard vanished for the last time, leaving a rain of gold, silver, and scarlet sparks to descend slowly into the foggy Hall. A cheer went up—it was time to prepare for Misrule. Footmen scurried to relight the candles. Their radiance, leaking through the haze, showed that the High Table had already been half-deserted. In order of importance, the courtiers now absented themselves from the Banqueting Hall, repairing to their suites to dress for the Midnight Ball.

With a rustle of silk, Dianella, attired in the costliest of fabrics cut in peasant style, entered Rohain’s boudoir. She was followed by her lady’s maid.

‘Are you almost ready, Dear Heart?’ she said with a sweet smile. ‘The night wears on! Allow me to help you with your coiffure. Servants do not know how to prosecute such affairs successfully. Besides, I have been told your maid’s sight is impaired.’

Biting her lip, Viviana stepped back. Rohain allowed Dianella to rearrange her curls.

‘Like this, see?’ said Dianella, teasing out loose strands. ‘A little messy, like a maid who’s forgotten to tidy herself—’twould be true to type, I ween. What a capital costume—it does show your figure to advantage! I see your skivvy-girl here is wearing the one of your gowns I most admire, oh, I could almost be jealous! Yet breeding will tell—the most gracious of raiment cannot enhance a low-born face. What’s this?’ She peered closely at Rohain’s hair. ‘What have you done to the roots? Why, I declare! Griffin, get out of here. You too.’ She rounded on the two lady’s maids, who hastily removed themselves.

Rohain drooped, wine-befuddled, before the looking-glass. ‘What is the matter with my hair, Dianella?’

‘Only that the roots are beginning to grow out gold. How entirely fascinating! Come, come, what are you hiding from us?’

‘I hide nothing! If I am Talith, what of it?’

‘Of course. What of it indeed! Nobody of any consequence wears their hair yellow these days—only old quizzes like the Dowager Marchioness of Netherby, and cold fish like Maiwenna. Verily, it is out of style. You had better have it seen to quickly—Griffin shall dye it for you on the morrow; she is taraiz adept. There’s not a moment to lose. Contrasting roots are so out of favour!’

She held up a strand of Rohain’s hair between finger and thumb.

‘La! What emulsion have you used, Heart? Your hair positively glows. Most of the usual black dyestuffs coarsen the tresses something storfenlent.’

‘I do not know what it was called. My hair was dyed for me by a carlin in White Down Rory.’

‘I must know her name, this adept witch of the hairdressing!’

Only half attending, Rohain said, ‘She is called Maeve One-Eye. Shall the ladies of the Court dance with the Dainnan tonight?’

Dianella laughed her silvery tinkle.

‘The ladies of the Court may do many things on this night of the Year. All of Roxburgh’s stalwarts are sofine and unco’ gallant—dare I surmise that your eye has rested upon one in particular, es raith-na?’

A gong sounded the call to the Ballroom. Dianella glided to the window and peered out. In the darkness below, torches flared.

Rohain rose unsteadily from her seat by the dressing-table.

‘Do you know of a Dainnan by the name of Thorn?’

‘Thorn?’ Dianella paused, without turning around. ‘Nay, I think not. Nay, I am certain I have not heard that name. Have you asked anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘Well it would be best not to, Dear Heart. It does not look so well, you understand, a lady in your position asking after one of the King-Emperor’s hired men, dashing though they be. I am sure you will see this man again, by and by.’ She lifted from her chatelaine an ivory mirror-case depicting a tournament. Knights jousted while nobles watched from a high gallery. Ivory heralds sounded long trumpets. After a quick glance at her reflection, she snapped it shut. ‘Is he very much in love with you?’

‘I hardly know him.’

‘But of course! You would be saving yourself for a viscount, at the very least! I am sure your Dainnan loves you from afar, in truest chivalry, with most ardent and untainted passion. Cai dreambliss! Have you your dance-cards and fan? Come now, take my hand—let us away to the Ball. We must be there before midnight. That is when the best fun begins!’

A great stillness fell, near and far.

In the gardens and courtyards of the palace, bonfires flared, inviting the Winter sun’s return. A band of well-wrapped musicians sustained the circles of dancers around each conflagration. Some maidens ran, screaming ‘Bogles in the hedges!’ Someone, it was reported, had seen them—but it turned out to be a mere folly.

The city bells rang a carillon for midnight.

A mighty cheer went up to the starry skies, and a blowing of horns and a rampage of bells and drums. In the Royal Ballroom, the oboe, the clarinet, the viol, the shawm and hautboy, the serpent, the trumpet, the horn and timpani, the triangle, the gittern, and the double bass struck up.

The Royal Ballroom stood wide and high, its painted, paneled, festooned walls lined with mirrors and chairs, the latter occupied by ladies with fans and gentlemen with snuff-boxes, many of these observers being in various stages of coquetry and flirtation. Dancers packed the floor. It would seem to an onlooker that servant and master, both simple and gentle, mingled without regard to propriety: cup-bearer and countess, minion and marquess, drudge and Dainnan, valet and viscount, laundry-maid and lord, nursery-maid and noble, equerry and earl, squire and seigneur, henchman and high-born lady. With blue glass gleaming at her throat like sapphires, a ragged scullion whirled in the arms of an under-butler with gold-buckled shoes, whose jacket had been turned inside out. A queenly dame in cloth-of-gold partnered an elderly, bewhiskered steward; a kitchen-maid in a stained apron trod the boards with a velveted duke while a baroness danced with a pastry-cook. The Yeoman to the Royal Wine Cellar footed it with the Countess of Sheffield, and the Master of Robes trifled with a gardener’s daughter in damson silk and a golden chatelaine. It was all bewildering in the extreme, which indeed was the intention, for the period between midnight and sunrise on Littlesun Day was a dangerous time when anything might happen.

On this the longest night, dark-loving eldritch things roamed abroad—in particular, unseelie entities out to do harm to mortals—and if they should be led astray by appearances, if they should not be able to identify those upon whom they spied, then there was a chance that they would have less power to wreak mischief upon them during the coming year. With reversal in mind, acrobats walked about on their hands, their feet waving in the air, wearing gauntlets over their shoes. Jesters, dressed as birds and butterflies with stars on their heads, toddled here and there; others, wrapped in swaddling to represent the worms of the soil, glissanded near the ceiling.

The lowliest drudge, a young, uncomely maid whose distasteful daily duties included the emptying of chamber-pots, presided over the Ball. Smiling in genuine glee, this Queen of Misrule sat on one of the King-Emperor’s very thrones, with a paste-and-paint crown stuck askew upon her curls and glass baubles winking on every joint. Ercildoune, who loved such occasions, made great show of falling upon his knees before her, offering tray after tray of sweetmeats and wine. In his joskin’s garb, he looked quite the yokel, although rather rakish. His performance, however, was soon eclipsed by Goblet-As-Footman. His powdered wig on sideways, his long-toed shoes tripping him up at the slightest provocation, the Royal Jester fell on many people—judiciously selected. He fell into the lap of the Queen of Misrule and was mortified and begged forgiveness, but, unforgiven, tried to hang himself with a noose whose frayed end he held high in his own hand. When suicide failed, he implored pardon again; she kissed him, and he was so elated that he cut a caper, tripped on his shoes, and landed in her lap once again. In disgust, his fellow jesters heaved him up by the hands and feet and threw him into the multitude, whereupon he was passed from hand to hand over their heads around the room. None scorned to join this activity, least of all those of the Set. In all seasons Goblet was deemed fashionable by the Set, even though he was, by choice, not part of it. His scathing tongue could strip face and facade from those he chose to mock; as jester, he was licensed to lampoon; none bar a very few would not give way before him, and most would not wish to do so. He was popular despite his acerbic wit and because of it; Goblet could say and do almost anything and get away with it. Furthermore, it was deemed lucky to touch a jester on New Year’s Eve.

When next seen, Goblet was wearing an elaborate farthingale, with two slightly lopsided puddings squeezed into the bodice and two more in the bustle. In this finery he skipped through the crowd, having perfected the knack of appearing at people’s elbows, then kicking up his heels and disappearing with an arch wink before they had time to collect their wits. A trail of children endeavoured to follow him.

In the adjacent room, the White Drawing Room, a take-as-you-please supper had been laid out. Gold glittered everywhere; encrusted on the walls and the heavy frames of the paintings that adorned them, on the embroidered chairs, the ornate ceiling, the solid gold firescreens. About the walls, cabinets inlaid with semi-precious stones housed objets d’art. Tall doors gave on to the torchlit gardens. Before these portals posed graceful marble statues and tall ivory vases overflowing with white lilies. Overhead hovered a breathtaking tiered crystal chandelier. The floor was thick with priceless purple and gold carpets that flowed out beyond the White Drawing Room into the length of the red-and-gold East Gallery.

The Yeoman of the Silver Pantry, who compensated for his lack of height with excessive girth, was helping himself generously, piling his plate high with lobster mousse and goose pâté. Nearby, a tipsy butler with a long and equine countenance was performing the most extraordinary antics before an admiring audience of pages and porters, balancing empty plates in aspen stacks upon his head and hands. Not unexpectedly, these ceramic towers ultimately descended with a startling crash, causing the unfortunate Yeoman of the Silver Pantry to jump and inadvertently bestow his victuals on the undeserving purple-and-gold carpets.

Thus deprived, he bristled like an indignant boar.

‘You there, Fawcett!’ he shouted. ‘Hold yer noise.’

‘Shout till yer hoarse, I’ll never heed your noise,’ came the flippant reply.

The Yeoman of the Silver Pantry hitched up his belt and rolled his sleeves to his podgy elbows. His cheeks purpled like two generous aubergines.

‘’Tis not I who’s horse but you, horse-face—and yet the face of you compares best with the hinder parts of the noble beast.’

Sniffing an entertaining discourse, servants gathered around. The Yeoman of the Silver Pantry had struck on an issue sensitive with the butler.

‘If horse I be then I can draw the likes of you after me—aye, draw you whithersoever I would choose to go,’ sneered Fawcett. ‘Put wheels on and you are a wain—you’ve the build of it!’

‘’Tis a pity he does not wane,’ interjected the butler’s friend waggishly. ‘He waxes more than he wanes methinks—more so than a thousand candles!’

‘Nay, no drawer you, but an artist,’ shot back the Yeoman of the Silver Pantry, ignoring this interruption. ‘An artist in horse manure.’ Quickly reconsidering, he added, ‘Had I but a pair of drawers such as you, you would be the crotch!’

The audience, who had been applauding each sally, cheered this barb of wit. Nonetheless, the butler was not to be deterred. After a brief deliberation as to whether to interpret the word ‘crotch’ as ‘fork’ and thus allude to his opponent’s disgusting eating habits, he decided on a more threatening approach. Both participants were incisively aware of the retribution that would shortly be exacted from them by the Master of the King’s Household in his wrath, as payment for the damage they had occasioned to the carpets and dishes of the White Drawing Room. Thus they decided that it was as well to be hanged for a buck as a fawn.

‘A crutch you would fain lean upon once I have bested you!’

‘Aye, leaner will they call me an you keep me from my dinner,’ hotly said the Yeoman of the Silver Pantry, who was in fact proud of his bulk. ‘But I’ll dine anon, horse-face, while you shall couch upon the cold ground. Then you’ll be the leaner, understand me?’

‘Rather do I overstand you, base churl.’ The butler loomed over the short figure of the pantryman, his long chin thrust forward.

‘Why then, I’ll undermine you!’

While the butler was thinking of a reply, the Yeoman of the Silver Pantry tackled him around the knees and bowled him over.

Fists flew. Rohain and many others prudently’ withdrew to the comparative safety of the Ballroom. Among the crowd that jostled there she briefly noted a tall man with a scarred face, high cheekbones, and startlingly blue eyes—one of the footmen. Wearing a gorgeous jacket of sapphire velvet lined with white Rimanian bear fur, he was bowing low before a curly-haired ‘chambermaid’, the sixth granddaughter of the Marquess of Early. The girl took his hand and they began to dance. Their eyes never left each other.

‘Love knows no boundaries of rank,’ murmured Rohain to herself.

Unfolding the pleated leaves of a carved wooden fan, the chicken-skin parchment of which was ostentatiously painted with a scene from the Legend of the Sleeping Warriors, Viviana edged closer to her mistress’s elbow.

‘I dream—am I truly wearing my lady’s cloth-of-silver gown and topaz girdle?’

‘Go on with you!’ said Rohain, smiling. ‘You are a lady tonight. You need not attend me.’

‘Georgiana Griffin attends Dianella—’

‘Nonetheless, I insist!’

‘A thousand thanks, my lady! I cannot wait to join the dance. This will surely be the best night of my life!’

After a quick curtsy, Viviana made haste to join the ladies waiting for partners.

Rohain’s eyes roved the assembly. She fluttered a lacquered fan of brilliant luster, edged with gilt. At her girdle hung a small, slender case containing ivory dance-cards. Made of mother-of-pearl, it was overlaid with gold filigree work and had a matching pencil. Several gentlemen had inscribed its ivory leaves with their names. Having been plagued with offers to dance, each ardent aspirant producing a white lace handkerchief and flourishing it under his nose with a bow, Rohain had accepted a few and refused many. Without the influence of trow-music she was an inept dancer, having learned the few steps she knew during impromptu lessons from Viviana—a fact that none of the gallants who whirled her in their arms had seemed to care a whit about. But not one of her partners could match Thorn. She did not wish to dance any more, not with anyone but him. Tired of refusing offers, she had masked her face with a feathered domino borrowed from the Duchess of Roxburgh, dressed herself like a chambermaid, stuck a large pair of artificial moth’s wings on her back, and teased out her black hair in a fright.

Dainnan knights were among the crowd in the ballroom, costumed as both aristocrats and servants, but she could not obtain a clear view from where she stood. It occurred to her that from the elevation of the musicians’ gallery, one could be sure of commanding the scene. Eluding a dashing young earl who may have penetrated her disguise and was advancing in her direction, Rohain slipped through a service door and found a narrow stair.

As she ascended the steps a chill swept over her. She looked up and flinched. Something barred her way. It was a tall, white object, like a column of pale marble. The flicker of a torch in a sconce showed a long, dark shadow stretching from the pillar’s feet and up the wall. She pushed back her mask to obtain a better view.

‘Oh! My lord Sargoth!’

He said nothing. He simply loomed there, looking down from the added height lent him by the staircase. Torchlight carved shadows out of his unblemished pallor, his luminous marble hair. The long face and beard matched the utter colourlessness of his wizard’s robes. Here was one member of the Imperial Court not dressed for Misrule. It was all Rohain could do to prevent herself from backing away, turning and fleeing down the stair. She told herself she would not be intimidated by this man. He was a servant of the King-Emperor, after all—surely in the Court hierarchy she was his superior?

‘Sir, let me pass.’

‘My lady—Rohain, is it? Is that what you are called?’

‘Yes.’

‘My lady Rohain,’ he deliberately emphasized the name. ‘Far be it from me to impede your upward progress.’

He did not move. His eyes glittered oddly. What did he mean? What could he know?

Her mind groped for some anchor, and found the past. Sianadh said never to show fear, never to run. To do so gives fearsome things power over you.

‘Well then, let me pass,’ she said, evincing a boldness she did not feel.

‘Assuredly.’

He moved, but she thought that instead of stepping aside he stooped toward her. She recoiled. A voice boomed up the stairwell from below: ‘Ho, my fair lady, are you there?’

Ercildoune bounded into sight. With relief, Rohain smiled at him. When she looked again, Sargoth was gone.

‘Oh! Where is he?’

‘Who? Have I been so churlish as to interrupt a lovers’ tryst upon the stair? Now, Rohain, you must allow me to know the name of my rival. And what an enchanting push-broom you make, I declare. Winged to boot!’

‘No rival, Your Grace. No rival was here, only Sargoth the Wizard.’

‘Gadzooks, you tremble like a twanged harpstring, my dear. What, has the old charlatan frightened you? I’ll have his gizzards!’

‘He has not.’

‘That is well for him! Never trust a wizard, that’s what I say. All that trickery and smoke—bah! There’s no more gramarye in the Nine Arts than in a sieve. Come now, were you not directing your steps to the musicians’ gallery? I would fain accompany you there. It is a place in which I feel right at ease, if they are playing well.’

They ascended together.

Yet, although she leaned long on the parapet looking down, Rohain could not spy the one for whom her eyes ached. And when the red eye of the Winter sun first opened its lid on the late, slate dawn, it seared his absence on a frost-blighted world.

Two days passed.

From the turmoil of festival, the palace was thrown into the upheaval of war. Aggression had flared again at the Nenian Landbridge. This time, the King-Emperor himself was to travel north, accompanied by many soldiers and Dainnan, leaving Thomas of Ercildoune in charge at Court. All had been in readiness for this eventuality. In two days more, the battalions were gone. The palace fell silent. The passages echoed with their own emptiness.

A dreariness settled.

Dianella came to Rohain privately, sending the lady’s maids away.

‘I have tidings.’

‘What tidings?’

‘News for which you have waited long.’

‘Well, what is it? Prithee, speak!’

‘Dear Heart, you seem a trifle peeved these days. Selestorfen thou al Sorrow Isles?’

‘No, I am not homesick.’

‘Now, I insist that you treat me kindly, Heart,’ scolded Dianella with a smile. ‘I have done some hunting on your behalf. See how I put myself out to please you?’ She pouted. ‘You know you are dearer than a sister to me.’

‘If I appeared brusque I ask your pardon, Dianella.’

‘I forgive easily.’ Lowering her voice, the courtier went on confidingly, ‘I have heard somewhat of your Dainnan, Sir Thorn.’

Rohain started.

‘What? What have you heard?’ she said, unable to conceal her eagerness.

‘Only that he has gone to the gythe.’

‘Gone where?’

‘To the gythe. He has gone to war, Heart, with the last detachment of Dainnan who left here with the King-Emperor. What shall you do now—dress as a soldier-boy and follow him into battle? Oh, but I only tease.’

‘Then he was here! Are you sure? How can you know? Have you seen him?’

‘Patience, patience! You know, Rohain, that I have certain connections here at Court. My uncle is an influential man. He has discreet methods of discovery. You can be assured that no one shall be apprised of your inquiry and that I shall keep you informed of any further word received. No gratitude, please! I have done all this out of friendship.’

‘But I am grateful, Dianella. You are a worthy friend indeed. I should ask the Duke of Ercildoune to make a heroic song about you.’

‘Pshaw! How singularly inventive you are. I must take leave of you for now, Heart—duty calls.’

‘Don’t leave—’

‘I must.’

As Dianella passed through the door, her voice floated back over her shoulder;

‘Until tomorrow, my—’

The last words were muffled, uttered with a laugh. She must have said ‘imaginative friend’. She could not possibly have said ‘imaginary’.

The Letters Patent would soon be finalized, but with the King-Emperor absent for an indefinite period, no date could be set for the official bestowal of Rohain’s title. Ercildoune was continually occupied with matters of business, ‘holding the fort’ as he called it, while His Imperial Majesty was absent. The Bard had never a spare moment between receiving and sending dispatches and attending meetings.

Conflicting rumours whirled like maddened insects up and down the streets of Caermelor. The Empire was doomed; it would be smashed apart by a sweeping assault from Namarre. Some barbaric wizard-warlord would then seize governance, and the lands of Erith would be plunged into decades of suffering and strife. Unseelie wights would overrun the cities. All mortal creatures would be destroyed.

Folk cringed, darting uneasy glances northward, as if they expected to see at any moment a tidal wave of unseelie incarnations rolling down to crush them. Like fog, an atmosphere of impending ruin brooded over the city. Many members of the Set dispersed to their country estates. Those who remained became bored and discontented. They quarreled often.

There seemed nothing better for Rohain to do but to repair to her new estate, Arcune. Somberly—in harmony with the weather—she set out with Viviana in the Duchess of Roxburgh’s Windship Kirtle Green, a topsail schooner, accompanied by that gentlewoman, who, now that her husband had departed once more for the battle zone, was eager to escape the dreary and suspenseful Court climate for the freedom of the countryside. Also on board were the Duchess’s eldest child, Rosamonde, her six other children, and her large retinue of servants and nursemaids.

Viviana spent most of the journey below, lying in her cabin. Her normally rosy face had taken on a greenish tinge, like a plum unripening.

‘I fear that Windship travel does not truly agree with me, m’lady,’ she had said woefully. ‘I never can master the art of walking on aerial decks, and the movement sets my head aspin. Waterships, on the other hand, present no problem.’

‘That is well. Many folk tremble to board a Watership, fearing the possibility of drowning.’

‘I have no fear of water voyages at all. I was born with a caul.’

‘I have heard of such things. A caul is a membrane, is it not? A membrane, sometimes wrapped about the heads of infants newly born. Such articles are supposed to protect against drowning.’

‘Even so,’ affirmed Viviana, passing her hand across her perspiring brow, ‘I carry a piece of my caul everywhere with me, inside this locket-brooch.’

‘A pretty ornament. I noticed you wear it regularly.’

‘Oh, ma’am, prithee excuse me. The ship rocks so … I must lie down …’

Arcune, set in the rolling hinterlands, exceeded its new mistress’s expectations. As the schooner docked at the Mooring Mast adjacent to the main house, Rohain leaned over the taffrail, gazing at her lands spread out below. In their Winter raiment they looked fair: fallow fields and green meadows, an orchard, woodlands, a chase abounding in game verts, a cluster of farm buildings, a river, and—most imposing of all—Arcune Hall.

This gracious chastel, part castle, part manor house, stood three or four stories high. Solid as a monolith yet of graceful, aerial architecture, it plumbed the ornamental lake with an exact replica of its columned self. A formal garden skirted the lake: neat flowerbeds, hedged squares of parterre laid out in gravel and sand of different colours in scrolls and arabesques, crossed and bordered by precise lines of trees. Fanning out from the garden walls lay a spacious park, with quiet tracts of velvet lawns, shady copses and spinneys, water like broken panes fallen from the sky’s window.

‘A fine estate,’ said Alys-Jannetta of Roxburgh approvingly, ‘and I shall teach you to be mistress of it.’

She did so with a will, hiring more servants, giving orders that the house—which had been unoccupied for several years—should be turned out, aired, polished, dusted, scrubbed, and refurbished. She held consultations with the Steward, the Housekeeper, and the Gamekeeper, she examined the accounts. For a week, she and Rohain indulged in no recreation, but when all was concluded to her satisfaction, they went riding in the chase.

In this open woodland, stands of leafless birch stood like stiff brooms. Horse-chestnut and elm spread black boughs over a deep, rich leaf-mold on which the horses’ hooves dully thudded. A line of ravens in arrowhead formation slid over the gray glass sky. Mist rose in soft streamers, like vaporous shang images of the trees’ roots themselves, as if the woodlands could ever grieve or love.

Each breath of the riders hung as a silver cloud. The day was dark. Another storm threatened. From upwind, the dire ululation of a howler rang out, to prove it.

‘You have a trustworthy Steward and an honest Housekeeper,’ said Alys. ‘I cannot say the same for the Gamekeeper—he’ll have to be watched. Howbeit, I would say that this estate, like all good properties, will run smoothly whether you live here or not, although a few unannounced visits by the landlady during the year tends to improve efficiency. On one such visit I shall return to Roxburgh shortly. How I hate these sidesaddles, don’t you?’

Rohain, who could not recall ever having sat on a horse before but who felt at ease in the saddle, agreed.

‘I do dislike them, yes,’ replied Rohain. ‘Next time you visit me here we shall dress like gentlemen and ride like them, like the wind, jumping hedges and ditches wheresoever they fall across our path. But look now, the storm clouds come rolling over. The sky is angry. We must make haste and return before the rain sets in.’

The echoing howl of the storm-harbinger again curdled the air.

‘Such a Winter it is for tempests!’ tutted the Duchess, turning her horse for home. ‘Such disruption to Windship and Stormrider schedules.’

Arcune Hall’s most ancient inhabitant was a household bruney known to all as ‘Wag at the Wa’. When no kettle occupied the pot-hook hanging in the kitchen, he would sit there swinging himself to and fro, chuckling. He loved merriment and in particular the company of children, of which, until now, he had lately been deprived. He looked like a grizzled old man with short, crooked legs and a long tail that helped him to keep his seat on the hook. Sometimes he wore a gray cloak, with an old tattered night-cap on his head drawn down over one side of his face, which was always harrowed with toothache, but usually he wore a red coat and blue breeches. He would not approve of any drink stronger than home-brewed ale and used to cough furiously if strong spirits were imbibed in the kitchen. In all other ways he was a benevolent wight despite the toothache, although very fussy about the cleanliness of the house, and the bane of slipshod kitchen-maids. Like most household bruneys he had no fear of cold iron. Swinging the empty pot-hook would bring him; this the Duchess’s children often did. What with the wight, the children, and the servants, the cavernous old kitchen was the heart of conviviality at Arcune. When beyond the house’s thick walls the wind came in sudden gusts like heavy blows, and sharp, prickling rain fell and thunder punished the skies with flails of lightning, all remained cosy by the kitchen fire. It was often there that Rohain, Alys, and the children would spend the evenings, in the company of the old Housekeeper.

Every day a Relayer of the Noblesse Squadron rode in with dispatches from Caermelor—communications about the fighting in the north and, often, snippets of Court doings in a note from Ercildoune.

‘I need to stay informed,’ said Alys. She looked daily for tidings of her husband. With equal impatience, Rohain awaited the incoming reports.

The messenger would be seen coming out of the southeast like some strange bird, his cloak flying, to alight on top of the spindly Mooring Mast whose structure of pointed arches was etched against the sky. Soon after, the sildron-powered lift would begin to descend, carrying both the Relayer and the eotaur with its hoof-crescents unclipped and flying-girth neutralised by andalum. The ostler of Arcune would then hasten to take the steed’s bridle and lead it to the stables, while the Stormrider, pulling off his riding gloves and winged helmet, strode into the house, a butler or footman hastening before him to open doors and bow profusely.

True Thomas of Ercildoune corresponded regularly, reporting on humorous Court incidents as well as graver matters from the strife-torn north, including descriptions of battle tactics, which Alys read over and over. The Bard wrote:

The mounted archers of Namarre are exceeding swift, and they use this to great advantage. Their preferred tactic is encirclement. Even when we outnumber them, they are often speedy enough to surround our troops or outflank us. Aware of this, our commanders try where possible to elect narrow-fronted battlegrounds, protected by natural features of the landscape such as rivers and rocky hills. As additional protection, they keep ready a reserve force in case of cavalry attacks from the rear.

Some days since, the first pitched battle was fought in northwestern Eldaraigne, not far from the Nenian Landbridge. The Luindorn Battalions were marching west in two parallel columns, about four miles apart, when as the first column entered the open fields it was assailed by vast numbers of rebels. In order to provide a secure base from which battle could be waged, the commander ordered his men to set up camp. However, the sorties and continual harassment of the barbarians hampered their efforts, so he sent out the cavalry to stave off the enemy, enabling the infantry to begin establishing an encampment.

However the Luindorn Drusilliers were unable to engage the rebels in battle and were repeatedly forced to withdraw to avoid being cut off. The barbarian rebels successfully encircled the Imperial troops. Furthermore, our infantry were unable to hold off their lightning strikes and sallies without the Drusilliers beside them, so the Drusilliers gradually fell back until all our troops of the first column were close-packed in a dense and milling confusion, surrounded on all fronts by fast-galloping archers on horseback. Their position was grim. Defeat seemed inevitable, until at last, with a great blowing of horns and clashing of swords on shields, the second column appeared over the horizon behind the rebel forces. It was not long before a Luindorn cavalry charge shattered the Namarrans, scattering them to the four winds.

‘The Namarran scouts must have been careless,’ commented the Duchess, folding the letter and handing it to a footman. ‘On this occasion, luck was with the first column. It seems these rebels are not to be swiftly defeated.’

‘I remain puzzled as to their purpose,’ said Rohain.

‘They are rebelling against the Empire,’ explained the Duchess. ‘The Namarran population comprises generations of cut-throats and thieves who have been banished to the north as punishment for their crimes. They hate the judicial system that cast them out, and wish to take revenge upon the whole Empire. Theirs is an unstable society in which violence rules. Habitually they quarrel and make war on one another, until the cruellest and most merciless butcher among them claws his way to chieftaincy. But such victories are short-lived. As soon as any flaw appears in the dictator’s defences he is attacked, and the conflict begins all over again.

‘Plagued by so much strife, the Namarrans cannot prosper. They have come to believe that the answer to their poverty lies in expropriating the wealth of the Empire.

‘In the past they have never stopped squabbling for long enough to mount a concerted assault against us. For some unknown reason, they have finally joined forces, it seems.’

‘And still there is no mention of the role of unseelie wights in this conflict,’ said Rohain in troubled tones. ‘It seems as if the barbarian commander is keeping them aside, waiting for some significant moment to strike with full force. But why? And what hold could any mortal man, even a great wizard, have over immortal beings so antipathetic to the human race?’

The Duchess shook her head. ‘Weighty questions,’ she replied, ‘and ones that we all ask ourselves often. As yet, no answers have been found.’

Some three weeks after they had begun their sojourn at Arcune, there came, in the usual letter from Thomas Rhymer, a paragraph that the Duchess’s daughter Rosamonde read aloud.

Unto The Most Noble the Duchess of Roxburgh, Marchioness of Carterhaugh, Countess of Miles Cross, Baroness Oakington-Hawbridge, also to the Lady Rohain of the Sorrows, Mistress of Arcune, I, Your Most Humble Servant Thomas, Duke of Ercildoune, send thee Greetings.

Madam and My Lady,

I send greeting and earnest desires that this missive should find you both hale. Be it known that following the discovery of the wealth amassed at a secret location in the Lofty Mountains and the apprehension of the culprits responsible for its treasonable looting, further questioning has revealed that members of a rival conclave were still at large. One of these, an Ertishman, ‘Sianadh Kavanagh of County Lochair’, also known as ‘the Bear’, was arrested yesterday in Caermelor. The felon has been consigned to the palace dungeons to await His Majesty’s pleasure, which may well be execution for treason …’

‘What?’ shouted Rohain. ‘No! It cannot be!’

She rushed to snatch the parchment from Rosamonde’s hand but could make nothing of the runes and threw up her hands in despair.

‘Alys, I must leave at this instant. Via, pack my chattels, have my horse saddled—nay, the sky would be faster. Is the Relayer still here, he who brought this message? Does he yet take refreshment in the front parlor? I shall ride up behind him.’

The Duchess asked no questions.

‘You shall have the use of Kirtle Green. Dobben, run and tell the captain to make ready to sail in haste.’

‘I thank you, but it will take some time to get her under way—I shall ride behind the Relayer!’ cried Rohain again, in agitation.

‘Their rules forbid it. Only Stormriders or the chosen of the King-Emperor may ride the skies. No need to wring your hands—the Windship shall be ready as soon as you are.’

The palace dungeons were no worse than the cellars at Isse Tower. In many ways, they were better, not so damp and slimy. The passageways had been hewn of clean stone. They were well-lit and well-ventilated. Still, they were dungeons, and cheerless. Down here, all was stone and iron, fire and shadow, with little change. The slow decay of time was signposted by the various laments of prisoners who came and went. With keys clanking, the Head Jailer led the way, lurching, down the stairs and along a corridor.

‘Hurry, hurry!’ urged Rohain.

‘Rats,’ whispered Viviana despairingly at her back. ‘I heard them.’

Rohain halted, aghast. ‘Rats? By the Powers, I detest them more than all the unseelie wights in Erith!’ She stared desperately after the jailer’s retreating back. ‘The guards will chase them off,’ she blurted. They ran on and caught up with the jailer. ‘Hasten, man!’

‘Beg pardon, m’lady, I’ve a crook knee. I’m goin’ as hasty as I can.’

Fume and fret she might, but no more speed could be got out of him. The clatter of his bunches of keys preceded them, while the boot-crunches of the two escorting guards brought up the rear, ricocheting off cold stone.

‘Obban tesh!’ said a voice farther down the passageway. ‘Can a bloke not get some sleep in here without being woken by yer racket, ye doch fly-blown daruhshie of a turnkey? Come in here and I’ll give ye a right knee to match yer left, ye sgorrama samrin.’

‘Sianadh!’

Rohain rushed forward, shoving the jailer aside. With both hands, she grasped the iron bars of the cell, gazing inside. There stood a man, bootless, in a ragged tunic of bergamot belted at the waist. His hose were riddled with holes and his cloak of coarse woollen kersey was threadbare. On his head was a taltry, worn beneath a filthy chaperon that ended in an outrageously long liripipe wound under his chin and over the top. From beneath this headgear bristled a red hedge in need of pruning, for it had overgrown to cover the jaw. Scorpions, crudely drawn and almost obliterated by dirt, crawled across the hairy feet.

It was indeed he.

Rohain’s tears mingled with laughter. Sianadh stared, his blue eyes bursting from their sockets. For once, he was dumbfounded.

‘My lady,’ said Viviana, ‘I shall fetch some salts—’

‘No.’ Weakly, Rohain leaned on her maid’s shoulder.

‘A handkerchief, please. That is all.’ She wiped her face. The tears disappeared, the smile remained.

‘What have ye brought me, jailer?’ Sianadh had found his tongue at last, but it rattled hoarsely against his palate. ‘One of the baobansith? A siren to tempt and strangle me? Has hanging gone out of fashion?’

‘Go,’ said Rohain, turning to the jailer and the two guards. ‘I shall be safe here. Wait in the guardroom. I would hold converse with this prisoner.’

Baffled, the yeomen warders bowed and obeyed.

‘You also, Viviana. Wait around the corner. I have words for this man’s ears alone.’

As Viviana departed, Sianadh took a step forward. His eyes squinted, as though he tried to look at something so bright it was too painful to be directly observed.

‘What d’ye want of me?’

‘Ah, Sianadh! That is the second time I have ever spoken your name and yet it feels not unfamiliar on my lips—I’ve thought of you so often. I’ve mourned you. How came you here? I thought you slain—I thought you dead at the foot of Waterstair by the hands of Scalzo. You live! Yes, it is true! If you were some incarnation and not a real man they would have found it out by now.’

‘Who be you?’ His voice was rough with wonder and suspicion.

‘I am—Imrhien.’

Sianadh’s jaw dropped. Then he turned on his heel. ‘Trickery,’ he growled, walking to the far wall of his austere cell.

Her words tumbled out.

‘Not trickery. Ask me anything! What happened to the wormskin belt that you won at Crowns-and-Anchors in Luindorn? You unbuckled it so that you could fall out of the sky after we jumped off the pirate brig—now it floats somewhere above Erith. How did we escape the Direath? You fought it until cock-crow. What did you call yourself in Fincastle’s Mill? “My Own Self”. What colour were the gowns you ordered for me in Gilvaris Tarv?’

‘Enough! Enough! My pate addles. If ’tis in fact Imrhien before me, then by the smoking bones of the Chieftains, her face is somewhat altered and her tongue is making up for lost time.’ Approaching, the prisoner peered through the bars.

‘She was kind o’ spindly, like ye be. She looked as if she’d snap in twain, with naught but a pin to hold her two halves together. But she was a straw-head.’

‘I have dyed my hair, mo scothy gaidair.’

‘Why?’

‘It is a long story …’

The Ertishman stood with folded arms, shaking his head.

‘Nay. It cannot be. I cannot believe what ye say, ye a fine lady and all. Don’t be taunting a condemned man.’

Rohain seized the bars again and shook them with all her force.

‘Listen to me, you stupid, pigheaded Ertishman. Question me about anything!’

He eyed her doubtfully.

‘What is the name of my niece?’

‘Muirne.’

‘Ach, ye could have found that out. I have it! What did I, in the Ancient City when the unstorm came?’

‘You doffed your taltry. You stood by some stone dragons with your hands upraised and said, “I be My Own Self, and I be here, so look ye, I have gilfed this town with my mark.”’

Bright-eyed and flushed with expectation, she looked at him. He returned her gaze with a strange one of his own, as if seeing her for the first time. His facial muscles worked in spasms. Very softly, he said,

‘Your face?’

‘Healed by the one-eyed carlin.’

‘Your voice?’

‘That also.’

She held her breath.

Beginning deep in his chest, a roar erupted. Sianadh collided with the cell bars at a run. Hurrying up the passageway, Viviana beheld her mistress embracing the prisoner through the grating, the latter still bellowing wordlessly. At the disturbance, other prisoners began to shout.

‘Chehrna, chehrna, chehrna!’ bawled Sianadh.

Tearing himself away, he danced around the cell. Guards appeared.

‘Silence! You there!’

‘Leave him alone,’ commanded Rohain. Unmoved by the presence of his captors, the Ertishman continued to sing, dance, and leap into the air, which caused his liripipe to unwind and tangle around his legs.

‘Let this man out. Unlock this door.’

‘M’lady, we are forbidden to do that without a release signed by His Imperial Majesty. This man is a treasoner. He is to be hanged.’

Sianadh stood quietly now.

‘’Tis greeting and farewell, ain’t it, chehrna,’ he said.

‘Not necessarily,’ she replied. ‘My dear friend, you are as innocent as I. I am going to try to have you pardoned. I must go now but I shall soon return.’

‘Wait! Muirne and Diarmid—do they live?’

‘Yes. They thrive at Isenhammer.’

‘Ceileinh’s arms! Take them a message for me, will ye?’

‘And have them know you live, condemned? And let them lose you twice?’

‘Ach, nay. ’Twill be time enough for to clap eyes on ’em when I be out of this doch cage. No use getting ’em worrit. Get me out quicklike, chehrna—my throat craves a drenching with a good tavern draught. I’d rather not save ’em the cost of a hangin’ by dyin’ of thirst.’

‘I shall get you out, I swear it. Meanwhile, remember—there are two days you ought never to worry about.’

The two young women left him grinning. As she moved off, Rohain said to the jailer, ‘Treat him well. If you do, you shall be rewarded. If you do not, you shall answer to the Duke of Ercildoune and the Duchess of Roxburgh!’

‘He must be pardoned. He must not hang.’

Rohain stood before the Royal Bard, in a courtyard of Caermelor Palace.

‘And why? And why not?’ demanded Ercildoune.

‘He is a good man, a friend—he saved my honour, my life.’

‘He is a treasoner.’

‘As much a treasoner as I!’

‘Never say that, Rohain. I forbid it.’

‘’Tis true. At Waterstair—’

‘You took booty to aid you on your return—you confessed it from the first. It has been recognised as no crime. Say no more on’t!’

‘With what crime is he charged?’

‘The thieves we apprehended upon your advice, the men you call Scalzo’s—although we did not find one by that name amongst them—they indicted him. It seems that unlike yourself, he returned to Waterstair to pilfer from it. This advice was confirmed by the man’s own drunken boasting, overheard in a tavern. ’Tis not the first time a man has hanged himself with a tankard of ale.’

‘His boasts are empty. The thieves lied.’

‘You are determined to remain his ally. Yet I have seen this man. I cannot fancy him to be your sweetheart.’

‘He is not. He is—brother or uncle. Family.’

‘Since you and no other ask it, I will grant stay of execution. But only His Majesty can grant pardon for such as this.’

‘Then I must have audience with His Majesty.’

‘Impossible. He is at the fields of war, as you know.’

‘And why should I not journey north?’

‘My flower, my very bird—you upon the battle-plain? Await His Majesty’s return. Until then, your friend, my fellow Ert, may live.’

By the grace of the Duke of Ercildoune, Sianadh was allowed, chained and under guard, to ascend daily to one of the parlors. Rohain would converse with him there for hours, regaling him with food and drink to his heart’s content.

She told him news of his family, after which, having sworn him to secrecy, she revealed all of her remembered past that her muteness had kept hidden from him. She had disclosed this history to nobody, ever, not even Maeve. He learned of the cruel ivy, Hedera paradoxis, and the callous denizens of Isse Tower, and her life as a servant. It was as if a weight had been lifted from her heart, to share such a burden of knowledge.

For his part, Sianadh was tickled to find himself enjoying the hospitality of the King-Emperor’s palace, if only conditionally.

‘’Tis the life,’ he said cheerily, sprawled on a wolf-skin rug before the fire. ‘If I could get these doch manacles off I’d be the happiest man. Fortune’s smiled on ye, chehrna. But ye haven’t your past returned to ye, yet.’

‘No.’

‘Ye ought to try. It be important to know history. Kings come and go and some remain. To survive, a bloke must know what comes before and after. Things be not what they seem at a given moment. They be the sum of their past and the hope of their future. The smiling stranger may offer ye wine but has he just come from the house of sickness?’

‘How am I to find out my history?’

‘When ye lose summat, ye must retrace your steps to find it.’

‘Do you say that I should return to Isse Tower?’

‘That be what I say. Far as I can tell, ’tis your only hope. I cannot call ye Rohain, or Lady Muck or anything. Find out your real name, eh?’

‘I could not go away, leaving you here.’

He shrugged.

‘I’ve been worse off. The fare down there in the dungeons be plain but plenty. I be gettin’ plenty o’ rest and flay me for boots if I’ve had much of that these past years. From what I ken, the King-Emperor will not be rushing back to pardon me for trying unsuccessfully to steal some of his treasure until after we win this war. Take a Windship to Isse. Ye’re wealthy—ye can afford it. Ye will not be gone for long and ye might find out summat.’

‘No,’ she repeated, ‘I could not leave you.’

But the dormant questions had reawakened.

‘Begging your pardon, m’lady, but I am surprised that you have not been Cut,’ said Viviana with concern. ‘There is all this talk of you having family connections with that hairy felon. M’lady, he’s Ertish and an outlaw! Dianella and all of them must think it such a quiz and yet they have not Cut you yet.’

‘Dianella is saying she thinks it an amusing novelty and she wants a condemned man of her own to keep on a chain.’

‘Beg pardon, m’lady, but I would not trust her, truly I wouldn’t. For all her peacock’s plumage, she is nothing but a gray-malkin that tears apart birds and helpless creatures merely for sport. M’lady, until you came here she was generally thought to be the fairest in the land and now she’s jilted from her high horse. She does not like it, and that’s a fact. But she has not let them Cut you and she worms her way into your affections for her own purposes. She’s a cold-hearted one and that’s for certain. Her own uncle is unwell, having returned from an excursion black with bruises from a spriggan attack, yet she troubles herself not at all on his behalf.’

‘You speak truly. Howbeit, I cannot trouble myself with Dianella’s meretriciousness.’

The meetings with Sianadh brought mixed pleasure and sadness, for the Ertishman could not bring himself to meet Rohain’s eyes very often, and when he did he would hastily avert his gaze. There was none of the easy comradeship of old times. That was all gone, and in its place stood an uncomfortable awareness, as if she were a porcelain figurine on a shelf and he too afraid to touch it lest it break or be sullied by his rough hands. And once or twice she caught him looking at her from the corners of his eyes with an expression of awe, as if he witnessed a vision in which he could not fully have faith.

She desired no reverence, only the banter of good fellowship. Was this gulf between them, and the covert duels in the gardens, and the spurious friendship of Dianella part of the real price to be paid for the unwearing of her mask of ugliness?

Maeve had said,

‘Do not be thankful until you have lived with your changed appearance for a moon-cycle or two. See how you like it then.’

Despite the awkwardness, Rohain looked forward to the company of her friend and used their hours together to discover his recent history.

‘The Gailledu saved me,’ said Sianadh, ‘as I lay below Waterstair wounded to the bone and almost breathing my last. A life for a life, he repaid me—gathered me up in his arms as if I were no more than a lad. Great strength has he, belied by his looks. It was because of that flower, ye ken, the blue one that Ethlinn preserved in an egg of resin and gave to me. It meant summat.

‘He took me to some place in the forest and healed me. When I was well, I returned to Tarv and sheltered with Ethlinn and Roisin. They told me you had set out for Caermelor but that the roads were bad. By then all roads to the west had been declared impassable, wightstruck. My thought was how to swiftly get word to the King-Emperor at Caermelor to inform him of the treasure, so that it could be quickly wrested from Scalzo’s cowardly uraguhnes, and ye and me could be heroes and Liam, tambalai lad, would be avenged. For I had little hope then that ye would get through, the reports being so bad and so many caravans being lost. So I scraped together all the money I could beg or borrow and went to the Stormriders.

‘I get sent to a scribe of theirs and I tell him a message to write down, to send to the King-Emperor. Not wanting the world to know about it, like, I don’t say exactly what ’tis about, but I give hints. Only one who knew aught could have pieced it together. Anyway, this scribe looks at me kind of strange, and he reminds me of another I saw somewhere, blast his eyes, but I couldn’t recall where. I took exception to him from the start. And with good reason, as it turns out later. For when I returned to Tarv Tower with Eochaid at my side, to ask whether the message had been successfully sent for all me trouble and money, we were set upon by ruffians outside the Tower, and hunted through the streets. And in the process, I got separated from Eochaid but the heat was still on me.

‘Now, I always had a plan for if something like this should happen—’tis wise to keep a couple of escape plans handy for emergencies, mark you, Imrhien. I have a friend with a boat at Tarv docks. Down there I run, for the lick of me life, but when I get there, the boat is gone. Must’ve gone out fishing. At this point I remember where I have seen the pox-faced Scribe before—he be one of Scalzo’s accomplices. Tarv be full of them—or it was. Anyway, these sons of dogs being hot on me heels, I jump into the nearest boat and head off. This shakes them off me tail because there’s a storm brewing which only a silkie or a mad Ertishman would take to the seas in. Being possessed of wondrous seamanship, I sail all the way to Caermelor, and many’s the unlorraly tale I could tell about events along the way. But when I finally get here, strike me lucky if the entire population doesn’t already know that there’s a treasure at Waterstair because some ladyship’s found out about it and squawked. It’s sleeveless me sayin’ aught about what the world already knows and expectin’ a reward for it, so there’s nothing left for it but to join the army.

‘Now, if a lad’s going to join the army he wants to make the most of the last of his freedom first. So I makes meself known at the nearest malt-house, where I meet a couple of blokes I used to knock around with in the old days, good mates. We’ve had a few sessions. Priz—that be his kenning and I wist no other, he was in the lock-up once—he be a fellow always dressed so clean and neat, careful with his clobber, like. Dogga, he don’t fuss so much about what’s on his back—’tis who’s on the end of his fist that counts with him.

‘So me and Priz and Dogga be sitting down to dine and Priz tells the story about how in that same malt-house last year there was a fight and the floor was rotten and eight big blokes crashed through the planking into the cellar below, which hadn’t been used for fifteen years and was full of slime up to their middles and Priz nearly laughed his well-tailored breeches off at the sight. Then I be telling the story about when old Cauliflower died at the table playing cards, and his hand still on the table, and his mates looked under his hand and there were three aces so they shoved the money in his pockets before they carried him out, ’cos he’d won.

‘As I be telling this, in comes Lusco Barrowclough, as loudmouthed a bullying drunkard and want-wit as ever cheated in a hurling match or got thrown out of a Severnesse tavern. I had not had the misfortune to set eyes on the whoreson villain for a year or two—not long enough. Barrowclough’s already well-oiled, and it’s not long before he starts miscalling the malter and his nice little tarty servant-wenches. I up and tells this gentleman that if I want a disturbance while I be eating, I only have to go and eat at me grandmother’s place. He looks down his Feohrkind nose at me, and me wearin’ a Finvarnan kilt—and he says with a sneer, “Nice legs.” “Would ye like one of ’em up yer backside?” I offers. He starts mouthing off a bit, then Priz says, “Pipe down while we’re trying to eat,” and then Dogga looks up and puts in, “I’ve had a gutful of ye.”

‘So then Barrowclough, the uraguhne, says, “Well, I’ve had a gutful of ye,” and adds, “I’ll break yer bleedin’ neck.” Dogga politely responds, “Ye couldn’t break wind let alone break anyone’s neck,” and in less time than it takes to fling a curse across a tavern, the fisticuffs is on. I flatten Barrowclough with much joy and return to my seat. He runs out the door and I politely say “pass the salt” and salubriously resume dining with my two mates. Before we have quite finished our meals, we look up to see our shera sethge gentleman walk back in the door. Behind him, another the same. Behind him, another. They keep walking in, until in addition to Barrowclough, there be nine. None of them are comely, I can tell ye—all bull-girthed, solid, bald, scarred, toothless, ugly skeerdas to a man, and ropeable as wounded steers. The malter and the servants went pale, and so did all the other patrons.

‘Not to be taken by surprise, I punched out one of Barrowclough’s cronies with no preamble. As foreseen, a fight began. There were stools being broken across blokes’ backs, tables being overturned, crockery smashing, blokes flying through the air, round and round the malt-house for a goodly while. A bloke could have had another square meal and a tankard in the time it took for that fight.

‘While this is going on, another two malt-house customers who have been watching with interest see that although ’tis three against ten, the three appear to be winning, so they join in on the winning side. That makes it five against ten, and pretty soon Barrowclough and his nine are being helped out the door by the malter and his brothers. We three now being five, we returned to our tables and sopped up the last bits of gravy, which had been preserved from ruin more by our own effort than by some stroke of good fortune.

‘As we are eating I take time to look at the condition of my mates. Priz, always so immaculate, be missing a boot. The remaining boot be split. One of his sleeves be ripped off at the shoulder, his shirt and every other article on him be torn. Dogga and I be in a similar condition. Heedless of small inconveniences, we are partaking of the last mouthfuls of our meal when a couple of fellows put their heads around the door and survey the scene. They turn out to be a sheriff and a constable.

‘“Has there been a fight here?” says they.

‘We look around in surprise. The malt-house looks a mite untidy.

‘“Fight? I ain’t seen no fight,” says we. The malter says the same as we—so do the serving-wenches.

‘The sheriff and the constable look us over once more, while we’re licking the gravy off our trenchers and complimenting the malter’s cook on the meal. They warn us against disturbing the peace, we assure them that we shudder to think of the idea ever entering our heads, then they slouch out and leave us be.

‘Well, news spread around and the malt-house began to fill up until we found ourselves with a jovial company of drinkers around us. Everyone likes a winner. The night went on and someone brought in a yard of ale, which was a bit of sport, and then more ale all round, and I got to talking about Finvarna and friends I left behind, and then about other friends and relations lost to me—for I thought ye’d been devoured on the Caermelor Road—and then on to what might have been, and the riches I nearly had. I may have said things I wotted not what of. Somehow, the truth got all twisted and next thing the sheriff and his constable be back, with about fifty others, putting the strong-arm on me and dragging me outside and me throwing punches while the drink robs me of my strength and then the revels are over. That be how I ended up here.’

Not seven days after Rohain’s return to Court, Dianella again sought a private audience with her. Dressed in a cotehardie of red velvet edged with fur, a kirtle of rich baudekyn, a cloak of blue-green velvet worked with a design in gold and lined with ermine, a reticulated headdress ornamented with goldsmith’s work and jewels, and a hip-belt of square brooches and jewels from which depended an aulmoniere with a baselard thrust through it, alongside a hand-mirror and a pair of pincers, Dianella looked fair in the most splendid degree, although, by the frown on her brow, she was clearly unsettled.

In her glorious plumage, she paced up and down for a while, pursing her lips and continuing to frown until Rohain said, ‘Unburden yourself, pray.’

‘Alas! It is not that simple, Dear Heart. What I have to say distresses me deeply.’

‘Thorn—he has not fallen in battle?’

‘I know not. But it is not of your Dainnan that I would speak. It is of yourself. You are discovered.’

‘What is your meaning?’ A seed of apprehension sprouted in Rohain’s mind.

‘Ah, what is yours, Dear Heart, whoever you may be? For you are not Rohain of the Sorrows, that has become evident.’

A chill sensation ran through Rohain to her fingertips. Her blood seemed to have frozen in her veins. Dianella smiled with only her mouth, not her eyes.

‘I perceive my words have an effect upon you. Good. You see, you have been found to be an impostor. Inquiries have been made, in Severnesse, in the Sorrow Isles. The family Tarrenys is an old one, granted, yet it has all but died out. Only a few members are left, all accounted for. Of them you are not one. Do you deny it?’

After a while, Rohain said, ‘I do not.’

‘Well, then!’

Triumph lit Dianella’s mien. Rohain itched to slap her face. If it had not been for the courtier’s knowledge of Thorn, Rohain would have thrust her from the room. Beneath the anger and the fear, a deep sense of shame spread out, taking root in her very bones. Through clenched teeth she said, ‘What now?’

‘What now? Dear Heart, there is only one course open to you. You will not, of course, claim the peerage of Arcune—instead you must leave at once.’

It was Rohain’s turn to pace now.

‘Leave, I say,’ continued Dianella. ‘This is not the place for you. You are above your station. For now, the knowledge of your deception rests with only myself and my uncle, and I swear to you as a true friend that neither of us shall expose you if you depart now. But should the word spread despite our best efforts to keep it secret, there is no knowing what steps might be taken to punish you for your wanton guile. For your own safety, go this day, this very hour.’

‘You say you will not betray me?’

‘La! I am cut to the quick!’

‘What do you want in return?’

‘More and more ungracious! Really! Do you suggest that I want payment? Friends do not buy and sell, but gifts are often passed from one to the other.’

‘Take my entire wardrobe. Take everything I own in the Treasury.’

‘Pshaw! How should it look, if I were to be seen dressed in your hand-me-downs?’

‘Dianella, I need, more than ever now, to retain the influence of my position, if only until the King-Emperor returns. I shall leave Court at first light on the morrow, only to come back one last time for an audience with His Majesty. After that you shall see me nevermore.’

‘A wise decision on your part, Dearest Heart.’

Omitting the courtesies of leave-taking, Dianella sallied from the room with a swish of baudekyn and a clash of implements. Typically, she tossed a parting shot over her shoulder: ‘Have your maid bring me the costumes now. And the keys to your caskets.’

Rohain rang for Viviana.

‘I intend to make an excursion from Court,’ she told the courtier, carefully keeping her tone level. ‘Have a letter dispatched to Isse Tower. Inform them, at the Seventh House of the Stormriders, to make ready—the Lady Rohain of Arcune sends greetings. She is coming from Caermelor Palace to sojourn for a time.’

Her heart felt wrung out like a blood-soaked mop. Now that Dianella had exiled her from Court, she had indeed lost Thorn forever.

Night drew in around Caermelor Palace. Rohain sat gazing drearily into a gold-backed looking-glass framed with ivory and mother-of-pearl. She wondered whether strange visions would trouble her this night, and whether she would wake in fear. Once, back in the cottage of Maeve, she had dreamed of three gentle, loving faces: those of a woman, a man, and a boy-child. Later there had been the Dream of the Rats. Both of these fragments had borne the hallmark of truth—she could not doubt that they were memories in disguise. It was only since Maeve had laid hands upon Rohain that her repose had begun to be disturbed by such images. She suspected something else must have happened at that time, when her face and speech had been restored. The restoration, perhaps, had acted as a catalyst for the beginning of a gradual arousing of memory. In Gilvaris Tarv, Ethlinn had once explained, <<Sometimes in such cases, all it takes is for the sufferer to come upon something familiar, and then the memories slowly begin to filter back into the mind.>>

Rohain whispered to her reflection, ‘My own once-familiar face … when I looked upon you, in the mirror of the one-eyed carlin, the sight sparked off an opening of closed doors.’

That night, through a chink in one of those doors, there issued a third dream—that of the White Horse.

It was under her, running, the horse—the apotheosis of swiftness and freedom. All was speed, all exhilaration. The wind roared in her ears, the ground passed swiftly by below—were the hooves even touching it? She laughed aloud, but a shape fell out of the sky beating its wings, dark against the sun. It dashed in close—too close—and the laughter turned to screams, but the horse itself was screaming and it was a night mare, because the horizon spun through weightlessness that gathered in the pit of her stomach and rose to her gorge, then the hillside came up with a smack and became a spear of white-hot iron that burned through the bone of her leg and she was screaming …

Dreams, memories—perhaps she had been better off without them.

4

THE TOWER

Hunt and Heart’s Desire

The twelve mighty Houses from Belfry to Fairlaise,

From Worthing to Outreme, where thunderstorms breed,

Command the four winds on the highest of highways.

The wings of the thoroughbred glory in speed.

VERSE FROM ‘SONG OF THE STORMRIDERS’

Uhta: the hour before dawn. Tidings arrived by carrier pigeon as the Windclipper Harper’s Carp was being rigged for takeoff. A Dainnan Windship had captured a black pirate brig lurking in the Lofty Mountains, and seized much booty.

Desperate and bloody had been the struggle. Few of the reivers had been taken alive. Those who fell had been abandoned, to be devoured by the strange mouths of the forest.

Winches rattled. Screws rotated. The wooden fish figurehead seemed to leap. As the crew vigorously onhebbed the andalum hull-plates, the Royal Bard’s personal clipper began to rise, leaning her silhouette elegantly into the wind. For those on board there was no feeling of motion forward or upward—rather the impression that the Mooring Mast was leaving the ship and the launch-crew was sinking away below.

Caermelor Palace dwindled. Spreading her canvas wings, the Harper’s Carp lifted like a long-billed crane through the clouds until she reached cruising altitude. After the first ascent there was no sense of height. The carpet of mist below appeared close and solid, beckoning the passengers to tread upon it. The Windship’s shadow skipped along down there, a trick of light-interference painting a coloured halo around the keel.

Like a thimbleful of bubbles in the sky, the Harper’s Carp sailed north along the coastline. By Windship, this journey was almost nine hundred miles. By Seaship across the mouth of the Gulf of Mara the distance would have been considerably shorter. Ercildoune, however, had insisted that Rohain take his private aircraft instead of buying passage on a merchant Seaship, claiming it would provide greater security from eldritch assailants. For the Bard, who was busy with political matters and frequently closeted for hours in discussion with members of the royal council, she had contrived an excuse for visiting Isse Tower: ‘Court is become so dull of late, and I should like to behold with my own eyes one of the famous outposts of the Stormriders.’

The captain had no qualms about sailing at night, and so they reached their destination in only four days. Late on the fourth day a jagged stalk began to grow from the horizon, enlarging until it became Isse Tower, fantastically tall, crowned with prongs, its dark shape cutting the sky in half.

A brass trumpet blared—the watchman’s signal. Two or three Skyhorses circled like flies against the raw wound of the western sky. When the sea-breeze had settled, the winches began their keening. The Windship was onhebbed down to the docking stair on the west side, one hundred and twelve feet above ground level. The crew flung out lines. Slowly she was hauled in to her mooring against the Tower’s shelf.

Once, a grotesque servant had fled from here—nameless, mute, destitute, despised. Now she had returned, Imrhien-Rohain, to the only home she could remember.

As she descended the gangplank on the captain’s arm, a young man in Stormrider uniform greeted her. Hard-faced was he, with the predatory look of a vulture. His hair was severely plastered against his skull and bound at the nape of his neck, his taltry was brazenly thrown back. Here stood Lord Ustorix, Son of the House, the Chieftain’s heir, who had once been one of her tormentors.

Ustorix met the arrivals with a deep bow and a calm formality at odds with his demeanor, for his gestures evinced intense excitement and the tension in his face betrayed a desperate covetousness. At his shoulder crowded numerous other Tower gentlefolk in black and silver, led by Ustorix’s sister Heligea, herself wide-eyed at the sight of this urbane newcomer.

To the Tower-dwellers, Rohain appeared the paradigm of courtiers. Prudently, she had kept aside half a dozen costumes when she handed over her wardrobe to Dianella. She was dressed in a fur-lined houppelande tightly fitting to the waist, patterned all over with a stitched motif of artichokes and vine-leaves on a ground of dark blue velvet. Dagged sleeves sweeping the ground were folded back to flaunt undersleeves of gold tisshew on deep red velvet, tight to the wrist. Three aerial feathers sprouted from her fur taltry-turban. Her cloak of ciclatoune was fastened at the shoulder by a gold filigree agraffe. From her jeweled girdle depended a sharp-bladed anlace in a decorated sheath, a gold tilhal in the shape of a rooster, whose eyes were pink rubies, and a fringed aulmoniere containing a certain swan’s feather.

Two rows of bowing Tower footmen in mustard-and-silver livery lined the corridor from the gatehall of disembarkation. Servants swarmed deferentially. The honoured visitor from Caermelor and her retinue were guided into a wrought-iron lift-cage. Ustorix stood near enough to his guest that nausea overswept her, caused by the familiar odour of his sweat and its past associations. Fighting her illness, she smiled at him, taking note of the way he trembled and flushed. She thought it an interesting effect, as though she brandished a weapon.

‘Of course, my father, Lord Voltasus, is in the north, fighting at the King-Emperor’s side,’ he was saying, waving a gloved hand. ‘I am master here during his absence. My lady mother is on a visit to my sister at the Fifth House, in Finvarna. Yet fear not, all has been made ready for Your Ladyship’s arrival, although word of your visit arrived but two days since. Pray pardon my boldness if I say that the messenger who delivered it neglected to declare that the visitor would be the fairest flower of the Court. He shall suffer for the omission,’ he added, executing a swaggering bow from which his visitor happened to glance away.

‘No doubt,’ he continued, ‘Your Ladyship has long desired to admire at first hand the strength of the Seventh House, the magnificence of Isse Tower, forever acclaimed in the accolades of bards.’

‘No doubt.’

Parochial, supercilious man! she thought. Do you believe the world has nothing better to do than drone endlessly in praise of Stormriders?

‘Be assured, Your Ladyship shall not be disappointed.’

‘I am certain of that.’

High expectations are a necessary prerequisite of disappointment.

The lift-keeper stopped the cage at Floor Thirty-seven, where Ustorix solicitously offered to hand his guest from the cage. Her hands, however, were occupied with lifting the hem of the velvet houppelande. She stepped scrupulously through the door.

‘My lady might wish to rest … shall be conducted to your quarters … obliged if you should sit by my right hand at dinner …’ The words tumbled out of Ustorix’s mouth like fried onion rings—well-oiled, pungent, and hollow. It appeared the Son of the Seventh House waged an inner battle that pitched his innate arrogance against a desire to present himself in what he considered a flatteringly humble manner. He bestowed a second lavish bow. His sister Heligea curtsied. With a brusque nod—she could not bring herself to make polite obeisance to this kindred—Rohain, accompanied by Viviana and a bevy of upper level servants, left them and entered her designated chambers.

It seemed that the more she scorned Ustorix the more he adored her. Deference would have encouraged his contempt, but ill-usage attracted respect. He, like most bullies, must exist either as a boot-heel to crush, or a doormat to be trodden upon.

At dinner Rohain shone like a peacock among crows—and the crows hung on her every word, copied her every gesture. They presumed that everything she did was the epitome of the latest mode. Of course, they said among themselves, she must be conversant with the latest trends—she had been dwelling at Court. What endeared her to them further was that there was no indecorous laughter from this fashionable courtier, no overt show of emotion to offend their stoicism. A complete model of detachment, she displayed admirable aloofness. Furthermore, she was wealthy, titled, and beautiful into the bargain.

The Greayte Banqueting Hall on Floor Thirty-one seemed small and austere after the glitter of Court. Rohain scrutinized every dish, insisting on learning the name of the cook who was responsible for each. The dishes were numerous, designed to impress. Most she waved aside, barely glancing at them. Beckoning her maid to lean closer, she whispered, ‘I advise you to partake of nothing prepared by the hands of the cook named Rennet Thighbone. I know he never checks the vegetables for snails. He also cleans his filthy fingernails by kneading pastry, and spits into the sauces—and those are not the worst of his habits.’

‘Gramercie, m’lady. With gladness I take this advice.’

‘The masters of this place are unaware of it,’ added Rohain.

Ustorix fawned, pouring out blandishments. He began intentionally addressing Rohain with the archaic forms ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, whose meaning had evolved from olden times to convey the close association of brotherhood, as between high-ranking Stormriders—or an intimacy of affection, such as between lovers.

‘May I tempt thee with a slice of pigeon pie, my lady? The pastry looks interesting—spiced, I fancy, by the spotted look of it. Or perhaps thou wouldst prefer to taste of this dish of cabbage with, I think, rather charming raisins—or baked leveret glazed with quinces and a little of this excellent foaming sauce?’

Rohain said softly to Viviana, ‘Tell Lord Ustorix’s page to instantly inform his master that it is hardly appropriate to address me with such familiarity.’

The message having reached its destination, the heir of the House upset his wine in startled mortification, thus adding to his distress. Both he and the page blushed to their ears. Ustorix kicked the lad, sending him sprawling, and bawled a petulant criticism at a passing steward.

The sauce foamed in its pewter boat. Avoiding it, Rohain sipped the fern-green wine, whose flavour had probably been beneficially influenced by the presence of moss-frogs in the cellars.

‘My Lord,’ Rohain remarked conversationally, turning the twin weapons of her glance on Ustorix, ‘the fact that Stormriders possess nerves of steel is well-known.’

‘Of course, my lady. As Riders we are born to it. Courage flows in the bloodline of the Twelve Houses. Howbeit,’ he added hastily, ‘an infusion of new blood may sometimes be of benefit, should it be particularly pure.’

‘As I was saying, the Stormriders’ unrivaled reputation for performing death-defying acts has achieved its pinnacle, methinks, with this latest rumour from Isse Tower which has at last reached the Court.’

‘The tale of my brave ride to Ilian during the storms of Imbrol?’ The vulture puffed out its chest. ‘True, many attempting such a hazardous undertaking would have perished, but I—’

‘No. The tale of the Stormriders who stood balanced on sildron, four hundred feet above the ground, wearing no flying-harness or safety ropes.’

Ustorix afforded no reply.

‘Zounds, what a feat,’ expounded Rohain, warming to her topic. ‘We all asked ourselves, what manner of men are these? There is naught so charming as a man of heroism and bravery, one who can perform acts of great daring and remain icy cool. Do you not agree, my lady Heligea?’

‘Certainly,’ replied that lady, who until now had exhibited only bored sullenness.

‘One must indeed respect such a man,’ persisted Rohain. ‘One must adore him. Pray, leave me not in suspense—who were the perpetrators of this rumoured exploit?’

‘A couple of the servants,’ drawled Heligea insouciantly, before her brother could reply. ‘Grod Sheepshorn and Tren Spatchwort.’

The knuckles of Ustorix whitened, like a range of snowy peaks. Gimlet-eyed, he shot a glance of pure hatred at Heligea.

‘Servants!’ Rohain smiled. ‘Well, if the servants are so remarkable, the masters by rights must be doubly so. I suppose ’tis quite a common feat among Stormriders. No doubt you practice it every day. Dearly would I love to witness such a valorous act!’

Am I becoming another Dianella? Oh, but the vulture deserves this, and more.

‘May I watch you at this trick, my lord?’ Rohain asked sweetly. ‘It would be something to tell them, at Court.’

Ustorix’s face had grayed. He cleared his throat, attempting a thin smile. The object of his adoration gazed at him expectantly.

‘Assuredly …’

‘Delightful,’ she said, raising her wineglass in salute. ‘I look forward to it. By the by, where are these dauntless servants to be found, this Tron Cocksfoot and Garth Sheepsgate?’

‘One of them enlisted. The other—well, I am told he joined the crew of a Windship,’ advised Heligea, who seemed to keep herself informed about all events both Below the dock and Above.

‘Was there not talk of some other servant,’ Rohain continued airily, inwardly remarking on her new persona’s ability to dissimulate. ‘A deformed lad with yellow hair?’

‘It is surprising how much talk of Isse Tower’s servants reaches the Court,’ purred Heligea. ‘One wonders how, since Relayers would hardly bother. Yes, there was once one such as Your Ladyship describes. I know not whence he came, nor where he went. Nobody knows.’

‘Unfortunately, there may be no time for the sildron demonstration,’ grittily interjected Ustorix. ‘I had planned to throw the Tower and demesnes open to my lady for a tour of inspection tomorrow, should my lady so condescend.’

‘Such an undertaking must prove diverting, but do not deny me, my lord, I pray you! I am certain there will be enough time for other amusements. It is not necessary for me to leave here until I receive word of the King-Emperor’s return to Caermelor.’

And so it was arranged. Before her visit came to an end, the Lady Rohain would be granted the entertainment she desired.

Keeping company with Isse Tower’s masters soon palled. After dinner, Rohain pleaded travel fatigue and retired to her rooms. There she instructed Viviana to go discreetly among the Tower servants.

‘Find an old drudge-woman called Grethet. She works on Floor Five, around the furnaces. There must be no fuss—concoct some story that I’ve heard she’s skilled at healing and wish to ask her advice, or some such explanation. And discover all you can about another servant who once worked here—a lad, yellow-haired, misshapen.’

Shang harbingers prickled Rohain’s scalp as she stood in the doorway watching Viviana, gray-cloaked, flit like a thought to the lift-well. There, the lady’s maid rang the bell and waited. From the deeps, the cage could be heard clunking upward on its rails. The wrought-iron gates slid apart and Dolvach Trenchwhistle burst forth beefily, followed by a quartet of chambermaids bearing laden trays. On beholding Rohain, the Head Housekeeper came to a sudden halt.

‘Oh, er, my lady,’ she stammered with a curtsy, ‘I was just comin’ ter see if there’d be anything Your Ladyship might be wantin’.’

‘No. Only peace.’

‘Yes, m’lady. Very good, m’lady.’

Dolvach Trenchwhistle turned back toward the lift.

‘Trenchwhistle!’

‘Yes, m’lady?’

‘Carry that tray for that little chambermaid. It is too heavy for her. I am surprised at you. At Court, we hear everything. I had been told that the Head Housekeeper treated her underlings as she would nurture the finest roses. Do not disappoint me.’

‘Yes, m’lady. Forgive me, m’lady.’

Flustered, the Head Housekeeper blundered into a tray, knocking it against the wall. Half the contents spilled. She muttered imprecations. As the lift-gates closed, she crooned aggressively to Viviana, ‘And what might you be wantin’ downstairs my dear?’

Rohain’s skin tautened. The air smacked of lightning. Her dark-dyed hair, relieved of the fur turban, lifted of its own accord. She was alone in her chambers in the Tower.

Her door opened onto a wide passage, at one end of which stood a pair of high and narrow portals. She walked to them, pushed them apart. They gave onto a balcony with a dominite balustrade. Spoutings sprouted winged gargoyles, their tongues protruding. The cool night wind shouldered its way past, bringing a whiff of the sea that knocked at memory’s gates. Down below at the dock, the Harper’s Carp bobbed, waiting to return to Caermelor with the afternoon breeze, since it could not be spared from duty. The Greayte Southern Star winked like an emerald beacon gemming the horizon. It being the middle of the month, the moon was full. A silver note sounded from somewhere in the crenellations overhead. An impossible silhouette flew across the moon’s face—a Stormrider coming in from a Run.

The unstorm travelled close in his wake. Rohain watched it cover the forest, far below, with tiny firefly glows, here and there shining brighter where a tableau pulsed. Isse Harbour was transformed into a carpet of gaudy fish-scales, green and gold. A real Seaship lay at anchor there. A ghostly galleon foundered off the headland, like the Seaship in a song Sianadh had once sung about a vessel caught in the Ringstorm:

‘If ye go forth into the north ye’ll see her evermore—

The ship and crew so brave and true, do perish o’er and o’er.

Outlin’d in gold from top to hold, each clew and spar and cleat—

She founders ever and again in terrible repeat.’

‘From whence come I?’ Rohain said softly. ‘From beyond the Ringstorm? Could it be that I sailed from unknown lands beyond the girdle of outrageous winds, and survived?’

The unstorm’s terrible splendor rolled by. She walked back toward her chambers but had not yet reached the tall doors when a disquieting occurrence took place, a jarring note in the paean of her triumphant return to Isse Tower.

Almost soundlessly, out of the moonshadows, something limped rapidly across the passageway.

‘Stop!’ she reprimanded.

It checked, for the space of a heartbeat, then backed away.

‘Pod—it is Pod, isn’t it?’

A hoarse sob broke from a throat.

‘You! You back again! I told you to leave me alone,’ Pod gasped. ‘Go away. Go from here. You might bring doom on this place.’

‘You know me?’ She was incredulous. ‘But how—’

‘Yes, I know you. You used to live here. Now you have come back. Come back to bring ruin on us all.’

‘No, I have not—’ but she knew herself to be at his mercy. Pod alone knew her, instantly, when in her altered persona she had scarcely known herself. It lent him a certain power.

‘Grethet,’ she said. ‘Tell her to come to me. Prithee.’

‘Cannot do that.’

‘Why not? I shall pay you.’

‘I do not want your tainted gold. Anyway, the crone’s dead—Grethet’s cold in her grave.’

With that, Pod limped to some hitherto unnoticed slot in a wall and sidled into it. Rohain called into the darkness after him but he did not reappear. Perhaps he was lying …

Clouds ate up the moon and a rapid wind slammed the doors shut.

‘A rum and gloomy lot they are, m’lady,’ announced Viviana, ‘the servants here. All save three of them—the old codger they call the Storyteller, he’s all right, and there is a rather strapping strapper among them, by the name of Pennyrigg. He knows how to laugh, at least, not like the rest. And one little girl—she seems ever so nice—name of Caitri Lendoon.’

‘The daughter of the Keeper of the Keys.’

‘How clever is my lady, to know all the names of the servants!’

‘The yellow-haired lad—what did they say about him?’

‘Where he came from and where he has gone are mysteries.’

‘What did you find out about Grethet?’

‘Why, she died, they told me. That’s all they said.’

Rohain fell silent. Eventually, she sighed. She must not reveal her grief. Inwardly she was crying, aching for the sake of the old woman who had roughly nurtured her, and who had been the last possible link to her old life.

‘’Tis late, my lady,’ said Viviana gently. ‘Oughtn’t you to be abed?’

‘I suppose so. You were long away, Via, what else did you hear?’

‘Well, the Storyteller, he told a couple of wondrous interesting tales. I could not help listening. He has a way with him; he reels his listeners in like fishes, so to speak.’

‘Yes. Maybe that old Grethet had a story too. It will never be told now.’

The tidings of Grethet’s demise caused Rohain to despair about her future. What course should she choose now? She could not return to Caermelor or Arcune. In the absence of any other plans she resolved to remain at Isse Tower until inspiration or opportunity should present itself.

They walked in the demesnes: Rohain, Ustorix, Viviana, the captain and first mate of the Harper’s Carp, numerous hangers-on and attendants, and the disconsolate Heligea dressed in black with silver buttons. The solemn shadow of the Tower unrolled itself across the Road and fell into the Harbour. Gulls scourged a cloudridden sky.

At Rohain’s side, Ustorix raved grandiosely. ‘These are the hattocking-circuits, m’lady of the Sorrows,’ he proclaimed, giving an expansive wave. ‘Smithy and stables are over that way. All that you can see is under my sway. Isse is the keystone of the entire Relay network, and without the network the Kingdom grinds to a halt, the Empire stalls.

‘Yeoman Riders, operating at an altitude of three hundred feet, are the younger Sons of the House. They ride for us on miscellaneous errands, or Relay for simple folk with urgent personal messages and enough coin scraped together to pay the fee. The largest squadron, the Regimental, makes its runs at four hundred feet. These are the mercantile wings. They Relay for wealthy merchants, who lavish upon them the appropriate deference and reimbursement, being dependent on our goodwill.’ He turned eagerly to Rohain. ‘Knowledge is power,’ he proclaimed, as though he had invented the phrase. The merchant who learns of enterprises early might send his own ships ahead to catch his rivals’ trade. He who is blessed with first tidings of a shortage might buy up that commodity before prices rise!’

Absently, Rohain acknowledged his words.

‘The Noblesse Squadron, of course,’ he ranted, ‘rides sky for the peers of the realm—their assigned altitude of five hundred feet is second only to the fastest and highest ranked, the Royals, also known as the King’s Emissaries, who are entrusted with state business.’

Rohain stifled a yawn.

‘Would my lady like to see the ornamental gardens?’ suggested Heligea halfheartedly, diverting attention from her brother.

The visitor’s eyes had meanwhile alighted elsewhere. ‘For what purpose are those long buildings roofed with slate tiles?’

‘They are the workshops of our wizard,’ smoothly replied Heligea, ‘Zimmuth, who was introduced to my lady at dinner. Most dull and cluttered are his sheds. Now, the gardens—’

‘Let us visit the workshops.’

The interior of Zimmuth’s main lair was grossly cluttered. Springs, alembics, coils of copper tubing, buckled sheets of metal, gear systems both rack-and-pinion and epicyclic, pendulums, levers, cams, cranks, differentials, bearings, pulleys, assorted tools, and stone jars containing alkahest and corrosive substances crowded every horizontal surface. The well-thumbed pages of a couple of ephemerides flapped weakly, held down by embossed leather bookmarks. Magnetic compasses, theodolites, telescopes, and pocket sundials had been shoved arbitrarily into worn wooden cases with specially shaped satin-lined compartments. Constructions resembling metal innards ticked and whirred. An impossibly configured planetarium dangled from the roof-beams, hitting the heads of all who passed under it. In one corner a clock struck fifteen and fell over with a sproing.

Men in skullcaps, with stained taltries and disfigured faces, hammered and filed and sawed. Zimmuth waxed enthusiastic, buzzing like an obsessed bee.

‘The sildron hoister project is over here,’ he spouted, ‘a new and more efficient lift system. And here is a modern skimmer being built. We had another but it blew asunder in the end. You understand, sildron and andalum will not bind to any other metal—these types of rotors tend to fly apart eventually, like the propellers of Windships. There is inherent instability. And yet I predict that every Tower shall have one someday. And over there, we are developing an improved andalum girth for eotaurs, to make the onhebbing easier.’

‘Wizard.’

Zimmuth broke off his monologue. ‘Er, yes—um?’ Already he had forgotten the visitor’s name.

Rohain idly flicked a scrap of iron off a bench. It rang dully on the raddled flagstones.

‘Fashion a sildron-powered butterchurn,’ she suggested.

‘What?’ Uncouthly, the wizard gaped.

‘And try your hand at designing a powered spinning-wheel, or better still, a loom.’

He scratched his matted beard. An earwig dropped out. ‘But what’s the point of it? I mean, that is women-servants’ work.’

‘Precisely. Facilitating it would give the women more time.’

‘To do what?’

‘Other things.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose so. But they do not know how to do other things.’

‘Such as building precondemned vehicles out of incompatible materials? Doubtless they could work it out if they had time to try, and the inclination.’

The wizard had already transferred his attention away from her words. He sucked on his teeth, then jabbed a finger in the air.

‘A butterchurn. Yes! It can be done.’ Like a blinkered horse he trotted away, summoning his henchmen.

‘My lady sows interesting ideas,’ commented Heligea as the party of gentlefolk moved out of the workshops and toward the gardens. Musingly she twisted her beaded taltry-strings.

‘I have heard tell of another, here at Isse, who dabbles in the Arts,’ said Rohain. ‘Who is that?’

‘A false rumour,’ interjected Ustorix. ‘No one here is acquainted with wizardry save Zimmuth.’

‘That will be Mortier,’ said Heligea deliberately contradicting her brother, to his chagrin. ‘He used to be Master at Swords.’

‘No longer?’

‘No. You see, m’lady, he used to try to transact with wights, outside the demesnes. He thought they would give him power over the unstorm.’

‘Heligea!’ Ustorix rapped.

‘One day he was out in the forest’ with some servants who were a-gathering,’ his sister went on blandly, ‘and—’

‘We are now come to the gardens,’ pompously interrupted her brother. A footman ran to open the gate and, bowing, stood aside to let them enter.

‘And the unstorm came,’ persevered Heligea.

‘Be silent, chit, or you will answer to me!’

‘My lord Ustorix, pray allow dear Heligea to continue,’ reproved Rohain. In the Stormrider’s neck, the tendons popped.

‘Well,’ said Heligea, breaking off a woody stem of poplar and using it to idly thrash its mother tree, ‘our good Master Mortier took fright at being caught by the unstorm in the open. He ran away.’

The party strolled down a gravel path between uninspiringly leafless hedges. Heligea prodded moodily with her whip-stalk at the groin of a skeletal rosebush, avoiding the furious glare of her brother.

‘We sent out searchers, of course,’ she went on, ‘and we finally found him. But it was vile.’

‘What had happened?’

‘We saw his boots first, dangling some way off the ground, swinging slightly. His feet were in them. He was hanging high on a Barren Holly, strung up cruelly on its branches. We cut him down—a wind sprang up as we did so—how the Holly thrashed and hissed!’

‘Nay!’ exclaimed Rohain in horror and disbelief.

‘He was still alive when we cut him down,’ blithely said young Heligea. ‘He survived, but he could not speak. His throat was ruined, from hanging there. In truth, his mind was deranged too. He could not teach swordsmanship anymore, but when he recovered partially he took to hammering late at nights at some invention he was working on in his chambers. One night as he was working away with only his servant nigh, his rushlight suddenly blew out and the hammer was knocked from his hand. When the servant managed to kindle a light he found Master Mortier pinned to his bench by his own hands. His fingers had to be forced apart to prise him off. After that he lost the use of his hands entirely. Now he has to be fed through a straw. He sits and does nothing. His hair drops out from his scalp until he is smooth and moist. He is no better than a great slug.’

The skycaptain and the first mate laughed boorishly. ‘A sluggard, no less!’ they joked.

‘Cry pity!’ gasped Viviana, grimacing.

Her mistress shuddered. She felt the hairs rise on her scalp and recalled with misgivings a curse she had once mouthed at the Master at Swords.

A strung-out note pierced the sky from high above. Prim Heligea craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the incoming Stormrider.

‘I must be informed at once if that Relayer brings word from the Royal City,’ said Rohain.

But from Caermelor there came no tidings.

Rohain felt uneasy. Like a sticky cobweb, a restless melancholy settled over her. It seemed that all plans, all hopes, had come to a standstill. Sianadh sat alone in a cell, the shadow of a rope falling across his neck. She, Rohain so-called, stood un-alone in a tower, the thorn of hopeless passion piercing her heart, the burden of a friend’s life weighing heavily on her shoulders, while the picture she had so foolishly allowed herself to paint, of life as a baroness at Arcune, was being washed away in the bleak rains of Fuarmis, the Coldmonth.

Far away in Namarre Thorn was fighting. Perhaps his life was even now in danger. Worse, perhaps he had been slain … That possibility did not bear contemplation and she thrust it from her mind. What weird and malignant enemies might he be facing? And what would happen if the strength of the Empire’s legions should fail and be vanquished? Stormriders would come hurtling back with messages: Escape, flee for your lives. The Empire is overthrown, all is lost …

Rohain envisioned the network of Relayer runs reaching from point to point across the kingdom like a mightier cobweb, their tension increasing so that they must thrum like overstretched wires. Dianella crouched like a spider in a corner, waiting. Beside that lady lurked a darkness that was not her shadow but another like herself, only more heinous: the wizard Sargoth. At the ganglion of the cobweb loomed the Tower. At a pitch too high for human hearing, the word impasse screamed through Rohain’s head.

What would this waiting bring?

‘I hope the King-Emperor shall return soon to Caermelor,’ said Rohain, in a private moment with her maid. ‘Think you that he will spare Sianadh’s life, Viviana? What kind of man is he, the King-Emperor? A merciful man?’

Viviana waxed circumspect.

‘Wise is how I should describe him, my lady—merciful when mercy is justified, ruthless to warmongers and other evildoers. A shame it is, that he should dwell in widowerhood.’

‘Ah, yes. Queen-Empress Katharine met her death in terrible circumstances, that much I know. What exactly happened to her? Nobody will enlighten me. Indeed, it seems forbidden to mention the topic, except in the most cursory way.’

The girl replied in low tones, ‘It is not spoken of at Court anymore. But we all know. Leastways, we know the main events, but some tell the tale one way, some tell it another. I can tell it the way I heard it but I know not if ’tis correct in every detail.’

‘Prithee, say on.’

‘It happened by the sea. Their two Imperial Majesties were out riding, late, along the strand, when a mist came down and they were separated from their retinue. For a time they rode on, calling to their guards and courtiers, but they could find none. All of a sudden the Queen’s horse took fright and bolted. His Majesty spurred his horse and rode after her, hearing her screams through the mist, but when he caught up, he saw her horse in its death throes, mangled, and the Queen being dragged into the waves. He sprang off his steed and ran into the water. Something unspeakably unseelie seized him. It was none other than Nuckelavee, the flayed centaur—no doubt my lady has heard of this terrible monster. His Majesty slashed at it with his sword but it would have dragged him under too, only that with the last of his strength he put his hunting horn to his lips and blew a long call. At the sound, his attacker loosened its grip and drew back. When his men found him, King James was half-perished, but still trying to heave himself into the waves. They had to pull him out of the water—he would have plunged in after his lady. She was never seen again, and she not yet five-and-twenty.

‘That happened some ten years ago, when the Prince was but a lad. Prince Edward seems older than his years, methinks, but has grown up fine and handsome.’ Viviana clasped her hands, staring into some unguessed distance. ‘His Majesty never took another bride. At that time, all the royal princesses of Erith’s lands were either too young or already wed. Besides, it is said he loved Katharine so much that he could never love another.’

‘A tragic tale.’

‘Verily. The grief of it changed His Majesty in some ways. He is at once sadder and merrier than before, so they say, although I never knew him aforetimes. I was but a child. They say, too, that sorrow sobered him, for since that time he has thrown all his fervour into ruling well and wisely. The lands of Erith, before this Namarran uprising, have never been so peaceful and prosperous. But then, the House of D’Armancourt has ever been the most powerful dynasty. The historians tell us there has been some special quality, something beyond the ordinary, in all who are born to that line. They say that royal blood is puissant. It sets them apart.’

Twice the Winter sun opened its shrunken eye. Both days were soused with rain. The next morning dawned clear.

Enclosed within the Tower, daily confronted by its horribly familiar smells and sights, and their painful associations, Rohain grew restless and irritable. She longed to be free of these environs, but had no notion of where she might go.

One evening, after dinner, a wild mood seized her. Leaning toward the sulky Heligea, she asked quietly, ‘Do you ride?’

‘It is my most favoured pursuit.’

‘Do you ride sky?’

‘To shoot the blue,’ replied the Daughter of the House, ‘is of all things what I desire most.’

‘You are of the Blood.’

‘Yet it is forbidden. And will ever be.’

‘Why?’

‘It is simply not done.’

‘Not a good enough reason. Ride sky with me on the very morrow.’

Heligea turned disbelieving eyes on Rohain. ‘Hoy-day! You would never dare!’

‘I would. You would too. Wait until your brother is otherwise occupied. The equerries, the grooms, the ostlers—they will not gainsay the daughter of Lord Voltasus.’

‘’Sblood! ’Tis impossible!’ Heligea seemed lit up from within, as if a lamp burned behind the porcelain skin of her face.

Unfolding their mighty wings the next morning, two eotaurs sallied forth from Gate East Three Hundred on the Yeoman Flight level. They circled the demesnes and galloped out across the forest. Beneath flying-helmets, the Riders were masked. They rode astride, demonstrating consummate skill, like Relayers of many years’ experience; yet instead of following a Run they branched off, toured the local terrain, and were back in the Tower before noon.

Ustorix’s rage was uncontainable.

At first he directed it at his sister, threatening her with death for breaking one of the most ancient and honoured tenets of the Twelve Houses. He scandalized the Tower’s occupants with the vulgar raising of his voice, his fiery displays of temper.

When he had finished haranguing his sister, Ustorix rushed unexpectedly through the door of Rohain’s suite. His colour burned high, his nostrils flared. His hair had escaped its bonds and now draggled in sweaty tendrils.

‘What is the meaning of your bursting so rudely in upon me, Lord Ustorix?’ demanded Rohain, rising from the chair by the fireplace where she had been seated.

‘You know it!’ He strode forward, careless in his wrath. ‘Riding sky is not the prerogative of women. Women have not the strength for it. Only noblemen possess the finesse and acuity required to learn the skills of governing eotaurs and the fickle currents of the atmosphere. How will Isse Tower be regarded when word of your folly is spread abroad? It will be said that we of the Seventh House cannot keep our women in their place. It will be said that we are weak, and our women are frolicsome and willful. You have destroyed the reputation of the Seventh House. You have brought ruin upon us all.’

‘I hardly think so. Take control of yourself, sir. These emotive scenes are scarcely seemly. We ladies can ride sky as featly as any gentleman. No harm has been done. It is a lesson—’

‘Hear me!’ He gripped her by the arm. ‘I’ll be hanged if you don’t need lessoning, and hanged if I’ll not teach you.’

‘Unhand me!’

The young Stormrider glanced down. In his guest’s hand, the point of the anlace, still chained to her girdle, jabbed the hard flesh of his stomach. He released his grip on her arm.

‘How dare you!’ Rohain enunciated carefully. Every ounce of hatred and scorn for him that she had ever stored flung its weight behind those words. Suddenly Ustorix dropped to one knee.

‘Forgive me. Forgive me,’ he gasped over and over. ‘I was not myself. I did not mean—’

‘Depart!’

‘Rohain, I am in …’ He squirmed in anguish, groping for words of apology and excuse.

‘Avaunt! Get out!’ At the sight of his groveling, Rohain felt only revulsion.

He went.

She wished that she had never thought of riding an eotaur, joyful as the experience had been. She scrubbed her arm raw where he had touched it.

At dinner, Ustorix was all scrupulous politeness. He said, ‘Tonight I will demonstrate the balancing feat.’

‘It is not necessary,’ said Rohain.

‘It will be done,’ he stated tightly.

Gate South Five Hundred gaped, the cusps of its portcullis pointing like daggers. Far below the overhanging threshold, miniature outbuildings were pricked by tiny lights shining from their windows. A light tracery of vapor sculled past, upon a thermal layer, about a hundred feet below. All was black and silver: the forest, as dark as Dianella’s hair; the ocean, as silver as a trow’s desire; the sky, as colourless as cellar slugs.

Heligea was present, with Ustorix and Rohain and a young Relayer displaying three stars on his epaulettes.

‘Lord Ustorix,’ said Rohain formally, sincerely regretting her taunting, ‘I beg you not to attempt this.’

Now this pompous ass was going to lose his life because she had craved vengeance. It had seemed a good idea at the dinner table, considering her past sufferings, but now that the time had come she wished she had held back her words. She would not relish witnessing anyone’s life being snuffed out. Revenge was supposed to be sweet. This tasted sour.

Her anxiety only served to fuel Ustorix’s intent.

‘Stand aside,’ he commanded heroically.

A refractory wind, which had been pummeling the Tower, tapered off. The Stormrider carefully placed the sildron ingots. They hovered. He ran and jumped. Agile and strong from riding sky, he found his footing and, as the momentum transferred to the metal bars, caught his balance. Like an acrobat he stood poised, slowing.

‘Well done, sir!’ breathed the three-starred Relayer. ‘The deed is done,’ Ustorix called back over his shoulder. His helper tossed him a rope to haul him in.

He glided back like a tremulous skater, until, without warning, the quiescent wind reawoke. With a gust forceful enough to shake the Tower walls, it pushed him sideways.

He fell.

Heligea screamed. Rohain squeezed her eyes shut.

‘My lord!’ The three-starred Relayer peered over the edge. ‘Are you hale?’ he shouted, rather redundantly. The rope hung slack in his hand. The sildron ingots had shot away into the night and were nowhere to be seen.

Ustorix’s hand appeared in midair. He had been floating, unharmed.

‘The rope.’ His voice was cracked and strained.

The aide reeled him in. As he clambered onto the salient doorsill, Ustorix pulled off his jacket and began unfastening the buckles of the sildron harness he had worn beneath to provide him with complete safety.

Heligea’s laugh was cut short by her brother’s virulent scowl.

‘I shall do it again,’ he grated.

‘No, Ustor, you are safe now. It does not matter that you cheated,’ cried Heligea.

Ustorix flung down the harness. ‘Give me the spare ingots, Callidus.’

‘Ustorix, you must not!’ beseeched Heligea. Gallant Callidus dragged her away.

For the second time that night, the heir of the House threw sildron into the outer airs. He took a deep breath and walked toward the edge. The whole of Eldaraigne yawned below, an expanse so vast and distant that it seemed to suck the very marrow out of his bones.

He collapsed on the floor in a faint.

When a pair of footmen had carried away the young lord, Rohain remained, for a time, alone in the gatehall. The wind was rising. From the core of this thirty-second story, the sound of horses came to her ears. They moved in their stalls, scuffling their hooves. She walked past the alcoves and vestibules leading off to either side, and continued down the wide straw-strewn corridors that circumnavigated the fortress’s walls. Eotaurs leaned over their demi-doors to blow their warm breath on her hands, allowing her to scratch their ears and stroke their forelocks.

From the corner of her eye she viewed a small shape edging furtively past.

‘Pod.’

It shrieked.

‘Pod, do not go away. I will depart from here if you tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘Where did Grethet find me? How came I here?’

The lad mumbled.

‘I do not understand what you are saying. Prithee, Pod, I returned here to find this out—for that reason only.’

‘Carters brought you in. Road-caravan.’

‘Did the carters say anything about me?’

‘Said they found you.’

‘Where?’

‘At the old mines—near the accursed place.’

‘What accursed place?’

‘Carter-captain had on a fine cloak, he did. A very fine cloak.’

‘What accursed place?’ she repeated insistently.

‘Got to go now.’

‘Pod! You are my one chance. If there is any kindness left in you, have pity!’

‘You had no pity. You made me go on the ship.’

Rohain seized Pod’s wrist. ‘Is force the only thing you heed?’

He wriggled. She released him and he scrambled away.

‘I shall tell them you hide in the goat-caves,’ she called.

‘No!’ wailed the lad, already out of sight. His voice floated back: ‘Don’t tell them where I hide. Huntingtowers. It was at Huntingtowers they found you.’

Huntingtowers. Rarely had that place been mentioned by the servants when the yellow-haired lad had lived among them. Like the Fair Realm, like the Unseelie Attriod, it was considered to be a subject that, if discussed openly, attracted ill-fortune in the guise of the wrath of some unspecified agency; yet, like children with an itchy scab, the lowly denizens of the Tower could not leave it quite alone, and sometimes they hinted at it in whispers. It was the name of the haunted crater-lake lying northwest of Isse Tower.

Huntingtowers had another name, but what it was, none of the servants knew, or if they did they would not say. It lay some two days’ ride away, toward the Cape of Tides, and it was said to be most evilly infested with unseelie wights—a hub of all things eldritch that irrevocably hated mortal men. A hill rose from the land there, but it had no tall and rounded peak. Instead, its centre was sunken and hollow, resembling a giant cauldron. Within this crucible of soil and stone lay a black lake whose level almost reached to the barren rim. Many cone-shaped islands were scattered across this forbidding water, some large, many small. On the central islet, the largest, a strange building had existed for as long as anyone could remember. It was a grim tower surrounded by eight others in a circle, each joined to its two neighbours and the central edifice by the stone arches of several flying bridges. From this fortress, the place had received its kenning, for it was said that an eldritch Hunt dwelt therein, the most terrible Hunt of all, so cruel and merciless that for miles around this black cauldron no mortal folk dared to dwell and even lorraly birds and beasts shunned the region. Folk who dwelled on the fringes would speak of their horror as, huddled in their cottages at night, they listened to sounds from high above: the baying of unnatural hounds, the weird and hideous screams of the Hunter, the rush of wind as eldritch steeds careened through the skies.

On nights of a full moon the Wild Hunt would debouch from its stronghold. Indeed, it had sometimes been seen through the spyglasses of the watchmen on the parapets of Isse Tower. So far the unseelie hunters had ignored the heavily fortified House of the Stormriders, but whosoever witnessed the Wild Hunt trembled at the certainty that come morning some road-caravan, or remote-dwelling charcoal-burner or cotter, or someone straying late abroad, would be gone, never to be seen again; or else would be found, far from home, lying torn to pieces in a pool of blood.

Viviana found out from the servants that lately the region of Huntingtowers had fallen into an unusual quietude. The Wild Hunt had not been sighted for many months and it was thought that the dwellers in the black caldera had removed to the north, responding to the mysterious Call; but of that there was no certainty, for no one dared venture there to see.

The moon was just past the full. If from Huntingtowers she had come, reasoned Rohain, then to Huntingtowers she must return. There existed no other clue to her past. From the high windows of the strange edifice in the centre of the crater-lake, any aerial approach would doubtless be spied. The only chance for her to reconnoiter undetected in its environs lay in getting there by the deserted and therefore less scrutinized land-routes.

‘Viviana.’

The lady’s maid looked up at her mistress. She had been sewing by candlelight, cocking her head and holding the work at arm’s length, peering with utmost concentration as she stitched loose beadwork more securely onto the fringed aulmoniere. Her softly rounded face looked younger in the candle’s dandelion glow. Her large and limpid eyes reflected the flame. She held the needle poised for the next stitch.

‘Yes, m’lady?’

Rohain seated herself beside the girl.

‘I wish to tell you something in the strictest confidence. Viviana, you have been a good servant to me, and a kind friend.’

The hand holding the sliver of silver abruptly dropped to its owner’s lap.

‘Some events have taken place,’ said Rohain, ‘which make it impossible for me to keep you on.’

‘Oh no, my lady, prithee do not say that!’ Viviana stuck the needle through the purse and put it aside. ‘I do not want to leave your service.’

‘I have with me enough items of value to pay the wages you are owed, and a little extra for a gift, in thanks,’ said Rohain. ‘After that I shall not be able to afford a maid.’

‘But you are a lady! Your estate, your jewels—’

‘Are no longer mine. And I am not a gentlewoman—not by birth, I think. I am just like you.’

‘I cannot believe it!’

‘It is true. Furthermore, I am about to embark upon a perilous journey to a perilous place. You cannot come on this path with me, Viviana, and so I am going to send for a Windship to take you back to Caermelor.’

‘My lady, you could not say anything that would make me more miserable,’ Viviana said quickly and tremulously. ‘Send me back? Never. I shall not go.’

‘There is no choice. You belong at Court, not here.’

‘I shall be sent back to the Marchioness! Ugh! I’d rather be a scullery maid. No—I shall stay with you.’

‘But I cannot pay your wages, after this day, and how should you make a living?’

‘In the same way as you, I expect,’ said Viviana, spreading her hands palms upward. ‘Whatever that may be.’

‘As for that, I suppose I shall go into service again if I return alive.’

Viviana pondered. ‘Go you into some kind of adventure?’

‘Yes—no. It may be a tedious mission or it may be tremendously dangerous and life-threatening.’

‘Well then, that’s not much different from life at Court, m’lady.’

Rohain laughed. ‘It is not necessary to hail me by a courtesy title now.’

‘I cannot help it, m’lady. Prithee, let me accompany you.’

‘After what I have told you, do you still wish to come?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I’d rather be here than there, if you take my meaning.’

‘Would you?’ It was Rohain who pondered now. ‘I like you,’ she said at last, ‘which is why I’d rather not put you at risk.’

‘Seeing as how you’re not paying my wages anymore, you have no say in the matter,’ said Viviana primly, picking up the aulmoniere and resuming her sewing. ‘And now you had better tell me the whole story, m’lady.’

So Rohain launched into the tale of her service at Isse Tower, her escape and the finding of the treasure that had allowed her to purchase a cure for her deformity, some fine clothing, and a new identity. She told also of her quest for the past, but, suffering from an ache that throbbed in her heart, she could not bear to mention Thorn—not yet. To her words, Viviana listened with equanimity. At the conclusion she said, ‘I declare, m’lady, you have been through more adventures than the Dowager Marchioness’s crook-tailed tomcat. Yet I have no doubt you are of noble birth, judging by your bearing, and this history you tell has not changed my opinion of you in the slightest. To me, you remain the Lady Rohain.’

Rohain shook her head with a nonplussed smile, taken aback at her friend’s stubbornness and heartily grateful for it.

No breath of wind ruffled the day. In Isse Harbour, the sea lay satin-smooth, barely moving. Hanging in seaweed valleys far below, countless jellyfish pulsed like glacial moons, blue-white, see-through, finely fimbriated. The Seaship that Rohain had spied from the gargoyled balcony lay becalmed. Its departure had been delayed. This was not the stillness of tranquillity; rather the deadly motionlessness of a predator poised to attack.

Rohain had spun a fabrication to her hosts, made of half-truths, improvisations, and prevarications. She told them that all she had heard about Huntingtowers had piqued her curiosity; that the vogue among the jaded courtiers of Caermelor was to journey in search of novelty and exciting adventure; that the moon was just past the full and therefore this was the best time to explore, or at least to view from the caldera’s rim the infamous abode of the Hunt, thus obtaining a delicious thrill of horror. It was a fabrication as full of holes as lace, but it was the best she could concoct on short notice. So bedazzled were they by this living jewel in their midst that her hosts accepted it.

How easily the lies roll out, she thought again, ashamed. I am no better than Dianella.

As a groom helped her mount a landhorse Rohain fought a stifling sense of dread. Once in the saddle, she looked around at the other riders. Ustorix in light armour, Viviana, the wizard Zimmuth and one of his scarred henchmen, Dain Pennyrigg, Keat Featherstone from the stables, and Lord Callidus had all wanted to accompany her. Sensing doom, she wished them out of her retinue. If catastrophe struck, their blood would be on her hands.

‘Now is your final chance to turn back,’ she said, ‘one and all. If I choose to ride into danger, merely for the purpose of satisfying my curiosity concerning this ill-famed place, it is not your responsibility. You have the right to withdraw.’

The wizard’s henchman made as if to dismount and was stayed by a gesture from Ustorix. Nobody spoke.

Like the ship in the harbour, the party’s departure had also been delayed. They had set out earlier that morning, but after they had ridden a few miles the wizard’s horse had cast a shoe and he had insisted upon them returning to have it reshod. Most of the morning had worn away by the time they started once more.

Ustorix raised his visor. ‘We shall have to set a good pace now,’ he said, ‘if we are to reach the Hill of Rowans by nightfall.’

Heligea stood plucking at her brother’s cloak.

‘Please, Ustor. Take me with you.’

‘No.’ He pushed her away with his boot. ‘Forward,’ he added over his shoulder.

The twelve landhorses, four of them carrying only packs, moved off. Heligea stood watching them leave, her hands planted defiantly on her hips.

‘I hate you, Ustorix!’ she shouted, kicking one of the grooms in the shins.

The party passed through the heavily fortified front gate of the demesnes, turned right, and disappeared from view.

The Tower stared out to sea. Behind it, in the servants’ graveyard, no wind ruffled the wreath of leaves and berries placed by Rohain beneath the wooden stick marking Grethet’s last resting place.

The riders hastened along the beaten dirt of the road. Trees burned black by wintry gales locked fingers overhead, forming a dark tunnel. Every portable precaution against wights accompanied the travellers: bells on bridles, salt, bread, ash keys, the ground-ivy athair luss, sprays of dried hypericum tied with red ribbons to rowan staves, tilhals and other charms, self-bored stones, and amber. Every fabric garment was worn inside out, save for the taltries tied closely around their heads. Lords Ustorix and Callidus, flanking Rohain on strong war-horses, had encased themselves in armour of plate and chain. Thus iron-clad, they must surely be invulnerable. The wizard carried a tall, whirring contraption that resembled a windmill, which he said was a modern wight-deterrent and which he cast aside after a couple of miles because it was too heavy for him or his henchman to carry for long.

Their plan was to halt for the night at a hill crowned with rowans, where the serving-men would set up pavilions. Zimmuth was to weave a tight wall of spells about the encampment to keep it safe during the long hours of darkness, the most dangerous time.

After noon the sky darkened with unusual rapidity. The sun became obscured behind a wall of somber gray clouds; its location could only be guessed. Judging by the deepening dusk, it must have been starting to slide toward the horizon when the road began to twist back on itself, climbing steeply.

‘We have reached Longbarrow Ridge,’ announced Callidus, pushing back his talium-lined visor. ‘On a clear day, the Hill of Rowans can be seen from the summit. Once we have crossed the ridge, we shall be less than an hour’s ride from the hill. I’ll warrant we’ll be there by nightfall.’

As he spoke, a heartbeat awoke out of the southeast.

It was an urgent, syncopated throbbing, deep and dire, the supple-wristed thudding of polished wood against goat-hide stretched over a resounding concavity. The voice of Isse Tower was broadcasting a warning.

‘The drums!’ exclaimed Ustorix echoingly from within his helm. ‘The drums of alarum!’

The riders urged forward their horses, hearkening to the compelling rhythm, their pulses rousing to its thrill. Around them, the trees thinned and gave way to stunted vegetation. Emerging at the top of a bald ridge, the riders were able to command an unobstructed view. Under clear skies, they might have been able to see the landscape for miles around.

There they reined in, by mutual agreement. Not a word had been spoken, but the presentiment was pressing. Why were the drums being sounded? What had the distant Tower watchmen seen? Fear gripped them all, and they stared toward the north from whence, unaccountably, the fear emanated.

Something unseelie was coming.

Swiftly, it was coming.

The evening darkened. Low thunderclouds completely covered the sky like a blanket, from horizon to horizon, and a thick gray mist roiled up from the hollows of the land. Even the sea, so close at hand, was hidden. By now, it seemed to the riders that they stood on an island in an ocean of fog, with a heavy ceiling pressing down on their heads and threatening to crush them. They all faced north, straining their eyes to pierce the thickening murk. From that direction came a certainty of sheer horror that enveloped them like some oppressive mantle. Their limbs weighed so heavily they could scarcely move a muscle. It was onerous, in that ghastly miasma, even to think of lifting a hand to guide the horses toward shelter. An unnatural lethargy pinned the riders to the ridgetop.

Their terror increased as sounds approached along the roof of the sky—a baying and yammering, a deep thunder, the crazed hallooing, the berserk screaming of carnivorous horses like the screech of metal ripped asunder. A denser cloud ballooned out of the rest and raced straight toward the watchers. Bursting from its depths loomed the shapes of fire-eyed hounds and dark riders on mounts that snorted flame. Ahead of them plunged their leader—a thing shaped like a man.

Yet it was no true man.

It was a darkness with two sunken sumps for eyes; and, not worn as a helm would be worn, but growing from the head, magnificent when gracing a stag, yet obscene on this human parody—the appalling tines, a pair of wide skull-claws, the antlers.

At the instant these apparitions appeared, Ustorix screamed and launched himself sideways off his horse. In panic, Callidus’s steed reared and threw its rider. Zimmuth’s mount bolted downhill, followed by the four packhorses. His henchman spurred after him. The Hunt galloped right over the heads of the remaining four riders and receded in the direction of Isse Tower, invisible somewhere in the mist, twenty miles away.

The two men of the stables cursed softly, calming their horses. Rohain’s mount shivered beneath her, slippery with the sweat of terror. Leaning over its neck, she murmured into its ear. Keat Featherstone spoke rapidly to his three companions.

‘Isse Tower is in dire peril. My lady, forgive us. We are obliged to leave you and return to the aid of our comrades in the Tower. Our lords remain hereabouts—they will guard you.’

‘I give you leave, Featherstone and Pennyrigg. Wind be with you.’

‘And with you, lady. We must ride hard. Let those follow who will!’

Without further ado, the two stablemen leapt away down the hill at a cracking pace.

Clanking, the armour-plated lords lurched on foot after their chargers, whistling and calling. They disappeared down the north side of the ridge, leaving the two damsels alone.

‘Well, Viviana,’ said Rohain. She was dazed and reeling from shock after witnessing such appalling visitations, and felt alarmed by their unexpected abandonment. ‘Well, Viviana, it seems our guardians are otherwise occupied.’ She mustered her thoughts. ‘Meanwhile, mayhap we can help our hosts. I vote we follow those who ride to the Tower’s aid.’

Viviana seemed to shrink. ‘Those things …’ she said in a low voice. ‘Those things that hunt through the sky …’

‘We are pinched between a sword and a spear, as the saying goes,’ said Rohain. ‘The Tower is beleaguered, for sure, but it is well-manned and fortified. Would you rather we camped on this hill waiting for the Wild Hunt to fly over our heads on its return journey? Or that we continue on to the haunted caldera, two ladies unguarded and alone?’

‘Marry,’ said Viviana in weary disgust, ‘this is a sorry state of affairs. That Ustorix is a craven bumbler and no mistake. First he falls from his horse in his terror, then he runs away, leaving us vulnerable. So much for his vaunted boldness and chivalry.’

‘Will you return with me to the House of the Stormriders?’

‘I am loathe to do so, m’lady, but we have little choice.’

They cast one glance over their shoulders in the direction of the horizon where Huntingtowers brooded unseen, unconquered. Then, pointing the heads of their steeds back toward the stronghold of the Seventh House, they set off at a gallop.

Below the hill, the road dived back under its roof of trees. The dank wall of mist and the obscuring vegetation afforded no view of the Tower to Rohain and Viviana as they rode. The sonorous pattern of the drums continued on for a while, then ceased abruptly, leaving a calm broken only by the hammering of iron-shod hooves on wet clay and leaf-mold.

The pale vapors drew back among the trees and frayed to invisibility. A wind brooming through the upper atmosphere swept most of the dirty clouds away to the west. Only the last rays of the sun lingered by the time the travellers cantered their weary horses along the last stretch of road leading to the demesne-gates of Isse, and a translucent moon was already rising, swimming up into the unfathomable sky like some pale coelenterate. Now rowans crowded in thickly toward the road. To the left, the stone walls of the demesnes rose high, topped with metal spikes and shards.

Through the black lacework of boughs the Tower loured in the half-light, tapering from its wide base to become a slim needle in the sky. So high it soared that its turreted head was hidden in a shredded remnant of cloud. Much winged activity was taking place around the upper stories. Darkly etched on the clouds, dozens of eotaurs whirled in descending spirals, onhebbing toward the ground. Their riders’ cloaks billowed up like broken bubbles. Shouts issued from behind the demesne walls, accompanied by the crunch of hooves on gravel. From high above speared shrill, inhuman yells, deep roars, the clash of metal and stone. A howling bundle plummeted from a balcony, its limbs writhing.

Just before a bend in the road that concealed the gate from view, the travellers crossed a stone bridge over a little rill and cantered beneath a long arch of overhanging willows.

‘Stop, my lady, I beg you!’ They reined in. Rohain glanced quizzically at her companion. ‘My lady, the Tower is overrun by wights. There is nothing we can do—we must turn back! We must ride for our lives!’

Two more victims hurtled, screaming, from above.

‘In good faith—we cannot leave! We must help them fight.’

‘There is nothing we can do. We are not warriors. To bide here means certain death.’

Rohain hesitated. ‘You have the right of it,’ she admitted reluctantly, ‘and yet …’

As she faltered, something like a fish-hook raked across her chest. It caught in the fine gold chain of her tilhal, ramming it tight into the flesh of her throat and crushing her windpipe until she could not breathe. Mercifully, the chain snapped. The rooster with pink rubies for eyes shot away into the grasses at the roadside. A scrawny arm whipped like a leather belt across Rohain’s eyes, blinding her.

A scrawl of hobyahs had swung down from the willow-boughs overhanging the road. Their grotesque limbs were thin and strong as whipcords. Wrapping them around the heads of the riders, they wrenched off the talium-lined riding hats. Others of their kind dangled by their skinny legs and gripped the damsels by their hair, whereupon their terrified horses ran from underneath them. Both mortals were let fall to the ground.

The hobyahs rushed at their victims. No more than two feet tall, they leered through bright needles of eyes that slanted upward at the outer corners, narrowing to mere slits. Their noses were large and uptilted. Pointed ears stuck up on either side of their conical caps and their mouths grinned maliciously. Avoiding contact with turned-out garments or bridle-bells, they hung off the saddles and surcingles, then jumped in twos and threes on the horses’ backs and rode them away. Possessed of the hideous strength of eldritch, they hooked their clawlike fingers into their victims’ hair and easily dragged them off the road. The struggles of the young women were futile. There could be no escape.

Yet in the next instant, the hobyahs’ yodels of victory turned to screeches. Red-and-gold lightning flashed among them, and suddenly there were horsemen brandishing swords. A skirmish broke out. The cold iron blades of the superior force broke the wights’ resistance, scattering them, routing them. Staggering to their feet, Rohain and Viviana clung to each other. Blood trickled in runnels from their scalps. Their garments hung in tatters. Hair tumbled over their faces.

‘Let us to the safety of the demesnes!’ gasped Rohain. But even as they started for the gates, equestrians emerged from both banks of the road ahead, blocking their way. In dismay, the girls whirled about, only to be faced with a second blockade closing in behind.

‘’Tis some eldritch trickery!’ cried Viviana. ‘These men wear the Royal Livery—this cannot be!’

In scarlet jackets and gold braid the riders sat tall and straight. The final thin shafts of sunlight, sword-bright, pierced through disintegrating clouds and struck golden gleams from their face-guards and plumed helms. They appeared like a vision from the Fair Realm.

Five of them rode slowly forward. The damsels exchanged frightened glances.

‘We wield iron!’ cried Rohain in desperation. ‘Approach at your peril!’

Calmly, the horsemen reined in a short distance away.

‘You mistake us,’ their leader, a lieutenant, shouted. His tone was grave. ‘We are cavalry of the Royal Legions.’

Rohain and Viviana exchanged glances of relief. Wights were incapable of lying.

‘Out here it is perilous for mortals,’ the lieutenant said. ‘The lower stories of the Tower are now secured against the enemy. Come. We shall bear you to safety there.’

He gestured to two of the cavalrymen. Dismounting, they helped Rohain and Viviana up behind the other two. A black smoke spewed from a southern gate in the Tower, just below the cloud ceiling. Dimly within it, the Wild Hunt soared in outward flight. They seemed this time to be fewer in number. Unseelie hounds and horses swooped around the Tower and struck out northward over the lifting moon, pursued by a company of eotaur-riders who, although great in number, could not match the speed of their eldritch quarry and were sure to be outdistanced.

‘Happy day! Huon is driven forth!’ exclaimed the lieutenant. on witnessing this rout. His men cheered; several yelled triumphantly and punched the air above their heads.

In perfect formation, six men of the platoon rode up and closed ranks around the officers with the pillion riders. Together, they made toward the gate.

Red-jacketed men-at-arms patrolled throughout the shadowy demesnes. Guards at the Tower doors saluted and allowed the lieutenant to pass through with his wards. He consigned them to the care of some doughty stewards of Isse and returned to his business of scouring the area immediately outside the demesnes.

Within the Tower, all was in uproar. Rohain and Viviana were escorted to a kitchen in one of the lower stories. There they found crowds of house-carls and nobles mingling, making a tremendous hubbub, some chattering, others sobbing.

‘Wickedness! Oh, wickedness!’

‘’Tis an evil hour that brought these fell fiends upon the House.’

‘Lend me your kerchief, for I bleed.’

‘All fate be praised for bringing us our rescuer in time of need!’

‘I cannot yet grasp that he is among us!’

‘And more striking than the stories ever told!’

‘Cursed be this day that saw such evil fall on Isse. Yet bless’d it be also …’

Some were uncharacteristically shrieking and wringing their hands, and several, in a sorry state, lay prone upon the tables while their wounds were tended. Pet capuchins loped about, jabbering and hindering.

Rohain stared at the scene, sickened and appalled. Questions and offers of help surged at her and her companion as soon as they entered. Dolvach Trenchwhistle cleared a path for them with her elbows.

‘Make way for the fine ladies from Caermelor! Can’t you see that they are hurt, you dolts? Get out of the way.’

She seated the fine ladies by the hearth, proffering glasses of brandy. Heligea shouldered her way through the press and stood before them.

‘My brother and Callidus! Are they with you?’

‘No,’ said Rohain, sipping brandy to give her strength. ‘I do not know how they fare.’

‘Ill tidings, then.’

‘Yet I would vouch for their safety, encased as they are in all that iron.’

‘’Sbane! I see you are wounded, my friend. Blood runs from your hair. You, servant, bring oil.’

A young girl hastened away.

‘What has happened here?’ asked Rohain.

‘The Tower was attacked at nightfall,’ said Heligea. ‘Terrible ravagers they were. Powerful. They landed in at the top stories and coursed down through the Tower at speed, like rats down a drainpipe. We had no time to escape. Methinks they were hunting for something, or somebody. When they couldn’t find their target, they turned on us like boars at bay, and took our people and began to torment them. Then he came.’

‘Who?’

‘Why, none other than the King-Emperor himself!’

‘His Imperial Majesty here?’ cried Viviana. ‘I can scarce credit it!’

Heligea’s eyes blazed as though with pride, or triumph, or battle-lust. ‘He came from the south, riding to our rescue, leading the Duke of Roxburgh and others of the Royal Attriod, and regiments of the Royal Legions and thriesniuns of the Dainnan, all mounted on Skyhorses. They’d got word that the Scourge was on its way here, and they came. Ah!’ Dreamily, she clasped her hands at her throat. ‘The King-Emperor himself, here at Isse! I never thought to see this hour. Dainnan and men-at-arms swarm all over the Tower. I’ll be honest, at first it seemed impossible that even such great fighting men could drive off the Wild Hunt, but victory has been won!’

‘Won?’ echoed Rohain. ‘So the wights are all gone and the Tower is safe?’

Heligea waved her hand dismissively. ‘Yes, yes. Almost safe. A few of the lesser wights that rode with the Hunter remain scattered throughout the upper stories and must be flushed out. We are to remain locked up down here until all things unseelie have been ousted and the Tower thoroughly scoured. As yet I have not set eyes upon His Majesty, but as I am, for the moment, the Mistress of the House, I am sure to be summoned soon by his gentlemen. I confess to a little nervousness, but in good sooth, how I look forward to the moment I am presented!’ Lowering her voice, she leaned forward confidentially. ‘You have seen him at Court. I never have. Is he as fine as they say? Do the images stamped on the coins of the realm do him justice?’

Rohain felt reluctant to admit she had never been in the King-Emperor’s presence. She could not know whether the portraits hanging in gilt frames all over the palace were good representations, or the worn and blurred profiles in relief stamped into the coins. Besides, she had only ever seen older coins, depicting the D’Armancourt ancestors. Of the portraits, she recalled only cascades of velvet and brocade. She could barely remember them, not having paid much heed. In any event, she supposed he had aged greatly since those images had been created.

‘Via,’ she said, ‘tell Heligea what he looks like.’

‘Well, ma’am, no artist has ever been able to featly capture his likeness,’ said Viviana. ‘Just barely do the portraits represent His Majesty. I look forward to seeing him again with all my heart, if only from a distance, for upon my word he is a gentleman any maid or wife would sigh to look upon—a gentleman after every lady’s heart. All the ladies at Court are in love with him, I doubt not—every one; and I’d warrant that every woman throughout Erith who has ever set eyes on him would share that passion.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘So handsome is he and so kingly. Just to think of him causes the strangest thrill, as if the shang were passing over.’ She balked, blushing suddenly. ‘Sain me—I hope you’ll not think me impertinent for speaking thus of His Imperial Majesty.’

‘You are impertinent,’ interrupted Heligea impatiently, ‘and should be thrashed for presuming to such familiarity, insolent girl. Ah, here comes a servant with the oil.’

A girl approached, carrying a stoneware jar. She was young, almost a child, thin and pale-cheeked but vigorous-looking, with large, deep-lidded eyes and a neat, bow-shaped mouth. Rohain recognised that triangular face, surrounded by its abundant cloud of wavy brown locks. The daughter of the Keeper of the Keys, the girl’s name was Caitri Lendoon, and long ago she had shown kindness to the deformed, yellow-haired lad.

Before Rohain could acknowledge her former friend, the smell of the oil assaulted her, closing in on her like a dark jail. Her throat and back were on fire. She gagged.

‘What is in that jar?’ she said hoarsely, holding the folds of her skirts to her nose. ‘Whatever it is, I beg you to take it away from me. I wonder you don’t all expire from the stench.’

‘’Tis only siedo-pod oil,’ said Heligea in astonishment. ‘A pungent scent, aye, but tolerable enough.’

‘I will not have it near me!’

‘It will soothe your hurts, my lady,’ protested the little girl, backing away.

‘Mayhap. But I cannot stand the stink of it. I would rather endure the pain of my hurts and take another drop of brandy. You may anoint Viviana, if she is willing, and I will move from her side. Heligea, I must be brought into the King-Emperor’s presence as soon as possible.’

‘None but His Imperial Majesty’s gentlemen may attend him now. That is how I am informed.’

‘Yes, but as soon as the Tower has been secured—’

‘Of course. Come, my lady, let these servants bathe you with lavender water if you will not have the oil. And take another sip of the spirit.’

There was to be no sleep that night. The moans of the wounded filled the lower halls. Those who had escaped harm spoke of nothing but the disastrous attack, and the unprecedented presence of royalty at the Tower. Occasional noises of belligerence echoed down the stairwells and the lift-shafts as malevolent presences were flushed out of oblique crannies. These became more infrequent, and eventually ceased altogether. Alone in a quiet room of the servants’ quarters, Rohain sat by a window embrasure. It was forbidden to open the shutters until the danger had passed, but a cold night breeze crept in through the cracks and this she inhaled with relish.

Viviana approached.

‘My lady—’

‘Come no closer, Via. I cannot endure the stench of the oil in your hair.’

‘It is strong, I’ll concede, but not truly offensive, surely? Some might consider it pleasant.’

‘I have ill recollections of the stuff,’ said Rohain. Her face closed in on itself.

Sensing some inner perturbation, Viviana nodded silently. She curtsied and withdrew.

Rohain remembered: Here in Isse Tower they use siedo-pod oil for many purposes, including the assuaging of every hurt from cuts and scratches to bellyaches and warts. Grethet used the stuff for the cuts on my back—yet I detested it well before then. I fought against her but I was too weak. She smeared it on, and as soon as I could I rubbed it off, rolling on rough bags, which opened the wounds afresh; but the stench—the stench clings for ages.

Restlessly, she stood up and walked to the next window. Along the hairline crack between the shutters, a glimpse of starry sky ran like a black thread stitched with, seed pearls. The brandy had warmed her, had taken the edge off the pain of her tortured scalp, but she ached with the longing to go straight away to the King-Emperor and plead for Sianadh’s life. And she blazed with a desire to see which of the Dainnan had accompanied him to the Tower.

All of that lay outside the barred doors.

Around midnight, a hammering on those doors announced the end of the waiting period—the Tower had been cleared of eldritch incarnations.

Chaos resumed. As the Stormriders and their ladies returned to the upper floors, all able-bodied servants were ordered into action preparing billets and provender for the King-Emperor and his attendants and men-at-arms. Heligea disappeared precipitately, in a clanging lift-cage.

Rohain, eluding Viviana to escape the siedo-pod fumes, took another lift-cage up to Floor Thirty-seven. Lords and ladies moved to and fro shouting orders. Overworked servants hurried to obey.

‘Where is the King-Emperor?’ Rohain asked.

‘His Majesty is at the topmost floor, my lady,’ was the reply. ‘He may be in conference or at meat. Is there anything you require? A repast is being set out on the tables in the dining halls.’

‘Thank you—no.’

A passing Dainnan knight started at the sight of her face. Simultaneously she jumped, taken by surprise at the sight of his uniform. Recovering his composure, he bowed.

‘May I be of assistance, lady? I am Sir Flint.’

His unbound hair fountained in bronze filaments to the small of his back.

‘The King-Emperor’s quarters on the top floor—do you know where they are?’

‘His Majesty holds conference there with the Royal Attriod. The while, the Stormriders of the Tower are gathering in the dining halls to take refreshment. May I conduct you there instead? Allow me to call your servants.’

Seeing herself suddenly as he must see her, it struck Rohain that she could not kneel at the feet of the King-Emperor dressed in a torn and inside-out riding habit, with her hair tousled. To beg for a man’s life, she must appear sleek and well-groomed, as etiquette demanded. She sighed.

‘You are kind, Sir Flint. I wish only to retire.’

‘Your name, my lady?’

Already she was walking away, not wishing to delay.

He bowed again and watched her go.

When she was out of his sight, she ran to her suite. On reaching it, she checked abruptly with her hand on the door-jamb and stared in.

The rooms had been ransacked.

Furniture lay splintered. Chests had been forced open and turned out, then apparently picked up and thrown across the chamber by some agency far stronger than any man, to crash and sprawl open, lids twisted awry, spilling out the remains of their contents. Garments had been strewn, torn to shreds. The looking-glasses lay in splinters on the floor—even their backings had been punched through. Only the frames of their obliterated faces remained. The bed had been reduced to no more than a welter of kindling and rags, scattered with dead leaves and a couple of live loam-worms, dusk pink and jointed. Rohain’s jewellery was unrecognisable—misshapen as though melted in a hot fire. Every item she owned had been broken or corrupted. An odour of compost hung over the whole scene.

Softly, she left the scene of the shambles. There was no sign of a door—save for buckled hinges half torn off the door-frame—or she would have closed it.

The hour had grown very late. Made aimless with shock she wandered, dazed. The torchlit halls were empty now that the nobles had gone to their supper. Dry leaves eddied along the floors, whispering, blown by a bitterly cold breeze from the gargoyle-wreathed balcony overlooking Isse Harbour. It was there she had stood on the night of the unstorms, watching a ghostly galleon being wrecked off the heads, and wrecked again, over and over.

One of the balcony doors stood open, Beyond it, stars dripped thick radiance down the sky. The sight attracted her. Thomas’s words came back: ‘Go into the wilderness on a clear night and look up. Look long. Then you will have seen something of Faêrie.’

Heedless of the slap and sting of the cold, she stepped out. A wide vista opened across gray water. The moon and the Greayte Southern Star had wheeled out of sight on their inevitable courses and only the fantastic splendor of the other starry realms remained, to draw heart and mind out through the eyes and send them spinning into the void.

Someone else was already on the balcony. A Dainnan leaned on the parapet. Ribbons of black hair rained across his wide shoulders and down his tapered back, reaching to his belt. A sea-draft driving up the walls of the Tower lifted fibers of darkness across the winking stars—the weft from which night itself was woven.

He straightened, turning. He was looking down at Rohain.

Instantly, all her thought was swept away by intense emotion. Speech and movement became impossible under that pierching gaze. Every wish, every hope, had come true in front of her eyes. The sight of him, so often imagined, was hard to invest with reality. For so long had his image existed only in intangible form that she had become accustomed to knowing him as a dream, and could not at first believe what she saw.

As from a distance, a dark, strong voice said,

‘So, you came at last to Court, Gold-Hair.’

A response was required. Rohain’s numbed mind could prepare none. Mechanically, she murmured, ‘Yes.’ Her eyes remained wide, fastened on him steadily, drinking him in. The action of speech released her paralyzed thoughts.

‘Is it really you …?’ She faltered.

‘It is I.’

She must say something else, something to keep him here, for the longer he remained the more substantial he became.

‘I am glad to see you.’

The statement seemed so feeble an offering, compared with the intensity of feeling it represented—as if she’d held oceans in readiness to offer him and instead, through lack of expertise, had handed over only a spoonful of water.

‘And I you.’

Like Pod, he had known her immediately, despite the complete transformation, and yet he uttered no comment about her hair, her face, her voice.

‘How brightly the stars shine tonight,’ said he, turning again to look out at the spectacle. She, moving to his side, was now blind to the radiant glory of the glittering haze spread across the sky. Only, she was aware of a heat on her left where he stood, like the heat of a beacon-fire, pulsing warmth all down one side of her body while the other was chilled. And so they stood together looking outward, and the rising thermals caught their hair, making it flow out behind them, the dark locks mingling.

An hour passed, or it might have been half an hour, or a minute. It was not forever, although Rohain craved that it should be. Although they kept vigil in silence, it seemed to Rohain that a million words were traced upon the air. They hung there in runes of fire, slowly fading. It was unspeakable to be there beside Thorn at those moments. It was to fall into stars, to ride sky in a thunderstorm, to dance in a riot of jewels at a masquerade ball on the uttermost peak of an ice-mountain, to be swept up on the winds of shang.

‘I have searched long for you,’ Thorn said quietly at last. ‘Will you come with me to Court?’

‘I will.’ Terror and delight swarmed, fizzing like sweet and savage acid.

‘I want you to belong to me, and to no other.’ Just like that, with no preamble. She felt too stunned to ask questions.

‘That I do already. I will be yours for my life.’ Did he truly speak those words? Am I sane?

‘Do you swear it?’

‘Upon the Star, upon my life, upon anything you wish to name, I swear it.’

He held out his hand. She grasped a levin-bolt whose convulsion sizzled from fingers to feet.

‘Now we are troth-plighted,’ he said, as though he had noticed nothing about the effect of his touch. Indeed, she would swear he had felt nothing.

The sound of boots approached, crunching along the corridor. A group of Royal Legionaries came to the open doors. At the sight of the two on the balcony they dropped to their knees, heads bowed.

‘Speak,’ said Thorn.

‘Your Imperial Majesty,’ said the colonel, ‘the one we seek is here in the Tower—the Lady Rohain.’

‘You are too tardy to avail me,’ laughed Thorn, ‘for I have found her myself.’

Have I heard aright? The aftermath of the past day’s fear and exertion, which until now Rohain had subjugated, arose again and challenged her consciousness. It mingled with her exhilaration and terror, her pain and confusion. If she allowed it to overwhelm her, she would faint like some overcorseted courtier; it would sunder her from him and when she awoke he would be gone, because this could only be a cruel dream.

She hid her face in her hands. Tears trickled in a pewter rain between her fingers.

Someone caught her up in a hammock of thunder-webs and carried her along. The voice of Thorn, deep and musical, spoke. She could not properly understand the words, but soon a cup was placed in her hands, and she drank, and felt the effects of a sleeping-draft coursing through the pathways of her body. The walls fell in, one by one, and she tumbled in a circle.

Which closed over her head.

He was gone, after all.

Music sounded, heartbreakingly sweet and haunting; a piping that described an existence beyond mortal grasp, beyond knowledge, a prize to stretch out and yearn for, unreachable, and she, not knowing what it was, awoke crying because she could not follow.

The sleep-memory troubled her waking mind, and a clear young voice sang:

‘I’ll sing you nine-O. Heark, how the winds do blow!

What are your nine-O?

Nine for the Arts of Gramarye and eight for the notes of singing.

Seven for the riders in the sky and six for the gamblers’ flinging.

Five for the rings on my love’s hand and four for the seasons winging.

Three, three, the Chances,

Two, two the lovers’ hearts joined close together,

One is one and all alone and shall be so forever.’

It was a well-remembered voice, a linnet of a voice that softly sang that old song. It belonged to Caitri, the daughter of the Keeper of the Keys, a daydreamer given to composing ditties that she often hummed to herself. The child seemed oblivious of the world beyond her small horizon, but in fact was the opposite. She sat nearby, playing cat’s cradle as she sang. She was dressed in servants’ subfusc and smelled of orange blossom.

‘Did I dream again?’ Bemused, Rohain raised herself on one elbow. She found herself reclining on a sumptuous couch within a richly decorated, spacious room. In a wide hearth, a fire flamed like evanescent castles of light. The windows were obscured by lengthy velvet draperies emblazoned all over with the Stormrider device, but the curve of the outer wall betrayed the room’s status as a Tower chamber.

Young Caitri smiled, still half musing on her song.

‘What is dream and what is reality?’ she asked, philosophically, rhetorically, and somewhat pedantically for one so young. Such a childish face could not have weathered more than thirteen Winters.

‘Where are we?’

‘Your Ladyship is at the fortieth story, the most exalted level of the Tower, barring the somewhat cramped turret rooms. The apartments here shall henceforth bear the title “Royal Suites”, and all future guests shall wish to occupy them. I was called upon to attend Your Ladyship and right glad I am to escape, for a time, the sorrow of the misfortune that has descended upon the Seventh House.’

‘Your mother,’ said Rohain suddenly, ‘is she hale?’

‘Why yes, my lady,’ returned the child, frowning her puzzlement. ‘My mother escaped the scourge …’ She put aside her string game.

‘That is well. Now I must make myself presentable at once.’

‘Take refreshment, an it please you, lady—here are both victuals and drink. A bath awaits and raiment is laid out. My lady Heligea has gifted part of her own wardrobe, since Your Ladyship’s was destroyed by the Antlered One and his unseelie wights. Seamstresses have lengthened the hems in haste, while you slept. Methinks the colours of the Seventh House shall become you. Your Ladyship is to be received by His Majesty this very morning.’

‘Has the night passed already and is morning come? Where is the King-Emperor?’

‘I know not, m’lady. I have not yet beheld His Majesty. Since I was called I have been in a constant state of excitement in case I should happen to glimpse him.’

‘And Viviana?’

‘She was, in sooth, the one called to attend Your Ladyship but she asked me to take her place, since she cannot rid herself of siedo’s faithful stench.’

‘Caitri, I am glad it is you who came.’

‘Do you know me?’

‘Yes. I wist that you are worthy.’

‘I thank you, m’lady.’

‘I wist you show kindness to unfortunates, to outcasts.’

‘I suppose you mean Pod—that I treat him fairly.’

‘Oh, Pod—yes. A curious lad.’

‘Your Ladyship has seen him, then? Some say he has the Sight, you know.’

‘Indeed! That would explain much.’

‘And somewhat of a gift of prophecy. Yet it is sad, for part of his wit is lacking. Possessing such wondrous gifts, he is unable to use them profitably and is betimes erratic in his augury. Dine now, prithee, or I shall be taken to account for failing to sustain you. I can assure you, our chief cook had no part in the preparation. Confidentially, Rennet Thighbone is a slovenly one.’

‘What is the Sight, exactly?’ asked Rohain, picking up a cup of milk and honey. The girl’s talk distracted her from the one thought that churned around and around in her head, threatening to drive her to the brink of madness. She welcomed the distraction.

‘Well, I suppose it is the gift of seeing what is real. It is a rare talent—only a very few folk are born possessing it, although the Sight disregards all barriers of social distinction. The rest of us must try to find four-leafed clover, for when its leaves are carried, somewhat of the Sight is acquired, but not always full-blown, and only temporarily.’ After a pause, Caitri added, ‘Personally, I think Pod does not have the Sight. I suspect he possesses an extraordinary sense of smell, like animals, or some wights.’

Rohain sipped the drink but could barely swallow one mouthful. A tightness knotted the pit of her stomach. Her heart raced. What she had seen last night—was it true? Could she believe her eyes and ears, or had she been overcome with distress and fallen into a strange hallucination? And what had become of her companions on the road?

‘Tell me,’ she said to Caitri. ‘Featherstone and Pennyrigg, Ustorix and the rest who were with me when I rode out—have they returned?’

‘The servant of Master Zimmuth’s, he never returned. My lord Callidus was badly wounded. The others are all home and hale, m’lady, which is more than can be said for the many folk of all ranks who were slain or wounded within the Tower’s very walls. Truly, doom came among us, and had not the King-Emperor come to succor us we had all perished. ’Twill be long ere we forget.’

By the Powers, let my meeting with Thorn not be a mere delusion. If I ask the child and her words prove it an invention of my mind, I shall lose hope. Therefore I shall not ask her.

Rohain bathed. Her assistant helped her dress in Stormrider finery. The black armazine gown, equipped with long, tight sleeves that would have been considered screamingly out of mode at Court, was bordered at the collar, cuffs, and hem with wide bands of black ducape stitched with winged crescents in silver. Caitri pinned a scrollwork brooch at the throat. The folds of the sable cloak displayed richly patterned sarcenet linings, and it was fastened at the front by fine chains laced through small silver bosses at either side. A girdle stitched with silver thread in a diamond pattern on a black ground passed around Rohain’s waist at the back, but angled down to a V-shape at the front. The shoes were painstakingly embroidered with a pattern of tiny horses.

Dark tresses flowed rampant down Rohain’s back, still damp. Caitri raked them with a broken-toothed ivory-and-tortoiseshell comb, then fastened silver stars in the midnight cloud of them, and placed a spangled gauze veil over all, bound with a fillet encrusted with milk-crystals and tiny beads of jet.

‘They gave me this to put on you,’ she said, fastening a golden chain around Rohain’s neck. It was a new tilhal—three bunched hypericum leaves made of jade, clasped in gold.

‘Your Ladyship is indeed comely beyond the ordinary, as all have been saying,’ she continued gravely, naively unaware of her boldness. ‘His Majesty is certain to be pleased when my lady goes before him.’

‘Thank you. I am ready now. But I am frightened. I may have dreamed last night, but which is the more terrifying, to be awake or asleep, I know not.’

Sir Flint of the Third Thriesniun, with a clutch of footmen, escorted Rohain to where the King-Emperor presided in the Highest Solar. The fortieth floor was heavily guarded by men-at-arms, but all was calm and serene. It seemed that the evildoers had passed this level by, leaving it intact. Ensconced torches shed a warm light on drab wall-hangings. Their brilliance startling against the black and silver of the Seventh House, yeomen in scarlet-and-gold uniforms stood at every door and window, at every corner. The Royal Standard leaned from wall-brackets, the crowned lion flaunting its splendid colours.

At the door, the visitor’s heart galloped as the sentries uncrossed their halberds with due ceremony and allowed her to pass. A wave of dizziness passed over her and she was forced to pause for an instant. Caitri clutched at her elbow.

‘Is my lady hale?’ Sir Flint voiced his concern.

Rohain nodded.

Across an outer room, through another door. Diagonals of sunlight, mellow and pure as honey-mead, lanced in at the windows.

Rohain looked up. And there he stood, the King-Emperor.

Through the slashed sleeves of his velvet doublet—gold lions worked on a ground of deepest royal purple—black cambric shirtsleeves showed in soft, full gathers, tied at three points. A wide belt of goldwork clasped the calf-length doublet, which was slit at each side in the manner of the Dainnan tunic and worn open at the front to show the shirt. Its wide lapels, lined with black and gold samite, jutted at the shoulders to form a V with its point finishing at the waist, just above the belt. Black hose fitted closely to his thighs, tucking into knee-boots turned back at the tops. His cloak, thrown back, flared in many folds from his shoulders. Made from purple velvet, it was worked in crowns and heraldic designs both black and gold, and lined with inky satin. His mane of dark hair spilled from beneath a simple low-crowned cap bearing three soft shadowy plumes.

All this finery could not in any way make him foppish; rather, he was magnificent, clad in splendor as rich and somber as a Summer’s evening. His vitality filled the hall as though all light, all darkness radiated from him.

At Rohain’s entrance, he regarded her without speaking. Viviana had schooled her in how to meet royalty. Like the servant girl, like the warriors flanking her, she dropped to her knees, bowing her head, noticing with intense clarity the detail of the skyriding design on the slightly worn rugs. This was one of the fringed, hooked rugs she had once been accustomed to punishing, in order to free the dust from it. In a detached way, she wondered who was privileged to undertake that job these days and whether they did it as well as she had.

A weight seemed to be pressing upon her eyelids. Soon she would have to look at him, but it would seem an impossible task.

She waited for him to speak.

Two hands lifted her gently to her feet. Their touch was lightning.

‘I’ll warrant thou wouldst be more comfortable sitting by me.’ The voice—rich, tempered, and flawlessly enunciated—a lion’s growl. She breathed the cinnamon incense of his presence.

He conducted her to one of two chairs at the head of a table, and seated himself beside her. The table was furnished with a pile of parchments like desiccated leaves, paper-knives with ebony handles, seal containers, red candles, a horn-handled knife, a twist of thin cord, pheasant-quill pens in a silver tray, and inkwells of cold, translucent onyx.

A timid page took a small key and unreeled the taper of a wax-jack on a little silver stand. He trimmed the wick with a pair of pointed snuffers and tremulously lit it, fumbling with the tinderbox.

Thorn’s existence was like a terrible furnace flaming at Rohain’s side. She was dimly aware that others were present in the hall—great lords, Roxburgh among them, all standing, facing Thorn. Caitri folded her hands neatly to hide her nervousness at being in the presence of the King-Emperor, and arranged herself against the wall where several pages and wigged footmen made bas-reliefs of themselves in scarlet duretty and gold frogging. High on a pelmet, the goshawk Errantry sat dozing, sometimes nervously flicking his tail from side to side. A whitewash of his mutes streaked and splattered the curtains below, as well as any footmen who happened to be standing in the vicinity. One or two hawk-casts decorated the floor with indigestible bits of bone and feather. Errantry opened one fierce eye and closed it again.

‘Fear not,’ Thorn whispered to Rohain. She found courage to return his smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said loudly, ‘here is the Lady Rohain for whom we have all sought high and low.’

Still standing, the lords bowed their heads: Richard of Esgair Garthen, Lord High Sea Admiral; Octarus Ogier, Lord High Chieftain of Stormriders; Durand Rivenhall, Lord High Chancellor; Istoren Giltornyr, Lord High Sky Admiral; John Drumdunach, Lord High Commander of the Royal Guard. Thorn introduced the chiefest among them by name to the lady at his side, then dismissed them, along with his Private Secretary, his pages and stewards, the guards, and all the other lords and servants, excepting Caitri. He bade the little girl wait in the anteroom.

Rohain sat utterly still, except that a slight tremor ran through her.

‘And now thou shalt want to ask some questions,’ Thorn said. ‘Dost thou wish to use handspeak? Hast thou lost thy tongue again? I confess, I was enjoying the novelty of hearing thy voice.’

She laughed then, joyously.

<<No, I have not lost my speaking,>> she signed, now at ease.

<<Speak, then!>> his hands signaled.

‘Thorn,’ she said, savoring the name. ‘Thorn. Your Dainnan name. That is, Your Majesty’s Dainnan name.’

‘Gold-Hair,’ he said, ‘it is hardly necessary to address me like that. Or,’ he added, ‘to collapse upon the floor when approaching me. Didst thou not pledge thyself to me last night?’

‘I did, sir, and most readily.’

‘Now thou must learn to be our betrothed, rather than a commoner who brazenly declares herself a lady. It is meet that thou shouldst become accustomed to bearing thyself like the future Queen.’

Her courage returned. ‘You know all? But how? Did you know I was residing at Court? Why did I not see you? How may a Dainnan be King?’

‘Here come the questions, all of a tumble,’ he said, amused. ‘But I shall start the tale at the beginning.’

‘Oh, but before you do,’ she said quickly, basking in his proximity as if it were Summer sunshine, ‘I wish to ask you to spare the life of a man imprisoned in your dungeons, condemned to death. His name—’

‘He is pardoned, from this moment, whatever his name might be. Now hearken, while I tell the tale. Art thou paying heed?’

‘No. I am looking at thee …’

Boldly, as though parched and drinking, her eyes travelled over the wiredrawn, flowing lines of his silhouette, the honed planes of his face, stern and laughing at the same time, full of strength, the jawline faintly shadowed with a dark tint, the arch of his throat interrupted by the subtle shadow of the round tumescence midway, and the hollow at the confluence of the collarbone.

His every movement was as graceful and confident as a lion in its prime, his demeanor relaxed yet poised, with the assurance that at need he, as a skilled fighter, could react with speed and power, and there would be only conquest. This time she tried to memorize his flawless beauty. The moment would be ephemeral, as was the wont of moments, and he would vanish soon. Rare beauty, by nature, must be ephemeral. Without that sting it is no longer rare. But I wish, oh I wish it were not so. I wish that he might endure forever.

‘And I am studying thee,’ he replied, ‘and I hope to do so more often and more thoroughly at my leisure. But if thou regard’st men in that manner, thou shalt drive them mad.’

‘Well, you deserve to be driven mad, sir, for you have already done so to me.’

‘Now thou must needs hold conversation with me from the other side of the room,’ he said, flame-eyed. ‘Else thou might provoke me to encompass and invade thee, here, at this instant.’

‘In that case,’ she answered breathlessly, ‘I remain.’

He regarded her with a strange softness, almost sadness.

‘Half child, half woman as thou art. For thee, virtuous maiden,’ he said, ‘there would be no rightness in that. Not yet.’

She forced herself to look away, suddenly understanding; there were rules that could not be abrogated, at this place, at this time, in this century, in Erith.

‘You must turn your back on me,’ Rohain commanded the King-Emperor of Erith, knowing him well enough to dare light banter, exulting in the play of words between them and the fragile power she wielded, while still unable to believe it was all true. ‘Turn your back, whilst you tell me the tale. But look not askance! Ever since I saw you for the first time I have longed to comb my fingers through your hair.’

He complied, laughing, sprawling back in the chair and stretching out his long legs. She let the dark veils of his locks flow over her fingertips and was amazed, that the very stuff of midnight could lie soft within her own hands, that what she touched was actually of him; he for whom she had ached throughout eternities.

He spoke.

‘Through the glades of Tiriendor I roved in Dainnan fashion, which is my wont when it pleases me, and when needs must. For, Gold-Hair, a good sovereign must gauge the state of his realm, and what better way than to explore it unmarked? Several, of my chief lords and advisors are persistently alarmed at this habit, and I must forever persuade them it is safer in the greenwood than in the wilderness of Court where poisonous vipers await the turning of every back.

‘I had long studied thee and thy companion, Captain Bruadair, ere thou didst meet with me. I was drawn to thee,’ he said. ‘In thee there burned a passion, right from the first moment—a passion of such intensity as I have never encountered. Thou dost possess a capacity for joyousness and for deep sorrow that bedims the torpid ardencies of others. The crests and troughs of their fervour are but the fickle waves of the ocean, whereas thine are like an island mountain, whose head lifts among the clouds, whose foundations are buried, far below on the ocean floor. Thou wouldst try to withhold thy fire, but such duplicity was beyond thy means. When it came time for us to part, I was already lost. Thou wouldst not accompany me then, but I was eager to bring thee to my side if not sooner, then later.’

‘Did it hurt you that I would not go with you?’ Rohain asked, surprised. Her heart leapt like a deer.

‘Hurt? To a degree. Only as a sword piercing the heart. Thou art kissing my hair.’

‘Even so.’ The strands were silk, lying across her mouth.

‘When thou didst hasten to the carlin’s house,’ he said, ‘I ordered guards to be stationed around it, to protect thee, to bring thee to me when your errand was completed. They were to be discreet.’

‘The watchers—they were men of yours?’

‘They were. I ought to have used Dainnan, but I did not suppose that thou wouldst try to slip through my net.’

She said hesitantly, ‘I was a servant here, once.’ Will he now reject me? He merely nodded, as if it did not matter. Her spirits immeasurably encouraged, she went on: ‘I escaped and found the wealth of Waterstair. For the sake of it, others wanted me to keep silence. They hounded me. And in Gilvaris Tarv I sought a cure for paradox ivy from the wizard Korguth. It failed and I thought he pursued me to take revenge for his own ill deed. I believed your men watching Maeve’s cottage to be those who hunted me for evil purpose.’

‘Why didst thou not enlighten me concerning your pursuers before we went our separate ways?’ he asked, his modulated, laughing tones threaded with a hint of gentle exasperation.

‘Why did you not declare your heart’s truth?’ she parried.

‘I asked thee to come with me—is that not enough?’

‘It was not plain to me. But you tell me plainly now.’

‘Because thou hold’st back thine own truth no longer. Thou speakest with thine eyes at last. And thy tongue. And because I would not lose thee a second time.’

Her heart seemed to melt like glass in the fire of his intent. ‘Now I do not fear to have you look upon my face. You read now in my eyes that which has long been written in my heart.’

‘Thou with thy secret commission to Caermelor—had you but confided to me this tale of treasure-troves, thou hadst saved thyself a deal of toil,’ he mocked gently.

‘I was to impart the tale only to the King-Emperor!’

‘And thus ’tis proven that thou hast that rare quality—thou canst guard a secret well. Wilt thou guard thine affairs so readily now that thou hast found thy tongue?’

He laughed. A sudden wave of concern swept through Rohain. There was another secret … Should he become aware of her strange history as an amnesiac foundling would he recoil from her? Yet he asked nothing of the past. For him, the present seemed sufficient. Indeed, what could that history matter?

‘But tell me,’ she said, ‘why did your guards not simply knock at Maeve’s door and announce that the King-Emperor summoned me?’

‘Thou mightst well have refused, as thou didst once before!’

‘I could hardly refuse my sovereign …’

‘So thou sayest, but how could I have known? Then thou didst disappear. Only once before in my life have I been thwarted so thoroughly. There arose a violent anger in my heart that this should have come to pass, that I should lose thee. All those around me suffered from my rage, which was caused by thee!’

‘Say no more!’ She tugged playfully at his hair.

‘No, thou canst not injure me now,’ he lightly teased.

‘It was not my fault!’

‘Dost thou gainsay me?’ he said, feigning to chide her. ‘When thou didst alter everything about thy appearance and demeanor, thy mode of communication, calling thyself by another name and coming right into my house, which is the last place I would look for thee, while the town criers were bellowing at every gate in the city, morning, noon, and night, to proclaim the King-Emperor’s command that anyone who sees a yellow-haired wench called Imrhien should bring her to him instantly, on pain of imprisonment?’

‘I heard them shouting, but I never heeded the words.’

‘They cannot be heard distinctly from the palace, unless the wind is in the right quarter. Which I had always counted pleasant, since their rantings are tiresome.’

‘Did you have them looking for a yellow-haired wench of exquisite ugliness?’

‘No. Thou hadst told me that thou didst want to alter that condition, therefore thou wert bound for the carlin at White Down Rory.’

‘Yet in the beginning, how could you warm to someone so ill-made?’

He turned his beautiful head and gave her a measuring look.

‘Gold-Hair,’ he said, ‘I have already told thee.’

‘Did you see my ugliness?’

‘I saw it. I saw thee.’

‘How did you recognise me last night?’

‘I say again, I saw thee. Thine inner worth.’

It was said that the D’Armancourt line was set apart from ordinary mortalkind by some puissance of the blood. Likely, that included the Sight; the ability to perceive what lay beneath masks. Thorn looked away, and Rohain resumed her combing. A wonderful silence linked them, filled with unspoken words. May the Powers of all realms grant that time shall now stand still.

‘I want for nothing now,’ she said presently.

‘Thou shalt change thy mind, in time, as is the wont of women.’

‘I shall not!’ She smiled at his banter.

‘Dost thou not wish to hear the rest of the story?’

‘I do!’

‘Behold! Thou hast changed it already.’

The goshawk shifted on his perch, shook out his wings, and glided down in a lazy spiral to land upon the back of Rohain’s chair. She reached up. Decorously, he nibbled at her hand. Thorn raised his arm and Errantry flew to alight on the leather bracer encircling his wrist. Absently, Thorn stroked the bird’s barred plumage.

‘We could not find thee,’ he said. ‘Your red cockerel of a friend at Isenhammer knew nothing. When there was no sign of thee by Imbroltide, we began in earnest to seek the carlin of White Down Rory.’

‘I dined in the same hall as you at Imbrol!’

‘Alas, that I was unaware of it! My eyes searched beyond the palace walls on that night, my sweet thief of quietude.’

‘And my eyes did not search at all! What of Maeve?’

‘Her cottage was discovered empty.’

‘Empty! Where had she gone?’

‘Curiously, she was nowhere to be found, even though the Dainnan and the most proficient of trackers sought her, and messengers were sent to every land. Then we had to depart for the fields of battle. We had tarried too long because of my quest for thee, but the need grew pressing. During my absence the search continued.

‘One evening, afar off in northern Eldaraigne, I was riding out with Roxburgh under the early stars, not far from where our troops were bivouacked. In conversation we chanced to look skywards, which turned us to the topic of beauty. My Lord High Field-Marshal of the Dainnan let slip the fact that a certain beauteous young damsel who had brought tidings of treasure to Caermelor had arrived masked. She had been unaware of particular aristocratic protocols and furthermore had recounted a strange story of traveling in the wilderness with a wild Ert by the kenning of ‘The Bear’. That sobriquet had once before come to my ears.’

Rohain recalled a conversation by a campfire, Diarmid saying to Thorn: ‘When I was a lad, I used to trade words with my—with my uncle.’

To augment his statement, she had signed, <<Once I heard Sianadh word-fighting, against some wicked men. He won.>>

‘He always won. Ertishmen are famous for their skill with words; Finvarna is the birthplace of most of the greatest bards. But the Bear could outspar even his own countrymen.’

High in Isse Tower, Thorn again turned the implicit barrage of his gaze upon her.

‘I knew then that this “Rohain Tarrenys of the Sorrows” was thee—changed, healed, as thou hadst desired. “Rohain” was a name recently brought to my attention at Court. Ercildoune had once or twice bothered me with it. They had described the lady as dark-haired. That thou didst go disguised was proof enough that thou didst fear some imminent peril.’

‘Swee-swit,’ said the goshawk, dulcet, picking up strands of Thorn’s hair in his curved beak.

‘Within the hour we departed from the battlefields. The best of our troops rode the skies beside us in haste to Caermelor, with more speed than any Relayer. We were too late—already the Lady of the Sorrows had reached Isse Tower. Pausing only to take fresh eotaurs, we left Caermelor at noon two days since, and rode nonstop, by day and night, arriving here as the festivities of the Antlered One were in full swing.’

‘Oh, happy chance! Had you not done so, there must have been massacre on an appalling scale.’

‘In that battle, I went through every blood-splashed hall and stair in this worm-bitten pillar, and my sword Arcturus sang metal’s song of death as I wielded him, smiting unseelie heads. Yet, thou hadst once again glided away like sand through my fingers, confounding me. Never to me has woman proved so elusive. No sense could be got out of the incoherent servitors and lords of Isse until at last one of them gathered his wits for long enough to inform me that thou wert away to Huntingtowers and might be lying slain upon the road. Roxburgh, who was already mounted, rode out forthwith. I, about to depart, was compelled to turn back. Someone said they had seen thee in the kitchens. A servant who was sent to bring thee returned, reporting that thou wert nowhere to be found, but that thou wert here, safe, somewhere, and many other folk confirmed his report. The Tower seethed with folk, but it was secure and I knew I should find thee again, sooner or later. I knew it at last.’

He was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Who, at Court, guessed thee as Talith?’

‘Only the Lady Dianella.’

‘Say further.’

‘I told her I was looking for a Dainnan called Thorn. Is your Dainnan name commonly known among the courtiers?’

‘As well-known as Roxburgh’s “Oak” and Ercildoune’s “Ash”. That lady connives to be Queen, and brooks no rivals. Constantly she flaunts her charms, like the rest, but she is assisted by her plotting uncle who wishes to lever her on the throne and puppet her on his strings. I would hazard she heard the town criers’ proclamations. Her kind hang on their every word in the hope of scandal. Hearing that thou didst search for me and I for thee, that jealous deceiver would have found it necessary to ask no further questions. I’ll warrant she and the wizard swiftly planned your downfall, before I could discover thee.’

‘Dianella told me to leave Caermelor.’

‘I suspect she did so in order that thy demise might occur at a less inconvenient location, and the blame would be looked for elsewhere!’ His face darkened. ‘Those who cross me are punished.’

A cloud passed across the sun. Shadows rushed in and dammed the room like thin, dark waters.

Thorn seized a curl of paper and a quill-pen from the table, trimming its point with a porcelain-handled penknife. Dipping the point in ink, he dashed off a missive, blotted it dry, rolled the parchment and tied it with cord, dripped wax from a candle and impressed it with the seal-ring he had not been wearing in the wilderness. Calling to Caitri, he directed her to deliver it to one of the messengers waiting outside the door. When she had departed, he resumed his nonchalant position in the chair, reclining on one elbow.

‘But surely,’ said Rohain earnestly, ‘Dianella could not guess that the Tower was to be assailed by the Hunt!’

‘One would suppose not,’ said Thorn thoughtfully. ‘She and her uncle must have prepared some other method of ridding themselves of you, had not Huon intervened.’

Rohain thought: What a curious coincidence, that the Hunt should choose to assail this fortress precisely at the time of my visit here … And then a hand of ice was laid upon her vitals, bestowing a suspicion so terrible she hardly dared to speak it aloud. Could the wizard Sargoth possibly wield enough power to summon the Wild Hunt? Worse: if he had not summoned it, then who had? And what had the Antlered One hunted for, besides destruction?

Thorn said, ‘Didst thou tell the Lady Dianella aught of the carlin?’

‘I did!’ replied Rohain in consternation. ‘Cry mercy! Have I endangered the old woman’s life? Dianella and her uncle, guessing that Maeve was party to knowledge of Rohain Tarrenys’s true identity, might have tried to silence her! Yet surely, mortal men—even the, Lord High Wizard’s men—could never trace Maeve One-Eye unless she wished it.’

‘In truth, Gold-Hair. Yet they were not mortal men who went after her.’

‘Then she must be rescued!’

‘She shall be, you may believe it.’

‘Yet I cannot credit that Sargoth has anything of gramarye at his fingertips, to force unseelie wights to obey him. All his vaunted tricks are only hocus-pocus.’

Thorn plucked a loop of light out of the air and waved it over his shoulder.

‘Is that hocus-pocus?’

She laughed. ‘A trick, yes—I’ll vouch that it was concealed in your sleeve! I am no country lass from Rosedale, to be gulled by sleight-of-hand!’

The shining thing was a small circle of golden leaves spangled with white gems that glittered, having somehow imprisoned the brilliance of stars within their depths. Thorn pulled down Rohain’s narrow wrist, printed a kiss on it, and slid the leaf-ring upon her finger. Each axonal fiber along her arm turned to hot wire.

‘Thou distract’st me, ever, from the tale,’ he said, without relinquishing her hand. ‘My imagination strays. Thou couldst never understand how difficult it is to remain thus, seemingly unmoved.’

‘Whither do thy thoughts wander?’

He leaned back and whispered in her ear. She murmured a reply. The goshawk, screaming, jumped into the air and flapped around the room, scattering a few loose, downy feathers.

‘Out, scapegrace!’ said his master, and the bird flew through the window. Thorn rose from the chair. Drawing Rohain to her feet, he followed the hawk to the embrasure. They stood close together, she intensely aware of the light pressure of his arm against her shoulder as they looked out through the archway across a wide land and the curve of a dazzling sea.

Thorn leaned his left hand upon the window-frame. It was long-fingered and strong. Around the ring-finger glinted a thin band—three golden hairs, twisted together.

He has kept the token he seized from me! Ah, what would it be like to wake in the night and see him lying against me, hair rayed out upon the pillow, dark lashes fanned upon his cheek, as soft as a sleeping child’s?

Below, high in the abyss, the hawk floated.

‘Let us speak no more of the past,’ murmured Thorn. ‘Few yellow leaves, or none, cling upon the boughs; stark, dismantled choirs where erst the birds of Summer sang,’ he said, possibly quoting. ‘But the dark days of Winter are not unremitting, and clouds have drawn apart on this day to let the sun shine on our contentment.’

‘As welcome as sunshine is, storm and wind and rain have their beauty also,’ said Rohain, recalling the rain in the Forest of Tiriendor. ‘Each season has a virtue to recommend it; not least Winter.’

‘I’ faith, I concur! Fain would I be without these walls, and soon we shall be, for we ride this day to Caermelor.’

‘By land or sky?’

‘By sky. On the wing. Fear’st thou that?’ The glance he bestowed on her seemed to fill her bones with water. Her legs would scarcely hold her up.

‘On the contrary,’ she replied, ‘I look to it with eagerness! But stay—before I depart from this place, I must first render them aid. Destruction and death have been brought down on innocents. My own apartments were wrecked, although the raiders left this level untouched.’

‘Not much was destroyed elsewhere, save flesh and bone. Thy lodgings were the worst ravaged. Other inorganic damage was incidental to their more vile pursuits. Among my men there are dyn-cynnils, an apothecary, and other flesh-tailors. As we speak they tend the wounded of Isse, regardless of rank or birth. I myself have recently walked among the injured and to me it seems there is none so badly hurt as will not recover fully. My physicians shall bide here until their work is done. To Caermelor we shall ride without further ado, I insist. There shall our betrothal be announced, and thou shalt meet Prince Edward.’

A pure, resonant strum went through and through Rohain. She managed to say, ‘I approach that meeting with delight.’

‘A ball shall be held in thine honour, if that should please thee. Should it?’

‘If we should dance the gavotte, as before.’

‘To synchronize with thee is joyousness, no matter the choreography, caileagh faoileag,’ he said lightly.

‘Once before you called me that name. What is its meaning?’

‘“Beloved bird of the sea”. The white bird of freedom is an ocean wanderer. It touches no land for seven years in its voyages around the world, flying over vast tracts of open ocean without landmarks. This fairest, most elusive of winged navigators travels far before it finds its rest.’

At the back of her mind, a thread snapped, but only a thread. Rohain glanced at her left wrist. Moon-pearls and jet-like chips of black ice embraceleted it, in their setting of white metal; a borrowed trinket of Heligea’s. They were not what she had looked for.

‘Now I have been called a butterfly and a bird,’ she said. ‘And Rohain.’

‘Which means “beautiful”. Each of us has many names. I have the privilege of possessing such a string of them as might arguably stretch from here to Namarre.’

‘And one,’ she said, ‘is James.’

He took her hand. The jolt shook her arm to the shoulder socket.

‘Oh!’ she said, shivering. ‘You take my breath away. Your touch has some alchemy in it.’

‘Think’st thou, indeed? Dost thou tolerate it?’

‘It is like a shock, but sweeter than anything I have ever endured.’

‘How canst thou be certain it is I and not thee who generates it?’

A silver trumpet sang loudly, somewhere in the machicolations close above. A distant fleck in the southeast shaped itself into a Stormrider.

‘A Relayer from Caermelor,’ said Thorn. ‘And we must tarry no longer. The day matures. Art thou able to be ready to depart before noon, Distraction? The hour is not far away.’

‘Easily.’

Rohain called for Caitri. A rattle as of small hard objects scattering upon the floor came from the outer room where she waited—the resourceful child had been playing at knucklebones and at the summons had dropped them.

‘At your service, my lady.’

Caitri, kneeling, had not yet overcome awe sufficiently to glance at her sovereign.

‘Tell Viviana to be ready to leave at noon.’

‘At once, my lady.’

‘And send a messenger to Roxburgh. I would confer with the Attriod,’ said Thorn.

‘Your Majesty,’ whispered the maid. Rising, she backed out of the chamber without lifting her eyes.

‘I am fond of that child,’ said Rohain. ‘May I ask her if she would like to accompany us?’

‘There is nothing thou needs must ask for. All is thine—take it.’

Still clasping her hand, he led her back to the table.

‘Is there nought else thou wouldst take from this chimney stack that once housed thee, besides a half-fledged chick?’

His hair held the subtle fragrance of cedar or perhaps wild thyme. Submerged by the barely leashed potency of him, Rohain wrenched her attention away. She recalled a dressing-table in the suite where she had slept on the previous night—one of the many apartments on the fortieth story that had escaped the depredations of the unseelie vandals. The fringed aulmoniere containing Maeve’s swan’s feather reposed there. Beside it lay the crimson vial of Dragon’s Blood—Thorn’s gift, unchained from around her neck when she had bathed. It had been neglected in the amazement of the morning.

‘Yes, there is something. I shall fetch it myself, and return in a trice.’

He raised her hand to his lips. Over it, he studied her with speculative tenderness.

‘Your kiss is fire,’ she murmured, blushing.

‘Burn, then.’

‘I do not want to leave your side, even for a trice.’

‘Remain, then.’

‘Soon, forever. Now I must go.’

He relinquished her hand. Someone’s knuckles rapped at the outer door. Thorn bade the door-knocker enter, and Rohain fled. Outside in the passageway, a convocation of tall lords stood aside, bowing respectfully, to let her pass. She inclined her head in acknowledgment of their salutes.

In the dressing-chamber a slight figure jerked its head up when she entered in a flurry of silver and black. The dressing-table was bereft of all accoutrements save a bowl and ewer.

‘Pod! What are you doing here? Where are my purse and vial?’

‘I don’t know,’ he rapped out, rather implausibly.

‘You have them. Give them to me, please.’

He backed away, his hands concealed behind him.

‘Prithee, Pod.’

The lad’s eyes slid from side to side, like loosely strung beads.

‘Such as you,’ he said in a stilted voice, ‘such as you and such as he shall never find happiness together.’

‘Say not that!’ shouted Rohain vehemently. ‘Take it back! Wish me well instead. Say it is not so!’

‘It is so.’

‘A king may marry a commoner—why not? He may marry whomsoever he chooses! Why do you hate me?’

‘I hate all of you.’

‘Do you not wish to find friendship?’

‘No.’

She lunged at him, hoping to catch him off guard and retrieve her belongings. He dodged past, skipping lopsidedly to the door and out.

‘Take your pessimistic prophecies hence, base villain!’ she cried after him. ‘They are false, in any event. Never speak to me again!’

She sat before the looking-glass and wiped away a few glassy tears that trembled in her eyes. Pod’s prediction had disturbed her deeply. He had stolen the swan’s feather and the Dragon’s Blood, but it no longer seemed to matter.

A reek of siedo-pods preceded Viviana into the chamber.

‘My lady! I am ready to return. I cannot wait to leave this miserable place.’

‘Stay back, please!’ Rohain held a lace kerchief to her nose.

‘There is no ridding oneself of it,’ mourned the lady’s maid.

Her mistress waved her away. ‘Ask Caitri and Pennyrigg and Featherstone and Brand Brinkworth the Storyteller whether they would like to accompany the King-Emperor to Court and abide there. All who wish to do so must assemble at Royal Squadron Level by noon.’

Viviana fluttered from the room. Rohain returned to the Highest Solar, before whose door a second crowd milled. Saluting, murmuring, the concourse parted to allow her through. Silver-and-black hat-hedges lined her path. A daunting assembly of lords and attendants now filled the hall, with the King-Emperor at its focus. All fell silent at Rohain’s entrance. Boldly she walked to the window embrasure where once again he stood, framed against the sky, with Errantry positioned on his shoulder. Yes, let them witness how it was.

Smiling that brilliant smile which left her weak, he kissed her hand.

‘Our business here is concluded. And so to horse,’ he added to the assembly at large.

They led a procession from the hall. Due to his stature, Thorn’s cloak was full-yarded enough to billow from his shoulders like a great banner; as he walked its edges flicked the denizens of the Tower in the passageway, who had shrunk to pilose dwarf borders, having removed their hats and fallen to their knees.

There was a stirring in the stones. The procession halted abruptly when Thorn sidestepped, reached into the bruised shadows of a gouge in the wall, and pulled out a small, yelping figure that stank like a goat-pen. Pod quailed, weakly flapping against Thorn’s grip like a half-dead fish on a hook.

‘Knave!’ said Thorn sternly. ‘Think you that you can spy on us, hidden, as you erroneously believed?’

Pod hung limply, sullenly.

‘Speak!’

The lad pointed an accusing finger.

‘She told me not to speak.’

‘What?’ roared Thorn. ‘Have you been troubling the Lady Rohain? I might have your shape shifted to that of a viper’s liver and feed you to my hawk.’

‘No, no!’ squealed Pod pathetically. To Rohain, he looked such a miserable, scrawny thing that compassion and deflection seemed the only possible reaction.

‘He has not—’ she began then broke off. He has been troubling me. I would not accuse him, but neither would I lie, especially to Thorn. There have been too many lies, since my tongue was loosened.

‘Any past wrongs are forgiven,’ said she. ‘He is able, conceivably, to be an amiable lad.’

‘He does not look so,’ said Thorn. ‘Get yourself some clean clouts, lurker, and a courteous tongue in your head.’

He released the boy, who unclotted to a nerveless blob and subsided against the wall.

They moved on.

A phalanx of footmen in mustard livery edged with silver braid stood to attention in straight lines, their gloved hands knotted behind their backs. Saddled and ready, eotaurs cluttered the upper gatehalls with the jangle of their flying-gear and the ring of sildron against stone. Their warm breath scented the air like a harvest.

Lord Ustorix, with Lady Heligea at his elbow, took leave of the King-Emperor and his entourage. The Son of the House croaked his farewells, hoarse with some kind of pent-up emotion.

‘Your Majesty has honoured our humble abode by this visit and by the succor Your Majesty has bestowed on Your Majesty’s undeserving subjects. May Your Majesty and the Lady Rohain ride with the wind at your backs.’ In his pompous efforts at civility he seemed to be tying clove-hitches with his tongue

Thorn nodded and leapt astride his steed, thrusting his boots down between the rustling wings and the smooth flanks.

‘Lord Ustorix, are you quite recovered from your ordeal?’ inquired Rohain.

‘No complaint shall escape my lips, most exalted lady,’ he answered with studied fortitude.

‘Until you are, I recommend that Heligea take over your Relayer duties. She is adept at riding sky. In fact, I suggest that she should Relay as often as she wishes.’

A murmur of surprise ran through the gathered Household of the Isse Tower. Heligea’s grin of triumph eclipsed the scowl of dismay her brother tried to conceal with a low bow.

The sun, at the keypoint of its arch, hung at the centre of the sky’s dome. The Imperial Flight, a fleet of some three score mighty Skyhorses, burst from an upper gatehall. Banking to the southwest, they formed an arrowhead and passed away to the distance like charcoaled galleons slowly sinking beneath an azure ocean.

5

CAERMELOR PART III

Fire and Fleet

If you are the lantern, I am the flame;

If you are the lake, then I am the rain;

If you are the desert, I am the sea;

If you are the blossom, I am the bee;

If you are the fruit, then I am the core;

If you are the rock, then I am the ore;

If you are the ballad, I am the word;

If you are the sheath, then I am the sword.

LOVE SONG OF SEVERNESSE

Viviana and Caitri rode pillion. They had no experience in riding sky, and onhebbing the eotaur flying-gear was too delicate an art for beginners to master. The sliding of andalum chain-plate along the inner courses of the sildron girth-strap to gain or lose altitude took skill born of practice. For the duration of the illicit skyride that had so disjointed the nose of her brother, Heligea—who had secretly practiced for years—had onhebbed like a professional. Rohain, however, had exhibited the clumsiness of the novice. Yet this was not the reason Rohain now rode sideways behind Thorn, her arms encircling the wood-hardness of his waist, watching the world dissolve into the flying thunderwrack of his hair.

She leaned against him, almost paralyzed by the exquisite sensation. Later, she could not recall much of that ride save an impression of a storm-whipped shore and a seashell tossed on a dark tide.

Three miles out from Caermelor, the riders heard distant trumpets blare. Watchmen on the heights had recognised their approach. A mile from the city, the cloud of hugely beating wings began to lose altitude on its long, low final descent. The eotaurs came in over the palace walls, their feathered fetlocks barely clearing the crenellations. They hovered like giant dragonflies over the baileys, churning the air with a backwash as thunderous as a hurricane. From the courtyards below, hats and straw and dust swirled in a chaotic porridge. The cavalcade landed with flawless precision.

Equerries ran to slip off the sildron hoof-crescents and lead away the Skyhorses, to unsaddle them and scrape the sweat from their gleaming flanks, to preen and water and treat the steeds like pampered lords and ladies. Servants hurried to meet the riders, to bear away the jewel-backed riding-gloves they stripped from their hands, to offer fluted cups of wines and cordials. The splendid foot-guards of the Household Division formed two ceremonial columns, creating a human arcade leading to the palace doors. Flowers had been strewn along the cobblestones. Along this arcade walked their sovereign and the dark-haired lady.

As the couple entered the doors of the palace, a slender young man stood upon the flagstones, barring their way. He seemed, in fact, no more than a youth—not much older than Caitri; fourteen or fifteen Summers, a sprout-chinned adolescent. His black hair was impeccably bound into a long horsetail, framing a face that was pale, serious, comely. He bowed briefly to Thorn—a look of understanding flashed between them—and regarded Rohain quizzically from behind soot-coloured eyelashes.

There was no need for introductions.

Rohain performed a deep, gracious curtsey. The youth pronounced her current name in the crack-pitched tones of his years and she replied with his royal title. Then they regarded one another. Rohain glimpsed a flicker of what lay behind the starched facade and smiled.

‘I am joyed to greet you.’

‘And I you,’ he said guardedly, but he smiled too and added, ‘well come.’

The Heir Apparent stood aside, that the King-Emperor and Rohain might enter first.

The rooms of Rohain’s suite burned with frost and flame. Snowy plaster moldings of milky grapes and vine-leaves twined across the ceilings. Brilliant garlands of flowers had been woven into pure white carpets, upon which stood carmine couches and ottomans. A pale marble chimneypiece was drizzled with sparkling ornaments of ruby red glass. Between the casement windows stretched tall mirrors, polished to perfection.

In one of the three bedchambers—vermilion-carpeted—there stood a bed whose canopy was supported on massive pillars of mahogany. It was hung with curtains of crimson damask embroidered with an interlocking pattern of clover, over and over. The table at the foot of the bed was muffled in a blood-red cloth. The walls had been painted a soft cream colour with a blush of rose in it, and around them were arranged several clothes-chests, lace-draped tables upholding jewel-caskets and chairs of dark, polished mahogany. A tall cushioned chair had been placed near the head of the bed, with a footstool before it.

The main dressing-room was sumptuously over-furnished with looking-glasses. Boxes on the dressing-table contained numbers of miniature compartments and drawers to hold trinkets and jewellery, with further mirrors fitted to the undersides of the lids, which could be propped open, in case one didn’t see enough of oneself elsewhere. In the writing-room, an impressive ink-stand with a double lid and a central handle dominated the polished jarrah escritoire.

Long fingers of windows, half-disguised by festoons and falls of wine-coloured velvet, looked out upon the Winter Garden where crystal wind-chimes had been tied to the boughs, ringing soft and pure, in random melody. Between the green cones of the cypress pines, cornelian fires sprang from high stone dishes, admiring their own fervent lucidity in tarnished ponds.

This, Viviana informed Rohain, was the Luindorn Suite—a vast and exquisitely furnished apartment usually reserved for state visitors.

After breakfast, two height-matched footmen skilled in the art of unobtrusiveness wheeled out the dining trolley and melted quietly away. Caitri, who had rung for them, leaned wide-eyed from a sitting-room window as though she might presently shift to a linnet’s shape and fly out into the sky. She appeared oblivious of Rohain and Viviana, who sat head to head, deep in conversation.

‘My lady,’ said Viviana, ‘that you have found favour in the King-Emperor’s eyes is advantageous for us both. As long as his favour lasts, we can never be Cut. As for your secret history of service in Isse Tower, why, you can depend on me never to divulge it to anyone. See, you have become a lady after all! I have but one concern—this dresser who has been assigned to you, and this footman also. What next? There is talk that you are to have a noblewoman as your own bodyservant! Are my services to be dispensed with?’

‘Of course not. You are to remain as my maid, if you wish it, as I do. And there are to be no ladies-in-waiting—not yet.’

‘Ladies-in-waiting?’

As the implications of the term sank in, Viviana’s eyes widened. Only a queen would have ladies-in-waiting.

‘Six there shall eventually be, chiefed by the Duchess of Roxburgh whenever she is at Court,’ whispered Rohain.

Simultaneously, maid and mistress burst out laughing. Seizing each other by the hands, they danced the circumference of the floor like children around a beribboned pole on Whiteflower’s Day, finally falling breathlessly on two couches of plum-red velvet.

‘So ’tis true!’ panted Viviana. ‘His Majesty has asked—’

‘Yes! We are troth-plighted, he and I. But it is not generally known—the announcement has yet to be officially made.’

‘In sooth, rumour has been rampant! I did not like to pry, but everyone guesses it. I cannot believe this! My mistress to be Queen-Empress!’

Caitri turned her head, emerging from the haze of her musing. She had been scandalizing at the amount of world that had heretofore been denied her, imprisoned as she had been in Isse Tower.

‘Is my lady to be Queen?’ She was clearly thunderstruck.

Viviana pranced to the window, grasped the little girl, and whirled her in another polka.

‘Yes! Love is the season of the year! What is more, Caitri, when Dain Pennyrigg lifted me from his eotaur just now, he called me his little canary and kissed me. Kiel varletto! And he only a stablehand! Oh, but it was taraiz delicious. His kiss thrilled me like lightning!’

Rohain nodded. ‘Passion’s current. In both senses of the phrase.’

‘Skyhorse travel is eminently more pleasurable than Windship travel,’ pronounced Viviana. ‘Oh, and Master Pennyrigg found this in his saddlebags.’ Rummaging in her pocket, she produced the crimson vial of Dragon’s Blood.

Rohain clapped her hands. ‘Happy day! It is returned to me! Was it companioned by anything else? An aulmoniere perhaps?’

‘Why yes, m’lady. Here it is, but it is now putrid with a stink of goats, and I thought to cast it away. I shall have it cleansed for you.’

Her mistress took the dirty purse and felt around inside it. ‘Curses! ’Tis empty! Was there naught else?’

‘No, m’lady, there was nothing else which Master Pennyrigg himself did not pack. Only an ensofell of smelly hair, tied with string—it comes from a dog or a goat methinks—and the bedraggled feather of some fowl. Shall I throw them away?’

‘No, give the feather to me. It is a powerful talisman.’

Rohain tucked the feather inside a tapestry aulmoniere, fastened with buttons of jet. It seemed that Pod was at least capable of thanks for his rescue from Thorn’s wrath. However, his return of the vial did not hint at a reversal of his dismal prediction. After all, he was supposed to be a prophet, not a maker of curses.

‘Come now, my two birds,’ said Rohain, absently retying a seditious lace on Caitri’s gown of forget-me-not blue. ‘I have been from his side for too long. It is fully an hour since we arrived from the Stormrider Tower. That is more than enough time to wash away the stains of travel and recostume ourselves.’

‘Look at us!’ prattled Viviana, ever conscious of appearances. ‘My lady dark-haired in crimson, I fair in daffodil, and cinnamon Caitri in a sky-coloured gown. What a motley bouquet!’

‘Yet some among us do not smell as a bouquet should,’ said her mistress, holding a perfumed pomander to her nose to block out the last odorous traces of siedo-pod oil wafting from Viviana’s hair. ‘Hasten!’

A rapping at the door announced the Master of the King’s Household, a gray-haired gentleman of middle age. ‘His Majesty sends greetings, my lady,’ he said, bending forward from the waist, ‘and regrets to inform you that he has been called away on a matter of uncommon import.’

‘So soon?’ murmured Rohain. ‘We have only just arrived!’

‘These are fickle times,’ said the gentleman. ‘Even the best-laid plans may go astray.’

‘I thank you, sir, for your advice.’

The palace seemed suddenly devoid of substance and character during Thorn’s unexpected absence. Rohain grasped the opportunity to visit Sianadh in the dungeons.

‘You are to be set free,’ she told him.

He would not believe her. ‘’Tis kind of you to try to cheer me,’ he said in a morose mood, ‘but these hard-hearted skeerdas would not free their own grandmother if she was in leg-irons.’

‘I tell you, I have heard the King-Emperor say so!’

‘Ye must have been dreaming,’ he said mournfully. ‘Ach! I’d give me right arm for a drop o’ the pure stuff.’

Thorn returned two days later. He sent a message to Rohain asking her to join him in the Throne Room. Swiftly she made her way through the long galleries and passageways, eager for the reunion.

The columns of the Throne Room aspired to a forty-foot ceiling. This huge space was lit by metallic lusters pendant on thirty-foot chains, and flambeaux on brass pedestals. Twin thrones beneath their dagged and gilded canopy stood atop the grand dais. They were reached by twelve broad stairs.

Around the walls, the history of the world reenacted itself perpetually on adjoining tapestries that reached to a height of twenty feet and represented years of painstaking stitchery. Above them, every inch of the plasterwork crawled with painted murals—not scenes, but geometric designs, stylized flowers, vegetables, flora and fauna, and fantastic gold-leaf scrollwork that did not stop at the ceiling merely because that was too high to be easily viewed, but surged across it in a prolific efflorescence with the vigor of weeds.

By comparison to this busy overabundance the polished floor seemed austere, parquetried as it was with wood every shade of brown between palest blond and burnt umber. These coloured woods formed the heraldic device of the House of D’Armancourt in repeated tiles six feet square. The hall was so vast that to enter the doors was to dwindle immediately to the proportions of a mouse among cornstalks.

Rohain entered, accompanied by her small entourage and a froth of footmen and alert courtiers who had entangled themselves in her wake as she sailed through the corridors. Like every chamber in the palace, currently the Throne Room was arrayed with a flotsam of courtiers and servants. One of the former—a familiar, foppish figure—bowed low before her.

‘My Lady Rohain, His Majesty yet walks in the gardens with the Attriod but will shortly join us here in the Throne Room.’

‘Please show me the way to the gardens, Lord Jasper.’

The courtier bowed again, but before he could fulfil her request a footman, whose wig resembled a white rabbit, dropped to his knee. He elevated a silver salver from which Lord Jasper plucked a parchment. The nobleman’s brow furrowed as he squinted at the writing of some palace scribe.

‘Er—a gentleman begs audience with Your Ladyship. It appears His Majesty sent for him. An Ertishman with an unpronounceable name.’

‘Send him in,’ said Rohain.

Uproar and a torrent of Ertish curses emanated from outside the Throne Room, reaffirming Sianadh’s contempt for formalities. The doors crashed apart and he burst through like a boulder from a mangonel. Catching sight of Rohain, he stood blinking as though dazed. Two footmen who had been shed from his brawny arms stood helplessly by.

‘There ye are, chehrna,’ said the Ertishman meekly, the bear now a lamb. ‘The skeerdas would not let me through.’

‘Mo gaidair,’ said Rohain warmly. She proffered a hand. He clasped it with the utmost delicacy and a bewildered look. Nothing else being offered in the way of courtesy, she drew it back with an appreciative sigh. ‘Mo gaidair, your lack of etiquette is a refreshing draught.’

‘Chehrna, in one breath I am thinking it might be me last, the next they’re turning the key in me cell-door and I am a free man. How is this? What have ye done?’

‘Lord Jasper, is there some minor chamber where I can converse in private with my friend? Somewhere less cavernous and popular?’

Lord Jasper’s eyebrows shot up to meet his hairline. ‘But of course, m’lady,’ he said, trying to conceal his disapproval by dabbing his brow with a kerchief of embroidered lawn. ‘Methinks the Hall of Audience is unoccupied for the nonce. Allow me to conduct you there.’ Calling for footmen to bring lighted tapers, he indicated the Hall’s direction with a courtly flourish and a neatly pointed toe.

In a corner of the Hall of Audience, Viviana and Caitri played Cloth-Scissors-Rock. Despite the fact that the chamber was virtually deserted, one hundred and sixty candles blazed in gold candlesticks, like banks of radiant flowers. Rohain and Sianadh conversed in another corner, she imparting an outline of all that had occurred at Isse Tower. As she spoke, he grew progressively more restive, jubilant at what he was hearing.

‘So you see, I did not find what I sought,’ she concluded, ‘but I found instead something far dearer to my heart.’

‘Dear to anyone’s heart, the riches of royalty!’ he crowed.

‘You mistake my meaning. I have no ambition, mo gaidair. I did not seek this. I have never desired anything that is theirs—wealth or pomp. Perhaps I have desired respect and ease, who has not? Yet I had hope for an ease that does not live by battening on the toil of others, and a respect that grows from genuine friendship, not social status. I do not need so many jewels, so many costly possessions. All this obsequiousness and etiquette is foreign to me. I suppose I shall get used to it for his sake and I doubt not that in time I shall have forgotten that it could be otherwise, and it shall all be enjoyable—for, mistake me not, I am not ungrateful. I entered the world beyond the Tower looking for three things: a face, a voice, a past. In the searching I found the first two, discovered a fourth desire, and lost the third. Now my past matters no longer. The present is all I could desire.’

She fell silent. It occurred to her that now, at last, she was at rest, if not at peace—not seeking anymore. Yet even as she surveyed the luxury surrounding her in the Hall of Audience with its one hundred and sixty lighted candles and three times as many waiting to be lit, a musty wind came funneling out of a past she had forgotten that she had forgotten. Troubled by Pod’s words, by a couple of abandoned loam-worms, the lingering breath of forest mold, and withered foliage sprinkled like scraps of torn manuscript in the ruined bedchamber, she shuddered and shrank from remembering. History was too dark; far too dark.

‘As my first edict,’ she said briskly, ‘I shall outlaw the beating of servants throughout Erith.’

‘Very right-minded of ye, chehrna,’ replied Sianadh, ‘but ye shall start a rebellion with that kind of thinking.’

‘My strength shall be used to shield the vulnerable. All I need,’ she concluded, ‘all I need is air to sustain me, and the one I love.’

‘And drink,’ rejoined Sianadh prosaically, jumping up, ‘and vittles. And him to be good enough for ye.’

Unable to restrain his glee, he jumped in the air and danced, as energetically as Rohain had danced with Viviana not long before. To the disgust of the stone-faced footmen and the door-sentries who for years had practiced outfreezing statues, the wild red-haired man performed an Ertish jig.

‘Free!’ he trumpeted. ‘Free, and pardoned, and in favour with the Queen Apparent! I could kiss ye, chehrna, I could kiss ye!’

A wintry gust, clean and sharp, howled through the chamber. It billowed the wall-hangings and blew out seventy-five candles.

Several Dainnan knights in chain mail had entered the chamber and positioned themselves on either side of the door. Sianadh seized up in midpose. Rohain’s maids jumped to their feet and snapped to attention, and even the guards ossified further.

Thorn stood in the open doorway, a score of lords at his back.

In Dainnan attire, straight as a sword he stood, and as bright. His hair and dusken cloak lifted, like shadowy vanes, in the breath of Winter that had entered with him. That cool current blew across the carpets a scatter of leaves from the gardens, leaves that chased each other and skipped like pagan dancers across the floor’s rich patterning. Rohain’s heart leapt painfully against her ribs, a bird battering itself against its cage. His beauty is perilous. I could die merely from beholding it.

Roxburgh, taciturn, stood behind his sovereign’s shoulder with two or three others of the Attriod. Like the tail of a comet, a glittering train forever attended the King-Emperor.

This tableau shattered when Thorn stepped forward, crunching dry leaves beneath his boots. Sianadh remained standing. A courtier hissed, ‘On your knees, fellow!’

‘I grovel before no man,’ said Sianadh, ‘save the King-Emperor himself.’

‘Behold the King-Emperor, block-brain,’ muttered Rohain.

‘What?’ Sianadh jibbed, thrown off balance. Stiffly he sank to his knees, bowing the bushy red head.

‘Rise, Kavanagh,’ said Thorn, calm as a subterranean lake, as cold.

‘Ye have pardoned me,’ said Sianadh, stumbling to his feet and moving to Rohain’s side with a mixture of gratefulness and wariness, ‘and for that I thank ye, Your Majesty. I’ve a strong right arm that has defended Imrhien here and would willingly wield a sword for the Empire, and it has not withered at all despite languishing in your dungeons without so much as a drop of ale to give me fortitude.’

The courtiers murmured against his questionable attitude and his unconscionable manner of addressing the King-Emperor using the second-person pronoun. Their sovereign appeared to ignore these mistakes.

‘Indeed?’ he said, raising one eyebrow. A captivating trick, thought Rohain.

‘Aye,’ said Sianadh. Lifting an elbow from beneath which emanated an odour of stale body fluids, he rolled up a sleeve. ‘Strong, my arm.’ Blatantly devoid of finer feeling, he flexed a great pudding of a bicep. Several guards made as if to throw him out for his effrontery. Thorn waved them away.

‘Leave us,’ he commanded his retinue. ‘Stay you, Roxburgh, and my page.’ Bowing, the attendants reluctantly began to trickle out of the Hall of Audience.

‘You say that arm has defended the Lady Rohain?’ Thorn inquired mildly.

‘Aye, and no man has ever beaten me in an arm-wrestle,’ replied the Ertishman, whose eyes were boldly fixed on Thorn’s. Being a few inches shorter, he had to look up to achieve this; an irksome necessity for him.

‘Sianadh,’ admonished Rohain. ‘Do not be scothy. Nothing can rescue you this time.’

‘Do you make a challenge?’ asked Thorn.

‘A challenge, by—’ Sianadh bit off his words. ‘Aye, some might call it that, sir. Now I have said it. There it be.’ His face was a mask of defiance.

The last two departing lords fingered their sword-hilts. ‘For this insolence his tongue shall be torn out by the roots,’ muttered one.

‘He’s for the scaffold,’ murmured another. Roxburgh folded his arms and looked interested. The heavy doors closed.

The corners of Thorn’s mouth twitched slightly. He rolled up his right sleeve and took a seat at a small table. His arm, a tawny mellifluity of waterworn driftwood’s smoothly contoured undulations, looked vastly different from his opponent’s. Sianadh’s arm was similarly thewed, but adorned by tattoos, freckles, red bristles, and scars.

Suddenly in his element, Sianadh took the opposite stool. They planted their elbows on the tabletop. Their hands came together. Cords bulged, sinews knotted. Elegantly, in the blink of an eye, it was over. Sianadh’s hand lay on its back; his shoulders skewed to follow the outward twist of his elbow.

‘Two outta three!’ he demanded hotly, as though he sat at a tavern table with a drunken caravaner. Shivering beads stood out on his brow. Thorn nodded. The act was repeated, with identical outcome. Sianadh sat stunned as Thorn rolled down his sleeve.

‘Well sir, ye’ve beaten me fair and square,’ the Ertishman admitted with admiration. ‘I cannot say as I wasn’t ready. I was. But ye might have dignified a man by breaking a sweat. That there is a right arm I’d be proud to fight in the shadow of.’

‘My sword arm might cast a darker shadow.’

The Ertishman threw back his head and shouted with laughter, displaying a crescent of broken teeth like stubs of moldy cheese.

‘Call me a blind man,’ he blurted between guffaws. ‘Your skian’s buckled on the south side. I’ve made a right sgorrama of meself.’

‘True, but not relevant since you have already proven your worth thrice over,’ said Thorn. ‘What boon would you ask of me?’

‘Boon? Sir, ye have already extended the numbering of my days, which I am never sure of. I could not ask for better. However …’ The Ertishman was struck by a sudden awareness of opportunity. He scratched his beard. ‘D’ye need more men-at-arms?’

‘Not at this time.’

‘Then there’s something I have always thought might suit me—to sail on a Windship and trade me way about. Travel, adventure, and wealth. That’s my style.’

‘A clipper lies idle in Finvarna as we speak. I gift her to you. What more? Ask, while I am generous.’

‘I give ye gramercie, sire. As for more—I have a craving to return to Finvarna, me native land. Yet I may not legally set foot on its shores because the High Chieftain, Mabhoneen of Finvarna, has banished me.’

‘You told me he lifted that ban,’ interjected Rohain.

‘I forgot to tell ye,’ said Sianadh. ‘He put it back.’

‘Why?’

‘’Tis a long and unjust story, chehrna. These days, I yearn for me home something vicious. ’Tis hard to explain—’tis like a sore plague that eats at ye. Aye, I have the homesickness, that which in Finvarna we call the longarieth. I would fain set foot on me native sod again.’

‘You shall be no longer exiled,’ Thorn said.

Sianadh digested this. When he looked at Rohain she beheld in his face a light of joy such as she had never seen there.

‘Finvarna,’ crooned Sianadh, as if murmuring a love-name. ‘Finvarna. I can go back. And a Windship! I shall become a merchant, that I shall. A respectable man. I shall see them, me children, me Granny … Ach! The chariot races and the good Ertish cookery—Your Majesty, I cannot find words to show me gratefulness!’ He jumped up. ‘A Windship! It shall be my beast of burden, my donkey. Therefore I shall call it the Bear’s Ass, or mayhap the Bear-Ass.’

‘Unfortunately for the rejuvenation of the Register of Ships’ Names, she is already titled,’ said Thorn drily. ‘Red of canvas, she is called Rua.’

‘Rua—the Red-Haired!’ Sianadh chortled.

‘You will not return to Finvarna yet?’ beseeched Rohain. ‘You will stay for the Ball and the Tournament of Jousting, mo gaidair? There are to be fireworks!’

‘I wouldna miss the festivities for gold angels!’

‘We shall be happy and remember happy times past.’

‘Aye, times past.’ Sianadh quieted abruptly, abashed. ‘But it cannot be like those times, not now, not never again, with ye looking like that and all.’ His eyes met hers, open but shielded. In them was written the knowledge that he looked upon a friend now contained within a different vessel, a vessel to which he would have responded differently had he known her in it first. He struggled to come to terms with this, having lived all his life in a world whose mores dictated that friendship should not exist between such a man as he and such a woman as she. The awareness discomfited him and made him feel, somehow, a traitor.

Comeliness is a blade with two edges, mused Rohain.

‘Inna shai tithen elion,’ she said, with a sad smile, recalling their first parting—long ago, it seemed in Gilvaris Tarv.

‘Kavanagh,’ Thorn said, rising to his feet. ‘Until you depart you have the freedom of my cellars and my leave to sample their contents in quantities to your liking. This is to indemnify you for the shortages you have ostensibly experienced while living idle at the expense of my Treasury.’

‘I shall seek them out at once!’ said the Ertishman energetically, clapping the King’s Page heartily on the shoulder. ‘I have some drinking to catch up on and I be in need of good fellowship to do it with. Ye look like a good fellow.’

The courtier stepped back hastily. Sianadh shrugged.

‘Have it your way, jack. I’ll warrant the kitchen-hands know how to make merry, if ye do not.’

Bowing with more enthusiasm than style, Sianadh took it upon himself to walk backward from the Hall of Audience, to demonstrate his knowledge of etiquette. No sooner had he reached the doors, however, than he was back again. In a sudden, unexpected, gesture, he knelt at Thorn’s feet a second time, unbidden, wordless.

Briefly, Thorn laid his hand on the Ertishman’s head. ‘Sain thee,’ he said gravely.

This time as Sianadh disappeared around the corner, a high-pitched whoop drifted back.

‘Barbarian.’ The whisper rippled knowingly among the courtiers clustered outside.

‘Now,’ said Thorn to Rohain, turning the twin shafts of his gaze on her to penetrate her eyes and plumb the wellspring of her thought. ‘Having dispensed with business, my intent, troth-plighted, is to walk with thee beneath the trees.’

He took her hand.

Later, as they sauntered together through the gardens, Thom said, ‘One man leaves the dungeons, another arrives. The Lord High Wizard is now imprisoned. As for the niece, she is under durance, confined to rooms, with only poor Georgiana Griffin to attend her.’

‘Good sooth! Are they guilty of conspiring to destroy me, as you suspected?’ asked Rohain.

‘As sure as drowners fill their lovers’ lungs with water. The one has demonstrated it, the other has confessed it,’ replied Thorn.

‘How so?’

‘Thou dost recollect I sent a letter from Isse Tower?’

‘I do.’

‘I bade Tom Ercildoune set a watch on the conjuror. When tidings of our success at Isse reached the Court, the swindler and his minions instantly fled. The fool thus betrayed himself, for why should he take flight on hearing the Hunt had been defeated and Dianella’s supposed rival found safe, unless he feared reprisal for his part in the fiasco?’

‘How did you find him?’

‘The Dainnan of the Ninth Thriesniun tracked them to the Well in the Wood’s Heart. Hast thou heard of it? No? ’Tis a dry and mossy shaft of ancient stone, forever secure from wickedness. Inside the well we discovered the carlin Maeve One-Eye and the lad, her apprentice.’

Rohain clapped her hands delightedly. ‘That is indeed good news!’

‘They were imprisoned there, under eldritch siege. The carlin had sealed the shaft with the powers of her Wand, for safety, but they could not leave without aid. The conjuror Sargoth, by contrast, went unharmed among the wicked wights winged, tailed, and fanged, in the Wood’s Heart. Indeed, he was imploring them for help!’

‘Does he wield power over them?’ cried Rohain.

‘Nay. He is naught but an ill-uttering entertainer, a sly and hollow-hearted man of wax. He had made some pact with them, which ensured his temporary immunity from their wanton wickedness. That is all. When I joined the Ninth Thriesniun we drove back the creatures of unseelie, releasing the two good folk trapped within the Well, and taking the conjuror prisoner. The Dainnan zealously drove the unseelie things far off, whereupon Maeve One-Eye and Tom Coppins went their way on the forest paths again, unafraid.’

‘I am glad!’

‘The conjurer and his henchmen were brought here to the palace. They were charged with trafficking with wielders of maleficent forces. As for the niece, when confronted with the truth she denied it at first, then, perceiving denial to be sleeveless, she told all. Their murderous conspiracy was revealed.’

‘Murderous conspiracy? Is it a fact that Sargoth sent the Hunt against me? That the infamous Huon should bend to a wizard’s will seems incredible, but I fear that the attack on Isse Tower at the time of my visit was more than coincidence. Nay,’ she said, answering her own question, ‘it cannot be so. Sargoth might have achieved his purpose to equal degree with a well-placed ambush of lesser wights.’

‘True, eudail, no wizard has the power to command Huon. He may have inveigled a hold over some common spriggan or duergar, but no mortal man can govern the Wild Hunt. The conjuror has unwittingly plunged himself into deeper trouble than he comprehends. His meddling has triggered more than he bargained for. He admitted, when questioned, that he sent some minor unseelie destroyer to slay thee, describing thee as a Talith daughter, a gold-haired damsel with her tresses dyed black. I surmise his words were passed on by eldritch tongues, to reach the ears of some mightier authority.’

Looking directly at Rohain he said gravely, ‘My bird, something mighty, unseelie, and malevolent came for thee—the Antlered One himself. Why should Huon wish to hunt at thy heels?’

His words accorded with her own suspicions. ‘I know not!’ she said, and this was true. Somehow I have incurred the wrath of the Antlered One. It might be that in my travels I inadvertently spied upon him, or took something that belonged to him or his minions. The Lords of Unseelie require only slight motive to persecute mortalkind.

In her heart she guessed the reason must lie in her forgotten past, but to herself she denied it, blindly hoping that banning such knowledge would negate that past. There was no place here, now, for sorrow and pain. Here was safety and happiness. Why dig up old miseries?

‘What is to become of the prisoners?’ she asked.

‘Time enough to ponder that later. I have turned my mind to other thoughts. Let those who cross me stew awhile, or rot.’

‘I would like to visit Dianella.’

‘As it please thee, ionmhuinn. She cannot harm thee now.’

Rohain made her way to the rooms of durance.

What did she expect? A brooding, bitter courtier, enthroned in shadow and candlelight, who would not turn her head to look at Rohain?

‘Come to gloat, have we?’ the prisoner would say. ‘Come to sneer, now that I am helpless? You have done your work well, have you not? Oh, so successfully!’

‘Dianella,’ the visitor would reply, ‘I have not come to gloat, to miscall you, or to be miscalled. I do not hate you. I never planned that all this should come to pass, I swear it. Dianella, that you loved him, love him still, I now know. If passion drove you to rash deeds I can at least empathize with that passion. I cannot comprehend how any woman who has looked upon him could be anything but lovestruck.’

Then, the courtier might say, ‘You understand!’ and weep, and beg forgiveness.

Rohain’s expectations of the meeting, however, were not to be fulfilled.

The only warning may have been a curious expression that flitted across Dianella’s face as Rohain entered with her maidservants—that was all. It might have been a look of surprise.

‘Rohain! Dear Heart!’ The dark-haired beauty glided forward to bestow an embrace on her visitor and kisses on the air. ‘La! You cannot imagine how glad I am to see you. The boredom has been beyond utterance. Griffin sulks, nobody else says a word, and I scarcely have any callers. The dullness defies description!’

‘I am sorry for you …’ Rohain stammered. Somehow, Dianella in the flesh always disarmed her.

‘Of course, you look perfectly lovely!’ Dianella purred. ‘Come—sit by me awhile. Can you spare the time, sweetness? Griffin, we would take a sip. Make arrangements.’

Puzzled and wary, Rohain sat at a table of carved walnut inlaid with copper and nacre. The rooms of durance were far from uncomfortable. They were well-furnished and provided with fireplaces in which flames now leaped cheerfully. Seldom used, these were not dungeon cells but apartments set aside for aristocrats who had fallen under suspicion of crimes such as plotting, treason, or spying.

Dianella chattered on as though she entertained at a garden party; as if nothing had ever existed between them besides close friendship.

‘You are simply delicious in seed-pearls and point lace. And your hair—still dark-stained! ’Tis sofine et gloriana! Wise of you not to have the dye stripped out, Heart. Doubtless the entire country would believe your goldie-yellow to be fake in any case, the sillies, or else you would have had half the Talith population begging at your doorstep, claiming you as cousin.’ Cocking her head to one side she added pleasantly, ‘Although in sooth, the yellow would match your skin tones so much more adequately.’

She laughed daintily, with her rose of a mouth closed tight as a bud. The colour in her cheeks was high. Rohain mumbled a reply as Georgiana Griffin finished pouring the wine, and Dianella’s flow ran on with barely a pause.

‘How do you like my embroidered surcoat and kirtle? See, the one is worked in motifs of dragonflies and reeds with a border of butterflies, while on the other, worms are stitched in sundry-coloured silks, with silver cobwebs and small snails in stumpwork. Different motifs, yet they match so cleverly in design and colouring, don’t you think? La! There it is again.’ Dianella broke off, going to the window. ‘Did you hear it, sweetness? Oh look—there it is!’ She pointed with a tapered fingernail. Joining her, Rohain peered out. She could see nothing but a courtyard below, framed by walls beyond which the ground fell precipitously away to a distant longbow of shoreline melding with a dragon’s spine of mountains.

‘I suppose it was a spriggan or another of those ghastly little unseelie things,’ said Dianella from behind Rohain’s back. She was already seated at the walnut table again, smiling, her red lips peeled back from her small white teeth. Holding out a chased silver goblet filled with dark liquid she appended, ‘They have been about so very frequently of late.’

As Rohain took the cup, Thorn’s leaf-ring on her hand clashed against the metal. The sound reverberated with extraordinary volume. It resonated and hummed sickeningly inside her head, like a tocsin, or perhaps a toxin.

‘To your health!’ cried Dianella, lifting her goblet on high. ‘No hard feelings, Heart, let’s drink to that!’

Rohain raised the vessel.

‘No,’ Georgiana Griffin blurted, ‘don’t drink!’

‘Actually, I had no intention of doing so,’ said Rohain, watching the thin black tongue of liquid drizzle over the rim of her tipped goblet. Spilled on the carpet, it gave off a wisp of steam. She let the vessel fall. Her footman and two guards, who had been standing scarcely noticed beside the door—one was never truly alone in the palace—moved swiftly toward Dianella. At the guard-captain’s command they stripped her fingers of the empty compartment-ring, and all other rings for good measure. Rohain’s maids clustered at her side, both talking at once. Their eyes, round with shock, were turned in accusation on Dianella. That lady returned their stares sadly.

‘Alack! I have failed,’ she drawled. ‘Yet do not judge me harshly. The decoction would not have harmed you, Dear Heart—it would only have brought upon you a semblance of death. Then, as you lay pale and unmoving in the crypt, my servants would have taken you away. On board a Seaship you would have woken to find yourself banished forever from these domains.’

‘Did you not mean to slay me?’

‘I swear I did not.’

Rohain met her adversary’s eyes. Deep down in their troubled depths smoldered a faint ember of truth. Dianella tossed her head and looked away as if angry to have been deciphered.

‘The House of D’Armancourt is a pure bloodline,’ she said. ‘Royal blood—that is the seat of its power. All its brides have been chosen from royal houses or else from aristocrats of great and ancient families such as mine. Your thin serf’s blood shall taint it. Worse—you shall be its downfall.’

‘Hold your tongue!’ cried Rohain.

At this, the courtier flushed with fury. Her voice became hard and harsh.

‘You think yourself so noble, selevader uncouthant. No doubt you thought to come here to these rooms to bring me comfort and show your goodness. Yet when they drag me through the streets next week, you will be watching from the window. You will laugh with the rest.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, haven’t you heard? ’Tis to be the spectacle of a decade! The Lord High Chancellor asked my dear friends Calprisia and Elmaretta to devise a suitable punishment for my so-called crimes. The sweetings suggested that humiliation would be my most dreaded nightmare. My hair is to be shorn off. I am to be dressed in rags and rattled through the streets in a donkey cart. After which, I expect they shall introduce me to the ax. I would prefer it.’

‘I shall intercede on your behalf.’

‘How gracious of you! You, whom I have wronged so dreadfully, sending you from Caermelor so that my uncle could tell the spriggans to carry you away and play with you. Take your pity elsewhere, malck-drasp.’ Glowering with sheer hatred at Rohain, the wizard’s niece spat words from her mouth like poison. ‘I will not waste my malison on you. I believe that has been done before, and done better.’

Rohain departed.

How foolish to have hoped for better.

Later, she said to Thorn, ‘Dianella’s sentence must be commuted. Were I she, to be deprived of proximity to you would be far worse than any infliction of hurt or humiliation.’

‘Thou art not she. Yet if pity moves thee, she shall be merely banished.’

‘The Sorrow Isles are remote enough, from all accounts. And her uncle?’

‘Thou mayst not pity malice.’

‘Welcome back to Court, Rohain,’ said Thomas Rhymer. His voice was solemn, but his eyes twinkled. ‘We have been the worse without you. Dianella is currently indisposed, but, fed on scandal, the Set thrives more hardily than ever. Were I not incapable of even the slightest exaggeration I would swear they add a new word to the dratted courtingle each instant.’

‘Hail, Sir Thomas,’ Rohain replied awkwardly.

‘Tut. There’s no need to be diffident with me, my dear. Of course I guessed as soon as I met you that you had not come from the bleak shores of Sorrow Isles. So did Roxburgh. It mattered little to us—methinks a gentle damsel like you posed no threat to Imperial security! At first your beauty was an intrigue to us both, besides which your manner provided a contrast to the monotonous ways of Court life and the petty obsessions of the so-called Set. It was no time before we found we liked you better, the better we knew you. That you once served in a House of Stormriders does not demean you in our eyes—there is no shame in honest work. Never fear, your secret remains safe. No one else knows.’

‘Forgive me, sir, for that deception.’

‘Consider it forgiven. Yet your path, and that of His Majesty, might have proved smoother had you entrusted us with a few meager scraps of knowledge.’

‘In truth, sir. And I am anguished to think of how much trouble might have been avoided, had I spoken out.’ Blood was shed at Isse because of my presence there.

‘Fiddlesticks!’ said the Bard, guessing her thoughts. ‘That was not your doing. It was the work of Huon the Hunter! Come now,’ he added jovially, ‘do not be anguished! Is it not consolation that, your Dainnan of the wilderness has found you, whom he sought, and you have found him?’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘Had I known,’ he said, ‘had I but known to whom your heart belonged …’

‘You might have helped me straightway, if I had mentioned the name of Thorn!’

‘Indeed, my dear. Howbeit, all that is in the past now. It is time for rejoicing. Come, let me lead you to the Blue Drawing Room. The ladies Rosamonde and Maiwenna would fain keep company with you there, and Alys, with the children of Roxburgh.’

The Winter sun shone cold, a pale doubloon. Lacquered against the sky, evergreens layered with fringes of pungent bristles reached out to offer upright cones like rows of squat candles.

It was the twenty-fourth of Fuarmis, just six days until Primrose Amble with its candles, brides, white lace, horseshoes, and procession of ewes garlanded with the first tentative flowers of Spring. This year the period of the traditional festival was to be extended. It was to culminate in the celebrations for the royal betrothal, beginning on the fifteenth of Sovrachmis, the Primrosemonth. The lacuna between these dates was wadded with a flurry of activity, a cramming of the palace baileys with carters and their conveyances bringing supplies. Every merchant and pedlar in Caermelor had seized the opportunity of a Royal Ball to hawk his wares, whether or not they had been requisitioned for the occasion. In spite of the continuing belligerence simmering in Namarre, which constantly threatened to spill out across the Nenian Landbridge into northern Eldaraigne, the populace applied themselves to the preparations for this year’s festivities with an extra abundance of zeal.

Viewed from a more exalted angle, Court seemed an entirely different place. To Rohain it was as though a screen had dropped from her eyes. She was introduced to aristocrats she had never before encountered, she found herself guided to regions of the palace she had not yet seen, she was treated with a respectfulness so novel she could not accustom herself to it. This new state of dignity was almost unnerving.

Courtiers acknowledged Rohain deferentially wherever she went. Crowds thicker than ever jostled at the gates from early morn until late evening. They were hoping for a glimpse of the chosen bride of the King-Emperor, James XVI of the House of D’Armancourt and Trethe, also titled High King and Emperor of Greater Eldaraigne, Finvarna, Severnesse, Luindorn, Rimany, and Namarre; King of his other Realms and Territories. Those who ran the Court machinery had assiduously put it about that his bride-to-be came of a noble line that, impoverished by ill fortune, had sunk into obscurity. If any disapproval evolved, or any questions were whispered about her birth, they were suppressed and popularly passed over. The King-Emperor might follow any whim he chose, and it would be accepted. As the highest of the high, his actions were beyond the context of convention. Besides, the people were glad their sovereign was to wed again at last.

Dianella’s dark dye remained fast in Rohain’s hair. It proved difficult to wash out. Rohain considered this fortunate, since to be publicly revealed as Talith would inevitably invite further questions as to her origins, and would surely destroy the careful constructions of the senior members of the King’s Household, who so ardently desired that His Majesty’s troth-plighted should be accepted by the populace as a gentlewoman.

‘Thou dost call me Gold-Hair,’ she said to Thorn, ‘though my locks are now as dark as thine.’

He shrugged. ‘Use what paints and colours thou wilt. Thou’rt Gold-Hair, beneath it all.’

To the far reaches of the Empire of Erith the tidings of royal betrothal travelled. Throughout Caermelor, all was noise and traffic, but within the walls of the Palace remained a wonderful, undisturbed tranquillity, an amazing sense of peace. The city whirled, and Rohain was its vortex, the stillness at the storm’s eye. To see the evidence of her new authority, her influence as an emblem, took her breath away. Thorn’s casual use of power awed her. She wondered how it would be to wield it with such careless assurance.

All this, she would whisper often to herself, by the Greayte Star—for me?

And sometimes the prediction of the twisted lad in the Tower would return to tease her.

For her, sheltered, there was no haste, no bustle—only days that slipped by like rain through a colander; days spent sometimes in conversation with Prince Edward, or with Sianadh (when he was not making merry with the butlers, ewerers, and panters in the servants’ quarters), or perhaps spent with Thomas Rhymer, or both (the two Ertishmen having formed a drinking and storytelling fellowship), or with the steadfast and ebullient Alys-Jannetta and her lively progeny. Gladly, Rohain was now able to eschew the tiresome company of the Set. Affairs of state took Thorn from her side at times. Then, with her attendants and Maiwenna the Talith gentlewoman and young Rosamonde of Roxburgh, she would ride out in a coach from the Royal Mews, through countryside green-hazed with the buds of an early Spring.

Maiwenna had become a friend. Rohain trusted her almost to the point of revealing her own Talith heritage, but not quite. She asked whether the gentlewoman knew anything of a lost Talith damsel. Maiwenna, however, was nonplussed. She knew of no clues that might lead to discovering Rohain’s past. Subsequently, the two spent many hours together, deep in conversation about Avlantia’s history.

But most often Rohain’s time was spent at the side of he whom she loved beyond others—loved with a passion so intense that it was a wound to the heart.

‘Let us go out,’ he would say. ‘These four walls are like to suffocate me.’

Laughing, chaffing one another, they would saunter in the gardens, or go riding and hawking through the Royal Game Reserves in the ancient Forest of Glincuith. He gave her a sparrowhawk and lessons in archery. He gave her a crimson rose so very dark that it was almost black, whose scent was a dream of Midsummer’s Night. And his long hair flowed blacker than Midwinter’s Night, glinting with a red sheen like the dark rose. He gave her a palfrey the hue of marshmallow frosting, and a diadem of gems like Sugar crystals. His land-horse, a splendid, swift, and spirited creature that he esteemed as much as he cherished Errantry, was named Altair. Hers was called Firinn.

These hours together, secluded, afforded Rohain rare glimpses of a shy tenderness in her beloved, a hesitancy quite unlike the self-assurance he possessed at other times. It was like the diffidence of wild creatures, such as birds and deer. Most often, he would be as a carefree and wanton youth—zestful, capricious, as merry as a jester, indulging in whimsy and play and foolish nonsense, in which she participated with a footloose joyousness and reckless abandon that surprised her inner self by springing from it. Gentle, witty badinage volleyed between them, taking unexpected turnings. Seldom could he be precognised.

He could be as temperate as the soft winds caressing the northern valleys, or stern as stone and as grim. And when this cold mood was on him it did not affect his manner with Imrhien-Rohain; toward her he was warm always, even though the unmelting snow of all Winters to others.

She knew full well that in these times of unrest he was needed at the helm of the Royal Attriod, but as often as possible he delegated his duties to his commanders and stewards in order to spend time in the company of his betrothed. Fortunately, there had come another unexpected lull in the activities of men and wights in Namarre and northern Eldaraigne. The buildup of minor assaults and skirmishes had again subsided. It seemed they were now gathering their strength, perhaps in readiness for some greater onslaught.

Nonetheless, Thorn could not always be spared from governance. On a day when his duties took him elsewhere, Rohain walked through the palace picture galleries and statue galleries on the arm of the young Prince. They halted beside a window to look out at the dormant Spring Garden with its arches of lichened crab-apples most ancient.

‘I should like to see those leafless trees in bloom,’ she said. ‘Crab-apples bear exquisite blossoms. I think they are my favourites.’

‘You shall see them,’ said Edward, ‘this and every Spring.’

Thorn’s silver-clasped hunting-horn was hooked to Edward’s belt. As he turned away from the window it chimed against a marble pedestal. Noting the direction of Rohain’s gaze, the Prince said, ‘Traditionally, the Coirnéad is worn by the reigning monarch—however, he has requested that I bear it now and in the future, saying it may stand me in good stead.’

‘The Coirnéad?’

‘A horn of Faêran workmanship. For centuries, an heirloom of the Royal Family.’

‘A fair ornament.’

A frown crumpled the Prince’s brow. They walked on. Edward made as if to speak again, but hesitated.

‘You are beauteous, lady,’ he stammered suddenly. ‘Do not think I flatter you, pray, when I tell you your beauty outshines all other beauties. He has chosen his consort well. His recommendation is law to me. My faith in his wisdom and judgment is implicit. I shall be glad to accept you as my—’

‘I can never stand in your mother’s place. Pray, allow me to be your friend.’

‘Indeed,’ he said earnestly, ‘and I shall be your friend and most devoted admirer. Nothing could make me happier than to welcome you into this family, dear Rohain.’ Raising her hand to his lips, he kissed it. His youthful smile was open, ingenuous.

‘So saying, you make my own happiness complete,’ she said, returning the smile.

The castle hawk-mews was extensive, housing not only hawks but also falcons, and one majestic wedge-tailed eagle named Audax. The Hawkmaster sported eight taut silver scars on his bald dome where the talons of an eagle owl had once gored him when he was stealing her clutch of eggs. In the mornings, he could be seen in the yards with his falconers and austringers, swinging lures to bring half-trained birds back to the fist. The lures were a pair of moorhens’ or magpies’ wings dried in an open position and fastened back to back, with a fresh piece of tough beef tied onto the end of a line.

Often, the clear ringing of the tail-bell on a returning gyrfalcon tantalized the early light. The bird would scream a welcome as it flew down, jesses trailing, thrusting its feet forward to lock onto the falconer’s tasseled glove, the savage joy of flight still purling in its black, gold-rimmed eye.

The Hawkmaster took Rohain among the sounds of the mews—the tiny tintinnabulation of bells, the bird-screams and whistles and chatter, the rasping whirr of rousing wings, the talk among the austringers and falconers. He proudly showed her the clean gravel-floored pens where roosted goshawks or sparrowhawks, merlins, hobbies, ospreys, peregrines, or the great and noble gyrfalcons, tethered to blocks and perches. Boys were assiduously sweeping up casts and scrubbing mutes off the walls. An austringer coped a tiercel goshawk’s beak using a small, bone-handled knife and an abrasive stone. Another imped the damaged tail-feather of a hooded gray hawk, carefully attaching a replacement pinion to the base of the broken one. An apprentice weighed a peregrine on a small set of scales.

‘Have to cut him down,’ he said. ‘He’s put on too much.’

‘Cut him down?’ repeated Rohain, astonished.

‘Cut down his feed, m’lady,’ explained the apprentice, with a respectful salute.

‘The merry merlins fly at larks,’ the Hawkmaster said informatively, moving among the birds with Rohain, ‘but the gay goshawks be the cooks’ birds, so we say, for they will tackle fur or feather. A hunting engine they be, the goshawks, swift as arrows—but ’tis their wont to be peevish and contrary betimes. They must be handled with patience.’

The eagle sat alone in a magnificent pen, fierce-eyed, his irises silver. He was beautiful; black with a pale nape, wing-coverts and under-tail coverts. His legs were long, strong and full-feathered.

‘We keeps the hawks and falcons well away from Audax the Great, else he might make a quick meal on ’em,’ said the Hawkmaster. ‘He will only come to two men—meself, who trained him, and His Imperial Majesty. Only royalty may fly eagles, but no milk-and-water king could do it. Audax’s wing-span be more than seven feet, tip to tip. His weight be nigh on seven pound and his hind claw be as thick as a man’s little finger. He can bring down small hounds, ye ken, and deer.’

A falconer went past carrying a bucket of day-old chicks and another of frogs and lizards. The eagle roused and shook himself.

‘Coo-ee-el,’ he whistled. ‘Pseet-you, pseet-you.’

‘Soothee, soothee,’ said the Hawkmaster.

Winter faded. Gone were the moon-spun webs of night, the tinsels of rime lining each edge with glitter, like the shang, and drawing frost feathers on leaf and pane with an exquisite silver pencil. It seemed that every day the sun flew up like a yellow rose and fell down like a red one, and at the end of Winter the stirring of Spring could already be felt as a stirring of the blood; every bare and lichened bough carried the promise of blossom and verdure. The breezes sighed with perfumed breath and sunlight coloured them with pale gold. In the Forest of Glincuith, the only sounds were bright gems of birdsong, and baubles of laughter threaded on strange sweet music drifting from the trees; the piping of eldritch things, like the plaint of weird birds. These sounds, Thorn made into a necklace and tossed it over the head of his betrothed. It hung about her shoulders, where it mingled with the abundant spirals and falls of heavy gold from which the dye had at last been stripped after many rinsings, along with the natural sheen, so that most folk believed she had bleached her tresses.

Sometimes Rohain and Thorn rode in open country with their entourage and the Hawkmaster and the falconers and the austringers. Then Thorn would fly Audax at ducks and geese and ptarmigan. The eagle was an expert hunter, possessing many strategies. He soared on thermals, so high that he vanished from human sight. Up there he could easily see everything that moved over a huge area. Once he had chosen his prey, he would dart without warning from behind a hill where he had deliberately lost height without being noticed, then fly close to the ground until suddenly appearing only a few yards from his quarry, swooping down over the tops of nearby trees. Or he would start his attack with a long, slow descent up to four miles from his victim, or, most spectacular of all, from hundreds of feet above the ground he would stoop, diving with folded wings like a plummeting stone, flattening out at the last moment, spreading out his wings and tail to decelerate efficiently, pulling his head back and throwing his feet forward with talons outstretched to strike and grasp. The remaining shock of impact would be transferred to the prey.

He never missed his target.

Rohain made a discovery.

It was akin to the memory-dreams of the Three Faces, the Rats, the White Horse. Since her return from Isse and the prematurely terminated journey to Hunting-towers, a verity had been clarifying by degrees in her awareness.

It was Erith, remembered.

Erith’s bones had been dredged up out of the waters of forgetfulness, but not much else. None of the history, none of the character—only the formations of the land and the labels of the countries, cities, villages on the map. The bones, and the names of the bones.

Somehow, the knowledge of three dimensions of the world had seeped through to Rohain. The fourth, which was time, was still lacking. Yet it strode on toward her betrothal day.

In the glades of Glincuith, the black fretwork of leafless branches formed, by day, a ceiling of sapphire panes; by night, a roof of smoky glass shattered by a gravel of stars. There, Rohain spent pleasant hours learning the courtly dance steps with a partner who moved so lightly and easily over the springy turf that she could swear their feet trod upon nothingness. Here was a lover who was ready, with extraordinary anticipation, to catch her after every pirouette, to whirl her as if she were a child, her skirts billowing like a full-blown camellia; to sustain and guide her, to hold her pressed so close that she thought his heart was beating within her own breast. The scent of pines was snagged like myrrh in his hair. Beneath her left hand, his shoulder was steel, sliding beneath layers of costly fabric. The dim, crimson light of dying suns gleamed through his hair, and his eyes, fixed upon her, were dark-smoldering coals.

At these times, love’s anguish and precipitancy threatened to overwhelm her. It was a torment with a terrible sweetness to it—addictive, unconsumed, consuming. From him raged an answering force, a torrent dammed, a ferocity chained, a storm scarcely suppressed, eager, impatient.

The festival of Primrose Amble having passed by, the betrothal was officially announced and celebrated, even while more legions of the Empire were making ready to depart for the north to relieve those that had been stationed there for lengthy periods, or to swell the numbers of the King-Emperor’s army. The Royal Ball took place in jeweled splendor, attended by royalty, nobility, and dignitaries from all over Erith; more than a thousand guests. The bride-to-be shone like a piece torn out from the very core of the sun. He who moved beside her seemed by contrast the glorious incarnation of night.

The feast was sumptuous. Rohain sat at the high table beneath the canopy, at Thorn’s right hand, sharing with him a cup and plate. At their backs, bright heraldic flags adorned the walls. Before them gleamed a swan-shaped cake covered with three thousand hand-molded Sugarpaste feathers. Below, the Banqueting Hall seethed and glistered.

As he conversed with Rohain, Thorn glanced down the table at Roxburgh, who looked splendid in a dress uniform of royal scarlet and gold. The Dainnan Commander had just cleared his trencher of a mighty helping of meats, and with a purposeful air he was contemplating the other dishes.

‘The Commander is a renowned trencherman,’ said Rohain, noting the object of his gaze.

‘Indeed he is!’

Roxburgh having looked away to speak to his wife, Thorn casually tossed a couple of roasted capons onto his trencher. Roxburgh, turning back and helping himself to pie, looked startled at the sight of his erstwhile empty platter. The King’s Page made a bursting noise and collapsed behind a gonfalon.

The swan-ship sailed from Waterstair for the occasion, the side of the hill having been knocked out to allow its egress. It was moored over the inner bailey, to the acclamation of the citizens, who could see it from every corner of Caermelor; a giant bird gently lifting in the draughts, bound by iron chains.

In the lists, the jousting knights gave a brave display, sunlight splintering to shards on their harness as their lances shattered on each other’s breastplates. The thunderous charge of the armoured war-horses and the impact of their meeting shook the ground. The tournament concluded with a night of fireworks.

Fireworks: traditionally a wizard’s stock-in-trade. A city wizard, Feuleth, was handling the preparations. Rohain, dressing for the evening feast, her head swimming with the intoxication of these giddy days and nights, became conscious, at last, of having overlooked a new wave of apprehension arising in the city.

‘Viviana,’ she said, ‘what news?’

‘A wizard in Gilvaris Tarv, Korguth the Unfeasible or some such, has been Dismantled and struck from the List. And a pirate named Scallywag has been captured.’

‘Scalzo?’

‘Yes, that was it, m’lady.’

Can it be that at last my enemies are all undone?

But the lady’s maid was still speaking. ‘And strange things have been happening lately—malign creatures have been creeping into Caermelor. They have been seen in the streets after dark. And in the north, things have gone from bad to worse. They say the barbarian wizard-chieftains and warlords are on the move again. There will be full-scale war, for certain. The times of peace are over.’

‘As usual you outstrip me with the latest goings-on. How is it that you are aware of these things, Viviana, and I am not?’

The lady’s maid blushed delicately. ‘Of late, you have been occupying yourself with pursuits other than listening to gossip, m’lady,’ she replied demurely. ‘We have scarcely seen you. You dismiss us when you go out. You are rarely between walls.’

‘True enough. What other tidings have been prominent?’

‘Only much talk of the forthcoming fireworks!’

After sunset, flaming cressets splashed carnelian light over the city.

Upon the lightless and stony heights of the palace the more privileged crowd waited for the fireworks to begin. The less privileged lingered expectantly beyond the walls, in the streets, on the roofs of houses. Feuleth the Torch-Fingered, a youngish wizard, excitedly prowled the inner bailey. He was setting fuses to last-minute rights in tubes packed with white, prismatic saltpeter, yellow spores of sulfur, and other pyrotechnic generators. For added effect, and to indicate his indispensability, he shouted orders and incantations and waved a staff purportedly imbued with grarnarye. Up on the parapets, like a human palisade, the Royal Attriod surrounded two who stood looking out across the starlit city. She leaned back against him, her head resting next to the base of his throat. He folded his arms around her. Their hands clasped. In the torchlight their profiles formed a double cameo on the somber sky.

With a howl of igniting combustibles, the display commenced. A hundred and eleven coloured fountains leaped: rufescent, iridescent, viridescent. Out of them, fast things shot high into the dome of night, where they destroyed themselves spectacularly, bursting into glittering rain, scintillating arrows, brilliant hail, confetti, baubles, sequins, petals, jewels. On the castle wall, vivid pinwheels began to rotate, spurting sparks and making whizzing noises that could barely be heard over the bangs, hisses, whistles, and roars, and the keening of air split by rapid flight. Comets sizzled past.

The assembly cheered wildly.

‘Zounds,’ breathed Thomas of Ercildoune on the parapets. ‘Old Feu has really outdone himself this time.’

Later that night, another vision came to Rohain. Later, she named it the Dream of the Feast.

A hall, filled with long tables. An assembly of guests, most of them stunningly beauteous, some offensively grotesque—paragons and parodies, all at one extreme or the other. As Rohain walked the length of the hall, alone, they turned, one by one, to stare, and the pressure of those stares was a threat. Their power was as strong as desire, as indiscriminating and as ruthless. Fear drowned Rohain in its troubled waters. Did they not mock and sneer? Did they not feint and leer, patently, gleamingly observing her walking through their midst, their very presence plucking at her every nerve? Was not their very maintenance of distance a menace, like a steel bar that held them from her but which they could crumple at will, laughing?

At the end of the hall, someone stood waiting, someone whose back was turned. The face could not be discerned. Dreading the sight of it, Rohain yet fastened her gaze upon that one with fascination. At any moment she would see and recognise the face.

The one turned. And turned, and turned again, repeatedly beginning but never completing the rotation. Always, at the moment the first pale curve of the face came into view, the image would flicker and retreat to its commencement, like a shang tableau, and there would be the back of the head again, starting to turn.

Rohain knew that in the last instance this someone would be revealed, but even as the face finally swung into view, there was only a great bird with beating wings, black as oblivion.

She awoke with a mad yammering in her ears, white pain splitting her skull.

Fell creatures were seen in the city at nights. Not before in this long-hundred of years had they dared to penetrate the walls of Caermelor. A curfew was imposed. The citizens made certain their doors were locked at nights, and their abodes well-decked with wight-deterring objects. Wizards and shysters did a brisker trade in charms than usual. Reports came in from outlying areas: The Wild Hunt was active.

The day after the Royal Ball, Thorn came to Rohain and said gravely, ‘If the city has become unsafe, it will not be long before the palace itself is challenged by the reeking forces of unseelie. The restlessness of the Wild Hunt concerns me. Theirs is an eternal malignity, a deep-rooted ill-will. A dangerous adversary endeavoured to get to thee, Gold-Hair, and will likely hunt thee again, for these are immortals and able to pursue forever.

‘I must leave Caermelor,’ he continued. ‘The north stirs again. This time there is a difference—after many a feint and false rumour, we are certain that the war-chiefs of Namarre are about to push forward at last, and that after all the skirmishes and raids, battle will soon be joined in earnest. More platoons have departed to take up their positions. A group of two hundred and seventy soldiers from the First Cavalry Division is headed from the Ilian army base to Corvath on a merchant Windship. Two more flights are to carry out seven hundred troops early tomorrow, with deployment completed in two or three days. To the killing ground I will not take thee, but here thou must not remain. I will take thee and Edward to the one place thou mightst dwell in safety while I am gone.’

‘So we are to be parted …’ Rohain’s blood fused to lead in her veins.

Thorn drew her closer. The effect was not unexpected, the alchemy turning the lead to molten gold. A clear un-scent carried on his breath, like the ether before a storm.

‘Dost think I want to leave thee? I want thee by me all ways, day and night, my Pleasure. Yet I will not lead thee into danger. A battlefield is no place for thee.’

‘I care nothing for danger. Take me with you!’

He placed a finger on her mouth and shook his head.

‘No. Until I can be by your side again, Gold-Hair, thou shalt bide in another place.’

6

THE ISLAND

Green Hair, Dark Sea

On rocky shores there used to stand, windblown,

A lonely tower built of graying stone.

O’er dark and restless seas it shone a light,

And beamed a message through the ageless night,

As if to reach the land where roses bloom,

Whose floral kiss abates despair and gloom.

A VERSE FROM ‘THE ROSE’S KISS’

Three hundred nautical miles separated Caermelor from that uncertain stretch of water halfway between the Gulf of Mara and the boiling fury of Domjaggar Strait, south of the Cape of Tides and north of the Cape of Winds. Here was a region avoided by Seaship routes, a domain where, no matter how vapid the sky, no matter how placid the sea, mist and cloud gathered their skirts and muffled themselves in their mantles.

The bosun blew his whistle. Blocks squealed overhead as the main yards were braced round. HIMS King James XVI hove to at the frayed edges of this foggy obscurity. It was as if a smoky twilight hovered beyond the bowsprit and the starboard taffrail, while elsewhere the day gleamed as lustrous as polished crystals. A mellow sea-breeze came cantering out of the west to lift among the sails the Royal Heraldry of the pennoncels and the long ribbons of streamers, the gay banners and the swallow-tailed gittons, laying them straight along its flowing mane.

Chunks of charcoal imprisoned crimson heat in a brazier suspended on chains from a tripod on the fo’c’sle. Passengers and crew with their taltries thrown back stood watching as a pitch-smeared arrowhead was touched to the coals. Fiery hair sprang forth from that head. In one swift, sudden movement, Thorn fitted the shaft to the string, bent back his longbow—the shaft sliding through his fingers until his right hand almost met the red blossom—and sent it soaring with a twang and a hissing whine, straight into the twilight’s heart.

Standing with feet braced apart at right angles to the target, in the classic archer’s stance, he watched it fly, high and far.

It vanished.

And then there came a thinning of the fog, and deep within the murk a form manifested as if seen through frosted glass. Across the waters, past a wild spume that was the white blood of waves suiciding in the jaws of reefs, a mountain loomed, indistinct, crowned with a pale cloud. An island, floating in the sea.

‘Release the bird,’ said Thorn, handing the longbow to his squire. A snowball or a wad of paper scraps was tossed into the air, shaking itself out into the shape of a pigeon. It took wing toward the island. They watched the white chevron disappear, following the red flower. Waves spanked the port side. Ropes creaked, wood complained, and now the faint cries of gulls scratched the wind.

Presently a spark appeared, a brass button against the dark hem of the land.

‘There she be!’ exclaimed several voices. ‘The Beacon!’

At this signal, the crew swung into action again, hauling on the braces to swing the main yards back into position. The helmsman spun the wheel and brought the ship about. Sails filled, and with the wind directly behind her the vessel began to pick up speed, skimming the crests, scooting toward the isle.

The mountain towered ever higher.

Along a narrow channel between the reefs sped HIMS King James XVI, guided by the Light. She ran between two headlands that held between them a span of vituperative currents called the Rip, until, skating free of those arms, with the Light in the Tower alone on its rocky promontory to the port side, she fell, like a gull to its haven into a beautiful harbour, tranquil and still.

Above the harbour, basalt terraces snaked up the cliffs to the cloud-bearded summit dominating all with its formidable presence. This peak let down its shadow to ink the water, dwarfing the tall ship with the lily sails now furled and lashed into long buds. The vessel became a mote of light on a dark pond. By the shore, red birds of fishing boats clustered at their moorings, all facing west. Some of these fishers, and other vessels shaped like seedpods, were rowed out toward the King James XVI. Crates of snowflake pigeons and a lumpy bag of letters were uploaded. Few other goods were exchanged—this was not a merchant ship, not a trade visit. A crowd lined the shore. Most of the islanders had come down to the harbour to admire the King-Emperor’s renowned ship and to try to catch a glimpse of him in person—it had been long since he was last on the island—as well as to welcome Prince Edward and the Lady Rohain, tidings of whom had preceded them.

Thorn’s hair swung down to brush Rohain’s cheek as he leaned to her. While the clipper’s longboats were being lowered into the water, the pair took leave of each other, speaking softly, standing on the fo’c’sle while all others kept a respectful distance. But when for the last time their hands unclasped, Rohain felt it was an agony, as though her flesh had grown to his and was now torn.

‘Guard her, Thomas,’ Thorn had commanded his Bard. ‘Guard her well.’ But she had thought it was Thorn who needed vigilance and protection, since he was going to war.

Auspiciously, the wind swung around. A sildron floater took Rohain down the ship’s side. In a swathe of rose brocade encrusted with carnelians, she sat in the bow, facing astern like the rowers. At the tiller, the coxswain called out a command. Hemmed in by red birds and seed-husks, the line of row-boats crawled to shore like oar-legged insects on the sun’s glittering path.

The fisher families greeted the Crown Prince, the Lady Betrothed, the Duke of Ercildoune, and the Duchess of Roxburgh and her brood with songs, jonquils, and strings of coloured lanterns. They presented them with trinkets and buckles inlaid with mother-of-pearl, all fashioned from carved coral; with tusks of walrus, skulls of seals, or teeth of whales. They gave also shell-work bouquets (each shell carefully chosen for its colour and shape to replicate a petal of a particular variety of flower), shell-work trinket boxes and glove boxes. The handful of wealthier islanders presented gifts of pearl necklaces, bracelets and girdles studded with garnets, peridots, and zeolite crystals, and containers covered in shagreen. To these they added amber and agate snuff-boxes, nautilus shell cups with pewter rims and feet, porphyry bowls, and a pristine prismatic bowl imprisoning three live leafy sea-dragons; delicate, innocent creatures that Rohain would later discreetly return to their habitat.

The village mayor made a speech.

The rumbling strains of a shanty drifted from the royal ship, out over the water. On the foredeck the men toiled around the capstan, straining against the bars. The anchor broke the water like some queer fish, flukes streaming. With a rattle and a clang it locked into place. Lengths of canvas dropped from the yardarms and fattened like the bells and scoops of pale pink shells. A phosphorescent wake awoke. Cream curled at the prow.

For as long as possible, Rohain held on to the memory of Thorn in dusken, handsome beyond reckoning, resting his elbows on the taffrail, not waving, merely watching her steadily, until distance thinned the bond of that mutual gaze and eventually severed it. Like the tide, terrible grief and longing then rose in her, and she could not speak, made mute again by loss. All the light and laughter in the world was draining out through the Rip, sailing away, far away.

This, then, was the secret island, Tamhania, sometimes called Tavaal. For hundreds of years it had been the private retreat of the kings of the House of D’Armancourt. Some sea-enchantment rendered it safe from all things unseelie. Furthermore, it was hidden from view by mists engendered, it was said, by virtue of a herb that grew extensively over its slopes: duilleag neoil, the cloud-leaf, whose effects were complemented by steam from numerous hot springs. If the isle was struck by a red-hot arrow fired from beyond its shores it would become visible for a short time, but no vessel could find the channel through the reefs without the guidance of the Beacon, and the Light would only be kindled in that gray Tower after the reception of a sealed order from the King-Emperor, or a secret rune, carried in by messenger birds.

Rohain had taken leave of Sianadh at Caermelor, where he had boarded a merchant Seaship bound for Finvarna. It had been a parting both sorrowful and joyous.

‘No tears, chehrna!’ he had said, tears standing in his own blue eyes. ‘’Tis not good-bye, in any event! We I shall meet again! When the war is over the Queen-Empress must tour the countries of her Empire. Start with the best—the land of the giant elk, and the long rugged shores, and the taverns filled with music and good cheer. Don’t ye forget, now!’

He saluted her and swaggered up the gangplank with a jaunty air, waving his cap. That had been the last she had seen of him.

A procession of coaches and riders wound its way upward along the rutted cliff road from the fishing village on the harbour. Over many an arched bridge of basalt they passed, crossing the rills that tumbled down the hillsides, by trees twisted into poetic shapes by salt winds, to the Royal Estate, Tana. High on the mountainside, Tana’s castle overlooked the slate roofs of the village, and the cove where flying fish, leapt in clear green water.

There the Seneschal of Tana, Roland Avenel, greeted them.

This entire island belonged to the Crown. Of those few Feohrkind folk who had been granted the right to dwell there, some were ancient families, the descendants of generations of islanders: fisher-folk, farmers, and orchardists who for centuries had paid their tithes in services and goods or in gems pried from the gravels and crannies of fissures in the mountain walls. Some had been born on the isle and lived out their span of years on it; others left its cloudy shores when they were full-grown, and never returned. Sometimes, folk came to live on Tamhania who had never set foot there before—men and wives who had sought permission from the official authorities representing the Crown, and been deemed worthy; probably they had some skill or talent to offer the community, Perhaps they themselves longed for peace and seclusion.

The Hall of Tana, the royal residence, was more ethereal by far than the buttressed blocks of Caermelor Palace—a chastel out of legend. Its tapering turrets and great ranks of windows rose tier after tier from an ivy-clad plinth that was itself as high as a house—the remains of an old fortress upon which the Hall was founded. Extraordinary masonry adorned the outer walls; pilasters imprisoned in banded stonework, their capitals scrolled or sprouting stone acanthus leaves. Arched niches, ceiled by carvings of giant scallop shells, sheltered statues of mermaids, mermen, porpoises, dolphins, and whales. Over the massive front door loomed the royal coat of arms. Above every ground-floor window, in petrified splendor, the devices of old and noble families were displayed. Swallows darted among the crenellations.

Built upon one of the few level areas on the island, the grounds were parklike. Lawns swept around leafy walks and plantations of ancient, wind-contorted trees that cast their reflections into still ponds, the whole scene overlooking the ocean on the one hand, overlooked by the mountain on the other.

Within, apartments abounded. Huge vaulted cellars with tiled cisterns built into living rock occupied the founding platform. A wide stair led up to the grand salon with its painted wallpaper, heavy-framed portraits, and gilt furniture upholstered in velvet, figured silk, and embroidery. The library was located on this level, as was the dining room, dominated by the marble minstrel’s gallery. Higher up, one could find the smaller salons and studies, the bedchambers each with their own sea-theme, and the Hall of the Guards, a gallery one hundred feet long and so wide that ten men could ride abreast through it. Its walls were ornamented with motifs and arabesques in light blues and reds and earthy browns. Throughout the chastel, the open-beam ceilings were set with hundreds of paintings of mythic scenes all finished with the highest precision.

In this sumptuous island retreat, the days fled by.

Rohain began to accustom herself to her new environs. It was not like living—it was more like waiting. So she waited, with Prince Edward—as vigorous as Thorn and yet as different from him as father from son—with red-haired Thomas of Ercildoune, and the Duchess Alys, and with Viviana, Caitri, and Georgiana Griffin, who had been dismissed by her invidious mistress and joined Rohain’s ever-increasing collection of attendants. Jolly Dain Pennyrigg was with them also, the lad from Isse Tower. He seemed to have become Rohain’s equerry by default, even though gray Firinn had not been transported to Tamhania, the steep slopes being unsuitable for thoroughbred riding-horses.

The climate was mild beneath the cloud-blanket, snugged in tepid seas. Turtles the hue of malachite flew under clear waves of jade. Ladybirds crawled or flew everywhere, like tiny buttons, in livery checkered cadmium and black, spotted charcoal and madder.

White vapours trailed from warm springs on the lower slopes. The Hall of Tana had been built over such pools which now, tamed and shaped by azure-glazed ceramic tiles, were used for bathing. Cloud-leaf grew sharp like dark green fox’s ears in basalt clefts, almost the only living things to cling to the sheer rock-faces of the northern slopes. The clouds captured by the eldritch herb seemed to possess the property of allowing one-way vision, so that from the island, the ocean and sky could be seen as far as the horizon—only their edges were softened a little as through a single layer of muslin.

Fisher-folk plied their nets mainly in the calm band of water betwixt shore and reef, for, once past the reef there was no return, not without the kindling of the Light. Without the Light, all vessels foundered, victims of the rocks. That was part of the island’s sea-enchantment. When a fleet was to venture out beyond that barrier, the leader would memorize the day’s Pass-Sign and take with him a caged pigeon from the lofts in the Light-Tower. When it came time to return, the rune was daubed minutely on a smidgin of papyrus and fastened to the leg of the patient bird. So that the avian aviator could see its way home, a fiery arrow was shot, to make the island visible. Whosoever forgot the sign, or lost the pigeon or the arrows or the fire, could not return; a boat must be sent out to give them aid. It seemed a troublesome affair, but the islanders had grown accustomed to it, and besides, some arcane property of the Light always ensured calm waters in the channel. Once it was lit, safety was assured, even in the most mettlesome storm.

Time passed, but the hours never hung heavily for the bride-in-waiting. Thomas the Bard taught her how to string a lute and make it sing a little, and how to recognise the runes of writing, beginning with the Thorn Rune, þ, and how to name the stars. She did not know if she had been able to read and write before she lost her memory, but penmanship and deciphering came easily to her. When personal messages arrived from Thorn at the battlefields she allowed no one else to read them, and painstakingly composed replies.

From the fisher-folk she learned how to sail the little boats they called geolas—‘What language is this you islanders speak in snatches?’ she asked. ‘A version of the Olden Speech. His Majesty is fluent at it,’ they told her.

But as well as voyaging and making music, it was time to learn to do harm.

Rohain summoned the Seneschal of Tana, Roland Avenel, a silver-maned, doughty ex-legionary of some fifty Winters. She said, ‘It has come to me that knowledge and the wit to use it are the most powerful weapons. The greatest warrior would fail in the wilderness, did he not understand the seasons and the secret ways to find sustenance and the lore of fire-making. Yet a swift and certain sword-arm would stand anyone in good stead. Will you teach me to fight with weapons?’

So the Seneschal tutored her in wielding a light blade and a skian.

When not fencing, strumming, sailing, or shooting arrows at straw bull’s-eyes, Rohain would ride with Edward and their companions. They cantered along dark beaches fringed with black pebbles and rocks twisted like slag, Splendid taltries flapped at their backs. The horses’ hooves kicked up black sand flecked with glitter, like dominite. Ferny weeds and strings of succulent beads filled rockpools so clear one would not have guessed there was water in them, save for a shimmer and a blur. The sun cast a golden fretwork on the waves—a limpid mesh over living glass, the wave-rims like the veil-flowers of clematis. On the dunes silvery saltbush clung, and kitten-tail grass, and scented tea-tree with its waxy flowers. After sunset, white wings of spray blew back off the rolling breakers, gleaming phosphorescent in the afterglow.

The sea-wind murmured like Thorn’s voice in Rohain’s ears.

‘While thou dost remain here,’ he had said, ‘I will never be far from thee.’

Could it be that intense, unremitting longing was powerful enough to bridge distance? Rohain imagined he touched her with every caress of the breeze that occasionally tore the mist into strips, and ruffled her skirts, and played with her tresses. She fancied the soft, warm raindrops on her upturned face might be his kisses. At nights, half waking, she heard the susurration of waves breaking on the boulders below the chastel, as the breathing of one who lay in slumber beside her, and she would reach out her hand, but there was only the substance of moonlight where he might have been, and shadow for his hair.

Still, she felt embraced by a sense of his nearness. She tried to believe it was not all pretense and, convincing herself, found a kind of contentment.

As for the Antlered One and his Hunt, they were far away, on the other side of the island’s enchanted barriers, where they could pose no threat. With each day that elapsed they shrank further back in time, until eventually Rohain abandoned all thought of them.

A secret island, Tamhania-Tavaal was an island of secrets, some of which Rohain came to imperfectly recognise, as days linked together in chains of weeks. Riding or walking along the strand, she and her ladies would often find the fisherfolk’s children playing among the seaweed-fringed rockpools—catching crabs, making coronets of sea-grasses, splashing and laughing. There was one little girl among them who always wore a necklace of perfect pearls that shimmered palest pastel green. Luminous were they, and worthy of a princess. Rohain thought it curious that the child of one of the poor fishers should wear such a valuable treasure about her neck as carelessly as if it were no more than a string of common shells.

It was the first of several curious matters, she discovered.

Once, rising early after another restless night, she rode out with her retainers before sunrise. Walking their horses along the shore, they spied a woman sitting on a rock at high-tide mark. She did not notice them, for she was staring out across the sea. As the first glimmer of dawn grayed the waters, a big seal came swimming toward the rock. When he came within a pebble’s throw, he raised his head and spoke to the woman.

She replied.

Then he walked up out of the sea with the water sliding off him like moon-drops. He cast off his sealskin as he approached, and met her in the form of a man.

The riders turned their horses and hastened away, leaving the couple alone together on the shore bathed by the glance and glimmer of morning light on the waves.

When Rohain told Roland Avenel about this encounter he nodded and said, ‘Ah, yes. I too have seen Ursilla once or twice, at early morning, waiting on the rocks. But prithee, bid your attendants to refrain from speaking to anyone about what you and they have witnessed.’

‘That I shall, if you say discretion is desirable. But who is she, this Ursilla?’

‘She is the wife of a farmer here on the isle, a proud, well-favoured woman who manages her household, her farm, and her husband well. To all outward appearances she possesses everything she could desire. Yet beneath the surface, I fear, she is not happy.’

‘So I have guessed for myself,’ acknowledged Rohain.

Avenel paused and scratched his chin thoughtfully, as though searching for words. ‘All three of Ursilla’s children,’ he went on, ‘have webbed hands and webbed feet. The membranes of skin between their fingers and toes are so delicate and thin that the light shows through. A horny epidermis grows on the backs of their hands. Every one of them has soft silken hair, the colour of the water in the first light of dawn.’

‘And her lover is one of the island’s secrets,’ concluded Rohain softly. She recalled, then, the little girl with the pearl necklace. ‘Pray tell me, Master Avenel, why the fishermen’s children wear such wonderful jewels when they play. I had imagined them to be poor folk.’

‘I’ll warrant you have spied young Sally,’ said Avenel with a laugh. ‘Only one other among the fishers owns such wealth. But nobody envies her, or would try to take the thing from her. Oh, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, because of the way she came by it. ’Tis said that last Summer, Sally was playing with her doll down by the rockpools and when she turned away a mermaid’s child stole the toy. Young Sally fled, weeping. On the following day when she returned to look for the doll, the mermaid’s child rose from the sea at the edge of the rocks where the spume flies highest.’

‘A mermaid’s child!’ interjected Rohain, fascinated. ‘Have you seen the merfolk, sir? What are they like?’

Avenel smiled and drew breath. The Seneschal of Tana was a fair wordsmith; Rohain loved hearing him speak. Now, as he held forth, he led her to imagine entities resembling young women, with waves of hair like sea-leaves, and half their bodies a graceful, sweeping mosaic of verdigrised copper coins. Their skin was the cream of sea-foam and they had long eyes of cucumber green. Avenel related how the merchild came, and in her shell-white hand she held out the pearl necklace, which she gave to Sally in atonement for the theft. In words of alien accent, she told the mortal child that her mother had bade her do so. Then she looked at Sally with her green eyes before flipping away with a flicker of iridescent scales, to plunge beneath the breakers.

‘That has been the most recent sighting of the merfolk,’ said the Seneschal, ‘but that one was only a stripling, not yet a harbinger and bringer of storms—at least, not of disastrous ones.’

‘Are they often glimpsed?’

‘Not at all, m’lady. To see a mermaid is rare. In all my years on Tavaal, I have never once set eyes on one, nor, in truth, do I wish to do so. Other sea-wights are seen from time to time, but these sightings too are rarities. None easily let themselves be spied by our kind.’

‘Who else among the fishers owns a jewel given by sea-folk?’

‘The mayor of our village below! In his youth, some thirty years ago, his father was out fishing when one of his comrades caught a wave-maiden on a hook. She promised, if the men let her go, to give them good fortune. The skipper thereupon dropped her over the gunwale and as she swam to her home she sang:

“Muckle gude I wid you gie and mair I wid you wish;

There’s muckle evil in the sea, scoom weel your fish.”

‘Then the six fishermen thought they had been cheated. Only the lad who was later to be our mayor’s father took any notice of the sea-maiden’s injunction. He scoomed his fish very well indeed, and found a splendid pearl among the scooming, which was kept in the family from that day forth!’

‘Oh, fair fortune!’ declared Rohain, pleased with his stories. She added, ‘I thank you for sharing your knowledge with me, Master Avenel, and while you are doing so, I beg you to solve just one more mystery that has us all intrigued. Last week we rode out to Benvarrey’s Bay. There we saw an ancient apple tree on the cliff, leaning right out over the water. Ripe fruit aplenty hung on its boughs but no one gathered them. When the wind shook the tree, several apples dropped into the sea. It seemed a waste. Why do the poor fisher-folk not harvest the fruit of this tree?’

‘There is a story attached to that tree,’ replied Avenel. ‘Years ago, the Sayles were a large fishing family on Tavaal, with a well-tended croft to supplement their living. They prospered. Old Sayle had a great liking for apples, and when they were in season he always took a pile of them with him in the boat. But when he became too old to go fishing, the family’s fortunes began to decline. One by one the sons left the island until only the youngest remained to look after his parents and the farm. His name was Evan.

‘One day after Evan had set the cleibh-giomach, the lobster creels, he went climbing on the cliff to look for seabirds’ eggs. He heard a sweet voice calling to him and when he went down he saw, sitting on a rocky shoal, a maiden of the benvarrey. Comely she was, so it is told, with nacreous skin, and eyes like sea anemones, and a slender waist tapering to a long fluked curve of overlapping scales. Evan was torn between fear and delight but he greeted her courteously. She asked after his father, and the youth told her about all the family’s troubles. When he came home Evan told his parents what had happened and his father was well-pleased with him.

‘“Next time you go fishing,” he said, “take a pile of apples with you.”

‘The white sea-daughter was delighted to get the “sweet land eggs” once more, and good fortune returned to the Sayles. But Evan was smitten, and he spent so much time out in his boat speaking with her when she appeared, and hoping that she might appear when she was absent, that people began to whisper that he had turned idle. When the youth heard these rumours he was so bothered by them that he decided to leave the island, but before he went he planted the apple tree on the cliff and told the sea-daughter that when the tree matured the sweet land eggs would ripen and drop down for her. Although he went, the good luck stayed, but the lovely wight grew weary of waiting for the apples to form and she went off looking for Evan Sayle. In the end the apples ripened, but neither Evan nor the benvarrey ever came back to look for them. Because the tree was planted there for a seawight, no mortal will touch the fruit.’

When she had listened to this tale, Rohain said, ‘It seems I have much to learn. You say this sea-girl was a benvarrey, a seelie wight, and yet she had a fish’s tail just like a mermaid. How did Evan Sayle recognise she was a benvarrey? And how many kinds of merfolk exist?’

‘As to your first question,’ answered Avenel, ‘it takes an islander, or one who dwells all his life at the margins of the sea, to be able to discern between the different kinds of fishtailed wights, the half piscean and half mortal-seeming. As for your second question, there are five. There are mermaids with their mermen, there are the benvarreys, the sea-morgans, the merrows, and the maighdeanna na tuinne, the wave-maidens. The benvarreys do not fail to look kindly on the races of men but the others may be seelie or unseelie or both. Fear not—around the Royal Isle malignity cannot dwelt. Unseelie merfolk are repelled from its shores. Indeed, the mermaids of Tavaal aid us.’

‘In what manner?’

‘When the men are fishing off the island a mermaid will warn them of forthcoming storms, calling out “shiaull er thalloo”—“sail to land”. If they hear this cry, the boats run for shelter at once, or else lose their tackle or their lives. The fishermen fervently hope to never behold a mermaid at sea, for they only show themselves, rising suddenly among the boats, if the forthcoming storm is to be truly terrible, such as the Great Storm of 1079, in which many perished. As you know m’lady, sea-wights of all kinds dislike being viewed by mortals, and few folk have ever set eyes on any of them, excepting the silkies, who are less wary. Tales of actual sightings are part of island history.’

As he finished speaking, Rohain detected a sudden evasiveness, as if he had just then recollected a fact that contradicted his last statement. I wonder, she thought, whether there might be seelie ocean-wights dwelling among us …

‘Well,’ said Rohain, ‘I have not seen a mermaid, but I have glimpsed a silkie, I think. I hope to see more of the eldritch sea-dwellers.’

‘Now,’ said the Seneschal with a change of tone, ‘I have a question for you, m’lady. Would it please you to come down to the shore towards evening? There is to be a party and a music-making. The seals will come near—the true seals, the animals that live on the skerries around the island. You shall see them, if not the merfolk.’

‘Why will they come?’

‘They are attracted by any kind of music, even whistling.’

‘I should be greatly amused by such a spectacle!’

As the day waned, the islanders gathered great piles of driftwood and lit fires along the shoreside, then played their pipes and sang their songs. Out where the breakers arched their toss-maned horses’ necks, the seals assembled to listen, their soft fur glistening. Burly, wintry-haired Roland Avenel took his bagpipes and walked along the shore playing traditional airs, splashing his bare feet among bubbled crystal garlands of foam strewn like pear-blossom on the ribbed sand.

This delighted the seals. Their heads stuck up out of the water, and they sat up, perpendicular. An enchanting sight it was for Rohain—eighteen to twenty-five seals gathered, all listening, facing different directions, and Avenel playing the pipes to them.

Annie, a serving-girl from Tana, was among the congregated islanders. She touched Rohain lightly on the elbow, saying, ‘Most of those creatures out there are lorraly, my lady. Others are not.’

‘Not lorraly?’ Rohain glanced eagerly toward the seals. ‘Are silkies among them?’

‘Even so!’

The silkies were the seal-folk, the gentlest of seawights. In their seal-form they swam, but in humanlike form they were able to walk on land before returning to the ocean. Despite that men were wont to do them great wrong, the silkies had always shown benevolence to mortalkind. They never did harm.

On another day Roland Avenel, knowledgeable in the ways of silkies, took Rohain, Prince Edward, Thomas of Ercildoune, and Caitri down to the strand they called Ronmara. It was a long-light afternoon. The last rays were roseate, the wind temperate, and the tide at its nadir. Not far offshore, out of the sea rose numerous rocky islets formed from tall stacks of hexagonal stones jammed together like honeycomb, a remnant of some past volcanic action. The water was deep on their seaward side and crystalline in shallow bead-fringed pools on the shoreward side.

There, the seal-folk played.

The silkies appeared like a troupe, of lithe humans: women and men, youths and maidens and children. All were naked, ivory-skinned. Some lay sunning themselves, while others frolicked and gamboled. Beside them were strewn their downy pelts. Eventually, catching sight of the spies, they seized their sealskins and jumped into the sea in mad haste. Then they swam a little distance before turning, popping up their heads, and, as seals now, gazing at the invaders.

‘They are beauteous indeed,’ exclaimed the young Prince.

‘Indeed!’ Caitri echoed, boldly.

‘’Tis little wonder mortals sometimes fall in love with them,’ said the Bard.

‘Do they?’ said the little girl, turning to him in surprise.

‘But surely,’ said Rohain, ‘such love must be doomed from the outset! One dwells in the sea, the other on the land. When lovers belong to two different worlds, how shall they be happy together?’

‘They can not,’ said Edward, rather sharply. Avenel nodded, his mien somber.

Rohain was about to ask, How can you know? when she thought of Rona Wade. She fell silent. Shallow, flat waves played about her feet, rippling with gold scales of sunlight, each delineated by the kohl-line of its own shadow, as she watched the seal-people swim away.

Three times a week, a fisherman’s wife would come to the Hall of Tana with her eldest daughter, delivering fish for the tables. Her husband had a knack for catching the best. The woman’s name was Rona Wade, and there was a strangeness about her, like the sea, and as profound.

Rohain liked to try broaching the reticence of this gentle wife by speaking with her on the occasions they met, but on subjects pithier than island gossip, she would not be drawn. Rohain could not help noticing the webbed fingers of the children of Hugh and Rona Wade. They bore an affinity with those of Ursilla’s progeny, however people wisely refrained from commenting on the likeness. The other island children, if they thought anything of these aberrations, envied them. Webbed fingers made for fine swimmers.

It was obvious that Hugh’s love for his bonny wife Rona was unbounded, but she returned it only with cool cordiality. Like Ursilla, she had been seen stealing alone to a deserted shore where she would toss a shell or some other object into the water. Upon this signal a large seal would appear, and she spoke to it in an unknown tongue.

But Rona was not really like Ursilla.

After the conversation, the creature would slip back under the waves, its shape unchanged. Rohain guessed that Rona did not love Hugh, but she was fond of her husband and never betrayed him.

There appeared to be much unreturned love on Tamhania, which the arrival of the visitors had served to increase. Within a few days of her arrival, Georgiana Griffin, Dianella’s erstwhile servant, had attracted the attention of one of the island’s most eligible young men.

Sevran Shaw was a shipmaster and farmer. Island born, he had travelled far over the seas of Erith on his own sloop, trading profitably, before coming home to settle. Shrewd was he, sensible, good-humored, and comfortably well-off. Now in his thirtieth year, he had never married. Several of the island girls had hoped to snare him, but he had not fallen in love until he set eyes on Georgiana Griffin. This refined lady, bred in the rarefied atmosphere of the Court of Caermelor, refused to hear his suit or to accept him as a friend. Weeks passed and his, attachment grew only the stronger, although she avoided him and they hardly ever met. It looked as if his love was ill-fated.

Thus proceeded the secrets and the passions of the isle.

Yet there were other mysteries on Tamhania-Tavaal, not of the affective kind, and these seemed to be more easily solved.

Through the island’s only village ran crumbling granite walls, and rows of tall wooden piles driven into the ground for no apparent reason. Some stood or leaned like branchless trees, others supported decrepit piers and condemned jetties that stalked toward the water but finished abruptly far short of it, in the middle of the air. Far above the high-tide line, the dried remains of mussels and barnacles encrusted these thick stems.

When Rohain asked about the useless and ruined structures, Avenel told her the village had risen sixteen feet over the last ten years, and the harbour had had to be rebuilt lower down. Local legend asserted that the island had floated at times during the past centuries, traveling on the ocean currents before catching on some submarine reef or snag and taking root again in a new position.

Market day in the uplifted village was a pleasant diversion for Rohain. At the time of full moon, makeshift stalls would be set up in the Old Village Square, and folk would arrive from all over the island to peddle their wares. Riding through the township one market day, with her nineteen ladies and her equerry, Rohain spied a woman dressed in the geranium-coloured houppelande commonly adopted by the middle classes. Her head was sheathed in a shawl. Walking among the stalls, she was bartering jars of honey, bunches of hyacinths and watercress, apple cider and apple cider vinegar in ceramic bottles.

Her face drew Rohain’s attention. There was a look about this woman that stirred some vague memory. Hope sprang in her heart. Could it be she had at last found someone from her past? Dismounting, she gave the reins to her equerry and approached the woman, who curtsied.

‘Do you know me?’ asked Rohain.

The woman’s eyes were two cups filled with reflections. Weather, years, and sorrow had engraved her face with their etchings, but she was not uncomely. ‘All on Tamhania know the Lady Rohain Tarrenys, who is to be Queen-Empress.’

‘But do you know me?’

‘No, my lady.’

‘Your face, to me, appears familiar. What is your name?’

‘Elasaid. Elasaid of the Groves.’

‘Are you certain you do not recognise me?’

‘Yes.’

‘What will you take in return for a bag of apples?’

‘Cloth. Good cloth for a new cloak.’

‘Mustardevlys? Rylet? Thick woollen frieze?’

‘Ratteen, if it please my lady.’

‘Give the apples to my equerry. The ratteen shall be sent to you tomorrow.’

A bargain was struck. It was a way of being linked to this woman.

At Tana, Rohain again drew Roland Avenel aside. She said, ‘Today I spoke with a woman in the marketplace. She is called Elasaid of the Groves.’

Avenel frowned. ‘With respect, does my lady deem it seemly for the future Queen-Empress to associate with commoners in marketplaces?’

Rohain arched her brows in surprise.

‘Why, sir, I shall speak with whomsoever pleases me!’ she responded. ‘There is nothing indecorous about conversing with an honest person in any place, be it public or private. You forget, sir, I am not as the courtiers of Caermelor, so rigid in their hierarchies that they cannot recognise a fellow human creature.’

Avenel bowed, murmuring an apology.

‘I wish to know,’ said Rohain, ‘where she dwells, this Elasaid. I shall visit her.’

‘She abides low on the eastern slopes above Topaz Bay,’ answered the Seneschal. ‘To it, there is a path only fit for donkeys or foot traffic. ’Tis very narrow, and an old stone wall runs all along one side. Those who pass that way must beware of Vinegar Tom. He is not unseelie as wights go—haters of mankind cannot abide here. He is a kind of guardian of the path, that’s all. There is a rhyme that you must recite if you want to get by him. If it is not said, Vinegar Tom takes you away and leaves you somewhere on the other side of the island where ’tis remote and prickly, and it can take a fistful of days to get back. When I first came here, they taught me the chant:

“Vinegar Tom, Vinegar Tom,

Where by the Powers do you come from?”

‘I learned this ditty and went, cocksure, along that path. Vinegar Tom came out and he was like a long-legged greyhound with the head of an ox, a long tail and huge eyes. When I saw him, I found myself so flummoxed that I said:

“Vinegar Tom, Vinegar Tom,

Where in the world do you come from?”

‘I said it wrong, but the words rhymed, so Vinegar Tom only tossed me over the wall!’

Rohain gathered a bolt of ratteen and her retinue and went to visit the lady of the apple groves. The narrow track climbed away from the main road and wound over wooded slopes. To the right, the hillsides dropped sharply to the plane of the sea. To the left they escalated to pathless gullies. There, fern sprays prinked the cracks that ran through spills of ropy, wrinkled rock like the sagging hide of some enormous beast, and mist hovered in ravines walled with strange formations in stone, like frozen waterfalls. Ascending, the party passed spindly towers and pinnacles and needles. They went by a rift in a hillside, which emitted occasional plumes of white steam to augment the ambient brume. In deep gullies, water tumbled noisily over pebbles. A light mist rose from the still surfaces of gray rainpools, and from the puddles lying like shattered pieces of the sky clasped between tree-roots.

They passed Vinegar Tom with no difficulty. When they had repeated the rhyme he turned into the likeness of a four-year-old child without a head, and vanished.

The path led them to a level apron where they beheld a vegetable plot, beehives, and a little freshwater runnel skirted by white-flowered cresses. Here nestled a slate-roofed cot, lapped in gnarled-knuckled trees. Purple hyacinths bloomed among their roots. Small birds twittered, and bees gathered in the foaming pink-and-white confectionery of blossom. From behind fissured, sprouting boles, a waif of a child with green-gold hair spied upon the newcomers, then ran away.

Elasaid welcomed her visitors into her cottage.

‘There is more cloth here than the worth of the apples,’ she said, unfolding a length of ratteen the colour of stormwrack.

‘Then pay me the balance in histories,’ said Rohain.

‘What would my lady wish to know?’

‘The roads you have trod. If it pleases you to tell of them.’

‘Well, I have trod high roads and low and I don’t mind telling at all.’

‘Tell me first about yon child with the green-gold hair.’

‘Willingly,’ said Elasaid of the Groves, ‘for I love her well. On an evening seven years ago, when the last afterglow of sunset was still reflecting in the sky and the owls were abroad, I heard beautiful singing coming from among the shadows gathering in Topaz Bay. I thought it might be the sea-morgans, and I was eager to see if I could catch a glimpse, so I made my way down to the bay as quietly as I could. However, I was not careful enough—my foot dislodged a pebble, and all I caught was a flash and a glimmer as the sea-morgans dived off the rocks into the tide.

‘In their haste and fright, they inadvertently left one of their babies wriggling and laughing beneath the waterfall that splashes from the cliffs above the bay. When I saw the baby I could not do otherwise than love her. I still grieved deeply for my own daughter, so, rightly or wrongly, I took this child created from foam and seaweed and pearls.

‘I took her, and I raised her as my own. I called her Liban. She is like any mortal child in most ways, but I can never get her hair completely dry, not even in the sunshine and the breeze, and the tang of the ocean is always in it. She loves to wade and play in my spring-fed pond, and among the wavelets down at the shore. She is a loving daughter, but there are those among the island-dwellers who, recalling their lives outside Tamhania where unseelie mermaids cause shipwrecks, deem it terribly unlucky even to speak of her kind.

‘I have tried to make them forget her origin. I have endeavoured to put it in their minds that she was born of me, but some do not forget and they wish her ill. Minna Scales is the worst. She has never forgiven me since the colt-pixie chased her son when he tried to steal my Gilgandrias, those apples which are said to be seeded from the land of Faêrie. The wight gave him “cramp and crooking and fault in his footing”—it made him the laughingstock of the village. But I’m not to blame for the colt-pixie chasing him. The colt-pixie is a guardian of apple trees. ’Tis a wight. I have no command over such.

‘Minna Scales will not let up her niggling,’ Elasaid continued. ‘“Odds fish!” she says to Liban. “Look how your hair drips water. Go and dry it like a lorraly lass!” Liban just laughs at her. We keep to ourselves mostly, on this side of the island. The child is happy. I have learned to treasure every moment of her happiness. I think of the other daughter I had …’

Elasaid’s hands trembled.

‘I have not always lived this simple life,’ she said. ‘I voyaged here, to Tavaal, several years ago. Long before I came here, my childhood was spent in a tall and stately house with many servants. I married—perhaps unwisely, but for love. Eight is the number of the children I bore.’ Her blanks of eyes sank into weary hollows. She rested her still-handsome head on her hand.

‘Evil forces took the first seven from me. I took myself away from the last one. To my eternal regret. For, when I tried to return, I could not. My child, my husband, had gone away in their turn, leaving no trace. I was alone. I searched up and down the Known Lands, to no avail. Finally, sick of the world and its heartbreak, I applied to come here, to live out the rest of my days in seclusion. I found Liban. Abiding with her and my freshet of water, and the apples, I open the doors from one day into the next and close them one by one behind me.’

It was easy to strike up friendships with the good-natured islanders. Elasaid of the rain-eyes was one of many with whom Rohain liked to pass the time in conversation. Another was Rona Wade, the wife of Hugh, whose children had webbed fingers. Rona could never be persuaded to reveal her thoughts and desires, but she knew all that went on around the island, and was happy to share her knowledge.

On a hazy afternoon, Rona Wade and her web-fingered eldest daughter tarried with Rohain by the kitchen door at the Hall of Tana. Outside waited the surly donkey with the empty fish-baskets, while its mistress discussed island lore.

‘Why do the children so often dive near the crescent beach beneath the eastern cliffs?’ Rohain wanted to know.

That is where Urchen Conch threw the chest full of money into the water,’ said Rona. ‘They are looking for gold coins. Ah, but I suspect you have not heard that tale, my lady!’

‘I have not, and I burn to understand why anyone would throw treasure into the brine! Who is this Conch?’

‘Urchen Conch was a somewhat simpleminded fellow,’ said Rona. ‘He lived and died a long time ago. Eighty years ago he saved a stranded benvarrey, carrying her back to the sea. He was entitled to three wishes, but did not know to ask, so she rewarded him with information about how to find a treasure. Doing as she bid, he found a chest of antique gold in a great sea-cavern, but he did not know how to dispose of the ancient cash, and at last he threw the coins back into the sea. It is said he threw them from the eastern cliffs.’

‘What a strange tale!’ said Rohain.

She was about to ask further questions when Rona’s two younger children came scrambling up the path, apple-cheeked and breathless.

‘Mama!’ they cried. ‘Luik what we hae fand under a corn-stack! Ain’t it pretty!’ Delighted with their prize, they held it high. It shimmered with a downy silverescence—a banner long and wide, rippling in the wind off the slopes. A meadow of moon-grass.

A sealskin.

Gazing at the hide, Rona’s dark eyes glistened with rapture. She grasped it, shouting aloud in an ecstasy of joy. The children stood gape-mouthed to see their mother put on such an uncharacteristic display, but she turned to them, her happiness suddenly dimming.

‘I love you, my darlings,’ she said, embracing each one hastily, ‘I will always love you.’

The words hung in memory, long after they had been spoken, as if nailed on emptiness. As soon as she had uttered them, Rona fled down the road toward the sea.

The children began to sob. The eldest daughter jumped on the donkey’s back. ‘I’m gaun tae find Da’!’

She whipped the petulant beast into a headlong run, and the younger ones went wailing after. But they never saw their mama again.

Rohain wept for the family, and brought them food and gifts.

Next morning, in the breakfast room at Tana, the residents sat down to dine.

The table-setting was a lavish seascape, dominated by a nef centrepiece filled with rock-salt. This nef had been crafted from a nautilus-shell, which rested beneath the superstructure of a full-rigged sailing galleon, modelled in gold and studded with precious gems. Shell-shapes decorated the gold and mother-of-pearl serviette rings. Over their hands, the ewerer poured phlox-scented water from a dolphin-shaped aquamanile. Meanwhile, a page cranked a serinette in a shellwork case; the miniature barrel-organ tinkled prettily, not with a tune but with the song-notes of the sea-curlew.

The sideboard, whose panels were framed by a graceful relief of crayfish and conger eels carved in apple-wood, had been arranged with figurines of water-serpents and merfolk carved from narwhal tusks. The ornaments were inlaid with nacre and the mottled shell of the sea-turtle. Dome-covered chafing-dishes sat atop charcoal braziers. A silver egg-boiler rested over its small spirit lamp. A sand timer was mounted on the lid, showing that the minutes had almost run out.

The Bard sprinkled allspice from a set of lighthouse-shaped porcelain muffineers. The Prince drank from a nautilus-shell beaker mounted in gold. Someone had left a snuff-box lying on the table alongside a miniature ship carved from bone—the box had been made, not unexpectedly, from a deep-bowled, voluted shell, with an engraved silver lid and silver mounts.

Tana’s decor tended to be thematic.

‘You have heard the news, my lady?’ Master Avenel sipped from a polished driftwood mazer reinforced with a silver foot-rim incised with a pattern of scales.

Rohain nodded assent. ‘Rona Wade has gone.’

‘Aye, gone back,’ said the Seneschal, ‘to her first husband. As Hugh returned from the day’s fishing, he saw her greet him in the waves. She called a farewell to him. Hugh is a broken man.’

‘Well, he was a thief,’ said Rohain, stirring medlure in a cup whose bowl was embraced by the claws of two coralline crabs.

‘Do not judge too harshly, my lady,’ Avenel reproached gently. ‘It was love that drove him to the taking of the sealskin.’

‘I beg to differ, sir. Love never steals. It does not subjugate.’

In the pause that ensued, a housemaid limped past the doorway carrying a dustpan and broom, on her way upstairs to sweep and clean the bedchambers. At first, Rohain had taken pains to avoid this young woman, because her uneven gait reminded her of Pod and his unpleasantries. On further acquaintance, she discovered Molly Chove to be an amiable and cheerful lass, who took it in good part when the other servants teasingly called her ‘Limpet’.

‘Master Avenel,’ she now said to the Seneschal, ‘is there no help for that lame servant?’

‘Molly got her lameness through her own fault,’ he replied, dabbing at his mouth with a linen serviette. ‘A couple of lesser wights inhabit the Hall of Tana—whether they benefit it or not there’s no telling, but they’ve become a habit of a few centuries.’

‘Do they help with household duties?’

‘Maybe,’ said the Seneschal, ‘but I think not. They are pixies or bruneys, I believe. So I am told; I have not seen them. Howsoever, our housemaids Mollusc and Ann Chove tell me they were kind to these imps, showing them hospitality and so forth, and in return the wights used to drop a silver coin into a pail of clear water that the wenches would place for them in the chimney-corner of the kitchen every night.’

‘Surely there is water enough for wights in the streams and wells?’

‘Domestic wights are loath to budge from their chosen dwelling. They like to have clean water put out for their drinking and washing. Once, several years ago, the maids forgot to fill the pail, so the pixies, or whatever they are, went upstairs to their room and shrilly protested about the omission. Annie woke up. She nudged Molly’s elbow and recommended that they should both go down to the kitchen to set things aright, but Molly, who likes her sleep, said, “Leave me be! Would it indulge all the wights on Tavaal, I will not get up.” Annie went down to the yard and pumped clean water into the pail. Incidentally, next morning she found seven silver threepences in it. Meanwhile, as she was going back to bed that night she overheard the wights discussing ways of penalizing lazy Molly. They decided to cripple her in one leg. At the end of seven years, she heard them say, the lameness might be cured by a certain herb that grew on Windy Spur.’

Did they mention the name of this wonderful herb?’

‘They did, but ’twas such a lengthy and complicated name, Annie could not grasp it. When Molly got up in the morning she was limping, and she has been perpetually lame to this day.’

Prince Edward said, ‘The island’s wizard, Master Lutey, has a reputation as an excellent healer.’

‘He has not been able to help Molly, sir,’ replied the Seneschal.

‘Then perhaps his reputation is ill-deserved!’

‘Do not, I pray you sir, despise the talent of old Robin Lutey,’ said Avenel, ‘for he is skilled—I can vouch for it. Do you know how Lutey came by his powers?’

‘Prithee, remind me.’

‘As a young man he was a fisherman near Lizard Point, farming a little, combing along the beaches after the storms. One evening when the tide was far out he went wandering along the shore seeking for some wreckage-find among the seaweed and rocks. As he turned, empty-handed, to go home, he heard a low moan from among some boulders, and there he discovered a stranded mermaid.’

‘For a shy race, they are seen surprisingly often,’ Rohain interjected.

‘Only on Tamhania, my lady,’ said Avenel. ‘This is a special place.’

‘I was given to understand that they only showed themselves before storms.’

‘They only allow themselves to be seen when they warn of foul weather. This one was stranded. She could not get back to the sea and had no choice but to be seen, despite the fact that no storm was on the way.’

‘Next her strange beauty allured him, no doubt?’ Rohain was learning the ways of sea-wights.

‘Yes, my lady, and he spoke to her, for the sea-folk understand all tongues. She told him that while she combed her long green hair and gazed at herself in the rockpools the tide had gone out without her seeing it. She begged Lutey to carry her over the strip of dry sand, and, giving him her gold-and-pearl Comb as a token, promised him three wishes. She told him that if he was in any trouble, to pass the Comb three times through the sea and call her name, Morvena, and she would come.’

‘Now you have me puzzled,’ said Rohain. ‘How is it that she could not walk, and yet I have heard that some of the sea-damsels when on land have limbs and walk about as well as you or I?’

‘That is one of the differences between mermaids and sea-morgans, m’lady.’

‘So.’ She nodded. ‘I continue to learn. And what were Lutey’s wishes?’

‘The power to break the spells of malign gramarye, to discover thefts, and to cure illness. These she granted, but only to the degree of her own power.’

‘He was fortunate.’

‘Indeed, but that was not the end of this fish’s tale,’ said the Seneschal, permitting himself a faint smile at his pun. ‘As he walked with her over the sands, she clinging to his neck, she told him of all the wonders of her home under the sea and implored him to go with her and share them all. Robin Lutey was fascinated and would undoubtedly have yielded had not a sharp bark of terror from his dog, which had followed him unnoticed, roused him to look back. At the sight of the faithful hound his wits returned to him. Already the clasp of the mermaid was becoming stronger as she touched the waves, and she might have dragged him under into the deep realms of the great kelp-forests, except that this is Tamhania, the isle of kings, and wickedness thrives not here. She relented. But as she swam away she sang to Lutey—and that, he never forgot. It is said that the song of the mermaid sounds forever in his heart, and that one day she will come for him and he will follow her.’

‘A future not unkind awaits him, then,’ said the Bard, who had been silent while eating.

‘But nay, sir!’ said Avenel. ‘Master Lutey possesses a terrible gift. He has somewhat of prescience, which allows him to garner an inkling of his own doom. I have gathered, although he has never said as much, that although he shall indeed go with the mermaid he shall not live long thereafter, for the dreaded Marool shall come upon him in its domain, the sea, and shall put an end to his life.’

Rohain pondered on this. Her eyes were wet. Presently she said, ‘A mighty wizard is he.’

‘Officially he may not carry the title of wizard since he never studied at the College of the Nine Arts, but meanwhile the island benefits from his powers, which are far greater than those of any ordinary wizard.’

‘Small praise, in sooth,’ said the Bard drily. ‘What became of the mermaid’s Comb?’

The Seneschal replied, ‘It is said that whenever he strokes the sea with it she comes to him and teaches him many things. The old sea-mage still has the Comb.’

‘But he could not cure Molly’s lameness?’ Rohain persisted.

‘It takes wondrous power to cure anyone who has been wight-struck.’

Rohain’s hand strayed to her throat. How true, she thought. In sudden fear she glanced at her reflection in the mirror-backed sideboard. The face that met her gaze reassured her. The past is gone. It need not trouble me anymore.

Days and nights brightened and darkened the shores of Tamhania. They brought a few alterations in life at Tana. On the strand below, the waves washed back and forth, giving and taking. Translucent to the point of transparency were they, only betraying their existence by shadows on the ribbed sand—shadows of floating foam-flecks, the long undulating shadows of ripples, little darknesses made by the water bending the sunlight, robbing the sand of it, throwing it joyously up in brilliant flashes.

One evening Rohain and Viviana entered the kitchens of the Hall of Tana to find Annie and Molly Chove dancing with the cook, while the spit-boy played the fiddle.

‘O strange!’ cried Rohain, steadying herself against a corner of the well-scrubbed table. ‘Molly, how do you caper so well? For I see that you dance better than most, and you limping like a henkie only yesterday! It is beyond all belief!’

‘I went mushrooming,’ said Molly, panting and red-cheeked.

Uncertainly, Rohain said, ‘So you went mushrooming, and that cured you?’

‘Nay, mistress! As I were picking a mushroom for me basket an odd-looking boy sprang up out o’ the grass, and would not be prevented from smiting me upon the thigh with a sprig of leaves. After that, the pain went right out of me leg and I could walk straight. Now I does the gallopede!’

‘Her seven years is over, you see, mistress,’ explained Annie, as Molly and the cook hoofed it around the kitchen in another mad frenzy. ‘Wights always keeps their promises.’

A new month came in, bringing the Beldane Festival, symbolised by flowers and baskets of eggs and butterchurns. At the Whiteflower’s Day Dance, Molly Chove outfooted them all.

After breakfast one morning, Rohain walked beneath the castle walls amid a crowd of attendants. The sea was apple-juice green. White feathers ran down the spine of the sky and a peculiar greenish tinge stained the northwest horizon. Something intangible about the island began to disturb her. She could not identify it, could not quite label it a wrongness, but there was something.

‘Jewel-toads are on the move, my lady,’ said young Caitri, ‘and the goats on the hillsides seek the caves. Master Avenel says these are signs that a bad storm is on the way.’

‘Storms frighten me,’ stated Viviana. Nervously she toyed with a silver thimble attached to the well-furnished chatelaine at her waist.

‘I had a dream last night,’ said Georgiana Griffin, ‘a strange dream. About that islander.’

‘What islander?’ asked Rohain, feigning ignorance.

‘Master Shaw.’

‘I thought you said he was nothing to you.’

‘He is. But this dream. I thought I was gathering the primroses and sea-pinks that grow among the salt-bushes on the slope to the west of the Hanging Cave, when I heard a singing on the rocks below. I looked down and saw Sevran Shaw lying asleep on the beach and a fair lady watching beside him. Then he was standing beside me and when he shook the saltbushes, showers of drops fell with a tinkling sound and turned as they fell into pure gold, and I caught sight of the lady floating on the water, far out at sea. I woke then, but just now as we passed that same flowery slope I could swear I heard the strange singing coming up from the rocks, as in the dream.’

‘I have more than heard it,’ said a male voice. Sevran Shaw himself was advancing up the path. ‘I have seen and conversed with the singer, the eldritch lady of your dream.’ A ripple of amazement ran through the assembly of courtiers. ‘Greetings and hail, Lady Rohain, Lady Georgiana, ladies!’ Shaw addressed them with a gallant bow, his plumed hat in his hand.

‘Greetings, Master Shaw. You say you have seen a mermaid,’ Rohain said.

‘Aye, my lady, and it has been long between such sightings. The last time a mermaid appeared near the Hanging Cave was just before the terrible storm in which my father was lost.’

‘La!’ exclaimed Georgiana. ‘Take care not to repeat the mermaid’s words, sir, for I have heard that they thrive ill who carry tales from their world to ours.’

Shaw returned, ‘There is no need for fear on my account, for I am the master of this sea-girl.’ He recounted how he had risen before dawn on the previous day—having not closed his eyes all night, for reasons he would not divulge—and walked to the beach to watch the sun rise across the skerries beyond Seacliffe Head. He had gone down to the Hanging Cave, a place renowned for its strange occurrences. As he stood, he heard a low song coming from a stack of rocks nearby. Moving toward the sound, he saw the singer, a damsel with long green-gold hair falling over her white shoulders, her face turned toward the cave. He knew without a doubt that although for years he had travelled far on the high seas, he was seeing a mermaid for the first time in his life.

Shaw crept toward the rock shelf on which sat this thrilling incarnation, taking cover all the way, but just as he reached it she turned around. Her song changed to a shriek of terror and she attempted to fling herself into the water, but he seized her in his arms. She strove with amazing strength to drag him into the waves with her, but he held her fast and at length bore her down by brute force. She still struggled but at last lay passive on the rock, and as he looked at her he knew he had never seen anything so wild and lovely in all his life.

‘Man, what with me?’ she had said in a voice sweet and yet so strange that his blood ran cold at the sound.

‘Wishes three,’ he had replied, aware of the traditional formula.

‘What did you wish?’ breathed Georgiana.

‘I wished that neither myself nor any of my friends should perish by the sea, like my father did. Next, I wished that I should be fortunate in all my undertakings. As for the third wish, that is my own business, and I shall never tell anyone but the mermaid.’

No one present failed to guess it.

‘And she said?’ Georgiana murmured.

‘“Quit and have,” was her reply. I slackened my hold then. Raising her hands, palms together, she dived into the sea.’

Georgiana scarcely spoke after the tale was done. As they climbed the hillside, returning to the chastel, Shaw offered his arm and she leaned on it.

But a mermaid had been seen, for the first time in twelve years. Every islander knew what that meant.

Soon, the elements would rise. A terrible storm was on the way.

That afternoon, Rohain went down to the village. Over the marketplace the greenish stain in the northern sky had darkened to heavy bruising, spreading across the sky, ominous and threatening. Gusts swatted the stalls in fits and starts, like a vexed housewife with a broom. Folk hurried to finish their market chores so that they could get home and begin battening down. The word was out: Master Shaw had seen a mermaid.

Spying Elasaid of the Groves and her child among the last of the trading crowd, Rohain approached them. Liban had plucked a posy of sea-pinks from crevices in the stone walls, and was making them into a chain.

‘Why do you not hurry home?’ Rohain asked. ‘Everyone says a storm is on the way.’

Elasaid glanced skyward. ‘On the way, but not yet here,’ she said. ‘Liban has told me it will not arrive before nightfall.’

As they stood in conversation, a weird song came down the wind. It seemed to approach, keening, from far out at sea.

‘Whatever is that?’ exclaimed Rohain.

Elasaid fell silent, but the melody was heard again, from close by, and this time it was Liban who sang. ‘That song is mine,’ said the green-eyed scrap of a child with sea-pinks in her hair. ‘Someone is calling me. The storm will come tonight.’

‘Wisht Liban!’ said Elasaid urgently. ‘Hush now!’ But a rope-faced old woman who had been loitering nearby turned and hurried away. ‘Alas, that was Minna Scales, and she heard what Liban said,’ said Elasaid sorrowfully. ‘She’ll be telling the men, those who fear the sea-morgans. What will happen now, I do not know.’

Since Rohain had arrived on Tamhania, shang storms had come with their jinking music like tiny disks of thinly beaten silver shaken in a breeze, and they had gone. But this was the first time a ‘natural’ storm had menaced. And, by all the signs, what a storm it promised to be! It would bring the world’s winds teeming, screaming forth in long, lean, scavenging fronts bearing tons of airborne water. Its brew of pressures would build up tension in powerful charges for sudden, white-hot release. And with all the ruthlessness of something mindless.

This storm was fast approaching, over the sea. And Rohain felt—she was certain …

… something wicked was coming with it.

As darkness crept across the island, objects rattled in the Hall of Tana. Gorgeously decorated pomanders, pounce boxes, and vinaigrettes were clustered on a small marquetry table. All exuded conflicting scents. To add to the sensory confusion, a porcelain pastille-burner discharged aromatic fumes through its pierced lid. Someone had absentmindedly placed this jumble of fragrant ornaments on the table—Molly perhaps, hastening about her business, distracted by the storm’s approach. There they sat, abandoned, and clattered—enamel clunking against metal, wood on ceramic, ivory on bone.

Late in the evening the gale’s first outriders hooted eerily in the chimneys and chivvied at the tiles of the chastel’s pointed rooves. Thomas of Ercildoune, Roland Avenel, and the Bard’s apprentice Toby played loudly on trumpet and bagpipes and drums for Rohain and the young Prince and Duchess Alys of Roxburgh, but although their melodies increased in volume so did the storm’s music, until nature obtained precedence. Then they put away their musical instruments and sat in the main salon hearkening to the rising howl.

In a sudden burst of thunder, the castle shuddered. A gauntlet fell off a standing armour, startling the company. It was like a challenge from the elements: Behold, I throw down the glove. Brave me if you dare.

They knew, then, that the storm had reached the island.

‘If I retired to bed I would not sleep, with this cacophony ringing in my ears,’ said the Bard, his tone over-jolly. ‘I shall bide here until the tempest abates. Wine, Toby! Have them bring more wine!’

‘For my part, presently I shall say good night to all and wend upstairs,’ said the Duchess, yawning behind her hand. ‘There is no profit in losing sleep.’ When next Rohain looked toward her, the Duchess had settled back against the cushions of a brocade couch and fallen into a twitchy doze.

Avenel sat brooding.

Rohain and Prince Edward remained at Ercildoune’s side. The Prince toyed with an empty cup, while Rohain stared out at the raging weather. The Bard compensated for the sobriety of his companions by quaffing deeply of his own cup, and calling for his squire to refill it. He was the only loquacious member of the party, loudly regaling them with an assortment of boisterous stories.

The main salon, where they kept company, was beautiful. A multitude of candles illuminated its glory. On the ceiling above the window reveal, stenciled swallows dashed across a painted sky. Bullion-fringed swags of heavy blue velvet in stiff folds festooned the pelmet. The tall windows were divided into smaller panes, each with its own shutter daubed with little pictures of rural idyll.

Through the panes of the embrasure, opalescent and salt-glazed, Rohain and Edward looked out across the village, now in darkness. Its lamplit windows were a scatter of square-cut zircons. Beyond it, the harbour now appeared insubstantial, bathed by the raw murk of night and thunderwrack. The gloom hid any sign of the Light-Tower standing lonely on the ocean’s rim. There, the Lightkeeper would be holding vigil, with only the pigeons for company—their cries as soft as dollops of cream—and the great mirrored Light floating at the top of the Tower in its bath of quicksilver.

The storm threw an apoplectic fit. Lightning erratically cast blue-white plaster reliefs of the Light-Tower. For the duration of a thought, it blanched the entire landscape with dazzles so intense they printed specters on the vision of the watchers, against the blackness that smacked down afterward.

The night was at its thickest and the storm had reached an apogee of violence when a brilliant strobe described something new out beyond the narrow gap between the headlands. Rohain seized a spyglass, its bronze casing etched with whorls. She trained its round lens on the pale thing that seemed to dance there. After a moment, the cylinder dropped from her nerveless fingers. At her side, Edward deftly retrieved the instrument.

‘What is toward?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I cannot bear it. Something must be done. The Light must be kindled.’

The Prince applied the spyglass to his eye.

‘A ship!’ he muttered wonderingly. ‘And in trouble, it seems—too close to the reefs. But what ship? The glass will not let me descry their ensigns.’

By now the Bard had relinquished his winecup and was squinting through a second spyglass. ‘Why does the Beacon not shine?’ he cried, his voice somewhat slurred. ‘Surely by now the ship’s master must have sent the message-birds.’ Grim-faced, he flung down the instrument. ‘But in sooth, what birds could fly in this gale? They would be blown away. And with no Light, that ship shall soon be dashed to pieces.’

Roused from his reverie, Roland Avenel leapt up and strode to the window. ‘This is madness,’ he said, frowning and peering through the metal tube. ‘No vessels are due to put in. Where is this ship from? And who is she?’

‘It matters little! Lives are about to be lost!’ expostulated the Bard. ‘Surely the Lightkeeper knows that. No doubt he’ll have seen this ship. It is unavoidable, for the Tower looks out upon the open sea. He is right close to them there—yet inexplicably he remains idle!’

‘Has he a heart of ice?’ demanded Rohain, pacing the floor, clasping and unclasping her hands.

‘He obeys orders,’ said Avenel.

‘A message must be borne swiftly to him, sir,’ the Bard said, leaning unsteadily toward the Prince. ‘Your orders to light the flame.’

The Prince replied, ‘When an off-island vessel comes in, a foreigner, the command to kindle the Light must bear the Royal Seal. The signet ring bearing that seal is now far from here.’

‘Of course—it is upon your father’s hand,’ said Rohain. ‘But do you not wear a similar ring, Edward?’

‘No. There is no other.’

‘Then,’ said the Bard, the Lightkeeper must accept the royal command by word of mouth instead! Zounds, methinks the cries of the drowning sailors are already clamoring in my ears. Is that the sound of men calling from the dim and heinous troughs of ocean swell? We must needs hasten!’

‘This is madness!’ shouted Avenel.

The Duchess Alys woke in fright. ‘What’s amiss?’ she said, hastening to join them at the window.

‘Ercildoune would have us kindle the Light, despite that the proper procedure is lacking,’ said the Seneschal angrily.

In a low voice the Prince said, ‘Good sir, good Thomas, I say to you the Light must not shine on this fell night. Not without the proper directives.’

The Bard stared at him in disbelief. ‘Do I hear aright?’ he said indistinctly. ‘Is Your Highness willing to let those poor folk perish?’

‘It may be some trick.’

‘Edward, how can you say so?’ Rohain trembled, hot with indignation. ‘It might not be a trick. Would you lay that on your conscience? On ours?’

The Prince’s face looked troubled. ‘Lady, when the Light shines it opens a gate through a shield of gramarye which covers Tamhania like a dome. While that shield is breached, anything unseelie might penetrate.’

The Bard said urgently, ‘For one brief instant only shall it be opened! As soon as the vessel slips through, the Light shall be quenched. Where is your heart, lad? I entreat you—ride with me to the Light-Tower and give your command. The Lightkeeper shall not gainsay the Empire’s heir.’

‘I will ride beside you!’ said Rohain.

‘May the Powers preserve me from bee-stings and headstrong wenches,’ muttered the Bard. He tottered slightly, steadying himself against a marquetry table.

The face of the young Prince was ripped to shreds of anguish and bewilderment. ‘Mistress Tarrenys, the weather is too wild for thee,’ he said, taking Rohain by the hand. ‘Do you not see? Thomas is deep in his cups tonight. The wine leads his thoughts astray. Like many bards he is a passionate man, ruled by his heart; the drink amplifies that tendency. Were he sober, he would not argue against me, for he understands the rules of the island very well. Prithee, do not even contemplate going out in the storm.’

At fourteen, Edward already matched her height. Level with his, her eyes beseeched him. ‘Won’t you come with me to the Light?’ she said.

His visage, pale, dark-eyed against the black brushstroke of his hair, softened. With a shuddering sigh, as though torn in twain, he turned out his hands, palms upward as if in surrender. ‘I will ride with thee.’

‘Madness!’ fumed Avenel.

‘Pray think twice!’ Alys urged the young man.

‘I have made my decision,’ replied he, and the Duchess could not gainsay the Crown Prince.

A stony road emerged from the northern end of the village. Hugging the line of the shore, it curved around the sweep of the harbour and along the promontory’s spine, ending at Light-Tower Point. Along this road seven riders flew through the fangs of the gale, and slanting spears of rain. The darkness was intense, alleviated only by whips of lightning.

They covered the last lap at a gallop. Pounded by the fists of the ocean, the very ground shook beneath the horses’ hooves, and salt spray erupted from the base of the cliff to smite them like a beaded curtain. Only the wall on the seaward side of the road saved them from being flung over the edge. Intermittent flickers of light revealed the ill-timed ship, closer now, foundering on the rocks. Its hull was cracking like a monstrous eggshell. Between blasts of thunder and wind, the riders’ ears were assailed by cries of fear and misery as thin as the piping of crickets. The ship, hanged on cruel spurs, slumped sideways, dangling.

‘We are too late,’ Ercildoune roared, but the words were snatched from his mouth even as he shouted them. The foundering vessel gave a great lurch. With a last macabre wave of its ragged sails it began to crumple slowly into the corrugated sea. A wave crashed against the rocks and jetted up in a pillar of spray.

The Light-Tower seemed to hover at the end of the causeway. Over the archway giving onto its courtyard, runes, weather-stained and eroded, spelled out:

Here, the Tower of Power.

Ye Who Wander Yonder

Keep the Light in Sight.

Tossing their reins to the two squires, the riders burst through the Tower’s door in a swirl of drenched cloaks and a clatter of squelching boots. The stairs spiraled up and up. At the top, in a round room, an icicle stood.

The Lightkeeper.

Age had plowed severe furrows into the waxen face. Over heavy robes of overcast gray, a gossamer beard hung to his waist. Moonlight hair flowed halfway down his back, from beneath a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat. Hollowed out of a face as bleached as parian, the eyes were two glass orbs, limpid, almost colourless. The Lightkeeper was an albino of the kindred calling themselves the Arysk; the Icemen.

He unlidded his eyes, like two silver snuff-boxes.

‘Welcome, Your Highness,’ this unlit candle declared above the tumult, his phonetics clicking in the Rimanian accent, ‘welcome Lords and Ladies.’ But it sounded like ‘Veltcome, Yourk Hightness, veltcome, Lorcds ant ladties.’

‘The ship,’ shouted the Prince, pushing past the closed eye of the Light on its pedestal in the room’s centre. He stared down from the latticed windows, barred with chill iron against the ocean’s siege.

‘Vun ist vrecket alreatty,’ said the Keeper. ‘Aknothert comest.’

‘You have doomed one ship and now you say a second follows the same path, Master Grullsbodnr?’ the Bard bellowed angrily.

It was true, The second vessel was smaller than her sister. Lanterns swung from the rigging. Their glow spilled sporadically on flowing-haired figures wearing long gowns. Their mouths were open. They were screaming.

The Bard swore vehemently.

‘There are women aboard!’

‘And yet …’ Edward murmured. His voice trailed away.

‘No kmessagte. No copmandt,’ intoned the Lightkeeper glacially.

‘Be wary,’ cried Alys, ‘I mislike the look of this. What ensigns does the captain hoist? I see none.’

‘See how the wind has torn the sails! How might ensigns remain untouched?’ Ercildoune returned. ‘They would be ripped to rags!’ He and the Duchess disputed, then, like quarreling rooks, in this high nest on its granite tree, until the Bard bawled, ‘While we stand in discussion, the second ship is driven upon the rocks. Master Grullsbodnr, kindle the Light at once!’

The aged Iceman shook his head. ‘Ta Light not sheint vidout ta kmessagte.’

‘Rohain, I appeal to you!’ The Bard drove his fist against the Light’s pedestal.

‘I am of one mind with you, Thomas. Sir?’ Rohain turned to Edward.

‘I do not know,’ the Prince shouted against the din, desperately grappling with indecision. ‘Grullsbodnr is right, and yet if these mariners are indeed mortal and should perish, the shadow of this grievous misdeed will lie heavy on us forever. They might well have been blown off course …’

The Duchess Alys plucked at his coat. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘our own course must not deviate. The mandate is unambiguous. For generations it has obtained security for the royal island. I rode here to prevent folly if I could. The Light must not be kindled this night.’

‘And I concur,’ Avenel declared.

As they spoke, another blistering flare displayed a ghastly scene on the rocks below. The second ship had fetched up on their points at last. She tottered. Amid the churning flood, human forms clung to broken spars. Some were overtaken by long valleys, emerging at the summits of crests, sliding down again through dark walls of hyacinth glass, to reappear no more.

‘It is too much to be borne,’ Rohain exclaimed, ‘two ships destroyed! We might have saved the last. We must send boats without delay, to aid any that survive in the water.’

‘No boat would live long out there,’ Avenel said.

On the second ship, the firefly lanterns had all winked out. Only the nautilus curve of her side now lifted and dropped on the storm’s pulse, sinking lower in the water, a mere evanescence of bent wood and ruined canvas, in its death throes no longer a ship, merely a broken thing.

Edward touched Rohain’s sleeve. His eyes clouded. ‘Forgive me.’

She nodded acknowledgment, unable to speak.

The fenestrations fretted in the gale, the panes rattling in their metal grooves like prisoners shaking the bars of their cells.

‘I am sick,’ the Bard said. ‘I am sick to my very marrow that we should stand thusly by and let this happen on the chance that it is some ruse of unseelie. If this vision is a forgery, what of it? Do we not have Lutey the mage who breaks spells, do we not have strong men and hounds to hunt down any mischief that should infiltrate?’

‘Your heart governs your head, Ercildoune,’ warned Alys.

‘And were that a more prevalent condition, mortalkind must find itself in better state!’ he returned warmly. ‘Drowned, all drowned, those brave folk, and their corpses to wash up, bloated and staring, along the shores of Tamhania this many a day, a mute reproach, the more terrible in its silence.’

The windows clattered. Between the leading and the wands of iron, the diamond panes wept salt tears. The Tower room was cold and drear. Its freeze seeped through Rohain’s sodden clothing and into her sinews. The wind’s ululation dropped away somewhat, enabling softer speech, but there was nothing to say.

It was after midnight.

‘We should depart,’ said Avenel bleakly.

Rohain stole one last glance through the salt-misted lattices, out across the wild sea.

Then, with an altered mien, she whirled away from the view. Seizing a candle out of a branch encrusted with dribbles of congealed wax, she stepped up to the Light in its glass cage atop the pedestal.

‘Lightkeeper, open the Light’s door,’ she commanded in a clear voice, ‘I shall kindle it myself, if you shall not.’

Edward, filling her place at the window glanced out. Sharply, he said, ‘Obey, Master Grullsbodnr.’

The future king has spoken,’ subjoined the Bard, scowling at the Iceman.

The Lightkeeper unfastened the little door. Rohain reached her hand inside. The buttercup candle entered, met the wick, and inflamed it.

The wick was surrounded by polished mirrors. Stark white radiance stood out from them like a solid bar of frost-quartz. Somewhere, clockwork machinery started up. Spring-and-sildron engines whirred and the Light began to rotate. It sent its steely beam through the lattices, far out into the dread of night, over frothing, coughing reefs and farther until, over the trackless ocean, the bounding main, it stretched itself too thin, becoming nothing.

Rohain had espied a third vessel down there—a lifeboat. Its sail seemed as small as a pocket handkerchief.

It was in the channel now. By the Light of the Tower, in protected waters, it steered true—straight for the gap between the headlands. On board were three shipwreck survivors. The young mother stayed at the tiller while two tiny children clung to each other beside the streak of a mast.

The Bard and the Seneschal ran down the stairs, calling to the squires in the stables to launch the Lightkeeper’s geola, that they might meet the fragile craft as it entered the harbour.

Past the Tower on its northern headland sailed the boat with its three passengers, beneath the single spoke of the wheel of light. The watchers in the upper room could see them clearly, could see their faces now—the courageous, tragic mother, the darling children standing up and spreading their arms wide for balance. But why had they done so? Why let go of the mast? And their arms had a strange look now—they seemed to be stretching … the children were growing.

And she was growing too, and changing, the one who no longer held the tiller, who could not hold anything anymore because it had no hands, only terrible wings like two charred fans of night. The two creatures by the mast extended their black pinions. The darkness was pierced by three pairs of incandescent coals—red fires burning holes in beaked skulls. One by one they rose, retracting spurred tridents of talons. The beaks opened.

‘Baav!’ cawed the first. ‘Macha!’

‘Neman!’ croaked the second.

Effortlessly on those outsized kites of wings, slashing the air with slow, powerful downstrokes, the three abominations, crow-things out of nightmare, flapped away over the lightless harbour. Out of the Light’s reach they fled—shadows winging toward Tamhania’s highest point, the mountain’s summit.

‘Morrigu,’ quoth the final corvus in a creaking voice, like the closing of a coffin-lid.

Then the moon came flying in terror from behind the clouds. Her light gleamed down. And there on the opposite headland, on Southern Point just across the Rip from the Light-Tower, was a child. It was Liban, the adopted daughter of Elasaid. She ran, spirited and free, like the ocean. The fear that the Crows had brought was not on her; she was not of mortalkind. Her own pale tresses flew in the storm wind as she ran along the path to the sea, laughing. A handful of men chased after her but they couldn’t overtake her, and the last man ran with a crooked gait. That strange sea-song came again, and the waves thundered against the rocks. The men halted in fear, staying where they were up on the cart-track.

The watchers in the Light-Tower heard Liban singing as she ran out along the reef, and then a mighty wave smashed against the reef and reared up. It washed over her, and she was gone.

In fitted bursts of moonlight the tempest subsided, rolling away to the southeast. The wind eased. Utter stillness commenced. Fog snakes came coiling out of the sea-harbour and all along the weed-dashed beaches. Although the hour was well before cockcrow, the villagers were astir in the streets. Lanterns passed to and fro in the dark. Much was amiss. The rough weather had wrought severe damage.

Furthermore, it had been discovered in the village that under cover of the storm, John Scales and his wife had incited some of the more superstitious islanders to form a lynch mob and go after the fey girl sheltered by Elasaid of the Groves. Hearing that trouble was afoot, the mayor had taken charge. He mustered certain law-abiding men who were now riding with him to the road from Southern Point, in order to confront Scales’s mob as they returned.

A few islanders—mainly those who were known to have a tendency to be fanciful—claimed to have seen three dark shapes flying from the headlands. They said they were like great birds, traveling in a barbed formation like an arrowhead, and they had ascended toward the mountain peak hanging in the sky. But with more pressing matters to attend to, of the alleged Crows little note was taken.

Seven riders hastened back along the crescent road to the village. They drew rein in the marketplace. Overhead, cloud-tendrils unraveled before the face of the bald moon. Frigid radiance bathed the Old Village Square.

‘I must find Elasaid,’ said Rohain dully. ‘She will be here, in the village.’

Her horse was restless, as if sensing her unease. The cold that weighed her limbs like iron chains was generated more by horror than by her soaked raiment. It was a clammy dread that drained her vitality and painted with a lavender hue her nails and lips. She could think of nothing but the appalling Crows, and the child taken by the wave, Elasaid’s loss.

‘’Tis folly to remain here,’ remonstrated the Duchess Alys, quietening her own steed with an expert hand. ‘I urge you to return with me to hall and hearth.’

‘I will not be dissuaded.’

A man ran up to the party of riders.

‘My lords, my ladies,’ he said, ‘the mayor’s wife bids ye come to his house, if ye will, and be warmed at his fire, and take a sup.’ He bowed.

Suddenly Elasaid was standing at Rohain’s stirrup. Her eyes were dark.

‘Have you seen Liban, my lady?’ she asked. Her tone was flat, without hope.

‘Elasaid,’ said Rohain, dismounting, ‘the child is gone back to the sea. Come with us to the house of the mayor. There we will talk.’

At the home of the village’s chieftain, servants brought wine for the guests. A cherry fire burgeoned amid a heap of driftwood, but Rohain was unable to thaw. She had become as one of the Arysk—a glazed and brittle shard, numb to feeling. When she closed her eyes, three ghastly birds flapped across the linings of her lids.

Edward described to Elasaid the entire story as it had been seen from the Light-Tower.

‘We heard Liban singing as she ran out along the rocks,’ he ended, ‘and then a great wave came surging up and swept her away. We saw her no more.’

After a time, Elasaid murmured, ‘Another child of mine is gone.’ She seemed like one who has been struck blind. ‘But I thank you for bearing these tidings,’ she went on doggedly. ‘I do not grieve for her sake—perhaps somewhat for myself, but self-pity bears no merit. She has returned to her own kind as I always knew she would. She was never my child. Liban has been reclaimed, as is fitting, just as Rona Wade returned to her people not long ago. Those two were not born for the land. Yet I never kept Liban here against her will—she was always free to leave. When it was time, they called her, and it was the song, not any act of credulous, craven mortals; it was the song that brought her to the waves.’

‘Those who harried her shall pay the price,’ vowed Thomas of Ercildoune, striking his hand against his thigh.

‘What of the black birds, the outsized hoodie crows?’ asked the Prince. ‘Had the child aught to do with them?’

‘No sir,’ replied Elasaid. ‘Of this I am certain. Such creatures are not associated with the sea-morgans—not with any of the merfolk.’

‘Do you know their portent?’

‘I saw them, the strange birds flying toward the mountaintop, but I know not from whence these fell things came, or what is their purpose. I know not what they fortoken, but I fear no good will come of this night.’

The cherry fire glowed. Somewhere, a cock crowed. Uhta waned—the sun’s edge ran a line of tinsel along a diaphanous horizon.

In pain, Rohain said, ‘Elasaid Trenowyn, I understand now why I thought your face was familiar to me. On a glass mountain in Rimany a girl with your face opens a lock with her finger, to free seven enchanted rooks. And in the valley they call Rosedale in Eldaraigne, a fine man waits for you and grieves, as he has waited and grieved this many a year. Do not let him wait much longer.’

Elasaid Trenowyn trembled. A spark jumped in her eyes. She picked up her shawl and gave Rohain a wide-eyed look, as though she had never before set eyes on her.

‘I hear you.’

Saying nothing more, she left the house and went down to the harbour.

No wreckage from drowned ships, no barrels, planks, spars, or corpses washed up on Tavaal’s shores. This proved it—eldritch vessels they had indeed been, all three. What mortal understood the workings of such simulacra? Perhaps they had repaired themselves as they sank. Perhaps they were sailing now, deep down among the benthos, phosphorescent lanterns swinging on the rigging to light up the abysmal darkness.

Today the swell rolled long and slow and blank, as if it had grown as heavy as lead, whose sad colour it reflected. On the beach, the skeleton of a whale lay as it had lain for years—a behemoth beached a decade earlier. The ribs curved skyward, sand-blasted, wind-scoured. Now the skeleton was a framework of great upturned vaults, a vacant hull, a giant cage of ribs that once housed a heart the size of a horse.

It could be seen from the house of the sea-wizard. Lutey’s abode perched like a rickety gull’s nest on a low cliff overlooking the village and the harbour. Gulls, in fact, went in and out at the windows like accustomed visitors. They spoke with harsh voices at odds with their lines of loveliness, and when the party of riders arrived, loud was their announcement.

Silhouetted against a souring sky, the company of noble visitors and their retainers waited on horseback. Presently the head of Lutey the Gifted appeared between cliff and sea. He came clambering up over the edge, his robes and hair and plaited beard-ends streaming up over his head, blown by vertical drafts. From a pocket in his clothing peeped a fantastically fashioned Comb of pearls and gold.

The riders dismounted and the mage led them to his house. Bowing, he held open the door. As they entered, the structure trembled like a bird’s nest in the wind. From somewhere not far off resounded a deep sound as of drums rolling.

The interior smelled of stale seaweed, yet for all its clutter and avian traffic it was surprisingly clean and orderly. Dried seagrasses—pink, rust, cream, and copper—hung from the rafters. A delicate clepsydra dripped by the window. Beside it lay a brass sextant and a folding pocket-spyglass decorated with lacquer, inscribed with the maker’s name: Stodgebeck of Porthery.

Shelves held nekton memorabilia. The only two chairs had been carved out of coral broken from the reefs by storms. The bed was a giant clam shell, the table a salvaged captain’s table inlaid with nacre and scored by daggers. It was set with sea-urchin candleholders, scallop-shell plates, mussel-shell spoons and dark amber-green dishes formed from lacquered bull-kelp—a material light and strong, malleable when fresh yet when dry as hard and impermeable as vitreous. Here in Lutey’s house existed many things of salt-water origin that, like the sea-wind forced by the cliff to alter direction, had suffered a land-change.

Like some barnacled, weed-grown sea-creature he seemed, this wizard. His skin was as translucent as a jellyfish, his eyes the windows of an ancient coelacanth. Strung about his throat, a necklace of shark’s teeth; scimitars of dentine.

‘A force unseelie, a force powerful, has broached our defenses,’ said the coelacanth, putting aside a brass astrolabe to clear a space on the table. ‘I saw them last night. My strength is not great enough to challenge such foes. I know not where they have gone now, the three dark birds, or what will happen. But ye, Princess, should not bear the guilt of it.’

He mixed a blue-green potion that he gave to Rohain in a chipped porcelain caudle-cup shaped like an octopus. It burned away the cold dread that had filled her veins with ice since the moment the unseelie entities from the sea had shifted back to their true bird-shapes, and she had at last understood what she had wrought.

‘I have Combed the sea,’ said the sea-mage, ‘but for the first time in my experience there is no reply.’ His face was grim. ‘What became of the masted lifeboat—the vessel that bore the invaders?’

‘It spun around three times,’ the Prince replied, ‘and then sank, straight down, like a stone.’

An echoing boom rolled up all around, and the shelves racketed.

‘Be not unduly alarmed,’ said Lutey, observing the discomfiture of his guests. ‘It is only the voice of the sea. Alack, that I do not possess its power.’

‘It sounds from near,’ said the Prince,

‘It is near, sir,’ said the mage, pulling up a trapdoor set into the floor. Beneath their feet, a great cavern opened out and fell away. Far below, perhaps a hundred feet down in the half-light, a dark swell travelled rapidly toward the inner wall of rock on the last few yards of its journey from the outer ocean.

‘The sea-cave undercuts this cliff,’ explained Lutey as the wave smashed into the wall and another hollow roar shook his house. ‘It is the same sea-cave where Urchen Conch found a chest of antique gold so many years ago, according to local legend—which I doubt not. Here is a ladder. Sometimes I climb down. I have found no gold there,’ he added.

He closed the hatch. A gull alighted on his shoulder and wheeled its fierce yellow eye.

‘Again I shall Comb the sea this day,’ said Lutey. ‘Leave a messenger with me, and I will send word of any tidings.’

‘What else is to be done?’ Avenel asked

‘There is naught to be done but watch and wait. Watch and wait, warily and wisely.’

Since the night of the storm, those who dwelt in the Hall of Tana, and some who dwelt in the village, would frequently turn their eyes up toward the roof of the island, hidden in white cloud—that remote peak whence the winged creatures of unseelie had vanished. But there was no sign of anything untoward. The peak seemed to float and dream as always; serene, untroubled. No flocks of ravening hoodie crows came swooping like a black rain, talons extended and toothed beaks gaping, to rip the rooftiles off the village houses and devour the inhabitants. As days passed and all appeared unchanged, the people ceased to raise their heads as often. But always the crown of the mountain overhung them, lost in its steamy wreath.

The Seneschal led a band of riders on eotaurs up to the summit. But the roiling vapors were as obdurate as a wall and the sildron-lifted Skyhorses would not, could not enter that blindfold haze. In such a murk, all orientation could easily be lost. Not knowing up from down, horse and rider might fall out of the sky.

One night as she dozed, it seemed to Rohain that she was still in the sea-mage’s house, with the waves booming in the sea-cave underneath, slamming against the foundations.

She awoke.

A kind of fine trembling seemed to pass through the canopied bed. The lamps hanging on chains from the ceiling shivered slightly.

A ship arrived from the mainland. When it sailed away, Elasaid was aboard. The vessel had brought letters, including a hastily written one for Rohain, in Thorn’s beautiful, embellished script that was more like an intertwining of leafy vines than characters. This she deciphered by herself. There were tidings of the business of war, and a brief but forceful line, I think of thee, the more earnest in its austerity.

News from the war zone was grim—unseelie forces assailed the Royal Legions and the Dainnan by night while Namarran bands harried them by day. The central stronghold of the subversives, hidden somewhere in the Namarran wastelands, could not be found. It was from there that orders were being issued. It was believed that if this fortress could be discovered and scourged of its wizardly leaders, the uprising might be quelled.

‘A letter from my mother,’ said Caitri, waving a leaf of paper. ‘It seems Isse Tower now harbours a bruney, or a bauchan. It pinches the careless servants and also the masters who beat them. It works hard but Trench-whistle, now black and blue, is trying to get rid of it, laying out gifts of clothing and so on. It ignores the gifts and won’t leave. My mother says the Tower is a better place for it.’

Perusing her missives from Court, Viviana let out a scandalized scream.

‘Kiel varletto! One of the palace footmen has run away with the sixth granddaughter of the Marquess of Early!’

For days, she would not cease talking about the elopement.

Late on an evening, as she lay abed waiting for sleep, Rohain again thought that a vibration came through the floor. It was as if a heavy wagon had passed the Hall of Tana, loaded with boulders—but when she looked from the window, the road beyond the wall was empty.

The apples of Elasaid’s abandoned orchards flourished and ripened. The island’s gold-hazed humidity seemed lately to be tinged with a slight smell of rotting—imparted perhaps by the cloud-vapors, or by the seaweed cast up by the waves to wither on the shores, or maybe by the duilleag neoil itself. As time passed, one became accustomed to the odour and did not notice it at all.

The weather was unusually warm for early Spring, the sea as temperate as bathwater. Rejoicing at this, the village children dived and swam, especially the children of Ursilla and of Rona Wade. Lutey’s warning, ‘wait and watch’, had lost its urgency. The people of Tamhania had waited and watched, but nothing had happened. A little, their vigilance relaxed. But if their masters were carefree, the tamed beasts of the island were not. They had grown restless, uneasy. To human eyes all seemed peaceful, all seemed well. Yet beneath this veneer, expectancy thrummed like an overstretched harp-string, drawn taut across land and sea.

On an overcast day, Rohain stood in Tana’s library with Roland Avenel. As they conversed, there began a shaking as if an army of armoured war-horses charged around the hill, pulling mangonels and other engines of destruction on iron wheels. Ornaments and girandoles rattled. The walls creaked. An ormulu perfume burner toppled from its stand and one book fell out of the shelves. From the coach-house came the noise of the carriages rocking on their springs.

‘Mayhap the island floats again!’ exclaimed the Seneschal, shaking his gray head in astonishment. ‘Or it is making ready to do so! Mayhap it has grown weary of this location and has pulled up its ancient sea-anchors or cut them adrift, in order to seek another home.’

Tamhania was moving again—at least, that is what they were saying in the village, where the doors and windows of the houses jammed tight in warped frames. And the rainy month of Uiskamis rolled on. On the high spit jutting into the Rip, the grizzled granite Light-Tower seemed to lean into the webs of salt spray, its eye looking far over the silken plain as if it could see past the horizon. At its feet, jagged hunks of rock gripped the uncertain border between land and sea like the Tower’s roots, seeming to draw sustenance from both. Perhaps the roots did not go down far enough to fix the island in place.

A minor unstorm went over without much ado. The Scales family and their cohorts stood trial in the village hall. They were fined heavily for their cruel and lawless behaviour, after which they became close companions of the stocks in the village square for a couple of days, where, not to waste them, any apples that had rotted in the high humidity were utilized by some of the village lads for target practice. The general opinion was that the sentence had been too lenient.

Meanwhile, Georgiana Griffin began trysting with Master Sevran Shaw.

Rohain went on with her lessons—the study of music and writing, and the warrior’s skills. All the while she probed the thin shell enveloping her lost memories. There was that about this place which disquieted her—had disquieted her from the first, even before the coming of the unseelie hoodie crows. Was the island indeed uprooting itself, to float away? If so, where would it go?

Listlessness overlaid all. Along the shores, layers of water came up with a long swish as if some sea-lord in metallic robes rushed past in the shallows. Apart from the cry of the wind, that was the only sound. The terns, the sandpipers, gulls, shearwaters, egrets, and curlews seemed to have vanished.

About a week after Whiteflower’s Day, Rohain and her companions sat at dinner in the Hall of Tana. Not one diner spoke or lifted a knife. The hounds stood with hackles raised into ridges all along their spines, their lips peeled back off their curved teeth—but it was no intruder they snarled at, only the doors. These moved gently as if guided by an invisible hand. Presently, they began to open and close by themselves. From out in the stables came the hammering of hooves kicking at stalls. On the dinner-table, wine slopped out of the goblets. Salt cellars shuddered, jumped about, and fell over. Above the heads of the diners, high in the belltower, the bells shivered, unseen, as if their cold metal sides had caught some ague. The clappers rocked but failed to kiss the inner petals of the bronze tulips. They did not ring. Not yet.

The maid Annie rushed in, incoherent, shouting something about Vinegar Tom. Starting up from his seat and drawing his sword, the Seneschal ran outside in case she was in danger from pursuit. He saw no creature, eldritch or otherwise. When they had soothed the girl she told them not what they had thought to hear, that Vinegar Tom had chased or harmed someone. Instead she said that Vinegar Tom was gone.

That which had guarded the path for centuries had deserted its post. And now it came out that the colt-pixie had not been seen for some time either, or the domestic wights of Tana, or the silkies, or any others of seelie ilk.

‘Is it possible the wights have left Tamhania?’ Alys of Roxburgh asked.

No one could answer her.

Over the ocean, thunder rumbled. Horses screamed and goblets toppled, spilling their blood-red wine across the linen battle-plain of Tana’s dinner-table.

‘These quakes …’ said the Duchess. She did not finish her sentence.

‘Should we not leave here?’ Rohain said. ‘I fear danger stalks the isle.’

‘I, too, am troubled,’ nodded the Bard.

‘Yet it is his Imperial Majesty’s command that we remain,’ murmured Alys. ‘A good soldier never disobeys orders. Neither should we.’

‘’Tis the sea,’ said the Seneschal overheartily. ‘’Tis choppy these days. If indeed it floats, the island moves roughly over the waves. We’re in for another storm, by the sound of it.’

The words fell from his lips like empty husks, and he knew it.

They sat silent again. Still, no one raised a knife. The salt cellar rolled lazily across the table, leaving a silver trail; an arc, a slice of moon, a fragmented sickle.

No mermaid’s cry gave warning of what happened next.

Thunder’s iron barrel rolled across the firmament, but there were no thunderclouds. The seas lurched. Even the warm waters of the sheltered harbour rose in a brisk, pointy dance, but there was no storm—not in the way storms are usually known.

For days this went on, and then the ground picked itself up and shook out its mantle. Many villagers rushed outdoors in fright. It became impossible to walk steadily. Windows and dishes broke. At the Hall of Tana, paintings fell from the walls, and in the stables the small bells rang on the bridles hanging from their hooks.

They jingled, those little bells, and then fell silent as the ground stood still again. Next morning, dawn did not come. Beyond its normal bounds, night stretched out like a long black animal.

‘Look at the cloud!’ cried Viviana, pointing.

The white wreath that continually lurked upon the mountaintop had now darkened to a wrathful gray. It had grown taller, becoming a column. From the top it forked, like the spreading branches of a gigantic, malevolent tree; billowing, blocking sunlight. Beneath its shadow, the mountainsides sloped as green and lush as always, but particles of sand and dirt moved in the tenebrous air, and flecks like black rain or feathers floated—tiny pieces of ash. This dirty wind irritated the eyes, made breathing difficult. The smell of rottenness had increased a hundredfold, and a stink of putrid cabbage invaded everything. To keep out the dust and stench, the islanders wedged shut their doors and windows. They masked their faces.

‘Make ready the sea-vessels,’ said the Bard. ‘Tell the villagers to prepare to leave.’

But Avenel said, ‘This is the Royal Isle! Naught can harm us here. Besides, most of the villagers refuse to even consider abandoning their homes.’

The peculiar storm amplified. Lightning flickered, phosphorescent green, but only within the massive pillar that stood up from the mountain, supporting the sky’s congestion. On the island, wells dried up. New ones opened. Streams altered their courses as tremors shook the island to its most profound footings. In the village, the mayor called a meeting.

Thorn had told Rohain: ‘Do not leave the island. Wait for me.’

She must do as he had bidden. Yet no longer was Tamhania the safe haven it had been when he had spoken those words. Rohain’s own hand had lit the candle in the Light-Tower, opening the island to the bringers of doom—just as, somehow, she had also led death and destruction to Isse Tower.

And once he had asked, ‘Why should Huon hunt at thy heels?’

The question confounded her, haunted her. Recent events once again brought it to the forefront.

The facts must be confronted. No matter how she tried to deny it, something sought her. Now that she was willing to face the truth, it blazed like words written in fire. It seemed incredible she could have overlooked anything so obvious. Never had Scalzo’s scoundrels sought her, never had Korguth’s mercenaries plagued her. All the time there had been one enemy—one other enemy with unseelie forces under its sway—an enemy far more terrible than any smalltime brigand or charlatan of a wizard.

In Gilvaris Tarv, on the day she had saved the seelie waterhorse from enslavement in the marketplace, she had seen a face. Memory now recalled that face in detail. Curious, it had been. In fact, ‘eldritch’ was the word that most described it, and ‘malevolent’. Some unseelie thing in the marketplace had spied her at the very instant her taltry fell back, revealing her extraordinary sun-coloured hair. By her hair, perhaps, the creature had recognised her. Perhaps it had known who she had been in her shadowed past. Perhaps, in that past, she had been hunted—but the hunters were thrown off her trail when she lost her face and her voice. Likely, the creature had gone from the marketplace and told of her whereabouts to her true enemy, the Antlered One. It had been after the market-day that suspicious-looking creatures had begun to watch Ethlinn’s house. In a stroke of what turned out to be fortune, Rohain had been mistakenly abducted with Muirne. For a time, while they were incarcerated in the gilf-house, her whereabouts had passed out of Huon’s knowledge.

Rohain pondered on subsequent events. Had the Antlered One got wind of her as she rode with the wagons along the Road to Caermelor? Had he sent the Dando Dogs after the caravan, resulting in the loss of so many lives?

She had eluded him, only to end up at Court where her Talith ancestry was unmasked by Dianella and Sargoth. The wizard had betrayed her to some unseelie minion of the Antlered One, himself not knowing the full extent of what he did, merely wanting her out of the way so that Dianella’s path to the throne would be clear. Doubtless, Sargoth had long been allied with the powers of wickedness. He might have known Huon sought for a Talith damsel, and waited until she was out of Caermelor to betray her.

When Sargoth’s tidings reached the Hunter, Isse Tower was attacked. Once again Rohain escaped, but now that she had regained both face and voice, Huon knew her. For whatever reason, he had traced her to the haven of Tamhania and knocked on the door. She, in her folly, had opened it and let his foul creatures enter. Why he hunted at her heels, she had forgotten. He had not.

‘Let us speak no more of the past.’ Close at her side, Thorn had said these words, while he leaned against a narrow embrasure of Isse Tower and talked with Rohain about Winter, and a hawk had hung suspended in the chalice of the sky.

Those effervescent days had been filled with joyousness. Consequently she, not to spoil it, had not spoken to Thorn of the past, nor told him that it could not be recalled. She had not let him know that in her history there might lie some important, hidden truth.

If he were struck down upon the northern battlefields, he would never know. Swiftly she brushed the thought aside; merely the thought of such loss was like a death-wound to her spirit. But if he triumphed in war, how could she ever return to his side, bringing, as she did, this bane, this curse that shadowed her and touched all those among whom she moved? Thorn was a warrior of extraordinary prowess who had proven his efficacy even against the Wild Hunt, but how long could any mortal man stave off such mighty foes? He and his forces could drive them off once or twice, maybe, but ultimately the immortals, with their unseelie gramarye, must win. This was a peril she would not allow herself to bring upon him.

Thorn—will I ever see thee again? Before I do, I must find out what lies hidden in my past. I must discover why Huon pursues me, so that I, and you my love, will know how to deal with this peril.

Iron bells clanged inside Rohain’s skull.

For three days the sun had not been seen. Under darkness, the air was smothering—a blanket stinking of brimstone. The island held still, or perhaps it gathered itself together one last time. And those who dwelled upon its flanks were still blind to its nature, deaf to its peril. Or perhaps they did not want to see or hear, for the probabilities were too mighty, too awful to comprehend. It is a human trait, to dwell in danger zones and be astonished when catastrophe strikes.

Then the land stirred again.

In Tana’s oak-paneled west drawing room, Rohain sat playing at card games with Edward, Alys, and Thomas of Ercildoune, to escape the grit and stench of the outdoors. On the window-seat beneath wine-hued velvet hangings, Toby plucked a small ivory lute. His fingernails clicked against the frets. Occasionally, distant laughter and squeals drifted in from the nursery, where the children of the Duchess played hide-and-seek.

A butler glided in carrying a tray in his white-gloved hands. He was followed by a replica bearing a similar tray. Placing their burdens on two of a scattering of small, unstable tables, they proceeded to decant hot spike into small porcelain cups. They poured milk from the mouth of a painted jug fashioned as a cow (which had somehow escaped the eye of Tana’s majordomo in his thematic pursuit), and offered cherry tarts and cubes of golden Sugar frosted with tiny pictures of sea-pinks.

Candles blazed in lusters and branches—yellow-white shells of light in the gloom. They lit up gilded chairs and tables, couches, silk-upholstered footrests, ottomans with their embroidered bolsters, polished cherrywood cabinets and toy clockwork confections. Roses gushed from porphyry vases.

‘Annie saw those flowers today,’ commented Alys, taking note of the roses, ‘and was horrified. She said that the blossoming of the burnet rose out of its proper season is an omen of shipwreck and disaster. These small islands breed such superstition.’

‘Speaking of local vegetation,’ said the Bard, ‘I was talking to some coral-fishers the other day. There are some on this island who hold that the surrounding mists are not accumulated, attracted, or given off by cloud-leaf. They hold that duilleag neoil has nothing to do with them. The waters around Tamhania are always warm. They say the vapors rise because of’—he picked up a card—‘a tremendous heat that burns forever beneath the deeps.’

Toby dropped his ox-horn plectrum, then stooped to retrieve it. In the silence, the clockworkings on the mantels clucked like slow insects. Toby resumed playing.

‘Did anyone hear anything last night?’ asked the Duchess of Roxburgh, leaning forward to put down the Ten of Wands.

‘No. I slept well,’ replied Edward.

‘I heard nothing,’ said the Bard, considering his fan of cards thoughtfully. ‘But the servants seemed uneasy.’

Rohain upturned the Queen of Swords on the tablecloth of turquoise baize.

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘I dreamed the sound of uncontrollable sobbing.’

The Duchess’s cards slipped through her fingers to the floor. A footman ran to pick them up.

‘Shall we abandon the game at this point,’ suggested Edward, folding his rising sun of painted cardboard leaves and tapping them on the table, ‘and take a cup of best Severnesse spike?’

‘An eminently practical idea,’ replied the Bard diplomatically, stroking his pique-devant beard and auburn mustaches. ‘Who can think of playing cards on a day like this?’

‘’Tis a pretty pack.’ Rohain examined the interlocking swan design on the back of each rectangular wafer. It called to her mind the tale of a swanmaiden stolen by a mortal man, and she was about to remark on this when a tremendous vibration went through the floor and walls, and a deep groan of agony emanated from all around. Almost simultaneously, a further commotion arose from the floors below.

‘What is it? What’s amiss?’ The Prince started from his chair. A tremendous clamor and clatter rushed up the stairway.

Footmen hurried to the door, but as they opened it a horseman rode through in a sudden gale, ducking his head under the high lintel. He wheeled to a halt before them. The stallion reared and curvetted, shrilling, its hooves slicing the carpets. The iron-shod forehooves struck a glancing blow off an ebony table, which flew across the room, its setting of porcelainware and sweetmeats dashing to pieces. Foam flicked from the beast’s snorting mouth, showering the crystal vases. In the dark, gusting wind, the curtains of magenta velvet bellied out. The playing cards, all six suits—Wands, Swords, Cups, Coins, Anchors, and Crowns—flew up like frightened seagulls.

‘Master Avenel!’ cried Edward. He and his companions stared in disbelief.

‘Haste, make haste,’ cried the Seneschal of Tana, controlling his mount with difficulty. ‘I have just come from the house of Lutey. The island is about to be destroyed.’

When the denouement came, it came rapidly. At the Hall of Tana, furniture collapsed. Plaster cracked, loose bricks fell. The belltower shook, from its foundations upward. At last, up in the murky vapors of their eyrie, all by themselves, their ropes dangling untended by any hand, the great bells of Tana’s chastel began to toll.

Hot and jarred, the sea chopped and changed without rhythm. Up and down the hillsides the fences undulated like serpents. Cracks unseamed their mouths; sand and mud bubbled out. It was almost impossible for anyone to remain on their feet. People stumbled and rolled, clawing at previously fixed objects that proved treacherous. Apple boughs crashed to the ground. Animals ran to and fro in confusion. Amid the black snow, tiny porous stones hailed down, too hot to touch.

Fishing-boats—the entire fleet—made ready to launch.

The false night was so dense now that it was impossible to discern even an outline of the mountain. Where its top should have loomed, there burned a red glare. Over this spurious sunrise strange lightnings snapped continually in an endless display. It looked like a wicker cage of eerie lightworks forming the death-blue, pumping veins of the smoke-tree whose black leaves continued to pour over the nightscape.

The islanders pushed open their doors with difficulty because of the detritus piled up outside. Down from the village to the harbour they fled with their goats, their hounds and horses, their cattle and sheep. Some folk wept; not many—this was a hardy people. Their strings of lamps, like blobs of grazed yellow resin, could hardly be made out in the gloom. Deep drifts of ash and pumice blocked the streets. Larger stones rattled down, causing hurt; a rain of pain. The darkness was so profound, so unnatural, that it was not like night at all. It was a windowless, doorless chamber. Only the tower of coldly flickering lightnings over the mountain could be clearly seen. Generated by tiny fragments of lava in the ash cloud rubbing against each other to build up enormous charges that tore in thundering bolts through the column, it rose to an unguessed ceiling.

The refugees boarded the boats, stepping from the land they knew in their hearts they would never see again. Great waves leapt up as tall as houses and smacked into one another. Through the chaos, the boats bravely put out into the ashen harbour. They sailed across to the Rip and through it, while smoke roiled on the water and fire boiled in the sky. Now blackened by poisonous effluvium, the brass bells of Tana rang out a lonely farewell from the swaying belfry. As the fleet passed the point, a mild glow as of candlelight exuded from the upper room of the Light-Tower.

‘The Lightkeeper!’ exclaimed Rohain, in the leading ship. ‘He is still within!’

‘He refused to leave,’ said Avenel, at her side.

Already, while the fleet yet rode out of the harbour, the land woke again and shuddered. As if in answer, the Light beamed forth for the last time, pure and white like a Faêran sword cleaving the murk. Then the mountain roared violently, the scarlet glow flared brightly, and a huge wave opened from the shore, almost swamping the ships, bearing them forward. Bombs of burning rock fell hissing into the sea on all sides. Some went through the rigging and landed, red-hot, on the decks, threatening to set the ships alight before the wary crews scooped them in shovels and tossed them overboard. As the last ship passed through the Rip the island writhed. The Light-Tower itself leaned a little, then, very slowly, as if resisting, it collapsed into the sea. All the way down, the Beacon lanced out courageously, a descending white blade, extinguished only when the waves closed over it.

In a shower of darkness and cinders, the vessels plowed across the deep.

Whether they would escape with their lives or not, none could say.

Behind them, the sea-volcano that was Tamhania had become wildly unstable. Some delicate inner balance had been meddled with. Once, it had slept. Now it awakened. A heat so great it was almost inconceivable, hotter than the hottest furnace; a heat that had been lying in wait for more than a millennium at the base of a fracture beneath the island, miles under the sea, now was mobilized. Raising a mindless head, it set its huge shoulders—sinewed with magma, veined with fire—against the scabbed-over crust of soil, to split the lid that held it barely in check. The sea-bed struggled. Deep within the mountain, under tremendous pressure, molten rock welled up through fissures. At temperatures of thousands of degrees, it began to form a dangerous mixture with the volatiles in seawater: venomous fumes to rise like serpents out of vents, stinking sulfurs to belch from fumaroles, asphyxiating exhalations to flow invisibly downhill and gather in hollows, acid vapors to slowly eat through whatever they touched, and strong enough to etch glass, fiery ethers to glow in great veils against the sky, explosive gases to burst open the heart of the volcano with a thunderclap.

Like a chimney catching fire, the central vent began to roar. With each new explosion, blocks the size of palaces hurtled up to the surface, ripped from the throat of the vomiting cone. The air filled with flying rocks. Long streaks of flame arched into the air every few moments. Above the vent a cloud boiled out, convoluted like a monstrous brain, its cortex twenty thousand feet above sea level.

A downpour of rain mixed with ash fell on the fishing boats. Some substance in this mud glowed in the dark, and soon the masts and decks looked as if they were covered with a myriad tiny embers. Behind the fleet, the steady roar of the dying mountain-island continued, as the boats sailed on through the night—or was it the day? Missiles screamed like unseelie avengers and howled like frights. A subsonic pounding was going on, as though giants worked at their subterranean forges, their hammer blows thud-thudding relentlessly on huge anvils, echoing in caverns where nightmarish bellows pulsed, blaring gouts of smoke up through the chimney. Against the blackness of night, roseate fire-curtains gleamed, speckled with gold. Far away on the slopes of tormented Tamhania, jeweled rocks went spitting, spinning over ash wastes where tall fumes leaned now instead of trees. In the harbour, seawater vaporized like immense billows of smoke. Heavy, deadly gases hugged the contours of the mountainsides, streaming down in rivers. Water floated like smoke, gas flowed as if it were liquid.

But the pressure from miles below did not decrease. Tamhania fought, opening new smoking fissures in its flanks, letting the crimson paste ooze out in languid rivers to incinerate and slowly crush the houses of the village. The island bellowed as it threw its guts into the air.

Hours passed. The fleet now sailed under true night, although all celestial lights were extinguished by the tons of ash and fine debris spreading across the upper skies of Erith. The luminous mud scintillated along the boats’ rigging. Tamhania was the light of the plenum: a fire-fountain, its noise circling the rim of the world like an iron wheel rolling around a bowl. Floating rocks—porous, gas-filled chunks of pumice like hard, black sponge—made the water hazardous. Infinitesimal specks of ash mixed with spray plastered the faces, clothes, beards, and hair of the refugees. The mixture stung their eyes and curdled to slippery scum on the decks.

As ring-shaped waves rush away from a stone dropped into a pond of still water, so the ocean reacted to the dreadful murmur of the island. The escaping fleet was rocked by ever-larger swells; long copings dividing extreme abysms. As morning was finally reborn, the sun rose dripping out of the sea like a corrupt gem fastened to the sky’s filthy cloak. Those who stood on deck looking back, clutching the railings, saw a brilliant burst of light. Soon, over the continual roaring, the sound of a truly enormous explosion came bounding and crashing across the wavetops. It hit the boats with force and passed away to the horizon. The vessels dipped and lurched, but they held together. The passengers did not rejoice. They knew what would follow. Sound travels faster than ripples in water. Heedless of modesty, all the passengers doffed their footwear and outer clothes in case they should be thrown into the water. Many could not swim.

Viviana pinned her locket-brooch to her chemise, and belted on her chatelaine. ‘When I come ashore,’ she declared bravely, ‘I want to have useful articles about me.’

The sun climbed higher. In the middle of the morning, a second massive explosion shook the entire region as the side of the volcano’s central vent was blown off, engendering spectacular outbursts of tephra and huge clouds of steam. Its reverberation smote the vessels with an open hand.

‘Make ready,’ the word passed from vessel to vessel. ‘The first wave comes.’

The crew raced to douse most of the sails, leaving a staysail for steering. As they did so, two helmsmen struggled at the wheel to turn the ship until her bowsprit pointed in the direction of the island, far-off and invisible in a smoky haze wandering ghostlike across the sea. The sailors held the rudder steady, keeping the ship’s bow pointed into the volcanic storm.

They saw it before they heard it—a darkness partitioning the sky.

A wall.

A long, long wall with no end and no beginning, that seemed to suck up every drop of water before it. It grew in a beautiful glossy curve, like a shell. Inexorable, stupefying, it approached.

‘Hold on!’ someone screamed pointlessly against the roaring din of this menace. The helmsmen fought to control the wheel. A swift wind drove against the boats—tons of air displaced by tons of water. The wall rushed across the sea to the fleet, gathered itself up and hung over like a shelf. Timbers shifted and squeaked under the onslaught of elemental forces. Besmirched with mud, Rohain clung to the mizzenmast. She had been lashed to it, because she was unable to keep her feet against the wind’s muscle. The wind screeched in her ears, vacuuming out all other sound. Looking up, she saw tons of coiling water suspended over her head. Bellowing, the wave came on, up and over. Rohain felt the deck drop away as she was lifted into the air. She held her breath.

Down she fell. The boat fell with her. Blood rushed to her feet, and an explosion of water assaulted the decks.

Somehow the valiant little vessel had ridden up to the crest and down the other side of the wave, gathering so much speed that she buried her bow in the bottom of the trough. Behind the mother wave came her daughters, rank on rank, rearing to a height of ninety feet. Time and again the boat was wrenched high only to race down and bury herself in the deadly darkness of the troughs, with only the stern jutting from the water. There, half-drowned, she would shudder as though contemplating surrender, eventually raising her bowsprit to lift again. As she came up, tons of water would come sluicing down the bows onto the deck.

No human cry could be heard against the roar of wind and sea. Visibility was almost canceled. At a hundred and thirty-five knots, so strong was the wind that passengers and crew must close their eyes lest it snatch out their inner orbits. Closed or open, there was little difference in what could be seen. Night rode down in the wave-troughs, while their ridges bubbled with a crust of scorched foam so thick that it blocked out everything except the tiny rocks that struck like hammers, and the horizontal daggers of rain or spray.

When the waves of the aftershock had passed, Rohain was able to see that the fleet had broken up, dispersed. No evidence remained of the boat carrying the Duchess of Roxburgh and her children. It was impossible to know which vessels had survived. On the far horizon stood a column of gas, smoke, and vapor, thirty miles high. And the second major wave was on its way.

Too soon, it came roaring after its leader. Not a wall, this was a mountain—a moon-tide altered from the horizontal to the vertical. Tied securely to various pieces of equipment on deck, the ladies-in-waiting screamed. Again Rohain’s boat lifted over the crest, borne, incredibly, a hundred and ten feet high to glide down the mountain’s spine. Yet this time she did not glide—momentum launched her off the top and thrust her down through the centre of the following wave. She emerged on the other side, her passengers and crew struggling for breath, and immediately fell into the next trough, to be submerged again up to the wheel. The battering of noise and water weakened her seams. The boat began to break up, taking in water. Those who were able manned the hand-pumps.

What was it Thomas had said as they boarded? ‘Lutey is aboard with us, Rohain. He can never drown.’ Did merfolk swim beneath this leaking nutshell hull, bearing it up, protecting it, keeping the promise they had made? What of the rest of the fleet? There was no sign, now, of any of them—not so much as a broken plank.

Ahead, Rohain glimpsed, between leaning hills of liquid, a striated coagulation that might have been land. Under ragged remnants of sails like street-beggars’ laundry the voyagers travelled on, trying to hold a course for this hopeful sign, but largely at the mercy of wind and water. The waves had subsided to sixty feet. On the sloshing decks, Rohain waited anxiously with Edward, Ercildoune, Lutey, the village mayor, Viviana, and Caitri, hoping that it was all over.

Oh, but it is not over, said her heart. Three crows, there were. That is the eldritch number. Yan, tan, tethera. Third time pays for all, they say.

Robin Lutey held up the mermaid’s Comb. On the ivory, the mesh-patterns of pearls and gold glinted like sunlight through waves, even in the dimness. Bracing himself against the boat’s canting, he thrust the Comb into Caitri’s hair.

‘You are but young,’ he shouted, his voice barely audible against the wind and sea. ‘Too young to die.’

‘Are you suggesting there will be another wave?’ yelled Prince Edward. He was standing beside Rohain, among their bodyguards.

Lutey nodded, held up his index finger.

‘One more.’

‘In that event, we must all once again be secured to the boat,’ called Rohain.

‘Nay!’ Lutey replied. ‘Remain free, in case the vessel breaks up. Better to swim unfettered, if needs must.’

‘If aught should happen, my lady,’ bellowed the Bard, close to Rohain’s ear, ‘not that aught shall, but should it, thou shalt be safe. Thou’rt protected. It is necessary thou shouldst know this. And the Prince also shall be safe, and now thy little maid also. Rohain, I may never see thee again. There are so many things I cannot say. My heart is full, howbeit by my honour I may not unburden it.’

‘But no!’ she shouted. ‘How should I be safe and not you? And Viviana, and my ladies!’

‘Mayhap Viviana too shall live.’ His voice sounded hoarse, as if he had swallowed gravel. ‘She told me she was born with a caul on her head, which is why her mother named her after a sea-witch. If she carries it with her then verily, she shall not die by drowning.’

‘Thomas …’

Rohain’s eyes were oceans, overflowing.

Far away, on Tamhania, seawater poured into the volcano’s ruined vent and hit the hot magma.

Then the world tore asunder with shocking force.

Such a tumult could only have one source. The whole of the island had been blown upward into the air. Once, long ago, born out of the sea, this stratovolcano had arisen. Now, by the same process, it was being destroyed. After its death, the regulation of the markless sea would disguise its latitude, marching over its former position as though it had never existed.

But for now, the blast travelled out in all directions at more than seven hundred miles per hour. At three hundred and fifty miles per hour, the wave hunted it.

Not so much a wave—the third was an entire ocean standing on end, more than a hundred and fifty feet high. It swamped the entire sky. It was the ocean folding in on itself; the ocean turning inside out. It came, and it picked up Rohain’s boat, and the boat travelled on its curling crest in a screaming wind while, underneath, the sea-bed rose and the water shallowed and the wave gathered until it was a hundred and seventy feet tall and beneath the keel, so dizzyingly far below, there was land.

‘Stay close to me!’ cried Edward, taking Rohain by the waist. She clutched him tightly.

‘Farewell, one and all!’ called the Bard through gritted teeth.

Time slowed, or seemed to. In a flash, Rohain realised—a wave like this had happened before. This was not the first time a sea-volcano had erupted in Erith.

… to the east, two miles from the sea, lies a thing most curious; the ancient remains of a Watership caught in a cleft between two hills.

Was this to be the fortune of her fishing-boat? To be carried in its entirety, along a river valley for two miles and be deposited, a shattered hulk filled with shattered corpses, far above the level of the distant ocean?

Instead, with a sound curiously reminiscent of the plucking of violin-strings, copper nails began to pull free and pop out of the hull’s stressed planking. Timbers burst apart. Caitri clung to Lutey. Viviana’s mouth opened like a tunnel of fear. Rohain reached for her, but she and the Prince were flung forth, out into the maelstrom. His hold was wrenched from her waist. Thomas slid away down the vertical deck. Crumbling, capsizing, shattering to fragments, the boat fell down the back of the ocean.

Ash rained down. It rained on and on.

Fine particles infused the air.

The sun, no longer yellow, had metamorphosed to sea-turquoise. A sunset ranged across one third of the sky—such a sunset as had never been seen by mortal eyes. Flamboyant it was, brilliant, gorgeous. Burning roses formed from rubies were strewn among flaming orange silks, castles of topaz on fire, and great drifts of melting glass nasturtiums. The horizon itself seemed ablaze.

Long after the sun had disappeared, the dusty air shimmered with rainbows. An emerald nimbus ringed the bitten moon. This then, was Tamhania’s epitaph; that its substance would be dispersed all over Erith, bringing night after night of strange beauty, and that wheresoever its fragments touched, the soil would be nourished with the aftermath of its existence, giving rise to new life. And perhaps in that new life would spring an echo of what had once been.

7

THE CAULDRON

Thyme and Tide

Fires in the core of cores lie quiescent;

Once they jetted from its maws, incandescent.

Lava from the magma bath, effervescent,

Nullified all in its path, heat rubescent.

Once upon a cinder cone light flew sparkling—

Now a crater-lake unknown, deep and darkling.

‘DORMANCY’, A SONG FROM TAPTHARTHARATH

All the time—through the drag and suck, the lift and toss, through the seethe and sudden swell battering ears to deafness, eyes to blindness, skin to numbness, through the forced drafts of brine gulping and gurning in her stomach, the salt stinging her mouth, the dread inbreathing of water provoking a panic of suffocation, her heart racing for air, splashes of red agony on a black ground like an eruption of the lungs; through it all, the object remained beneath Rohain’s hand and bore her up: the Hope, the wooden Hope that floated on the top of the ocean.

Another surge, and the buoyant piece of timber scraped on something. Rohain found solidity beneath her feet. She tiptoed on it and it was snatched away, relinquished, abducted, returned. She walked, emerging from the flood. The wood weighed her hand down now—why so faithful? Why could it not leave her? Wiping blur from her eyes with her free hand she looked down. The leaf-ring on her finger was caught in a bent copper nail, partly dislodged and jutting from the fishing boat’s figurehead. Thorn’s gift had saved her.

Now she leaned over, unhooked the bright metal band, waded to land, and lay down on a muddy knoll above the tide. Her body spasmed as she gave back to the sea the water that had invaded her lungs. Clad only in a pale shift, she sprawled there like a hank of pallid seaweed, long and lank. Somewhere on the sea or under it, her discarded gown floated; a headless, handless specter among specters more truly terrible.

Drying in the mild night within a thin casing of salt and ash, the girl lifted her aching head. She was conscious now of the careless clatter and tinkle of water chuckling down a stony sluice. A brackish freshet bounced down a rock wall, like a handful of silk ribbons. Rohain drank a long and delicious draft. As she leaned, two articles fell forward and swung in front of her face: her jade-leaved tilhal and the vial of nathrach deirge, both strung on strong, short chains about her neck. At her waist the tapestry aulmoniere remained firmly attached, though bedraggled. For the retaining of these precious accessories she was grateful.

She sat by the laughing trickle and looked about in wonderment. This was no rocky shore or strand. Farther uphill, trees were growing, with green turf mantling their feet. Perhaps, after all, the ocean had carried her inland. Under the starless sky, its vestigial moon a haloed sliver of bluish green, the savage waters that had spat her out were now receding, as though the tide were ebbing. They seemed to clutch at the land as they dragged backward, scoring the turf with their talons. Through the ash haze Rohain saw the mermaid figurehead, wedged between two tree boles. The monstrous wave was shrinking back into itself, leaving behind a swathe of wrenched-up trees, dragged boulders, plowed ground, doomed seaweed, wreckage, flotsam, and a ragged, half-uprooted wattle-bush that shook itself and sprouted a muddy foot whose ankle was encircled with a gold band and whose toenails were painted with rose enamel.

Staggering and slipping through the blowing ash haze, her own feet squelching in sodden turf where alabaster shells lay among bone-white flowers, Rohain seized the foot.

‘Via!’ she gasped. Relief surged—one other, at least, had survived. Further than that she could not bear to surmise.

Viviana moaned. Rohain helped her from the network of wattle twigs and boughs that had caught her like some flamboyant fish. Scratched and bleeding in her silken shift, the lady’s maid could not speak. The only sounds from her were made by the ringing and clashing of the metal chatelettes of the chatelaine fastened to her belt, which had somehow, through the dunking, been spared.

Her mistress supported the court-servant, leading her to the freshet.

‘Drink now.’

She drank, and together they stumbled forward. As the salt water receded, it became clear that the wave had deposited both of them midway up a wall of gentle cliffs sloping down to the original sea level, which was currently lost beneath the retreating flood.

The brownish mist wafted in streamers that occasionally parted. Rohain strained to look ahead through the haze, trying to glimpse humanlike shapes she had earlier seen or imagined. Staunchly the shapes remained—solidifying, growing larger with every step.

Two embodiments coalesced, dark against umber.

Thorn guaranteed that the leaf-ring would allow its wearer to see the truth and not be tricked by glamour.

The cry that issued from Rohain’s throat threatened to tear her flesh in its passing, as lava tears at the walls of its vent. The two incarnations paused in ash night and turned around. One of them, Caitri, ran sobbing and flung herself into Rohain’s arms.

‘Sweet child,’ Rohain said over and over, gripping her in a fierce embrace. Presently she asked, ‘Who is with you?’

Viviana sank to her knees, coughing. The figure accompanying Caitri took on the ragged form of the sea-mage, Lutey, who knelt at Viviana’s side.

‘Courage,’ he said. ‘Courage.’

‘Have you seen others?’ asked Rohain.

‘No,’ Caitri responded.

Lutey said, ‘A cottage stands yonder, halfway up the cliff. Go there.’

‘Will they help us?’ Viviana choked piteously.

‘That steading is long abandoned,’ said Lutey, ‘but of those who once dwelled there, one possessed something of the Sight. When she departed, she left behind provisions to succor the needy, for she prophesied that such a dread night as this might come to pass. I know where we have come to land. This entire region, for miles around, is uninhabited by mankind.’

‘How do you know this, Master Lutey?’ asked Rohain quietly, guessing, even before she saw.

The choppy waters had sunk a short distance down the cliff face. There at the border, between the domain of death-cold fishes that lived without breath and the realm of beings who stalked on legs and died without breath, she sat. She was shining wet, with the seawater still coursing down her limbs. No ash-dust troubled the luminous splendor of those peacock-feather disks traced in helixes, the shot silk of the great translucent double fin, the marble whiteness of the slender arms, the spun-glass tresses that shone green-gold like new willow leaves and flowed over the full length of her graceful lines.

‘She lifted me up,’ said Caitri, suddenly calm and wondering. ‘She carried me.’

‘You must give me the Comb now, little one,’ said Lutey, holding out his hand for the sparkling thing. ‘It is time for me to return it.’

For the first time, Rohain noticed how aged the sea-mage looked, how wizened and weighed down with years—far more so than when she had first seen him, only days ago.

‘You tried to stop it happening, did you not?’ she said, understanding. ‘You tried to work against the birds of unseelie. And it took away your strength.’

‘Aye, my lady.’ His face crinkled in a grin. ‘But sooner or later I’d have been reduced to this, in any event. In some ways’—he glanced at the shining scroll of the sea-girl—‘in some ways I’m glad ’tis sooner. She has waited long. So have I.’

‘But no!’ A sob caught in Caitri’s throat. ‘You must not go, sir. Perilous things of the Deep lurk out there. The Marool—’

The old man smiled, and kissed her forehead. Beneath the erosion of years, the face that he turned back toward the vision from the sea was young, brave, and gentle. The little girl fell silent.

Taking the Comb, Lutey clambered down the slope, straight-backed, dignified, moving slowly but with surprising surefootedness. It seemed that time sloughed from him with every tread, until he sprang forward like a lithe young man. He reached her. A sparkle passed between them. She flipped the sinuous tail and was gone without a splash. He turned, raised his hand in a gesture of farewell, and followed, walking.

Caitri wept. The sea lapped at Lutey’s ankles, his knees, his hips. A swell rolled in and disintegrated against the land. Finally the water closed over his head, and he was never again seen by mortal eyes.

Whitewashed and slate-roofed, the cottage on the cliff overlooked a little drowned harbour. Bordered by guardian rowans, the abandoned garden, once tamed, had burgeoned into wild dishevelment. Mostly one plant ramped over it: a sharp-scented thyme that smothered most of the other vegetation, save for some parsnips and carrots gone to seed.

The latch lifted easily. The door had not been locked. Weatherproof, to keep out the strong sea-winds, the dwelling had resisted much of the ash-sifted air. Only a fine layer of dust greeted the three survivors.

Inside, they found munificence.

A chest that stood in one corner was filled with neatly folded peasant garb, plain and ill-fitting but clean and serviceable. Another ark held fishermen’s oilskins, gloves and taltries, stout boots. A drawer contained two or three knives and bent spoons, candles, a ball of twine, salt, and a tinderbox. Wood was stacked beside the fireplace. There was a hatchet and trowel, a bucket to fetch water from the well—even a sack of musty oats that, boiled up in an old iron cauldron over the fire, made a supper of edible porridge. Beds of desiccated straw lay piled against the walls. Here, by the light of the fire and a single candle, the exhausted companions lay down to rest after bolting the door to keep out the eerie night.

Out in the yard, silence seemed to press so strongly upon the cottage’s walls that they bowed inward. No sound came, not even the bark of a fox, the sob of an owl, the moan of a hunting wind. Leaves hung stifled under laminae of ash.

The three young women were deeply affected by all that had happened. To see an entire island destroy itself, to survive a storm beyond their most bizarre invention, to be battered and almost drowned, to be suddenly and utterly wrenched from friends and companions, to find themselves in helpless isolation—all these experiences were too intense to bear close scrutiny. When the madness of the world exceeds its usual bounds there comes a time when the captives of that madness must either slam shut the gates of their minds or else be invaded, transformed, and broken by absurdity, horror, and grief. By some unspoken agreement the castaways endeavoured to avoid the topic of the tragedy in which they had been unwilling participants, with all its disturbing ramifications. They had remained alive; now they must persist.

‘I suppose the previous occupants must have been wealthy as well as generous, to leave so much behind,’ mused Caitri, lying back against the straw bedding. ‘I wonder why they chose such poor lodgings.’

‘Unless they departed in a hurry. I wonder why they left at all,’ said Viviana. She glanced quickly toward a window, as though expecting some sudden, malevolent shape to flit secretively past, or dash itself against the panes.

‘Somehow I must send word of our survival to His Majesty,’ said Rohain. ‘How, I cannot fathom.’ She swept salty, tousled hair from her forehead. ‘I am weary beyond belief. But I cannot seem to fall asleep.’

‘Neither can I,’ said Caitri.

They listened, for a while, to the oppressive silence, wrapped like a muffler about the cottage’s walls. The candle flickered.

‘Peril walks near this place, I fancy,’ said Viviana after a while. ‘All is too quiet and still. It is uncanny. And the fog in the air makes it seem more so.’ She sniffed. ‘The stench of brimstone and burning clings about us. Phew! Only the smell of the garden thyme overpowers it.’

Rohain said, ‘Yes, there is an uncanny feeling about this place. This night will prove long, I fear. Make the dark hours fly past, Caitri,’ she went on, forcing a smile. ‘Tell us a story, prithee.’

The little girl settled back against the wall, drawing her cloak around her shoulders. Her vision turned inward as she told of a man who danced with the Faêran for one night only, as he thought, only to discover when day dawned that he had in fact been absent from the world of men for sixty years. As he stepped once more upon the greensward of the mortal realm his footsteps grew lighter and lighter, until he crumbled and fell to the ground as a meagre heap of ashes.

Caitri stopped speaking. Outside the cottage, along the sea-cliff, no living thing stirred.

She sighed. ‘You see,’ she elaborated, ‘he did not return from the Fair Realm until long after his mortal span had elapsed. Time there had a pace different from time here, yet mortal time and Faêran time seemed to somehow interlock at moments.’

‘Entrancing tales,’ said Viviana, ‘but only dreams, in truth; as are all tales of the Fair and Perilous Realm.’ She yawned.

Forgetting the story, drifting into sleep at last, Rohain thought of all the other questions she ought to have asked the sea-mage. Where was this coast on which they had been cast ashore? What fate had met the other boats? Why was this region empty of mortal men? Where was Prince Edward? Had any others survived—Alys-Jannetta? Thomas? Ah, Thomas—am I doomed always to grieve for kindhearted Ertishmen torn from me? If my friends have perished, it is in large part because I insisted on the kindling of the Light. The guilt weighs heavily on me …

Caitri’s smothered sobs came softly to her ears. So much had been lost to them all.

And then Rohain allowed herself to think of Thorn and a piercing, sweet sorrow flooded through her.

Oh, my dark fire! My knight of chivalrous grace whose joyous temper overlays depths unfathomable, as light leaves float on a forest pool … Severely I miss your amazing touch, your regard of stern tenderness … How shall I send word to thee? Shall I ever again find myself at thy side?

Over all these questions hung another, unanswerable, like a somber mantle. This place, this cottage on the cliff, seemed familiar. Have I been here before?

During the night, Rohain woke to silence. Or so it seemed. She fancied she had been roused by the sound of snuffling around the house, as if a dog prowled out there. For a time she lay awake—it made no difference whether she kept her eyes open or not, the darkness was impenetrable.

Abruptly, it gave way to dawn. The colour of the air paled to gray and then to the washed-out blue of diluted ink.

‘Last night I dreamed that a bird was beating its wings against the cottage door,’ said Caitri, on waking. Instinctively, Rohain glanced up at the ceiling, as though she might stare beyond, to the sky. Fear tightened its noose around her neck.

‘We must away as soon as possible,’ she whispered. ‘Already we have stayed too long.’

Below the cliffs, the sea had receded noticeably. Still the air looked burned, like toast, yet it had cleared a little. The sun remained blue-green, like an opal, hanging in a yellowish sky. Southwest of the little harbour, not far from shore, a tall, cone-shaped island lifted its head. Farther west another reared up, and beyond it several more in a great sweeping curve dwindling around to the northwest.

‘The Chain of Chimneys,’ Viviana said, as she stood on the cliff top with Rohain and Caitri. ‘My governess told me about them when I was a child, in Wytham. I have never seen them before. I think we are on the desolate western coast of Eldaraigne, not far east of—not far from …’

‘What?’ asked Rohain.

‘That place. The place we never reached; Huntingtowers.’

They searched along the shore, calling, but no other survivors could be found. In the trees farther down, they discovered a few fish that had been caught among the branches and left by the receding wave, to suffocate in the air. These victims they fried for breakfast, since the bag of oats was small and would not feed them for long.

‘The oats are our only provisions,’ said Rohain, ‘and they will run out after a few days. Time is not limitless either. For now we must rest and regain our strength, but when we leave here on the morrow, you two must take the oat-bag and follow the coastline to the southeast. Make for the Stormriders’ Hold at Isse Tower, keeping well away from the Ringroad and its dangers. Tell the Relayers to take word to His Majesty that I am secure.’

‘Ugh! That Tower is traiz olc,’ muttered Viviana.

‘My mother is there, at Isse,’ said Caitri, fingering the miniature she wore on a chain around her neck. ‘I would that she and I had been placed in service elsewhere. It is a dreadful pile, that Tower. What has it do with you, my lady? Why did you visit there?’

Rohain told the little girl how she had once served alongside her in the Seventh House of the Stormriders. After the tale ended, Caitri waxed pensive.

‘So, you were he,’ she said at last. Strange events had ceased to astound her.

‘Yes.’

‘There were some marks on your flesh when they brought you in.’

‘I know. My face was disfigured by paradox ivy. My throat—by something else.’

‘And your arm also. It looked as though a band or bracelet had dug into your wrist. I could not help noticing. I felt sorry for you. After a time, the weals faded.’

‘I do not remember any marks on my wrist.’

All fell silent.

Eventually, Rohain said, ‘I have here a vial of Dragon’s Blood, see?’ She produced the tapestry aulmoniere, which still enclosed the swan’s feather and Thorn’s gift. ‘Nathrach deirge it is called, yet ’tis not the blood of dragons but an elixir of herbs. It gives warmth and sustenance. You shall take it with you. Our ways must part here. Viviana, you say Huntingtowers lies close by. I shall go and seek it. No, prithee, do not protest! It would be far more perilous for you to accompany me than to do anything else. I am Huon’s quarry. This I have come at last to understand, and I know that he will never give up until he finds me. But I do not know why.

‘As a vulture in human form once pompously stated, “knowledge is power”, and if I can find out why I am Huon’s target, perhaps I shall have a better chance of eluding him. After all’s said and done, there is only one way for me to discover the reason he hunts me. I must retrace my footsteps in earnest. Once, I tried it, and failed. This time, either I will succeed or Huon will win. But until I meet or defeat my doom there will be no safety for those I love. Those who accompany me anywhere shall become his quarry as much as I.’

‘But Your Ladyship must come to the Stormriders’ Tower yourself, to send the message to Caermelor that you are safe,’ Viviana said earnestly. ‘Otherwise, how shall we be believed?’

‘I wish that none should know my whereabouts. Not even His Majesty. Tell them that I live, send word to His Majesty, but never reveal my purpose or destination. I do not want others to come seeking after me; they would be seeking their doom.’ Turning her face away she murmured softly, ‘Anyway, I am as good as dead already.’

‘In Caermelor they would never let it rest at that,’ argued Caitri. ‘They would extract the truth from us by fair means or foul. And then they will come after you, for your own good.’

Rohain was forced to concede the truth of this assertion.

‘In that case, do not admit that you have seen me at all. Then they shall have no reason to ask further—’ She broke off. ‘Ah, but to leave His Majesty uninformed cuts me to the quick. Yet if there is no other way to keep them from me …’

‘We shall not go off without you,’ burst out Viviana. ‘We shall not leave you in the wastelands.’

‘I am able to survive on my own. I have been taught how to find food in the wilderness. This ring I wear, engraved with leaves, has some charm on it, although whether it is strong enough to ward off the Wild Hunt I do not know. I tell you, I must go, and it must be alone and speedily. I am sure that Tamhania’s ruin was brought about for the purpose of destroying me or flushing me out of my refuge. My guess is, if such strong forces have been sent against me, wielding the powers of both sea and fire, there are those who will wish to know whether they have succeeded in their mission. Immortal, they will not rest until they are certain of it. Perhaps even now they have learned that I live, and that I walk in this forgotten place. It is possible that as we speak they are drawing nigh. I dare not stay in one place for too long. Haste is imperative.’

‘But Your Ladyship is to be Queen-Empress!’ Viviana burst out in amazement. ‘What is this talk of pursuit and danger? The Dainnan shall guard you. His Imperial Majesty shall be your protector. There can be no greater security than that.’

‘There is no security against that which threatens me. Do you think mortal arms and wizards’ charms can stand against the most malign and feared of eldritch princes? Can the Dainnan blow an island apart?’

‘I beg to differ, ma’am. Tamhania was a sleeping volcano. It might have awoken at any time. It destroyed itself with its own life-spirit. I’ll warrant the three hoodie crows, great and malevolent though they doubtless are, would not be mighty enough to marshal the elements of heat and pressure.’

‘Perhaps not, but Huon’s birds set the machinery in motion.’

‘Huon’s birds?’ repeated Caitri. ‘My lady is mistaken. Huon commands no birds—at any rate, not in any tale I have heard. His terrible riders and horses and hounds are what he hunts with. Sometimes he enlists spriggans to ride crouching on the cruppers of the fire-eyed shadow-steeds, but no birds. The Crows did not fly at the behest of the Antlered One.’

‘You are indeed very learned!’ exclaimed Rohain between astonishment and doubt.

‘My mother taught me much. She is wise in eldritch lore. Besides, in all of Master Brinkworth’s tales there was never a mention of hoodie crows flying with the Wild Hunt.’

‘Tarry!’ said Rohain quickly. ‘Say no more. Your words discomfit me. I thought I knew my enemy, but once again I am thrown into chaos and confusion. If Huon did not send the birds, then what did?’

‘I know not, but I do know they might sniff you out,’ said Caitri. ‘Spriggans will, at any rate. They have crafty noses and can trace trails in the same way hounds course after scent, only better. I think they might know the scent of you. They ravaged your chamber at the Tower. And by now, they must know your looks.’

‘Indeed they must,’ agreed Rohain. ‘I fear I betrayed myself in the marketplace of Gilvaris Tarv. These are two problems I do not know how to resolve.’

‘That stytchel-thyme all over the garden has a perfume strong enough to cover any odour,’ Caitri pointed out. ‘You might journey incognito, if masked with the fragrance of it.’

‘Caitri, do not encourage Her Ladyship to pursue her wild goose chase!’ said Viviana.

‘Nothing can sway me,’ said Rohain. ‘I will go to Huntingtowers.’

‘But the Wild Hunt issues from that place!’

‘Usually at the full of the moon, they say. By my reckoning, we are very early in the month of Duileagmis. The old moon has almost faded. The new moon is yet unborn.’

Viviana sighed deeply. ‘Well then, if you must, m’lady. And if there is anything I can do to keep you safe, I shall do it. So, if ’tis disguise you’re after, I can help.’

‘’Tis not more than six or seven leagues due west of here, by my reckoning,’ said Viviana, trying to recall the maps her governess had pinned upon the walls of the nursery, ‘that horrible place, I mean. A swift all-day’s walk.’

In the lonely cottage above the ocean, the courtier had finished dyeing her mistress’s golden hair brown, using a crudely made concoction of boiled tree-bark. Now she set about stitching a half-mask for Rohain’s eyes and forehead. Viviana was never one to be unprepared. The versatile chatelaine had come through the shipwreck, still tied to her waist-girdle. From its chains dangled various chatelettes made from rustproof materials: brass scissors, a golden etui with a manicure set inside, a bodkin, a spoon, a vinaigrette, a needle-case, a small looking-glass, a cup-sized strainer for spike-leaves, a timepiece that had stopped, and whose case was inlaid with ivory and bronze, a workbox containing small reels of thread, an enameled porcelain thimble and a silver one, silver-handled buttonhooks and a few spare buttons—glass-topped, enclosing tiny pictures—a miniature portrait of her mother worked in enamels, several rowan-wood tilhals, a highly ornamented anlace, a penknife, an empty silver-gilt snuff-box, and a pencil. Only the notecase had been ruined by the salt water.

‘’Tis a wonder all that motley didn’t pull you down like a millstone,’ remarked Caitri.

‘I carry my caul,’ Viviana said demurely, returning a needle to its horn case, which was set about with cabuchons. ‘M’lady, with this half-mask over your eyes, and the lower part of your face well-kohled with chimney-soot, you will look like some filthy country itinerant, begging your pardon. Whether you are lad or wench none will discern, if we bundle you in enough rags. And with a little stytchel-thyme rubbed on, any creature that sees you or catches your scent won’t be any the wiser.’

She cocked her head to one side and gazed critically at Rohain. ‘I must admit, it seems a shame, ma’am, to spoil a beauty of the rarest sort—for upon my word, never was such a fair face seen at Court or anywhere else for that matter. ’Tis no wonder His Imperial Majesty was smitten.’

‘Mistress Wellesley!’ remonstrated Caitri, now schooled in etiquette. ‘How boldly you speak before Her Ladyship!’

‘Speak plainly before me always, please,’ said Rohain absently, her mind on other matters. ‘You should both know I always require frankness and do not consider it an impropriety.’ She tweaked a lock of her tangled hair over her face to examine its new colour.

‘Well, if ’tis frankness you are after, my lady,’ said Viviana, ‘let me speak my mind now that those other ladies are no longer fluttering about you—sain them, I hope they may be safe on land. I do believe you are a lost princess who’s slept for a hundred years and been awoken.’

Rohain laughed. ‘Thank you for your kind words. I would it were so, but I fear it is not. I would augur that I am by birth greatly inferior to royalty.’

‘What exactly do you hope to find at Huntingtowers, m’lady?’ asked Caitri.

‘I do not know.’

‘And if you find nothing?’

‘I will keep searching. I have no choice. I am driven.’

Caitri seemed about to say something else, but thought better of it.

That night the snuffling and sniffing sounds came again around the cottage, and a tapping at the window, soft and insistent. A wordless, muttering drone started up. The three sleepers woke and sat still, not moving so much as a toe. They held their breath until they could hold it no longer, and then expelled it in long, silent sighs, fearful that even the slightest noise would betray them.

Toward dawn, the sounds ceased.

In the morning Rohain bade farewell to her companions. Her sense of loss and desolation was magnified by this parting. Always, the burden of guilt associated with the destruction of the island oppressed her; inwardly she lamented for Edward and Thomas, for Alys and Master Avenel and all the other friends she had lost to the violence of fire and water.

She trudged alone to the top of the cliffs and halted, turning to look back at the brooding expanse of the sea. Beneath a leering sky, it was striped with many shades of gray from ashen to lead. The symmetrical cones of the presumably dormant Chimneys stood sentinel, waves outlining their shores with froth. Two petrels winged across the sky. Far below, the cottage looked tiny, like a mantelshelf ornament. After a few more steps it was lost to view altogether. Stunted tea-tree scrub grew on the cliff top, spiking the air with the tang of eucalyptus. In the far distance a disused Mooring Mast stood, a dark web sketched against smudged skies.

This is not the first time I have trodden this path, thought Rohain, without knowing why.

The sharp smell of thyme permeated her disguise—her clothes and knapsack, the brown and lusterless hair combed close about her face to obfuscate her features, the half-mask across her eyes and brow, her roughly kohled jaw. In a mustard-coloured kirtle and snuff-coloured surcoat, a plain leather girdle and an oilskin cloak and taltry, she bore no resemblance to an elegant Court lady. Her slenderness was lost beneath bulky folds.

Is it my fate to go always disguised?

Under the oddly-hued sun, whose face had been transformed by the death of Tamhania, it seemed to Rohain that she no longer moved in the world she had known. Duileagmis, the Leafmonth of Spring, put forth a bounty of darling buds whose colours appeared altered by the stained atmosphere. Greenish flowers bestarred bilious marram grasses, their perfumes dust-clogged. Rohain stooped swiftly. With a knife obtained from the cottage on the cliff, she sliced at some vegetation, hacking off scurvy-grass and the fleshy leaves of samphire. She had recognised this wild food from Thorn’s teachings. Chewing some, she tucked the rest into her belt.

Once again, she looked back toward the ash-fogged sea. From this angle it gave the illusion of rising up in a broad band, higher than the land on which she stood. As she hesitated, she spied a movement in the scrub. It issued from behind a dune and made off in the direction of the cottage. The thing had a wightish look, no doubt of it. At the same time, dark dots in the southern sky swelled, proving themselves not to be the sea-eagles she had at first taken them for.

Stormriders!

A desire for concealment gripped her. She dashed for cover in a tea-tree thicket. The company of riders swept over, following the shoreline at a low altitude. Thrice they circled the vicinity of the cottage, swooping in close over the roof.

There was little doubt that the Relayers were scouring the coast for survivors of Tamhania’s disaster. Rohain hoped fervently that Viviana and Caitri, wherever they were, would wave down the Stormriders and be taken to safety at the Tower on eotaur-back. But wights were abroad too, it was plain. Even in daylight they were on the move. The creature from behind the dune had headed away with a purposeful air that boded ill. She and her companions had not left the bountiful cottage a moment too soon. As soon as the Stormriders had flown away, Rohain hurried onward.

Farther inland, coastal vegetation gave way to lightly wooded hills. Here grew hypericum with its yellow cymes. Hurriedly she gathered it by the armful for its wight-repellent properties, binding the bunches with twine to hang them about her person alongside the stytchel-thyme. Looking up from her work, she made out the distant trapezium of an apparently flat-topped mountain dominating the murky horizon.

On she went. Under her feet, little tracks were born, ran dipping and climbing through the trees and faded among the turf. Among the bushes, leaves stirred. There came a faint, metallic ching. Rohain halted.

‘Come forth,’ she ordered loudly.

More rustlings and a brittle snap were followed by the appearance of Viviana and Caitri from a clump of callistemons.

‘You stepped on a twig,’ Caitri accused Viviana.

‘And I did not!’

Rohain said, ‘Ever since I left the cliff-tops I have been hearing you two following me. A herd of oxen might have progressed more quietly. You have no woodcraft whatsoever, and Viviana’s chatelaine rings like all the bells of Caermelor. I hoped you might give up. I wished you might attract the attention of those Stormriders and go with them. Turn back now, while you are yet far from Huntingtowers.’

‘No.’

‘This is to be no picnic in the King’s Greenwood.’

Sulkily, the two damsels glared at their mistress. They did not reply.

‘Those who walk at my side do so at their peril!’ fumed Rohain. She then fervently besought them to leave her, in an exchange that lasted a goodly while—time they could ill afford—but they were adamant in their refusals.

It occurred to Rohain that she might easily abandon them and slip away on her own, drawing off the Hunt. She did not entertain the thought for long. Two untutored maidens, roaming out here without even the benefit of her limited knowledge of survival in the wilderness, must surely perish. Either way, there seemed scant hope of saving the lives of these faithful companions. There was no choice—she must accede at last to their wishes.

‘Well,’ she said briskly, ‘if you are prepared to meet your dooms at such an early age, who am I to stop you? Be it on your own heads. But move discreetly. We are looked for.’

‘We spied the Stormriders,’ said Viviana. ‘Here is your elixir, m’lady.’

‘Worse things than Stormriders are abroad,’ replied her mistress, accepting the vial and rehanging it around her neck. ‘Come. The wind is in the west. We only have to keep our backs to it.’

Chains pulled down Rohain’s heart. She foresaw the spilling of the blood of her loyal friends, and guilt flooded her conscience. When she faced the direction of Huntingtowers, an undefined fear also began to take root.

As they hastened along the way, to thrust aside dread she pointed out useful wildflowers, and in a low voice imparted knowledge gleaned from Thorn in the wilderness.

‘In tales, adventurers merely stroll along through wood and weald, pulling wild berries and nuts off the hedges,’ said Caitri.

‘Yes, I have noticed that,’ said Rohain. ‘Obviously, they only go adventuring in Autumn, the season of ripe fruits.’

‘And they do not die of cold,’ added Viviana. ‘In tales they merely lie down to sleep wrapped in their cloaks, even on bitter nights, with no fire or Dragon’s Blood to warm them.’

‘Sheer fiction,’ said Rohain firmly.

White umbels of wild carrot nodded in the breeze, alongside the pinkish-green bells of bilberry. The travellers passed banks of pimpinella, sporting its flat-topped flower heads like lacy plates.

‘Common centaury,’ instructed Rohain, indicating a herb. ‘A bitter tonic can be made from an infusion of the dried plants. Dock leaves for nettle stings. Loosestrife for henna dyes, pretty hemlock, all lace and poison. Poppies for torpid illusions.’ She astonished herself with her own erudition. ‘Here’s chicory. The leaves can be eaten, the roots roasted.’

‘’Tis a veritable pantry out here,’ marvelled Viviana. ‘A pharmacopeia.’

‘In sooth,’ affirmed Rohain, ‘but most of it does not taste very nice.’

Everywhere in this pathless land, Spring wildflowers nodded, but there was no time to stop and examine them closely. Instead, Rohain was compelled to rush across the face of the land under unfriendly skies, toward the very bastion of all things unseelie.

‘I feel a certain nostalgia for life on the road,’ she said, brushing with her fingertips the leaves of an overhanging elder-bough.

‘You are bold and brave, my lady,’ said Caitri.

‘Mayhap. I am bold but I can be craven, I’m free but I’m caged, I’m joyful but I grieve, Caitri, like everyone else. But do not call me by my title now, or even by my name—we might be overheard.’

‘What name will you be called instead, my la—my friend?’ stuttered Viviana.

‘I wish to be called Tahquil. ’Tis a name I heard once, at Court, and did not mislike. It will suffice.’

‘A strange-sounding, foreign name. It has the ring of Luindorn.’

‘Indeed, I believe it originates from that country. I heard tell it means “Warrior”, in feminine form. And warrior I must become. I intend to fight on, despite that fate throws turmoil at me again and again. Whether I will be defeated, I cannot guess.’

After a brief halt for an unappealing meal of cold porridge and samphire leaves, the three companions followed a flowery ridge up wooded slopes and over a shoulder of the hills into rank meadows that once had been well-tended farmlands. Abandonment had made wild the overgrown hedges, the deep brakes of flowering briars. Choked drainage-dikes provided a haven for marsh pennywort, bog asphodel, sedges, and rushes. Under the hedges grew foxgloves and tall spikes of wound-wort—‘A styptic, used to staunch the bleeding of injuries,’ observed Rohain—and white deadnettles, whose dry hollow stems she collected in a bunch.

‘Used in concoctions?’ inquired Viviana.

‘Used to make whistles.’

As she scanned the landscape for provender, words of Thorn’s came back to Rohain-Tahquil. He had said, there is no need to hunger or thirst in the lands of Erith … When all else fails, there is always Fairbread.

The thought brought reassurance.

Later in the afternoon, tattered clouds began to move across the sun’s face. A wind gusted, blowing up leaves and dust in sudden spurts. A few spots of dirty rain spattered down. Worse than bad weather, uneasiness crept over the travellers—a cooling of the blood. Rohain-Tahquil shivered, the nape of her neck prickled. Time and time again she would whirl rapidly, knife in hand, only to face emptiness. Yet she could swear she had sensed something following behind. She kept the knife ready in her hand.

By unspoken agreement, the companions kept under shelter as much as possible, creeping cautiously from tree to tree or scuttling quickly across open glades. Always their heads turned this way and that as if they expected to see dark shapes of an antlered horseman and other fell manifestations watching them from the shadows or from the skies, ready to spur forward and ride them down.

Ever ahead loomed the low, flat-topped trapezium of the cauldron-mountain, dark through the haze. The closer they approached it, the heavier was the hush that fell on the landscape. Back along the coast, magpies and larks had warbled their pure bell-tones. From every bush and tree had issued shrill twitterings and pipings. As they pushed farther inland, the birdsong had diminished without the travellers noticing. Now they became aware of a quietude eased only by the murmur of the wind in the leaves.

Acid rain came sluicing down in drowning sheets, hissing in the dust until it made mud of it, before settling down to a steady patter and trickle. Made corrosive by the oxidation of atmospheric nitrogen and brimstone gases from the eruption, water dripped down the collars of the walkers’ oilskins, off the edges of their fishermen’s taltries, and into their eyes.

‘I’d rather an unstorm than this,’ grumbled Viviana, shouting to be heard above the downpour. ‘This rain bites. It stings.’

‘Hush,’ warned Rohain-Tahquil. ‘Something might hear us.’

As the sun dipped behind their backs, the shower eased. The land had begun to rise steeply. Emerging from a belt of oaks they saw the great sheared-off cone rising ahead of them; the caldera of Huntingtowers, its lower versants leprous with stunted vegetation, pimpled with the low mounds of old, forsaken diggings.

It seemed desolate. Nothing stirred. The ancient caldera lay silent and still. In its mouth where once deadly fires had raged, the waters of the lake stood deep, dark and cold.

Now that they stood on its slopes, breathless apprehension laid hold of the damsels. The feeling was so strong it was almost intolerable.

The light was fading. In the east, long clouds ripped themselves to black ribbons. No moon came up behind the summit of the blunted cone.

‘I shouldn’t like to be any closer to that place at night,’ said Rohain-Tahquil.

They found shelter in a mossy stone ruin that had once, in ages long past, conceivably been a byre. Honeysuckle and traveller’s joy formed a roof over the few remaining, slug-haunted walls. Against these they piled dry bracken to serve as a bed. Not daring to light a fire, they unwrapped the last slabs of cold porridge from their dock leaves and dined in silence. Rohain-Tahquil offered a sip of nathrach deirge all around. Warmed, but wet and cheerless, they huddled together.

‘I did not know it would be like this,’ complained Viviana. ‘I hate slugs.’

‘They like you,’ said Caitri, subtracting one from Viviana’s sleeve. ‘Anyway, you said you wanted to come,’ she added primly.

‘I said I wanted to come, but I never said I would not grumble.’

The malachite oval of the sun strayed into a magnificent post-eruption sunset, a drifting flowerscape in a profusion of marigold, carnation, primrose, gentian, and lilac—colours that would bleed softly into the air and hang there in frayed, cymophanous striations like shang-reflections for hours after the sun had wasted away.

‘We have been fortunate to discover this niche,’ said Rohain-Tahquil with a new sense of authority born of her limited knowledge of survival. ‘Sometimes farmers inscribed runes into the walls of these animal pens—charms to ward off unseelie wights. See here—’ With a loose rock she scraped away a thick nap of moss. ‘Some symbols are cut into the stones. They are worn shallow now and hard to see. Still, they may yet hold some efficacy.’

‘Of course, all the lesser wights have spied us already,’ said Caitri fatalistically. ‘It is to be hoped that they will be deterred by our iron blades and tilhals and salt, and by these great bunches of hypericum.’

‘And it is to be hoped they will not go telling their greaters,’ said Viviana, using a silver needle from her chatelaine to punch holes in a stalk of deadnettle.

‘I have been told that eldritch beings do not cooperate like that, not in the way of our kind,’ said Rohain-Tahquil, who was crushing yet more thyme leaves to release their penetrating aroma. Not unless they’re forced, by threat or bribe.’

‘Some have their own leaders,’ said Caitri. ‘The siofra bow to their Queen Mab, for example; their little queen no bigger than a man’s thumb.’

‘Even so,’ replied Rohain-Tahquil, ‘but fortunately the siofra are given more to glamourish trickery than to war. Their tiny spears would prick mortal flesh no more than a thistle would. Once I travelled with a road-caravan which was dispersed and ravaged by unseelie wights, but I surmise it was not the result of a planned and concerted effort on their part. Many of them happened to be crossing the Road at that time and by ill chance we moved in their way.’

It came to her again that perhaps Huon had planned the devastation of the caravan. But no—hindsight and reason told her there were significant differences in the method of attack. The Wild Hunt had mounted a full-scale, coordinated assault directly on the Tower, while the wights of the Road had appeared at random, following their own hostile instincts rather than obeying a leader.

‘Long before that time,’ she went on, ‘I learned something of the ways of wights from a fellow traveller. Like all creatures of eldritch, the fell things of unseelie are amoral. Left to their own devices they are arbitrary in their choice of victims, neither punishing the bad nor letting alone the good. Spriggans are trooping wights, to be sure, and they have a chieftain—nominally, at any rate—but most unseelie wights are solitary by nature. They do not hold meetings or discussions, they simply act in accordance with the antipathy that drives them. As such, they are the more terrible, being an ungoverned—I will not say lawless, for they are subject to the rigorous laws of their kind—an ungoverned battalion of man-slayers, a division without a major-general, a corps without a head. Yes, a headless horseman would be an apt symbol. But I have said enough, enough to give you nightmares. Sleep now. I shall take the first watch. Caitri, did you want to tell me something?’

Caitri drew breath and looked at her mistress. Then she shook her head and turned away with a sigh.

There being no moon, and the stars being hidden by the last aerial memories of Tamhania, the night waxed as thick as pitch. The wind had dropped. Strangely hushed was the landscape, and devoid of movement. Time dragged on, with no way to mark the hours. A dark melancholia seeped up from the ground.

The thoughts of Rohain-Tahquil strayed to Thorn, encamped in the north with his men. This night he would speak and laugh, but not with her.

Not with her.

Tears welled at the inner corners of her eyes. They were tears for Thorn, and for the young Prince and the others who had been subjected to the wrath of Tamhania because of her inexcusable stubbornness. Could her culpability ever be absolved? She thought not.

Slugs meandered across her skin. She flicked at them. Toward what she guessed to be midnight, a sound came through the gloom. Something was coming, brush, brush, brush.

It stopped.

She ceased to breathe.

It came again, brush, brush, brush, and this time she thought it was accompanied by a dull clanking as of several links of a heavy chain striking together. She strained into the darkness until she fancied her eyes must be bulging from their sockets. Nothing was visible. Groping for the sharp knives she had brought from the cottage, she held them ready in both hands. Brush, brush, brush, something approached, until it stopped right at the doorstep of the ruined shelter.

A sudden wind blasted Rohain’s face. In the sky, clouds of vapor and ash parted momentarily. Dimly the stars shone out. Standing silently in front of the hideaway of crumbling stone was a black dog, huge and shaggy, the size of a calf. It stared with great saucer-eyes as bright as coals of fire.

Tahquil-Rohain’s hand groped for the tilhal of jade-carved hypericum leaves that hung beside the vial at her neck. She gripped it tightly. Her thoughts flew to Viviana and Caitri, asleep and innocent at her back.

Let them not wake now, or they will cry out.

There must be no sound, nor sign of fear. This Black Dog might be benign or malign. With luck, it might be a Guardian Black Dog, one of those that had been known to protect travellers. Yet again, it might be one of the unseelie morthadu. In that case, one must not speak or try to strike it, for the morthadu had the power to blast mortals.

She stared at the apparition and it stared back at her. Her body ached with the tension of keeping perfectly still.

It was said that to see one of the morthadu was a presage of death. Whether the thing now before Tahquil-Rohain represented succor or calamity, there was no way of finding out. She sat, rigid as steel, avoiding the burning scarlet gaze, using every ounce of her strength to prevent herself from betraying her fear by the slightest twitch and thus yielding power to the creature.

Toward midnight, the Black Dog was not there anymore.

She kept watch until dawn.

At first light, Tahquil-Rohain roused Viviana to take her turn at the watch. She did not mention their night visitor. No paw marks remained in the sifting ash layer to betray what had come and gone in the night. Tahquil-Rohain surmised there were two possibilities—that the Black Dog was seelie, and had guarded them against some unimaginable menace, or that it was one of the morthadu and had, hopefully, been warded off by one or more of the charms they carried. Either way, she and her friends were safe, for now. She warmed her stiff sinews with a sip of nathrach deirge, rolled herself in her cloak, and slept.

When she awoke a third possibility came to her—that the Dog had been unseelie, and had made sure they stayed put all night before going off to spread the news of their whereabouts to others who might be interested.

Quickly they departed from the ruin.

Daylight dribbled through clouds and fog. Breakfastless, the travellers climbed among the overgrown mullock heaps of the redundant mines that pocked the foot and heath-covered skirts of the mountain. All the while, the desire to hide pressed on them until it became almost overpowering. Eldritch gramarye seemed to crackle in the air, although nothing untoward could be seen or heard. Nothing was audible at all, in fact, save the wind soughing in their ears. Continually they glanced at the skies and to right and left, every nerve stretched, poised to dive for cover or run for their lives at the first sign of any living thing.

Over their heads, the rim of the caldera hung halfway up the sky. It blocked from view everything within its black walls, including the mysterious architecture of complex towers that, as legend had it, was the stronghold of Huon and his ghastly following. From here the Wild Hunt would put forth on the three nights of every full moon, to sweep out across the countryside and fall upon the unwary, doing to them what harm they chose.

Or not.

Messages received during the sojourn on Tamhania indicated that since the attack on Isse Tower, the Hunt had not been seen to ride …

Viviana said, ‘My la—Tahquil, there are too many of these slag-heaps—so many pitfalls and potholes. We must be wary. One false step might see one of us toppling down some hidden shaft. The very ground is treacherous. Many places have subsided, while others look to be in danger of collapsing.’

‘Wisely spoken, Via. You and Caitri must sit here in the shelter of this scrubby brake. I will wander alone awhile.’

‘It is so perilous, ma’am! What do you seek, exactly?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘Every bush and twig hides something that is ardent to harm us, I am certain. Can we not now go back?’

‘I have no choice. I am driven to wander here until I find some clue or key, or perish. There is no life for me in the world if I do not find an answer.’

‘And maybe if you do,’ said Viviana.

‘My—’ Caitri twisted her fingers together.

‘What is it, Caitri? If you have something of importance to impart to me, say it now.’

‘No. No, it is nothing.’

‘Stay here.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the very gates of Huntingtowers. I forbid you to follow. Wait for me. If I am not back by nightfall, leave with all speed.’

Tahquil left them sitting with their arms about each other; a pathetic picture, like a charcoal sketch of two orphaned waifs. She walked on, stumbling on clods, rocks, and freshly turned dirt, making sure she walked sunwise—for luck and protection—around the eroded mullock heaps. She recalled from descriptions given to her at Isse Tower that somewhere to the right lay a loop of the Ringroad; a section that was dreaded by road-caravans. But this did not concern her. It did not lie in her path. A low cliff did—she changed direction to walk parallel to it, under its briar-tangled overhang.

A creeper trailed across the ground. Its five-pointed leaves were glossy and dark green. Between them sprouted tiny inflorescences, pale green like the phosphorescence on rotting corpses. The plant attracted her attention. When her ankle brushed against it, fire ripped through her flesh. She jerked away.

Paradox ivy! You cursed leaf.

She avoided it. In doing so, she missed seeing a mineshaft farther along, teetered on the edge of inviolate darkness, and overbalanced, but in the last instant she was able to throw herself backward. To break her fall she flung out her arms, but stones met her as she landed. She lay winded, her hands scrabbling at rubble and weeds.

Rising to her feet painfully, awkwardly, she noticed a scintilla of gold that winked, once, in the corner of her left eye. Where her hands had clutched the ground, something lay uncovered. She picked it up, brushing away the caked dirt.

And something like a memory spun before her eyes.

The ground emptied from beneath its feet. It hurtled downward, to be brought up on a spear-point of agony. A band around its arm had snagged on a projection. The scrawny thing dangled against the cliff face, slowly swinging like bait on a hook.

Then slowly, with great effort, it lifted its other arm. Bird-boned fingers found the catch and released it. The band sprang open and the creature fell.

The band. A bracelet, gold, with a white bird enameled on it. This she held in her hand.

And knew it belonged to her.

The world faded.

Another took its place.

8

AVLANTIA

Quest and Questions

’Tis rumored that the Piper will come soon

And lead us all to Reason with his tune.

New day shall dawn for those who wait, no doubt—

And through the forests, laughter will ring out.

TRADITIONAL FOLK SONG

In ancient times, when the Ways between the Fair Realm and Erith were still open, of all the races of Men the Talith were most favoured by the Faêran—or so it was said. The people of that northern race were tall and golden-haired, eloquent, ardent in scholarship, delighting in poetry, music, and theater, skilled in the sports of field and track, valorous in war. Avlantia was their country, and this sun-beloved land was split into two regions—in the west, Auralonde of the Red Leaves; in the east, Ysteris of the Flowers.

The eringl trees of Auralonde grew nowhere else in Erith. Unlike the thorn bushes shipped from the cooler south to be planted in rows for hedges, their boughs were never bare, for they could not know the touch of snow in these warm climes. Their newly budded leaves glowed briefly green-gold. Unfurling, they swiftly deepened to red-gold, bronze, amber, and scarlet. The roofs of the eringl forests burned deep wine-crimson, and the glossy brown pillars supporting them were wound about with trails of a yellow-leaved vine. Fallen leaves mingled in a bright embroidery on the forest floors, buttoned with fire-bright hemispheres of mushrooms, forming a richly patterned carpet fit for royalty.

Branwyddan, King of the Talith, kept court in Auralonde at Hythe Mellyn, a mighty city built of the golden stone called mellil, which gleamed in the sunlight like pale honey. Tier upon tier, the city’s shining roofs, spires, and belfries rose upon the hillside, crowned by the King’s palace. Neat shops and taverns bordered the side-streets. Tall and imposing houses flanked the city square, which was overlooked also by the domed Law Courts and the gracious columns of the Council Chambers. In stone horse-troughs, white doves flurried on the water like fallen blossoms.

Below the city sprawled a green and fertile river valley, well-tilled, festooned with orchards, and on the other side of this valley the land climbed suddenly to the steep hills of the Dardenon Ranges, well-clad with the flame-coloured eringls of Auralonde. Hythe Mellyn prospered, as did all of Avlantia.

A plague of rats came to Hythe Mellyn, but though they poured into the city like liquid shadow in a nightmare, it was not their predations that emptied it. The rats were merely the heralds of its doom; many other matters were to come into play before the fate of Hythe Mellyn would be sealed.

At first, when they were few, the needle-eyed, yellow-fanged visitors seemed to be no more than a nuisance. After all, Hythe Mellyn until then had endured no plagues and few vermin. A squeaking and rustling in the night, a chewing of the corners of flour sacks and a depositing of filth in the pantries—these offenses were annoying but could be borne. Traps and baits were laid. It was thought these would eradicate the pests, but the rats’ numbers grew steadily despite the efforts of the citizens to destroy them, and they grew bolder. In the hours of darkness they ran across the bedcovers of the citizens. With their septic teeth, they bit people’s faces as they lay sleeping, the pain waking them to stare into a mask of horror.

Soon, not only at night were the rats abroad, but also during the hours of daylight. They were to be seen in the street-gutters and on the roofs of houses, scuttling across courtyards, poisoning the carved fountains with their waste. From every cleft and shadow stabbed the knife-point glint of their eyes, and the cold, thin whistling of their squeaks shrilled like spiteful giggling. Never was a pantry door opened without a rain of wriggling black bodies falling from the shelves and scurrying into the corners. Never was the once-sweet air free of the stench of decay and foulness. With sudden bustles of teeth, tails, and spines, the rodents clustered in the cellars like bunches of fat pears. They killed the songbirds in their cages and gnawed unwatched babes in their cradles.

Every countermeasure was tried. More traps and baits were laid, cats were brought in—but for every rodent that was destroyed, two more took its place. In desperation the Lord Mayor posted a reward to whomsoever should rid the city of this scourge—five bags of gold. As the news travelled, it brought in many adventurers from other countries eager to win their fortunes in such an easy way. But it was not easy—in fact, it proved impossible, and the reward grew from five bags to ten, and then to fifteen, as the plague intensified. Rogues and ruffians, itinerants, wizards and conjurers; all turned up with their bags of tricks, each more bizarre than the last, which they claimed would dispel this curse. None succeeded. The citizens now lived in a state of siege, with every cranny in every house sealed. Many people were too frightened to venture abroad at all, and the city was seized by paralysis, juddering to a standstill.

On the day the Lord Mayor officially increased the reward to twenty bags of, gold, a stranger arrived in Hythe Mellyn. Foreigners in outlandish garb being by now a common sight, this one caused no more than the raising of an eyebrow among the few who caught sight of him as he passed through the rat-infested streets toward the Chambers of the City Council in his gaily striped doublet, parti-coloured hose, and versicolour cloak, and his cap like a rainbow with three horns.

But as he entered into the stately oak-paneled halls of the Council Chambers and bowed before the Lord Mayor and councilors of Hythe Mellyn, his remarkable comeliness suddenly became apparent. Dark eyes, upswept at the outer corners, glittered beneath long lashes. Wavy hair rippled down his back; it was the colour of a blackbird’s plumage, with a gleam of chestnut. The clinging fabric of his doublet showed his person to be muscular and lithe, slight but well-proportioned. A faint smile played along his lips, revealing flawless white teeth. His raiment glowed like the Southern Lights—a phenomenon never witnessed in Avlantia but spoken of with awe by travellers who had journeyed to the low, freezing latitudes of the deep south. They said they had seen these lights spread across the skies in luminous mantles of living, shifting colour—fire red, dawn amber, daffodil yellow, leaf green, ocean blue, twilight indigo, and violet. Such was the appearance of the stranger’s exotic garb.

Stern-faced, the statesmen of Hythe Mellyn regarded him as he stood before them. Boldly he returned their gaze as if noting their blue eyes and noble features. The ice-white hair of the elders and the corn-yellow locks of the younger men fell across broad Talith shoulders richly cloaked in velvet.

‘I shall rid you of the plague, my lords,’ the entrancing stranger said cheerfully, ‘for the price of twenty-one bags of gold.’

Among themselves the Lord Mayor and the aldermen saw no reason why this ‘colourful fellow’, as they called him in murmured asides, should succeed where others had failed; and if by some miracle he did, why then they would be glad to shower him with twenty-one bags of gold, the freedom of the city, and more! Thus it was that they readily agreed to his price.

After he heard this, instead of departing to set up traps or wizardly devices, the handsome youth reached into his pocket, took out a set of pipes, and began to play a queer, wild tune. Immediately, the flesh of the listeners crepitated. Astonished and insulted by this odd behaviour, the councilors were about to order the sentries to cast out this offender when they were stayed by an even odder sight.

Down from the wall-hangings and across the floor of the Council Chambers came a thin, dark tide, its edges reaching out like crawling tentacles or threads, directed toward the Piper where he stood. Silently, as one organism, rats gathered at his feet. He turned and skipped away, still playing, and they followed him. In sudden fear, the sentries flung wide the brass-bound, oaken doors.

Outdoors and down the street danced the musician, trailed by his invidious entourage. Behind them, the officers of the Council burst out through the doorway. Their shouts and exclamations mingled with the eerie sound of the piping, which, it seemed, could be heard over the entire city. Above the city square, shutters banged open and faces peered out. Rats were gathering—thousands upon thousands of them. From every storehouse and granary, from every wainscot and pantry, attic, cellar, and gutter, from drain, cesspit, cistern, and crevice they came scurrying soundlessly, climbing on one another’s backs, crushing their fellows in their haste to join the living spate that grew and overflowed the streets in pursuit of the Piper down King’s Avenue, through the East Gate, and out of town.

Never before had such a bizarre and loathsome turmoil been seen in Hythe Mellyn. Frozen in wonder, the citizens stared. Children covered their ears against the shrill keening of the pipes. The tune seemed to remain loud and piercing in the heads of the people even as the Piper danced away down the winding road into the valley, across the bridge, and on toward the hills, for it seemed to tell of queer things waiting on the other side of the valley—the dank holds of Seaships filled with sacks of grain, and stinking scrapheaps, and walled darknesses filled with limitless living flesh to feed on. Yet the melody also described dangers that hunted swiftly from behind: steel-jawed engines, swift monsters with rending teeth and claws, and treacherous, irresistible sweetmeats that tasted delicious but burned caustic through the stomach and brought agonizing death. The rats hearkened and followed. The people hearkened, but did not understand.

As the last of the rodents, the maimed, lame, and slow, struggled to catch up with the horde, the Talith slowly emerged from their dwellings and followed, to see where they would go. Through the wrought-iron gates of the city went the people, until they assembled in a great concourse outside the high walls and looked out across Glisswater Vale, while the more venturesome youths gave chase.

The sun was setting in citrine splendor behind the city. Long light lay across the land, sparkling on the distant ribbon of the River Gliss where golden willows leaned. The thin trilling of the pipes interwove with their leaves and echoed down the valley. The black tide followed the road, with the Piper at its head, and more tributaries ran to join it from the valley farms, until at last it turned off toward Hob’s Hill.

The rats never returned.

Those brave youths who had continued the chase reported that a portal had yawned suddenly in the green flank of the hill. There the Piper had entered. The rats followed him faithfully, every one, and were swallowed up inside. Instantly, a pair of double Doors swung shut, meeting in the middle. The sound of the pipes ceased abruptly. The Doors appeared to be covered with the same green turf that grew all over the mound, and after they had closed there remained no crack or disturbance to show where any portals had existed. A chill, dark wind then blew across the land, and a solemn watchfulness closed in upon Hob’s Hill.

But Hythe Mellyn rejoiced. The spires and belfries gave voice with their great brass tongues. After throwing open every gate, door and fenestration, the people danced in the streets. Not a hale rat remained, only a few crushed and crippled ones, soon to be swept away. King Branwyddan, who had removed his court to his palace in Ysteris until such time as the pestilence would be contained, returned soon after. He commanded the refurbishing of the city, so that all should be cleansed and repaired. The Lord Mayor ordered that the coffers be opened and the city’s gold be used to buy in what was needed. Only the Piper’s promised payment was held in reserve, in expectation of his imminent return, and a hero’s welcome was prepared. So began a time of great industry in Hythe Mellyn, but in their happiness the workload seemed light to the populace, and in their business they did not stop to ask, or perhaps did not want to ask, where the Piper had gone and why he had not immediately returned for his reward.

A week slipped by, and another, and another. Still the Piper did not appear, but if he was mentioned at all, it was in whispers. He was no mortal creature, that was certain. Some thought him one of the Faêran; others said he was naught but an eldritch wight. There was talk of his being unseelie, malicious, and in league with the rats, for one of the councilors vowed he had spied a small black creature in the Piper’s pocket when he took out his instrument. Iron horseshoes were placed above every archway, and in the gardens the rowan-trees were hung with bells. But the Piper did not return and the people began to conjecture that he had been trapped under Hob’s Hill, or had perished, and that by a stroke of fortune they were rid of this creditor as well as the rats. Many congratulated themselves on their luck, but others shook their heads.

‘He will return,’ they said quietly among themselves. ‘Immortal beings do not forget, nor do they perish so easily. He will return for his payment.’

And they were right.

Seasons changed. Little by little, the gold set aside for the Piper was borrowed for other purposes. Hythe Mellyn returned to its former glory and the stranger who had saved it from the rat-plague was almost forgotten. If ever he was mentioned, it was now postulated that perhaps he had not drawn off the rats after all—every plague eventually comes to an end. Besides, there had not been so very many of the rodents. The baits and traps and cats had wiped most of them out before the ruffian ever showed his face. But a year to the day after he had first appeared, the ‘colourful fellow’ turned up.

Under the judicious rule of William the Wise, Third King-Emperor of the House of D’Armancourt, no war existed in Erith, and most walled cities did not bother to close their gates at all. During the rat-plague, Hythe Mellyn’s gates had been sealed at night in an effort to reduce the numbers of invading vermin. Now they stood open again by night and day. Well-equipped sentries, stationed at the entrances, possessed enough force to turn away the few undesirable outlanders who tried to come in.

They never saw the Piper enter.

In the city’s heart, the doors of the Council Chambers also stood open, although sentries were always posted for ceremony’s sake. These yeomen jumped and thrust forward their pikes as a shadow crossed the steps, but already the Piper walked within the solemn halls, past the statue of King Branwyddan on its pedestal, to stand before the assembled aldermen. In his gorgeous raiment he appeared like a ray of light piercing a stained-glass window. Amid the throes of their discussion, the councilors paused. Heads were raised. Surrounded by the echoing silence of the high-ceilinged hall, the stranger did not bow. He tilted his head cockily. That same faint smile tweaked the corners of his mouth.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I am come to claim my payment. Thrice seven bags of gold.’

His words fell into a hollow space of incredulity and were bounced back from the walls and columns.

A mutter of indignation rippled across the chamber. The Lord Mayor rose from his seat.

‘Piper, you are come late.’

‘Late or early, I am come,’ was the blithe reply.

The Lord Mayor cleared his throat awkwardly.

‘But at the time of our bargain, our coffers were full. Now they are depleted, due to the refurbishment of the city. We can ill afford to make such a large payment.’

The Piper offered no response.

‘For playing a tune,’ continued the Lord Mayor, ‘a skilled musician should expect no more than a penny or two. However, we are grateful and not ungenerous, and shall give you a bag of gold. This should be more than enough to keep a thrifty fellow like you in comfort to the end of his days.’

‘City of Hythe Mellyn,’ came the cool reply, ‘you must abide by your promise.’

Mutters of outrage and anger rose from the assembly. The Lord Mayor called for silence. Trouble creased his brow.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said to his colleagues, ‘the Piper speaks truth—a bargain was made.’

‘Offer half,’ someone shouted, and argument broke out on all sides. Never in the city’s history had the orderly proceedings of the council degenerated into such chaos. Ill feeling toward the jaunty fellow ran strangely high. For the Talith were a wise and just people, but perhaps over time, in the comfort of their prosperity, they had become somewhat arrogant, and their wisdom had become clouded by their love of their city. And perhaps there was some alien quality about the beauty of the Piper that, in some, provoked unreasonable fear and hatred.

Said the Piper, ‘I do not haggle.’

The Secretary sprang to his feet. ‘Then,’ he shouted, his face congested with rage, ‘you are heartless and no true man. You shall receive nought.’

A storm of approval greeted his words, against which the Lord Mayor remained silent. The Piper smiled, turned swiftly around, and was gone out through the doors. The aldermen heard a burst of clear laughter fading as he passed quickly through the precincts, and they were seized by an unexplained terror.

‘We have done amiss,’ cried the Lord Mayor in much alarm. ‘Send the sheriffs and constables after him. That creature plots some dangerous mischief and must be caught.’

Hardly had the messengers sped forth than an uncanny sound was heard throughout Hythe Mellyn.

The Piper was playing a different air.

This time, it promised honey-cakes and ponies, swings and sandcastles, hoops and whistles, rainbows, puppies, and Summer picnics—all lying ahead, on the other side of the valley. No man or woman hearkened to it but they wept, for they were taken as in a nostalgic dream back to the lost days of childhood. No child heard it but they must cease what they had been doing and go in quest of these enchanting delights. Thus, as the Piper danced through the streets, he gathered behind him another entourage. Among the bright-eyed, rose-cheeked faces, not one was above the age of sixteen years. From the houses of merchants and lords, aldermen and tradesmen, they came by the scores and by the hundreds—the sun-haired children of the city, the older ones leading the younger by the hand or carrying the babes. The small tots toddled as fast as they could, but the Piper went slowly. For him there was no need for haste, because all the grown-up citizens stood rooted to the spot. Weeping, they stretched out their arms and called the names of their children, who heeded them not. The children had ears only for the Piper’s tune, eager eyes only for some distant place. Their little feet moved as if independent of their owners’ control.

The tune, dangerous and irresistible, now told also of nightmares and loss, sickness and pain following hard behind, so that the children lagging at the tail end of the crowd wailed and hurried forward. The Piper danced down the valley road, through orchards bubbling with blushing fruit and fields lush with corn. Slowly the city was emptied of its youth. Along the rutted road between the hawthorn hedges they went, across the ivied stone bridge to the other side of the river where hazel bushes burgeoned and blackbirds sang; and on past the turnip-fields and the cow-meadows.

Unable to move, the parents could only shake their fists and scream and call down every curse on the Piper and beg help from the Faêran, or fate, or any source. For half the day the procession crossed Glisswater Vale, swelled by the children from the farms. The farmers could only reach out their empty hands and watch through brimming eyes. They could not see what happened when the children reached Hob’s Hill, but they guessed. The great black Doors gaped, this time to admit the cherished flowering of the Talith. Then they snapped shut, as before, leaving no trace save the footprints of the little ones—a trail that ended halfway up the hillside.

With the closing of the Doors in the hill, the citizens found themselves released. They ran, the third living tide to surge down the valley road and across the bridge. They beat on the hillside. They brought shovels and excavated. They dug with their hands and scratched with their fingernails. Night drew in, and they worked on and on until the sun rose, all the while calling and crying until they were hoarse, but nought did they find save cold stones and soil, roots and worms.

In the weeks and months that followed, they brought every piece of gold and every treasure of Hythe Mellyn and laid it before Hob’s Hill, until what was piled there was worth many times twenty-one bags of gold. Still the digging continued, deep into the hill’s bowels, but no pick broke through to any secret hole or cavern. Many of the people lay down before the hill among the gold and refused to eat or drink, calling out that they themselves must be taken in exchange for their children. The Secretary of the Council was discovered to have hanged himself from his rafters. King Branwyddan of Avlantia came, bringing chests of treasure as an offering. His own sons had been too old to be taken, yet sorely he grieved for his people.

But no royal gold and no wizard’s gramarye or wisdom, and no sacrifice of life or labor could open the Doors of Hob’s Hill or even reveal the thinnest hairline crack of an outline.

Hythe Mellyn and all of Avlantia fell into despair.

In later days, travellers who arrived at the gates of Hythe Mellyn found the city deserted, and went away again. Several explanations were offered. It was reported that a pestilence had arisen and wiped out the population. Some folk said that the children never returned, and the townspeople in their grief hanged themselves on the red trees in the forest, or else travelled to the coast and cast themselves into the sea. Yet others said that the citizens had gone looking for their kin and become trapped under the mountains, and there they wandered still, lost in some strange country. The great Leaving of Hythe Mellyn was a fact, although the manner of the Leaving and the reason behind it were hidden from the knowledge of all, save for a select few.

But the truth of it was this:

When the last child had passed in under Hob’s Hill, the Piper, who had stood playing his tune by the Doors as his followers entered, looked back along the road. Far away, just outside the city gates, a small shape crawled in the dust. He played more loudly and the shape moved a little more swiftly, but the sun was setting by this time. The wind bore a faint cry of ineffable sadness and longing over the treetops of the valley. The Piper looked to the sky and laughed, slipping inside the Doors just as they closed.

When the Lord Mayor ran out of the gates he found his little daughter lying in the dust of the road. Gathering her in his arms he brought her home.

Leodogran na Pendran, Lord Mayor of Hythe Mellyn, had given his daughter a pony on her tenth birthday.

‘Now, do not let him loose,’ he had admonished tenderly, ‘as you did with the songbird.’

‘Father, he is beautiful!’ the child had cried, thanking him with kisses. ‘And I shall not set him free, for he cannot fly, and might be eaten by wicked wights. But I shall love him and care for him as best I can.’

‘And ride him, for he is already broken to the saddle.’

‘Oh no. I shall not ride him unless he wishes it.’ She stroked the pony’s snowy neck. ‘I do not wish to burden him and make him sad, for he has done no harm. But if he comes to love me as I already love him, then one day he will tell me he enjoys my company. And then, since I cannot run as fast as he, he may let me ride.’

Her father shook his head.

‘You are too sweet-natured, elindor. Be the beast’s mistress!’

‘Father, pardon me, for I do not wish to be discourteous, but he shall be my friend, and the friend of Rhys too. His name shall be Pero-Hiblinn: Little White Horse in the “Old Speech”.’

‘I see you have studied your lessons, my little bird,’ stated Leodogran kindly. ‘But “Pero-Hiblinn” is a tall name for a short horse.’

‘Then he shall be “Peri”.’

‘Come, let us take Peri to stable. But do not leave it too long before you ride him!’

And so it was that some weeks later, in the last days of Autumn, Ashalind na Pendran rode on Peri’s back across the daisy-speckled sward surrounding her father’s house, which stood just outside the city walls. By Leodogran’s side, young Rhys, Ashalind’s brother, clapped his hands, crowing with delight. His sister had crowned him with Autumn daisies and he looked like a merry woodland sprite. As Peri cantered around the field with his tail flying like a white banner, a bird swooped out of the skies like a bolt, close to the pony’s head. Startled, the beast reared up, flailing his front legs. The child was thrown to the ground and the bird flew away. Ashalind lay still, as if in a swoon, but when her father rushed to her side, his heart wrung with concern, he saw her eyelids flutter and knew that she lived.

A servant rode for the apothecary, who, after he had performed his ministrations, said: ‘Sir, such a fall might have proved more serious. Fortune has favoured your daughter. She is hale in body save for her left leg, which is broken. I have set it. Let her now rest for three days, but when she rises she will not be able to bear her weight on the limb until it is healed.’

A suitable pair of wooden crutches had been commissioned, but before they were ready the Piper had beckoned, and Ashalind had not been able to follow.

Now all the laughter was gone. It had fled from Hythe Mellyn and Auralonde and out of Avlantia altogether. The amber city was all silence and stillness.

From that execrable day when despair had fallen upon Hythe Mellyn, Ashalind was the only child under the age of sixteen dwelling in all the great city, save for the babes who were born thereafter. No jealousy stained the bereaved hearts of the Talith, only love for this child who was the child of them all. A strange and lonely life it was for her, with no playmates of her age and no small brother with whom to frolic—only older youths and maidens, men and wives, graybeards and dowagers with hearts as heavy and eaten-out as old cast-iron cauldrons. Much of her time was spent with the carlin Meganwy, a woman of wisdom who understood the healing arts and taught her many things. Under Meganwy’s guidance, the child grew to be a damsel skilled in herb lore and songs.

For Ashalind there was something more than the heartache of missing all those loved ones and watching the world turn gray-haired. For she had been touched by the Piper’s call as none of the adults had, and been drawn by it just like the other children. She had been privy, for a moment, to a world beyond the fences of the world. Never could she forget it. In her inner being a longing had awoken, and it smoldered.

Never again, save once, did Ashalind ride upon Peri—and that was at a time of great need. Her father did not care. He cared little for anything now—except his daughter. Nothing she did could displease him. He took off his Lord Mayor’s chain of office, for he had not the spirit for it anymore, and his young steward Pryderi Penrhyn, who had been eighteen years old when the children were taken, took over the running of his affairs in the city.

‘I have failed in my duty,’ said Leodogran. ‘I ought to have spoken for the city and paid the Piper. My silence itself proved to be betrayal.’

The delving of Hob’s Hill continued at whiles over the years. Graves were raised there also, for those who had pined away and wished to rest at last near their children. The grass grew over the pits and scars and over the graves, but every year on the first day of Autumn, the Talith of Hythe Mellyn laid on the hillside wreaths of late daisies, leaves, and rowan-berries tied with red ribbons.

The grass grew, long on Hob’s Hill and the slate-gray hair of Ashalind’s father became laced with threads of silver. He withdrew from public life, spending much time in his library—studying, he said, books of lore. But often his daughter would see him there, sitting at the window, staring out into the distance, his eyes clouded like milky opals. His apple orchards, untended, fell into ruin—but his affairs in the city remained well-managed by his trusty steward Pryderi Penrhyn, who did not fail in his duties.

As soon as her leg had healed, Ashalind took to rambling at every chance with her hound Rufus through the wooded hills surrounding Glisswater Vale. Endlessly she sought Rhys and the children or looked for another way into the Piper’s realm. Love for her father and brother drove her, no more nor less than that fierce white star of Longing kindled by the pipes, now burning within her.

Rarely were unseelie wights encountered in the eringl forests and Ashalind was not troubled by them in her wanderings, for Avlantia was a domain where evil things seldom strayed. This land was said to be beloved by the Faêran, of whom she had once or twice caught a flicker of a glimpse. Folk who had been visited by them told tales of their strange ways and their beauty.

Seven years Ashalind spent searching, never relinquishing hope when it should, reasonably, have long given way to despair.

On her seventeenth birthday, her father gave her a bracelet of gold. Upon it was enameled a white seabird with outstretched wings—the elindor, the bird of freedom, which, after it left the nest, never touched land for seven years but instead hunted and slept while gliding on the wing or floating on the ocean.

And one evening in late Autumn, just after her birthday, she met a stranger in the woods.

Pale moths were fluttering. A white owl flew into the gathering gloom. Something glimmered in a clearing. She thought she spied an old gentleman standing there, leaning on a staff and watching her. Approaching without fear, she greeted him courteously.

‘Hail to thee, lord.’

‘Well met, Ashalind, daughter of Leodogran.’

His voice was as deep and mellow as dawn.

At this the damsel hesitated, for she was startled not only by his use of her name but by the piercing eyes that bent their gaze to her from under the shadow of his hood, eyes like those of a wild creature, but in what way, she could not say. The whiteness of his robes was as pure and perfect as a snowscape. The hoarfrost of his long hair and beard was like the silver of bedewed cobwebs, a fantasy in crystal lace, a symmetry in ice and diamonds hung with long prisms. His glance was a frozen sword catching the sunlight and stabbing it with brilliant sparks. Yet beneath the snow lay warmth. Now that she viewed him closely, she could not say why she had thought him very old, other than the reason of his pastel colouring, for very few lines were graven upon his face.

His strangeness now engendered in Ashalind an uncertainty bordering on fear. Her fingers touched the tilhal at her throat but the whitebeard said:

‘I am no unseelie wight, daughter. You have naught to fear. How should I not know who you are, since you are seen wandering our forests day after day, year by year? Such loyalty as yours should not go unrewarded.’

‘Sir, I do not know your name but I guess that you are a mighty wizard, such as Razmath the Learned, who fashioned my tilhal.’

‘I am called Easgathair.’

Ashalind seized her opportunity.

‘I beg leave to ask of you the same questions I ask of all folk I meet, especially the wise and learned.’

‘Ask.’

Ashalind hesitated again, for there was something thrilling yet almost perilous about this sage, and his presence disquieted her. It came to her, then, that she stood before one of the Faêran. Nonetheless she gathered up her courage, for never yet had she been daunted in her quest, despite that it had forever been fruitless.

‘Do the children of Hythe Mellyn still live, and if so, can they be regained?’

The sun had now set and the white moths were clustered more thickly in the air. All around, eringl leaves spread rumours among themselves. A night-hunting bird hooted. The old gentleman shifted his staff.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and yes.’

At this reply, Ashalind caught her breath. Many times she had received this same answer from the learned or the optimistic, but this time the words were declared with more than hope or conviction. They were uttered with knowledge.

‘If they have taken any food or drink then the children cannot return to you,’ he continued, ‘but they may not have done so yet, for seven years of Erith seem shorter than one night to them in the Fair Realm, and they are under the enchantment of their games.’

‘What is to be done?’

‘One alone may go after them and fetch them back. One who has the courage.’

‘I have it. But I do not know the road.’

‘Hearken. In view of your faithfulness, and because the treachery of your city was no fault of yours, Ashalind na Pendran, I shall tell you how to find the road. Tomorrow night you must couch yourself beneath the ymp-tree in your father’s orchard. Stay awake, and you will find the way. But truly, you are exceeding beauteous and they would keep you, so you must go in disguise. Perhaps they will not expect deception from one so young as you, and may look no deeper. Twine about you sprigs of mint and lavender, so that long-nosed wights may not encounter the fragrance of your skin. Neither speak first, nor give thanks, but show due appreciation. Beware of Yallery Brown and do not reveal your true name.’

Ashalind fell to her knees, trembling.

‘I will do it all. Pray tell me, good sir, when I go there, how should I make them hearken to me?’

‘The moon waxes to the full, and these are feast nights in the halls of the Crown Prince, Morragan, the Fithiach of Carnconnor. At such times he looks mercifully upon petitioners, and may grant favours. He will never vouchsafe the unconditional return of those you seek, but he may vouchsafe the chance to win them.’

The staff in the sage’s hand was a shaft of moonlight. Moths settled along it like snowflakes. An owl sideslipped low overhead with a whoosh and a whirr of predators’ wings. It blurred into the night. The Faêran regarded the damsel with a thoughtful stare.

‘Think thrice before you take this chance,’ he said. ‘So far, your path has wended across the ordinary hills and dales of humanity. But if you dare to enter the Realm it will change your life forever. Be careful, be very certain before you choose to step across the boundary.’

‘There is no choice to be made. I must bring them back.’

‘You are untutored. Beware of the power of gramarye. If on second thought you should decide to continue your normal life, one day perhaps this dream of redemption shall cease to trouble you and you might live in contentment as the years pass by. If you gain entry to the Realm you must pay for it—and the price can be high. No matter which choice you make, you may regret it.’

‘Sir, no words shall sway me.’

‘Now thrice have you averred this. Go then. I have warned you.’

With that he turned away and went into the shadows under the trees.

‘Lord Easgathair, please wait!’ she called, following. But he moved swiftly for one so old.

‘If you get in, neither eat nor drink until you are out,’ were the last words he called over his shoulder, and all she saw was the snow-glimmer of his robes vanishing among the eringls ahead and a few white owl-feathers strewn on the ground among the ferns and mosses.

On the following day, Ashalind made the housekeeper, Oswyn, repeat a vow of secrecy. Delighted by the thought of adventure, the woman bustled about following her mistress’s instructions, bringing men’s rough garb of tunic and breeches, packing the pockets with fragrant herbs as instructed, dyeing Ashalind’s hair with black ink and rubbing pig’s grease into it until every filament was snarled and tangled. Between them, they pulled the matted locks forward to conceal most of Ashalind’s face and bound the rest in a club at the back. The damsel regarded herself critically in the looking-glass. She practised pulling faces and speaking from the side of her mouth, all the while wondering whether she would have the effrontery to carry this through, and whether she ought to walk with an uneven gait, like a farmer’s lad accustomed to clod-hopping among furrows.

That night, Leodogran’s daughter stole down to the garden and delved her white hands into the soil, tearing her nails on the stones and smearing her face with cinders and clay. Then she went into her father’s orchard and lay down beneath the ymp-tree, the most ancient tree of all, the grafted apple. The leaves fell down around her, lightly covering her as she lay wrapped in a blanket. Under the light of the moon and the stars she tried to stay awake but at last slept, dreaming strange dreams of laughter and the ringing of bells, and songs of joy and grief that wounded like swords. But she saw no road.

She awoke damp and cold in the blue light of dawn, her thoughts first straying to her own featherbed in its warm chamber, with her hound lying on the rug, and then to young Rhys, lost and crying in the darkness.

None of her friends in the city had ever beheld the sage Easgathair, and when she sought him in the woods she found no sign. The next night she dressed in disguise and kept vigil as before, but again, sleep took her and she discovered nothing. On the third night as she lay, she twined briars and thorns about her wrist to keep herself awake with their pricking: a wild, lacerating bracelet in place of the smooth gold band she usually wore. Late after middle-night she was still awake when she heard at last a heart-stopping sound; the crystal chime of a bridle-bell.

Then it seemed to her that the wind lifted her suddenly and swung her against the night sky.

The jingling approached like the spangle of sequins, like a woodland of silver bell-flowers rustled by a Summer-silk breeze.

Seen indistinctly in the star-watered gloaming between the apple orchard’s fretted boughs, a procession of seven score riders was slowly passing by.

A Faêran Rade.

Breathtakingly fair were they, with a shining beauty that was not of Erith. All were arrayed in splendid raiment of green and gold, and mounted on magnificently caparisoned steeds whose bridles glittered with tiny bells, like chains of stars. The knights among them wore golden helmets. Clasped about their limbs were finely chased greaves. Some bore in their hands golden spears like shafts of pale sunlight. To see these riders was startling, like a first glimpse of new blossom in Spring—a sudden enchantment glimmering against boughs that lately stretched stark and black.

To see them was to truly awaken, for the first time.

A knocking started up under Ashalind’s ribs, for the yearning within her, born of the Piper’s call, had found an answer at last.

The horses were of a splendid breed, surpassing any she had ever seen in the world—noble, milk-white steeds, moving with the grace of the wind. Each possessed the arched neck, the broad chest, the quivering nostril, and the large eyes of a superb hunter. They seemed made of fire and flame, not of mortal flesh. Each was shod with silver, striking silver sparks with each step, and each bore a jewel on his forehead like a star.

The fair riders made the orchard ring with their clear laughter and song, but other horsemen surrounded them—mounted bodyguards or companions. In contrast, these outriders were of hideous form and face, and mostly smaller in stature.

When the last of the procession had passed, Ashalind sprang to her feet and followed. Keeping well back so that they would not spy her, she ran after the riders, out through the orchard gate and down Hedgerow Lane and on across the valley. Although the revelers seemed to ride slowly, Ashalind was hard-pressed to keep up. She dropped farther and farther behind. Not once did any face turn back toward her—neither the achingly fair knights and ladies nor the misshapen riders seemed to notice her at all—and thus she grew bolder and more desperate, until after they crossed the bridge there was no more attempt at concealment and she ran openly, gasping for breath, her left leg throbbing deep in the bone.

Ahead loomed Hob’s Hill, but now there was a broad road leading to it that had never been there before, and the side of the hill was open. A great light streamed out of the arched Doors. Without pausing, the procession rode inside. Their pursuer was so far behind that she saw the last of them pass within before she could come near. In great fear lest the entrance should close before she could reach it, she sprinted forward, sobbing with agony and longing. Her heart banged so loudly in her chest that she thought it would burst. As the monumental Doors finally began to swing to, Ashalind had almost reached the threshold. With a last effort she flung herself through the portal and heard, at her back, the sonorous clang of stone clapping against stone.

All seemed dark at first, but ahead, as if from beyond a corridor or tunnel, shone a pale pink light like the glow of dawn. After recovering her breath, Ashalind hurried toward it. A breeze blew from there, rose-scented, poignant. An extraordinary excitement surged through her, swelled by a sense of yearning and urgency.

The long hallway ended in a second archway. Its single Door stood open.

Beyond, she beheld a staggering view. Under a sapphire sky, a fair land of wooded hills stretched away to mountains of terrible height and majesty, their keen peaks piercing rings of cloud. She had heard tales and songs of the Fair Realm, and the Piper’s tune had described it, but the splendor, the seduction, and the fascination of that realm had never yet come home to her. Her heart was possessed, stabbed by enchantment and desire, and she gazed, almost forgetting her mission, at the land beyond dream or invention. She wept, for it was the land of the Piper’s tune, and she had only to walk a few steps to reach it. But those steps were forestalled.

Out of a side opening she had not noticed before sprang two small black figures dressed in mail, crossing their pikes to bar her way. Their ears were long, upstanding and pointed, their mouths wide and their noses broad. They stood about three feet tall and exuded a strong odour of leaf-mold.

In accents unfamiliar, these small and evidently dangerous adversaries demanded, ‘Halt, stranger. Who trespasses here and on what business?’ A gleam darted from their slits of eyes. Their barbed and whiplike tails switched aggressively from side to side.

Ashalind drew herself up to her full height and tried to gain a moment to ponder, for she had not remembered to make a new name for herself. She shrank from giving them the name of anyone she knew in case it brought the owner into danger. Thoughts quarreled in her head—the kenning her father called her, and her golden bracelet, now lying on the dressing-table at home. She spoke in a gruff voice, mumbling.

‘I am called Elindor. I am come to ask a boon of the Lord Morragan of Carnconnor.’

Distastefully, the spriggans eyed the filthy peasant lad.

‘Steenks,’ they agreed, exchanging nods. They spoke to one another in their own creaking tongue.

‘Follow,’ they said at last, and one entered into the opening from which they had appeared, where a stair led upward. With one last longing glance at the land beyond the hill, Ashalind started to climb, and the second spriggan came after.

The stair soared up and up, and opened into a corridor from which led many branches and portals leading to rooms and other stairways, one of which the leading guard climbed. At the top of this second flight was a third. By now Ashalind had been rendered once again breathless, for it was difficult to ascend so far and fast. Fortunately she was not hampered by skirts or a feigned limp, although in the leg that had been broken the bone ached. Already weary from the race across the valley, she was also troubled by thirst.

The wights led her finally to a high room in a tower. The door stood open and a resplendently furnished room lay within. The walls were clad with bright tapestries and leafy vines; the chairs and tables were wrought of gold, embellished with jewels and living flowers. One of the tables was set with goblets and jugs, and dishes piled high with fruits and sweetmeats. Warm air blew softly in at the open windows. What had at first seemed to be a blaze in the hearth was no fire, but a heap of roses so red they seemed aflame. Ashalind had never seen such a splendid room and hardly dared venture in.

‘Enter,’ said the creaking voice of the leading spriggan sentry.

She went in, but the speaker was no longer to be seen, nor was the other who had been following behind. After examining the room in amazement, she moved to the windows and looked out. There below she saw the spreading of a great garden ringed by a greenwood. Birds and fountains made music, a sea of roses surged and broke like waves against the garden walls, and on the long lawns children played.

The children of Hythe Mellyn.

Unchanged, not a day older than when they had departed seven years before, they frolicked there, lit by brilliant sunlight that seemed peculiarly clear and pink, as if viewed through a pane of roseate quartz. Ashalind dared not call to them, disguised as she was, but tears of joy and pain stung her eyes when she spied Rhys among them. Leaning from the window, she stretched out her arms, but a sound at her back made her start and turn around.

The spriggans had returned. They led her through the thundering halls and extravagant galleries of a fantastic palace, until they came at last to the most amazing hall of all.

Therein, the air was charged.

Lofty trees grew along the walls—indeed they constituted the walls, intersticed by greenery. Their boughs made a serpentine roof of leaves, forming arches laced together by the mellow breeze, tiled by glimmers of azure sky. Flamboyant birds winged across this ceiling and owls perched as if carved.

Merriment resounded, and music of harps and flutes. Long, narrow tables stretched the length of the hall, set with gold-wrought bowls of flowers and platters of food. Seated along them was a splendid company.

At the sight, Ashalind’s head spun. For a long instant she thought she fell upward from on a rocky height into a dizziness of open sky where points of light glistered, thick as salt. The song of the stars seemed to choir in her head.

She was among the Faêran.

A faint shimmer of radiance surrounded them. Their voices fell like flower petals on water, as musical as birdsong in the morning. They spoke in a language Ashalind did not understand: a tongue as smooth as polished silver, as rich as the jewel-hoards of dragons. Some wore scarlet and gold and amber like leaping flames, some were clad in green and silver like moonlight on leaves, some in soft gray like curling smoke. Others among them appeared to be as naked as needles, graced only with the beauty of their comely forms and their flowing hair, which was threaded with jewels and flowers.

Courageously, Ashalind stepped forward. Instantaneously, silence fell and all eyes turned to her.

Justly were they called the Fair Folk. Indeed, they were the fairest of all, possessing a beauty that was intoxicating, almost paralyzing. Ashalind had barely caught sight of them through the half-leafless boughs of the apple trees, but now that she was so close, it seemed to her as if her heart and brain had stopped functioning and she could think of nothing to say.

They seemed as if formed of air and light, yet as strong and living as trees, as lively as wind and fire and swift-flowing waters. Clean and finely drawn were their features, with high cheekbones and sculpted chins. At the outer corners, their eyebrows and their eyes swept up, slanting ever so slightly, as if everything about them was suspended from above and only whimsy anchored them to the ground. Tall and straight as spears were they, the lines of their forms clean and hard. Taut was their peach-blossom skin. Always they smiled and laughed. Indeed, it seemed that gravity and other weighty matters never touched these flower-ladies—fragile and slender, almost waiflike—or these virile lords possessed of the strength and grace of warrior heroes, who were beautiful in another way entirely—not as flowers, but as lions and eagles of immense power. Ashalind thought some among the assembly were older, some younger, but how they gave this impression was hard to say. No heavy jowl, no sagging chin gave evidence of accumulated years. Perhaps the effect of age was lent by an air of greater wisdom and tempered gaiety, in addition to some indefinable aspect of appearance.

Appearing stiff and awkward by comparison with the easy grace of the Faêran, eldritch wights sat among them. These seemed to be mortal men and women, but were not. Some were lovely to look upon, others ordinary—but all were betrayed by some deformity, no matter how minor. Others not so beauteous also mingled with this astonishing company: dangerous fuaths and murderous duergars, unseelie wights of assorted hideousness whose spindly shanks and outsized extremities made a screamingly grotesque contrast to the beauty of their companions. To Ashalind they appeared like fungoid growths and molds sprouting amid wildflowers.

Woodland beasts she saw also—the mask of a narrow-eyed fox, the curve of a deer’s neck, lop-eared hares pale as curd flitting over the roots of the wall-trees, a raven on a high branch.

A voice announced, ‘Elindor of Erith comes to beg audience of His Royal Highness, Morragan, Crown Prince of the Realm, Fithiach of Carnconnor.’

Bright, melodious laughter rippled around the hall as Ashalind approached the high table and knelt, hardly daring to raise her eyes.

‘His Royal Highness bids me welcome you, stranger,’ said a corrosive voice. ‘Come, drink the guest-cup with us.’

The fellow who had spoken gave a rictus of a smile. He was small and thin, with bloodless lips, a savage, wrinkled face of a yellowish-brown hue, a greasy beard sprouting from his chin. His hair hung lank and stringy, like tangled rats’ tails, but it was striped with the colours of dandelions and mud. Clothed in shades of tan and yellow, he stood behind the shoulder of a tall Faêran lord who was seated at the centre of the high table.

As Ashalind dared to lift her gaze for a moment to this lord, a cool, keen wind gusted through the hall.

Or so it seemed.

With eyes as grey as the cold southern seas, he was the most grave and comely of all the company. Hair tumbled down in waves to his elbows, and it was the blue-black shade of a raven’s wing. The heartbreakingly handsome face betrayed no sign of any passion. Leaning his elbow on the table with the relaxed poise of the omnipotent, he regarded his petitioner, but said nothing.

Bending forward, the wrinkled fellow at the lord’s shoulder poured a draught into a jeweled horn and offered it to the newcomer, along with a knowing leer.

‘Drink, erithbunden.’

‘Sir, I respectfully decline your hospitality, but let it be no cause for ill will, I beg of you. I am come but for one task, and I have vowed to neither eat nor drink until I have accomplished it.’

It was a sore trial to Ashalind to say this, for the wine was sweet-scented, clear and pale green like the new leaves of Spring in Ysteris, and thirst shriveled her palate.

‘You are as discourteous as you are decorated with the dirt of your country,’ reprimanded the rat-haired fellow, handing the horn to a gargoyle-like creature, which gulped the drink. ‘And what may be that task?’

Undaunted she bowed, replying, ‘I have come to win back the children of Hythe Mellyn.’

The crowd of Faêran murmured among themselves, and, the sound was a brook in Spring, or wind through the cornfields.

‘And why do you wish to take them away from this happy place?’ barked Rat-Hair. ‘For mark you, they dwell in bliss.’

Ashalind found no words for reply but bowed her head in silence, afraid of causing insult and losing her chance to redeem the lost ones.

‘His Royal Highness’s Piper should have been paid,’ continued the puckered fellow. ‘A bargain is a bargain. The brats are our playthings now, to toy with as we please. Mayhap we will keep them forever. Mayhap on a whim we will send them back’—with a sudden grin he cocked his head to one side—‘in a hundred Erith years’—his head jerked, birdlike, to the other side—‘and watch them wither with accumulated age, crumbling to dust as soon as they set foot on Erith’s soil!’

This drollery was greeted with joy by several of the more insanely hideous unseelie wights.

Then for the first time the raven-haired prince spoke. His voice was deep and beautiful, like a storm’s song.

‘What shalt thou give, to earn these children?’

Ashalind, still kneeling, heard her blood thump behind her ears. She chose her words carefully before she made reply.

‘Your Royal Highness, ask of me what you will and I shall endeavour to provide it—if such is within my power, and causes no evil.’

‘Think you, that you can make conditions, cochal-eater?’ snapped the ocher-faced fellow. As he spoke a large rat ran across his shoulders and disappeared, and the warm wind from the window-arches turned chill, lifting the gray-eyed lord’s fall of hair as if he were undersea in a current, spreading the strands like dark wings.

But the prince-lord smiled.

‘Elindor of Erith thinks to consider his words wisely,’ he said. ‘Consider this. If thou canst solve three questions of me, then thou shalt take away thy noisy brats. If not, then they shall stay for ever, and thou also.’

Ashalind bowed low.

‘Sir, your offer is accepted as graciously as it is given, and I am ready for the three questions.’

‘First, tell me how many stars shine in the skies of Erith. Next, tell me what I am thinking. Last, thou must consider two of the Doors which lead from the chamber below this hall, and tell me which one leads to Erith.’

At these words the ratty fellow laughed hideously, but his master’s face still revealed nothing.

Despair threatened to overwhelm Ashalind. She tried to play for time.

‘Those questions are …’ she fumbled for words, ‘not easy, sir. I beg leave of you to take time to ponder them anon.’

‘Beg, snivel, grovel,’ said the servant. ‘Now or never.’

‘Hold thy tongue, Yallery Brown,’ said his master, ‘or I shall have thee again imprisoned beneath the stone. Go then, mortal, I grant thee the time. But speak no word, scribe no symbol, and make no sign until thy return, for the answers must be of thine own inspiration and not of others’. Return when the moon of thy land waxes full again. Give me the answers then or my servant Yallery Brown shall have thee too.’ He turned away, to drink from a goblet he held in his hand.

Then the spriggans seized her and rushed her down from that place, and when she came out from Hob’s Hill she found herself alone in the night and the falling rain. But the moon was crescent and three weeks had already passed.

When Leodogran’s daughter was discovered to have vanished, the city had roused to uproar. She was sought high and low, until Oswyn in fear and shame confessed a garbled version of all that had passed—that Ashalind had met a wizard named Easgathair who had told her how to find a way to the Perilous Realm.

‘Alas,’ mourned Leodogran, ‘for now she too is lost.’

He fell into a fit and would not allow a morsel of food to pass his lips. Oswyn had expected dismissal, but Leodogran told her she was blameless, whereupon she fell to her knees and thanked him for his mercy and justice.

The learned wizard Razmath was consulted.

‘Easgathair is not a wizard but the Gatekeeper of the Faêran,’ said he. ‘Mayhap Ashalind has been ensnared because, after all, she is the One Who Would Not Follow when the Piper played his dire tune. The laws of the Faêran, so it is said, are absolute. It may be that she was marked as their own from the very moment the Piper blew the first note.’

In the house of na Pendran, one rainy eve, Pryderi the loyal young steward sat by the fireside with Leodogran. All the servants were abed, for the hour was late, when the hound Rufus began joyously to bark and there came a knocking on the door. There on the threshold stood Ashalind—wet, dark, dirty, dazed, unspeaking. From her black hair, ink ran in rivulets down her face and her ill-fitting men’s garb. Leodogran clasped her in his arms.

‘Never shall I let you from my sight again, Elindor mine,’ said he. ‘My bird, my precious bird is come home.’

But she spoke no reply.

A cool wind was blowing from the south. Leodogran’s daughter left her father’s lore-books where she had been studying them in the library. Throwing her cloak about her shoulders, she unlatched and opened the front door, but her father, appearing at her elbow, closed it again and took her hand.

‘Ashalind, you must not go out.’

He studied her face. He could see that a great conflict was happening within her, and knowing this hurt him grievously.

‘How can I help you? Why do you not speak?’

But his daughter was afraid to make any sign, even to shake her head, for the power of the Faêran was everywhere. Somehow they would know, and the chance would be lost forever. She turned again to the door.

‘Wait. I shall walk beside you.’ Concerned only for her welfare, Leodogran took up his own cloak and his walking-stick. If, in her sickness, she needed to wander, so be it—only he would never let her from his sight.

Thus, every day at dusk in the wooded hills about the city, Ashalind walked with Leodogran and Pryderi, while the dog Rufus followed close in her footsteps. Tears ran unstaunched down the damsel’s face, for she sought there Easgathair, believing he might help her in some way, and she feared he would not appear before her unless she walked alone. Yet her father would not leave her nor could she ask it of him. Her hope was that Easgathair would tell her the answers to the three questions without even being asked, for it was certain he would know of the bargain she had struck in the hall under the hill. But all that passed through the eringl woods were the white moths and owls. Without the help of Easgathair, she and the children must be doomed.

The third problem set by the Faêran prince at first appeared not to be difficult. She had seen two Doors leading out from a chamber below the Hall of Feasts, one made of polished silver and the other made of oak. It would seem simple enough to recognise the portal leading to Erith—but perhaps over-simple. Faêran things were often not as they seemed, and that task might prove the most treacherous of all. For the Erith Door to be fashioned of wood was too obvious. It was a trick—yet what if it were a double trick? Believing she would choose the silver Door, they would make sure the wooden one barred the way to Erith. Or perhaps not … Alas, that question might be more formidable than she had supposed, after all. For the second question she had prepared an answer—whether it would prove acceptable or not was another matter. But for the first there seemed no solution.

Every night, returning to the house, Ashalind gazed up at the sky. To look up and suddenly see the majesty of the far-flung net of stars burning blue-white in their trillions, that was an awesome experience. Always that moment of first seeing them was like the moment when, after silence in an echoing hall, a choir of hundreds burst into song, high and deep, accompanied by the rumbling growl of a pipe organ. The stars, indeed, seemed a heavenly choir if only she could hear their music. The Longing for the Fair Realm ached in her more gnawingly than before, ever since she had scented the rosy breeze at the end of the tunnel in the hill and walked the halls of Carnconnor. The sight of the stars in their quietude and utterness eased that pain yet exacerbated anxiety. How could they possibly be counted?

The swiftly waxing moon rode high in the heavens, pooling shadows in Leodogran’s eyes. The glory of the stars blazed like diamonds thickly sprinkled on velvet. As soon as Ashalind began to count them, some faded and others twinkled forth, and they moved as on a great slow wheel, dying and being born.

On the night of the full moon, Ashalind stole secretly from the house and crept to the stables. There she had hidden a cloak that laced down the front. With this she covered her gown, adding a close-fitting wimple to hide her golden hair and a hood to overshadow her features. She smeared her face and hands with filth as before, and embraced the white pony standing in his stall. Silently, in thought only, she bade him farewell, not daring to even whisper his name. Win or lose, she must now honour her promise to return to the place beyond the hill. And lose she must, for should she solve the last two problems to the satisfaction of the Faêran, the first she could not answer.

‘First, tell me how many stars shine in the skies of Erith. Next, tell me what I am thinking. Last, thou must consider two of the Doors which lead from the chamber below this hall, and tell me which one leads to Erith.’

The final hour was come. She would be separated forever from her father, Pryderi, Meganwy, Oswyn, and her home. She would fall prey to the unseelie, unspeakable thing called Yallery Brown. Imagining what sport he might have with her, she quailed, hesitating. Should she go back, knowing she would fail? What if she never returned to those legendary halls—would they pursue her? Would they hunt her to the fences of Erith, or would they merely laugh at her impotency and faint-heartedness, turning their backs on her forever? She had promised to return. Honor your word, her father always said. Honor your word. She must keep her promise to return to the Faêran hall. And, though it should be pointless, she must also honor the condition not to speak, scribe, or show sign. No farewell could be spoken, no letter could be left for her father.

She might vanish without clue and spend eternity in the rose garden with Rhys, or in the clutches of Yallery Brown, but in her perverse and willful heart, despite her misgivings, sorrow was mingled with excitement. Since her first glimpse of the Realm the white-hot Longing had begun to excoriate her mind more stringently than ever. That land was the vision of her waking hours and filled all her dreaming, and the pull of it was like the moon to the ocean. The Piper’s tune had told all. It was indeed the world wherein lay all the hidden forests of fable, the soaring peaks of dreams, sudden chasms of weird adventure; a land at once dangerous and wild, yet filled with joy and wonders unguessed.

She muffled Peri’s hooves, tying on rags. When she ran her fingers through his mane, one or two coarse hairs slid free to cling to her sleeve. One or two more would grow to replace them. The pony swung his head around to look at her. His brown eyes seemed full of wisdom, and as she gazed into them the answer came to her and she knew what to do. From the nearby tack room she fetched a sharp knife and hacked clumps of hair from the mane in several places, letting them fall into the straw. Haltering the now unlovely pony, she led him from the stall.

Beneath the silver penny of the moon went the cloaked damsel and the white horse, among the outbuildings to the overgrown apple orchard. For there was only one way Ashalind could be certain of finding the doors under Hob’s Hill once again. She lay down under the ymp-tree.

Middle-night approached. Gnarled lichen-covered trunks leaned, their leafless boughs reaching out to cast shadow-nets on weedy aisles. Feeling the spell of drowsiness coming over her, Ashalind clutched a clump of thistles. Needles of pain shot up her arm, awakening her to the sound of sweetly tinkling bells. The Faêrie Rade passed through the trees like shimmering ghosts. Peri whickered softly and pricked up his ears. Climbing on his back, Ashalind followed.

As before, the Doors of Hob’s Hill opened and the light from within revealed a paved way. Lagging several paces behind the end of the procession, Ashalind rode in. The Doors rumbled to, and she slid down to stand beside her steed, who strained toward the far archway. Beyond it now lay a landscape of purple night bejeweled with giant stars of every hue. The everdawn day of Faêrie had altered to soft silver-blue, a sonata in moonlight.

Would Rhys now be sleeping in a bower of blossom somewhere in the Fair Realm? Or would he and the other children still be playing their enchanted games in the rose garden under the canopy of stars? With a rush of tenderness a picture of his face came to mind; his skin soft as a ripe peach, his eyes wide and trusting. Always he had looked to Ashalind as a mother, since their own mother, Niamh, had died giving him birth.

The two spriggan sentries appeared and, complaining, commenced to escort the visitor away.

‘Garfarbelserk, Scrimscratcherer,’ remarked one, hefting his pike in a knobble-jointed hand.

‘Untervoderfort, Spiderstalkenhen,’ agreed the other with a nod and a scowl.

Peri snorted and tried to kick the wights, at which they struck at him with the butts of their pikes, screeching. Ashalindas-Peasant-Lad shouldered her way between the weapons and the pony.

‘Stay away from my steed! Hush, hush, Peri. You must come with me.’

His mistress took the tilhal from around her neck and tied it to his halter for protection. This time the sentries led her by a divergent route with no stairs up or down.

Gathering force as she approached, the presence of the Faêran broke over her like a wave.

On this occasion she was brought to a different hall, whose walls were lined with silver trees. The ceiling was high, or else there was no ceiling. Overhead gleamed the shadows and strange fires of the night sky, a fever of stars. To a wild song of fiddles the Faêran danced, clad in rustling silk or living flowers, their hair spangled with miniature lights. Many wights, both seelie and unseelie, danced among them garbed in robes of zaffre and celadon. Repulsive beings, scaled, mailed, leathered, feathered, beastlike or bizarre, mingled with the beauteous. Lace-moths drifted everywhere like bits of torn-up gauze tossed into the air. In the shadows, a pair of agates opened, watched, closed—the eyes of a great black wolf.

When the music ceased the dancers seated themselves around the hall, laughing, conversing in their marvelous language or in the common tongue. The contemptuous sentries beckoned and Ashalind stepped forward, keeping her cloak close-wrapped around her. Instantly a hush fell on the gathering. She felt herself to be truly alien here, a gauche, awkward thing, bound to the soil, bound to ordinariness and eventual mortality. How they must despise her. From under the shadow of her hood, her eyes scanned the gathering. A frisson of excitement surprised her when she saw him. It might have been fear or it might not.

Brighter than the rest was the soft radiance surrounding the gray-eyed lord. He stood on a dais at the far end of the hall, in the midst of a bevy of lords and ladies. Nearby, Yallery Brown sat with some ill-favoured companions of assorted shapes and sizes, some resembling cruel-faced men and others so truly goblinesque as to approximate no living creature Ashalind had ever seen.

From somewhere to the right, a mellow voice announced her presence: ‘Elindor of Erith returns to beg audience of His Royal Highness, Morragan of Carnconnor, Crown Prince among the Faêran.’

Whereupon Yallery Brown and his cohorts howled and hooted, prancing with glee. Ashalind waited on bended knee, her head bowed, firmly gripping Peri’s halter. Thistledown, like thousands of tiny, pale dancers on tiptoe, floated through the air.

Morragan turned upon her cool, mocking eyes, eyes the colour of smoke. ‘Elindor!’ he said in his beautiful storm’s voice. ‘Are they in truth naming young churls after birds in Erith?’

Her blood halted in icy veins. Could it be he saw through her disguise? Was a reply expected?

After a moment he laughed and said:

‘No matter. Speak.’

‘Sir, I have returned with the answers to Your Royal Highness’s three questions. The first was, “How many stars are in the skies of Erith?” And I answer, that there are as many stars as there are living hairs growing on the body of my horse. See here, if it please my lord—it was necessary for me to cut some off to ensure that the total was exact. If anyone doubts this, they may count the hairs themselves and they will find that I do not lie.’

A burst of laughter and applause greeted her words. Yallery Brown gave a shriek and his comrades yowled like cats. The Faêran lord did not smile, but Ashalind’s hopes leapt, for he said,

‘A clever reply, erithbunden, and amusing. So the first question is answered. What of the second? Canst thou tell me what I am thinking?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Ashalind bravely, using her own clear voice for the first time. ‘Your Royal Highness is thinking his humble petitioner is a peasant lad, Elindor of Erith. But your Royal Highness is misled. I am Ashalind na Pendran.’

At this, in a desperate and daring gambit, she threw off her disguise. Bright locks spilled down her back. Using the discarded wimple she wiped her face clean, then stood proud and straight before the astonished assembly, clad in her linen gown. The prince regarded her consideringly. Applause rang louder this time, and praises were shouted from all sides of the hall.

‘E’en so!’ some of the courtiers cried. ‘’Tis none other.’ For they knew of her, they had seen her wandering on the borders of the Realm, searching, and but for her hound Rufus, she might have been stolen years since.

All eyes turned to the prince, but he offered not a word. Then stepped forth a lady of the Faêran, and her loveliness was a poem. Her dark hair, bound in a silver net laced with glints, reached to her ankles. Her gown was cloth-of-silver overlaid with a kirtle of green lace wrought in a pattern of leaves. Laughing, she said, ‘Ashalind, we love clever riddles and tricks—you bring us much merriment this night. We would welcome thee to dwell among us.’

‘The golden hair of the Talith is much to our taste,’ added another Faêran lady, smiling.

Great wisdom was written in their beautiful faces. Ashalind wondered how such as they could traffic with unseelie things, but she recalled a passage from the lore-books;

‘The laws, ethics, customs, and manners of the Realm are in many ways unlike those of Erith and are strange to us.’

‘That,’ said Yallery Brown suddenly, pointing straight toward Ashalind, ‘is ours in any case. It was intended to be part of the city’s payment.’ With unnerving swiftness he crossed to her side, reached up, and spitefully tugged her hair. The pony’s eyes rolled and he shied nervously. Icy fire flowed down the damsel’s spine. She noted a dandelion flower, yellow as cowardice, peeping from the wight’s hideously knotted hair. It might have been growing there, rooted in his skull.

From among the gathering, a Faêran lord spoke. Like the others of his kind, he was comelier than the comeliest of men. A gold-mounted emerald brooch clasped his mantle at the shoulder, and on his head was a velvet cap with a swathe of long spinach-green feathers trailing down to one side.

‘In order to find this way in to our country, thou hast spied upon our Rade from under the boughs of the ymp-tree. We of the Realm do not love spies. Other meddlers such as thee have paid the price.’

‘My fingers itch to tear out the eyes of this false-tongue mortal, my liege,’ said Yallery Brown, turning beseechingly to the prince.

‘Yet this smacks of Faêran help and advice,’ interjected another Faêran lord. He was garbed in a gaily striped doublet, parti-coloured hose, and versicolour cloak, his cap a rainbow of three horns. Ashalind thought she recognised him.

‘Even this clever deceiver,’ Three-Horn-Cap continued, ‘could not have come here without the aid of one of our own people—so there can be no forfeit to pay. The Erithan brats were taken because of the perfidy of her kind, those same Men who delved the green slopes of the sithean with iron, and scarred it. But she did not follow me, and thus she is not part of the fee.’

He smiled, showing dazzling white teeth.

‘Yes, gentle maid,’ he added, ‘I am the Piper.’

Of course Ashalind hated the Piper, and yet looking upon him she was forced to admit she loved him, as one must love all the Faêran, even while abhorring them at the same time.

Said Prince Morragan, breaking his silence at last, ‘I desire no truck with mortals save for sport, and even that becometh tedious eventually.’

‘Never for me, my liege,’ whispered the rat-faced Yallery Brown. ‘Oh, never for me.’

‘She is not thine yet,’ replied his master. ‘Thus we come to the last question. If this erithbunden chooses aright, she and the others shall go free, and it shall be their loss. But if she chooses the wrong door, she and they will take the road to doom, Yallery Brown, and perhaps thou shalt be the architect of that doom or perhaps it shall be myself. Behold the Hall of Three Doors!’

As he spoke, the dancers parted, and behold! they stood already in that chamber Ashalind had seen previously. A pathway opened among the crowd revealing not only the Door by which she had entered, but also two closed portals. The Doors of silver and oak faced each other from opposite sides of the hall, and beside each one waited a doughty, grim-faced young man, in ragged plaid and heavy leather, feet planted firmly apart, each holding a pike twined with the dripping red filaments of spirogyra. These door-wardens stared into the distance, looking neither to right nor left. Their raiment too was wet—indeed water streamed from it in droplets and rivulets to pool around their feet. Seaweed was tangled in their lank hair.

‘One of these Doors,’ said Yallery Brown, ‘leads to Erith. The other leads to your downfall.’ He played a little tune on a fiddle and added, ‘Think you that you and the brats be the only mortals in the Realm? Not so. For these pikemen of the Doors be Iainh and Caelinh Maghrain, twin sons of the Chieftain of the Western Isles, believed drowned with their comrades in the waters of Corrievreckan. Foolish and arrogant were they, to think they could ride the back of the finest steed in Aia. Now they have learned their lesson well, for they have served in the domain of the Each Uisge this many a long year. Lucky men are these, for their five comrades were torn apart and only their livers washed to shore. And although they look as alike as two peas in a pod they are as different as day from night, for one is forced to be an honest man, while the other never spoke a true word since my lord the Each Uisge became his master. Speak ye the truth, man?’

The guard of the silver Door said, ‘Yea.’

‘And speak ye also the truth?’

‘Yea,’ said the guard of the oaken Door.

‘You see, it is as I have said,’ Yallery Brown continued. ‘And this is quite curious to us, for lying is a skill possessed only by mortals. False wench, do not think that we shall tell you which man is which!’

A very pale, exceedingly charming fellow now came forward. He wore close-fitting green armour like the shell of a sea-creature, with a fillet of pearls on his brow and a dagged mantle of brown-green like the leaves of bull-kelp, but he moved like a horse, and despite his finery an unspeakable malevolence hung about him like a ragged shadow.

For a brief moment the mortal damsel looked into his terrible eyes. Cold and expressionless they stared at her, as devoid of emotion or pity as fathomless water, as a drowning pool, as cold rocks and waves that relentlessly smash ships to splinters. Whatever his true shape, here was a thing of horror. She thought: I am beholding the Each Uisge himself, the Prince of Water-horses. May all that is benevolent preserve me.

He said, ‘My servants only speak two words—yea and nay. They may never say more.’ His voice, booming like waves surging in subterranean caverns, ended in the hint of a whicker.

Then said Prince Morragan, ‘The mortal may ask one question of one pikeman only.’

Ashalind turned as pale as the Each Uisge and clutched at her pony for support. She had hoped for more clues than this. The wights surrounding Yallery Brown screamed with laughter and leaped about, cutting the most fantastic capers, but the Faêran lady with ankle-length hair said softly:

‘Ashalind, fairest, there exists a question which would reveal all to you, if only you could deduce it. We may not aid you in this, but do not despair.’

‘When the music stops,’ said the raven-haired Fithiach, ‘thou must needs choose.’

The dulcet melodies began again, and a whirlpool of dancers flew around Ashalind and the pony, their feet in truth scarcely touching the floor. Time passed, but how much time she could not tell—whether it was a few moments or hours or days. There must be some question she could ask one of the guards, the answer to which would tell her with certainty which was the right Door. If she could not find it out she must choose at random and take a chance, as recklessly as tossing a coin: a chance of losing all, forever—not only for herself but for Hythe Mellyn and the children, for Rhys and their father and for Pryderi. Had she come this far only to fail?

The music and movement distracted her cogitations. She buried her face in the pony’s ruined mane and covered her ears. In the darkness her mind raced with a thousand questions, and permutations of what their answers would reveal.

It is like pondering a move in a chess game, she thought. If I ask this, then if he is the truth-teller he will say that, but if he is the liar he will say the other, and how should that help me in the end?

With a flash of inspiration she lifted her head. She saw that amid all the motion one tall figure stood and looked down at her and knew the triumph in her eyes.

‘Thou hast another choice, Ashalind Elindor,’ said Prince Morragan softly. ‘To go out by neither Door. I have no love for mortals and would not be grieved if thy race all should perish, but thou’rt passing fair among mortals, and faithful, and acute. Bide here now, and I swear no harm shall come to thee under my protection.’

Beneath straight eyebrows, the smoke-gray eyes were keen and searching. Strands of black-blue hair wafted across his arresting features. This Faêran was indeed comely beyond the dreams of mortals, and he possessed terrible power. The Longing for the Realm pained Ashalind like a wound. He spoke again, more softly than ever:

‘I can take thee through fire as through castles of glass. I can take thee through water as through air, and into the sky as through water, untrammeled by saddle or steed or sildron. Flight thou shalt have, and more. Thou hast never known the true wonder of the favour of the Faêran.’

For moments the damsel struggled, pinned by the piercing blade of his gaze, and then her pony blew on her neck and nuzzled her shoulder. At the sudden warmth of his hay-scented breath, she sighed and lowered her eyes.

‘Sir, I must take the children home.’

Instantly the gray eyes blazed with a bleak and cold flame. The prince turned away, his cloak flaring, sweeping a shadowy swathe through the air.

The music stopped. The dancers stood still.

‘Now choose!’ cried the Piper.

Ashalind went to the guard at the oaken Door and asked her question. He replied,

‘Nay.’

And she said, ‘Then I choose your Door.’

Immediately the Door opened to reveal a long green tunnel of overarching trees beyond which shone the hills of Avlantia in the saffron morning, and the larks were singing, and a merlin hovered in the sky, and the hedges were bare and black along the fallow fields, and blue smoke stenciled the distant skies. And from the city came the sound of bells: ‘Awake! Awake!’

But Prince Morragan grasped Ashalind by the hair, pulling her head back so that she must look up at him.

‘Thou hast won this game,’ he said evenly. ‘Thou canst walk the green way and return to thy home. The children will follow behind you, but only those who have not tasted of our food and drink. To them it will seem as though they have passed but one hour in the Realm. Go now, but if thou turnest back, even once, thou shalt return here and never leave.’ Abruptly he released her.

Tears pricked her eyes as she took the pony by the halter and stepped through the Door. The rumour of a multitude of footsteps arose from behind, and childish voices.

Slowly she paced along the vaulted avenue, and soon the first of the children passed her, running down the road, calling to one another in joyful voices. She glanced to the side and saw many whose names she knew, but Rhys was not among them. Had her brother, then, been one of those who had eaten the food of Faêrie?

‘Ashalind!’ called the compelling voice of the gray-eyed prince. She stumbled, but plodded on. He called her name a second time and she halted and stood, but only for an instant. Onward she went, and now she was halfway along the arched way. More and more children ran past, like leaves blown by an Autumn gale, and there were hundreds of them, but still she could not find her brother, and she thought of Yallery Brown and his flesh-devouring rats, and her courage almost failed her.

‘Ashalind.’

This time she fell to her knees and could not arise. The children hurried by. To look over her shoulder, to see one who governed gramarye standing there with the whole of the Fair Realm at his back and that world promised to her—it would be so easy. So sweet it would be, to watch him pivot on his heel and walk away, and to follow. Slowly she clambered to her feet. Despite her desire, she neither looked back nor turned around. She pressed on, her feet and legs heavy, as though she waded through honey. Now the end of the avenue was near, and crowds of children streamed down into the valley, and rushing to meet them down the road from Hythe Mellyn to the bridge flew another crowd—the men and wives of Hythe Mellyn come to bring their children home. Forward into the sunlight went Ashalind.

Then, farther back, she heard the piping tones of her own brother:

‘Sister, turn and help me, for I am afraid.’

At that, with a rush of relief, she almost spun about, but she said, ‘Do not be afraid, Rhys.’ And still she faced toward Erith.

‘Sister, turn and help me, for I cannot walk.’ Her heart was wrenched, but she hardened it.

‘Then, Rhys, you must crawl, for I may not turn back.’

His sobs turned to screams—‘Sister, a monster is upon me!’

For the third time, Ashalind stopped, right under the eaves of the last tree, and her neck ached from the effort of not turning her head, and she cried out:

‘No, you are not my brother, for he never addressed me as “Sister”!’

Then she heard a crash of thunder and the angry scream of Yallery Brown, and wild laughter. A freezing gust of wind tore leaves from the trees. But her brother ran up beside her and she recognised that this time it was he in truth. She set him on the pony’s back and they followed the last of the children down the valley.

Sitting on a mullock heap beneath a briar-hung cliff, the young woman blinked. It had been a long time since she had done so and her eyes were filmed with mist, gritty. She looked at the bracelet in her hand, her father’s gift. She slipped it on her wrist. Closing, the catch went click.

And the memories kept flooding back.

9

THE LANGOTHE

The Longing for Leaving the Leaving of Longing

What is Longing that it never lets go? Would that joy could grip us so!

Even the strong oak falls at last, having withstood the south wind’s blast.

What is Longing that it never runs out? Even a well may fail in drought.

What is Longing that it never ages, like leaves to dust and youths to sages?

What is Longing that it will not depart and let peace descend on mortal heart?

MADE BY LLEWELL, SONGMAKER OF AURALONDE

The tale of the Return of the Children was recounted far and wide in Avlantia. The entire country feted and praised Ashalind na Pendran. A wealth of gifts and the highest honours in the land were bestowed upon her. Bards made songs about the brave maiden who had ventured into the Secret Country, facing not only the Faêran but also the most dangerous of wights, and, against all odds, outwitting them all. The King of Avlantia himself bestowed upon her the title ‘Lady of the Circle’, with the rank of baroness. Glory and honour paved her way, and happiness ought to have followed—but it was not to be. There remained something the people of Hythe Mellyn had not reckoned with.

‘Langothe,’ said the wizard Razmath, reading from a lore-book before an Extraordinary Assembly of the citizens of Hythe Mellyn. ‘The Green Book of Flandrys describes it as the Longing, or Yearning, for the Fair Realm. All who have visited Tirnan Alainn—as some of the ancients called it—all who have so much as glimpsed that country, wish to return. They do no good in the mortal world thereafter. They cannot forget it, even for a little while, and continually search for a Way to return. In severe cases they pine away to their deaths, having no interest in meat or drink and no desire for life in Erith.’

Gravely he raised his eyes to survey the men and women seated before him.

‘There is no known cure.’ He closed the book. Stiffly, Leodogran rose to speak. He stood with shoulders bowed.

‘Never has there been such joy in this city as on the day our children returned after seven years in the Perilous Realm. On that morn I rose from my couch to find my daughter’s bed empty and forsaken. But there came to my door a messenger from Easgathair, Gatekeeper of the Faêran, saying, “Ring the bells and rouse the city, for your daughter is bringing the children home.”’

He paused, fighting some inward battle, momentarily unable to speak.

‘And on that day we believed all our dreams had come true. The children had indeed been restored to us, but alas, what was lost has never been entirely regained. The Langothe is upon them despite all we have tried. Not love nor gold nor wizardry can bring our children’s hearts back to their native land. Though they love us and were overjoyed to be reunited with us, their thoughts constantly stray far away. Ever they wander, ever they search. We have consulted the histories and books of wisdom to no avail. In truth, there is no cure.

‘Some lads and lasses never returned from the Perilous Realm because they had partaken of its food or drink. To add to the city’s grief, their families have mourned long. My ladies, my lords and gentlemen, we lived in sorrow for seven years, and now for seven long weeks we have watched our neighbours grieve afresh while our children languish and fade. What say ye?’

Then Meganwy, the Carlin of the Herbs, rose to her feet saying, ‘I speak for most of us when I declare, we must put an end to sorrow. We cannot let the children’s wellbeing continue to decline, nor can we bear to be separated from our darlings. Only one path lies open to us. Together we must seek a way to leave Hythe Mellyn, yea, to leave Erith’s dear lands, and journey to dwell in the Realm. How we shall find that place, and whether those that dwell there will admit us, I know not.’

This proposition was greeted with a great outcry, and fiery debate ensued, which continued throughout the many assemblies that followed.

Like the other mortal visitors to the Fair Realm, Ashalind had been brushed by the strange pull of the land beyond the stars. As with them, her interest in the meats of Erith had declined, and her flesh waned, losing the soft curve of youth and conforming closer to the angles of her bones. She did not speak of her own anguish, of the severity with which the Langothe seared her spirit. However, they guessed, her father and Pryderi. Rhys knew only too well; at whiles she and the ailing child would hold one another in a tight embrace.

‘What is to be done, Ashli?’ he would sigh. ‘What is to be done?’

At a loss, she could only shake her head.

The snowy lace of blossom was on the hawthorn when overnight, it seemed, there came a sudden increase in eldritch and Faêran activity throughout all the lands of Erith. Wights of all kinds were abroad in unprecedented numbers, and the Fair Folk were glimpsed much more frequently than ever before, in woodlands and meadows, in high places and by water. Rumors seethed. It was said that some great catastrophe loomed, such as war or the end of the world. People whispered that the King-Emperor in Caermelor knew all about it, for he was in the confidence of the Faêran sovereign, and that they both struggled to avert the mysterious calamity. Many stories circulated, but none knew for certain what the truth might be.

A delegation of wizards, aldermen, and elders of Hythe Mellyn met on many occasions with Branwyddan, King of Avlantia, and his privy council in the palace that crowned the golden city. The seventeen-year-old Lady Ashalind and Pryderi Penrhyn, eight years her senior, were included among them. Hours toiled past in discussion.

‘Your Majesty,’ said Meganwy of the Herbs, ‘in Hythe Mellyn there have been many gatherings of the people, and much ado. The Langothe sorely afflicts our children, and some have died of it. Families yearn vainly for their lost youngsters. Life burdened with this curse is unbearable for many—they wish to leave the city and find a Way into the Fair Realm, there to dwell in peace with their loved ones.’

‘How many wish to go?’ the king asked, somber of countenance.

Razmath the Learned, wizard of Hythe Mellyn, replied, ‘About one third part of the city’s population, Your Majesty—those whose children are most severely affected or who never returned.’

‘That is many,’ sighed the king, ‘yet we have looked long upon these silent children and their wan faces. Even the sternest heart could not remain unmoved. I have pondered much on this matter and spoken of it at length with my advisors. Gravely it concerns me, that I cannot furnish contentment for my subjects. Grievously it troubles me that the goodly flower of my people would leave Hythe Mellyn. Yet their sovereign shall not stand in the way of their happiness. So it shall be. If they wish to go, I, Branwyddan, will not gainsay my people, though to lose them will surely be a devastating blow to this land. For many years now the numbers of our race have been dwindling. Sorrow waxes heavy within me—I fear that a Leaving such as this will herald the final days of the Talith.’ He added, ‘Perhaps only a hastening of the inevitable.’

Leodogran said, ‘Your Majesty is gracious and just, and we thank you for your favour. But sire, we need your help, for we do not know how to discover a way to return. My daughter has lain awake beneath the ymp-tree night after night, yet no Faêran procession rides by, no Doors appear in the hillside. Methinks the Hob’s Hill traverse is now permanently closed to mortalkind. I have scant knowledge of the Ways between the worlds. What say ye, Orlith?’

The king’s wizard spoke. ‘Oak coppices, rings of mushrooms, the turf-covered sitheans, circles of standing stones, high places, green roads of leaf and fern, certain wells and tarns, stands of thorn or ash or holly—all these and more are sites where a Way may be found. It is said that these Ways into the Secret Realm, all so different, are each guarded by a Gateway configured like a short passage with a Door at either end, one leading to Erith, the other to the Fair Realm. They are not always doors as we recognise them, with posts and hinges, but Faêran portals that may bear many guises. These Gateways cannot be traversed without the aid or permission of the Faêran.’

Then spoke Gwyneth, Queen of Avlantia.

‘William the Wise, King-Emperor in Caermelor, has commerce with the Fair Folk, I believe. It is said that a great friendship exists between them.’

‘A messenger shall be dispatched forthwith, asking his help in this matter,’ said Branwyddan, ‘although I vigorously emphasize that it sorely grieves me to think of losing any of our people.’ Sorrow clouded his brow. ‘But hearken also to this of—late, unusual occurrences have disturbed all of Erith, as you are well aware, and they have shaken the very foundations of the Royal City in Eldaraigne. An answer from there may come late or not at all, for we hear that William, King-Emperor, is greatly occupied and hardly sleeps. Caermelor has issued orders to open new dominite mines, so that as much of this stone as possible may be dug out of the ground for two purposes: to line the walls of buildings, and to extract the base metal talium for the making of chain mesh. Furthermore, it is reported that heavily guarded shipments of a new kind of metal are being received at the King-Emperor’s treasure-houses. What this all means, I may not yet say. But I tell you—time is not unlimited and you must not delay in making your move. Now is the hour to act. Speedily find a Way to the Perilous Realm if that is your desire, citizens of Hythe Mellyn, and end the suffering before it is too late.’

In the soft Spring twilight the air was heavy with honey fragrance. Leodogran remained at the palace in discussion with the wizards Orlith and Razmath, while his daughter walked in the company of Meganwy and Pryderi down the winding streets, through Hythe Mellyn toward the city walls. Ashalind was thinking of her little brother; at the house of na Pendran, the stolen and regained Rhys lay in his bed under Oswyn’s care, dreaming of an enchanted rose garden.

‘Pray tell us, Mistress Ashalind,’ said Pryderi, forgetting, as always, her new title of Lady of the Circle. ‘What is the question you asked, to learn which was the Door leading to Erith? For we have all pondered upon it until we are ready to tear out our hair and ’tis most unfair of you to make us suffer so.’

Meganwy said to him, ‘But Pryderi, if you had studied the lore-books you would have discovered it! For although Ashalind reckoned out the answer herself, the riddle is an ancient one, and has been asked and solved before.’

‘Do not chide me with ignorance!’ returned Pryderi good-naturedly. ‘I do not spend my days with my nose buried in books, that is all. There are better things to do. Now, Ashlet, you must relieve me of my misery.’

‘Not until you promise not to tease my Meganwy so.’

‘Oh, balderdash!’ laughed the carlin, her eyes crinkling with merriment. ‘’Tis merely banter among friends. He only teases those he loves. Besides, I am used to it—after all, I have put up with it since the lad’s knees were as scabby as two tortoises. And that was a full day ago, at the least.’

Pryderi snorted.

‘The question,’ interrupted Ashalind, before he could respond with a clever retort, ‘which was in fact the answer, was, “Would the other guard tell me that this is the door to freedom?”’

They walked awhile in silence. Presently Pryderi spoke again.

‘I see. Well said. Acute, if I may say so. ’Tis fortunate you had perused the same moldy tomes as Meganwy.’

‘I had not! It is news to me that this is an old riddle. As Meganwy said, I fathomed it myself!’

‘The more credit to you, child,’ said Meganwy gently.

‘How strange it is,’ mused Pryderi, ‘that not so long ago we would have given everything we owned if only the children could escape from the Fair Realm. Now we are desperately seeking a Way for them to return. Truly it is said, “misguided are mortals”.’

A pale, hollow-eyed child leaning from a casement called out to them. There was an ache in her voice.

‘My lady, have you found a Way?’

‘Nay,’ Ashalind returned, ‘not yet.’

A gaunt, lethargic youth lounged beneath the wall by the city gates, looking out across the valley. A reed pipe hung from his belt. As though begging for his life he asked Ashalind, ‘Are you bound for Faêrie, my lady? Shall we return now?’

His name was Llewell, and he was one of the returned youths, a brilliant musician and songmaker. He was being driven mad by the Langothe. In his delusion he often believed he was truly one of the Faêran.

‘Nay, Llewell,’ Ashalind said again, turning away lest the sight of his forlorn and desolate aspect should crush her heart. ‘Soon, maybe. Meanwhile, make us a song so that we might forget, for a time.’

So it was, always, with the children. They turned to Ashalind in their blind and urgent need. They clung to hope in the form of her native wit, by which, once, she had achieved the impossible. They wanted to believe she could do it again. And like them, she had been There. She understood how they suffered with the Longing.

Outside the gates there was a stirring among the trees, a susurration in the leaves. The rumour of things unseen was everywhere; muffled laughter, scamperings, squeakings, shrill whistles, low mutterings and far-off singing. The lands of Erith were alive with the denizens of Faêrie as never before—the Fair Folk themselves, often heard or sighted but rarely seen clearly, eldritch wights trooping and solitary, wights of water and wood, hill and house, cave and field; incarnations both seelie and unseelie.

‘Eldritch creatures lurk all about us,’ said Meganwy. ‘Surely there must be one who can take a message to Easgathair. From your account, Ashalind, the Faêran sage seemed to hold you in high regard.’

‘Then the misguided are not only mortals,’ said Pryderi, striding ahead.

Ashalind smiled, as she still sometimes did, despite the dull, sustained pain of unfulfilled yearning. ‘Pryderi loves me!’ she cried after him chaffingly.

‘I do!’ he called back over his shoulder.

Ashalind caught hold of Meganwy’s arm.

‘What you say is true, Wise Mother,’ she said. ‘Let us go direct to the orchard. It is said that apple blossom delights all creatures of gramarye, particularly the Faêran.’

Soft wind, as warm as love, whispered sweet nothings to budding leaves. From far away scraped the raucous hubbub of jackdaws coming home to roost. A skein of swans stitched its way slowly across the mellow west. Passing under the trees and half-hidden by blossom, the urisk was unnoticeable at first, but a flicker of movement caught Meganwy’s eye. Silently the Carlin took Ashalind by the sleeve, indicating with her forefinger. A small, seelie man-thing moved between the trees on hairy, goatlike legs.

‘In the name of Easgathair,’ Ashalind called out urgently, ‘I bid you tarry.’

With a rustle, the wight jumped away into the trees and was seen no more.

That evening after supper, Ashalind personally set out the pail of clean water and the dish of cream for the household bruney, a task usually carried out by Oswyn. The dark hours came creeping. She sat in the kitchen’s inglenook, waiting, waking, and at midnight the bruney came stealing. Its face was ugly and rough, with a stubbly gray beard and wide mouth; its hands were outsized. A conical cap of soft brown deer’s hide covered its head; its other clothing consisted of a threadbare coat, patched knee breeches, coarse woollen hose, and large boots. The damsel watched the wight begin its chores, sweeping and scrubbing, scouring the pans to mirror-brightness with preternatural speed and efficiency.

‘Bruney’,’ she said softly into the shadows, never taking her eyes from it, never meeting its gaze.

The little manlike thing ceased its industry.

‘What are ye doin’ sae late awake, Mistress Ashalind?’

‘I seek your help, hearth-wight of my home.’

‘I seen ye grow up from a bairn no bigger ’n meself, and yer father before ye and his father before that. Have I ever failed this house?’

‘No, you’ve never failed this house. You’ve been good to us—never a dollop of sour cream, never a drop of unclean water. In return, we’ve looked after you. Bruney, I seek audience with the Lord Easgathair of the Faêran. Can you bring me before him?’

‘I have ways to send messages to the Faêran, Mistress Ashalind, but I wist the Lord Easgathair will nae heed me at this time, if ever, for ill deeds and evil tidings have come upon us all.’

‘Of what do you speak?’

‘Fell doings and ill fortune,’ said the bruney obscurely, ‘but there be nocht that such as I can do to change things. Alack that I should see such times as these. Alack for the folly of the great and noble. The world shall be mightily changed and what’s tae come of it I know not.’

‘But you will try this for me?’

‘Aye, that I will, hearth-daughter. Now get ye abed as is proper and leave me to my doings. They’s my hours now, not yourn.’ He shook his little besom broom at her.

‘Good night,’ she said, lifting the hems of her skirts as she flitted upstairs.

Toward morning, just before cock-crow, Rufus woke up and began to bark frantically at the bedroom door. Leaping half-awake from her bed, in her linen nightgown, Ashalind collared him.

‘Hush, sir. Stay.’

The bruney’s head appeared around the door’s edge and spoke. ‘’Tis only me, Rufus. What are ye groazling and bloostering about, ye great lummox?’ Lowering his ears sheepishly, the dog wagged his tail. ‘Mistress Ashalind,’ the bruney went on, ‘I hae a message for ye.’

‘Yes?’

‘Next middle-night ye mun gae to Cragh Tor.’

The head disappeared.

Steep, thickly wooded hills rose close on every side, dark against the star-salted dome of night. Streamlets splashed like threads of spun moonlight down their shoulders. A path wound its way up Cragh Tor, overhung by a cliff on one hand, dropping away precipitously on the other. As the party of three walkers climbed higher, they saw, looking back through a gap in the hills, a scattering of yellow lights shining like fireflies in a dusky dell: the lamplit windows of the city.

Finding the hilltop deserted, they sat down on mossy stones to wait, uneasily. Cragh Tor’s summit was flat. No trees grew there; instead it was crowned by a half-circle of granite monoliths, thirty feet high, a ruined cromlech whose other half had collapsed in centuries past. Of the stones that stood, three were still connected by lintels while the others leaned lazily, painted with lichens in rouge, celadon, and fawn. Grass grew over the fallen monoliths, which lay partially buried. Usually this place was dismal and unwelcoming, and this night was no exception. An unquiet breathing of the night soughed and grieved its way in eddies around the angles and edges of the rocks. From somewhere below the ground came the gushing hum of running water. Glowing eyes peered out from shadows near ground level, but no voice answered the inquiries of the incongruous mortals. No Faêran lord or lady appeared.

Ashalind and her companions felt the presence of wights massing thickly all around. The night was full of their mutterings, their lascivious snickerings, sudden wild laughter and unnerving yells. A sneering bogle jumped out, then leapt, spry as a toad, over the rim of the hill. Gray-faced trow-wives peered from shadows and tall tussocks, whispering and pointing, their eyes protruding like onion-bulbs, their oversized heads bound in dun shawls. One of them was clutching a ragged baby. The slight weight of the tilhals at the throats of the mortals felt reassuring, yet inadequate. The trows melted away as slowly the hours of darkness stretched on. The mortals huddled drowsily into their cloaks for warmth.

It was about an hour before dawn when soft music came stealing out of the darkness, subtle but permeating, like jasmine’s fragrance. Simultaneously, a rose-petal glow bathed Cragh Tor Circle, like the dawn but untimely. A fox ran across the grass. The monoliths were shining with an inner radiance, like crystal with a heart of fire, and now strange flowers sprang in the turf. Two people of the Faêran were seated upon a fallen monolith while a third stood, one foot braced upon a stone, strumming a small golden harp.

He was like a sudden bird of the night, this harpist; an orchid of many colours, a tonal melody. Twined about his neck was a live snake, slender as grass, yellow-green as unripe lemons. Blinking away the blur of weariness, Ashalind started up, biting off a low cry before it had left her lips.

The harpist was also the Piper.

She turned away, wisely concealing her anger and indignation.

The musician laid down the instrument and spoke softly to his companions. Then the whitebeard with the staff spoke.

‘Hail and well met, fair company,’ said Easgathair, greeting by name each of the three who now stood before him. He looked indefinably older and more careworn than before, and at this, Ashalind wondered, for the Faêran were said to be immortal, and unaffected by the passage of time.

The three petitioners bowed.

‘At your service, Lord Easgathair,’ Ashalind said.

‘We know your names.’ She who uttered these words was seated at Easgathair’s right hand—the Faêran lady with the calm and lovely face Ashalind had seen in the halls of the Fithiach of Carnconnor, she whose dark hair reached to her ankles. Green gems now winked like cats’ eyes on her hair and girdle. The fox that had run across the grass sat elegantly beside her, looking out from narrow slits of amber. ‘But you do not know ours,’ she went on. ‘I am called Rithindel of Brimairgen.’

‘My lady, you gave me courage when I needed it most,’ said Ashalind with a curtsey.

‘That which is already possessed need not be given.’

‘I Cierndanel, the Royal Bard, greet you, mortals,’ said the slender young harpist-Piper, bowing with a white smile that seemed, to Ashalind, mocking.

‘The musicianship of Cierndanel is renowned amongst our people,’ Easgathair said.

While Meganwy and Pryderi saluted the musician, Ashalind faltered, filled with conflicting desires for vengeance and courtesy. Here before her stood the one who had originated all her troubles, with his irresistible pipe-tunes.

The Faêran bard turned an inquiring eye upon the young woman. Like a nail, it transfixed her.

‘Have I offended thee, comeliest of mortals?’ (A voice like rain on leaves.) ‘Say how, that I might ask forgiveness. A frown blights thy loveliness like late frost upon the early sprouts of Spring.’

‘Can you not guess, sir? Yet, offended, I have no wish to offend. I will say no more.’

‘Tell on. Our discourse cannot progress until I am satisfied.’

‘Well, then.’ Ashalind took a deep breath and blurted out, ‘You, sir, are the perpetrator of the most heinous thievery of all. You are the Piper. You stole the children. That’s your offense.’

‘I am all astonishment,’ said Cierndanel.

At Ashalind’s tidings, Pryderi took an impetuous step forward, raising his fists. Meganwy’s eyes snapped fire.

Before they could take issue, Easgathair held up his hand. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Cierndanel, thou know’st not the ways of mortals as I do. In their eyes, your accomplishment was not a meting out of justice but a misdeed. Understand, mortals, that Cierndanel was acting on behalf of the justice of the Realm when he led away the children with the music of the Pipes Leantainn. ’Twas not done for revenge or spite, ’twas a lessoning and an upholding of what is just; a fair treatment and due punishment in accordance with equity.’

‘Faêran equity,’ said Pryderi tightly.

Meganwy said, ‘We can hardly applaud the Piper’s actions, but let us not quarrel. I have studied somewhat of Faêran customs and mores, and while I cannot approve, I acknowledge. Our moral code is not yours.’

‘You all seem to forget,’ pursued Cierndanel, the bardic snake sliding around his neck like a pouring of liquid jade and topaz, ‘that I piped away your plague of rodents also.’

‘But did not Yallery Brown send the rats to begin with?’ cried Ashalind.

‘The wight Yallery Brown has nought to do with me, sweet daughter. He, like many of his kind, mingles freely with those of our people who tolerate such types, but what mischief they may choose to make outside the Fair Realm is no concern of ours. The crime, the betrayal of promise, was the city’s,’ he added, stroking the seashell curve of his harp with a long and elegant hand. ‘Why hold a grudge against me for being the instrument, so to speak, of retribution?’

The corners of his mouth quirked. A smile tugged at them, as ever.

Said Easgathair, ‘Condemned mortals ever rail against the executioner, though ’tis only his given task, and had there been no transgression, there would be no punishment.’

‘It seems immortals shall never understand why,’ said Pryderi bitterly.

‘Immortals we be, yes,’ returned Easgathair, ‘but filled with passion; swift to laugh and love, swift to anger, slow to weep. We can, like you, be bowed by grief.’

‘No, never like us,’ replied Pryderi. There was a harsh edge to his tone. ‘Never like us, since you cannot know death.’

‘An immeasurable gulf,’ acknowledged the Lady Rithindel, after a pause, ‘sunders our races, one from the other.’

‘Nonetheless,’ said Meganwy, ‘we must let grudges shrivel and be blown away like the leaves of past seasons, for now we are come to ask for your help. Knowing the Fair Ones to be an equitable and just people, we are certain you will not deny us.’

‘Indeed, we will not deny that we are equitable and just!’ said Easgathair. ‘Seat yourselves before us now. We wait to hear what you shall say, although perhaps we have guessed already.’

‘We wish to speak of the Langothe,’ said Ashalind, guardedly taking a seat beside Pryderi on a mossy stone.

Easgathair nodded.

‘We cannot abide with it,’ she continued, ‘and we beg you to let the children return to the Fair Realm with their families, there to remain. We ask that they may receive protection against unseelie wights such as mingle with the retinue of the Fithiach of Carnconnor, and that they should dwell far from his halls.’

‘Far and near do not mean the same in the Realm as they do here,’ said Cierndanel lightly. ‘Thou mightst cross from one end of Faêrie to the other and still be close to the place from whence thou proceeded. Indeed, there are no ends or beginnings as thou know’st them.’

The Lady Rithindel said, ‘Angavar our High King has always welcomed the gold-haired Talith whenever they have entered our country. You people of the gold have often been a source of delight, aye, and help to us, and this occasion, I wot, would be no exception—despite that he is grievously burdened at this time.’

Ashalind saw Easgathair’s fist clench as he gripped his staff. Raising his silver-white head, he directed a calm gaze at the mortals.

‘Ashalind,’ he said, ‘for seven years thou didst wander in the hills and those eringl woodlands where the Faêran take delight in riding and hunting. Thy kindness and loyalty of spirit were marked by those who saw thee pass and that is why I helped thee when thou first asked. For that same reason I will help thee a second time, for it is the way of my people to reward goodness. Also, there are some among us who would perhaps opine that at this time we need, more than ever, a quota of humankind to abide among us. As Gatekeeper to the Realm, I will grant your request. You and your friends and families shall have your admittance, as well as protection against wights. Against Prince Morragan I cannot shield you, but I think he will not harm you.’

The mortal folk jumped up and embraced each other, smiling, bowing deeply to the three Faêran. ‘Lord Easgathair, Lady Rithindel, Lord Cierndanel—we greet your generous words with joy!’ they cried, mindful, even in the midst of their exultation, to refrain from thanking them, as custom decreed.

A meteor arced down the glistering sky, scoring a trail as fine as diamond-dust. Chaste breezes raced across open spaces, lifting the white silk strands of the Gatekeeper’s hair. His proud face, with the erudition of eternity engraved into it, hardened to an uncharacteristic severity.

‘It delights us to behold your happiness,’ he said, ‘but many things you must now learn—for a dire event has come to pass in Aia, and a more disastrous one shall yet befall. Sit yourselves down once more. I must relate to you now a history of Three Contests.’

Perplexed and intrigued, Ashalind and her friends did as he had bid. When they were comfortably settled, the sage began. ‘Know first that I, Easgathair White Owl, am the Gatekeeper, the overseer of all the Ways between the Realm and Erith. Some while ago—time runs out of kilter in your country, but it was about the season when Angavar High King traded places with one of your kings for a year and a day, and the two of them became friends—some while ago, I was challenged to a game of Kings-and-Queens, or Battle Royal, as it is sometimes known. The Talith entitle the game “chess”. My challenger was the younger brother of the High King—Prince Morragan, the Raven Prince, who is called the Fithiach. Morragan has long been my friend, and such a challenge was not unprecedented. We often vied with one another in amiable gaming.’

‘Indeed,’ interjected Cierndanel as the whitebeard paused, ‘and the prince’s bard Ergaiorn follows his lead, for it was then that he won from me in a wager the Pipes Leantainn, the Follow Pipes as mortals might name them, and the very instruments with which thou wouldst have quarrel, sweet maid.’

‘Then sir, I would venture to say that you are well rid of them,’ rejoined Ashalind with feeling. ‘But prithee, Lord Easgathair, do not halt the tale.’

‘Alas,’ continued the Gatekeeper grimly, ‘I did not see then the dark current that ran deep, far below the surface of the charm and wit and mirthfulness of Prince Morragan. I did not suspect the iron acrimony that had become lodged in his once-blithe heart, hardening it over the years, feeding the fires of his pride and arrogance.

‘He gifted me with a beautiful Kings-and-Queens set made of gold and jewels, beautifully wrought by Liriel, jewelsmith of Faêrie, and challenged me to find anywhere in the Realm a fairer or cleverer assemblage of pieces for the board. We played the game and, as was our wont, we bet on the outcome.

‘Lately the Fithiach had been lamenting the fact that always I must abide near to my post in the Watchtower, from which I can oversee all the rights-of-way, and if I step into Erith I must not stray too far lest I am needed. Until he spoke of this, I had not resented my duties, but when he conjured these ideas I became persuaded that perhaps they were, at whiles, a trifle irksome, and I would fain enjoy a brief respite, if only for a change.

‘“If thou shouldst win the contest,” said Morragan, “I shall take thy place in the Watchtower for a space of a year and a day, while thou sojourn’st as thou wishest.”

‘“But sir,” said I, “what stake may I offer thee? Thou dost already possess all thou couldst desire.”

‘“Wilt thou grant me a boon?” said he, and I made answer—“Provided it is within my scope.”

‘Eventually we settled that if I should lose I would grant him a boon as yet unasked; that I would pay him whatever he should desire, were it within my power. We played and I defeated him. He assumed my role at the Watchtower for a year and a day.

‘Some time later, I in my turn gifted the prince with an equipage of Kings-and-Queens, the pieces being the size of siofra, those diminutive wights who love to mimic our forms and customs.

‘“Skilfully is this wrought, I’ll allow, my friend,” said he, “and ’tis larger than the Golden Set I bestowed on thee, yet ’tis no prettier or more artful.”

‘Then I showed him how at the touch of a golden wand the pieces moved by themselves, by internal clockworks, and walked to their positions as bid.

‘Thus, with the Mechanical Set a second game was played. On this occasion we both wagered the same stake: “The loser shall pay whatever the winner desires,” and Prince Morragan ended up the victor.

‘“One victory to each of us! This time I have defeated thee, Easgathair,” he said, laughing, “but I must beg for time to consider before I ask for what I desire.”

‘“Sir, thou mightst enjoy as much time as thou wishest,” I boasted. “And whilst thou art at it, thou mayst take time also to search high and low for a cleverer or more beautiful set than this, which I’ll warrant thou shalt never find in the Realm.”

At that the brother of the High King smiled and agreed, but added, “Yet, I will bring thee a more marvelous collection and there shall be a third trial. Two out of three. This shall decide the champion.”

‘Fool that I was to play for unspecified boons,’ said Easgathair bitterly. ‘And yet how could I suspect? I believed him free of jealous thought. One day, not long—in our reckoning—after thou, Ashalind, hadst taken away the children, he brought me to a glade wherein was raised a platform. It was inlaid with squares of ivory and ebony and upon it stood sixteen dwarrows in mail, armed, and twelve lords and ladies of Erith including four mounted knights, also a quartet of stone-trolls, all enchanted, all alive. At the player’s spoken command they obeyed!’

‘But how cruel,’ protested Meganwy, ‘to enslave living creatures in that way!’

‘They were trespassers in the Realm,’ explained Cierndanel the Faêran bard with a shrug. ‘Those who trespass may, by rights, be taken.’

The mortals looked askance, but held their tongues.

‘With this Living Set we played a game,’ said the Gatekeeper, ‘and once more the Fithiach defeated me. He is an adept player and I began to wonder whether he had allowed me to win the first time. As before, we agreed that the loser must pay what the winner should desire—but this time, having won, he immediately asked for what he wanted. He asked, did the Raven Prince, and I was bound to honour my word. I did not guess it had already become a bitterbynde.’

Easgathair rose and paced around the circle. His feet crushed no blade nor pressed any flower.

‘It was then that I discovered the thoughts he harboured. For he made a terrible demand, which was truly anathema to my expectation. I alone am in charge of the Keys to each Gate. If the Ways and the Gates are invisible to you it is because they are merely closed. Rarely are they locked. Once locked, they remain shut forever, according to our Law, as happened to one Gateway after the theft from Lake Coumluch on White-flower’s Day.’ The Gatekeeper shook his silver-maned head. ‘I recall precisely the words the Fithiach used when he described the boon he would ask of me. He proclaimed:

‘“Upon thy word, Easgathair White Owl, thou shalt grant me this deed. Thou shalt lock the Gates to the Ways between the Realm and Erith, barring the passage of Faêran, eldritch wights both seelie and unseelie, unspeaking creatures, and all mortal Men. No more shall traffic pass to and from the Realm, which shall remain properly for the Faêran and not be sullied by humankind. At the instant when the Gates finally close, those who bide within the Realm shall remain within and those who bide without shall remain without. After the locking, all the Keys shall be placed in the Green Casket, whose lid shall be sealed by my Password.”’

Pryderi jumped up in a panic.

‘Are the Ways to be closed forever? Then we must hasten!’

‘I asked him,’ said Easgathair, for grace of a year and a day. For friendship’s sake he granted it.’

‘“Thou might’st enjoy grace of a year and a day,” he said, “but do not conjecture that the passage of time shall change my heart. Never shall I retract this demand.”’

‘Why should the prince wish to cut Aia in twain, to sunder Erith from the Fair Realm?’ asked Meganwy. ‘Why does he so despise mingling with mortals?’

‘Prince Morragan has no love for your race. There are deeds done by mortals which have aroused his ire, and also stirred the anger of others of our kind—deeds such as spying and stealing, the breaking of promises, slovenly habits, lying, greed, captiousness, the snaring of a Faêran bride by a mortal man. Morragan loves only the Faêran, but traffics also with eldritch wights. His hatred of mortals is not like the bloodthirsty savagery of unseelie wights but rather a desire to shun your kind, to shut them away from his sight.’

‘So,’ Pryderi summarized, ‘it is purely out of contempt for mortal folk that he would lock the Gates to Faerie.’

‘That, and more,’ said Easgathair. ‘Know that Morragan is the younger brother of Angavar, called Iolaire, High King of the Realm, who is friend to mortals. Your own King-Emperor William once helped Angavar to bring about the fall of the Waelghast, the Chieftain of the Unseelie Hosts, who was a supporter of Prince Morragan. The Waelghast used to plague Angavar in days of yore. Methinks, perhaps Morragan, in his jealousy, encouraged this. Without the Waelghast the unseelie wights are leaderless, but more and more nowadays they are foraying into Erith to harass mortal men, and mayhap Morragan is behind this also.

‘Angavar is powerful. Morragan is the younger and so he must be Crown Prince, instead of King. ’Twould be unwise for me to reveal more, here in this place—even stones may have ears. Suffice to say that rivalry between siblings causes strife in many races, and jealousy is not a trait monopolized by mortals. It hurts Angavar to Close the Ways.’

Clouds of moths gathered around the luminous stones, spattering their tiny X-shaped shadows in evanescent patterns on the lichen. The fox gave a grating, silvery yap like the beat of a wire brush against metal. Down in the mosses, a small stone bobbed up and down as though something were pushing up from underneath it.

‘Get thee hence!’ said Easgathair, nudging the stone with his foot. It wailed thinly and dropped with a clunk.

An eggshell of silence closed around the Circle, brittle and fragile. Ashalind and her friends were dumbfounded at what they had heard.

‘We begged the Fithiach to reconsider,’ said Rithindel in low tones, ‘but he would not listen. Many of our folk applaud his plan, especially those who have ever given him loyalty and love. Now ill will sunders the Faêran and many go forth to visit Erith, knowing it shall be for the last time. For there are a multitude of things in Erith that please many of us—not least, its mortalkind.’

‘Angavar High King,’ Cierndanel the Piper said, ‘has ordered Giovhnu the Faêran Mastersmith to forge a special metal with which to make gifts of farewell for William of Erith—a metal such as has not before been seen in Aia, a metal with which gramarye is alloyed. Sildron, it is called. Your people shall deem it precious.’

‘Why then are we mining the yellow metal, the native talium?’ asked Pryderi.

‘Never have all the Gates been locked,’ said Cierndanel. ‘It is feared that when the Day of Closing comes, a weaving might be torn; a balance might be shifted. The imbalance may well let loose wild winds of gramarye. Strong forces surround the places where our two countries intersect, and they will be thrown into confusion, striving one against the other. It is possible that uncanny currents will be sent howling around Erith forever, without guide or purpose. Untamed winds of gramarye can create shape and image from the thoughts of Men. Only talium can block them out.’

‘On the Day of Closing,’ said Easgathair with a sigh, ‘Midwinter’s Day in Erith, three warning calls will be sounded throughout both worlds. On the last call, the Gates shall swing shut, and remain so, seamlessly and forever.’

‘Unless Prince Morragan should later reconsider and open the Green Casket of Keys using the Password,’ said Meganwy, ‘and return the Keys to you, sir.’

‘He has vowed never to change his decision once he is sealed within the Realm. What’s more, he would have no reason to do so. He is a denizen of the Realm and believes all his happiness can be found therein, throughout eternity. Indeed, he is not mistaken. The delights and adventures of Faêrie are limitless. I can assure you, never shall Morragan change his mind.’

‘But might you not divine or guess the Password?’

‘There exist words and words, in a multitude of tongues. In the Realm, time is infinite. But should the wrong Password be spoken to the Casket three times, its Lock will melt and fuse so that nothing may ever open it, alas.’

‘And alas for the Langothe,’ said Ashalind resentfully, ‘for dearly do I love the good soil of Erith. Had I not heard your tune, Piper, and glimpsed that place, I had rather eat of a fresh-baked brown cob than all the sweet fruits of the Fair Realm. I had rather walk in the briar-tangled woods than the ever-blooming rose gardens, and wear the good linen and coarse wool than dress in Faêran gossamer and moonlight. But now I have no choice, for my blood is changed.’

‘Hush, Ashalind,’ warned Meganwy; but the Piper laughed.

‘We take no insult that a damsel should declare her love for her native land.’

‘The Lady Rithindel reached down and caressed the ears of the restless fox. She looked out across the land below, its valleys now drowned in mist. The skies were bleaching in the east. A frigid blue light waxed all around.

‘The cock crows soon,’ she said, ‘and we must away.’

‘In the morning of Midwinter’s Day,’ said Easgathair to Ashalind, ‘gather together all those who wish to dwell forever in the Realm. Take the way leading west from the city. When you come to the crossroads, take the Green Road.’

‘I know of no Green Road,’ said Pryderi.

‘On that day, those who seek it shall find it. Follow that path to the land of your desire. For now, return to your homes. Farewell.’

Ashalind and her friends took their leave. As they passed beyond the ring of stones they turned back for one last glance, but the Circle was empty. A sense of desolation and abandonment overtook them, as if the last light had faded from the world. They shivered; something more penetrating than chill puncturing their bones. A cock crowed in the distance and the sun peeped over the rim of the world, lighting the dew on the mossy stones and the grass, making jewellery of it.

Thus began the Leaving of Hythe Mellyn, the exodus that no war, plague, or pestilence had brought about. Instead, this migration was initiated by the Langothe; that yearning for a place which all mortals strive to find, in their own way, whether consciously or not; an estate sought either within the known world or beyond.

Throughout Erith in the weeks that remained before the closing of the Gates there was unprecedented mingling of Faêran, mortal, and wight. The Talith families who had resolved to depart set their arrangements in order, and packed the belongings they wished to take with them. As the day drew nearer, more and more of their friends and relations, unable to bear the thought of parting forever, decided to join them.

Thus it happened that early in the morning of Midwinter’s Day an immense procession left the golden city by the Western Gate and proceeded down the road, their shadows lying long before them. Of the entire population, only a handful remained behind.

Piled high with boxes and chests, the horses and carriages and wains trundled along. Hounds ran alongside, or rode in the wains with the children. Some folk were mounted, others went on foot. All were singing. Every voice lifted in the clear morning air, and the song they sang was the love for the green hills, the sun-warmed stone, and the red trees of the homeland they were leaving behind. ‘Farewell to Erith,’ they sang, ‘land of our birth. No more shall we tread your wandering paths or look out across the fields to the sea.’

They smiled as they wept, and hardly knew whether it was gladness or sorrow that they felt; indeed pain and joy seemed, on that journey, to be one and the same.

Behind the procession the city stood almost empty on the hill. Blank windows stared out over deserted courtyards and the streets lay silent, but the amber mellil stone glowed as ever in the sunlight.

At the crossroads where usually roads radiated in four directions, there was now a fifth. A winding Green Road, smooth and unmarked by wheel ruts, stretched out, disappearing over the hills. Bordered with ferns, it was paved not with stone but with pliant turf. Down this path the convoy turned. Those folk who remained standing at the city gates with the Avlantian royal family and their retainers saw them dwindle into the distance, their singing still carried faintly on the breeze. The watchers strained their eyes until they could see their kinsmen no more, but some said later that they had seen a bright light burning white on the horizon and that the procession had passed right into the centre of it.

The King moved his Court from Hythe Mellyn to Filori, in the land called Ysteris of the Flowers. The abandoned city rang hollow, like a great bell. With the Leaving of Hythe Mellyn, the spirit had gone out of the people. As the years passed, fewer children were born to the Talith. Their race dwindled, the last of the royal family died without heirs and the Talith civilization passed into legend. No Feohrkind or Erts or Icemen came from the southern lands to Avlantia, to settle in the abandoned Talith Kingdom—or if they came, they did not remain. Therefore the cities lay dreaming in their crumbling splendor, visited only by the tawny lions and the dragon-lizards that basked in the sun. In later days it was said that a plague or pestilence or unseelie gramarye had emptied the cities of Avlantia. The real reason was forgotten.

Ashalind, riding side-saddle on the black mare Satin—a gift from the city—lagged behind even the most reluctant travellers on the Green Road, despite the urgings of her friends. Only Rufus trotted beside her, alert, reveling in the myriad scents only a hound’s nose could trace. Ahead, Rhys rode with their father on the big roan gelding, with Peri following on a rope, bearing light packs. Leodogran was gladdened to see how vitality was returning to his young son as they traversed farther along the Road, and colour bloomed in the boy’s cheeks.

Pryderi’s spirited horse pranced forward eagerly, fighting restraint.

‘Don’t dally, Ashalind,’ the young man called merrily over his shoulder. ‘You have made your choice like the rest of us. Lingering only protracts regret. Look forward—we shall be happy when we arrive!’

Leodogran’s daughter would not listen, heeding no one. Tugging gently on Satin’s reins, she looked up and thought she spied, out toward the coast, a white bird flying.

‘I am torn,’ she said to herself, ‘between the land of my heart and the realm that’s infiltrated my blood.’

And she glanced back at the lonely city on the hill.

But her family and friends were advancing down the Road, and so she flicked the reins and rode on. Her hood fell back from her fair head and the edges of her traveling cloak opened like flower petals to reveal her riding-habit, a long-sleeved gown of blond and turquoise saye, worn beneath a short, fitted jacket of ratteen. About her throat was wound a white cambric neckcloth. Nostalgically, she had garlanded her wrists with eringl leaves in place of briars. Beneath the leaves her bracelet glowed on her left arm, like a flame reflected in the rim of a goblet of golden glass.

As they travelled, the road began, imperceptibly, to alter. It became a sunken lane of deep banks, and thick, overhanging hedges. Bright flowers flecked its grassy borders, yet they were not the blooms of Erith.

To either side of the Road, stands of eringls gave way to thick forests, simultaneously bearing fruit and blossom. Rufus ran ahead to join the other hounds frisking and tumbling on the green verge. When Ashalind looked back at the city again, it was gone. Hythe Mellyn, the trees with their leaves of somber crimson and bronze, the hills—all had vanished. Landscapes fair and foreign unrolled behind the travellers on all sides, and they were not the hills of home.

The terrible heartache of the Langothe fell away like a discarded mantle, whereupon a form of delirium overswept the mortals. They ran and rode on as though nothing could touch them. Their mood was euphoric, as if they had become invulnerable giants who strode at the top of the world and perceived, through vast gulfs of air, the immensity of a mountain range suspending its ancient blocks from horizon to horizon, each peak stamped on the sky so clearly that they could step out and tread them all.

Now that she had entered the Fair Realm with all of her loved ones and the Langothe was assuaged, it almost seemed to Ashalind that there was naught she could ever lack again. Happiness surrounded her, within her reach, only waiting until she took a sip or sup of Faêran food, when she would possess that happiness and be possessed by it completely. Only the memory of the Langothe remained, a fading knowledge that it had once existed. But there was also, still, the memory of Erith, which must be relinquished, wiped out by the act of consuming a part of this new land, in order to be consumed, to gain the utter peace that stems from utter lack of yearning.

A memory too precious?

Afterward, she could never clearly recall those hours in Faêrie when, for a brief efflux, time ran synchronously with time in Erith.

She and her people had come into a marvelous countryside. Here the trees were taller, their foliage denser; the valleys were sharper, the mountains steeper, the shadows more mysterious, thrilling, and menacing. All colours were of greater intensity and brilliance, yet at the same time softer and more various. Through everything ran a promise of excitement that profoundly stirred the psyche.

Avenues of towering trees like rows of pencils led to glimpsed castles of marble and adamant, flecked rose-gold by an alien sun. Exuberant brooks flowed through meadows, and on the lower slopes of the hills deer grazed beneath great bowery trees in pastures of flowery sward. Orchards, where fruit hung like lanterns, were yet snowed with full blossom. In the boughs, songbirds trilled melodies to shatter the heart with their poignancy.

Even as the Talith pushed deeper into the Realm, the rosember light paled to the glimmering blue of evening.

The newcomers perceived that a feast was laid out on the starlit lawns, beneath spreading boughs heavy with scalloped leaves. There were pies and puddings, flans and flummeries, saffron seed-cakes, cloudy white bread and soft yellow butter, raspberries, pears, strawberries and honeyed figs, creamy curd, truffles, and crystal goblets encircling dark wine. The children who had eaten Faêran food and remained in the Fair Realm now came running forth. Ecstatic families were reunited. Beasts of burden, unhitched from rein and shaft, ran free. Bundles, chests, and boxes were left piled beside still-laden wains, all abandoned, all unnecessary now.

Entranced by the music of fiddle and harp, the yellow-haired people of Hythe Mellyn danced and feasted in the mellow evening. Their cares had been discarded with their belongings on the flower-starred lawns. Caught in the ecstasy of the moment, Ashalind cast off her traveling cloak and prepared to join in. Yet at the last, she did not.

The mortals were being watched. Faêran forms moved among the trees.

When she glimpsed them, something within Ashalind lurched and turned over.

At her elbow, handsome Cierndanel said, ‘Thou art honoured, Lady of Erith. The most noble and exalted Lady of the Realm has sent for thee. Come.’ He flashed his mercurial grin.

It seemed then to Ashalind that she followed him, or else was transported by some unfathomed means, to another location. In this new place there reclined a Faêran lady; surely a queen among her race. And as Ashalind beheld her she was given to know her name also: Nimriel of the Lake.

Nimriel’s tranquillity was that of the calmness of a vast loch at dawn. Her mystery was that of a solitary black tarn in the forest, where, like a breath of steam, a creature of legend comes to drink, its single diamond spire dipping to send swift rings expanding out across the surface. Her beauty bewitched like moonlit reflections of swans moving on water. She was mistress of all the wisdom hidden in deep places; in drowned valleys and starlit lagoons; beneath mountain meres where salmon cruised in the dim, peaty fathoms.

Ashalind looked into a pair of wells, dark and clear.

It was said among mortals that if you stand at the bottom of a deep shaft and look up, then even on a sunny noon you will see the stars shining against pure shadow. That is what it was like to meet the gaze of the Lady of the Lake.

As Ashalind made her duty on bended knee, a dark-haired maiden, lissom as a stemmed orchid, stepped forward: the Lady Rithindel. She offered a two-handled cup.

‘Thou art welcome among us, Ashalind na Pendran! My lady Nimriel invites thee to drink.’

Ashalind’s hands reached out to take the cup. The red eringl leaves encircling her wrists brushed against it, rustling. Releasing the cup, she drew back with a sigh.

‘The Lady Nimriel is generous, but I have promised myself that I shall neither eat nor drink until the last Gate is closed and all links between our two worlds are severed forever.’

On an inland sea the weather might change suddenly. Blinding fogs might form without warning, a wind might come gusting from nowhere to whip up white-capped waves.

The Lady Nimriel spoke, soft and low.

‘Many fear me, Ashalind na Pendran.’

‘Ought I to be among them, my lady?’

‘Thou hast refused my cup. I do not lightly brook refusal of my hospitality. Nevertheless, because thou speakest from thine heart, thou hast no cause to be afraid.’

Ashalind bowed in acknowledgment.

‘My custom is to gift newcomers. If thou wilt not accept food or drink, perhaps thou wilt accept other gifts. On thy journeyings, thou may’st need to cheat the moon.’ Briefly the lake-queen leaned forward and brushed her fingertips across Ashalind’s dagger-slender waist.

‘My lady speaks of journeys,’ exclaimed the damsel. ‘I believed mine to be over.’

‘Thy voyage is only just beginning, daughter of Erith. This I see, although as yet I know not the reason. Thou need’st not much in the way of gifts. Thou dost possess many of thine own. Yet mine is bestowed now.’

Confused, at a loss for words. Ashalind stammered a reply. She could not understand what it was the lady had given her.

The two reservoirs of lucency regarded her gravely, as though from a distance.

‘Know this, daughter of Erith. The Faêran are in great strife and turmoil at this very hour. Our eyes, from all over the Realm, are turned now toward your country. The time of Closing draweth near, but all is not as it should be. Part of the plan goes awry. Go now to Easgathair and thou shalt view, from the Windows of the Watchtower, what the eyes of all who dwell here can see without aid. Farewell.’

Cierndanel escorted Ashalind to the Watchtower. Again, they travelled by some esoteric, indescribable method.

Light as if filtered through geranium-tinted glass washed over a stone building. It was a tower, intricately carved all over, whose slender flying buttresses soared to pointed arches and singing spires. Glossy-leaved ivy climbed there among the rosettes and gargoyles and pinnacles.

Inside the tower, stairs led upward to a chamber where the Gatekeeper stood amid a gathering of the Faêran. Leodogran and Rhys were among them. Eight tall windows reached from floor to ceiling, each facing a different direction. Their crystal panes did not hinder the birds flying in and out. At times these windows would cloud over like breath-misted mirrors. When they cleared, different landscapes would lie beyond them.

Between these fenestrations soared slender golden pillars twined with living ivy leaves and carved ones of peridot, jade, and emerald. The golden ceiling too was festooned with these leaves, and with clusters of jeweled fruit and flowers. In the centre of the room stood a raised plinth draped with mossy velvet, gilt-embroidered. Thereon rested a large gold-clasped green casket with a high-arched lid. The lid was closed.

Easgathair greeted Ashalind, saying grimly, ‘I would that I could welcome you here in a happier hour.’ His glacial hair and the voluminous folds of his white robes fanned out as he swung around to glance at the Northwest Window, then settled around him again.

‘I too, my lord,’ replied Ashalind, but her father said gladly:

‘Sir, there could be no happier hour.’

Rhys, laughing, chased birds around the hall.

‘The Windows may look onto any right-of-way according to my command,’ said the Gatekeeper. ‘See, the South Window shows the Gate at Carnconnor, that thou call’st the Hob’s Hill.’

A curious thought struck Ashalind.

‘Does it show the passage which divides the outer Door in the side of Hob’s Hill from the inner Door to the Fair Realm? Does that passage lie in Erith or in Faêrie?’

Distracted, Easgathair glanced over his shoulder. ‘I must return to the Northwest Window.’

‘Allow me to explain.’ The fetching Cierndanel, who seemed to be everywhere at once, took the Gatekeeper’s place. ‘Every Gateway comprises two Doors, an inner and an outer, with a short passageway between. Time flows at different speeds in Erith and the Realm. A Gate-passage is needed to adjust the flow when something passes from one stream to the other. It operates like a lock in a canal.’

‘Suppose someone was trapped in there!’ said the damsel, thinking of the Gatehouse at the palace in High Mellyn, with its fortified barbican and its ceiling pierced by murder-holes for the destruction of invaders.

‘There exists a safeguard to prevent such an accident. When they are locked, the Gates at each end will still open outwards only, permitting traffic to flow out of the Gate-passage in either direction.’

‘Like eel traps backwards,’ put in Rhys, intrigued. Recognizing the Piper, drawn by him, he had ceased his vain attempts to capture a bird in his hands.

‘Just so, perspicacious lad. But from this hour, such engines are of use no longer. Already has each Key been turned in each Lock. All Keys, great and small, have been remitted to Easgathair White Owl—from the emerald Key of Geata Duilach, the Leaf Gate, with its intricate wards, to the silver-barreled crystal Key of the Moon Gate; the shell and jade of Geata Cuan’s Key and the great basalt Key of Geata Ard. They lie, indestructible but untouchable, in the Green Casket, which is even now sealed by the Password of the Fithiach.’ He gestured toward the casket on the plinth. ‘Every bond on every Door has been set to lock and link, and now it only remains to join them at the appointed and immutable hour of the Closing. Listen! Do you not hear? The winds of gramarye are awakening at this outrage, the winds of Ang. They flare from the Ringstorm at Erith’s rim. Soon they might prowl the lands of thy world, dyed by the imprints of men’s designs.’

The smile that usually played about his lips had left him. A shadow crossed his attractive face.

‘But something’s amiss. Thou seest how the crowds cluster about the Northwest Window, with White Owl at their fore. They look upon a Gate we call the Geata Poeg na Déanainn, awaiting Angavar High King and Prince Morragan, who still ride within Erith’s boundaries. The royal brothers dare to ride late, as the Closing draws nigh. The first Call is about to sound!’

‘Why do they tarry?’ asked Ashalind, craning her neck for a better view of the Northwest Window.

‘The Fithiach and his followers were returning from a last Rade in Erith, hawking I was informed—but the King and his knights have ridden out to detain them, blocking their path.’

In the Northwest Window a scene revealed itself with startling detail and clarity. A hush fell on the assembly in the Watchtower. Beyond the Window the skies of Erith sheeted storm gray and a strong wind drove the clouds at a cracking pace. Thunderheads boiled over darkly.

Two companies of riders faced each other, one led by Prince Morragan, whose sculpted face could clearly be seen framed by the long dark hair and cloak billowing out behind him. His followers, about a hundred tall Faêran knights, sat motionless upon their horses. Harsh-faced, they gazed upon the King’s retinue, which was massed between them and the traverse called the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. The Faêran King’s voice could clearly be heard, by the enchantment of the Watchtower Window.

‘Brother, renounce thy boon of the Gatekeeper. Shall I drive thee forth before the Gates close and shalt thou be exiled forever from the Realm?’

The watchers cried out in shock and dismay, but the Crown Prince betrayed no sign of disquiet. Calmly, he replied,

‘Dost think me a fool? ’Tis a game of bluff.’

‘Nay,’ replied the King, ‘there is no more time for games.’

For an instant, anger flashed from the Crown Prince’s eyes, then he smiled and lifted a hand in a signal to his knights. They split into two groups and sprang away, one to the right, the other to the left. Immediately the King’s knights spread out to block them, but some broke through and were harried and pursued, and wrestled from their steeds. Faêran-wrought metal flashed up silver against the purple stormwrack of the furious skies. Desperately, the followers of the Fithiach raced to elude their hunters, to reach the portal between the worlds, the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. Among all these knights, two stood out—the High King and his brother. These two, so noble of bearing, strove hardest each against the other. The wind was howling, running before the storm.

Suddenly, cutting across the milling confusion, the sound of a horn rang out, dulcet and virginal, piercing both worlds. Faêran, mortal, and wight alike paused and lifted their eyes.

‘The First Call to Faerie,’ cried Easgathair White Owl. ‘The appointed hour approaches. Hasten home!’

Some among the Faêran assembled in the Watchtower exclaimed to one another in consternation, ‘They must hurry! ’Tis too odious a fate they are hazarding!’

Cierndanel said to Ashalind, ‘The Sundering of Aia will wreak great changes in Erith, many of which cannot be foretold. The very Gates themselves might become distorted or dislocated beyond recognition. As the instant of Closing draws upon us, Time, habitually unsynchronized, begins to run awry. The King and the Prince risk misjudging the moment of their return.’

‘Ah,’ murmured Ashalind, whose thoughts were far away. ‘How I crave to return to my home. I cannot bear that this should be my final view of it. Yet, should I return, I would pine away swiftly. The Langothe, incurable, would destroy me.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Cierndanel in surprise, wresting his gaze from the Window, ‘for there is a cure for the Langothe.’ At his throat the eyes of the slender serpent glared, twin peridots, coldly insulted by humanity.

‘A cure!’ Ashalind whirled to confront him. ‘Lord Easgathair never told us!’

‘You did not ask for the cure, my lady, but instead for entry into the Realm, which was granted.’

‘A cure!’ Oppression unchained Ashalind’s spirit and she laughed weakly, too stunned at this revelation to be vexed at Faêran literalness. ‘Where is this cure? How can I obtain it?’

‘Perhaps it is not commonly known among mortals, but the High King of the Realm has the power to take away the Langothe. He is the only one who can do so. Simply by saying the words, “Forget desire and delight in the Land Beyond the Stars,” he can annul the Longing.’

‘Then I must go now to him before it is too late! Alas, would that I had known before! Would that this fact had been noted in the books of lore, for pity’s sake!’ she exclaimed passionately.

‘It is already too late. There is no time. The Closing is imminent. Besides,’ said Cierndanel, ‘he does not lightly grant the cure.’

Beyond the Northwest Window, a red-haired rider called to the High King.

‘Turn back, sir! Turn back now for home.’

The King’s company drew together and swerved, but as they rode toward the Geata Poeg na Déanainn, the riders of Morragan the Fithiach galloped close at their heels. At a shout from the High King, his company wheeled and urged their horses against those who followed, driving them back. Directly over their heads now, lightning struck repeatedly. Hundreds of bolts flashed within the space of a few heartbeats, scalding the sky to white brilliance. A distant pine tree exploded into a living torch.

‘Renounce thy boon!’ the High King roared to his brother, his voice strong above battle and thunder. His demand was answered by Morragan’s mocking laugh.

‘The Fithiach knows that the King in desperation tries to trick him,’ whispered Cierndanel on breath of lavender. ‘I too believe our sovereign is bluffing. He never would banish his brother from the Realm—he is not as ruthless as that—and if his words be examined closely, it will be found that he has not in fact said that he would do so. But what is this madness that overtakes them? They must all make greater haste now!’

From beyond the Window echoed deep-throated yells of anger, the clash of battle, the shrill neighing of Faêran horses. The two sides were evenly matched. They fought magnificently, not to wound or kill, but to prevent progress, and in so doing each impeded the other. Their fighting was a dance of strength and skill, like the clashing of stags in a forest glade, or two thunderstorms meeting to tear open the sky. Conceivably, it was their Faêran rage that now disturbed Erith’s elements.

Presently the Call came for the second time, its haunting echoes lifting high overhead—the long, pure notes of the horn, a two-note hook on which to suspend the moment.

‘Turn back—the hour is upon us!’ cried the High King’s captains.

As one, the Faêran lords swung around and began a race, but as before they would not leave off harrying and hunting one another until, nearing the right-of-way, the High King’s entourage turned in fury again to assail and drive off their rivals.

‘Leave well alone!’ shouted Easgathair. About him, the gathering parted as he strode closer to the Window, his white hair flying like shredded gossamer. He seemed taller, and fierce as a hunting owl.

‘Can those beyond the traverse see and hear us?’ wondered Rhys, at his sister’s side.

‘They could do so if they wished,’ answered Cierndanel, hovering nearby, ‘for there is little beyond the power of such mighty ones. But in the heat of this moment it seems they have eyes only for the conflict at hand.’

‘We must make the choice now!’ said many of the Faêran who watched. ‘If Angavar High King does not return in time, we choose exile with him.’ In the next blink they were gone.

Others protested that it was unthinkable that the royal brothers and their knights would not return in time. Nevertheless many fled the Watchtower; soon a flood of Faêran, wights, birds, and animals poured through the Geata Poeg na Déanainn to aid the King’s return. There was scant chance that they would reach him before the Closing—the combatants fought, in fact, more than a mile from the Gate.

Silently, Ashalind battled an agony of indecision. She lifted her gaze once more toward the knights beyond the Window, staring at the melee. And all at once she forgot to breathe. In that instant her spirit fled out of her eyes and into Erith.

‘Father, forgive me,’ she cried suddenly, ‘I must try to return …’

Aghast, Leodogran cried, ‘But why?’

‘Only that—’ His daughter struggled to find words. ‘My future lies in Erith, I think. If the High King does not return in time, I will beg him to cure my Langothe, for he has the power to do so.’

‘My Elindor, my dearling—would you be parted from us forever?’

‘Oh, I do not want that, but it must happen, for just now I have learned where my heart lies, or else my heart has been torn from my body, for I feel a rupture there, as if it were no longer here with me.’

His face was stricken. ‘Why do you decide now, at the terminal stroke, to leave forever all the people you love, all you have worked for, in the hour of your triumph? What strange perversity has overtaken you?’

‘Father—’ She struggled for words, her feet of their own accord stepping away from him as she spoke. ‘I do not want to hurt you. This bird must fly the nest, dear Father, or else it will never fly at all. Forgive me. You shall be happy, you and the others I love. Mayhap you shall forget me, here in this land of bliss. My duty is over now. My path is my own. Furthermore, and more importantly—’

‘I forbid it!’

Father and daughter opposed one another, the only motionless figures among the swirling multitude.

‘Have I not done enough?’ Ashalind begged. My ears strain to hear that last Call. Let it not be now!

Slowly, Leodogran bowed his head. After a pause he took a pouch, a horn-handled knife, and a dagger from his belt and handed them to his daughter. His movements were stiff, his voice was roughened with grief. ‘These heirlooms and this gold, which I bethought in my naivety we would need in this place, I give to you with my benison. They are of no use here. They may do you some good, if you go. But I hope you will not. There must be more to this, more than you have told. I do not understand you.’

He kissed her and quickly turned away.

‘Father, when Rhys came back from Faérie I vowed that I should never weep again, unless it were for happiness. I shed no tears now, but I will carry your loving words with me.’

She leaned to embrace Rhys, whispering comfort in his ear. Rufus had somehow eagerly pushed his way in and she bent down to pet him. Excitement and sadness flooded through her. Her words rose strongly, eagerly.

‘Tell Pryderi, Meganwy, and Oswyn I hold them always dear in my heart. And Satin, who is free here—whisper the same in her ear. Cierndanel! If the High King does not turn back in time, I would return to Erith through the Geata Poeg na Déanainn.’

The Faêran Piper looked at her wonderingly, yet knowingly.

Woe the while! thought Ashalind, in an agony of impatience. The Faêran Herald puts the clarion to his lips.

‘In truth?’ said the Piper. ‘But the King shall return, he must return. The Iolaire is the very quintessence of the Fair Realm. Without him its virtue would be greatly diminished. And those that accompany him right now are the flower of Faêran knighthood, who, if they do not reach the Gateway soon, would be banished until the end of time. But thou, fair damsel, thou mayst not leave, for hast thou not eaten our food and drunk our wine?’

‘I have not.’

His comely face sharpened. She caught a spark of anger in his eyes.

‘Stay here,’ he said.

‘As you love me, Cierndanel, benefactor and malefactor of my people, aid me now!’

He paused, as if considering. Then he smiled.

‘Very well. Follow me to the right-of-way if you wish, but I think you will never pass through it.’

As the Piper grasped Ashalind’s hand, she saw, through the milling crowd, Pryderi. Flailing desperately like a drowning swimmer, he was pushing his way toward her. His jaw knotted, his eyes aghast and fixed, he gasped and lunged forward, but then was gone in what seemed the blink of an eye, and the Watchtower, the assembly vanished with him.

Cierndanel led the girl to an avenue of trees in blossom, whose boughs arched to intertwine overhead. At the far end of this tunnel, two stone columns capped with a sarsen lintel framed a scene. Thunderstorms raged in the skies of Erith, and the maelstrom of Faêran knights did battle. Behind them, distant peaks reared their heads to the racing clouds. Ice-crystals clung to the grainy surface of the Erith Door, but the perfumed trees of the Realm Door swayed gently. Ashalind and Cierndanel found themselves surrounded by a crowd of Faêran and wights, who paid them no heed, being engrossed in staring through the Gateway toward Erith.

‘Thou seest, every traverse has two Doors,’ said Cierndanel, speaking quickly, ‘and a passage which lies between. Before thee lies the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. In the common speech of Erith, that means the “Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss”.

‘Mark thee, it bears this name for a reason,’ he added. ‘Over the centuries, several mortal visitors have departed the Realm through this right-of-way and all have been given the same warning. The Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss imposes one condition on all those who use it. After passing through into Erith, if thou shouldst ever be kissed by one who is Erith-born, thou shalt lose all memory of what has gone before. The kiss of the erithbunden would bring oblivion upon thee, so beware, for then there is no saying whether the bitterbyndings of such a covenant may ever crumble, whether memory ever would return. I think it would not.’

She nodded, trembling. ‘I heed.’

‘Furthermore,’ he insisted, ‘the Geata Poeg na Déanainn is a Wandering Gate with no fixed threshold in Erith. When open, it behaves like any other traverse and remains fixed in its location. But when the Gate is shut it shifts at random, as a butterfly flits erratically from blossom to blossom. Therefore, one is never able to predict its next position. Chiefly it is wont to give onto the country of Eldaraigne, in the north, somewhere in that region known as Arcdur. Always, that was a land uninhabited by your people, but perhaps no longer. Knowing these truths, dost thou still desire to pass through this perilous portal?’

‘I do.’

Unexpectedly, the Faêran Piper folded around Ashalind’s shoulders a long, hooded cloak the colour of new leaves. He whispered closely in her ear, his words carried on a fragrance of musk roses:

‘Fear not, brave daughter of Erith. The Gates are perilous only in the rules by which they exist. If you abide by these, not so much as a hair of your head shall be harmed.’

Ashalind closed her eyes to the strange beauties and perils of the Fair Realm, reaching for the scent of wet soil, the tang of pine, the chill of a storm wind, the cry of elindors on the wing. Her head spun and her mouth was parched taut with a terrible thirst. Easgathair’s voice roared from nowhere in the mortal world:

‘Return instantly, ye knights, for the time is nigh! The Gates are Closing!’

Ashalind looked through the Gate-passage. At the Erith Gate, one or two of the knights from both sides broke away and rode hard, sparks zapping from their horses’ hooves.

‘Forget this quarrel!’ Easgathair’s caveat boomed from somewhere indeterminate. ‘Set aside your pride and ride for the Realm!’ But the High King and the Crown Prince, intent on their purpose, continued to ignore his warning.

Then red lightning smote from the High King’s upraised hand, splitting the sky, and all who looked on heard him shout, ‘By the Powers, I will not again petition thee, Crow-Lord. Now thou hast truly stirred my wrath. Consequently, I swear I shall exile thee.’

‘No!’ Hoarse and harsh came Morragan’s vehement denial, and for the first time there seemed to be a note of alarm in his tone. He flung a zigzag bolt of blue energy from his palm. Confronted with his brother’s fury, he gave ground, but even as they battled, the long, clear warning sounded for the third time, rising like a ribbon of bronze over the treetops.

‘’Tis too late!’ thundered the Gatekeeper.

Now at last the High King and the Raven Prince were riding together, flying for the Gateway at breakneck speed with their knights flanking them, and nothing stood in the path of their headlong rush; they spoke not, nor looked to left or right, and all quarrels were abandoned as the threat of permanent expatriation became imminent. Dread fell on the hearts of the assembled audience. A crash like the world’s end shook the floor of the Watchtower, the horizon shuddered, and a shadowy veil drew across the vault above. There arose a loud keening and clamor of voices fair and harsh from near and far, and as the beautiful riders almost gained the Gate, a cataclysmic tumult filled the sky and seemed to burst it asunder. The voices, of the Faêran joined in a lament like a freezing wind that blights the Spring, for the Gates were swinging shut, and those they loved most would be exiled for eternity.

A sudden terrible gust slammed through the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss with a mighty concussion, snatching mortal breath. It was all over. The Faêran royalty and their companions were forever excluded from the Realm. The Watchtower Windows shattered and fell out in shards, leaving shadowy apertures that stared sorrowfully across the long lawns where the Talith dancers stood poised as if in a frozen tableau.

But with a pang of regret for the land of desire and delight, which spoke of the Langothe already reawakening to haul on its chains, Ashalind had slipped into the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss.

10

DOWNFALL

There’s a place that I can tell of, for I’ve glimpsed it once or twice,

As I’ve wandered by a misty woodland dell.

I believe I almost saw it on the green and ferny road,

Or beside the trees that shadow the old well.

And I’ve never dared to whisper, and I’ve never dared to shout,

Even though it always comes as a swprise,

For I fear that by my movement or the sounding of my voice

I might make it disappear before my eyes.

’Tis a place of great enchantment and wild gramarye; a fair,

Everlasting haunt of timeless mystery,

You’ll find danger there, and beauty; strange adventure curs’d and bless’d,

That will seem to wake a longing memory.

But I’ve heard that if you go there you might stay for far too long,

And you may forget the road by which you came.

Some folk never learn the way. If you should find it then beware,

For if you return, you’ll never be the same.

FOLK SONG OF ERITH

For immeasurable moments, all was confusion. Something fluttered and battered softly about her head in the colourless half-light.

Ashalind could not comprehend her status. Had she fallen off Peri’s back, or perhaps Satin’s? Her leg ached. Should it not heal, she would not be able to follow the Piper—oh, the anguish of hearing that call and not being able to respond! She would drag herself through the dust … Such a hard bed to lie on, this, and why was everything so hushed and still?

Stung by sudden recollection she sat bolt upright. She looked around for the stony land she had seen at the end of the Gate-passage, and the Faêran knights embattled there. But there was no open sky above her head, no Erith, no tall riders, only a dim, distorted passageway, an arched and twisted tunnel sealed by a Door at either end. The vaulted ceiling was cracked. In places it sagged down like a bag of water. The Gate-passage had been biased, damaged by the unprecedented sundering of the worlds between which it lay. Yet its structure remained viable.

For how long?

In each half of the chamber the walls were different. As they approached one Door they resembled living trees growing closely together, their boughs meeting to interweave as a ceiling. Toward the other portal they merged into rough-hewn rock.

This, then, was the Gate-passage between the Other Country and Erith.

The Lords of Faêrie had been trapped in Erith after all. In her native land, they lingered. She fancied she could hear, at the other end of the Gate-passage, beyond the silver Realm Door with its golden hinges, the sound of sweet, sad singing.

The distraction beat her around the head again, with soft wings. It was a hummingbird. She recalled it rushing by her as she had leapt through the Realm Gate. Now in agitation the tiny creature darted about, seeking escape.

‘Which Door shall I open for you?’

But the bird flew up to the wracked ceiling and perched in a niche there.

‘Little bird, which Door shall I open for myself? I still have a choice—how odd. I may go out from here to either place, but once out, I may never come back, for when the Doors Close for the last time they are Locked forever.’

She empathized with mailed crustaceans entering a wicker trap; a one-way entrance with no return.

Prince Morragan’s edict had been intended to ensure that the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss would let no one pass through it, after its Key had been turned in its Lock and it had Closed for the final time: ‘… barring the passage of Faêran, eldritch wights both seelie and unseelie, unspeaking creatures and all mortal men …’ Yet she fitted none of those descriptions! Ashalind laughed, as it came to her that the Raven Prince had overlooked mortal women—overlooked and underestimated. Doubtless Meganwy would have said, A common trait among males.

Enchantments must always be carefully worded. The Raven Prince had not been careful enough. The thought of this made the smile linger on Ashalind’s lips, and she recalled the remnant of some old tale she had heard during childhood, the story of a man who had outwitted a Lord of Unseelie by hiding in the walls of his home. She thought: Here in the walls where I now dwell, I am neither within the Realm nor without it … Indeed, borders are mysterious, indeterminate places.

Gently, Ashalind pushed the stone Erith Door with one finger. It floated open easily under the slight pressure. Beyond stretched a land of towering rocks: Arcdur, empty of all signs of life. Night reigned.

The hummingbird dashed past. Once outside, it rebelled against the darkness and tried to return, but the invisible wind formed a barricade. It flew away, leaving Ashalind bereft.

She let her hand follow it, gingerly, through the Erith Door, out into the airs of home. Her fingertips tingled and she snatched them back. Withdrawing, she allowed the Door to close itself and sat leaning against the wall to ponder, touching the dying eringl leaves that covered the bracelet on her wrist.

The Door would not harm a thing of flesh by snapping shut on it. Even her nails—part of her living person though dead in themselves—had prevented it from sealing.

Now that this truth was apparent, a plan began to evolve.

If she could somehow prop open the Erith Door, then even if she ventured into Erith she could return through the Gate-passage and thus into the Realm whenever she wished.

Furthermore, the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss had not yet Closed for the last time. It could not do so, while someone remained within it or partway through it. As the only living creature (bar the hummingbird) who had been locked neither in Faêrie nor in Erith, was she, Ashalind the only one who could ever pass unhindered between the two worlds? Or might anyone enter the Gate if it stood wide?

There was no way of knowing.

If the Doors could be propped open and the Gate could be duped to allow her passage to and fro, then she might be able to carry a message from one place to the other. What if, in Erith, she could discover the Password to the Green Casket; the Password that would release the Keys to open all the Gates again? Then the High King might be reunited with his Realm!

The preternaturally attractive Prince Morragan, whose dark male beauty cloaked acid and steel, had asked his boon and it had been fulfilled exactly. Once fulfilled, all boons lost their power over whosoever had promised them.

There remained only the danger of the second pledge, the unasked boon that Morragan had cleverly won from the Gatekeeper. But if she, Ashalind, could only find the High King, surely he would be able to put all things to rights, to force his brother to reveal the Password and renounce his second boon in exchange for his own return to the Realm. Surely the Crown Prince would do anything to be reunited with his beloved homeland.

Was it possible? Could she return the generosity of the Faêran by reuniting them with their High King? She would search in Erith for him—surely it was not possible for him to have travelled too far away in such a short time—and when she found him, she would beg him to cure the Langothe, which had begun again, of course, to eat at her. Then she would tell him of her secret way back into the Fair Realm and all would be well! The only peril would lie in preventing Prince Morragan from discovering the secret first.

But the Fithiach, the Raven Prince, did not know she was in Erith. No one in Erith knew.

Her fingertip pushed open the stone Erith Door for the second time.

The landscape had changed dramatically. Weather had eroded some monoliths, while others looked sharp and new, as if they had but lately been thrust up from subterranean workshops in some violent upheaval of the ground. It was no longer nighttime. Sunset tinged the air with the delicate pink of blood diluted in water. Puzzled, she took a moment to work out what was happening, and when she did her insides crawled like cold worms, her stomach flopped like a fish.

Time in Erith was racing past while she remained in the Gate-passage. She must delay no longer—how many years might have passed already? In a panic, she tried to think quickly. Cierndanel, or someone else, had mentioned that time was running all awry because of the Closing. There was no telling how many years might have elapsed by the time she finally slipped through the Door into Erith—perhaps seven years, perhaps a hundred. All the mortals she had known, who had remained behind, might be long dead. Her world might be altered in many other undreamed-of ways. It might have evolved into a place unknown.

‘I shall be a stranger in my own land,’ croaked Ashalind, with difficulty forcing words from dehydrated lips.

The Faêran, however, could not be slain; they were immortal. They could choose or be forced by serious injury to pass away into a lesser form, but unchallenged, the exiled knights, the royal lords of the Realm and the lords and ladies who had fled to join them would live on, whatever else.

Driven by a sense of overwhelming urgency she propped her father’s knife in the open Erith Door. As soon as she let go, the Door snapped shut, breaking it.

A living hand could keep the Door open, but not an object of metal. If only she could delude this enchanted valve, make it believe that she was partway through it, perpetually half in, half out, it would stay open for her, and her alone. Some part of her must remain in the doorway, to prop it open. A finger? No, that was too gruesome to contemplate. Other measures must be taken. She worked quickly.

For the third and last time she opened the Erith Gate. Arcdur’s stony bones leaned up, even more skewed and corroded, shouting against the low-slung sky. A storm was raging, but Ashalind could not wait for it to abate—already too much time had passed. Her preparations were made. Pulling Cierndanel’s gift-cloak closer around her shoulders, she stepped out of the quiet passage.

Chaos assailed her. Reflexively she flung herself back against an upright stone pillar, one of the Gateposts. Torrents of rain lashed all around and wind screamed through darkness. Crouching in the lee of the rock, she let the waters of Erith run down her face into her parched mouth, drinking greedily of the chill deluge, feeling it irrigate her body and send silver channels running along her veins, until she had her fill.

Already her riding-habit was sodden. It was strange to recall that this was the very costume in which she had made the journey from Hythe Mellyn to the Perilous Realm. That journey now seemed ever so long ago and far away. The words of Nimriel came back: ‘Thy voyage is only just beginning, daughter of Erith.’ Ashalind wrapped herself more tightly in the Faêran cloak. Lightning ripped open the belly of the sky and its dazzle revealed, in a black-and-white instant, a world of tumbled rocks and oblique crags utterly different from the realm she had departed from moments earlier. Looking back, she noted that on this side the Geata Poeg na Déanainn looked to be no more than a tall crevice between leaning boulders, perilously inviting, its secret recesses wrapped in deep shadow. Intermittent flashes illuminated slanting water-curtains pleated suddenly by gusts of wind. Her thirst slaked, Ashalind felt a great weariness coming over her. She crawled under an overhang, out of the storm’s fury. Desiccated leaves flaked from her wrists and turned to dust. The Faêran cloak was warm. Briefly she wondered how this Erithan storm compared to the one in which Morragan had battled against his brother, maybe a hundred years ago.

Then she slept.

Pale dawn revealed a nacreous veil over the sun. Rivulets chattered swiftly over pebbles, droplets fell tinkling from ledges. Boulders had piled themselves high everywhere in fantastic, towering shapes. Water and granite surrounded Ashalind. The only signs of life were mosses and pink lichens.

She drank again, from a rocky cascade, wishing that she had a flask in which to carry water. She was alone in an uncertain place, probably far from human habitation, and she knew nothing of wilderness survival, but good sense told her that thirst and exposure were her two most immediate enemies, and against them she must be prepared. First—survive. Next—fulfil her quest. She decided not to proceed until she had memorized the surroundings in the vicinity of the Geata Poeg na Déanainn, to ensure future recognition.

The furor of the Closing had distorted and dislodged the entire Gate, including both of its Doors. The portal had been blasted out of alignment. Fallen rocks partially covered the Erith Door.

I think the Faêran would no longer know this Gate. Only I am here, to record it in memory.

She began to take careful note of her surroundings, preparing to imprint every detail of the Gate’s identity and location on her consciousness. Something nagged, diverting her attention, like a fly buzzing about her ears. She lost concentration …

‘—hain?’

Crackling voices, someone calling out a name.

She took no notice. It was not her name. Or was it?

What was her name?

The interruption faded. A fancy.

She shook her head to rid her ears of the buzzing. The voices faded, giving way to memories.

The Faêran cloak now appeared to be mottled gray in colour, exactly like granite. Its fabric, soft and strong, was unidentifiable and had remained dry, although rain and wind had bedraggled her riding-gown and other garments. Leodogran’s dagger and pouch of gold swung from her belt. Ashalind emptied the water out of her riding-boots, braided her long hair, and bound it around her head for convenience, then took a deep breath of the pure, silver-tinged air. It set her blood ringing. The soft luminescence that indicated the sun’s position was still low in the sky, behind dully gleaming crags that stood up like pointed teeth.

Northeast of Arcdur, she knew, lay the strait that separated Eldaraigne from Avlantia. Besides having no means of crossing it she was reluctant to return to her homeland lest devastating changes had been wrought on it by the winds of Closing, or by Time. Never had she travelled out of Avlantia, but her thorough education had included studying the maps of the Known Lands of Erith. These she now recalled.

South, a long way south, lay the Royal City, Caermelor, and the Court of the King-Emperor of Erith. It might be the best place to glean news of the whereabouts of Faêran royalty. Besides, the Geata Poeg na Déanainn had spilled her out toward the south, so it seemed somehow meet to continue in the same direction.

Now that excitement, fatigue, and thirst were behind her, Ashalind was aware that hunger, like a rat, gnawed her belly. Worse than that, the Langothe, which had coiled up like a snake temporarily dormant, now hit her with full force, redoubled now that she had not only breathed the air of the Fair Realm but also left her loved ones there. Retching, she staggered and clutched at an outcrop, half turning toward the Gate.

Now was the time to leave, and leave quickly, before the Langothe’s cruel pull drew her back to the Fair Realm at the very outset of her quest. With an effort, as though walking through water rather than air, she forced herself to set out, step by step, aching to turn back, at least to take one extra glance over her shoulder at the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. Instead, as she rounded a granite shoulder she quickened her pace. To deflect her thoughts from hunger and longing she determined to focus her mind on her final glimpse of the Gate, to recall every detail so as to engrave its image deeply into memory. She must never forget.

The Door she left behind, seemingly just another rocky crevice among many, stood still and unnoticeable in the deep shadows of morning, as it had stood for many years. Yet not quite as it had previously stood—a crack was penciled down one side, where it remained slightly ajar. Only a thin crack; a hairline, one might say, as wide as the thickness of three strands of gold; three thin braids of hairs torn out, one by one, from the roots and weighed down at one end by a rock and at the other by a broken knife. A girl’s fingernail might have slid into that gap, as it had indeed slid not long before, to test it.

A girl’s fingernail could open that Door, as long as the girl was the owner of the hair.

‘—hain! Rohain!’

The girl on the mullock heap opened her eyes to darkness. Spicy, intoxicating night enclosed her in its embrace. Someone was calling. Fear drilled her brain, lacerating it with cold skewers.

‘Rohain …’

How can one move, with wooden limbs?

Closer now: ‘Where are you?’

Where indeed? On the slopes of Huntingtowers.

She stood up too late—they were upon her, two white masks of terror in the gloom.

‘She’s here!’

‘My lady, hasten!’

The young woman stared at the masks, unseeing.

‘’Tis us, Viviana and Caitri—we have been searching for you all day! Quickly—night is come and danger is upon us! Wights are everywhere and not a seelie one among them!’

The urgent tones shattered meditation. An insubstantiality floated away from the dreamer’s grasp. Her reverie had been interrupted just as she was about to recreate a visualization of the portal to Faêrie.

Now I shall never recall it.

As her lady’s maids grabbed her by the elbows, the damsel had enough presence of mind left to ensure that the bracelet securely encircled her wrist. Then they were off, stumbling through the mountainside’s witchy darkness.

Wicked and eldritch indeed was the night. The three mortals were tripped and tricked at every turn, taunted and haunted, jeered at, leered at by the hideous, the horrible, the hateful. Unseelie energies hummed electric in the air like charged wires, for the wind or eldritch fingers to pluck or to slide down with fiendish screams; like cords to snake across their path, to catch in webs at their ankles, transmitting the throbbing menace of the darkness in thin metal slices of pain. On ran the three mortal maidens, expecting at any time to be cut down from behind, or beside, or in front, but a globe of soft luminosity illuminated their path.

This light travelled with them. It radiated from the ring worn on the finger of one of them. Things that lunged at the escapers were brushed by the edge of this orb. They yelped and ricocheted away. The boots of the three damsels hammered on the surface of a road as they crossed. On the other side a bank ascended steeply into a wood. Panting, they climbed up into the tangle of undergrowth, pushing in under muffling trees until one of them, the smallest, fell.

‘Caitri!’

‘I can run no further. Go on without me.’

Green eyes, long and narrow, popped up like sudden lamps. A skinny, pale hand reached for Caitri. Her mistress slashed at it with a knife. Black blood spurted. The screech was like a white-hot arrow through the eardrums. Encouraged, she slashed right and left, back and forth. On her hand, Thorn’s leaf-ring flared. Shadows leaped up and away from it, and so did the mad things of the night. Some of the screaming was pouring from the knife-wielder’s own mouth, a wordless battle cry of which she had not known she was capable, a song of frenzy. Her knife was everywhere, flashing in a kind of whirling cocoon, of steel within which her two charges huddled.

When she stopped, arms hanging by her sides, the blade no longer gleamed. Inky blood covered it, splashed her arms and dripped from her clothing. Silence on silver chains hung suspended from somewhere far above. The damsel wiped the knife, ineffectually, on her sleeve.

‘Trouble us no more!’ she shouted into the quiescent shadows—or tried to shout. The words emerged in a strangled whisper. She sank to her knees on a whispering carpet of leaves.

‘You saved us,’ said Viviana, awed. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Is there any water?’

In the woods, the night was long. She whose memories had been reborn did not sleep. She sat with her back to her dozing friends, holding a knife in each hand. The ring shone. Strangely, wights’ blood had never smeared it.

I must recall the image of the Gate.

Somehow, as she sat through the night, she happened to glance again at the golden bracelet that symbolised her kenning-name. Her eyes began to cloud over. More memories returned …

Arcdur. She had travelled through it.

Avlantian riding-habits had not been designed for hard walking. The skirts of blond and turquoise saye tangled about Ashalind’s legs and caused her to stumble. On her feet, the soft leather boots yielded to sharp angles of adamant. Only the amazing Faêran cloak flowed with her movements, never snagging on projections, conforming to her body with a gentle caress.

Jumbled stones and scree slopes made progress even slower and more difficult. Constant water and wind kept the rocks swept clean of silt in this region—only in the deepest cracks it found refuge, and there the mosses grew, or the tenacious roots of the blue-green arkenfir.

The cadence of the wind amplified as Ashalind approached the summit of a hill, and it was as if she walked at the edge of the world, for there was only the deep sky beyond. In a few steps, a majestic vista of far-flung hills and stacks stalking into the distance unfolded unexpectedly at her feet, and the wind swept up over the rise to meet her, soughing in her ears. She paused, looking out over lonely Arcdur, devoid of human habitation. Overhead, choughs on the wing caught updrafts. A dark patch of conifers clothed the opposite ridge. To her right, a glint on the horizon suggested the sea.

She picked her way down the hill and lay flat to drink at a clear beck, then went on, hoping to reach the shelter of the trees before nightfall. The Faêran cloak provided extraordinary warmth and protection, and without it she must surely have perished by now, but fallen pine-needles would be a softer cushion than rock.

From stone to stone she stepped, conscious always of keeping her footing, aware that her next enemy in this remote region was injury. She kept going on a course due south, memorizing landmarks along the way; a stack of flat rocks like giant pancakes, another like loaves of bread … most of the constructions reminded her of food, and she wondered how long it was since she had eaten. Searching her memory, she recalled honeyed pears poached in a cardamom and anise sauce, followed by buttered griddle-cakes, eaten for breakfast on the morning of the Leaving. The memory tied knots in her belly, and she directed her musing elsewhere.

She pondered all the strange events that had brought her here, and the foolishness of Men and Faêran that had caused them. Images of her loved ones in the Fair Realm made her choke with longing and she suddenly stopped and hurled herself down among the boulders, digging her fingers into gravel.

‘I cannot go on. I must go back.’

There she lay, rigid, while the sun moved a little farther across the pearly sky and the choughs wheeled, inquisitive, above. Eventually, out of her confusion arose a conclusion: she had decided to attempt this venture in order to be rid of the Langothe and to bring the High King back to his Realm. Yet even as she reached this disposition she knew the answer was not really that simple; there was more, if only she had the courage to admit it. For now, however, the important point was that she had freely chosen her own path. No one had coerced her. She had elected to pursue this quest, and all pain, all longing, must be contained and controlled if it were to be achieved.

Hence, with a new strength born of despair, she climbed to her feet again and resumed her journey.

There was no food.

It was very beautiful, this land of stone and pine so close to the sky; clear and clean, embroidered with joyous, glimmering waters. But day followed day and Ashalind could find nothing to eat, not even mushrooms down among the gnarled roots of the arkenfirs. Chitinous beetles sometimes crawled in crevices, but she had no mind to consume them. When they opened their wingcases and became airborne, the choughs swooped to snatch them instead.

The light-headedness and aching she had experienced in the first two days vanished, leaving her with a sense of remarkable calm and vigor. She held her course, but on the sixth day of her journey the land to the east started to climb in ragged notches, more precipitous and sheer, while to the west it gentled, and groves of pine and fir marched over undulating hills.

Using a castle-shaped crag as a landmark for her turning-point, she was now forced to veer westward. Somewhere ahead, she knew, lay the northwest coast of Eldaraigne that looked out over a vast sea whose end was in the storm-ring that encircled the rim of the world. A deep ocean current, the Calder Flow, journeyed from the icy southern latitudes past the island country of Finvarna to touch that coast with its chill fingers and keep Arcdur cooler, year-round, than the rest of the country.

On the seventh day she gathered a few handfuls of watercress and wild sage, the first edible plants she had seen. But she noticed that her hands and feet were always cold, and her limbs quaked. Her strength was failing. At night, proper sleep would not come, only a trancelike state, similar to floating on water, buoyed up and unable to sink. She wondered how long anyone could continue to travel without proper sustenance. Perhaps if she could reach the seashore she would find food. If she did not, then she must lie down there and die, within sight of elindors flying over the waves.

Would elindors still navigate the airs of Erith? How many years had passed? Would Men still walk the world, or would their cities lie in ruin? She stumbled, then shook her head to clear it, but could not focus, and recalled vaguely that she had fallen many times that day and her hands were bleeding.

The sky turned from pearl to grape. Another storm blew out of the west that night, bringing strong winds and lashing rain. It lasted all night and through the next day. The Faêran clothes were waterproof, but moisture insinuated itself past the edges to dampen her neck and wrists.

By nightfall on the ninth day the rain had dissipated to the southeast. The falling sun had at last broken through the clouds, and as the traveller plodded up the side of a grassy dune she saw it, low on the horizon, scattering a fish-scale path across the sea. Lulled by the susurration of the waves, she sat among saltbushes and watched the evening’s glory fade. Stars appeared. A gibbous moon looked down at the long pale beach, but Ashalind, wrapped in her cloak, her head pillowed on her arms, was already dozing.

It was a fitful sleep, disturbed by dreams of Faêran feasts. The first gleam of dawn wakened her suddenly, and, raising her head, she looked out to sea. A stifled cry escaped her lips, and in the next instant she had sprung to her feet, and, drawing on her last reserves, was running down to the water’s edge, waving and calling.

Triangular sails floated, saffron, in the dawnlight. A boat, not far from shore, was silently heading south toward a headland. Onward it tacked without deviation, seeming unaffected by her cries, and she thought it would pass from sight forever and leave her stranded to become, washed by time and tide, sunbleached bones in the sand. But the angle of the hull changed. It had turned, and now cut through water toward her; she could see the curl of white foam beneath the prow. When the vessel was within earshot, she hove to. Her keel prevented her from venturing into the shallows. A man on board dropped anchor and shouted, honouring the time-worn cliché of mariners:

‘Ahoy there!’

‘Help me,’ Ashalind answered. ‘I have no food. I am alone.’

The man hesitated.

‘Please help me.’ The damsel’s voice cracked and she sank to the sand, heedless of the lace-edged waves swirling around her knees. Perhaps he did not believe her, or thought she was a decoy for some brigand’s ambush, which indicated that whenever she was, danger lurked still.

There was a splash. He had stripped to his breeches and was swimming to the beach, towing something buoyant on a rope. A strong swimmer, he soon rose out of the water, dripping, and waded out. He was thickset and bearded, with hair as brown as his body. Bright eyes peered from a weathered face.

‘Gramercie. I am grateful,’ was all she could think of to say. She tried to stand but collapsed again. He gave her a measuring stare, then asked, in unfamiliar but clear accents,

‘Can you swim?’

She nodded, unclasping the cloak and throwing off the ragged gown and jacket.

‘Come on now,’ the man said to the gaunt, hollow-eyed damsel shivering in hose and gipon. Securing her to the cluster of inflated bladders, he towed her out to the boat and dragged her aboard, then tossed a dry blanket over her while he returned to retrieve her riding-habit and mantle.

There was a small cabin on board, and wicker baskets filled with luminous shells like pale rainbows. An older, grizzle-bearded sailor in the boat handed her a bottle of water and some food: stale bread, cheese, and pickles in a stoneware jar.

‘Eat slowly,’ he advised.

On his return the younger man dressed himself. Then without another word he dragged in the anchor. The old man hauled on the jibsheet and took the tiller. The favourable breeze bellied out the lateens against an azure sky. Ashalind lay back on a pile of stinking nets and watched the horizon rise and fall.

‘Where are you from? Where are you going?’

‘My name is Ashalind na Pendran. I am a traveller, seeking the High King of the Fair Folk. I lost my way.’

This was the truth, as far as it went. She trusted them, these brown sailors—their faces were open and honest. Nonetheless, the secret of the Gate was too precious to be revealed to any save the High King of the Faêran.

‘My name is William Javert,’ said the younger man, ‘and this is my father, Tom. Never have I known a young lass like you to travel alone, but such practices may be common in outlandish regions, I suppose. I doubt not that you seek whom you say you seek, but we have never seen any such people as those you call the Fair Folk. It is not our habit to pay heed to tales and legends of the Strangers. If such folk do exist, maybe ’tis better they remain hidden. To my mind, the less trouble that is stirred up, the better. Some old tales what folks make up when they got nothin’ useful to do, tell of a King of the Strangers—the Gentry, as some calls ’em—who sleeps with his warriors under a hill, but I don’t put much faith in that. I believe in what I see. In wights I believe, for mickle trouble they do give us. Thought you was one, at first.’

‘Old folk used to tell tales of a Perilous Kingdom,’ Tom said, squinting at the damsel, ‘but I do not know where it was supposed to be. Under the sea perhaps, or under the ground. The Strangers dwelled there, it was said, and their King too. But nowt has been seen of that country since ages long gone, when folks was more ignorant and believed in such fancies. Then again, the world’s a queer place.’

The son, William, took his turn at the helm. The boat changed tack and they rounded another headland, still keeping the coastline in view to the left. The hull rocked on a gentle swell. As they sailed southward, the distant landscape changed from the barren rocks of Arcdur to wooded hills.

‘Caermelor … who is King there?’ asked the passenger.

William regarded her with a quizzical stare.

‘Where have you come from, that you don’t know our sovereign’s name? Your manner of speaking sounds foreign …’

‘I come from far away. North.’

‘Ach, I wouldna have believed any folk did not know of our good King-Emperor, the Sixteenth James D’Armancourt!’

Ashalind fell silent. In her time the sovereign had been William the Wise, who was grandson of the great Unitor, son of James the Second. Had thirteen generations passed? Two or three centuries? It was difficult to credit that such a vast span of time had elapsed.

‘How old is the dynasty of D’Armancourt?’ she asked.

‘Why,’ said old Tom, ‘it is traced back, they say, a thousand years, that was the first King James. But not all were called James. Some of the D’Armancourt kings bore other names.’

Shocked at this crushing of her hopes, Ashalind clenched her hands. In a spasm of frustration she hammered her fist on a wooden water-barrel. A millennium! It was too much to contemplate. What far-reaching changes had taken place in Erith during such a long period? Why were the exiled Faêran lost or forgotten?

A flock of shearwaters flew overhead. In the water several yards from the keel, something splashed. Instantly the attention of the men was fixed on the spot.

‘’Tain’t she, is it?’ William asked in a low voice.

‘Nay, ’tis one of the maighdeans,’ said his father. ‘But which kind I cannot tell.’

Through the aquamarine depths Ashalind caught a fleeting glimpse of a long, glittering curve, a drifting skein of pale hair, an eldritch face. Then the subaquatic visitor was gone.

‘A maighdean na tuinne,’ explained Tom to the ignorant northerner, ‘a damsel of the waves. ’Twould be a good thing to befriend one of them, a seelie one, for they can give warning of storms. The last few days, we were diving for coral and nacrisshell on the northern reefs—that storm blew us off course and away from the fleet. The anchor dragged and we were caught out. Had to run for hours before the wind.’

An eerie crooning of music came blowing to their ears along the wind. Ashalind saw, on the distant beach, half a dozen figures swaying in dance. The men shaded their eyes with their hands.

William became oddly quiet and appeared to pay a lot of attention to his steering. The distant dancers must have caught sight of the boat. With cries and shouts, they pulled on garments that had lain beside them on the rocks, and slid into the water. The dark shapes of them arrowed toward the small vessel. The young sailor loosened the jib and the sails hung flapping. When the swimmers came cavorting close, the heads that broke the surface were those of seals. William leaned over and spoke to them in a tongue Ashalind could not recognise. He spoke lovingly, gently, and the seals replied in the same language.

‘One of the Roane was once wife to Will,’ Tom murmured to Ashalind. ‘He stole her sealskin while she was dancing, and hid it. ’Tis unlike him to do such a thing, but she were very comely and he were fair taken with her. She begged him to return it, for without it she couldna return to the skerries out in the ocean. But he would not give in and at last persuaded her to marry him. She made a good and dutiful wife to him for three years, although she always had a wistful eye on the sea. One day she chanced to find the skin and then she was off in haste, down to the sea never to return. Will allus asks for news of her. But you see, unions between mortals and immortals allus end in breach and bereavement. Everyone knows that. Will should ha’ known.’

‘Please, Will, ask the Roane if they know aught of the High King of the Fair Folk.’

William spoke again in the seal language.

‘They say they never speak to mortals about the Fair Folk,’ he translated, when the seals had given their answer, ‘but the eldritch wights of Huntingtowers may be able to tell.’

The Roane went undulating away through the waves, and Tom turned the sail so that the wind filled it. The patched canvas snapped taut as the air crammed into it. Foam creamed at the prow.

Ashalind asked, ‘Huntingtowers—what is that?’

‘A dreadful unseelie place it is, a caldera infested with powerful wights of gramarye,’ said Tom. ‘It lies on the other side of the old magmite mines, not more than seven leagues west of a cottage belonging to a good family of fisher-folk known to us—the Caidens. That family lives in fear of the wicked things that issue from the place from time to time.’

‘Have you seen any of the creatures that dwell therein?’

‘No. But Tavron Caiden has told us of them. And they’re not pretty, most of ’em. There’s nasty little spriggans and trows as creeps about, and white pigs and hares, but the Caidens wear wizard-sained tilhals and the lesser wights don’t bother them much—that sort keep away from the rowan and the iron. The worst things …’ here the shell-diver paused and scanned the horizon with a troubled air ‘…the worst things is them that goes hunting. Fuaths and duergars and such. Some of them are worse than any nightmare. Others of them look like Men, even right noble and kingly Men, but there’s something wrong about them …’

‘Kingly Men, you say? Then Faêran may be amongst them!’ cried Ashalind, dropping the bread on which she had been biting. Her face was flushed.

‘That may be so, but there is no mercy in the creatures that infest Huntingtowers, and that place is not where you should seek your King. It is a hub of evil and death. I do not even like to speak of it on a fair day such as this. Leave that sinkhole to the wicked wights, lass. Caermelor’s the place for you. News always flows toward big cities.’

‘This cottage of your friends—is it far from here?’ Ashalind asked.

‘’Tis near Isse Harbor. It stands alone on the northern coast of the Cape of Tides—twelve to fourteen days away depending on the wind, and if we do not call in at our village on the Isle of Birds. But we have a good haul of nacris-shell already on board, as you can see, and we are heading home to unload it. Besides, we’ll not put a slip of a thing like you ashore at the Cape of Tides. Not in the shadow of Huntingtowers.’

‘If you do, I shall give you gold.’ Their passenger rattled the pouch her father had given her, then subtracted some coins from it. The antique disks in her palm glinted, flashing in the sunlight. ‘I beg of you—take me there.’

Astonishment registered on the ingenuous faces of the shell-divers, quickly replaced by suspicion.

‘How did you come by such wealth? Is it honest gold?’

‘It is honest gold, not stolen, nor gold of gramarye to change into leaves come morning, and blow away. But it has lain hidden this past millennium and now it is uncovered.’

‘Ye’d be better off coming with us to the Isle of Birds. From there you might take the ferry to Finvarna, and thence find passage south to Caermelor on one of the regular shipping runs.’

‘Sir, I am grateful for your advice but I will not be dissuaded.’

Putting their heads together, the two boatmen murmured earnestly to one another. From time to time they glanced at their passenger, who lowered her eyes and endeavoured to look as if she took no heed of their discussion.

‘Be you steadfastly set on this course, lass?’ said Tom at last. ‘Is there naught that will change your mind?’

‘I am steadfast. If you will not take me to the Cape of Tides, I shall seek another ferryman, in any case.’

A troubled expression clouded the brow of the shell-diver. ‘This goes against my better judgment. If you be set on going near Huntingtowers, we will transport you, but not for payment. ’Twould not be right, to bring a starving waif like you into danger and take her gold as well. If you change your mind when you get to Tavron Caiden’s place, you might make your way to the Royal City from there.’

‘Gramercie!’

Privately, Ashalind decided she would leave payment with them despite their protestations. They had given her food and passage, and it was evident they were not rich folk.

They made landfall thrice during the next fourteen days, entering profound inlets where steps were crudely hewn into the cliffs. William replenished their water supplies from thin waterfalls that trailed like the frayed ends of silk down these walls of adamant, but they met no human creature there.

‘These lands of the northwest coast are deserted,’ William said. ‘Here dwell only the birds and beasts, and wicked things, and the wind.’

Rugged and rocky was the coastline. The sheer cliffs that lined it were pierced by deep channels and wild, wave-churned sounds cutting far back into the land. For some miles, huge trees crowded down to the very cliff tops. Dense shadows were netted beneath their boughs.

On sighting these ancient woodlands, William remarked in a grim undertone, ‘There ends the westernmost arm of the terrible forest.’

At length, the voyagers sailed between islands and arrived on the coast of the mainland at an area where cliffs sloped gently to a tiny harbour. There they tied up the boat and came ashore. The salt breeze stung their faces with a hint of chill.

‘Winter’s here,’ said Tom.

The cottage of the Caidens, whitewashed and slate-roofed, overlooked the neat harbour. Behind it was a large, well-tended vegetable patch, the inevitable beeskeps, and racks for drying fish. Stunted rowans and plum trees grew all around. A few sea-pinks straggled in the window-boxes facing east. Tavron’s wife, Madelinn, kept chickens, goats, and a sheep whose wool she spun.

There were children—a boy, Darvon, and a girl, Tansy. This family welcomed the boatmen and the yellow-haired stranger into their midst, sharing their home and provender, begrudging nothing. Tom and William returned their greetings and hospitality with amiability, but it was evident that the two men felt uneasy in that place.

‘The lass here had some notion about Huntingtowers,’ explained William, ‘but instead she may go on to Caermelor, with the next road-caravan that comes this way, or take ship.’

Tom advised, ‘Do not be too hasty, lass. Wait until you hear more about that place.’

The next morning the shell-divers sailed away to the Isle of Birds, carrying the gold coins Ashalind had slipped into their pockets while they were not looking.

‘Stay awhile, lass,’ Tavron Caiden said, ‘before you travel on. ’Tis few enough folk who pass this way and we would be glad of the company. Besides, by the look of you, if you don’t mind me saying so, a rest would do you good.’

Indeed, the turmoil of the Leaving and the Closing, the shock of finding she had been gone from Erith for a thousand years, and the toilsomeness of hard travel across Arcdur without nourishment had taken their toll. For the first two days the newcomer slept a great deal, woke to eat, and slept again. Good health began to return. The Langothe was on her, nevertheless, pulling toward the north where lay the last open Gate to the Fair Realm, but she felt driven to quest on, to be rid of the terrible longing at its root. The Caidens bade her tarry longer with them, until strength fully returned. When they saw that she was bent on departing with all haste, they would not tell her the way to Huntingtowers.

‘Stay awhile,’ they begged. ‘Bide just a few days more, then we will tell you the way and set you rightly on it.’

Indeed, their guest was in no state to argue and must submit. They set the best of their simple provender before her. Although she hungered, she had seen Faêran food and breathed its fragrance. No Erithan victuals gave off much flavour in her mouth now, and, above all, the eating of flesh had come to seem abhorrent.

The fisher-folk had never before seen golden hair, and by this she learned for the first time—to her secret sorrow—that the Talith Kingdom was no more. The race had ebbed. Its few remaining representatives were scattered throughout Erith, and in Avlantia red- and bronze-leaved vines grew over the ruins of the cities. Throughout the Known Lands the stockier brown-haired Feorhkind predominated now, far outnumbering even the red Erts of Finvarna. One or two small Feorhkind villages had been established on the fringes of Avlantia, but generally that kindred preferred the cooler southern lands.

Without revealing her origins, Ashalind gleaned much more information from the conversation of her hosts. She learned about the fine talium chain mesh that lined the taltry hoods, used to protect against that wind of gramarye they called the shang, which burned Men’s emotions into the ether. She found out about sildron, which (it could only be she who remembered) had been the gift of the High King of the Fair Realm to the D’Armancourt Dynasty. In this new era, sildron lifted Windships and the Skyhorses whose routes never passed over the remote region where the cottage stood. She discovered much concerning the Stormriders and the King’s warriors, the Dainnan, and the strifes of past history, and the current unrest in the northeast lands that was wont to erupt into skirmishes.

She was fascinated, numbed by the changes that had happened over a millennium. There seemed so many—yet so few, when such an incredible span of time was considered. Conceivably, the enchantment of the Gate allowed those who passed through it to adapt to alterations in language over the years. As for the evolution of technology, the centuries of ignorance and strife known as the Dark Era had checked the progress of civilization in Erith, or even dragged it backward. Apart from sildron, taltries, and the shang, there seemed little difference between the world as she had known it and the world as she saw it now. Perhaps she would not feel like so much of a misfit in this new age, after all.

Yet she marveled and she grieved. A thousand years; it might as well have been forever.

The Caiden children, who had been restraining their curiosity with difficulty, begged their visitor to tell them stories of her travels in the north. After the tale of her hardships in Arcdur was related, they wanted another, and another. Ashalind was happy to oblige as best she could without revealing her secret, so she delved into her hoard of tales learned from Meganwy, and from wandering Storytellers, until Madelinn bade the children cease their pestering and leave the guest some peace.

At nights by the fireside, with the pet whippet lying before the hearth and the sea-sound booming beyond the walls, Ashalind regaled her hosts with all the gestes and songs she could recall. In return they told her about the hollow hill where, it was said, Faêran knights and ladies lay in enchanted sleep with their horses, hounds, and hawks and their treasures of untold wealth, and of how it was supposed to be possible to wake them by certain means if one could find the entrance to their underground halls. But none knew which hills they were, or if the stories were true.

Only one event marred the harmony of these times.

The child Tansy had a tuneful singing voice. Ashalind taught her many songs, including one named ‘The Exile,’ which had been made by Llewell, the young songmaker who had been among those brought out of Faerie by Ashalind. Well did she remember that youth calling to her at the gates of Hythe Mellyn. He had been driven mad by the Langothe and sometimes believed he was one of the Faêran. But he had never returned to the Fair Realm, for he pined and died before the Leaving. His songs remained.

Full many leagues of foreign soil I’ve trod.

At last, I would reclaim my native sod.

Alas, it seems I cannot find the way.

Exiled, my heart grows heavy, day by day.

And wondrous as these hills and vales may be,

They’re not the mystic realms I crave to see—

The dream’d-of world in childhood’s state of bliss—

My land of birth; that is the place I miss.

So am I doomed to seek, forever banned?

A stranger wandering in this strange land?

The strongest measures cannot ease the pain.

Oh, will I ever see my home again?

When she first heard it, Tansy was so taken with this song that she stood on tiptoe to offer Ashalind a kiss. In fright, Ashalind jumped back, covering her face with her hands.

‘Oh no! You must not do that!’

The family stared at her, astonished at this peculiar behaviour.

The guest stammered her apologies.

‘I must not be kissed. It is a bitterbynde, a geas. It must not be broken.’

The awkward moment passed. A geas must be respected, no matter how strange, and so must the wishes of a guest.

It was a pleasure to help with the many tasks demanded by this solitary life: bread-baking, cheese-making, drying and salting barrels of fish, gardening, washing, tending the hives and the animals. Immersion in the work of this family temporarily ameliorated the nostalgia Ashalind felt for her own, but always the Langothe corroded the core of her.

One night she was woken with crackling hair, feeling for the first time the prickling exhilaration of the unstorm.

Opening the shutters she saw, below the cliff, every wave-crest foaming with stars. Near at hand, the vegetable patch was powdered with emerald-dust, and even the tethered goat watched with blazing topaz eyes, its horns sculpted of polished agate. It was just as Cierndanel had said—‘The winds of gramarye are awakening at this outrage, the winds of Ang. They flare from the Ringstorm at Erith’s rim. Soon they shall prowl the lands of thy world, dyed by the imprints of men’s designs.’

On other days the shang came, dimming sunlight, frosting the land and sea with strange lights, but there were no tableaux here in this far-flung outpost.

‘Why do you live alone?’ Ashalind asked her benefactress as they mended nets down by the harbour. ‘Is it not perilous?’

‘We have no choice,’ replied Madelinn. ‘No other folk will live so close to the place of dread. Unseelie things roam near here. Men who venture to the caldera never return, or if they do, they come back raving mad and perish soon after. Sometimes when the moon is full, dark skyriders come to Huntingtowers from the northeast and after that a ghastly Hunt issues from that place. Its leader is Huon, the unseelie prince from whose skull grows a set of antlers like those of a stag, and he is called the Hunter.’

‘I have heard the name,’ murmured Ashalind. ‘Who has not?’

‘When the Hunt is abroad, we lock ourselves inside the house, barring all the doors and windows, but the bars do not keep out the horrible baying of black hounds with fiery eyes, and the beating of hooves. It’s enough to make your blood curdle.’

‘Why then do you live here?’

‘Because it is our own.’ Madelinn spoke with quiet dignity. ‘Eight years ago, when the children were small, we sailed here, from Gilvaris Tarv on the east coast. Tavron and I were raised among fisher-folk, but poverty had forced us to seek employment in that city. It was a terrible life.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘Bad conditions; cruelty. Never enough pay to feed the family properly. The children were forever hungry. My uncle lived in this cottage on the cliffs. He died and I inherited it. Here we came, and here we rule ourselves and seldom go hungry, even if it is sometimes fish day after day. We have learned to live in the shadow of Huntingtowers.’

‘Will you tell me of that place?’

Madelinn stretched her arm out in a wide gesture to the sea. A tall cone-shaped island reared its peak not far from the shore, southwest of the little harbour. Farther west another thrust up, and beyond it several more in a great sweeping curve dwindling around to the northwest.

‘That’s what we call the Chain of Chimneys,’ she said, ‘a line of fire-mountains, ages old, that once lifted themselves out of the sea.’

‘I have heard of them by repute,’ said Ashalind, ‘called by the old Feorhkind name of Eotenfor, the Giant’s Stepping-Stones.’

‘Aye,’ said Madelinn. ‘One of these fire-heads pushed up under the land instead of the sea, and became Huntingtowers Hill. In its top is a vast cauldron more than a mile wide, and inside it crouch a dozen or so small hills. Ash cones they were. Now they are islands in a lake, for the crater has filled with water. The biggest island sits right smack in the middle of it all, but spans and causeways have been built everywhere, it is said, so that the eldritch creatures may cross over. On this central hill stands a keep of stone, surrounded by eight other towers all linked by flying bridges.’

Madelinn paused thoughtfully and pushed a stray strand of hair back from her face.

‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I suppose some folk must have gone there to see it all and returned with some wit left, else we wouldn’t know what the place looked like, would we? Don’t say as how I’d recommend a sightseeing tour, though. The lesser unseelie wights there can be put off with charms, but them things that go a-hunting—they are full wicked.’

But Ashalind was only half listening. Her mind was on Huntingtowers Hill.

If some of the exiled Faêran dwelt there, they must surely know the whereabouts of King Angavar. But by what Madelinn had said it seemed that they shunned mortals, and would be hardly likely to welcome her in, answer her questions, and wave good-bye. She must approach with caution and try to glean information using stealth. What if they were not Faêran? Wights such as the Each Uisge were able to take on a form resembling Men or Faêran, duping those who did not look too closely. Nonetheless, they could never make the transformation complete and always bore some inconspicuous but betraying sign such as webbed fingers or animal’s feet, and when in man-shape they moved like Men, not with Faêran grace.

Prince Morragan had mingled with unseelie wights at Carnconnor. Perhaps it was he who was master at Hunting-towers. At this notion a surge of something akin to shock or exhilaration coursed through Ashalihd.

Beside her, the fisherwoman sighed. ‘One day we might leave this place. We grow no richer here. The merchants of the road-caravans are miserly in their bartering for dried fish and only come by once a year. And it is not right for the children to be raised in the shadow of fear. One day … I don’t know where we’d go.’

There came an evening when the moon was almost full. The wind screamed at the gray-green sea and whipped the white-horse crests out beyond the harbour. Inside the cottage, ruby light flickered from the fire, casting deceptive shadows on rough walls.

Ashalind placed the purse of gold sovereigns on the table and loosened the drawstring of its mouth. Coins spilled out, gleaming softly across scored wood. The fisher-folk stared, struck dumb by the sight of so much wealth.

‘This is for you,’ their guest explained, ‘save only for seven pieces, which I may need on my journey. If I do not return within three days, take all of it and leave this place, for my efforts might inadvertently arouse the wrath of unseelie wights, and you might find yourselves in peril. If my quest is successful I may not return. If unsuccessful I will ask you to carry me in your boat to Caermelor. I go now to Huntingtowers to seek the High King of the Fair Folk.’

The silence was broken by Tavron clearing his throat.

‘We shall not take your gold,’ he said gruffly. ‘Return it to the pouch. Our hospitality asks no fee.’

‘I do not mean to insult you,’ stammered Ashalind. ‘Only, if I do not return I shall not need it. With this you might buy land elsewhere and start a new life.’

Sensing her distress, the white whippet jumped into her lap. Fondly, she caressed it, thinking of her faithful Rufus.

‘If you must go, I shall accompany you as your guard,’ said Tavron. ‘Charms are not enough to ward off such wickedness as lurks there.’

‘Would you leave your family unprotected?’ asked Ashalind.

‘There will be no going to the place of dread, especially now,’ interrupted Madelinn. ‘Have you not heeded our warnings? The moon will be full tomorrow night, and it is then the Wild Hunt goes forth to scour the surrounding lands. All mortals who love life ought to stay safe behind rowan and iron.’

‘I have heeded your words,’ replied Ashalind, ‘but I am driven. A certain longing burns in me and daily eats me away—longing that can only be appeased when I have found the one I seek. It is the Langothe, and those who have never felt it cannot understand. Nothing you can say will alter my course. I have no choice.’

‘You must fight it,’ pleaded Tansy. ‘Stay with us. Teach us more songs.’

‘I must go.’

The next morning, covered by the Faêran mantle, which had subtly altered its hues to match the surroundings, Ashalind left the cottage. She took her father’s iron dagger, a wallet of food, some charms, and a leather water-bottle that was a gift from Tavron. The ragged riding-habit lay folded in a wooden chest inside the cottage; in place of it she wore worsted galligaskins, a pair of boys’ buskins, and a tunic of brown bergamot, all gifts from the Caidens.

‘These garments are old, but fit for traveling,’ Tavron Caiden said. ‘Unfortunately we have no taltry for you. If an unstorm should come, you must become still, eschew passion—otherwise your image will be painted on the airs for all passersby to see.’

‘It may be that the curious cloak you wear has the power to protect from the shang,’ suggested Madelinn. ‘Cover your head with the hood. It might work.’

At the cottage door the fisher wife made one last appeal.

‘Do not go, Ashalind,’ she said, looking the damsel squarely in the eyes. ‘My mother was a carlin and I possess some of her foresight. I tell you that if you go to Huntingtowers you go to your doom. I tell you that you will be defeated there, and that it will be the end of you as we know you now. You will die or, at best, you will be altered in some terrible, inexplicable way.’

Her entreaties were in vain.

With embraces but no kisses, the family bade her farewell. They turned their harrowed faces aside to hide their horror at this obvious suicide.

The damsel set out in a westerly direction toward the tip of the Cape of Tides. She climbed the slope behind the cottage, breathing hard from the exertion. Shreds of morning mist were dissolving in tatters. At the top of the cliff she halted, surveying the satin expanse of the sea. The waters were striped with shades of blue from milky to intense, under a cornflower sky. The perfect cones of the Chimneys stood like guardians, waves creaming on their beaches. A shag perched on a rock, transfixed and cruciform, drying its wings. As yet, Ashalind had seen no elindors in this new era. This morning only shearwaters and petrels rode the sky.

The whippet had followed her. Stoically, she sent it back with a harsh word. The cottage looked tiny, far below. In a few steps it was lost to view.

Low tea-tree scrub grew on the cliff top, spiking the air with the tang of eucalyptus. In the distance, a disused Mooring Mast stood dark against the skyline. Rain had fallen the night before, and puddles made mirrors on the ground.

Despite a growing feeling of trepidation, the traveller made swift progress along the cliffs and past the overgrown mullock heaps of the abandoned mines. Toward nightfall she reached the foot of the long-dead volcano. Its heath-covered flanks rose in a long slow sweep to a brooding summit that appeared flat from her vantage point. Hairs prickled on her arms and neck. The prescience of danger pressed down like the weight of a mountain. Dark clouds clustered over the sun’s face and the air stilled. No birds sang, here.

Stopping in the shelter of a scrubby brake, Ashalind took a draft of water. Her stomach roiled with trepidation; she could not eat a bite. After tugging the Faêran hood more firmly around her face, she began to ascend as noiselessly and unobtrusively as possible.

As she climbed the hillside, she sensed she was being watched. Bushes rustled furtively, and twin points of viridescent light gleamed out from many an enigmatic shadow. Close by, a shout of loud laughter made her jump. Sweating with more than effort, she labored on, eyes darting from side to side, trying to make sense out of the odd shapes in the gathering darkness. What a fool she had been, she realised too late, to challenge a domain of wights at night. Most of these creatures were nocturnal, and she had placed herself at a grave disadvantage. She ought to have found a sheltered place to sleep and await the dawn. Had she lost her wits already, in her eagerness to be rid of the wearisome Langothe? But there would be no turning back now that she had come so far, and she toiled on until she reached the lip of the caldera.

The waxing moon, risen early, extruded ghostlike shafts through a gash in the cumulus. Its crepuscular light reflected back from the expansive lake that lay stretched out far below Ashalind’s feet, strewn with the dark humps of islets like solemn tortoises. The top of the central island rose up level with the caldera’s rim, and from it soared, attenuated, the fantastic structure Madelinn Caiden had described, with its towers and flying bridges. From within these towers bluish light pierced the slit windows at many levels. The slits glowed eerily, like cobalt gas; weird optics watching the night. To the right, a road sliced through a cutting in the rim and crossed several bridges to reach the towers.

From somewhere to the left a crow harshly said ‘cark-cark’. Surely it was unusual for diurnal birds to be calling out at this time of night … The intruder took a deep breath and started to move quietly down the inside wall toward the first bridge.

Her fall was caused by the white hare that ran under her feet. In the next instant, something small but with the strength of a coiled spring landed heavily on top of her, gouging, beating, pummeling, until her hand found the iron dagger’s hilt and she wrenched it from its sheath.

The thing sprang away, shrieking falsetto alarm as it fled into the night. Blood dripped into the damsel’s eyes and she wiped it away with her sleeve.

‘Cold iron will not serve you far, ’ere,’ said a voice like two dry branches rubbing together.

‘It serves me well enough,’ she said to the spriggan who stood six paces away.

‘Only foolish mortals trespass in the domain of ’uon, the Prince of ’unters,’ the spriggan said, answering her first question before she had asked it. ‘Especially when he is on his way. For this, you must die.’

It flinched, blinking as she flicked the dagger to reflect moonlight from the blade into its squinty eyes. This was partly to disguise the fact that her hands were shaking.

‘Ah, but if I die, you will not benefit,’ Ashalind said steadily. ‘In return for certain information, I am prepared to pay gold. True gold.’

She rattled the purse.

‘Pah,’ sneered the spriggan. ‘What use is that yellow metal to me, eh? I ’ave no need of gold, true or otherwise. It cannot buy me juicy caterpillars or sweet cocoons and spiders’ eggs.’ The wight pranced around, switching its tail restlessly. ‘What else does the erithbunden offer?’

‘Do you like maggots?’

‘Love ’em.’

‘I passed a dead bird not long ago …’

She broke off—the wight had already disappeared in the direction she indicated.

Something bit her knee. Reflexively, she kicked it away. With a sigh of relief and disappointment, she decided to retrace her steps after all, and wait on the lower slopes until morning.

As she turned away a nuggety, grotesque shape detached itself from obscurity. Here was a wight even more sinister and repulsive than a spriggan. Ashalind backed away, clutching the charms at her belt, for she recognised this small, manlike being as a black dwarf—a duergar. Battling a sinking feeling, the damsel hoped the rowan and iron charms had some potency against such a dangerous entity.

‘What else do you offer?’ the duergar asked casually.

‘I am come to buy information. I offer nothing until I can be sure that you are a trusted henchman of Huon the Hunter, who would have knowledge such as I seek,’ she countered. Her hand shivered, gripping the charms. This thing was not to be trifled with—duergars were quick to anger and quicker to strike. She wondered why it had not already torn her head off. Maybe the immutable laws of eldritch forbade it until she showed fear, or else some protective spell of the Lady Nimriel’s lingered.

‘For instance,’ she continued, trying to trick the wight into revealing the information she was after, ‘do you know the whereabouts of Angavar High King?’

Out of its puddle of inky shadow, the duergar took a step closer.

‘If you want information, I can smuggle you secretly into the Keep of Huon the Horned,’ it offered, flexing grimy fingernails and baring long, pointed teeth, ‘on the wains that come tonight. First, give us a little suck of your blood.’

Ashalind recalled stories of benighted travellers found by roadsides in the morning, desiccated husks.

‘No!’ Wildly she cast her mind about, desperate for something with which to buy off this manifestation of iniquity. Fumbling at her wrist, she said, ‘A golden bracelet inlaid with a white bird … gold coins … poppyseed biscuits and blackberry cakes …’

‘Ignorant flax-wench! How dare you offer trash!’

‘If you dislike my offerings, then we cannot do business.’ She grew still, but was too wise to turn her back and walk away.

Noise ceased while the night condensed under a grinning moon.

‘Cut off your hair and I will get you into the Keep,’ said the duergar eventually.

‘The Central Keep? Unharmed and in secret?’

‘Yea.’

‘Then, yes!’

A whip snaked from the wight’s powerful hand. Before the damsel could recoil, it had lashed her throat like a tongue of white-hot steel. The duergar emitted a strange mewling noise, which may have been laughter, and muttered, ‘Yea indeed.’

Ignoring the searing pang at her throat, Ashalind unbound the long heavy braid from her head and cut it off close to the scalp. She tossed the rope of hair into the wight’s hands just as the sound of horses’ hooves and wooden wheels came clopping and rattling out of the darkness.

‘The bird may enter the cage but it will never sing the songs it learns, and when it pops out its head—pigeon pie!’ were the black dwarf’s last words. The wicked thing rushed away and Ashalind followed as fast as possible, knowing it was bound to keep its promise to her.

Around the caldera’s upjutting rim the duergar led her, until they reached the cutting where the road entered from the gentler slopes. Along that road a convoy of wagons was entering the volcanic basin. The vile creature leaped up beside the driver of the lead wain. What it did to him, Ashalind could not be certain, but the wain and those in procession behind it stopped long enough for her to climb swiftly aboard. As the train moved off again, she found a deep, wooden chest half full of some pungent dried pods and concealed herself inside.

She could tell by the numbness now in her throat that the treacherous duergar had stolen her voice, and she knew by the jolting and swaying and the hollow ring and thud of hooves that the wagons were passing over bridges from island to island. When the wain stopped, the chest was unloaded and propelled upward with nauseating speed before being transferred a second time and left alone in utter silence.

Bleakly the smuggled girl pondered over the loss of her voice, the latest setback of so many in her life. If she could only learn the whereabouts of the King and find him, he might provide some Faêran cure.

After a long while she dared to lift the lid. The chest had been abandoned among others in a dim storeroom, but the door of the room stood ajar, admitting a streak of cyanic light. Having ventured out of the redolent container, she nervously peeped around this portal. There was only an empty stone-flagged hallway with other recessed doors leading off to either side. A faint smell of charred meat permeated the air.

Waves of weariness washed over Ashalind. She had walked far that day. Fear had kept her senses sharp, but now, in this tomblike quiet, she was overwhelmed by the need for sleep. After withdrawing into the half-empty storeroom she curled herself in the farthest corner, among a stack of boxes, then pulled the Faêran cloak around her and closed her eyes.

Severing themselves from nightmare, faint echoes woke her. They had sprung from the mutter of distant voices. Feeling in need of sustenance, she took a swig from the water-bottle hanging at her belt and ate the blackberry cakes she had, in desperation, offered the duergar. Refreshed, she emerged from her niche and followed the undercurrent of sound. It led her along the deserted passageways, up spiral stairs, and onto another floor more sumptuously decorated. Tapestries hung along the walls of the galleries, and rushes strewed the floors. Blue lamps glowed. Hearing the pad-pad of multiple footsteps approaching, Ashalind pressed herself into a recessed doorway. Her Faêran cloak adopted the dusky hues of bluestone and old oak, and without noticing her, half a dozen assorted creatures went past in the wake of a manlike figure whose cloak billowed at his back.

‘Steenks of siedo-pods up ’ere,’ a creaking voice commented as the bevy disappeared around a corner.

Fine droplets beaded the damsel’s brow. It dawned on her that siedo-pods’ strong odour might well mask the scent of mortal flesh. Following quietly behind the group, she peered around the corner. The mutterings she had been hearing emanated from a doorway farther along, and were accompanied by a clinking of pottery and metal. Beyond that doorway, a grating voice deeper than the tones of spriggans was giving orders to select certain wines and convey them in haste: ‘… and hoof it, you spigot-nosed kerns,’ it rasped. ‘His Royal Highness will soon be here.’

At these words tempests of blood beat about the temples of the spy. She could have screamed for sheer delight and terror. Such good fortune, such evil luck! By ‘His Royal Highness’, the speaker could mean only Prince Morragan. It seemed the Crown Prince was not, after all, comatose beneath a hill, surrounded by Faêran knights. Doubtless he would know the whereabouts of his brother. Had he remained unsleeping throughout the years? Or had he woken not long since? How dreary, how weary, how slow-dragging and tedious would be a millennium of banishment!

But tragedy must follow, if this royal exile should discover and identify her. Instantly he would guess she had come recently from the Fair Realm. How else might a mortal have survived for a thousand years?

That the Prince must recognise her the moment he set eyes on her she had no doubt. He would not forget the mortal maid who had entered his dominions, answered his challenges, reclaimed his captives, refused his invitations and thwarted his desires. He would be fully aware she had accompanied the Talith in their migration to the Realm before the Closing. All these years, he had supposed her locked away in Faêrie with her family. If she had appeared in Erith, there could be only one explanation. Against all possibility, somewhere, a Door had been opened.

Assuredly the unseelie wights of Huntingtowers would torment her until she revealed the secret of the Gateway, and then all would be lost. Morragan would send her back to Faêrie with the Password, and when Easgathair opened the Gates, the Prince would be there waiting to enter the Realm in place of his brother, his rival. Then would Morragan use the remaining unasked boon to exile the High King from the Fair Realm, this time truly forever. He would rule in his brother’s place. And it would be her fault.

But no, she would not permit discovery. She would be careful. She would listen, and learn what she could.

‘Get rid of those miserable slaves below,’ a voice bellowed. ‘If he finds any cursed mortals here, your heads will roll on the flagstones, after which I shall kick ’em out the windows. And while he visits, utter only the common speech, on pain of disembowelment. I will not have the Fithiach disturbed by your squawkings and squeakings. I will cut out the tongue of the first dung-gobbler that disobeys.’

Bowed figures hurried out of the doorway bearing laden trays, and ascended yet another stair.

Soon after, Ashalind’s cloaked form glided after them. She had no idea how long the mantle’s special qualities might let her remain undetected, but a relatively quick death was preferable to years spent slowly perishing from the agony of the Langothe, and she must persist in her quest.

Thick rugs carpeted the floors of this upper level. More brightly lit, the walls were hung with arras of richer textiles, and shields emblazoned with wonderful devices. The last of the wightish menials entered a chamber by way of richly carved doors inlaid with bronze. The bellowing voice had spoken of mortal slaves in the lower regions of the Keep. Ashalind wondered whether she might possibly pose as a servitor, and thus move freely with less chance of discovery. But no—it was clear that when the Fithiach visited, all mortals were banished from his sight. Nonetheless, he must endure mortal speech, for according to what she had overheard, he despised the guttural wightish languages but would not permit them to sully the Faêran tongue by employing it. So far, within these walls she had heard only common-speak.

Meanwhile, judging by the sounds in the carved-door chamber, further preparations were being made for the arrival of the Raven Prince.

A small insignificant portal was sunk into a niche almost opposite the carved doors, across the passageway from them. When Ashalind pushed, its hinges obeyed with a groan. Inside nestled another dark storage cubicle—a good enough vantage point for surveillance when the door was left ajar. Dust arose like phantom brides, and a spider dropped on her face. She might have yelped in surprise, had the duergar not stolen her power of speech.

Her narrow field of vision through the carved doors across the corridor showed lofty arched windows looking out from the larger chamber, which was bustling with activity. A tall, manlike figure moved past one window. Its head was crowned by the branching antlers of a stag. A graceful lady was standing with her back to Ashalind, dressed in a lace-edged green velvet gown sewn thickly all over with peridots. Dark hair cascaded down her back. Gold ornaments glittered on her svelte arms. She might have been a damsel of the Faêran, since several ladies of the Fair Realm had been riding among the ill-fated hawking party exiled on the Day of Closing, and others had fled into Erith as the last Call sounded, when the exile of the royal brethren was in no doubt. But when this green-clad belle turned around, the hem of her dress swished aside. The spy flinched. The ‘woman’ was neither Faêran nor mortal, but an eldritch wight. How doubly hideous it seemed, that such a fair form should walk upon woolly sheep’s hooves.

A glow of firelight to the right illuminated polished furniture and tableware. Nothing else in that room could be observed.

A familiar voice came pummeling like a blow to the stomach:

‘Set those goblets aright, nasty little hoglin, or I shall have you flayed like your sniveling cousin whose hide hangs above the Gate of Horn.’

Never had Ashalind erased from memory the coarse tones of Yallery Brown.

Commotion arose to the left. She could not see what caused it.

‘Get out,’ commanded the unseelie rat-wight. ‘His Highness arrives.’

A motley collection of wights hastened from the chamber, disappearing down the corridor. A chill draught followed them, and the clatter of hooves on stone.

‘My liege …’ Yallery Brown’s tone was fawning. He had broken off as if in fear or awe.

Several tall figures crossed quickly past the doorway. The carved doors were slammed shut—in the instant before they met, Ashalind discerned a stunning profile that could only be Morragan’s. He and his retainers must have entered at the arched windows, which were as vast and high as the front gates of a castle.

Through a gap at the threshold drifted the conversation of those who were sequestered within. Listening with intense concentration, Ashalind could glean most of what they were saying, but it made little sense. Either they discussed matters far removed from her knowledge, or else she was too tired to comprehend. Eventually she succumbed again to sleep.

By the fluctuations in the window-light when the carved doors were open, Ashalind could tell night from day. She remained concealed hungrily in the spider-haunted cell, sipping her water, and the next night Morragan met again with his followers in the chamber.

Scant liquid remained in her leather bottle, and the siedo-pod odour was fading. The Faêran hated spies, and the Raven Prince in particular detested mortals. She began to think that if she were caught there, the manner of her demise at the mercy of unseelie wights might prove more horrible than even the Langothe. But she stayed, and she listened, wishing heartily that there were some way of prompting the gathering to speak of the High King.

On the third night, by strange fortune, they did—but it was not as she had hoped.

The heavy doors stood ajar. A low buzz of conversation had been proceeding for a good while, when Morragan’s Faêran voice carried clearly across the corridor, rich, deep, and melodious in contrast to the harsh, throaty tones and raucous squeaks of the wights.

Gooseflesh raked the listener’s spine.

‘There has been a restlessness of late,’ he said musingly, ‘a breath of finer air, as from the Realm. This dusk, I rode down by the fisherman’s cot and heard a maid within, warbling a song I have never heard before. In faith, it moved me not a little, although poorly versed.’

Ashalind held her breath. From the unseen fireplace on the right sparks flew into her field of vision and hung dying in midair.

‘A song of exile,’ said Morragan.

‘If it displeased my lord,’ murmured Yallery Brown, ‘the cottage shall be razed, and those who have dwelt there for far too long shall be punished.’

The eavesdropper stiffened. She must return as soon as possible to warn the Caidens!

‘A song of exile,’ repeated Morragan, ‘reminding me of my own.’

A thicker spray of sparks exploded, as if someone had kicked a burning log.

‘Cursed be Angavar, may his reign end!’ said the marvelous Faêran voice. ‘May his knights rot in their hill grave. Cursed be the White Owl and his Keys. Cursed be the moment the Casket snapped shut with the Word. Might I but live those times over again …’

Ashalind, eyes tightly shut, clasped her hands together. Her lips moved soundlessly.

The King, speak again of the High King! Where is this hill beneath which he sleeps amid his noble companions?

‘Behold, Your Highness, they bring up the steeds,’ said the Winter-wind voice of Huon, Prince of Hunters and steward of the stronghold. ‘Tonight we hunt.’

A rush of biting air swung the carved doors open on their hinges. Morragan stood at a window, looking out at the night. The full moon was rising, outlining the statuesque shape of him, the wide shoulders from which his cloak eddied like a piece of darkness.

‘The Realm,’ he said.

Then softly he spoke, but the night airs carried his voice back to the ears of the eavesdropper. It was a rhyme. The words were Faêran and she did not know what they meant, but their implication was haunting, lyrical, and strummed her Langothed heart with pain.

A half-shang gust lifted Morragan’s cloak and hair like a wave. The inked-in outline of a horse appeared at the window. Then the Prince was gone, and several motley figures followed. Bridles jingled, boots scraped on bluestone, and commands were shouted. Far below, hounds began to yelp. A horn sounded. With a dissonance of shrill whoops and strident shouts the Hunt was away, borne aloft on invisible airstreams through the silver-sprayed vaults of darkness.

Abruptly, the fire went out.

Soon afterward, the spy heard two wightish servants come shuffling out of the chamber. As they came through the carved doors, one hoarsely muttered something.

‘Shut your snout, clotpoll,’ the other wheezed, ‘or I’ll roll your head in the fire. I’ll teach you to speak the low tongue when the Crown Prince is honouring your dunghill with a visit!’

‘So high and mighty are you not?’ returned the hoarse one sarcastically. ‘You may have been chosen for his royal household, scumbag, but you do not deserve it and as soon as they see through you, you’ll be thrown out on your muleish ear.’

The wights had by now come to a halt in the corridor.

‘You cap of all fools alive!’ berated the wheezer. ‘And do you plot to take my place? I was chosen for wit and wisdom far beyond the grasp of your greasy claws, boiled-brains.’

‘Ha!’ retorted Hoarse-Throat. ‘The jumped-up feathergoose is even more contemptible when it struts!’

His antagonist could scarcely contain his ire. ‘You know not to whom you speak,’ he hissed between gritted teeth. ‘Be wary, parasite, for your folly outweighs your fat head. I’ll warrant you do not even have a notion of the Faêran words spoken this night by his Royal Highness!’

The other spluttered incoherently.

‘Anyone with a jot of wit knows the meaning,’ said Wheezer triumphantly. ‘Even the merfolk sing it in the Gulf of Namarre. It is a riddle, an easy one, but too hard for the likes of you, you foul, undigested hodge-pudding.’

‘You’re full of air!’

‘Nay, noisome stench, and I’ll prove it!’

The wheezer cleared its throat phlegmily and began to translate, slowly, as if every word was an effort.

‘Nor bound to dust, ye ocean’s bird, the word’s thy name, the Key’s the word. So? What’s the answer, goat-face?’

But before goat-face could reply a voice thundered from further down the corridor: ‘Get along there, you rump-fed idlers, chattering like parrots outside the door! If you utter another word I’ll have your lungs!’

With a rattling of spilled trays, the servants fled.

After that there was no more sound, except the wind whining around the Keep and the loud drumming of Ashalind’s heart. The riddle was indeed easy. The answer was the elindor, or white bird of freedom, which spent seven years on the wing or water without touching land—her kenning-name. And there was another answer. ‘Elindor’ was the Password that opened the Green Casket of the Keys, in the Fair Realm.

Like syrup, silence poured forth from the recently vacated chamber. Surely the room was empty. Pulling the hood of the Faêran cloak over her head and tying it securely, Ashalind crossed the corridor, crept inside, and looked around. Indeed, they were all gone. There was no sign of Morragan’s erstwhile presence. She felt, again, bereft. Perversely, she had hoped for some evidence of him—what, she could not say. But fingering the enameled bracelet on her wrist, she exulted. She had discovered a fact of tremendous significance! She now knew the Password! The elindor, the white bird of freedom—how ironic that Morragan should have chosen it as the master-key. The jest was manifold—the bird that lived free of the bonds of Erith’s soil, the kenning of she who had freed the children, the Password to free the Keys from the Green Casket. But she must make haste and escape from Huntingtowers Keep—the danger was too great.

Her ears, strained to the limits of hearing, caught scuffling noises approaching along the corridor. It was too late to leave the chamber through the heavy carved doors. What measure of camouflage the cloak offered, she could not guess. Wildly she looked for a place of concealment among the furnishings, but none offered itself. Nor were there any other exits, save the wide, high openings of the windows, which led to a ledge over sheer nothingness, looking out on lands far below and dark horsemen riding the sky, fell shapes etched against crystal. A huge raven that had been watching her from the sill flapped slowly away. At that moment, enraged screaming broke out in the corridor, just beyond the doors. Terrified, Ashalind ran out to the ledge and dropped down over the side.

For a mere instant she hung by her sliding fingers over a void, knowing full well she would inevitably lose her grip. The chamber above was filled with a cacophony of raucous braying, piercing screeches, and the crashes of laden tables being overturned. Her kicking feet found a toehold just as her left hand lost its grip. Leaves brushed her face; thick tendrils of common ivy. It grew thickly, latticed all over the outer wall, great ancient, arthritic stems of it. Grabbing hold, she began to climb down.

Silent sobs of fear shook her body. Terror melted her sinews like wax and drained them of power, so that her fingers, nerveless, could scarcely grip. The half-shang wind buffeted erratically, alternately flattening her against the wall and wrenching her away, outlining each ivy leaf with green-and-gold rime. Claws of dead stems hooked themselves in her garments. There was no time to disengage them, so they tore great rents in the fabric.

Down she scrambled, seeking blindly for footholds and not knowing when her toes might scrabble against naked bluestone. Farther and farther down she maneuvered, sliding one quivering foot after another, one sweat-slicked hand after another, her heart pounding like a pestle in her chest. How far she must descend she did not know for certain, but the central Keep had looked to be hundreds of feet high. From the corners of her eyes, she could see other towers with their watchful blue-gas windows, and glimpse a couple of soaring spans over an abyss. It was like being a beetle clinging to an open wall, so vulnerable, for all eyes to see, for any predator to pick off with ease.

A chair came hurtling down from above, passed her within a hairsbreadth, and went spinning down to shatter far below. Doggedly she continued to descend. They had discovered her presence. It was only a matter of time before they hunted her down.

The water-bottle hampered her. She dropped it.

When her fingers would obey her no longer, she let go of the ivy. After falling a surprisingly short distance, she lay in a crumpled heap, dazedly trying to comprehend that she still lived and had reached the ground safely after all. She tried to stand, but her legs gave way, so she began to crawl, passing by the smashed shards of the fallen chair. Common ivy sprawled all over the ground, covering small bushes and shrubs. Something became hooked on it—her bracelet. Carefully she freed it. The white bird shone in the moonlight, and somehow the sight of this icon gave her strength and courage. Standing up, she broke into a run.

In the rising unstorm, scarlet and silver sparks flew from her iron-shod boots as she fled from island to islet, from bridge to bridge. Shang afterimages pulsed here and there, and the edge of every leaf on every bush was spangled. Up and over the caldera rim she ran, and down the other side, using the iron dagger to slash wildly at small things that sprang, yellow-eyed and malevolent, from the darkness. Away back, the hue and cry gathered momentum. Onward she sped, until she reached the mining grounds, and as she darted in among the heaps she heard the Wild Hunt catching up at her heels. The fire-eyed hounds were baying weirdly now, but there was a jarring note too, a sound that didn’t belong. It sounded like a small dog yapping, and its source was up ahead. Rounding a mullock heap, she beheld the white whippet from the cottage of the Caidens. It barked frantically, ran a little distance, then turned to see if she was following. Placing all her faith in the brave little dog, she hastened after it.

The ululation of the pack crescendoed, soon augmented by the deafening blare of horns. She dared not look back, but it seemed as if the Hunt must be almost on her shoulders, when without warning the whippet disappeared into a hole in a hillock. Ashalind followed suit, not a moment too soon, and the horde thundered past overhead.

Gasping for life, the damsel lay with outflung arms in the umbra of a deep cavern whose floor sloped gradually downward. Her throat and chest burned. Somewhere nearby, the little dog whimpered uneasily, and she sensed that it was trying to communicate. Still panting, she crawled in the direction of the sound.

The quietude outside was split by a roar and a concussion that made the ground shake. Handfuls of clay nodules and damp soil showered onto her hair and ragged clothes. After springing up in blind panic, the refugee ran farther into the cave, only to feel the floor drop away beneath her feet. She started to slide. The dagger was still in her hands—swiveling her body like an acrobat, she jammed the blade into the soil to halt her progress. Loose pebbles slipped past and down—she must have stumbled, in her mad rush, over the edge of a shaft. The dagger stayed firmly embedded and she realised she had not fallen far. Her feet dangled over some unguessable depth. She hung from the weapon’s hilt. Just above her head the whippet stood, whining. When she looked up she saw its anxious form backlit by gray light from the cave’s entrance.

The bellowing roar blared again, and heavy steps caused the ground to vibrate. Something monstrous and massive was approaching, and everything trembled before it. Its weight might cause a cave-in, burying her and the whippet. Doubtless the giant, or whatever it was, intended to do just that. In an agony of effort Ashalind heaved herself up, slid down, tried again, and finally inched herself up over the edge of the shaft. As she crawled up and over, on her elbows, her face level with the dog’s muzzle, she saw it wag its tail with delight to see her safe.

‘No!’ she mouthed in helpless exhaustion. The animal trotted toward her.

‘No, no!’ she tried to scream; but no words came from her wight-whipped throat, and, unchastized, the white whippet licked her face in innocent and loving greeting—the kiss of the Erith-born.

Acknowledgments

Yallery Brown: The tale of Yallery Brown is inspired by an article in ‘Legends of the Cars’, by Mrs Balfour. Folk-Lore 11, 1891.

McKeightley and the Antlered One: Inspired by The Devil at Ightfield’, collected in English Legends by Henry Bett, Batsford, London, 1952. This traditional tale has many variants.

Perdret Olvath: Inspired by ‘The Fairy Widower’, from Popular Romances of the West of England, by Robert Hunt. London, 1865.

Eilian: Inspired by a traditional tale collected in Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx, (vol. 1) collected by John Rhys. Oxford University Press, 1901. Also inspired by an account of a Faêrie Rade in Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, collected by R. H. Cromek. Cadell & Davies, London, 1810.

The Midwife and the Faêran: Inspired by a tale in Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx (vol. 1) collected by John Rhys. Oxford University Press, 1901.

The Stolen Child: Inspired by the old folktale ‘The Stanhope Fairies’, collected in Folk-Tales of the North Country, by F. Grice. Nelson, London and Edinburgh, 1944.

Lake Coumluch: Inspired by the traditional tale ‘The World Below the Water’, collected in Legendary Stories of Wales, by E. M. Wilkie. George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., London, Bombay, Sydney, 1934.

Meroudys and Orfeo: Inspired by MS. Ashmole 61, reproduced in Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, by Halliwell, reprinted by W. C. Hazlitt in Fairy Tales, Legends and Romances Illustrating Shakespeare, 1875.

The Enchanted Knight: Inspired by a traditional ballad recorded in No. 39a, The English & Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by F. J. Child. The Folklore Press in Association with the Pagent Book Co., New York, 1957.

Bevan Shaw and the Mermaid: Inspired by ‘The Mermaid of Gob-Ny-Ooyl’, a folktale collected by Sophia Morrison for Manx Fairy Tales. Nutt, London, 1911.

Vinegar Tom: Inspired by a folktale collected by the late Ruth Tongue and reproduced in County Folklore VIII, Somerset Folklore. Folklore Society, 1965. The rhyme is a traditional quotation.

Liban: Inspired by the folktale ‘The Sea-Morgan’s Baby’, collected by the late Ruth Tongue for her book Forgotten Folk-Tales, 1970.

Evan Sayle and the Mermaid: Inspired by the folktale ‘John Reid and the Mermaid’, in Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland. Hugh Miller, Edinburgh, 1872.

Scoom Weel Your Fish: Inspired by and partially quoted from the folktale ‘The Mermaid Released’, County Folklore III, Orkney and Shetland Islands. Edited by G. K. Black. Folklore Society, 1903.

The Piper and the Rats: Inspired by ‘The Pied Piper’, Joseph Jacobs ‘More English Fairytales’, 1894.

Lutey and the Mermaid: Inspired by a folktale collected in Traditional and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, 1st series. William Bottrell, Penzance, 1870.

Lazy Molly: Inspired by a folktale collected in A Book of Folklore, by Sabine Baring-Gould. Collins, London, n.d.

The Swanmaiden: Inspired by ‘The Fairy Maiden’, a traditional tale collected in Legendary Stories of Wales, by E. M. Wilkie. George Harrap & Co., 1934.

The Guardian Black Dog: Inspired by a passage in My Solitary Life, p. 188, by Augustus Hare, n.d., n.p.

The Unseelie Black Dog: Inspired by the traditional tale ‘The Mauthe Doog of Peel Castle’, collected in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, with notes and introduction by Sir Walter Scott. Edited by T. F. Henderson. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1932.

The Battle of Evernight

Book Three of the Bitterbynde Trilogy

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

THE STORY SO FAR

This is the third book in The Bitterbynde trilogy. Book I, The Ill Made Mute, told of a mute, scarred amnesiac who led a life of drudgery in Isse Tower, a House of the Stormriders. Stormriders, otherwise known as Relayers, are messengers of high status. They ‘ride sky’ on winged steeds called eotaurs, and their many towers are strewn across the empire of Erith, in the world called Aia.

Sildron, the most valuable of metals in this empire, has the property of repelling the ground, thus providing any object with lift. This metal is used to make the shoes of the Skyhorses and in the building of Windships to sail the skies. Only the metal andalum can nullify the effect of sildron.

Erith is randomly visited by a strange phenomenon known as ‘the shang’, or ‘the unstorm’; a shadowy, charged wind that brought a dim ringing of bells and a sudden springing of tiny points of coloured light. When this anomaly sweeps over the land, humans have to cover their heads with their taltries—hoods lined with a mesh of a third metal, talium. Talium prevents human passions from spilling out through the skull. At times of the unstorm, this is important, because the shang has the ability to catch and replay human dramas. Its presence engenders ‘tableaux’, which are ghostly impressions of past moments of intense passion, played over repeatedly until, over centuries, they fade.

The world outside Isse Tower is populated not only by mortals but also by immortal creatures called eldritch wights—incarnations wielding the power of gramarye. Some are seelie, benevolent towards mankind, while others are unseelie and dangerous.

The drudge escaped from Isse Tower and set out to seek a name, a past and a cure for the facial deformities. Befriended by an Ertish adventurer named Sianadh, who named her ‘Imrhien’, she learned that her yellow hair indicated she came of the blood of the Talith people, a once-great race that had dwindled to the brink of extinction. Together, the pair sought and found a treasure-trove in a cave under a remote place called Waterstair. Taking some of the money and valuables with them, they journeyed to the city of Gilvaris Tarv. There they were sheltered by Sianadh’s sister, the carlin Ethlinn, who had three children: Diarmid, Liam and Muirne. A city wizard, Korguth, tried unsuccessfully to heal Imrhien’s deformities. To Sianadh’s rage, the wizard’s incompetent meddling left her worse off than before. Later, in the marketplace, Imrhien bought freedom for a seelie waterhorse. Her golden hair was accidentally revealed for an instant, attracting a disturbing glance from a suspicious-looking passer-by.

After Sianadh had departed from the city, bent on retrieving more riches from Waterstair, Imrhien and Muirne were taken prisoner by a band of villians led by a man named Scalzo. Upon their rescue they learned of the deaths of Liam and Sianadh. Scalzo and his henchmen were to blame.

Imrhien promised Ethlinn she would reveal the location of Waterstair’s treasure only to the King-Emperor. With this intention, she joined Muirne and Diarmid, and travelled to distant Caermelor, the Royal City. Along their way through a wilderness of peril and beauty, Imrhien and Diarmid accidentally became separated from their fellow travellers, including Muirne. Later they met Thorn, a handsome ranger of the Dainnan knighthood whose courage and skill were matchless, and Imrhien fell victim to love.

After many adventures, followed by a sojourn in Rosedale with Silken Janet and her father, these three wanderers rediscovered Muirne, safe and well. Muirne departed with her brother Diarmid to join the King-Emperor’s armed forces. Recruits were in demand, because rebel barbarians and unseelie wights were mustering in the northern land of Namarre, and it seemed war was brewing in Erith.

Imrhien’s goal was to seek a cure from the one-eyed carlin, Maeve, before continuing on to Caermelor. At her final parting from Thorn she was distraught. To her amazement, he kissed her at the last moment.

At last, in the village of White Down Rory, Imrhien’s facial disfigurements were healed. With the cure, she regained the power of speech.

Two of her goals had been achieved. She now had a name and a face, but still, no memory of her past.

At the opening of Book II, The Lady of the Sorrows, Imrhien realised that Maeve’s cottage was being watched and decided to leave secretly, in disguise. With black-dyed hair, gorgeous new clothes, a fake identity and a new name—Lady Rohain Tarrenys of the Sorrow Islands—Imrhien arrived at Caermelor Palace.

There she informed Duke of Roxburgh, Tamlain Conmor, and the Royal Bard, Thomas Rhymer, of the treasure under Waterstair. The magnificent trove became the property of the Crown and Rohain was richly rewarded for her part in its discovery. She was given jewels, an estate, the title of ‘Baroness’ and the services of a maid named Viviana Wellesley.

Rohain had to remain at Court until she gained an audience with the King-Emperor. The sovereign, however, was busy with preparations for conflict with the barbarian rebels of northern Namarre. Serious trouble was brewing there, and it was feared that the Empire itself was in danger of being attacked and overrun.

The maidservant Viviana turned out to be a friend and ally, and Thomas Rhymer and the wife of Tamlain Conmor, Alys, watched over Rohain. They told her tales of the Faêran, the race of powerful immortals who long ago used to walk the lands of Erith. Another courtier, Dianella, the niece of the Royal Wizard, Sargoth, also appeared to befriend the newcomer.

To Rohain’s delight, she discovered that her friend Sianadh had escaped death. She told him about her amnesia, and he advocated returning to Isse Tower in a bid to find out more about her origins. But spiteful Dianella discovered Rohain’s identity was faked, and told her to abandon her wealth and leave Court forever, or face the broadcasting of her duplicity. Taking Sianadh’s advice, Rohain departed for Isse Tower, accompanied by Viviana.

At the Seventh House of the Stormriders, all that Rohain could learn was that the deformed servant she had once been was found near Huntingtowers, a frightening place inhabited by the Wild Hunt. Rohain set out for Huntingtowers, but her journey was cut short. On returning to Isse Tower, she was reunited with Thorn, only to discover that he in truth held a higher status than she could have imagined.

She returned to Caermelor Palace at Thorn’s side. Fearful lest her cup of happiness should break, Rohain concealed from him the fact that she had no memory of her past life before Isse Tower. When her lover had to depart for the conflict in the north, he left her in the safest possible place—the Royal Isle of Tamhania. Before they parted, he gave her a golden leaf-ring as a token.

Tamhania was guarded by enchantments that made it inviolable to unseelie forces. During a violent storm Rohain was tricked into kindling the great Beacon that opened safe passage into the harbour. She unwittingly allowed unseelie entities to breach the security of the island. Soon afterwards, the destruction of Tamhania commenced, and Rohain fled over the sea with her friends. Many boats were lost: the rest were torn from one another.

Rohain found herself washed up on a remote shore not far from Huntingtowers, along with Viviana and young Caitri. Knowing she faced great peril, Rohain decided to assume yet another identity, and took the name ‘Tahquil’. Using boiled tree-bark, Viviana dyed Tahquil’s hair brown. Through the cindery air, still filled with the ashes of Tamhania’s volcanic destruction, the companions travelled to the caldera of Huntingtowers. On the outskirts of the caldera, Tahquil found a gold bracelet. The sight of it triggered memories …

She recalled a time long past, in the land of Avlantia, when the city of Hythe Mellyn had been purged of a plague of rats by a mysterious Piper, who had snared the rodents with his enchanting music. The city had not paid the Piper his due, so in return he stole away the children of Hythe Mellyn, leading them under Hob’s Hill.

One child alone had not answered the Piper’s call. Ashalind na Pendran had had an injured leg and had been unable to follow. As she grew up in the city of sorrow, she sought constantly for a way into the Piper’s realm. Easgathair, one of the Faêran—the immortal race who walked of yore in Erith—took pity on her, and described a way to penetrate Hob’s Hill. Once inside, Ashalind was brought before the Crown Prince of the Faêran, Morragan, the Raven Prince. Clever Ashalind was able to answer three questions with which the Prince challenged her. In return, he permitted the children to return to the world of mortals.

However, the relinquished children began to pine and languish. A profound longing for the Fair Realm had gripped them, a deadly yearning known as the Langothe. The wizards of Avlantia declared that there was no known cure. In desperation, Ashalind called on Easgathair to allow the children to pass back into the Fair Realm, this time with their families, so that the longing would leave them, allowing them to survive. Easgathair granted her request. He also announced that the Gates between the Realm of the Faêran and the lands of mortals would soon close forever.

On the Day of the Closing, the citizens of Hythe Mellyn deserted their homes and rode into the Fair Realm. Just before the Gates swung shut, Ashalind discovered that there was in fact a cure for the Langothe, of which the wizards had been unaware. She decided to return to Erith. Due to a last-minute skirmish between Prince Morragan and his brother Angavar, both members of the Faêran Royal Family were locked out of the Fair Realm along with their respective retinues. They were forever exiled to the world of mortals. However, Ashalind had already slipped into a traverse that was known as the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss because of the condition, or bitterbynde, it imposed on all who entered it.

By the time she-of-many-names emerged, a millennium had elapsed in Erith. Through many trials she managed to make her way to Huntingtowers, where, on the haunted slopes of the caldera, she lost her golden hair, her voice and her memories.

The Gate’s bitterbynde had come upon her.

1

KHAZATHDAUR

The Masts of Shadow

Pale rings of smoke come floating through the trees,

Clear voices thread like silver on the breeze,

And as I look towards the west I grieve,

For in my heart, I’m crying out to leave.

MADE BY LLEWELL, SONGMAKER OF AURALONDE

The rain was without beginning and without end. It pattered on incessantly, a drumming of impatient fingers. There was only the sound of the rain and the rasp of breathing while the girl in the cave, mute, amnesiac, shorn, and wasted, crawled away from the brink of the mine-shaft.

She was alone, with no concept of her own identity, no memory of how she had come to this place. In subterranean darkness she moved sightlessly, until, reaching a small opening, she tumbled out among javelins of rain. Over levels of harsh stone and through dripping claws of vegetation she drove herself on limbs emaciated by weeks of the Langothe, days of starvation in the wilderness and lack of appetite for the food of Erith after the sight and fragrance of Faêran fare. Sometimes she slept momentarily, or perhaps lost consciousness.

Pleasantly, even the Langothe had been forgotten, then.

With stiffening limbs she moved slowly through the mud and wet stone of the abandoned mines, oblivious of their beauties or horrors, blind to obstacles that tore at her. Reaching level ground, she rose onto trembling legs and walked, an action her limbs seemed to remember by some instinct of their own.

The little dog was gone. The girl had lain a long time underground after the cave-in, at whiles licking at water droplets that oozed from the rock. Buried alive, she was presumed dead. The Hunt had been abandoned because the hunters had not known who she was, believing her to be merely some foolish spy, some unlucky wanderer or thief, now punished by death beneath the rock fall. Yet, she had survived, whether due to the Lady Nimriel’s mysterious gift or some inherent strength, or something else, unfathomable.

The ground had emptied from beneath her feet. She hurtled downward, to be brought up on a spear-point of agony. Her bracelet had snagged on a dead twig. She released the catch and fell into a thicket of Hedera paradoxis.

Hours passed.

Later, lying ivy-poisoned by the roadside, the shorn-haired waif in tattered masculine attire had been discovered by a passing carter. He had stolen her Faêran cloak and delivered her into the hands of Grethet.

Much had happened since then …

Now, as memories flooded back like sap rising in Spring, a strange euphoria blossomed within the damsel lying in a semi-trance beneath the night-bound woods near Huntingtowers. The experience of recall imbued her with power. She felt like a winged being looking down on the world from an impossible height, while a light of glory crayoned her pinions in gold. So expanded was she in this virtual form that if she held out her hand she could cup the rain. Clouds brushed her cheek with cold dew, and should she raise her arms she could catch the sun like a golden ball. Mankind moved like beetles around her feet, and nothing could touch her. She had endured it all and been borne through, shining. She was winning.

So far.

Her shoulder hurt. It was being shaken in an iron claw. Her entire body quaked. She thrust off the claw, uttering an inarticulate groan.

‘Rohain! Mistress!’ Hazel eyes in a rounded, dimpled face appeared, framed by bobbing yellow curls with brown roots.

Sitting up, the dreamer took a swig from the water-bottle. Like any warrior, she rinsed her mouth and spat, then wiped her lips on her bloodstained sleeve.

‘Via, I told you not to call me that. And cut your fingernails.’ She rubbed her shoulder. ‘Are we alive?’

‘Yes, all three. You saved us.’

‘I would like to agree, but I have this ornament on my finger which is responsible for our current state of health.’ The speaker’s hands wandered up to her face, lightly touching the forehead, the nose, the chin. She examined a strand of dark hair. ‘Am I as I was? Am I ugly or beautiful? Boy or girl?’

Viviana and Caitri exchanged meaningful looks.

‘Your experience at Huntingtowers has unsettled you—er, Tahquil,’ said Caitri. ‘Come, let us help you to your feet. We must get away from here. We are still too close to that place.’

As they stood up, the one they called Tahquil swayed, clutching at her heart. Leaning against a linden tree she closed her eyes and grimaced.

‘Zooks, ma’am, what is amiss?’ asked Viviana, full of concern.

‘Ah, no, it cannot be. Alas, it has me in its grip again. This, then, is the price.’

‘What has you in its grip?’

‘The Langothe. There’s no salve for it.’ The sufferer gulped down her pain. ‘Let us go on.’

I must endure the unendurable.

She wondered how long it would take to destroy her.

It was the second of Duileagmis, the Leafmonth, viminal last month of Spring. In the woods, every leaf was a perfect spearblade chipped from lucent emerald, fresh from the bud. As yet the new foliage was unbitten by insect, unparched by wind, untorn by rain.

The travellers walked through a glade striped with slender silver-paper poles marked at spaced intervals with darker notches that accentuated the clean, smooth paleness of the bark. The tops of the poles were lost overhead in a yellow-stippled haze of tenderest green.

The damsel called Tahquil twisted the golden leaf-circle on her finger. Her thoughts fled to he who had bestowed it upon her. I miss thee. I have come full circle. Here I am once more. And thee, my love, shall I ever see thee again?

The damsel, Tahquil. Her insides ached. Yearning chewed at them.

Thus she thought: I am more than a thousand years old. I am Ashalind na Pendran, Lady of the Circle. I come from a time before the shang, before Windships and sildron. The kingdom of my birth has crumbled to nothing. One of the most powerful Faêran in Aia pursues me—but why? Is it simply because I committed the crime of eavesdropping and survived his vengeance, or does he guess I have found a way back to the Realm? Is he after my life or my knowledge? And all the while the other powerful Faêran, his royal brother, sleeps forever amongst a great company of knights beneath some unmarked hill.

One Gate to Faêrie remains passable: the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss. Only I may open it, only I might recognise it, if I could recall. But the past has returned imperfectly to me. The most important recollection of all, that of the Gate’s location, is still hidden in oblivion’s mists—mayhap ’tis hidden forever. Indeed, some other events surrounding my time in the Gate passage lack clarity.

If I could return to the Fair Realm with the Password ‘elindor,’ the Keys could be released from the Green Casket. All the Gates might be opened once more. The Faêran would be able to send a discreet messenger to where their High King lies—for surely they could guess where he would be, or find him by means of gramarye—to tell him to return in all haste and secrecy to the Realm. Yet, if the Raven Prince discovers that the Gates are open and enters the Fair Realm before his brother, he might use his second boon to close them again and condemn the High King to continuing, everlasting exile.

Back and forth shuttle my thoughts, my confusion. This is like playing a game of Kings-and-Queens: if this, then thus, but if that, then the other.

Nonetheless, many matters are now clarified. Now I understand truly who it is that hunts at my heels—it is not the Antlered One, after all. Huon is only one of Morragan’s minions. Huon’s powers are naught by comparison with his master’s. Now I understand whose henchman noticed my Talith hair in the marketplace of Gilvaris Tarv, and who lost track of me after the attack on the Road Caravan, and who found me again when Dianella and Sargoth betrayed me. I understand who it was that ordered the Wild Hunt to assail Isse Tower, who sent the Three Crows of War through the Rip of Tamhania. I know who pursues me with destruction wherever I may go: it is the Raven Lord, Morragan, Fithiach of Carnconnor, Crown Prince of Faêrie.

Sombrely, as she walked through the birch woods, the traveller with the dark-dyed hair and the festoons of thyme-leaves dwelled again on the moment she had first set eyes on that extraordinary individual in the Halls of Carnconnor under Hob’s Hill.

With eyes as grey as the cold southern seas, he was the most grave and comely of all the present company. Hair tumbled down in waves to his elbows, and it was the blue-black shade of a raven’s wing … he regarded her, but said nothing.

I dismiss that personage from my contemplation, she said to herself. He brings sorrow. The Faêran! I have met with them, spoken with them! Sorrow they bring to mortals but delight also, and they are so joyous and goodly to behold as I would not have believed possible. Again she caressed the golden ring on her finger, smiling sadly, her eyes misted with reflections. Indeed, had I not seen with my own eyes Thorn wielding cold iron in his very hand, I would have said he must be of Faêran blood. Beloved heartbreaker! I am fervently glad he is no Faêran—but I must banish thoughts of him now.

When I walked from the Geata Poeg na Déanainn, it was my thought to embark on a quest to restore the Faêran High King to his Realm. I wonder—how long had be reigned in the Fair Realm, the High King of all Immortals, bearded with his pride, swollen with power, overripe with glory in his failing years? For how many centuries did he sit upon his hoary throne in Faêrie, toying with the lives of mortals, before he met his own exile? And would it truly matter to me if this ancient King and his dormant warriors were to lie forever entombed under Erith’s eroding mountains?

She sighed. She already knew the answer.

Yes, it would matter. Those who sleep might waken, one day.

In this era, I have heard more tales of the Faêran than I knew in the past. Those tales have illustrated a race that is dazzling, but callous and cruel. Like all mortals I am drawn to them, but now that I recall history, my abhorrence is confirmed. I dislike the Faêran, almost as heartily as the Raven Prince hates mortalkind. I could not endure it if Faêran warriors should awaken and, undying, walk in my Erith. It is the fault of the Fair Ones and their quarrels, and their heartless laws, that I am here now in this perilous place, separated from those whom I love. I am fully aware of the trouble they may wreak, if they rouse from their enchanted sleep.

She who I once was, Ashalind of my memories—she loved them, the Faêran. I, her future incarnation, am wiser. Oh, they are beauteous, fascinating—it is impossible not to be attracted by them. But I, Tahquil-Rohain, loathe and fear their alien ways, their weird morality, their immutable laws, their arrogant use of power. ’Tis true that sometimes, when it suits them, they may behave with kindness, but the tales reveal them to be haughty, proud, contemptuous and cruel. They are users and punishers of my race. Rightly do folk name the Faêran ‘the Strangers’. Strange indeed are they; scorching flames of gramarye. They ought to be shut out of our world.

This is my conclusion: that the Sleepers must awaken and depart. They must go back to where they belong. Every Faêran now in Erith must be repatriated.

Yes indeed, if I can survive long enough, if the Langothe is not too swift in its deadly work, I shall go back to Arcdur and seek the Gate. Then I shall return through it to the Perilous Realm and use the Password to unlock their Casket of Keys so that the Faêran of the Realm may go forth and find the hill in Erith where their King sleeps. Some shall waken him and his noble company, and take them away. Others shall take away the beautiful Raven Prince who frets and rails so passionately against his exile. When they and all their shadowy, sparkling, fair and terrible kind are gone, then the Gates must truly be locked forever. I shall not rest until that is accomplished.

This is my predicament and my undertaking.

Coloured spindles of lupins, as high as a man’s knee, marched between the boles of the silver-birches. Each one flaunted a different hue, ranging from salmon, peach and apricot to mauve, maroon and lavender. Clusters of flower-turrets sprang from their own green coronas of frondescence. Now at the height of their blossoming they stood so erect, so tapered and symmetrical, each petal so crisp and painted and perfect, that they seemed artificial. Their petals brushed the garments of the travellers as they passed.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Caitri, not unreasonably.

‘Northeast. Then north.’ Nearer to Thorn, in fact. Yet never shall I seek thee my beloved, never shall I bring my hunters upon thee.

‘Did you find what you wanted at Huntingtowers?’

‘I did. Tonight, if we find a safe place to rest, I shall tell you everything.’

‘Tonight you shall sleep,’ admonished Viviana in a motherly manner, ‘since you did not do so last night. We thought you were in a trance. We believed you were bewitched.’

‘Why are we heading north?’ young Caitri wanted to know.

‘The region called Arcdur lies to the north. I must find something there—a Gate. The first time we see Stormriders overhead, you must wave them down and go with them, feigning that you have not seen me. You two have suffered enough. This new quest of mine is not for courtiers.’

‘Your words insult us,’ retorted Viviana.

‘I am sorry, but it is true.’

In silence they walked on.

‘We will not see Relayers,’ said Caitri, wise in the ways of Stormriders. ‘We are travelling far from the lands over which the Skyroads run, which are their usual routes. Besides, they have searched this coast already. They shall believe us lost, and they will not return.’

‘Is there any road to Arcdur from here?’ Viviana queried.

‘Not that I know of,’ replied the young girl. ‘The King’s High Way used to go there, but it has long since been swallowed by the forest, or fallen into the sea. I know only that Arcdur’s western shores lie along the north-west coast of Eldaraigne.’

‘Then we ought to keep to the sea’s margins,’ Viviana said. ‘If we keep the ocean to our left we will be sure to come to Arcdur eventually.’

‘It would be impossible,’ said Tahquil-Ashalind, once Rohain. ‘The cliffs along here are rugged, pierced by deep inlets thrusting far back into the land. Without a boat we cannot go that way.’

Viviana stopped beside some low tree ferns. She plucked out some whorls of fiddle-heads, tightly coiled, like pale green clockwork springs. Other greenery and assorted vegetation hung on lengths of twine from her waist, her shoulders and her elbows, obscuring the articles swinging and clanking from her chatelaine.

‘You have not eaten anything since the day before yesterday, auradonna,’ the courtier reminded Tahquil from behind her matted, bleached curls. ‘’Tis little wonder your belly pains you.’

The euphoria dissipated. Tahquil looked at the dead and wilting leaves she herself carried, and the dirty, worm-eaten tubers. A forgotten tendril of something akin to hunger stirred within her. One could not live on memories.

The three companions sat beneath the lissom poles of the birches and kindled a fire. Viviana unbound bunches of edible roots, seedpods and herbage.

‘Via has become adept at finding food,’ explained Caitri with a touch of reproach, ‘especially since you went off on your own. She’s remembered all you’ve taught us. She has an eye for it.’

‘Even courtiers can learn,’ said Viviana haughtily, ‘to be useful.’

‘Then let me teach you how to cook,’ offered Tahquil. It would be a distraction from the hurt within.

These wooded, gently undulating hills were named the Great Western Forest, but, more innocuous than a forest, they were actually one vast woodland of beech, budding birch, oak and rustling, new-leafed poplars, hung with leafy creepers. The trees were interspersed with brakes of hazel and wild currant bushes veiled with a diaphanous lace of blossoms. Rivulets chuckled through leafy dells. Bluebells sprang in a lapis lazuli haze, attractive and perilous.

Directed by a dim, smoke-bleared sun glimpsed through the woodland canopy, the travellers walked on through the reddish-brown smog of the day, and at evenfall, when weariness threatened to sweep Tahquil from her feet, they climbed to shelter in a huge and ivied weather-beech, pulling themselves up on vegetable cables to rest in a scoop at the junction of three great boughs.

Twittering like sparrows in the undergrowth and fallen leaves, a gaggle of small wights came tumbling and capering over the knotted roots below. They were grigs. No more than eight inches tall they stood, applecheeked, their eyes dark brown with no whites, their small mouths grinning. On their heads perched fungus-red caps, terminating in tasselled points. Their knee-breeches were bark-brown, their coats the fern-green traditionally worn by trooping wights. In this typical eldritch attire they performed cartwheels and other acrobatic feats which they apparently considered hilarious and which, in their audience’s opinion, were tediously uninspired.

‘I should like to throw something at the little uncouthants,’ said Viviana peevishly.

Nestling into the spoon of the tree, Tahquil slept. Oblivion descended, total again. She slumbered through the shang wind when it came, but Viviana, watching, pulled her mistress’s taltry over her head lest she dreamed. In the unstorm, the cindery air transmuted to minuscule sequins.

‘I shall have to inform her soon,’ said Caitri, meeting the courtier’s troubled gaze with a worried frown.

A putrid drizzle of stagnant daylight announced dawn, struggling to pierce Tamhania’s airborne, incinerated detritus that hung like cobwebs in the skies. Fine powderings of that dust were slowly settling everywhere—on landscape, garments, hair and flesh.

Stiff and sore, the travellers stretched their limbs.

‘By the powers!’ exclaimed Tahquil, snapping into wakefulness. ‘We’re lucky to be alive—we didn’t set a night watch!’

‘You did not,’ said Caitri primly, crushing stytchel-thyme leaves to release their pungent oils. ‘We did.’

Tahquil smiled through a layer of encrusted ash-mud. ‘It is well that I have you both with me.’

She rubbed more thyme leaves over her limbs and clothing, and they breakfasted on water. As she stoppered the water-bottle, Caitri looked up at her mistress. Her deep-lidded eyes seemed huge, liquid; her cheeks were paler than usual.

‘It is the season to endure,’ she murmured, obscurely.

‘What is it, child? Your eyes tell me a terrible tale. I recall, now, you have been trying for some while to impart some tidings to me. Suddenly I burn to know. This time you must out with it—for it is something that concerns me deeply, I feel.’

Caitri swallowed. ‘It is this. I should have told you earlier, but I could not. Even now—’

‘Go on! Give me the words, quickly, or I shall go mad with the waiting!’

‘The reprobate Sargoth, he who was once the Royal Wizard—’

‘What of him?’

‘He escaped from the palace dungeons and roams freely through Eldaraigne. He seeks you, and has sworn to take terrible vengeance upon you.’

The weather-beech stretched its arms upwards to the sombre sky. Talium-coloured butterflies puppeted through the leaves, like primrose petals on strings.

‘How do you know this, Caitri?’

‘I overheard, at Tana, the day after the last Watership came bearing news. It was too odious. I could not tell you, and besides, it was forbidden.’

‘Whom did you overhear?’

‘They were holding converse in the adjacent chamber, Prince Edward and the Duke of Ercildoune. I was arranging flowers in a vase for you—burnet roses, they were. I did not intend to listen. I could not help it—their words carried clearly. The Prince seemed agitated and sorrowful. He was saying that he wanted to leave the island, to go north to the war. He said he felt like a merlin in a cage, pent up, when what he wanted to do was to fly free to fight alongside the other warriors. He said it was not manly to hide on Tamhania when he should be on the battlefields slaying wights, his sword black and smoking with their blood. The Duke, he tried to persuade the Prince otherwise, saying he was too young yet for battle. The Prince replied that at the very least he should be scouring Eldaraigne for the escaped wizard, Sargoth, who by his tricks had slain the soldiers that pursued him, and who had vowed to do all in his power to bring about the downfall of the Lady Rohain, against whom he held a bitter grudge.’

Caitri was biting her lip, uneasy about conveying ill tidings. ‘And then the Duke, he told Prince Edward to hush, not to speak so loudly, for doubtless the wizard would soon be recaptured and it would not do to cause undue alarm by revealing this threat, which in fact was no threat at all, because my lady dwelt in security on the Royal Isle. And the Prince after a time, he said yes, he knew that. They did not say more, after.’

‘Are you certain of what you heard?’

‘Yes. There was no mistaking it. I am so sorry, but I thought it best to warn you …’

Tahquil-Rohain stared at the cinnamon rind of the weather-beech. A brightly enamelled ladybird walked across it, a tiny hemisphere of scarlet and black on barely perceptible feet. The fragile insect teetered along the edge of a crevasse in the bark.

‘Gramercie, Caitri,’ she said. ‘It is well done, to inform me that yet another enemy seeks my blood. Nay, I do not mock! I mean every syllable in earnest. Those who know their enemies are better prepared to defend themselves. The disagreeable Sargoth, wherever he might roam, shall not catch me unawares!’

But, having allowed recollections of Tamhania to return, Caitri was weeping now. ‘Poor Edward!’ she sobbed. ‘And dear Thomas!’ Her tears were a catalyst. Memories of all they had ever loved and lost sprang clearly to the forefront of the damsels’ minds. The impetus of Tamhania’s tragedy, postponed during their scramble for survival, now returned to them in full force. Together, embracing one another, the three of them wept inconsolably until no more tears would come.

As aftermath, a deep tranquillity pooled within them.

Ultimately, Tahquil swung out of the tree, scrambling down the woody creepers to the ground. She landed hard and did not glance up.

‘Come.’ Her throat rasped, irritated by volcanic fumes. ‘’Tis time we were away.’

Above the leaf canopy, rain clouds gathered. They let down their silver hair to wash away the grieving ash, the corrosives.

The next morning the air struck clear, wincing, sparkling like polished crystal.

Northeast they walked, keeping about two miles inland from the coastline. A northerly breeze brought the savage scent of the sea. The sounds of wights bubbled all around, especially at night: footsteps, rustlings, occasional bursts of manic laughter or screams, that sense of unseen presences that raised hairs, prickling, on the scalp, and choked the throat with a cold hand and hammered at the heart. Either their tilhals or the shining ring or good sense or luck or all four had, so far, kept safe this trio of inexperienced wayfarers.

From time to time, Caitri and Viviana continued to anoint Tahquil with oil of stytchel-thyme to prevent recognition by her scent, because there were, in the world, things that would not be barred by charms and good fortune. Tahquil showed her companions the gold enamelled bracelet and told them all that had returned to her as she sat in the shadow of the caldera. They were left awestruck.

‘After all that has transpired, my lady is in fact a lady,’ Viviana declared, with a courtier’s consciousness of rank. ‘A right rare one, if I may say so!’

‘How is it, my lady,’ wondered Caitri as they travelled, ‘that you are not dust? In the tales, when mortals return from spending many years in Faêrie, they crumble away after setting foot on Erithan soil.’

Ashes to dust. ‘I know not, unless it were part of the Lady Nimriel’s gift, or a property of the Gateway in whose shelter I spent a thousand years.’

‘But can you not remember the exact location of this Gateway?’

‘I cannot. Yet I think that if I set eyes on it I shall know it.’

‘To search for it—that is where we are going?’

‘Yes.’

‘But should we not instead seek out the King-Emperor so that you may inform him of all you have recalled?’ persisted the little girl. ‘For, if anyone can aid you in the hunt for this Gate, it is His Majesty! Why, with the Royal Attriod and all the Legions of Erith at his command, he could not fail!’

‘His hands are full enough with the conflict in the north,’ Tahquil said quickly. She paused, as if reconsidering, then added, ‘In all truth, I would fain keep my lord from this perilous business of Gates and Faêran princes and unseelie hunters. Already, he risks his life at the battlefield. I have no wish to bring further danger upon him.’

‘In my opinion,’ Caitri responded, choosing her words with tactful care, ‘a decision against taking your news to His Majesty is unwise. He is our powerful sovereign, and a Dainnan warrior beyond compare. Wizards throng to his summons. He governs great armies of bronze and iron. Does my lady truly believe such a one cannot defend himself against unseelie foes? I say he can—and he can facilitate your quest as well.’

‘I thank you for your outspokenness,’ Tahquil said with sincerity. ‘There is much in what you say.’

Additionally, she reflected wryly, between my love and myself, who are handfasted, there should be no secrets …

‘Surely it is our duty as citizens,’ interjected Viviana, ‘to acquaint our sovereign with the nature of the disquieting undercurrents that are stirring. Surely it is his right, as Erith’s monarch, to be able to name the enemies of the Empire.’

A look of pain twisted Tahquil’s features. Racked with indecision, she strode faster, her hands plucking at the air as if grasping for answers. Unable, for the nonce, to decide whether to let the arguments of her companions sway her, she permitted her thoughts to briefly stray.

Indeed, he does rule armies of bronze and iron, she mused. His own armour is wrought of polished steel, and had I not seen him wearing it, I would wonder—not for the first time—whether Faêran blood flowed in his veins. Yet the touch of cold iron to the Fair Ones is as the touch of flame to mortals. No Faêran lord or lady may brush so much as a fingertip against steel and not be tormented with agony beyond measure.

No, he is not of their race. It is my love for him that makes him seem more marvellous than other men. ‘Love is blind,’ they say; rather should they say, ‘Love makes heroes of ordinary fellows, princes of commoners, Faêran of mortalkind. In the eyes of all lovers the beloved transcends the mundane, forsakes all flaws and becomes supernatural.’

Besides, how could he be other than mortal? He is the King-Emperor, whose very birth was witnessed by the Lord High Chancellor, not to mention a multitude of midwives and carlins.

Abruptly, Tahquil slowed her pace and waited for the others to catch up.

‘Speed is imperative,’ she said resolutely. ‘If we go looking for His Majesty, much time will be lost. The sooner my plan is put into action, the sooner the Faêran will depart from Erith and leave us in peace. The more we dally, the greater chance Prince Morragan has to find the Gate before us!’

‘True enough!’ Caitri agreed.

Resignedly, Viviana shrugged. ‘Then so be it. Against my better judgement I follow.’

‘I do not compel you,’ Tahquil rebuked mildly.

The courtier smiled. ‘Well!’ With a flourish of her hand she indicated their wild and leafy surroundings. ‘Where else would I go?’

A rill fed a woodland pool; a dark-green stillness flooring a frog-hollow lapped in vernal shade. Here the travellers halted, warily, to bathe their hands and faces. They kept watch for signs of unseelie presences, wights of water, such as drowners, waterhorses or dripping fuaths. They dared not venture in, lest pallid hands should shoot forth from submerged lairs and seize them. Nothing untoward took place, save that as they left the pool Tahquil looked back and, in the shifting light and shade, thought she saw something sitting alone at the water’s edge, where only emptiness had sat alone before. Pulling her taltry well forward she urged her companions to hasten.

The jade-misted birch woodland gave way to groves of blossoming pear and almond, and now they walked beneath a sea of another kind: foaming acres of exuberant white petals in luxuriant profusion, an aerial wedding-world, zithering with bees.

‘The last remnants of an old orchard, perhaps,’ said Viviana. ‘Like Cinnarine. Oh, to see those lands in Spring.’

‘Cinnarine is too close to the battlefields for my liking,’ said Caitri.

The long, narrow, pointed spear-blades of almond leaves and the shorter, rounded, glossy discs of pear foliage still lay wrapped tightly inside their buds, on the point of unfolding. On boughs bereft of any greenery, only pristine clouds of starched blossom gathered, their white wax petals flawlessly formed. Nebulae of paper-white butterflies steamed among the flowers. Flocks of milky doves ascended and descended like snowy, burst pillows. Thistledown wafted like the ghosts of fallen stars.

The wanderers dined on chicory leaves and silver-weed roots. Contrarily, the astringent flavours evoked for Tahquil a contrasting picture of Oswyn’s honeyed pears poached in cardamom and anise sauce, and her almond bread, rolled into buttery crescents, last tasted a millennium ago though it seemed only a short span of time. Yet even the memories of these dainties could not put zest into her appetite, already dulled by the Langothe.

As the dusk chorus of birds had foretold, the sky bloomed like a grey-blue pearl, dim but faintly luminous. Treetops were suspended, dark against its satin. From the finest end of the finest overhanging bough, silhouetted, a tiny possum let itself down delicately, slowly, quietly, by its tail. Its hands grasped the twig below. It swung sideways and was gone.

That night, waiting for sleep, hammocked high in a natural web of ivy strung thickly between almond boughs, Tahquil lay and listened to the rustlings of the possums. As her eyes began to adjust to the moonlight, she became aware that she was staring at one of them, and it was looking back at her. She saw it, dark against the pale black sky. Its shy partner had dashed away in panic, crashing down into the ivy net. This one regarded her solemnly then unhurriedly melted into the night—a wild thing, courageous, inquisitive. Untouchable.

She fancied, for an instant, that if she did but turn her head she would find Thorn lying beside her. And so she did not turn her head, lest he was not.

Her companions slept soundly. Caitri’s triangular face, surrounded by its abundant cloud of wavy, brown hair, was at peace. Her thin, pale limbs sprawled among the leaves and her neat, bow-shaped mouth was relaxed, slightly open.

Next morning the companions journeyed on. On the other side of the snow-lace orchard the trees became sparser. The spaces between them allowed glimpses of a sky the pastel blue of a wild bird’s egg, striped with wind-raked ribbons of cloud. The orchard dwindled and dropped away altogether, giving way to rolling grasslands pricked with soft colours like a sprinkle of dyed sugar crystals.

These borderland tracts were like wild gardens, bursting with colour at the height of their flowering. The hard rain of Tamhania’s destruction had scarcely touched them. Deep bosks of rhododendrons filled them, and callistemons thrusting forth their startling scarlet bottlebrushes, and mauve magnolias, and brightbaubled hakeas. Towards the middle, the flower meadows were drowned in cataracts of wisteria, a profusion of purple tassels rich with heady scent, a rain of delicate flowerets hanging in chains and dripping with petals and bees.

The travellers gazed out across the meadows. To the north, a dark ribbon crossed the horizon from east to west. From this distance, it looked to be a sheer cliff wall or escarpment, or a front line of giant warriors standing elbow to elbow.

‘Ahead of us lies the mighty forest of Timbrilfin,’ said Tahquil, forcing her thoughts away from Thorn to recall the lessons in mapping she had learned as a child. ‘I have never come close to it, but in my time I learned of it and once, from a boat, I glimpsed the final reaches of its western arm. We are come to the Arven Meadows in the Marches of Timbrilfin.’

‘I have heard of a vast forest in these parts,’ said Viviana, ‘but I have not heard the name you call it by. I do not remember what I have heard it called; however, I think ’twas not so pleasant to the ear.’

‘Perhaps the name has changed over the years,’ suggested Caitri.

‘Many things alter, over time,’ said Tahquil. The forest itself may not be the same.’

‘I do not want to enter it,’ said Viviana. ‘It looks dark and eldritch, even at this distance.’

‘That’s as may be,’ replied Tahquil, ‘nevertheless we must go through, for there is no way around. Or if there is, it would take us many leagues out of our way, for the forest stretches right across the west to the rocky cliffs of the coast, and equally afar into the east.’

‘In your time perhaps,’ said Viviana, ‘yet its mightiness may well have dwindled these thousand years.’

‘Think you?’ asked Tahquil. ‘I see no end to it at either side.’

After carefully scanning the dark line across the horizon, the courtier had to agree.

Lumpy with bundles, the travellers made their way through the flowers. To a casual observer they might have looked like three taltried peasants in stout boots, the leader tall and slender with greasy brown locks overshadowing the face, the second shorter and plumper with straw-coloured curls straggling from beneath the hood, the last small and slight with hair combed neatly back from a clean-boned child’s face. Thigh-deep they waded in a rainbow of tulip goblets, silk-petticoated peony and ranunculus, long perfumed trumpets of daffodils and bonnets of freesia, hyacinth’s grapes and bells, the earnest blue lace of love-in-the-mist, the innocent faces of primula and the filaments of crocuses dusted with saffron powders. Knee-deep the travellers splashed through little boggy streams or wandered amid armies of flag-lilies waving like proudly borne standards—a blaze of amethyst banners tongued with yellow flame. At nights they looked for islets or forks in these rivulets, sleeping between two arms of running water so as to be safe, at least from minor wights.

For this land was riddled with eldritch manifestations.

When the evenings drew in, humpbacked, small, bogle-like mannikins with beady eyes and snouty, wicked faces would cavort among the flower stems. They pelted the travellers with tiny stones, hurling abuse in high-pitched voices. They turned somersaults, rolling themselves into balls, and as they rolled along they were no longer mannikins but hedgehogs which uncurled before snuffling out of sight. The flowers swished as though invisible legs stalked through the Arven Meadows.

The urchens were annoying and their aim was accurate, the cause of painful bruising and cuts. It seemed that the more their three victims shouted, waved their arms and tried to chase them off, the more the urchens delighted in inflicting torment. Guffawing with derision, they pitched more stones and wheeled away.

‘Leave off,’ Tahquil said to her friends at last. ‘Attention only encourages them. Ignore their pranks and perhaps they’ll grow bored.’

Eventually the wights moved off.

‘Beastly urchens, giving hedgehogs a bad name,’ said Caitri, wiping blood from her cheek where a sharp stone had gashed it. ‘It must be centuries since mortals have passed this way for them to harass.’

‘I don’t suppose they have much else to think about,’ said Viviana.

‘I don’t suppose they have much to think with,’ said Caitri scornfully.

The urchens returned on one or two other occasions, in case the travellers should languish for spiteful company.

‘Where do they find all those pebbles?’ pondered Viviana.

Stars hung overhead like burning snowflakes.

One sunfall, while gathering dead twigs of rhododendron for kindling, Viviana screamed. Gibbering with terror, she came splashing across a beck to the island campsite. Snatching up knives and sticks, Tahquil and Caitri stood back to back with Viviana folded between, preparing to defend themselves.

‘Should something powerful come, we have no chance,’ murmured Caitri to Tahquil beneath Viviana’s hysterical, unintelligible gasps.

‘I know.’

They scrutinised the meadows. The flower heads nodded, skimmed by a zephyr and the enchanting flute-like calls of a pied butcherbird. The great, wild garden appeared guileless.

‘What saw you, Via?’ Tahquil asked without turning her head. Every nerve hummed like ship’s rigging in a sea storm.

‘It came at me. It had a face, like a man’s but shaggy, horned. It was naked from the waist up, ten feet tall with goats’ legs …’

‘Goats’ legs? Are you certain it was ten feet tall?’

‘Well, perhaps nine. Maybe eight. No less than five or four—’

‘An urisk.’

‘But you should have seen it! It was horrid!’

‘It sounds like an urisk, Via. Did it look like the marble figures supporting the Duke of Roxburgh’s mantelshelf in Caermelor Palace?’

‘Why yes indeed, it did resemble those, only—’

‘If it is an urisk you saw, we have nothing to fear.’

‘Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. But ’twas most fearsome.’

The Arven Meadows now lacked any sign of wights. As the travellers kindled their little fire, the book of night opened, upon whose dark pages were printed the runes of constellations spelling out a huge, slow language as old as evolution.

‘There are trows about,’ said Tahquil next day as they picked their way across the confetti-stippled uplands. ‘Each night I see them, moving under the starlight.’

‘The Grey Neighbours,’ said Viviana. ‘Harmless mostly, but vengeful if offended.’

‘In the Tower we never saw any wights at all,’ said Caitri. ‘Only if we returned late from gathering in the forest beyond the domains, someone might glimpse movement or the flash of eyes in the darkling, but not often. I heard only the tales.’

‘We had a bruney at Wytham,’ said Viviana. ‘He was called Billy Blind—a very reliable little domestic who kept the house spick and span. And I recall with pleasure my lady’s household wight at Arcune, which used to sing with us and swing on the pot-hook. But I’d never seen unseelie wights except from a distance,’ she shuddered, ‘until I met with hobyahs on the road to your Tower, Cait. That was a meeting I could well have done without.’

‘And now you have met an urisk,’ said Tahquil, ‘and what is more, I suspect this urisk is following us. Upon reflection, I believe it has been trailing us ever since we stopped to wash in that pool under the birch-woods.’

‘What might it be after?’ asked Viviana nervously.

‘That I cannot say.’

That night, Viviana unhooked her sewing implements from her chatelaine and stitched up a rent in the leg of her breeches. A watch was kept all night, but in the morning her silver thimble was missing.

‘I left it here by the fire,’ she exclaimed, ‘and now it is gone! Stolen.’

‘Trows,’ said Tahquil darkly. ‘They are silver-thieves.’ Fleetingly, a vision returned to her—a memory of a happier time spent amongst trows and henkies, when eldritch music played. They danced, then, the Dainnan and the girl—so close, so very close but never, ever touching. Neither did a lock of his hair flick her shoulder nor the hem of her dress brush against his boot, that was how precisely they danced. Later, looking back on this night, Imrhien could not clearly recall the slow beauty of the inhuman harmonies or her wonder at the clear eyes that smiled down on her, only the way the wind lifted his long, dark hair like spreading wings.

‘Guard well your chatelaine, Viviana,’ she said, thrusting aside the knife that twisted in the wound.

The courtier checked over the ornate clasp holding together the medley of chatelettes; the scissors, the manicure set, bodkin, spoon, vinaigrette, needle-case, the looking glass and spike-leaf strainer, the faulty timepiece, the workbox, the portrait and tilhals, the anlace, penknife, snuff-box and pencil.

‘This motley collection seems sorely out of place in the wilderness,’ she sighed.

‘It may yet come in useful,’ Tahquil assured her. She lay back to rest against dulcet grasses, and closed her eyes. Dimly, through sombre veils of yearning, the conversation of her companions drifted into her awareness.

‘Do you not long for home and hearth?’ Viviana softly quizzed the little girl.

‘I miss my mother,’ admitted Caitri, apparently surprised at the question, ‘but life in Isse Tower was disagreeable—never the life for me. Now I am bound to my lady’s service, and gladly do I follow her. This is the way I was taught. I follow, I serve, I learn. It is enough for me to walk outside the walls of the House of the Stormriders. Being content, I crave no more. And you?’

Viviana deliberated. ‘I am fearful of these wights that haunt our surrounds,’ she said eventually, ‘and I would wish we might find ourselves safe within walls.’

‘Walls may not guarantee safety, necessarily,’ Caitri reminded her.

‘Yet they appear secure, which is reassuring.’

‘Then, do you wish you might not accompany my lady on this quest?’

‘No, I do not wish that, but ’twould make my heart lighter were I convinced that our venture stands a good chance of success. I fear the dangerous regions lying across our path might ensnare us, and drag us to our doom.’

Next morning they journeyed on.

The land undulated in folds and banks and wooded shoulders from which toppled the pewter braids of rills. Ever as the travellers approached the thick, dark border of Timbrilfin, leaving at their backs the flowery lea, the outlying trees grew higher and stouter, closer together. For fourteen cool rain-misted days they trudged along, although there were no visible paths. Few words were exchanged between them. Food was scant, and they rationed themselves. Half a month had elapsed since they had left the slopes of the caldera, when they came under the forest fence.

The sun shone from the northwest, still making its annual zigzag journey to the southern tropic. Away from it fell the heavy shadow of the fence of trees, casting a chill, grey gloom all along the boundary.

A dim and mysterious place, it certainly felt eldritch.

There the travellers halted, tilting back their heads to look up. High above, the straight boles of massive autarken trees leaped a hundred and fifty feet up to a distant roof of leaves. In the spaces between these magnificent pillars dusk gathered—a hollow absence of light, a curdling of twilight.

‘Timbrilfin, Land of Mighty Trees, uninhabited by mortal men,’ said Tahquil aloud. Instantly she regretted having spoken. Caterpillars seemed to be crawling across her shoulders.

‘Something is listening,’ said Caitri, voicing the opinion of them all.

As one they turned and moved away. When they considered themselves out of earshot of whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the trees, they stopped to talk.

‘I had supposed that Timbrilfin would be like the fair Forest of Tiriendor,’ said Tahquil quietly, ‘but I was mistaken. Tiriendor possessed its dangers, but at least it was filled with light and air. Those overshadowed vaults ahead of us give out an ominous look. It may be that in the centuries since my time hosts of unseelie wights have gathered within those sunless arbours. Now horrors unguessed might well dwell therein. We are not Dainnan knights. The three of us, alone, are no match for any truly fell beings. It is unlikely we would pass unscathed through their domain.’

‘What is to be done?’ asked Viviana. ‘As you have said, to the west the forest meets the ocean, while to the east the trees stretch mile after mile. Are we to turn back at this barrier, after coming so far? Must we return to Court after all?’

A note of hope might have chimed in the courtier’s tone.

Tahquil chewed a stem of grass, squinting thoughtfully at the sky.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I need time to think and we should all rest awhile. That spring we passed not far from here, soaking out of the hillside—let us sojourn there.’

The spring was not much more than a boggy patch, vivid green, fringed with rushes and iris. Here, dragonflies of metallic emerald-gold or ruby iridescence froze in midair on almost-invisible wings of diaphane. Abruptly they froze in another place, kissing the reeds and the water. Midges droned, frogs creeked in the last of the butter-yellow afternoon light.

There the companions rested while the sun’s rays lengthened, reaching long warm fingers across the land. The fingers withdrew, clenching into a hot fist which punched out of sight behind the horizon. Further up the slope, the forest stretched taller, blacker, more menacing. Indeed, it seemed to have advanced a few yards down the hill towards them while the travellers were not attending. They fastened their eyes on it.

Dusk crept over the landscape.

A sad wind searched over the grass, in and out of the trees. Leaves moved with a soft fluttering sound which possibly included a light footfall.

Tahquil stood up.

‘Wight,’ she said loudly. ‘Urisk.’

There was no reply. The staccato dragonflies had vanished. All was still.

‘Urisk,’ she repeated, ‘show yourself.’

Viviana and Caitri sat utterly motionless, save that the lips of the former were moving in some kind of chant. Water waited, lurking darkly amongst plaited bog-grasses.

‘Obban tesh!’ muttered Tahquil. ‘How may I persuade?’

Viviana raised her head.

‘Urisk,’ she quavered helpfully, ‘pray come forth.’

An encouraging frou-frou rustled in a nearby clump of parallel, tasselled stems.

‘In the name,’ said Tahquil, ‘of the King-Emperor of Erith. In the name of Nimriel of the Lake and Easgathair of the Gates. May it please you, urisk, to appear!’

They stared at the clump of tasselled reeds. In a moment, Tahquil swung around. At their backs, woven into the gloaming, there existed a small dark-skinned chap with a pointy face which concluded, appropriately, in a goatee. Two stubby horns stood up from a nest of curly brown locks. Thick hair covered rounded haunches tapering to neat, cloven hooves. His waist was strung about with a belt of braided rushes, from which dangled a syrinx.

His voice hooted tragically, like wind whistling through hollow wood.

‘Duck,’ he honked.

Stones whizzed past their ears from the clump of reeds, followed by shouts of laughter. The urchens made off, leaving Tahquil daubing a fresh graze on her chin and Caitri massaging a sore elbow.

The urisk remained.

Tahquil cleared her throat. She thought, I have summoned a wight. I have invoked an eldritch thing. Such a summoning may be onerous, may become a burden to the summoner. It must be followed through rightly. What do I know of these goat-legged wights? They are seelie. Someone whose very name pierces my heart once told me that urisks crave human company, but their appearance frightens people. Should they be thanked or does thanks drive them away?

‘You honour us,’ she stammered. ‘We request your help.’

‘But,’ whistled the wight, ‘ye be afeard o’ me.’

‘Oh no, not at all,’ Viviana assured him, her eyes like saucers. ‘I am sorry I screamed in the rhododendrons. You took me by surprise, that is all.’

‘I’m accustomed tae it by noo,’ mourned the urisk. ‘Your kind want nae part o’ me since my ain hoose fell tae ruin.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said Tahquil, ‘now that we have invited you to converse with us, will you help us find a way through Timbrilfin?’

‘Och, I’ve nae heard the forest called by that name that this many a lang nicht,’ said the urisk squatting down on his hairy haunches. ‘That is an auld kenning, that is, from the nichts langsyne when the forest was young and Themselves that named it were wont t’ gae on their Rades or a-hunting through its green aisles. Green no mair are the lofty halls o’ Arda Musgarh Dubh, but grey as sowen-pats.’

‘Is that its title now?’ asked Tahquil, not attempting to pronounce it. ‘A formidable one!’

‘For a formidable wood,’ said the urisk. ‘’Tis the name my folk ken it by, one o’ many names. Bolr Sceadu the bogies call it; the Great Ones say Axis Umbru, while to the swans whose speech is still close to the Faêran, it is Urlarliath. But the Men of the Grey Glass Firth title it Khazathdaur, meaning the Masts of Shadow.’

‘Can you show us a safe path through?’

‘Och, that be axin somethin’, that be. Safe? There’s nae sich thing as safety for mortals in that kittle foggie roughness yonder. Ye dinna want tae gae in there, ye three lassies. ’Tis a muckle greet tree-tangle, that one. D’ye no’ ken what abides in its glaury lairs?’

They shook their heads.

‘Wicked things,’ said the urisk. ‘Powerful things. ’Tis ever dark and shadowy on the forest floor. The trees grow high and the leaves block out the sun’s rays, so the light o’ day never reaches doon there. ’Tis always twilight or black nicht, and in the shadows stalk unseelie sorts. Skrikers lurk there, and pixies that mislead travellers.’

‘I thought pixies were nice little wights, like fanes, but with wings,’ interposed Caitri.

‘Nae lass, not nice at all, pixies. With their wee lanthorns, they’ll lead mortals like ye intae bogs until ye stick fast in the muck and droon. They’ll feign voices and call ye frae up ahead until ye walk over a cliff. They’ll invite and draw ye from your road and lose ye in the wilderness.’

Tahquil interposed, ‘Skrikers and pixies are dangerous, but if one keeps one’s wits, one may confound these minor wights. Begging your pardon,’ she added, in case she had offended him.

‘Bide—I hae not told the worst o’ it. Hae ye no’ heard o’ Grim?’

‘Many tales tell of him,’ said Viviana, shuddering. ‘A shape-shifter he, and a stealer of merriment.’

‘Aye, a shape-shifter who has taken to haunting the tall timbers o’ Arda Musgarh Dubh. And Black Annis, she dwells there too, the hag o’ cats, the eater of mortal children. And speaking o’ cats, grey malkins hunt through the forest as weel.’

The travellers glanced at each other. No charm would fend off grey malkins, for those were lorraly beasts—efficient, feline killers.

‘And if ye escape Grim and Black Annis with the malkins and the rimfire and the rest, ye may have tae deal with another which visits the dark floors of Arda—the Cearb himself.’

‘The Killing One?’ Tahquil asked, her mouth suddenly dry.

‘Aye.’

‘Then, is there no chance of crossing Khazathdaur safely without Windships or eotaurs?’ she asked.

‘Och, there might be a way,’ hooted the wight.

They looked at him expectantly but he spoke no more. Over his shoulder, the moon was rising, outlining his horned, disquietingly alien silhouette. Yet in the glimmer of night his face was gentle as he gazed at the small mirror on Viviana’s chatelaine, like a miniature moon at her waist.

‘I hae moved in the forest,’ he said at last, ‘and in its fringes, since I lost my hame in the braes o’ Ishkiliath, which Men call the Grey Glass Firth. I ken the ways o’ the forest, and I ken its kindreds, and I keep out o’ the way o’ most. But there’s a race o’ folk that lives high in the leaves, far frae the ground, and their paths hang in the air, up where the light sieves through. With their nets and their iron they keep themselves safe frae malkins and all. They might let ye use their roads, if I ax them.’

‘If they use iron, then surely these folk are not of eldritch.’

‘They be a mortal race but what kind I cannae say. This verra nicht I shall axe them, for ’tis kittle for ye here. There’s sonsy hurchins in them spretty bushes.’

‘Kittle?’

‘Dangerous.’

The urisk became part of the environment again.

‘Bide awee,’ his voice fluted back. But he was gone.

‘Can it be trusted?’ Viviana wanted to know.

The moon edged twenty-seven degrees higher. The three travellers sat beside the spring, maundering in and out of a light doze. Tahquil dreamed that the touch of the breeze on her cheek was Thorn’s breath. In the gathering dew frogs chanted monotonous lullabies, setting the brain buzzing with broken fragments of thought which subtly changed into incoherent half-dreams.

A sharp cry jolted Tahquil back to wakefulness. Viviana was on her feet, rummaging in the folds of her cloak, casting about.

‘Hens’ bells!’ she cried. ‘Stolen, right off the chain, my timepiece!’

Near the forest fence a leaden stirring could be detected.

‘There they are!’ shouted Viviana triumphantly. Trows—the thieves!’

She dashed forward before anyone could stop her. As her companions hurried after, a pale glow opened from Tahquil’s finger.

‘The ring warns. Something unseelie is near,’ Tahquil said urgently to Caitri. ‘Something worse than trows!’

They caught up with the courtier right under the overhang of Khazathdaur’s black boughs. Grey faces peered out from between the trunks just inside the forest, their large eyes baggy, their noses long, with rounded, drooping ends. The foremost of these was a small trow-wife wearing the traditional grey headscarf. In her hand she carried the silver timepiece, in its case inlaid with ivory and bronze. From the shadows the trows glared at the mortals. A hundred and forty-three feet above their heads, a leaf became detached and fell, eddying like a flake of soot in the moonlight.

‘Give it back, wretched wight,’ demanded Viviana angrily, holding out her palm. ’Tis mine. ’Tis all I have in this horrid wilderness. Give it back.’

The trow-wife made no reply. Somewhere, a fox barked, harsh and grating, not like a sound from a natural fox’s throat. The ring pulsed with a brighter light, like a warning.

Then the trows’ bulbous eyeballs bulged. The corners of their malleable mouths turned down in a strange reversed rictus and they all retreated further back into the shadows.

No!’ Viviana stepped forward. ‘You must not go—’

With a last grimace, the trows fled into the forest.

‘It takes more than the pulling of faces to frighten us,’ Viviana called determinedly after them.

‘Odd,’ said Caitri, ‘I could have sworn that they suddenly took fright.’

‘Yes, but not because of us—because of something coming behind us,’ said Tahquil, spinning on her heel.

It was moving—walking or gliding—tall and straight as a chimney. At first she could not make it out between the tree trunks on the lower slopes. Two triangles flapped—the corners of a long, black coat. Was it a man?

If it were, something was horribly wrong with his head.

Tahquil felt her insides turn to water. The ability to move drained from every limb. The head of this approaching man-thing was wrenched over to the left side, lying horizontal on the shoulder. It was twisted back in a position which would have been impossible unless the neck had been wrung. It was the head of a hanged man.

A mote of moonlight splashed down.

The skew-polled apparition glided on, reeling itself in unerringly on the thread of the travellers’ paralysis.

Then, a hooting: ‘’Tis Wryneck! Dinnae just stand there ye ninnies, run for yer lives!’

At this, the thread snapped. The supernormal energy of panic surged through their sinews. Released from the vice of terror the mortals took to their heels in the direction of the urisk’s call—‘This way, this way!’

As they ran into Khazathdaur’s submerged glades the autarken trees, like iron towers, closed in at their backs. They blotted out the moon.

The smell of fear was darkness. In the darkness there was no speed but instead a pressure, as though the hunted mortals ran futilely into a sponge. As if it had sensed a need for camouflage, the ring’s light had dimmed.

‘Over here! Over here!’ The urisk’s hooting was fainter now.

‘A trick,’ shrieked Viviana. ‘We’re being pixie-led.’

‘No!’ shouted Tahquil.

They swam through shadow paste. It blinded their eyes, stoppered their noses and mouths. It suffocated.

A horizontal beam of wood slammed against Tahquil’s face.

‘Climb!’ It was the reedy voice of the goat-wight.

Groping in the dark she found a series of slats in parallel—a ladder.

‘You first.’ Roughly she hauled on Caitri’s elbow and felt the little girl pass her, ascending energetically. The ladder wriggled like an eel.

‘Your turn, Via.’ The courtier needed no second urging. She swung up behind Caitri, then hesitated.

‘My lady—’

‘Go on, if you love life. It hunts after us yet!’

Indeed it did. Fungous parasitic growths on the ramrod tree boles gave off enough corpse-light to show a more intense black in the blackness—a chimney gliding nearer, swifter. With Viviana’s boots out of the way, Tahquil grabbed a rung, hoisted herself up, hung in space, scrabbling for a footing, booted a toehold and began to climb up the serpentine rails.

But too late.

An extrusion of darkness came forth; a long, hinged jaw. With one rapid movement Tahquil pulled out her knife, aimed and threw it. It hit its mark. The blade flared cobalt as the weapon vaporised, destroyed instantly. The enemy barely flinched, yet the attack had been enough to cause a hesitation, and in that instant Tahquil had climbed beyond the reach of that long, toothy jaw. Clambering on as fast as strength permitted, she unintentionally rammed her face up against Viviana’s boot heels.

‘Get up!’ she screamed. ‘It is still coming!’

Inexorably, the twisted head was moving up the ladder. Tahquil flung down a second knife. It blazed up like the first, obliterated. The pursuer’s hook-jaw reached for her ankles to pull her down.

A pipe tune puffed through the forest like smoke.

It stopped short, replaced by yelling:

‘Yer greet laithron doup, yer hawkie’s hurdies Wryneck, ye couldnae catch me if ye had wheels on.’

The insult was not stinging enough to provoke retaliation perhaps, but sufficient to bring on another pause. Additionally, the chimney-thing was tugged backwards by the power of its spoken name. In that instant of reprieve, Tahquil surged upward to find an astonishing emptiness on the ladder. Viviana’s boots were no longer there, but hands gripped Tahquil firmly under her armpits and heaved her up sideways, up and over onto a platform. With a rattling swish the ladder dropped, collapsing back to the forest floor, still bearing its singularly nightmarish burden.

Sucking in great draughts of air, the companions reclined with their backs to the tree-trunk, alone on the platform. Somewhere nearby a stream of gibberish broke out, burbled on for a while then bleated off into the distance.

It seemed that for the moment they had reached safety.

‘How did you cut down the ladder?’ gasped Tahquil.

‘We did not,’ panted Viviana. ‘Some things did. They were here with us but I had no chance to look at them. They helped us get off the ladder, then they dashed away.’

Their unidentified rescuers had apparently deserted them. Tahquil crawled to the side of the wooden floor. Savage spikes of iron protruded horizontally from its edge. Grasping one for security, she peered down through the gloom.

‘We’re only about twenty feet from the ground. That thing may be able to get up here, given time. We ought to climb higher.’

‘We have no choice,’ said Caitri, gazing at the overhead murk. Flush with the treetrunk, another ladder led upwards. Meanwhile, down on the leaf-mold, ill-boding footsteps went pad-padding purposefully.

‘Wryneck made only silence. Others are on the move down there,’ said Viviana, easing her bundles where the strings cut into her flesh. ‘The higher we go the better pleased I’ll be.’

But the aftermath of fear was enervation. They remained drooping against the treetrunk, procrastinating against further ascent, overcome by lethargy.

Not a lateral shoot, twig or limb branched out from these autarken pillars. They stretched sheer-sided from the ground to the canopy one hundred and fifty feet above. There they burst into multiple bifurcations, forming an interweaving grid, a huge, mottled ceiling whose girders supported a natural roof thatched with layer upon layer of leaves and other types of fruition. The canopy linked all the trees of the forest, yet up there the slender twigs were so fragile that only birds and the lightest arboreal creatures might cross it.

Heavy breathing and a kind of intermittent tearing effect erupted beneath the travellers’ feet. Between a pair of jutting iron spikes, two green flames were rapidly approaching. Beneath this pair of eyes, a snarl widened. Black lips everted on shiny red gums embedded with sickles of gleaming enamel.

Amazed at the previously unsuspected depths of their strength reserves, the mortals shinned up the next ladder. Before they had attained the platform above, a yowl of white rage seared their ears. Looking back they saw a massive paw, its talons unsheathed, swipe up over the edge of the recently vacated platform. Destructive, poison-coated needles of steel that could rip open a man’s belly with one clout now scored furrows across the planks, generating a chilling screech. The interstices between the spikes were too narrow—one of the claws, impaled, tore off. The woodwork shuddered from a mighty blow to its underside. Part of it gave way and tumbled slowly into the gulf, revealing the cat’s rabid maw, saliva-dripping fangs, flattened ears, slitted eyes and powerful, switching tail. The three birds it hunted did not wait to inspect it further. Reaching the precarious safety of the higher perch they pulled the ladder up after them.

By now, six or seven well-thewed felines were swarming up the surrounding trees. With an agility belied by their size, they leaped from trunk to trunk, twisting in midair to present themselves belly-first to their destinations, claws hooking deep into the bark as they closed on each tree stem. The forest giant supporting their human quarry stood somewhat apart from the rest—the space around it was just a little too extensive for the grey malkins to bridge it with their aerial manoeuvres. One, having hitched its way to a higher level than their platform, sprang out and across, performed the spine-wracking twist and, by inches, missed landing right beside them. It plummeted, contorting.

Their tree was protected from malkin attacks by its spiked platforms, its wide separation from sturdy outreaching boughs, and the provision of wide, rusty metal bands which clasped the circumference of its trunk at regularly spaced intervals. Claws could not penetrate these deflective bands. Higher climbed the fugitives now, forsaking the clamour of the frustrated hunters. Bundles and bottles banged between their shoulder blades. Every twenty or thirty feet the ladder passed through a cutout in a higher platform fastened against the huge trunk. Each time they reached such a haven, they rested a moment, gathering strength.

At last they could go no higher.

The reason for this was twofold: they had in truth exhausted themselves with their exertions, and there were no more ascending ladders. The light-emitting growths were sparser in these upper regions but a silver-of-blue tinge to the air hinted of moonlight behind foliage laminae. Some ropes, anchored to the tapering bole with hooks and pulleys, projected sideways in a graceful curve. Their opposite ends were lost to view. Hot and flushed, the travellers drank deeply from their water supply and sank down to wait out the night like a trio of wooden dolls, too alert for danger to fall comatose.

Tahquil laid her head against the tree bole and thought she heard the hydraulic pumping of green blood within that cortex as though it were the pulse beat of her own life. Her mind, as always, turned to Thorn.

From the moment she had first espied him beneath the trees of Tiriendor, the kernel of her thought had been always with him, so that at times she felt detached from the play of life, as though she were an onlooker viewing her physical surroundings from somewhere at his side. Since the Langothe’s return, another yearning had been added to love’s anguish, and now, faced with the possibility that they might never meet again, that somewhere in the world Thorn might be slain in battle and lost to her forever, the two agonies combined as one. She felt they hammered out her blood to thinness until it was but silverwater in her veins, and she with bones of crystal, so drained as to let the light through, was a wafer, a leaf of glass to be blown away in the bitter south wind.

Yet she clung on, as her hand clung to the ridged and whorled bark of the giant autarken—for within that crystal burned a poignant flame not yet extinguished by despair. Fancy bore her far from Khazathdaur and somewhere within her skull she stood in a starlit glade of Faêrie beside a tall knight. His dark head was crowned with sharp white stars like thorns.

Always, shadowing every word and deed, sweet sorrow and terrible longing desolate my heart.

Sounds carried long distances and rose up high, in Khazathdaur. From far below fountained a busy whirring as of spinning wheels in motion. This carried on for a while until, without warning, jolly music struck up as though a band of fiddlers and pipers played accompaniment to a rollicking peasant barn dance. Yet there was a queer element to it. It seemed only a copy, a hollow attempt to emulate the orchestrated merriment of such an occasion—even a parody. It stopped as suddenly as it had started, chopped off in the middle of a bar.

‘Sooth, this is no picnic,’ remarked Viviana. Her face, in the gloom, looked pallid as dead flesh.

The platform swayed ever so slightly with the slow dance of the tree. It moved in rhythm with winds far above, blowing among the massed leaves. The forest’s lullaby soothed the weary travellers into a slumber so profound that a slight creaking of ropes and a sigh of cloven air could not waken them.

Silver-of-blue diffused, becoming a dense green twilight. The morning sun filtered through translucent tiers, millions upon millions of leaves whispering and murmuring continuously. Khazathdaur could never be truly silent. Leaves rustled in upper winds that never seemed to ruffle the airs below the leaf canopy, bringing a sound like the sifting of fingers through a coffer full of tiny crystals. Hundreds of thousands of leaves glided slowly down as though threaded on invisible filaments.

In Tahquil’s breast the hard ache for the land beyond the stars drew salt water that quivered in her eyes, reflecting leaves.

By the morning light the travellers spied, on the platform’s opposite side, freshly heaped vegetation. There was a dazzle of white blossoms with luteous centres, and fruits like leathery gourds with skins striped and speckled in what might have been, in another light, shades of madder. There was a leafy bough from which some of the outer rind had been stripped, and three dried, hollow gourds filled with pure water, and a small woven-twig cage packed with spun-silk cocoons like bonbons, pastel pink, softest saffron, palest pearl. From the calyxes of both fruit and flower trailed long beards of cellulose fibres.

Out of the blossoms arose a honey fragrance so intense as to be almost intoxicating. The travellers discovered these nectar-brimming blooms could be eaten. The crisp autarken leaves proved edible also, tasting of sweet angelica. Slashed open, the fruits revealed dark red flesh like a wound—a meaty, palatable pulp. The bark’s inner cortex, when peeled away from the core, tasted like strips of chewy bread. Caitri slit open one of the long, oval cocoons. A pale, blind grub wriggled there, rearing its blunt head. Flinching, Caitri dropped it as if it had scalded her.

‘Oh, poor thing.’

Instantly remorseful, she scooped it back into the cage. They made no more attempts to dine on the cocoons.

‘’Tis a wonder they didn’t bring us dead birds,’ said Caitri.

‘Here no birds sing,’ said Tahquil. ‘Have you not missed them?’

‘Not I. I am sated on sweetmeats,’ said Viviana with her mouth full of honeyed blossom. ‘Who ever would have thought that one could eat flowers!’

‘We eat cauliflower,’ said Caitri. ‘At least, others do.’ She wrinkled her nose.

‘And Sugared violets, and rose petals,’ added Tahquil, biting a fruit.

Caitri looked up at the high canopy, dim and grey, sparsely raining leaves.

‘I see no such flowers or fruits as these within reach. I fancy they all sprout in the higher regions. I wonder how the Tree-Dwellers get them down.’

‘I cannot imagine,’ said Tahquil. ‘But I do imagine that the urisk asked those Tree-Dwellers to aid us by dropping one of their ladders. After all, it was his voice calling us and not some pixie counterfeit luring us into Khazathdaur to meet our doom.’

‘Yes, the little fellow proved trustworthy,’ said Viviana, ‘I’ll grant that. The trows unintentionally aided us also. If they had not stolen my chatelette we would have been still sitting beside the soak when that thing called Wryneck came upon us. He might have cut us off from the forest and the Tree-Dwellers’ assistance.’

They fell silent at the mention of this horror.

In the jade twilight the forest world was all perpendiculars tapering down to vanishing points in darkness far below; a vertiginous perspective. On the ground, peril waited. Overhead swayed slender boughs and twigs too fragile to bear the weight of anything heavier than a possum. To either side stretched reeling chasms of air so vast that merely to look into their depths was to feel oneself falling.

It seemed there was nowhere to go.

Tahquil examined the apparatus of ropes and pulleys tied to hooks nailed into the trunk.

‘These ropes are made of the fibres growing from the bases of the fruits and blossoms—strong, tough, coarse cordage, twisted together. Ropes would be useful in our situation. Perhaps we could manufacture some …’

‘We shall have no use for ropes or anything else if we remain perched up here forever,’ said Viviana. ‘I wish those Tree-Dwellers would return to help us.’

‘The urisk said they have highroads of their own up here,’ said Caitri, tracing the outward-leading cables with a forefinger. ‘I believe this is the beginning of one, and another leads out from one of the platforms below.’

Tahquil unhooked a thick rope tied in a massive knot near its free end.

‘The Tree-Dwellers’ gear is cleverly designed,’ she said, inspecting it. ‘Simple and effective. This is what I know as a flying fox. Pryderi used to have one rigged. It led from the balcony of his house to the bottom of the hill. He would let me ride it when I was a child—I liked to pretend I was flying. If my father had known he’d have had an apoplexy.’ She pulled hard on the rope to test it. ‘It is secured firmly. And see, by this mechanism this knotted ride rope can be pulled back to its starting position when the rider has disembarked at the other end.’

‘Yes, but where is the other end?’ pondered Caitri.

The cables swayed almost imperceptibly, pale lines passing into an indifferent gloom beyond which a jungle of tree pillars could be dimly glimpsed.

‘There is only one way to find out.’ Tahquil gave the ride rope one last tug.

‘I shall go first,’ she said. ‘If all’s well, I’ll send back something tied to the ride rope as a token—a bunch of these dried stytchelthyme sprigs, since it appears I am adorned with so many of them. This retrieval cord will follow me. It must be allowed to unroll freely as I go, and it must be coiled neatly when the ride rope is brought back, or the whole operation may fail. Should the retrieval cord snag and the flying fox be halted abruptly in midflight, the passenger would be flung off. There is no safety cord to hitch us on.’

‘You are not going to jump off this ledge on that contraption!’ Viviana cried. ‘What if you fall? ’Tis a long way down—I cannot even glance over the edge without feeling swoony.’

‘Take heart, Via,’ said Tahquil bracingly. ‘There’s nothing else for it.’

‘’Tis always the same saw,’ desponded Viviana. ‘There is no choice. Are we naught but flotsam on this quest, to be tossed about at the whim of contingencies not subject to our command? Methinks the only choice I have made so far was to accompany you, my lady, and yet even that was not a choice, for I could not in all conscience do otherwise.’

‘Speaking from experience,’ said Tahquil, ‘I would say that perhaps I have only ever made one true choice in my life and that everything else I have ever wrought has been a result of causes beyond my choosing. I searched for the stolen children for seven years but how could I not seek them? I entered the Fair Realm but how could I resist the chance to save them? I chose to leave the Fair Realm at the last moment but even then, if I examine my heart, I know I had to leave and in truth it was no choice. Perhaps you are right.’

‘True choices,’ said Caitri sagely, ‘are made all the time—the small decisions. If we have no say in where the road takes us, at least we can decide how to place our feet and what to look at along the way.’

‘The Duke of Ercildoune used to argue that we choose our own destinies—’ began Viviana.

‘This conversation is becoming too allegorical for me,’ Tahquil broke in, changing the subject. ‘When I reach the other end, I shall tug on this thick cable, the slide cable, three times. That will be the signal for you to start hauling. Fare thee well.’

Seizing the rope with both hands she swung forward. As she left the platform she tucked her feet up on top of the knot, wrapping herself around the thick ride rope. Over her head the pulley squealed, running along the main slide cable down into darkness and the unknown.

She rolled down the cable’s incline at exhilarating speed, her hair and taltry and cloak streaming out like banners. To either side the forest flashed by as though she flew along the middle of a columned canyon.

The cable stretched a long way, as far—it seemed—as Summer’s end.

At last the flying fox’s terminal rushed at her with alarming rapidity out of the gloaming—another platform on another tree. Just before the end station, the pulley reached its lowest point and turned uphill, slowing the headlong rush of the ride rope and its rider dangling underneath. Tahquil’s boots clipped the shelf’s edge. She yelped in pain, let go with one hand and was dragged unceremoniously onto the ledge by the ride rope before she remembered to release her grip. The pulley having reached the apogee of its swing, it lost the last remains of momentum and succumbed to gravity’s seduction. It reversed direction and slowly began to slide back down. Righting herself, Tahquil seized the rope just before it swung off the edge and out of reach. It would have pulled her over the edge with it, except she flung her weight backwards, hauled hard and quickly hooked it over a peg jutting from the trunk.

She found herself on the second highest platform of a tree which appeared identical to all the other trees in Khazathdaur. From the ledge directly below, the cables of a flying fox ran back towards the first tree. From the platform immediately above, a profusion of funicular cordage radiated in three other directions. This tree was an aerial crossroads.

Tying the sprig of dried thyme to the pulley she tugged three times on the slide cable, sending a quiver along its length. This cable was so thick and long that the quiver dissipated before reaching the end of the visible section. Vigorous repetition of the exercise was eventually answered by a sudden tension of the retrieval cord. Unhooking the pulley she hurled it forth and watched it disappear behind curtains of shadow. It occurred to her that she ought to have checked the upper platform for danger before sending for her friends. Now there was no time for it.

Presently, the slide cable tautened and began to hum. Out of the half-light hurtled Caitri. Like a fruit on a vine she was tightly clenched in around herself, eyes shut.

‘Open your eyes!’

The pulley slowed on its final short ascent. Caitri’s boots touched the stage. She released the rope too soon—borne forward by momentum she toppled over the further edge. Tahquil grabbed two handfuls of clothing and pulled her back with all the force she could rally and they both sat down hard, the ride rope pendulating about their ears.

‘Horns of the Ant!’ expostulated Caitri, white with shock.

They sent for Viviana who arrived with speed, propelled by proportionally greater inertia. Swinging her legs down, she alighted gracefully, as though well practised.

‘That was easier than I had expected.’

Her companions blinked at her.

‘Where to from here?’ Viviana asked. Oblivious of their astonishment at her natural prowess, she surveyed the forest. ‘From the platform above us, the highways lead in three different directions.’

‘North. We must ever go north,’ said Tahquil. ‘But as to which direction is which, I have no notion. I lost my bearings during the confusion of the flight from that lop-headed creature, and now the sun cannot push its beams through these leaves to show us its path.’

High up, a sweet, soft rain began falling in a long sigh, a gift of clear water to swell buds, soothe parched leaves and rinse the long green hair of the forest. No drops yet penetrated the canopy.

When the shower had passed, the companions climbed the spindly ladder to the higher platform.

‘See!’ said Caitri. ‘Flowers bedeck the anchor point of the central cable, and its carrier rope is here, too. The carriers are missing from the other two flying foxes.’

‘A clear directive. ’Tis obvious,’ said Tahquil grimly. ‘No matter which way is north, the Tree-Dwellers have indicated the path they wish us to follow. Let us hope they are as benevolent as the urisk has told.’

‘But we could use the retrieval cords to haul back the other ride ropes,’ suggested Caitri sensibly.

‘I have no wish to offend these forest denizens. We move within their domain—never forget it. Over us they have the power of life and death. We must bend to their will for now, yet remain wary.’

They negotiated the second flying fox in the same manner as the first. It brought them to a similar tree in similar surroundings.

‘This sameness proves irksome,’ said Viviana. ‘I feel as though we go nowhere, or in circles.’

‘’Tis impossible that we should be going in circles,’ declared Caitri. ‘Take note—we have travelled in a straight line, so far.’

As if to mock these words the next garlanded flying fox veered off on a diagonal, bringing them this time to a platform within view of other enshelfed autarkens which were strung together by rigging. As they went deeper into Khazathdaur repeating these flying performances, they became more adept at takeoffs and landings. Also, the number of rigged trees multiplied.

‘’Tis a veritable spider’s web,’ marvelled Viviana.

Having traversed about a dozen spans, each measuring a good forty yards, they stopped to rest on the subsequent platform. Their arms and legs ached with the unaccustomed strain of clinging tightly to the ride ropes, urged by the knowledge that no safety cord was attached. Nothing could rescue them from a certain fall, should their grip loosen.

In the gloom far off to the right, a geometry of long triangles could be discerned indistinctly. It appeared to be an interweaving of lines strung between the tree pylons at great height. Once or twice it seemed to the travellers, peering into the dimness, that small figures moved along these lines.

After reaching the next tree they looked across to discover that the distant webs had become more complex, and traffic on them had increased. Instead of a flying fox, suspension bridges led off from this platform. They were made of wooden slats tied across a pair of parallel cables, with a single handrail of rope. The entrances of two were barred with slender cords. Through the handrails of the third, nosegays of leaves had been stuck.

‘Upon my word,’ exclaimed Viviana, ‘this is more like it! I never thought I would joy in walking upon such a rickety affair, but after dangling from those fox ropes, this appears to be safety.’

‘Mayhap ’twill lead us to the Tree-Dwellers’ city,’ said Caitri, glancing to the right. ‘I’d as lief behold it, and them.’

To run the gamut of the suspension bridge was no mean feat, as it turned out. The whole creaking contrivance wriggled and shook like an angry watch-worm the instant the travellers set foot on it. Under the differing rhythms of their footsteps it bucked out of synchronisation and was as like as not to suddenly smack up jarringly at their boots as they put them down, or to drop away under their steps so that they stumbled. Haltingly they made their way, careful not to glance down. Between the slats a great nothingness opened to the forest floor, far below and dark-mantled. One single fortunate shaft of sunlight momentarily struck down like a gold pin through the bridge as they crossed, and the leaves continued to shower down all around, and the forest breathed uncountable sighs.

Now they could see, over to the right, what might have been a tree city. Amongst the long bridges and flying foxes and catwalks, the elevated walkways and flyovers, the autarkens supported wider, more solid platforms. Some of these were walled. Small dwellings perched there, built close against and around the tree boles. Small oblong windows and doors showed black against the grey of the structures, and a rumour came to the ears of the companions, almost below the reaches of hearing—voices on the static airs, and perhaps the sound of singing.

‘We are being led away from the tree city,’ sorrowed Caitri. ‘Why should they fear us?’

‘Or scorn us,’ said Viviana, ‘or be sending us astray.’

‘Why should they provide us with victuals only to lead us to ruin?’ Tahquil asked.

‘Perhaps they wanted to fatten us up for their larders,’ responded Viviana gloomily.

‘Methinks,’ said Caitri, ‘’tis neither scorn nor fear, but a desire for privacy tempered with goodwill. They wish to speed our passage, that we might not stumble into their midst and trouble the patterns of their lives.’

‘Scorn,’ repeated Viviana.

A loud screech made them all jump; the bridge heaved and undulated. From everywhere or nowhere resounded a guttural pronunciation:

‘I walk with the owl

And make many to cry

As loud as she doth hollow.’

Wings juddered forth like squeaking hinges. They flapped away, to be swallowed by darkness.

‘I thought there were no birds here,’ said Viviana.

‘That was no bird.’

Gingerly, with trembling knees, they set out to cross the next beflowered bridge.

It seemed that the day was closing. Pale grey leached to dark grey around and over and under the swaying, airy road. The wighting hours approached. Already, maniacal laughter tore through the trees, punctuated by simpering giggles and tortured groans.

Almost sumptuously, the next platform was surrounded by a low wall. It was laden with fruits, foliage, flowers and rain-filled gourds.

‘Here we may sleep without fear of falling,’ said Viviana gratefully.

They feasted, sipping a drop of the seemingly inexhaustible dragon’s blood as the evening drew chill. Taking turns to stand watch that night they saw, further off, tiny lights moving, up in the remote heights away to the right, which they had begun to call the east. The Tree-Dwellers’ city.

Closer at hand, the forest’s emanations were more eldritch. Sweet, wild music came spiralling on the cool draughts, a music that tugged at the heartstrings, its cadences evoking lost loves and lonely mountain urns in the moonlight. At the same time, way down below, something out of sight went clanking across the forest floor, shuffling, as if chained and gyved and fettered in iron.

In the pit of night the lights of the tree city blinked out, one by one. Silence settled in, except for the incessant susurration of leaves. Tahquil, who was on watch, remembered a place where harps and flutes resounded, and sweet voices sang—yet, trying to recapture the fleeting images of the Fair Realm was as hopeless as trying to hold water in a sieve, as vain as trying to fashion ropes from sand, as futile as reaping with a sickle of leather.

Tirnan Alainn—Faêrie.

How should I so love a place? she thought. A land of dream and legend, perhaps no more tangible than dreams and legends—a land which lies beyond the stars, and which is no more suited for my dwelling place than the sea is fit to be my abode. Why should I waste and weary and pine for a shining jewel that can never be grasped? Surely the rough homespun and coarse bread, yea, even the cool silks and Sugar-cakes of Erith ought to be enough for me. Yet, the Langothe overrides both my aversion to the Faêran and my love for my native land. It pulls the tide of my blood, and that I cannot change. Something in the very core of my being responds to its call—a recollection that seems to come from before my birth. It is like some powerful race-memory that awakens and reaches forth and, unavailing, mourns. For when I first set eyes on the Fair Realm, it seemed I had always known it. I recognised every tree and cloud, every lake and mountain as my heart’s desire. Now would I go thence, if I could, like a shotten arrow.

She wondered again how long it would take for the Langothe to claim her life. Some of the children of Hythe Mellyn had succumbed within weeks of their return to Erith. Others had lingered for months, slowly fading. She, Tahquil, endured constant pain, and victuals held no relish for her. Yet her strength had not yet waned. Perhaps it was some property of Thorn’s ring, or maybe part of the arcane gift Nimriel had bestowed on her in the Realm. Whatever the reason, the Langothe did not seem to be killing her as swiftly as she had expected.

On her finger, the gold ring tightened.

The sharp smack of a whip sliced the darkness. Tahquil peered over the edge of the stage, between the armouring of flabellate spikes. Shrunk by distance and lit by its own ghastly luminescence, a coach and four raced through the trees. The driver on the box wore a three-cornered hat and a short cape. What rode within the black coach Tahquil could not discern. The conveyance slowed to a halt and then rolled slightly backwards, in the manner of all wheeled vehicles finding their point of rest. In that similarity was the only commonality between the black equipage and more lorraly turnouts.

A door opened.

A boot weighed heavily on a step. A second dented the dank mold of the forest floor. Now a statue stood beside the coach. Motionless, the horses stood also, and the driver sat ramrod straight on the box. Then, as a sphere gyrates on a swivel, the statue’s head turned. One expected to hear the sound of machinery in motion.

Tahquil held her breath. Oddly, she could perceive all this quite clearly from her perch, even through the gloom. It was spread before her like a miniature scene, like clockwork figures on a table, lit by a soft, eerie radiance.

As silently as it had appeared, the sculpted form was gone. The coach rocked with the motion of a weight settling inside. The door closed, the horses moved off with an echoing clang of harness, and the whip’s crack shot upwards to explode beside Tahquil’s ears.

Whether this unseelie manifestation had been tracking her and her companions she could not say, but such a powerful wight, so close by, could hardly fail to pinpoint its prey. It might be supposed that, fortunately for the mortal damsels, the creature had been hunting something else; that it was not aware of mortal watchers close by, or even of their presence in the forest. Tahquil knew the carriage for the same vehicle she and Muirne had seen before the attack on Chambord’s Road-Caravan. She knew it now, with the certainty of recall, to be the coach of the Cearb, that unseelie slaughterer of Men and cattle they called the Killing One.

Day after day the three wayfarers travelled along the highroads of Khazathdaur, leaving behind the mysterious village or city of the Tree-Dwellers. Sturdy, numerous bridges leading to every quarter gave way to less numerous flying foxes. The arms and shoulders of the travellers ached from the tension of gripping ropes; their sinews transmuted themselves to agonised cables of steel.

When the shang came, the autarkens took on the mellow burnish of aged gilt; a sombre sheen like the last rich rays of vintage Summer lingering languidly on sated bronze. Every falling leaf became a spangle, each rope a chain of fireflies; the canopy turned into a shimmering galaxy of green-gold. The only tableau the travellers saw was of two children gathering flowers on the forest floor where no light-loving petals had bloomed for centuries, their images existing beyond harm there on the leaf carpet which now buried them to their waists. There was no other evidence of the psychic debris that haunted scenes of passion.

Each night the forest sprang to renewed vigour with queer sights and sounds. Far below, a heartbroken sobbing would start up like a millwheel, or weird, high singing would weave resonating glass rods through the forest, or eldritch knockings and tappings would echo through the lofty vaults, emanating from down among the roots. Sometimes strange smoke rings came floating; blue-grey wreaths of vapour that moved slowly through the trees. O, O, O, they made, before some transient breath of air deformed them, like buckled wheels. High on their airy perches the travellers would shiver, bearing witness to these phenomena; however, they sensed also that they were watched over by the elusive Tree-Dwellers. Food and drink, though monotonous, were never in short supply.

Yet ever and anon they felt other eyes upon them. Other beings bided here in Khazathdaur, amongst the serried wooden towers, the attenuated vaults, the fluted shadows like widows’ veils trailing from every soaring bough, the endlessly falling leaves drowning in a watery twilight. It was ancient, this world of neck-breaking heights and breathtaking depths unknown by wind or sunlight, and it was filled with secrets. Gnarled roots dug deep below centuries-old layers of leaf mold imprinted only by the strangest of footprints or wheel ruts, a soft, yielding compost that covered up many curious things and out of which many curious things grew …

In the far reaches of the forest where stands of massive oaks began to mingle with the autarkens, the smell of aniseed came pouring like a rich oil upon the air. Grey malkins were about. Their eyes made the night into an aiode of emeralds. On the wide bands of iron nailed to the tree boles, the claws of the great cats could find no purchase. The predators yowled their frustration. Sometimes the night was further troubled by a loud ululating wail like theirs, yet almost human—Black Annis howled her dismal hungers in a cave somewhere down beneath the mold and stones. Once upon an eve there came a muttering, in a low monotone:

‘Ellum he do grieve,

Oak he do hate,

Willow do walk

If you travels late.’

‘Zounds,’ whispered Viviana, ‘was that Black Annis, d’you think?’

If travel by bridge was slow, rope and pulley was faster. Fourteen days after coming under the stasis of Timbrilfin-Khazathdaur, there came a time when, alighting skillfully on a rather unkempt and shaky platform with frayed edges, instead of being greeted with a highway signposted by leaf or flower, the travellers found that they had reached a dead end.

In any event, there was nowhere to go but back into the forest’s heart or down the rickety ladder which swung against the trunk and vanished away towards the ground. It appeared that this tree was the furthest outpost of the network rigged and maintained by the Tree-Dwellers. All around, mighty tree stems continued to plumb the distance from canopy to floor in slatted hues of grey and black. Yet there was an end to the aerial roads.

A last offering of forest fare awaited the travellers, but their dismay at this turn of events blunted their appetites.

‘Where to now?’ mused Caitri, staring down over the crumbling, barbed edge to where perspective falsely indicated that the bases of the surrounding trees huddled close together.

‘Down, by my reckoning,’ replied Tahquil. ‘Let us go swiftly, before night draws in—and we would be well advised to carry some of this fare with us. It may be long ere we find any other provender now that we are leaving the auspices of the Tree-Dwellers.’

‘Conversely,’ said Viviana, ‘it may be a short while before we personally provide provender for the grey malkins of Black Annis. The claws of the lovely Dianella are seeming ever more amiable by comparison.’

‘Do not underestimate that lady’s weaponry,’ said Tahquil.

Down the long, long ladder they stepped, past the iron bands that deflected predators’ claws. Twenty feet from the ground the stair of rope and wood stopped short at a narrow ledge. On hooks there, a rope had been coiled, one end of which was belayed to the tree. This last distance must be descended by rappelling, with this rope passed under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder so that it might be paid out smoothly and gradually.

‘I shall go first,’ said Viviana. ‘I am practised at this trick, for my brother and I used to clamber upon the oaks in Wytham Park when we were children, although our parents were kept ignorant of our vulgar behaviour. My lady has first braved every enterprise thus far, and it is now my turn. Should you not allow it I shall not be able to countenance myself.’

‘So be it,’ said Tahquil, smiling wryly at the courtier’s determination. ‘During my journeys in the wilderness I too have been taught somewhat of the art of rope-descent. Caitri, watch and learn. Viviana, should you spy danger, shout loudly and we will try to haul you up, although I fear there’s not much leverage on this thin shelf.’

Viviana took the rope in both hands. Cordage made from the silk-smooth beards of autarken blossom did not burn the skin. She let it slip slowly through her fists. Nervously she set her boots against the trunk, gritted her teeth and leaned back with a display of confidence she scarcely recognised in herself. Pushing from the ball of her foot she walked backwards down the tree into the dreariness of everdusk. Her shoulders felt almost wrenched from their sockets. Her tensed forearms suffered a dull, sustained pain as though bruised; they trembled and threatened to lose all sensation, all power. At the last they betrayed her. The rope shot skywards through her fingers and she fell into a great drift of leaves which sprayed up like water.

Scanning the depths, her companions could see nothing.

‘I am hale!’ Viviana called, spitting out a leaf. ‘Haul away!’

Tahquil and Caitri pulled up the rope. It occurred to Viviana that the bank of dead leaves in which she was sitting might be home to things with which she would prefer to avoid close contact. Hastily she waded out of it, thigh-deep. Tahquil came swinging down, then Caitri. By the leaf-ring’s glow they looked at each other.

‘Should we simply leave the rope dangling?’ wondered Tahquil. ‘Fain would I withhold from ground-dwellers access to the highroads of the Folk of the Trees.’

They tried tossing the rope’s end back up to its hook, to no avail.

‘We beg pardon,’ Tahquil called softly skywards. ‘We cannot close your gate.’ Mindful of not thanking their benefactors in case, like wights, they took offence, she added, ‘Your kindness is gratefully acknowledged. May your trees be forever fruitful.’

From the jade demi-dusk came no answer.

‘Let us move on,’ said Tahquil, shaking leaves from her hair. ‘We can do no more, and must flee before the coming of night.’

They set off. Thick shadows were fastened like webs in the hollows between the ancient trees. All that could be seen was the light of the leaf-ring shining on their three faces. The companions could not know where they were going—only intuition guided them, a sense that they should continue to progress in the direction they had been shown by the Tree-Dwellers.

Now that they were down on the ground their sense of unease quickly turned to dread. All around, the pit of Khazathdaur festered with unclean things. The whispers of the mortals fell dead on the dank compost underfoot. As they blundered forward their feet dragged as though weighted with stones, and they became certain some sightless horror came in pursuit, reaching out to seize them.

Viviana held the chatelaine fast, folded in her cloak, so that it would not clash and ring. Their boots sank to the ankles in the top layers of leaves. Underneath, decomposed mold had compacted to form a springy firmness. They waded through piles and mounds built up by the steady sibilant showers cascading gently from a canopy now so far above it was lost to view. Tiny spores of apprehension came clinging over them and took root and grew into a clammy terror which burdened their limbs until it seemed they could no longer go forward but must sink down on the forest floor, doomed to perish in the damning weald.

Then from afar, a call. It was the winding of a horn.

At once, as though at a signal, the air stirred. A light breeze had entered the forest. Down this new airstream it came again—the long, clear note that seemed to come sweeping over open hills under wide skies.

A third time it sounded. The travellers pushed on with renewed hope and vigour.

At last, grey light filtered through a thinning of the trees. Undergrowth sprouted in the wider spaces between the boles. Harpoons of red-gold light pierced the leaf canopy and strayed down to the murky floors, here and there picking out a quill of copper, a nib of russet, a sickle of mellow gold among the fallen leaves. Clumps of juniper bushes and crepe myrtle added a dense dark green. The travellers’ morale lifted at the thought of reaching the outskirts of Khazathdaur, of being able to look up and see the clear sky again and feel the wind combing their hair. Faster went they, eagerly. Now through the trees streamed the long, amber light of sunfall. Joyousness seized them—they had almost made it to the far edge of the forest!

Tahquil’s hand flew up. A shock went through the ring, and a ‘ping!’ as though a sharp blow had struck it. Almost simultaneously, Viviana jumped sideways with a shouted exclamation, losing her grip on the implements hanging from her belt.

‘Something hit me! It hit my knapsack!’

An agitation whipped the bushes all around. Like vengeful wasps, invisible projectiles shrilled through the air. Puffs and eddies of leaves showed where they were hitting the ground. Disturbing the undergrowth, red caps like tall mushrooms poked up. Beneath them grimaced the sly faces of tiny archers.

The travellers bolted. Sharp points whizzed past their ears. Unseen darts struck their thick cloaks, and deflected off Tahquil’s ring. One ricocheted off Caitri’s belt and another off Viviana’s chatelaine. The soft mulch hampered their running feet like sludge, weighed down their boots, stuck to their leggings. It seemed certain, after all, that they would never get out of Khazathdaur, when abruptly the tree stems diverged and fell back on either side. They burst forth into the open.

Caitri uttered a sharp cry and fell sprawling.

‘Get up! Come!’ her companions urged, endeavouring to drag her to her feet. Ælf-shot whistled all around. Caitri writhed on the ground, clutching her shin. Tahquil threw off her pack, heedless of scattering foodstuffs. She hoisted the little girl under the armpits and dragged her away. Viviana snatched the knapsack and followed, using both packs as a shield against the darts that zoomed out of the forest.

Down a grassy slope they struggled. Caitri now hung limp in Tahquil’s arms, a dead weight. The shooting decreased as the targets drew out of range, and finally, when for the space of about fifty yards there had been no more thumps of eldritch arrows hitting bundles, Tahquil heard Viviana cry, ‘Hola! The attack is over. Stop, so that I may help you.’

Beside dense low clusters of yellow-flowered gorse Tahquil gently laid Caitri down on the grey-green grass and leaned over her.

‘She has taken a stroke!’ wailed Viviana. ‘She will be paralysed!’

‘Cait, can you hear me?’ Tahquil said tenderly.

Caitri’s eyelids fluttered open. Her face was grey and drawn.

‘I am hale,’ she whispered thickly. She tried to rise, but collapsed with a groan. ‘There is no feeling in my leg, my arm …’

‘Bide,’ said Tahquil. ‘We shall lift and bear you.’

She did not mention that one side of the little girl’s face was dragged down and half her mouth remained slack when she spoke. The child looked like a doll fashioned half of porcelain and half of rags, limp down one side. Tahquil knew they must bear her away from the dangers of the forest. But where could they go?

Against the slanting, nasturtium-tinted rays of the westering sun Tahquil stood, shading her eyes with her hand. A light, fresh breeze raced across the grassy hillside. Rank upon rank of silvery grass blades bent their backs to it in waves tumbling down to a wide vista below.

Tahquil looked to the north. From her feet the land ran down in a gentle slope towards a long, narrow inlet. Here, the sea sliced into the land from miles away on the western coast, cutting a deep valley filled with still waters the colour of steel. Half tinged gold in the fallow afternoon, clean flinty rock-cliffs fell steep and stark from the heights into the firth. Seabirds glided on outstretched wings, in the shape of margran, the M-rune. Low hills rose to the east and west and also across the firth to the north. At the head of the inlet the land rose gently to a marshy vale watered by rills which fed a fast-flowing brook chattering down out of the hills to the ocean.

Near at hand, towards this vale, the countryside was chequered with little verdant meadows. They were bordered by blossoming hawthorn hedges, screened by sallows and alders. Clotted with the flowers of late Spring were they, and so lush that already the grass stood high. Down along the inlet’s edge a few thatched roofs peeped from dark-smudged lines of trees. Smoke issued from chimneys like wisps of wool, and were teased out by the breeze.

‘A village,’ croaked Tahquil, hoarse with relief. ‘An abode of Men in the wilderness. We must go and knock at their doors—I’ll warrant they have a healer—a carlin or a dyn-cynnil.’ She glanced back and up at the tall, sinister eaves of the forest from whose dominions they had so narrowly escaped. The trees leaned forward.

‘Via, we must cross our hands over and grasp each other’s wrists, in this manner, to form a seat. We must hold Caitri’s poor arms about our shoulders and thus we may bear her down the hill.’

Just then the sun sank into the dyed ocean far beyond the hills and a deep, throaty voice said, ‘Stay!’

The admonition issued from a large, hairy creature that looked like an oversized bruney. About five feet tall he was dressed raggedly, like a household wight, but deep-chested and massive across the shoulders. His superb physique indicated enormous strength.

‘Run!’ contradicted Viviana. Starting forward she began to drag Caitri along the ground, a helpless burden. Without appearing to move, the wight barred their path.

‘They call me seelie,’ he said. ‘Down by Ishkiliath, they do. I can cure the ælf-stroke, I can. Give me the girl.’ He grinned a gaping, thick-lipped grin.

‘Set her down, Via,’ said Tahquil, deliberately avoiding the use of her friend’s full name. She did not take her eyes from the wight as Viviana lowered Caitri to the grass.

To him she said, ‘Can you in truth do as you say?’

‘Aye, that I can.’

‘Do not let him touch her,’ hissed Viviana.

Tahquil hesitated. ‘What else do they call you, down there in the village?’

The uncouth fellow bowed.

‘Finoderee at your service, miss. I plough, I sow, I reap, I mow. I herd cattle and sheep, I thresh and rake and carry, I build stacks. I can clear a daymath in an hour and want nothing better than a crockful of bithag afterwards. I work all night, but at the top of Glen Rushen, above the curraghs, that’s where I curl me up in my hiding place each day. I can heal a weal and cure an ill too, and I can cure this mortal girl.’

‘Well, sir, you give a thorough account of yourself and no mistake,’ said Tahquil guardedly. ‘A strong fellow I see you be, with a kindly feeling towards humanity. If I let you cure her, what will you ask in return for your pains?’

Finoderee’s chunky jaw dropped open, his eyes widened in shock.

‘Alas, poor Finoderee, don’t send him away! He only wants to help!’

‘No reward, then,’ said Tahquil quickly, alarmed at his unpredictable distress. ‘Howbeit, if you can cure her and not harm her in the process …’

‘I’d like a word wi’ ye if I may, lassie,’ politely said the urisk, who was sitting beneath a gorse bush. Tahquil, taken aback at the unexpected appearance of their friend, approached him while Viviana stood guard over Caitri, glaring at Finoderee, who was shuffling his huge, hairy feet in the grass.

‘Och, the cure is simple,’ murmured the urisk confidentially. ‘Ye mun find the piece o’ ælf-shot that struck the lassie and gie it her, and she’ll jump up as sonsie as ever. They dinnae lodge in the flesh, those bits o’ shot. It’ll be lying aboot somewhere. Dinnae let Finoderee find it first—that is my rede. He cured Dan Broome’s red cow all reet but carried it off afterwards.

‘But yon linkin’ birkie’s mightier in thew than in brain, ye ken? He will do your biding gin he is able, and a mollymawk the likes o’ he might be easily gulled.’

Tahquil nodded gratefully to the urisk.

‘Finoderee,’ she said clearly, ‘we do need your help. Please take this,’ she unhooked the silver spike-leaf strainer from Viviana’s chatelaine while its owner spluttered indignantly, ‘and fill it with water from that stream and bring it back.’

Energetically, Finoderee loped off across the hillside with the chatelette in his hand.

‘My silver sieve!’

‘Quickly, Viviana—we must find the arrowhead that gave Caitri the stroke.’

Backtracking up the hill, they crawled about on the long tussocks. The urisk joined the search.

‘What should it look like?’ asked Tahquil, on all fours, fossicking among the turf.

‘Bother, I cannot see anything anyway, ’tis too dark,’ said Viviana. ‘And you’ve sent that Finoderee fellow on a fool’s errand. When he realises the task is impossible he will return in wrath!’

‘Not he,’ rejoined the urisk. ‘T’ only thing that gets him of a pother is criticism of his wark. If that happens ye must look to yourself, for he can be spiteful. If ye’ve put him tae summat he can no’ do then it can be no’ criticised, eh?’

‘Here’s something,’ said Viviana. ‘Ouch, ’tis a gorse prickle. Nay, I have it, I think!’ She held up a triangular shard of flint, its edges dighted as thin and sharp as any metal blade.

‘Weel done,’ approved the urisk. Viviana ran down the slope and handed her find to Caitri, who received it in her sound hand and touched it to her paralysed leg. Hope changed to despair on her face and a dewdrop tear squeezed from the corner of her eye, catching mercurial reflections of the first stars.

‘Tith no uthe,’ she lisped.

‘Dinnae be fashed,’ said the urisk encouragingly. ‘We shall just luik wi’ a stronger e’e—that’s all there is to it.’

‘You have night vision,’ Tahquil said to him, ‘have you not?’

‘Aye, but I cannae see through thick tuffets o’ bent. I’m no’ of Faêran bluid, ye ken!’

‘That nuggety wight will be coming back any moment now,’ wailed Viviana, ‘and if he finds the right flint he shall carry off Caitri. If nobody finds it, Caitri shall be maimed for life!’

Scrabbling around, the urisk came up with a handful of arrowheads. He galloped to the side of the prostrate patient.

‘Here ye go, lassie!’

Caitri tried them all, again and again, to no effect.

‘I think I could hop down the hill, if I might lean on thomeone,’ she said.

‘Nonsense,’ said Tahquil. ‘The object must be hereabouts, somewhere.’

She gave Caitri a sip of nathrach deirge, and in doing so touched her left hand to Caitri’s side. A pressure exerted itself on the leaf-ring. Walking up the slope, Tahquil let the pressure direct her hand, into the dry, soughing grass stems. Down among their roots her fingers met a fragment, hard and cold.

‘I have found another.’ she said. She placed it in Caitri’s hand.

No moon showed on the horizon on this the last-but-one day of the month and also of Spring. From the curraghs at the head of the valley, nocturnal marsh birds hooted. More stars came out, scattering their reflections like flaws over the glassy waters of the firth below. The leaves at the eaves of Khazathdaur rustled and the trees soared, uninviting, black against the stars.

‘The forest wakens,’ softly said the urisk.

Tahquil was watching Caitri intently. The little girl smiled. She stood up.

‘It was the one,’ she said, opening her fist to show them the piece of ælf-shot. ‘Oh—it has crumbled to sand!’

‘All tae the good,’ said the urisk briskly. ‘It can harm naebody else.’

Viviana laughed with relief. She and Tahquil embraced Caitri.

‘Feater advice was never given,’ said Tahquil tactfully to the urisk, wanting to thank him but bearing in mind that he might be insulted by thanks, as wights apparently were.

‘You came in goodly time, but how came you here?’ Caitri asked the little goat-man.

‘I hae no head for heights. I came along byways through the forest,’ he hooted. ‘I have wandered it lang enow that I ken it weel. Howsoever, the lands of Ishkiliath are my real hame, or they were once.’

‘And those who dwell in the village down there—would they be kind to three wayfarers?’

‘Mortal strangers hardly ever come tae Appleton Thorn by land. The only foreigners they meet are sailors coming by boat, up frae the sea. The villagers will squint at ye sideways but most o’ them be reasonable sorts of folk.’

A couple of lights stippled the night, down amongst the lines of trees along the cliffs.

‘Now,’ continued the urisk, ‘get along wi’ ye. Ye’re standing on the banks o’ Creech Hill and a bullbeggar haunts here sometimes. Besides, ye’re still on the borders o’ Arda Musgarh Dubh and its tall population has lang roots.’

‘Yet its small archers are bad shots,’ said Viviana. ‘Fortunately.’

Tahquil wondered about the village. Should I walk down there amongst humankind? Will there be spies sent by Prince Morragan, to recognise and betray me? Few wights dwell within human settlements—mainly domestic solitaries, usually seelie and untravelled, for they do not willingly stray from their Places. I might be safer in that village than anywhere, and yet …

At their backs, the black curtain of the ancient forest stood silent, like an unvoiced spell. The helpful Fenodoree remained a small blob in the starlight, still kneeling beside the stream. His tuneless singing wafted across the hillside:

‘If ye call me imp or elf

I rede ye look well to yourself.

If ye call me fary,

I’ll bait ye long and weary.

If good neighbour ye call me,

Then good neighbour I will be,

But if ye call me seelie wight

I’ll be your friend both day and night.’

The three travellers picked up their belongings. The night wind plucked at their hair and the corners of their garments. Now four, they strode down the hill towards Appleton Thorn on the high cliffs of the Grey Glass Firth, and the slender grasses sighed at their passing.

2

ISHKILIATH

Field and Fen and Mortal Men

In mountain caves the bat-winged worm, a thousand époques old,

With furnace breath and jewelled hide lies coiled around his gold,

While on the ocean’s gleaming foam a giant shell unfurls.

Behold! A mermaid sleeps within, more marvellous than pearls.

With passion warm as dragonfire, with benthic mystery,

They kindle mortalkind’s desire—the silkies of the sea.

OLD SONG OF TAMHANIA

The piquancy of the salt sea and the pungent aroma of seaweed cast up on the rocks stung the wind. Straggling atop and down the cliffs, sheltered by hardy firs and rowans, the village of Appleton Thorn was protected on the landward side by a semicircular fence. This was no ordinary fence, but a mighty fortified palisade of oak and ash, studded and barbed and bound with iron. Eleven feet high it stood, overlooked by small watch-houses built in the treetops just inside the perimeter.

‘There is an East Gate and a West Gate,’ said the urisk, leading the three travellers to the left. ‘The heathery coast road runs frae the West Gate. The road to the east leads tae the rigs and the corries of the Churrachan, the sykie risks, the heigh gowan banks and the foggie braes. No gate has ever been made in the southern wa’ o’ the Fence. There’s nae road rising to the glaury choille-rais.’

‘We ken only the Common Tongue,’ said Tahquil. ‘Make plain your meaning, prithee sir.’

‘Och, I’m forgettin’. Rigs are what ye might call fields, a sykie risk’s a marshland, a curragh. Banks and braes, them’s slopes and dales to ye. I must mind my tongue—things hae changed since last I spoke wi’ your kind.’ He sighed. ‘And as to the rest—there’s no road up Creech Hill to the forest because naebody frae the village goes there and most things that come frae out o’ Arda’s shades are no’ welcome among Men.’

‘I see no Mooring Mast either. Why do they choose to dwell in such a remote and forsaken place,’ asked Caitri, ‘and so close to Khazathdaur?’

‘The forefathers of the villagers lived here in greater numbers once,’ replied the urisk. ‘As years went by and things o’ unseelie ilk pushed deeper into these regions, many o’ the villagers departed. Those who remained did so because this is their land, or mayhap because of the Thorn.’

Tahquil’s heart hung static over a beat.

‘What Thorn?’ she said quickly.

‘The Noble Thorn, they title it—a lone tree growing in the Errechd, at the heart of the village. ’Tis said it is the only one of its kind. It puts forth flooers only once a year, at middle-night on Littlesun Eve. At that season, sailors sometimes come in their boats up the firth to see it.’

Merely a thorn bush. Tahquil felt deflated, though what she had been hoping for, she could not pin down.

The travellers arrived at the Fence and followed it around to the West Gate without being hailed from the lookout posts in the trees. Only a rumour of conversation emanated dimly from the village precincts.

‘Tomorrow’s Flench Ridings Eve,’ remarked the urisk. ‘They’re likely all clatterin’ at the tavern this night, singin’ cuttie-muns.’

The gate was as tall as the Fence, a grille of wood and steel bars.

‘Here I’ll leave ye,’ said the urisk. ‘The haunts o’ Men are dear to me but I walk them in my own way.’

‘Oh, but shall we see you again?’ stammered Viviana.

‘Aye, if ye wish it.’ The urisk seemed shyly pleased.

‘Farewell,’ they said.

He bowed and trotted away through the darkness into a stand of feathery peppercorns.

Caitri turned suddenly and looked over her shoulder, back towards the forest. ‘I thought I heard footsteps following,’ she said.

Tahquil took a deep breath and shouted towards the gate, ‘Hallo! Please let us in—we are benighted wayfarers seeking hospitality!’

This announcement was greeted by sudden tumult on the other side of the gate. It sounded like someone heavily armed, falling out of a tree. This cacophony was followed by a subdued cursing and a clanking of metal.

‘Who goes there?’ a man’s voice eventually yelled.

‘Three wayfarers seeking hospitality,’ repeated Tahquil.

‘Stand back nine yards from the gate!’ came the order.

They obeyed. From a wooden boxlike affair nesting above the Fence in the fork of a tree, a figure wearing a brightly polished open helmet surveyed them. This figure exchanged remarks with a party on the ground near the tree’s foot, then a large nose appeared through the bars of the gate.

‘Advance and be recognised!’

Forward now they stepped again. They could hear the guard in the tree saying, ‘Certain, are ye?’ and the guard on the ground mumbling unintelligibly.

‘Are ye wights of eldritch?’ challenged Big Nose, peering through the gate.

‘No. We are mortal damsels.’

‘All of ye?’

‘Yes.’

A further raucous clangour ensued; a laborious unbolting, unlatching, unchaining and unlocking up and down the length of the mighty gate. With one last crunch, a small portal in the gate swung open. Big Nose’s head popped around it and he jerked his chin in the direction of his shoulder, a gesture the travellers interpreted as permission to enter.

‘Look lively, then,’ he said. ‘Can’t leave the door open all night.’

Ducking their heads under the low lintel, the visitors entered.

Big Nose quickly shut the postern after them, securing it again with much fuss. Meanwhile, Bright Helm hurried down his ladder, which was missing a few rungs, and stood looking at the newcomers with undisguised awe.

Both the gate-guards were clad in loose-fitting tunics belted at the middle, taltry hoods with camails and cross-gartered breeches tucked into boots. Over this they wore half-armour; thick leather tassets and epauliers. One had on a worn leather brigandine decorated with bright studs where metal plates were riveted to the interior; the other sported a mail hauberk of antique design. Thick and brown, their hair straggled to their shoulders. They were armed with falchions, broadswords and halberds, and a thorn tree sigil was emblazoned on their gear.

At their backs, some forty paces off, stood an ivy-covered tavern—it was from here that the sounds of conversation had issued. Tangerine lamplight glowed from its leaded casements. The sign over the door bore a painted image of a thorn tree, black-boughed and spiky.

The mouths of the guards hung open. Tahquil shifted uncomfortably under their stares, until one man elbowed the other in the ribs and they recovered their composure. Their eyes slid briefly over Tahquil’s companions but kept rolling back to her like ball bearings to a lodestone.

Bright Helm cleared his throat.

‘Well I’ll be jiggered,’ he said, scratching his ear. ‘I never seen the like. Three young maids a-traipsing over the countryside on their own—well I never. I suppose you heard the Forest Horn a-blowing.’

‘You’ll be here for Flench Ridings,’ surmised Big Nose, ‘and the Bawming of the Thorn on the morrow, with Burning the Boatman. You’ll have come up the coast road, off a ship. Will you be staying for the other Summer celebrations?’

‘Regrettably, no,’ replied Tahquil without depriving him of his assumptions. ‘We are but travelling through.’

‘Ah.’ Bright Helm tapped the side of his nose with a stubby finger and winked knowingly, in the manner of one who is privy to knowledge so common it need not be questioned further. Tahquil guessed he had no idea why three damsels might be ‘travelling through’, but presumed that everyone else did, and was loath to reveal his ignorance.

‘Are rooms available at the inn?’ she inquired.

‘Most assuredly, mistress!’

Bright Helm flew along the path ahead of them, to be the first to announce the Arrival of Strangers. Big Nose stolidly brought up the rear with the air of a seasoned campaigner who would not allow Unexpected Visitors to interfere with Duty.

‘Burning the Boatman?’ Caitri whispered nervously in Tahquil’s ear. ‘Are these folk so barbaric?’

‘I think not,’ Tahquil replied. ‘I suspect it is a title for some less excessive custom.’

The uproar triggered by Bright Helm’s advance warning instantly broke off when Tahquil and her companions entered the yellow torchlight of the tavern’s common room.

Dirty, stained and ragged the travellers appeared, this being partly self-inflicted for purposes of disguise and partly imposed by the exigencies of travel. Before them, the room presented a motionless tableau: drinkers poised with tankards upraised, folk sitting, standing, immobilised in the act of turning around, jaws dangling loosely, eyes protruding.

All at once Tahquil felt very weary and wished they had not entered there.

‘What’s amiss, lads? Ain’t ye ever seen a miss before?’

The pun-maker, a doughty man, sun-browned, stood with his thumbs hooked through his belt. In contrast to the snuff-brown locks of the other patrons, his silky mane of hair was a soft shade of grey, streaked with silver as though it had aged before its time, for his face was that of a young man of perhaps eight-and-twenty Winters.

Laughing but shamefaced, the patrons buried their noses in their beer. The hum of talk and the clatter of tavern business resumed. Now covertly, the customers observed the three visitors, squinting sideways, as the urisk had augured.

The doughty man nodded affably.

‘Wassail and welcome to Appleton Thorn by Grey Glass Firth,’ he said with a cheerful grin. ‘I hight Arrowsmith, Master of the Village and Lord of the Hundred. Will you sup this night?’

‘That is indeed our wish, sir. Gramercie.’

While Arrowsmith called for meat and drink, places were found for the newcomers. After guardedly introducing themselves as ‘Mistress Mellyn’, ‘Mistress Wellesley’ and ‘Mistress Lendoon’, they sat down, unnerved by the excess of attention. It was not long before every customer at the inn had found a reason to gather around their table. Big Nose, his post forgotten, was saying authoritatively, ‘They have come for Flench Ridings and the Bawming of the Thorn. They have come up the coast road, off a ship.’

Everyone contributed.

‘We don’t get many ships these days—I reckon only two or three a year.’

‘And after that storm, the terrible one when the sky went all black for days and the waves came up big, right to the cliff tops like never was seen before, well, we ain’t seen a single ship since.’

‘Give us tidings—what news from the world?’

‘The Royal Island of Tamhania has been destroyed by unseelie forces,’ the visitors replied. ‘Its downfall was the centre of the storm. Meanwhile the armies of the King-Emperor amass in the east. Skirmishes and small engagements have been fought, but as yet no great battle, when last we heard.’

By the time the taverner’s wife planted heaped platters on the table, the audience was packed tightly around. Arrowsmith waved them away.

‘Allow our guests to dine in peace, gentlefolk. Give them room to lift their elbows! You, Wimblesworthy and Ironmonger, are you not on guard at the West Gate tonight? Hasten back to your post. Bowyer, give us a song by the chimney.’

Sheepishly, Big Nose and Bright Helm hurried out. Enthused at being called upon to entertain the guests, Bowyer stepped up on a three-legged stool, tidied his jerkin, puffed out his chest, waited for the talk to subside and began to sing:

‘All was hushed in the Mountain Hall as the Jester told his tale

But outside in the bitter cold a voice began to wail.

The Jester told of the Great High Road that goes forever on,

Winding by the greenwood trees and past the Ring of Stone.

‘Through the rocky mountain gate, along the jagged ridge

Past the dark well of the fire, across the iron bridge.

And who would travel this long road with lamp and staff in hand?

’Tis Jack the soldier seeking for the Door to the Lost Land.

‘Three coins within his pocket and a raven on his shoulder.

The rival’s sword hangs at his side—the South Wind’s blowing colder.

And when at last he reached Road’s End, ’twas at the eleventh hour.

The storm raged in the darkling sky ahint the blackened tower.

‘And who art thou,’ the Watchman cried, ‘that knocketh at my door?

For now that thou hast raised thy hand thy fate is sealed for sure.’

The soldier raised his sword on high—a rune was writ thereon.

The thunderstorm fled swift away, and a bright star shone.’

When Bowyer finished, everyone applauded and called for another. The words ‘… seeking for the Door to the Lost Land’ unsettled Tahquil, but in the noisy tavern there was no opportunity to ponder them further. Bowyer had a second ditty well under way when, without warning, the door crashed open. Wimblesworthy rushed in exhibiting a frightened look and asked for the loan of a crossbow—

‘To shoot a Shock which hangs upon the West Gate!’

‘A Shock, is it?’ cried the inn patrons. ‘That’s what comes of leaving the gate unattended!’

They all poured out of the Thorn Tree, following Wimblesworthy to the gate. Out of curiosity Tahquil joined them, Arrowsmith striding close at her side.

A thing with a donkey’s head and a smooth velvet hide hung on the wooden middle rung of the grille. Beyond it hung the dark, with which it seemed to merge. Holding aloft their blazing torches, the onlookers stood in a semicircle regarding this phenomenon from a few yards away.

‘What is a Shock exactly?’ asked Bowyer, frowning at the apparition.

Nobody knew. They could only say that things like that were called Shocks.

‘Why don’t ye use yer falchion?’ suggested someone.

‘You use yer falchion!’ said Wimblesworthy aggrievedly. ‘You get close to it then!’

‘You’re such a maukin, Wimblesworthy,’ said a drinker who had carried his tankard out with him and still had it in his hand. ‘You’d be frightened of a chicken. What’s the use of having a whey-blood like him on guard, Arrowsmith?’

‘I’ll show you maukin!’ growled Wimblesworthy. ‘I’ll sneak up and grab it and take it to the inn to get a good look at it. Then you’ll find out what a Shock is!’

‘Aye, go on Wimblesworthy,’ they all encouraged, since there was little entertainment to be had from a Shock that did nothing but hang on a gate. ‘Do it!’

Emboldened by the support of his companions, Big Nose crept forward. As he seized the thing, it turned suddenly around, snapped at his hand and vanished.

Wimblesworthy bellowed. He jigged about, cradling his hand to his chest. His friends ran to his aid, lifting him bodily and carrying him back to the inn with all speed. Arrowsmith ordered that the gate guard be relieved and doubled.

The last of the crowd trailed back to the Thorn Tree.

‘What a night!’ said Ironmonger, shaking his helmeted head in wonderment. ‘First Strangers, then a Shock. Well I never. What next?’

‘What next indeed?’ cried Arrowsmith. ‘With all these goings-on it would be safer for these three young ladies to stay in a well-protected house such as my own. My good sisters shall see that they are comfortable. What say ye, Mistress Mellyn?’

Tahquil noticed some of the men nudging each other.

‘It would not be meet,’ she demurred. ‘Gramercie, sir.’

‘Meet? I myself shall sleep in the stable, if ’tis propriety you are thinking of. You shall share the house with my sisters and no one else.’

‘Except of course tomorrow night,’ said one of the men significantly.

Arrowsmith stood as if a sudden thought had struck him.

‘Aye, tomorrow night. Well, we shall take that as it comes. I insist that you accept my offer of hospitality—after all, it would be less costly for you.’

In her turn, a sudden thought struck Tahquil. How much money did she and her companions carry? Did they have enough even to pay for the food they had eaten that evening?

‘Well, sir, if your sisters agree—’

‘Of course they shall agree!’ laughed the village’s Master. ‘Now we shall fetch your companions from the inn and wend home forthwith!’

At the Thorn Tree Inn, the wounded man sat with his hand plunged in a flagon of beer while the taverner’s wife mopped his brow.

‘Let’s see what’s to be done,’ said the wife.

Bravely, Wimblesworthy lifted his damaged extremity. Beer, mixed with blood, dripped down his sleeve gaily, like red feathers.

‘Ah, look at that!’ admired the inn patrons. ‘He’ll bear the scar of that bite on his thumb for the rest of his life, no doubt.’

Discovering that he lived yet and furthermore was branded with a badge of courage, the hero managed a watery smile.

‘Who’s a maukin now, Cooper?’ he sniffed.

No sooner had Tahquil, Viviana and Caitri stepped out of the inn door accompanied by Arrowsmith and several others, than one of the new gate guards strode up to them wearing a puzzled look.

‘Finoderee’s at the West Gate, Master Arrowsmith,’ he reported. ‘Says he’s got summat for these misses here.’

‘A busy night at the gate.’ The Master of the Village turned to his protégées. ‘Can this be?’

‘Yes,’ replied Tahquil. ‘It is possible.’

They returned again to the West Gate. Through the bars, Finoderee held up a muddy, dripping object in his huge paw.

‘I did it!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Though ’tis only a drop. Had to put a bit of clay-mud in the holes first. It wants mending, ye know.’

Viviana grabbed the silver spike-leaf strainer.

‘Don’t spill the water,’ warned the wight.

‘Well done,’ said Tahquil. ‘We now have all we require. Goodnight.’

Finoderee did not leave the gate. He stood nodding at Caitri. Tahquil noticed that the men were laughing silently.

‘You gave Finoderee a little sieve to bring water?’ Arrowsmith exclaimed. ‘Best jest I’ve heard since last Peppercorn Rent!’

‘Hallo, Master Arrowsmith,’ said Finoderee. ‘I’ll be mowing your alder-meadow tonight.’

‘Aye, and I’m sure I don’t know what I’d do without your help,’ said Arrowsmith.

‘I am the hardest worker you’ve ever seen, ain’t I?’ said Finoderee.

‘Surely,’ agreed the Master. ‘Well, you’d better be getting to that meadow now. The night’s wearing on and cock-crow’s not long away.’

‘I don’t mind cock-crow. I’ll toss the hay to the fading moon or the star of morning and care not a whit for the rooster’s alarm.’

‘Finoderee is the wonder and no mistake,’ eulogised the men.

Satisfied, the brawny wight loped off.

After the exciting events of the evening, the travellers spent a restful night at Arrowsmith’s house, an oak-timbered building with a thatched roof, high gables, low side walls and mullioned windows. His sisters, Betony and Sorrel, welcomed them as he had guaranteed; he had sent a message on ahead and they had bade the servant air extra featherbeds in preparation. Their brother slept in the stable, keeping his promise.

As usual the Langothe would not permit sleep to come easily to Tahquil. While she lay in her bed looking through the window at the moon-sheen of the night sky she was reminded of the colour of Thorn’s eyes.

On the morrow, it was so pleasant to wake upon goose-down, to bathe in hot water and to be served with cowslip wine, barley bread, fried kippers, and ducks’ eggs—boiled with a handful of gorse flowers to dye them yellow—instead of cold forest leaves, that Viviana and Caitri begged Tahquil to consider staying in the village for a day or two. Added to these pleas were the blandishments of the villagers, who insisted that their guests remain for their forthcoming annual celebrations. Under such pressure, Tahquil yielded, although it cost her dearly and the Langothe had its cruel say. In her heart, the last Gate to Faêrie called.

Moreover, the east itself called, for she hoped with the fervency of life itself that Thorn remained safe and well. She prayed that he had not fallen victim to the wiles and treacherous glamours of unseelie wights, who would be certain to target the leader of their foes. Despite herself she constantly pictured him as he might appear at the fields of conflict, if he lived; James XVI, King-Emperor, mounted on his armoured war-horse Hrimscathr, the sword Arcturus scabbarded at his side and its damasked quillons catching the sun’s rays. Thus he came to her mind’s eye, shining in the steel field-armour of the era, with its slender, elegant lines and cusped borders and shell-like rippling, damascening glinting on the lames; with studded metal roses connected by riveted laminations to shoulder, elbow and knee, and adorning the breastplate. The Lion of D’Armancourt roared upon his breast—a great golden beast, gorged with an antique crown. His open-faced burgonet was crested with a panache of herons’ hackles threaded with gold. A lambrequin of purple sarcenet hung down from the back of the helm, embroidered with tiny gold trefoils. Beneath the steel nose-guard there would be a glimpse of high cheekbones, the strong chin, the eyes as keen as knife blades. Perhaps he would smile at one of his captains and then the lean lines of laughter would appear at each corner of his mouth. The Royal Attriod in their plumed splendour would surround him, armoured cap-a-pie, light splintering off richly ornamented chausses, vambraces, coudieres, genouilliers, tassets, gauntlets. Flanked by standard-bearers, a trumpeter, the Legions of Eldaraigne and battalions from the armies of every country in Erith with their banners and gonfalons, their gay pennons unfolding their points along the breeze, the King-Emperor might look towards the wide lands sweeping to the sea and that jealously guarded strategic jewel, the Nenian Landbridge. And they would all await the coming of the Hordes of Namarre.

Long ago in Tiriendor, in what now seemed happier days, Thorn had spoken of Namarre.

‘The Dainnan are everywhere at this time—even scouting in Namarre to pick up what information they can regarding this Namarran brigand Chieftain who is said to have arisen, who seems to have the power to unite the disparate factions of outlaws and outcasts—indeed, it is thought that he must be a wizard of great power, to draw even the fell creatures of eldritch to his aid—that, or he promises them great reward, such as the sacking of all humanity, save only his own supporters. If so, he is sadly deluded, for unseelie wights would as soon turn on him as on the rest of humankind.’

Diarmid had said, ‘Never before in history has man been allied with the unseelie.’

Thorn’s reply: ‘Never.’

As she recalled these words, a cold dread clutched Tahquil-Ashalind.

‘It is he,’ she whispered to herself. ‘It must be Morragan who allies unseelie and seditionist brigands against us in Namarre. What hope have all our armies against the terrible power of a Faêran Prince? Cry mercy! Only I can rid Erith of the Raven.’

And she wondered how many of his spies walked among mortals, and whether any lodged at Appleton Thorn. Then she wanted to leave immediately, but she had already given her word that they would tarry.

On that day, the last of Spring, she and her companions were taken to visit every corner of the village on its perch high above the sea-arm of long, cold pewter.

Past the heather-thatched cottages they wandered, where gardens burgeoned with the season’s adornments of foxgloves, pansies and marigolds, and honeysuckle twined the walls with sweet-scented prettiness. Children whistled tunes on white dead-nettle stalks or willow stems, and sucked the nectar out of flowers, and played Fighting Cocks with the stems of ribwort plantain. On porches washed with saffron sunlight, elderly women sat weaving withy-baskets, while old men fashioned ropes from marram grass.

By the duck pond to the Errechd the visitors walked. The Errechd was the Assembly Place in the village square where, all alone, grew the Noble Thorn with its lichen-covered boughs. The ancient tree seemed to bow down beneath the weight of accumulated knowledge, the tips of its twigs almost touching the lawn. Now they were misted with new, green leaves.

Later, down the precipitous stair cut zigzag into the living cliffs the three damsels were guided, to where small boats lay at anchor in the scoop of a bay. Waves surged up and down, hanging pale waterfalls all along the lower rocks. Wavelets made white frills on leaden water and frilled gulls chalked white waves on a sky of slate.

Nine canoes floated out on the firth, fragile vessels made of untanned animal skins stretched over a framework of hazel or willow withies. In each boat a man was standing, holding a short-bladed scythe with a handle twelve feet long. The men dipped the scythes under the water and severed the ribbons of seaweed, then with a rack they gathered it out of the water into the boat. Others on the shore were cutting rock seaweed that grew at the base of the cliffs, where it was exposed at low tide. Nodding donkeys walked up the cliff stair carrying panniers filled with kelp and dulse, wrack, oar weed and laver. Far away, out in the deep channels, fishing boats rocked like curled leaves on the grey water.

‘The firth is calm, most days,’ said the water bailiff, one of the guests’ guides, ‘but Gentle Annie haunts these parts and she can be treacherous. We are well protected from the north and the east but Annie is apt to blow unexpected squalls through a gap in the hills. Many’s the time on a fine, calm morning the fishermen have been tempted out on the water, only to encounter a sudden violent gale, sweeping in and endangering the boats. Annie’s sister Black Annis lurks beyond Creech Hill, deep in the heart of Khazathdaur, but she raids us when her hunger grows.’

‘Do you have a protector, a wizard?’ asked Viviana.

‘We have a dyn-cynnil who is learned in wight-lore. Webweaver is his name—we call him Spider.’

Up to the sheep-pricked meadows they rode on horseback, to survey Finoderee’s work of the previous night. The steward, reeve and bailiff accompanied Arrowsmith, as was their wont. Along the wayside, buttercups and daisies, late harebells and amethyst clusters of grape hyacinth were still springing in the grass. Cows grazed beneath blowing showers of peppercorn trees with pale green leaves. Some stared over stone walls with the eyes of bold lasses. Wind-grazed cirrus feathered the sky with ibis’ wings and five herons took startled flight from the water-meadows.

Sprouts of barley dusted the furrowed fields with powdered emeralds. A water-driven gorse mill was grinding away on the banks of the rollicking Churrachan, its heavy metal spikes crushing and bruising the boughs of whin to make feed for the horses. Further upstream squatted a fenced grain mill flanked by its stone storehouses. From the nearby steamy curraghs leaped the cool song of frogs and the hot trill of insects. Women were gathering rushes there, for making candles.

A long meadow had been scythed flat. The cut grasses lay flat in the sun, drying.

‘He’s too hasty,’ objected Cooper, the bailiff. ‘He does not cut close enough to the ground. There’s a great deal of waste.’

‘Nay,’ laughed Arrowsmith. ‘You quibble, man. ’Tis right enough in my eyes.’

‘Right enough? See how long the stubble stands, Arrowsmith. You favour the wight as no other man would.’

Arrowsmith bristled. ‘I favour him no more than would any other mortal man.’

It was then that Tahquil fancied she caught, in the flash of Arrowsmith’s eyes, a fleeting fey quality.

‘Did Finoderee in sooth mow this meadow single-handed in one night?’ she digressed, to temper the strange antagonism that seemed to have arisen between Master and bailiff.

‘Aye that he did,’ lazily said Cooper. ‘He’s a good worker, if he can be kept under the thumb.’

The steward rejoined, ‘The vigour of his mowing is like a whirlwind! His scythe thrashes too fast for the human eye to perceive, and the grass flies up so thick it blocks out the sun! You ought to see his threshing!’

‘He whisks horseloads of stone and wrack about the countryside like a little giant,’ elaborated the reeve, ‘and when he shepherds, sometimes in his enthusiasm he folds in wild goats, purrs and hares along with the sheep.’

‘’Tis a pity about Dan Broome’s red cow,’ remarked Caitri.

‘Dan Broome? Who is he?’ the men wondered.

‘There haven’t been Broomes in Appleton Thorn for nigh on eighty years,’ said the reeve.

At all times, Arrowsmith poured libations of hospitality upon his guests. Wherever they went they were greeted with friendly smiles and small gifts of local wares until they thought that Appleton Thorn must be one of the best places in Erith, but Tahquil’s heart never ceased to ache. Ever and anon she would lift her head and glance to the east, and Arrowsmith did not fail to mark this.

On the way back from the fields, he let his horse drop back beside Tahquil’s.

‘You and your ladies cannot stay in my house tonight,’ he said quietly. ‘My house has been troubled by a certain presence every Flench Ridings Night for years. I have vowed that I am going to wait up for it tonight with a wizard-wrought tilhal and an axe, to get rid of it once and for all.’

‘What manner of wight is it?’

‘’Tis a master of glamour. No two people looking at it see the same thing. One man might see a big lump of slub like a jellyfish, another might see a manlike form with no head. To me, it appears like a beast lacking legs.’

‘Is it dangerous?’

He shrugged. ‘I know not, but ’tis best to be sure. I have made arrangements for you and my sisters and the servant to lodge at my neighbour’s house. I shall wait alone tonight.’

That evening, the Village Hornblower lifted up the great sickle-shaped, gold-clasped Forest Horn like a moon on its ornate baldric and sounded it three times, as he always did, as it had been sounded in Appleton Thorn every evening since antiquity.

‘’Tis to direct folk lost in the forest,’ the inhabitants explained, ‘a custom from olden times when folk used to walk among the trees, before the place turned wightish and unseelie. Nobody goes in there now. No need to keep Forest Horn going really, but ’tis one of the old village laws we’ve never bothered to revoke. If all is going well, why change things?’

After the sun had gone under the hills, Finoderee came to the East Gate.

‘Let him in,’ said Arrowsmith, hard at work in the midst of preparations for the customary ritual. Garlands of marsh marigolds and birch were being laid around the village well, and massed white hawthorn blossoms hung above every door, mingled with the goosey gullies, the catkins of sallow—none of which were allowed to be brought into the houses, for to do so ostensibly attracted bad luck.

Cooper brought Finoderee before the Master of the Village and Lord of the Hundred.

‘More mowing tonight?’ asked Finoderee. ‘The round-field, under Bonfire Hill?’

‘Aye, but let the work be better carried out this time,’ said Arrowsmith testily. ‘If you’re going to do it, do it well. You’re not cutting the stalks close enough to the ground.’

‘Not close enough?’ echoed the wight.

‘Aye. The stubble is too long.’

‘Too long?’ repeated the wight again. ‘Galan Arrowsmith, ’tis the mortal blood that’s singing in yer ears. You never before said such a thing to Finoderee. What is it you are trying to prove to your comrades? Is Sule Skerry so far away?’

‘Go on with you. I am busy this night and have no time for idle chatter.’

Finoderee wandered off a short way then stopped. His shoulders seemed to swell.

‘Too long? I’ll give ye too long!’ he shouted. ‘Finoderee is a good mower. I plough, I sow, I reap, I mow. I herd cattle and sheep, I thresh and rake and carry, I build stacks. I can clear a daymath in an hour and want nothing better than a crockful of bithag afterwards. I’ll not mow an inch without you mowing alongside o’ me, Arrowsmith. I’ll outswathe ye ten to one and I’ll show you too long.’

‘I need that meadow mowed, and tonight I am busy!’

Finoderee was unmoved.

‘Very well,’ exasperatedly said Arrowsmith. ‘Meet me at the round-field at uhta. Will that give us enough time?’

‘Enough time for Finoderee.’

‘Good. Now go.’

‘And by the by, Arrowsmith, where’s me crock of bithag from yesternight?’

‘Wainwright will give it you on the way out.’

‘I’ve never heard of a village that makes so free with wights,’ marvelled Caitri as Finoderee lumbered away to the inn, escorted by Fletcher. ‘Talking to them and treating them like lorraly folk!’

‘Appleton Thorn is different,’ said Arrowsmith curtly.

A faceless figure rode around the village on a flench, a wide plank carried along by two burly flench-bearers. He stopped at all the houses to collect small coins, flowers and food, after which he returned to the inn, where the collected gifts were divided between him and his helpers. A crowd of children followed him, singing songs.

The enigmatic Flench Ridings was another seemingly redundant custom. Its origin had long ago passed into obscurity. The chosen villager dressed himself in old clothes stuck all over with burdock burrs so that not a particle of fabric showed. He put on a burry mask and a flower-covered hat, and took up two staves, one in each hand. On these staves were tied two flags, the Royal Standard of Eldaraigne and the Empire Jack, and the handles were decorated with spring flowers.

This event having taken place, to the great amusement of Caitri and Viviana who thought it ought to be introduced at Court, time came to retire for the evening. Most of the men went to the inn to carry on the celebrations. Arrowsmith was not amongst them. He sat alone in his house, waiting.

The village resonated soundlessly.

It was an eldritch outpouring of silence, below the reaches of hearing.

In the next-door house of an elderly neighbour, Tahquil toyed with a twisted hazel baton which Arrowsmith had given her on bidding them goodnight. She had noticed his hands then; the skin was rough. Between the fingers stretched a fine, translucent membrane.

The sisters, Betony and Sorrel, had eaten no supper. They feigned tranquillity as they sat with the spinster neighbour, teaching plant lore to Tahquil’s companions.

‘Yes, of course you know that you must not pick red campion,’ said Sorrel sagely. ‘If you do, ’twill bring thunder.’

‘There are others, too, that will bring thunder,’ interjected old Hazel the neighbour, her gnarled fingers busy at lace-making. ‘Thunderflowers and wood anemone and thunderbolts, which some call speedwell.’

‘Nonetheless,’ added Sorrel, ‘you can protect against lightning with elder, house leek and biting stonecrop.’

‘And hypericum,’ said her sister. She bit her lip and looked towards the curtained window.

‘What is the purpose of this?’ asked Tahquil, holding up the hazel baton.

The sisters exchanged shy glances.

‘That’s a honeysuckle stick,’ said Sorrel. ‘Honeysuckle has entwined itself around that stem when it was green. Now that the woodbine has been removed, the hazel is twisted.’

‘But for what purpose?’

‘’Tis just a good-luck charm.’

‘A love charm,’ breathed Caitri.

A wind came up. Something fell with a crash, or a door slammed. In the stables, a horse shrilled and kicked at the walls.

The sisters stiffened, turning their heads towards their house where their brother waited.

‘What is this entity that troubles you every year?’ asked Caitri. ‘How does it get inside the Fence?’

‘Alas, we know not,’ answered Sorrel. ‘Galan thinks it flies through the air and down the chimney, or maybe comes up under the hearthstone, using it like a trapdoor. It has been seen to run fleeter than a hound and fly swifter than an eagle.’

‘What is your brother going to do?’

‘Again, we know not. He has forbidden us to keep vigil with him. I cannot bear to contemplate what might happen—oh, let us converse again, that our thoughts might be distracted!’

In his empty house, Galan Arrowsmith sat in a chair with his axe resting across his knee and a carved ashen tilhal in his hand. On the table, rush-candles burned, each with its gorse-yellow bud at the tip. In the fireplace a gorse-wood fire leaped with a bright, clear flame, and the wind came invading down the chimney like Namarran raiders. Sparks went up in evanescent flowers.

The hour was getting late when there came a sound like dead meat slammed down, as if someone had flung a carcass on the floor. Arrowsmith looked up.

‘Myrtle is lovely,’ said Betony next door, speaking a little too loudly, ‘but of all the plants not cultivated in gardens the hawthorn is my favourite, for it is both fair and strong. Its blossoms are as white as purity, its berries as red as passion, its leaves are painted with the green of youthful Springtime. Its thorny branches are kind to small birds of all descriptions, giving them shelter, so that hawthorn hedgerows ring with song. Even its Winter starkness has a wild sort of beauty, etched in black lines against grey skies.’

‘Yet those thorns can be cruel,’ Sorrel pointed out, after a quick glance at the window. ‘And of course bringing the flowers of the may into the house invites ill fortune.’

‘’Tis the same with lily-of-the-valley and all white flowers,’ averred Betony.

‘Ah, but ’tis not as dangerous as bringing in lilac,’ interjected Hazel.

‘I’ll not disagree that thorns can be harsh and fierce,’ Betony said, ‘yet only towards the foolish, or to the ignorant who approach them without due caution. And as for bringing the blossoms indoors—why would one wish to pluck such beauty and watch it wither, when it might display its loveliness for so much longer, crisp and strong on the twig, kissed by sunshine and rain? It is said that of all white flowers, the may was most beloved by the Faêran, and that is why they cursed those who would break its boughs, and hide it away within walls.’

‘It is reputed that thorn bushes were under the protection of the Fair Ones,’ said Hazel. ‘Some say the protection lingers yet. When I was a girl, any thorn which grew alone in a field was called a Faêrie Thorn. To this day, people say it is not right to cut such a bush. Cutting down a Faêrie tree brings death and madness—’ She broke off.

Outside, a commotion had erupted. The five damsels and the elderly neighbour hastened from the house. A man ran through the Errechd, shouting, ‘Come and see! Come and see! Out along the West Road, at the top of the cliffs!’

A knot of villagers was heading out of the West Gate where the guards were still talking excitedly about what the Master of the Village had been hunting when he passed through it several moments earlier.

Grabbing their cloaks, the girls followed. Out along the cliff tops they went, and the salt gale rode up over the side, out of the firth to meet them. Spray blew upward in jets spouting over the top of the cliff. Violent, the sea below churned where it met the rocks, like boiling cream. Away on the far bank the cliffs gleamed like chiselled stone doves in the starlight. Crystal halls of water smashed there, gauzed by the mist of their own vaporisation. Their thundering was blown ragged by the gale.

At the top of the cliffs, It was pinned, with Arrowsmith’s axe sticking out of It. To Tahquil, It looked like a sack of white wool.

‘Don’t be afeard,’ said Arrowsmith, his rough hand warm around hers. ‘It came to the house. I chased It, with the tilhal in one hand and the axe in the other. It took the road to the cliffs and I followed hard after. Just as It was going to slide over the cliffs and into the sea, I said a Word and slung the axe, which stuck fast in It.’

‘Where’s Spider?’ the villagers were shouting. ‘Fetch Spider!’

However, Spider, it seemed, had made overly merry on Flench Ridings Night and still slept the sticky apple-wine slumber.

Gathered together at a distance they considered safe, the audience scrutinised the strange thing pinned to the cliff top. It did not move. There was no way of knowing whether It was alive or dead. Indeed, there was no way of knowing Its true appearance, if It had one, because each person saw something different.

‘We’d better cover It over,’ someone suggested, so a few young men ran to fetch shovels. They scooped up soil and flung it over the entity, until It was buried under a thick layer of dirt. Then they dug a deep, wide trench around It, so that neither man nor beast might approach the dangerous object and possibly disturb It.

In fact, none of the villagers dared go near It. They stood around with the wind whipping and harrying at their cloaks, like a flock of strange birds flapping.

Now that the agitation was over and they discovered that they were in the perilous position of being outside the Fence at night, folk began to hasten homewards, clapping Arrowsmith on the back and congratulating him on a fine night’s work.

‘I shall stay alone in the house for the rest of the night,’ he said, ‘in case.’ He turned to Tahquil, lowering his voice. ‘Do you hear the wet wind off the water, Mistress Mellyn? A sound like the calling of a name.’

‘I hear the wind, sir,’ called Tahquil, drifting away in a bouquet of maidens.

‘Nothing more?’

‘No.’

‘Good night,’ he said.

‘Good night.’

Uhta woke Tahquil from tortured dreams with a sudden tightening as of a coiled spring—the imminence of the day. Something was about to happen at this early hour.

The wind had dropped. All was still. The clatter of hooves on cobblestones alerted her—looking out of the window she saw Arrowsmith mounted on his horse, leaving the stable. Finoderee was going to mow the round-field with him, and Finoderee was angry. The urisk had warned, ‘… he can be spiteful.’

Betony and Sorrel were stirring too.

‘Will you venture out with us to the cliffs?’ they asked. ‘The men are taking Spider to see where It is pinned. He will know what to do. And on the way we shall bathe our faces in the early dew. If ’tis done before dawn on the first of Uainemis, one is assured of an improved complexion. It cures freckles.’

‘We shall come.’

Tahquil and her friends dressed hastily, tugging cloaks around their shoulders. Already, out on the Errechd, many indistinct figures were assembling in the almost-darkness. The flames of their torches wove a dance but their faces were morose. This was the hour that made any festive atmosphere impossible. There was something about the chill, the stillness, the tense and expectant obscurity and the bleak blue tinge of pre-dawn air that would unfailingly bring melancholy to even the highest-spirited reveller wending home from a merry night at the inn.

Of which there were none this uhta—carousing throughout the entire night was a luxury the folk of Appleton Thorn only permitted themselves at Midsummer’s. Rest was a necessity; they had to work hard for a living, although not as hard as they would have had to work without the help of a certain brawny wight.

Spider was late, it having been difficult to rouse him. The village girls used this spare time to splash their faces with dew from the leaves of hawthorn and ivy, which were said to be most powerful.

‘Dew of ivy can bring ye a husband within the year,’ they whispered, giggling.

At length the wiry old dyn-cynnil arrived, yawning, and the three visitors joined the torchlit throng as it moved off toward the gate in the glimmering darkness. Along the cliff-top road the procession walked, its members conversing in muted tones, until they arrived at the place; the wide, deep trench and the mound in the middle. The tip of the axe-handle still stuck out of the top. Here, the procession halted and gathered expectantly around Spider.

Spider looked solemn. He gazed at the blank dirt. Beyond it, the sea glimmered with a satin lustre. Gentle draughts blowing up the land’s wall stole under the onlookers’ cloaks and flared them wide and hollow, spreading them out like war-banners.

‘Got to have a look at It,’ declared Spider.

Someone handed him a shovel. He jumped over the trench and began to raise the soil. As he lifted the seventh spadeful, a lurid light glowed up at him and the spectators drew back uttering gasps and muted cries. A dense mist steamed out of nowhere, wrapping Spider in a nebulous smear. Through the blur, the onlookers could dimly discern something rising out of the hole. Next moment it rolled down the cliff and into the sea.

Startled shouts jumped from many throats, but It was gone.

The mist tore into tattered strips and blew away. Spider was revealed leaning on the shovel and looking out across the firth.

‘It might have been a seal, or maybe an otter!’ proposed a voice.

Gravely, the dyn-cynnil shook his head.

‘Perhaps, or perhaps not. Eldritch wights that dwell in the air, in the ground and water are more numerous and various than we can ever know. What chance have such as we of understanding them, or even seeing them aright?’ he said. ‘Better to leave that to the mighty wizards, and those that have the Sight.’

They all made their way home, shaking their heads at the strangeness of it all, and the sun ran the gilded line of its upper edge along the horizon’s maiden blush.

As the damsels reached the house three horses came cantering up and wheeled to a halt. Arrowsmith and his reeve and steward dismounted. Crimson rivulets, as dark as wine, soaked through the fabric of Arrowsmith’s breeches. One leg was drenched with blood from the thigh down. Wincing, he limped to the door, shrugging off offers of help from his friends. The sisters flew to him like wrens, uttering soft cries of distress. Once indoors, they made him rest his leg on a stool while they tended it.

‘Cry mercy! What’s happened?’ exclaimed Viviana as the three travellers entered the room.

‘The wretch most unworthy!’ Arrowsmith expostulated. ‘As I mowed he followed me, grubbing up the roots so ferociously that at one time his pickaxe grazed my hamstrings. Indeed, my legs were in grave danger of being cut to the bone, had I not moved nimbly. I told him that he will never work for me again, now that he has so offended me, but he said he will continue to do so, and went off to drive my sheep up to pasture on Bonfire Hill. We went after him but already in his vengeful zeal he had driven them too close to the cliffs and some of them had fallen over. I shall call all the men together to drive him out!’

‘I fear you will not be able to rid yourselves of a wight like Finoderee by force,’ said Tahquil.

‘That’s as may be,’ said Arrowsmith grimly.

In the mellow morning the village turned out to pay respects to the Noble Thorn. They bawmed and adorned it with flowers and ribbons. Six village girls came riding on black rams to dance in a ring about the tree while the traditional Bawming Song was sung. This was followed by a festive picnic on the green lawns of the Errechd, and various rowdy sports.

Then horsemen in splendid costume trotted forth from the gates to perform the annual Riding of the Marches. The inspection of the boundaries of the common land outside the village was a dangerous mission, since it must pass under the eaves of the Khazathdaur. The cavalcade was headed by a young man chosen to be the Cornet, who bore the village banner and who led the Cornet’s Gallop at the end of the Ride.

The traditional Summer ceremonies did not cease there. When the light lengthened in the afternoon, those responsible for keeping watch and ward over Appleton Thorn set out to collect their head-penny from every householder and, by an old statute both bawdy and chaste, a kiss from every woman they met. The reeve, the bailiff, the steward, the Keeper of the Keys of the Common Coffer, the water bailiff, the constable and the Village Master had a merry duty as, armed with their ribbon-decked tithing pole, they toured the cottages. They were accompanied by a Pumpkin Scrambler in extraordinary raiment, who tossed to the children miniature pumpkins hollowed out and filled with honey cake and spiced fruits, and who offered these dainty victuals to each woman kissed.

‘Fie! ’Tis a silly game,’ said Caitri, watching the shrieking goodwives pretending to avoid the tithing-men’s jocular advances.

‘You are too young for it anyway,’ said Viviana, glancing in the tiny looking-glass chained to her chatelaine, and pinching her cheeks to redden them.

‘I wouldn’t wish to be kissed by those churls!’

‘I would not scorn a kiss from Master Arrowsmith,’ said Viviana, who relished any sort of merrymaking. ‘And that young water bailiff—the set of his shoulders is not entirely odious.’

‘I shall shut myself in the house,’ decided Caitri, ‘and they will never find me.’

‘I too,’ said Tahquil, ‘am surfeited with celebration.’

She and Caitri hid themselves away on the top floor of the house of the Master of the Village. She could not hide herself from everything, however. The Langothe worked its claws deeper in her, with every hour.

The distant sounds of laughing and cheering scratched at the upstairs shutters while the day faded. The Forest Horn sounded from the now deserted Errechd, and the shutters flew open. Favouring his injured leg, Arrowsmith climbed in.

‘I’ll not let the men trouble you,’ he said. ‘Pardon my uncouth entrance, but I could not get inside any other way. My sisters locked the house and kept the key. The village ladder is mine.’ Looking at Tahquil, who sat calmly by Caitri, he faltered.

‘Are you come to claim the kiss,’ said Tahquil, ‘which lawfully is yours? I cannot stop you.’ Her gaze met his, steadily.

He read her message with ease. For a time he did not reply. Eventually he proffered a honey-coloured globe dripping with ribbons.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You are not of the village, Mistress Mellyn. You owe naught.’

Tahquil accepted the gift. As Arrowsmith turned to leave, Caitri rose, stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the side of his stubbly jaw. He muttered something, then awkwardly flung a leg over the windowsill. Before he descended out of view he hesitated once more. Turning his eyes upon Tahquil he said, ‘Will you stay till Meathensun? You will be Queen of the Garlands.’

‘No,’ said Tahquil, ‘I cannot stay.’

She gazed past him, over his shoulder, as though focused on some distance he could not see.

‘Aye,’ said Arrowsmith.

He climbed down, disappearing from view.

Handbells were ringing throughout Appleton Thorn, ringing like cup-lilies on the brink of clear pools. Night stalked through narrow streets.

A horse’s skull with snapping jaws came roaming in the dark from house to house, seeking admittance. Terrifyingly it pranced; the jaws flapped and clicked. Youths swaggered at a safe distance, but immune at the side of this equine spectre sauntered a huge man dressed as a woman and brandishing a besom.

‘Hey, Sally!’ called the youths, and the man-woman roared. He shook the broom and chased them, and the horse-impersonator hidden under a sheet of linen, and bearing the skull on a pole, chased them too, pulling the strings to make the jaws snap. Tonight was for Burning the Boatman, so the Hooden Horse was abroad.

At the other end of the village an effigy issued from a cottage, its arms hanging limply across the shoulders of two men. His body, larger than a man’s, was crammed with old rags and shabby fleeces, saturated with turpentine and whale oil. The amorphous head was eerily and somewhat riskily lit by two candle-lamps for eyes. A crowd assembled, marching in his wake. As he travelled down the main street he stopped at the doors of the oldest and the most esteemed villagers, whereupon one of his attendants would sing loudly, on a single note:

‘At Pikehall Crags he tore his rags

At Appleton Thorn he blew his horn

At Churrachan Stee he broke his knee

At Grassrill Beck he broke his neck

At Cliffroad’s bend we’ll make his end

Shout boys, shout!’

After which the members of the crowd would give three cheers, take another swig from their spilling jugs and continue on their way. The Hooden Horse and facetious ‘Sally’, meanwhile, jumped unexpectedly out from corners at anyone straying on the fringe of the mob.

Carrying flaming brands, Tahquil and Viviana found themselves in the centre of the press, borne along with the tide. Still ringing the handbells, the villagers exited from the West Gate and continued out along the cliff road, past the excavated spot where It had rolled into the sea the night before. Down the rough-hewn wall stair went the Boatman and the crowd, with the Hooden Horse’s jaws snapping at their heels and enormous Sally sweeping. There at the bend where the stair terminated on a level platform just above the high tide mark, all torches save one were extinguished and the Boatman met his end.

They stabbed him with a knife and laid him in a canoe, then set him on fire. The canoe was pushed out onto the black waters of the firth. As the Boatman burned, the villagers sang—not any traditional verse, but whatever songs came into their heads. He blazed up with a popping and a crackling and the orange flames, moving away, cast their dazzling reflections way down into the obsidian depths. The current and the tide caught hold and bore the boat from shore. It dwindled as it departed, but the fire leaped higher until it became a splendid blossom of pure, radiant energy suspended in total darkness, its light eclipsing, for the moment, all others—a blend of dazzling ruby, topaz, citrine.

For a long time the audience stood, and the choruses from their combined throats, bass and alto, tenor and soprano, sobered now. Far out across the water the flames began to die and soon the burning Boatman was only a glowing speck, a hot coal in a black pit. Then the boat sank—they heard the hiss of steam, and all was over.

The reason for it all had long ago been forgotten.

The single torch gave life to the others, and led by the Hooden Horse, the procession wound its way back up the cliffs and into the village. The bells were silent now. Some folk dawdled—Cooper was the last man in tow. The rest had just passed inside the gate when they heard him shout and turned to see him pointing to a figure lying beside the road.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Someone’s hurt!’ he yelled. ‘Come and help!’

Before anyone else had time to move in its direction the figure abruptly grew to the supernatural stature of thirteen feet. Like a tower on legs, it began chasing Cooper towards the gate. Shrieking madly, the man came bolting along, his cloak flying. With one last despairing effort he hurled himself sprawling on village ground and the guards slammed the gate. The figure, which had now shrunk to a respectable height, bounded away laughing wildly.

‘The Bullbeggar!’ wailed the crowd. ‘The Bullbeggar of Creech Hill!’

Cooper lay gasping, moaning.

His friends hauled him to his feet.

‘Come on, Cooper,’ they said philosophically. ‘There’s naught wrong with ye that a pint of best beer wouldn’t set to rights.’

They repaired to the Thorn Tree, but an uneasiness had crept amongst them.

‘Bullbeggars one night, It another,’ some muttered, ‘not to mention Shocks. Black Annis will be next no doubt; we shall hear the gnashing of her teeth and she’ll be reaching her metal claws in our windows to steal our babes and how shall we defend them?’

Some began again to look askance at the newcomers.

Despite these undertones their stay at Appleton Thorn lengthened. Each day brought a new excuse as to why they should not yet depart. However, while most of the inhabitants tempted them to tarry and argued that to leave now would be to travel at a perfidious season, there were those who whispered to each other that these three damsels on their untoward, unaccompanied journey had drawn after them unwholesome things, and that an extended visit might bring down some eldritch threat upon the hamlet.

There were questions, too, as to where Tahquil and her companions must go, and why, and by what means they would travel. Unwilling to divulge anything which might provide a clue to spies, the travellers gave out the only story they could fabricate—that they had disembarked from a merchantman at the firth’s mouth and walked up the coast road to see the famous Summer celebrations of Appleton Thorn. They would rendezvous with friends at a specified location to the north, and they must meet them there early in Grianmis.

‘Why did they not accompany you, your friends?’ persisted their inquisitors. ‘Three young damsels, all alone, ’tis not right. Or do you have some manner of special protection?’

‘We do,’ they said, but they would not disclose its nature.

‘And why north? And where?’

Arrowsmith defended them against such inquisitions, saying, ‘Pry not into the affairs of our guests. You would have them believe us discourteous rustics.’

But this only had the effect of whetting the curiosity of the villagers and, deprived of facts, they began to hypothesise their own.

Since his altercation with Arrowsmith, Finoderee was proving more and more troublesome. He used his hideous strength to extremes with every task he undertook, resulting in the loss of livestock, damage to ploughs and other equipment, and the spoiling of cart-loads of produce. Constantly he oppressed Arrowsmith with his excess of zeal.

‘He’s turning unseelie,’ lamented the men and wives of Appleton Thorn. ‘He is corrupted. Something must be done.’

One evening in the middle of Uainemis, Greenmonth, after Finoderee had thrown all the cut hay over Bonfire Hill, scattering it far and wide, Tahquil inquired, ‘Master Arrowsmith, how shall you deal with Finoderee?’

‘This very night,’ he replied quietly, glancing to right and left in case of eavesdroppers, ‘we assemble. The wight turns unseelie. He runs awry and must not be permitted to remain in these parts any longer. Who can tell what damage he might be doing at this moment?’

‘He has haunted around here for many years, has he not? Is he not as old as your customs, or older?’

‘We shall bring iron,’ the headman continued without heeding her, ‘scythes and pitchforks, halberds and good Eldaraigne broadswords. Spider shall stand alongside us. And I have a Word, a Word of Gramarye.’

‘Your men will suffer sorely. He is strong, Finoderee. I have heard it said that he once lifted a block of stone that all the men of the village together could not budge. Are you wanting to be revenged on him or do you truly wish only to protect the village?’

‘The desire for vengeance is strong. But the village comes first, while I am at its head.’

‘Then I beg you to do one thing.’

‘Aye, and what might that be, Mistress Mellyn?’

‘Once—how long ago it seems—I offered to pay him, and he said, “Alas, poor Finoderee, don’t send him away, he only wants to help.” Give him a suit of clothes, good clothes made to fit. He is dressed in rags like a household bruney, and perchance he will depart if rewarded. Besides, after he has laboured so diligently for the village, would you not agree that he deserves proper remuneration?’

Arrowsmith looked up at the stars. The sound of the sea booming in the firth echoed from afar and, as many times before, he seemed to be hearkening to it, as if to some call.

He looked down and said, ‘There might be sense in what you say, Mistress. I will not be forsworn—aye, it will be done, but if he does not depart we shall drive him forth or vanquish him.’

Men stood inside the East Gate at uhta. Helmed they were, and clad in a motley assortment of half-armour and brigandines. Their pikes and halberds and common farming implements stood up like a thicket.

‘Open the gate,’ commanded Arrowsmith.

‘Aye.’ A throaty grunt from beyond the fence. ‘Open the gate, boys, that Arrowsmith might come a-mowing the meadows with Finoderee. We shall raze the tares and marram alike to the naked ground.’

The gate swung wide. Finoderee stood grinning.

‘There are no meadows in need of mowing,’ said Arrowsmith, ‘or reaping.’

‘But there’s a field of barley,’ grimaced Finoderee.

‘The barley’s only new-sprung.’

‘Better early than late,’ said the wight, having the last word.

Arrowsmith stepped forward and held out a bundle.

‘Take these clouts, Finoderee. You have worked long and hard for Appleton Thorn. Here is your reward.’

Finoderee’s coarse face metamorphosed into a cameo of surprise and dismay. Tenderly, almost fearfully, he took the bundle and opened it. He shook out every article as it came to hand and held each one aloft.

‘Cap for the head,’ he cried, ‘alas poor head! Coat for the back, alas poor back! Breeches for the bum, alas poor bum! If these be all thine, thine cannot be Ishkiliath.’

The burly old wight threw off his old rags then and there before the gate. He donned the new clothes before turning and walking away towards the forest, singing as he strode:

‘It’s not well mowed! It’s not well mowed!

Then ’tis never to be mowed by me again.

I’ve scattered it all to the east and west—

They’ll have some work ere they get their rest!’

But when he had passed out of sight his voice could still be heard, and his plaint—faint …

‘Far from me is the fen of weeping,

Far from me is the glen of sleeping,

Far from me is the field of reaping.

No more the watch-hours I’ll be keeping

When the yellow moon comes creeping.’

Finoderee never returned to Grey Glass Firth. The men went back to their homes and took off their armour and laid down their weapons. When the sun rose that day, there would be many heavy tasks awaiting.

On the land, people had to work hard for a living.

Tahquil and the sisters were still wakeful when Arrowsmith came limping back to the stable to throw himself on the fragrant hay and find repose. They moved away from the window after they saw him go indoors.

‘Will you not stay for Weighing the Lord of the Hundred and Hare Pie Scramble next moon?’ asked Betony. ‘Will you not remain and dwell with us?

Tahquil shook her head.

‘The Lord of the Hundred and Master of the Village has always been an Arrowsmith,’ Sorrel said. ‘It is not a hereditary title, but an elected one, by secret ballot. Appleton Thorn has thrived under the watch and ward of our forefathers’ line. The Noble Thorn itself has thrived, living far beyond the years of any other tree. We dwell so remote here, beyond the aid of the greater world. They say that if ever the Arrowsmiths leave the village then the luck will go and the Noble Thorn will perish.’

‘A mere superstition, surely.’

‘They say in the village that you have spelled our brother,’ said Betony. ‘And in sooth, he was a merrier man ere he set eyes on you.’

‘That is hardly my fault.’

‘He might be married now, if he had wanted. Every maid wants to marry a silkie’s son. Have you seen him, swimming in the firth, quick and sleek as a seal? No man has dived so deep and so long. No man can catch fish with his hands and swim so fast, swim down to the ocean and the skerries out beyond the firth’s mouth, where the seals play.’

‘There is a power of him,’ said Sorrel. ‘And he has the Word. His mother taught it him, but she was not our mother—two marriages had our father. Sometimes at nights Galan stands at the window and listens to the water mulling and brewing in the firth.

‘He longs for the open ocean, but he has said he will stay if he takes a landwife. If not, then the land cannot bind him much longer. None here please him enough, not that he is hard to please, but being of the blood that he is, he looks for different qualities in a wife than most men.’

‘Would you have me bear the doom of the village upon my shoulders?’ cried Tahquil angrily. ‘I have never given any sign of love. I do not play with men’s affections.’

‘You kept the honeysuckle stick—’

‘Was that some meaningful gesture? I know naught of your customs. Here it is. Take it back now.’

The sisters gazed upon her sorrowfully, and would not accept the stick, so she laid it on the table.

‘Pray do not reproach me!’ Tahquil said. ‘Three reasons I will give to you for declining your invitation. The first is this; as has been proved time and over in every tale of yore, all liaison between mortal and immortal is doomed to tragedy. Where is his silkie mother now? And where your mortal father? I would hazard that the one swims far out in the cold ocean while the other lies deep beneath the cold stone.’

‘Ah, but that brings a question,’ said Betony. ‘Does our brother’s blood run with the sealkind or with humankind? Is he mortal or no? But tell on, if so ’tis your will.’

‘The second is that my heart is already given. I love another, and it will be so while I have life. ’Twas he who gave me the ring on my finger. Thirdly, if this were not so, yet could I not marry Galan, for there is no real love between us. I honour and admire him. Perhaps he thinks me comely—that is all.’

Sorrel picked up the honeysuckle stick and turned it over in her hands.

‘Then you will depart.’

‘This very day.’

Arrowsmith’s sister threw the stick into the gorse fire, where it burst into yellow buds like a sudden, brief Spring.

Tahquil and her companions rode out of the East Gate accompanied by the Master of the Village. His sisters and most of the villagers followed at their backs, some mounted, some on foot. Slowly they rode up to the barleymow and the meadows where Finoderee used to wield the scythe, and around past the rushy curraghs and the glen where he no longer slept the days. They splashed through Grassrill Beck and clattered across the stone bridge by the gorse mill. They passed across the open downlands, while away to their left the firth boomed and rolled with a grey swell like sounding whales, and white stitchery seabirds braced themselves against the salt wind out of the west.

At the northern marches of the common lands, Arrowsmith and the three travellers detached themselves from the concourse and took their leave; for he had sworn that he would ride with them and deliver them safely into the care of their friends and nothing would dissuade him from this resolve. In tears, his sisters fell upon his neck and clung to him. The men saluted and the women curtsied. One would have thought they were losing their headman forever.

Leaving the villagers, the three companions and their defender turned their horses’ heads to the north. As they rode away they heard the voices—bass, alto, tenor, soprano, raised again in song:

‘The wind whistles wild in the withies of willows,

The magpie is calling to welcome the dawn.

The Churrachan sings to the wheel of the mill-o,

Where green are the hillsides and golden the corn.

In rushen-grown curraghs where water is shallow,

The herons are wading, the frogs are a-spawn.

Bright marigold, bog-bean, flag-lily and mallow

Spring under the leaves of the old peppercorn.

The wind from the Firth lifts the hulls at the winnow,

The waves on the Firth lift the hulls in the morn.

The fishing boats sail for the sturgeon and minnow

So pearly. So early, the fishermen yawn.

Beyond the curs’d reach of the forest’s dark shadow

Where loiter foul wretches that make us to mourn,

We bide at the edge of the wide, open meadow.

Unseelie we banish, malign wights we scorn.

So if you’ll but lend me the wings of a swallow,

No more shall I linger bereft and forlorn—

I’ll fly on the path that my heart yearns to follow,

Back to the Grey Firth and the place I was born.

Where applejack cider’s abundant and mellow

And we’ll sit ’round a pint when the sheep have been shorn.

Where the gorse on the Creech is a buttery yellow,

We’ll raise up our jugs. Drink to Appleton Thorn!’

Just before they reached the shoulder of the hill, the four riders turned and looked back. Small against the wide, green land looked the knot of villagers, insignificant against the sky’s dizzying heights. Their song came lilting clearly on the breeze and every hand was lifted in a flourish of farewell.

3

LALLILLIR

The Veiled Vale

In Lallillir I heard the water falling

Through secret places bung with dripping ferns.

And, as it fell, the water-voices calling

From rushing gills, and mossy becks and burns.

FROM THE CHAP-BOOK: ‘POEMS OF THE NORTH COUNTRY’

Tahquil tied a scarf over the lower part of her face as soon as they had passed out of sight. On leaving the village she had drawn on a pair of gloves, lest the leaf-ring should betray her identity to questing wights. Her garments, the travel-worn garb from the fisher-cot, were drenched in oil of lavender—a gift from Betony and Sorrel. Her head swam with the intensity of its fumes. Surely no unfriendly wight could penetrate that smothering fragrance … or was it already too late for disguise? During their sojourn in the village she had unwittingly relaxed her vigilance. Reconsidering, she pulled off the scarf. To go about masked would surely attract more interest than not. The inevitable dirt of travel would conceal her features less conspicuously.

Their borrowed steeds were a welcome means of travel. Three of the horses belonged to Arrowsmith and his sisters, the fourth had been lent by the water bailiff. To lend a horse was a generous gesture indeed, for which Tahquil and her friends were deeply grateful. It had been arranged that Arrowsmith would bring the beasts back with him after he saw the travellers safe to their destination.

The Master of the Village might have been a welcome addition to their band, except that he was a well-known figure in these parts. The news that he had ridden off with a trio of young women could not fail to attract the attention of inquisitive wights. His presence could only make them more obvious.

‘Your sisters’ tears threatened to drown you,’ Tahquil remarked to him as they cantered on. ‘You will return soon, within a day or two surely—not long enough to warrant such distress. They love you dearly.’

But will he turn back when he finds out we have no protectors to guard us along our further journey?

‘This I have said to my sisters and to all the rest,’ replied Arrowsmith, ‘that either I will return in two days or my horse will return without me. And if they find tied to the saddle a strand of kelp, then they will know where I have gone.’

Then he rode his horse close up beside her and looked her in the eyes.

‘Fear not,’ he said. ‘My sisters have spoken to me. By the ring on your finger I now know you to be pledged. I force no suit.’

He flicked the reins and cantered ahead.

She had seen what it cost him and her heart quickened with compassion. For that alone, she might have loved this grave, honest gentleman, almost.

The northerly way they followed was an old road, a faint path cut into the hillsides, called the Long Lane. Rising gradually all the time it crossed a land of dales not rugged, grand or majestic but rounded and gentle, with no peak rising more than two thousand feet. So vast and open was the sky that the land seemed no more than a rim pressed against it. the horizon framing the surging clouds and sun-rinsed blue of the heavens.

Thickly wooded hills stood above beck-threaded valley floors where bird’s-eye primula, hart’s tongue fern and pink foxglove peeped from stony crevices. An ancient rune-carved monolith, its edges softened and worn by the loving, ruthless caresses of wind and water, stood by itself—a lonely sentinel rooted in the turf of a distant slope. A windhover falcon gracefully rode a thermal, hanging in the lucid air.

‘By Kingsdale Beck we go,’ said Arrowsmith, ‘and past Churnmilk Hole. By Frostrow and Shaking Moss, and Hollybush Spout.’

The Long Lane entered woodlands of wych elm and aspen. Spindly trunks like painted streaks, gold-flecked with sunlight, supported a misty tracery of leaves. Epiphytic lichens, ferns and mosses lived firm-footed on the organic debris which, for centuries undisturbed, had built up in clefts and hollows in the boughs. The undergrowth was rich with pink valerian, woodsage and early purple orchid. Red deer raised their heads at the sound of hoofbeats and darted into thickets. Grouse flew up in fright from wild shaws and bosky braes.

The horses splashed through shallow stony fords across fair streams of silver which cut through overhanging woods. Droplets flew from their hooves, as bright as polished threepences. Fish leaped like silver-plated leaves. Towering trees leaned their long boughs over the water and the banks were in flower with primroses and celandine, marsh marigold and herb robert.

Into open country they passed again, still climbing. From the peaks to the east, gills hung long and glittering like strands of Icemen’s hair.

‘Over there to the east,’ said Arrowsmith, ‘Ashgill Waterfall goes tumbling down the scar by Crooked Oak. In Autumn after rain the falls are thundering and the trees seem to have been wrought of copper. Look to the northeast—Rookhope Chimney rises beyond Briarwood Bank. The dales have names, though Men have never dwelt here. Only the road and the Rune-stone have been wrought by the hand of man, long ago, but the Long Lane ends at the foot of Mallorstang Edge.’

The late sun was turning towards dusk and mauve vapours coagulated in the still air. The distant hills took on shades of lilac and purple. Clouds kissed their tops. A small owl out hunting early was perched in the fork of a silver birch looking for mice and shrews in the long grass. It flew away as the riders disturbed it.

Tortuously the path began to wind, ascending a long fell-side out of the dales. Here the trees crouched, stunted. Higher up, they disappeared altogether. Wildflowers were overtaken by thick, tufted grasses. Swift, wild gills tumbled recklessly down narrow sluices.

By evenfall they had almost reached the top of Mallorstang Edge on the outer marches of Lallillir. Rising from the hill’s brow, a twisted tree leaned stark against an arch of pale cloud flaring across deepening twilight. Beneath its roots a couple of shallow cave-openings bored into the rock face, overhung with ivy and ferns. Nearby, white-flowered enchanter’s nightshade sprang in the grasses. A black fox loped past and uttered its rusty bark, so unlike a dog’s, so strange it seemed more like the cry the moon would make, had it a voice.

There they halted to rest, kindling their fire just inside one of the caves in case it rained. They sat around its glassy blaze and ate some of their provisions: bannocks and dried fish, cheese, salty dulse and red carrageen from the firth. The treble pip of an insect chipped away at the upper edges of hearing. Caitri idly piped a few notes on Viviana’s whistle of white dead-nettle, until Arrowsmith hushed her with a wave of his hand.

‘Soft,’ he advised. ‘Wights may be moving up there on the edge-top, on the high land above the rising of the rills.’

The horses at their pickets seemed to sense the whiff of danger. They pricked up their ears but remained quiet. Only an occasional shuffling in the grasses indicated their presence.

Overhead, the sky deepened. The stars appeared, so huge and close that Tahquil fancied she might reach out and touch them. Disrupted from its swarm by a passing star, a frozen nucleus of ice in a coma of nebulous gases hurtled along its sky track. Pushed by the sun’s wind the comet’s tail streamed out a hundred million miles long.

‘Turn back,’ said Arrowsmith.

Perhaps he said it to the comet. If so, futilely.

Tahquil shook her head.

‘A war is brewing,’ she said. ‘I can stop it.’

She thought he might laugh, but he did not. He merely looked down at his elbows, which rested on his knees.

‘A young lad was lost out towards Mallorstang not two weeks ago,’ he said. ‘Seven rode out, six returned. Lallillir is a mighty perilous land. You will not survive there without aid, clever though you are, possessed of a ring of gramarye though you may be. You would not have made it as far as you have, except that many wights have departed from hereabouts and vanished eastwards. For good or ill, fewer remain here now than ever in living memory.’

Said Tahquil, ‘As you have suspected, we make our journey alone. The ring I wear is protection enough.’

Arrowsmith stilled then, suddenly; every line of his body drawn taut.

Without glancing around he took the last bannock from the stone on which it had been warming beside the fire, and placed it beyond the circle of light. Then he resumed his position. Taking their cue from him, Tahquil and her companions continued as though nothing were afoot, though they strained their senses for signs of peril.

‘Not enough,’ Arrowsmith went on, ‘for you were all tired and hungry and ragged when you came to Appleton Thorn. Why so unguarded on an enterprise which you say is of gravest importance to every kingdom?’

‘For secrecy.’

‘From whom?’

‘Galan,’ Tahquil said, ‘only three people know the truth—myself and these two who accompany me. Too many know already. The knowledge in itself may be dangerous to the bearer of it.’

He laughed softly. ‘Think you that I cannot withstand a peril flouted by three girls? Very well, if you will not tell me, so be it. I will accompany you nonetheless. In Lallillir you will be in need of more than mortal strength.’

‘Aye, and that is the truth,’ hooted a voice. ‘That is the truth indeed, Galan Siune’s son.’

Beyond the globe of firelight the speaker propped himself against the twisted tree, flicking bannock crumbs from his hairy flanks. His deft hooves balanced on roots which were tangled like skeins of hair, caging the ground with an intricate, interlocking design like the embellished borders of manuscripts.

‘Urisk,’ said Arrowsmith, ‘have you come back, then?’

‘Och,’ said the urisk drily. ‘Ye mun be dreaming.’

‘A welcome sight you are, sir,’ chimed Viviana.

‘Friend urisk!’ exclaimed Caitri.

‘Will you sit with us?’ Tahquil asked. ‘By the fire?’

‘Dinnae mind if I do.’

Graciously the wight squatted down on his haunches. The ruddy glow played across his features: the pointed ears, the snub nose, the slanted eyes with vertical slits of pupils narrowing in the firelight. Neat, he looked, and dignified—artistic in the way that an agile woodland creature or a gnarled, wind-wrung tree is a work of art. It seemed he remained part of the landscape against which their group huddled. Although he was inside the circle of light, he belonged outside it.

‘You have been long away,’ said Arrowsmith, and somehow the listeners understood that he was speaking of years, not days.

‘Aye. Syne the sons o’ the Arbalisters left their hame on the Churrachan and sailed across the Great Salt where sich as I couldnae follow.’

‘The old cot is naught but broken stones now,’ said Arrowsmith, ‘and bindweed clambers over the remains of the walls.’

‘The hame I used tae keep fine for them, and all,’ the urisk replied regretfully. ‘Still, that’s the way o’t. The forest reaches oot, the village dwindles, folk take their leave.’

‘You would have been welcome at any house in Appleton Thorn.’

‘Now dinna be tellin’ me ye don’t understand the way of it, Galan Siune’s son,’ chided the wight. ‘’Tis the place that’s the thing. The Churrachan’s my ain stream o’ water. ‘’Tis in me bluid and ’tis mighty hard tae leave it.’

‘But you cannot cross it, can you?’ asked Caitri. ‘A running stream? How did you reach this side?’

‘Lassie, there be a mindful o’ matters ye ken nowt of, I see!’ chuckled the urisk. ‘There be more than one way tae get tae t’ither side o’ a running water. I went around by the springhead, up where the stream rises out o’ the hills. The mightiest barrier agin our crossing be the south-running water. Churrachan flows tae the west, otherwise Siune’s son wouldnae be here the noo. Saw ye how his horse fashed itsel’ against crossing the Grassrill, and baulked at goin’ over the Churrachan Bridge? It felt the current flowin’ aslant its rider. But there be an affinity there too, with the water, and the bluid that’s half mortal is insensitive. So you ride over it, Siune’s son, but ye feel it sorely, do ye no’?’

‘’Tis naught,’ said Arrowsmith curtly.

‘Oh aye, ’tis naught by comparison tae Lallillir,’ said the urisk. ‘Lallillir be the Land of Running Waters.’

‘What can you tell us of this land, this Lallilir that lies ahead of us?’ asked Tahquil.

‘Much,’ said the urisk, and he proceeded to do so.

He told them about the four long ridges running parallel, south to north. Swarth Fell, the highest, bordered the coast and attracted rain to the three sharp valleys: the Vales of Wood, Water and Stone. Elfinwoodsdale was the westernmost, Blackwatervale lay in the centre, and to the east delved Ravenstonedale. The early tributaries of the river Elfinwater rose on Mallorstang Ridge and rushed away down between Swarth Fell and Bleak Fell, until at the northern marches of Lallillir the river turned west through the last foothills of Swarth Fell and ran to the sea. The middle waterway, the Blackwater, began in the same heights and was fed by the thousands of springs on the eastern side of Bleak Fell and the western slopes of Wold Fell. Where Bleak Fell sank in the north, the Blackwater curved to meet the Elfinwater on its journey oceanwards and at that point the names of both the rivers changed, for though mighty, they became but feudatories to the thundering Ravenswater gushing down from the east.

The Ravenswater flowed furthest inland. Its valley clove between Wold Fell and Scarrow Fell. Like its siblings it received tribute from the myriad brooks, streams, waterfalls and fountains gushing from the hillsides and cliffs. The entire rain-drenched landscape of Lallillir was threaded with silver and electrum and faceted with sheets of platinum where water curtained down great rock shields. It was diamonded with the brilliant necklaces of sudden jets spurting from subterranean chambers. Bleak and gaunt were the heights of the Fells, but the vales were rich with ferns, thick with moss-crusted trees dripping with epiphytes, hung with permanent rainbows in a crystal mist.

Wights of water haunted Lallillir, but it was a land to dwell in for aeons, not to roam, for they could not leave their rivers or streams for long without fading. And wights of land could not traverse Lallillir’s surging currents, the flowing waters inimical to the eldritch of their gramarye. They must keep to the ridge tops, to the roofs of the fells, and so they did. Yet, while it was possible to reach the fell-tops from the south without crossing running water, it was also impossible to leave them in the north without crossing the Ravenswater—except in the eastern foothills of Scarrow Fell. For this reason, wights must traverse Lallillir along the top of Scarrow Fell. Ever since the land was formed, they had done so. The path they travelled came to be known as Wight’s Way.

‘No mortal walks Wight’s Way and survives,’ said the urisk sombrely. ‘Ye canna go that way. Ye mun go by the western slopes o’ Wold Fell, in the upper reaches o’ Blackwatervale. ’Tis directly to the north o’ us noo, if ye could but see it o’er the top o’ Mallorstang. Ye’ll hae many’s the brook tae cross, but each one shall put a fence atween ye and whatever’s got on yer tracks.’

‘Wights might still come upon us from the fell-top above,’ objected Viviana.

‘The trick be tae get between a stream’s fork, then. If any should lay siege tae ye, then move downhill till ye’ve crossed some more water and put yerselves beyond reach. But mind, the further down ye go towards the brae’s floor, the broader the streams, the swifter, the harder tae ford.’

‘And what shall we do,’ said Tahquil, ‘when we come to valley’s end, with the Ravenswater turning its elbow to bar our path? For surely a spate so immense might not be forded.’

‘Black Bridge,’ put in Arrowsmith. ‘Black Bridge spans the Ravenswater at that point. ’Tis the only bridge across it, since the old Wynch Bridge fell into the torrent downstream. The Wynch used to be part of the King’s High Way, but in these regions that road has fallen into disrepair.’

‘One bridge only?’ said Tahquil. ‘I mislike this. One bridge is dangerous, for, knowing that we have no choice but to cross it, that is where our enemies would look for us, and perhaps lay ambush.’

‘In sooth,’ said Arrowsmith. ‘And that is why you need a man’s strong arm—to smite those enemies.’

‘Sealman!’ the urisk said sharply, his ears flattened to his curly hair. ’Tis the salt water that loves ye, not the fresh! These fells and vales sit well above the high tide mark! How far d’ye think ye’ll get in Lallillir before the currents pull the marrow out o’ ye and weaken ye like a babe? Then ye’ll be naught but a burden to these lasses.’

‘Who’s to go with them then?’ Arrowsmith snapped. ‘You? You’d be worse off than I, goatfellow. You cannot even cross the Churrachan. Besides, you know nothing more than farming and housekeeping. You are no fighter.’

‘No fighter, aye, but is it a fighter that’s needed? ’Tis cunning that’s needed, and knowledge and maybe gramarye tae boot, if mortals are tae conquer Lallillir.’

‘What is your suggestion, urisk?’ asked Tahquil.

Flames swayed like Autumn forests, bronze and cinnabar in the urisk’s peculiar eyes.

‘I have none.’

Disappointment washed over the damsel. She felt at a loss.

Viviana broke in unexpectedly, ‘Mistress, do you not recall the article which Dain Pennyrigg found in his saddlebags when we returned from the Stormriders’ Tower to the City?’

Tahquil shook her head, wrinkling her brows in puzzlement.

‘The feather of the swan, mistress,’ Viviana went on. ‘You said it was a powerful talisman. Mayhap it will prove useful now.’ She gazed at Tahqil with optimistic expectancy.

Slowly Tahquil nodded, as the possibilities sank in. ‘Gramercie, Via!’ she murmured. ‘A bright hope indeed!’

‘If ye have a Summoner on ye,’ the wight said eagerly, ‘use it.’

Tahquil drew out the tattered aulmoniere, one of the few keepsakes she had salvaged from Tamhania. Within, the black feather nestled beside the vial of nathrach deirge. It looked even more dilapidated, bedraggled and bent than ever. Indeed, events had battered it into such insignificance that she had overlooked its very existence.

‘Och, ’tis braw and blythe, true!’ exclaimed the urisk upon beholding the plume. ‘There’s more than one way tae cross running water! Use it, lass!’

‘Right now?’ Tahquil asked. Arrowsmith smiled. The urisk inclined his curly head in assent. ‘How?’ she inquired.

‘Give it your message,’ Arrowsmith answered. ‘Cast it high.’

Tahquil stood up. Recalling the words Maeve One-Eye had told her, she whispered to the swan’s feather, ‘Come, Whithiue. Aid us.’

Lifting her arm she flicked the pinion up, expecting it to drift down immediately in the windless night. A cold-blooded draught entered from nowhere, snatched it and twirled it away out of sight. The gust swirled Tahquil’s cinnamon-dyed hair, rushing the tresses up around her face in a flare of singed fleece.

‘And now?’ she asked.

‘Wait.’

That night the three mortals lay down to sleep with the tension of excitement stretched like a cord between them. Their two self-appointed guardians did not close their eyes.

Towards uhta she came, in those ephemeral predawn moments on the borders of day and night when the world swings around and odd things may easily occur. They knew her first by a clap of wings and a rush of air. Presently a feminine manifestation emerged out of grey dewdrop stillness, forming as though she gathered shape to herself from the sky, the clouds, the last fading star. A startlingly scarlet band glimmered like a crescent of roses across her brow. The black cloak of feathers dripped from delicate shoulders to her bare feet. Coral-red bangles encircled the narrow ankles, matching the poppy-petal nails on the tips of her webbed toes. Like a wondrous girl she appeared, yet imbued with an inhuman wildness and a strangeness that evoked glimmering meres glimpsed through rising mist. Afar off she stood on the grass—unspeaking, remote.

Tahquil was already awake, smudge-faced and gloved to conceal identifying features.

‘I called you,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’

The swanmaiden uttered a soft, hissing whistle. Stirring restively, the horses whickered.

The urisk trotted over to the wight-girl. He spoke in a low, soothing undertone, then returned to Tahquil’s side.

‘I hae informed her of your need,’ he fluted. ‘She’ll aid ye in your journey across Lallillir. She’ll see ye safe—gin ’tis possible—tae Black Bridge, nae further. She’d nae do that much, were it no’ tae honour the geas o’ the feather.’

‘I see,’ said Tahquil. The swanmaiden’s chill gaze struck through her like a sharpened icicle, or like a quill pen writing aversion on the air in frozen characters.

‘Tell her she must help us get across the river to Cinnarine, at the least, at the very least.’

The two wights conversed again.

‘Ye hold the feather. She must obey ye tae the word,’ said the urisk. ‘But the swans dinnae favour mortalkind—they opine ye’re all thieves and hunters.’

‘And not far from the truth, I suppose,’ said Tahquil.

‘The sun’s about to lift his head,’ said the urisk. ‘I’ll toddle along, and swans must fly. As ye make your journey she’ll patrol the skies. She’ll come down and tell ye if peril approaches. She’ll point out the best ways to go. Mind, she doesnae love shifting tae her woman’s form under the sun’s eye—’tis not the wont o’ her folk. She mun do it, if she be forced tae speak wi’ ye, but she’ll nae stay in that shape for lang.’

Already the swanmaiden’s pale face was turning away, hidden by the long fall of ebony hair. Her slender form glided out of sight behind a rocky outcrop. A swan flew up with an elegant downsweep of wide wings, the serpentine neck outstretched, the red feet tucked up underneath. Wings beat hard, like sail canvas snatching at the wind. Soon she was no more than a pinprick on the sky.

The sun opened its eye over Scarrow Fell.

The paling of the dawn revealed a lack of urisks. In the little caves beneath the tree roots, Viviana and Caitri slept with their arms loosely woven about each other, their peaceful faces as soft and guileless as two pastel-hued peaches. Tahquil sat beside the cold embers of the fire, her hands clasped about her knees. Adrift in some sorrowful reverie, she gazed sightlessly at the ashes. The enchanter’s nightshade had closed its blooms. It hung its many-hooded heads, eschewing the day. Only Arrowsmith stood under the twisted tree that canted its limbs over the rocks and the dew-limned ferns.

As so often, he looked to the west. A mauve breeze blew up over a powdered violet horizon, bearing with it the spine-raking whistles, the descending, burred notes and boy’s-throat calls of magpies. Arrowsmith turned his silver-grey head. He directed at Tahquil-Ashalind a gaze of burning intensity.

That was all.

Up and over Mallorstang Edge the travellers climbed that morning, leading their horses. At the summit a wide vista lay spread above and below them.

Overhead, the sky was a drama of clouds, dark thunder-grey in the centres. The sun behind them made a dazzling white-goldness of teased wool around the edges. Fraying spaces revealed the azure layers deepening to infinity behind the clouds.

Out away towards a distant haze stretched Blackwatervale, a deep valley embowered in wild and lovely woods, filled with gauzy veils of vapours. The river’s snail-track spurled down the centre, but only an aqueous glint appeared here and there through the trees. Close together clustered those trees, but as the slopes of the land rose up on either side, so the stature of the trees dwindled. Like sleeping giants the high, grassy fell-tops loured bare and windswept against the horizon—the domain of grey stones and vacuous bights of space, the haunt of cool barrenness and avenging winds to catch the traveller unawares and whisk him off the brink. Yet down their sides plashed their tinsel hair, skein on skein, strand on strand. Thickly wooded, the gills tumbled from the very edges of the fells to the valley floor. Sometimes they vanished, falling into sinkholes and coursing through underground caverns until, driven against a bed of solid sandstone, they were forced out as springs or founts upon the hillside. Larger becks toppled through the mist on the high crags and down their own little valleys in chains of falls.

Beyond the western wall of Blackwatervale a tenebrous line indicated the serrations of Bleak Fell’s spine. To the east, the high route of Wight’s Way pressed against the sky. But it was lost from view in the mists.

Keeping to high ground the riders picked their way to the right. Cotton grass and heather rolled green, brown and purple at their feet. Curlew and snipe flew up into the crisp air and grouse broke cover chattering a warning: ‘Go-bak, go-bak.’

Noon saw the travellers reaching the southern limit of Wold Fell. This formidable ridge dividing two river valleys culminated in a flat top, as narrow and tortuous as a crumpled ribbon. Here and there, its width contracted to no more than two feet. A few steps further on, it would broaden to seven feet or more, only to narrow again within a furlong. In places, thrusting crags flanked this high way, but in the greater part the ground fell steeply away on both sides. Those who would walk this open, windswept path might obtain a view of both valleys, Blackwatervale on the one hand and Ravenstonedale on the other. Out of the fell-sides, sometimes only yards below its crest, rivers were born. The walker might perceive the slender beginnings of the Blackwater spouting forth beneath his left heel, while the many sources of the Ravenswater trickled below his right.

Because it hung above these stony gushings and spoutings and did not cross them, this was a road favourable to creatures of eldritch. At noon it might appear quiet and inviting. Later it would not be so.

‘We ought to turn now down to the slopes of Blackwatervale,’ said Tahquil, ‘to put some distance between ourselves and these heights before nightfall. Here, where the incline to the left is gentler, we might find our way. And here, by rights, we ought to part company.’

‘Nay, do not leave us, Master Arrowsmith,’ cried Viviana before he could make reply. ‘Do not heed the urisk’s words. I am certain you may cross these tiny waterways without trouble—why, up here they are a mere finger’s width and nothing at all compared to the Churrachan.’

‘Yet so many,’ said Tahquil. ‘And there may be a need to find a route lower along the hillsides for safety, where flow many streams like the Churrachan. Your bravery, sir, is not at question. But freshwater, running, must be like poison to you.’

‘Its force pulls and tears,’ he confessed. ‘It cruelly disrupts the eldritch patterns of gramarye woven into the fibres of half my being. Yet only half—the other half can master it.’

Tahquil remonstrated, ‘To ride or walk the lower slopes of Lallillir would drain your strength. She will be our watcher, the swanmaiden, according to her geas. You can leave us in no better care.’

The man shook his head. ‘Come. It is dangerous to tarry here,’ he said. Loosening his reins he moved on.

Flower heads of hard rushes poked up out of the middle of the plant’s round rosettes. The one-sided blooms of mat grasses thrust forth like tiny hay rakes. Among this low vegetation the horses’ hooves slipped and slid on the steep ground. Soon their riders dismounted and led them by the reins, in single file, with Arrowsmith in the lead. It was not long before they must cross a chattering cascade no bigger than the dribble poured from the spout of a pitcher—then another, and another. Tahquil watched Arrowsmith’s back. He did not falter. The fell rose high to their right, blocking out all view of Ravenstonedale. Below, a sea of trees engulfed the valley sides and floor. From all around echoed the sounds of water babbling, chuckling, clattering, arguing vociferously, gossiping, laughing; the rich warm roar of a far-off river behind the high crystal chimes of droplets striking clear liquid, flung from a great height.

The cataracts matured as the travellers descended.

‘We shall not own a dry boot between us before long, if I am not mistaken,’ predicted Viviana, sloshing through the most recent rill. She spoke loudly, to be heard above the white noise.

Keeping above the tall trees clustered on the lower slopes, they levelled out their course. Open country provided a better vantage from which to scan for danger. Here, brakes of low bushes squatted, well spaced and no more than waist-high. Horizontal surfaces were a rarity on the fell-side. Caitri laughingly declared that her right leg must be growing shorter, her left longer.

As night approached, Arrowsmith seemed weary. On reaching a spot where the incline flattened out to form a semicircular apron ringed with low scrub, they halted to make camp. The Summer evening drew in, damp and mellow. Lily-of-the-valley sprang in crevices, its racemes of tiny snow-bells sweetly perfumed. A rush-fringed pool had collected in the hollow at the centre of this grassy ring. On the utterly black surface of the water the campfire mirrored itself.

Having helped to construct the fire, Arrowsmith lay back on the ground, breathing heavily. He refused to take food. Constellations of sweat bestarred his brow. His face was dark, as if congested.

Tahquil offered him water. ‘You are ill. Turn back,’ she said, unintentionally echoing his earlier words.

‘No,’ he muttered. ‘I will heal.’

Caitri rinsed a strip of cloth in the opacity of the pool. She shrieked. Clumsily, Arrowsmith jumped to his feet, knife in hand.

‘I thought I saw something,’ said the little girl, between fear and doubt, ‘something in the water.’

There was nothing to be seen now, not even a ripple.

Arrowsmith sank down, his knees buckling beneath him. Caitri laid the damp cloth across his forehead while Viviana arranged his cloak in folds across his body.

‘Don’t fuss,’ he rasped. ‘’Tis hale I am. I shall keep watch.’

A moment later his lids were shuttering his eyes. His jaw sagged. Starlight silvered his face to match his arctic hair, and pooled blue shadows under his cheekbones. Save for the slight rise and fall of his chest he might have been unliving. Water hurdled and gurgled, bubbled and burbled and snickered like a chorus of eldritch voices. Osmosis seeped.

Tahquil took first watch. She sat with her mud-smeared face turned to the pool, which remained profoundly calm, profoundly black.

How secretive is water, and how deceptive! It can act as a shield to throw off sheets of light, or as a sucking void like this well, to absorb light, or as a kind of passive nothingness to let light down through sheer translucency. But even when it allows radiance to penetrate, water bends and magnifies—distorts and plays tricks on the eye. An arm inserted partway appears disjointed, severed at the point of entry. Reflected in the convex surface of a drop, a face bulges at the brow and the eyes slide outward like a fish’s.

Little wonder that so many wights are attached to water.

This pool, now. So dark is it, so absolutely blank-faced, that its depth is a mystery. It might be a mere scum of water skimming a flat bowl—no more than a puddle. Yet again that inkiness might extend far below us, deep into the fell-side, a hundred feet, two hundred feet—even as far as some subterranean river system below the valley floor …

Lallillir crooned soothing lullabies close to Tahquil’s ears, singing songs of the susurrating sea and a synthesis of shadows sliding stealthily shorewards, soon to subsume …

The leaf-ring clenched. With a sick spasm, its wearer’s head jerked up.

Have I dozed?

Something had broken through the pool’s surface from below. It poised there studying her, unblinking. What it was, she could not be certain, but it looked like the staring head of a debauched sheep or goat. As she watched, the apparition sank without haste. Seven ripples opened in ever-widening circles from its absence.

Viviana and Caitri slept consummately. Arrowsmith muttered thickly in his sleep. He had rolled against a prickly bush and flung out his arm. Thin runnels of blood flamboyantly striped the back of his hand but he had not woken. She rose to attend him and throw more wood on the fire.

At the same moment the dark water coalesced, clothing itself with a shape. The shape ascended as smoothly and quietly as oiled machinery.

Dripping, a large goat emerged.

The goat’s eyes were two wells of darkness. Water streamed from its greenish hide.

Tahquil stared at the fuath, not daring to move. She remained this way, motionless, on and on into the atrophying night. Her heart threw itself urgently against her side as though trying to escape. A desert had invaded her mouth. At length, with utmost care and deliberation, Tahquil began to move her hand towards the dagger strapped at her side. Closer her gloved fingers crept, while her eyes never left the goat-thing, yet never locked with its gaze.

The goat grinned.

Rather, it drew back its caprian lips and bared its fence of teeth. Bedded in bloodless gums, the teeth were long and pointed as stakes, yellow as old parchment, stained slime-green.

The fire went out with a hiss of steam.

Tahquil jerked her head towards the sound. When she looked back the entity no longer stood before her. Footprints led away from the pool, impressed into the mosses; the prints of cloven hooves.

Over at the pickets the horses began to stamp and whinny. Tahquil snatched the last burning brand out of the fire. Its uncertain glare described a form moving amongst the tethered animals—not that of a beast, but a woman. The figure stooped. A horse screamed, that unmistakable scream of mortal terror. The others instantly caracoled into a frenzy, pulling at their pickets. One mare uprooted her stake, another broke her rope. White-eyed, neighing shrilly, they fled. Tahquil ran towards the two horses which remained. One lay stretched on the ground, a terrible rose blooming under the arch of its neck where the throat had been torn out. The other struggled still to break free. Something was standing over the prone form—not a woman but a four-legged beast, as before. It raised its head as Tahquil approached.

The hairs of its chin-beard dripped crimson. It had been feeding.

The dagger dropped from Tahquil’s nerveless fingers. An extraordinary stench of rotting vegetation surged over everything, so powerful that she retched. It was that same nauseating odour of decay given off by deep vases in which flowers have long since died, their immersed stalks putrefying to become mush in the dregs. A spatter of spray assaulted her. Hooves plunged, long teeth snapped. Outlined against the sky she beheld an appalling shape—not a goat nor yet a woman or a man, but a man and a beast locked together in combat. In the thicket of their belligerence, Arrowsmith’s blade glittered. Viviana was screaming, Caitri shouting, ‘Avaunt! Avaunt!’ Tahquil regained her feet and darted out of the way as Arrowsmith and the fuath came crashing down. Teeth snipped and snapped. Flames burst from the firebrand as she whirled it, ready to strike. Then came a rush of air and a beating of great wings.

With a snarl the fuath sprang sideways. It swung its wicked head. Five antagonists faced it, four armed with iron and fire, the fifth—for an instant a winged woman seemed to be rising there, but in the next instant it was clearly a swan, neck arched, head stretched forward like a serpent’s, wings at full span as they stirred the air to a storm. Wind roared and clapped, mingled with the fierce sibilation of the bird.

Coldly, clear as ice through the tumult, the goat spoke with a woman’s voice:

‘Raggid forrn,’ it pronounced, oddly.

The fuath jumped into the pool, which sealed itself seamlessly.

‘Viviana, saddle the horse,’ Tahquil cried. ‘Caitri, watch the water. Encourage the fire.’

Arrowsmith swayed and tottered. She ran to his side.

‘Are you wounded?’

‘Nay,’ he gasped. ‘The hooves gave my ribs a drubbing but the teeth did not meet in my flesh. And you? The damsels—’

Pushing herself under his arm, Tahquil manoeuvred him to the remaining horse, which stood trembling as Viviana tightened its girth. Arrowsmith’s eyes rolled in his head. It appeared that he was not fully cognisant of his surroundings, nor of what had occurred. Weakened as he was by many crossings of running water, the act of repulsing this unseelie attack had driven him to the verge of death. His existence hung in the balance.

‘Get up in the saddle. We will follow after,’ Tahquil said, forcing ardent conviction into the lie.

‘The horses …’

‘They are near at hand.’

‘The world tilts. Weary. So weary—’

‘Get on your horse, Galan, in the name of reason. Only death waits for you in Lallillir.’

‘You will follow.’

Calling on the last of his strength, Arrowsmith heaved his frame up and flung his leg over the horse’s back. Losing consciousness, he gradually fell forward onto his mount’s neck.

They roped him securely to the animal, placing the knots beside his dangling hands so that he might reach them when he revived. Turning the horse to face south, Tahquil sent it on its way with a slap on the rump. Glad to be granted freedom, the gelding leaped forward, moving swiftly along the treacherous incline in the wake of its escaping comrades.

Now they looked for the swanmaiden, but in the elusive manner of wights, she had vanished.

‘No time to lose,’ said Tahquil, gathering up a bundle. ‘We must away from this place, ere the fuath returns to finish this night’s work.’

She wept, and the others wept also, as they abandoned the carcass of the poor faithful beast that had stood no chance against the eldritch slaughterer. When they looked back they saw the sea-shell curve, the hull of its flank pale under the starlight, while from the ominous pool a shape arose once more, with the smooth precision of oiled machinery.

Through the night they walked, afraid to stop, afraid to cease the crossings of running water. When they had put a goodly number of falling streamlets between themselves and the fuath’s pond, they dared to speak.

‘Galan was kind and generous,’ said Caitri, her eyes swimming. ‘I shall never forget him, or his sisters. I hope we shall meet again.’

‘Perhaps we shall, one day, out upon the waves,’ Tahquil said. A breeze from the west breathed coolly upon her cheek.

‘He shared hearth and board with us,’ added Viviana. ‘We are in his debt.’

‘We must travel by night from now on,’ said Tahquil briskly, endeavouring to distract her friends from melancholy, ‘and use the days for sleeping. Our senses must be sharp and wakeful during the wighting hours.’

‘The swanmaiden ought to have warned us not to camp by that fuath-haunted sink!’ fumed Viviana aggrievedly. ‘That is her duty! A poor sentry she has shown herself.’

At uhta, they halted from sheer exhaustion, throwing themselves down in a gully, narrow and rugged, near the confluence of two streams. Spikes of frog-orchids grew amongst the upland grasses. Hooded, toothed and spurred, their yellow-green flowers were tinged with russet. Below, the valley lay lead-grey in the half-light, the ancient furrows and folds of the land flowing down with unhurried grace to meet the riverbanks.

‘I shall call the swanmaiden,’ said Tahquil. ‘Wights are unable to dishonour their word. She has vowed to oblige herself to whosoever should summon her with that feather.’

‘How shall you call her now?’ asked Caitri. ‘The feather is gone.’

‘I know her calling-name.’

With that, heedless of invisible eavesdroppers, Tahquil cupped her hands around her mouth and called, ‘Whithiue!’ into the echoes of the valley. Thrice she called the name—to the north, to the south and skywards. Thrice the walls of the fells tossed the syllables from one incline to the other.

The swan answered; a dark rune scribed on a grey slate sky, a swart and swooping serenity of flight, falling behind an outflung arm of the fell.

With the demure protocol habitually practised by shape-shifters, the swanmaiden made her transformation beyond the view of mortal observers. Soon afterward, she was standing amid the angular rocks edging the gully’s head, her pale face like a flower on a dark stem.

‘Welcome,’ said Tahquil. ‘Pray sit with us.’

A low ‘Whaiho’; perhaps a symbol of derision. A soft pre-dawn breeze stirred the feathers of her cloak, but the preternaturally lovely maiden remained as poised as a bird stalking fish, and did not step forth.

‘Well, then,’ said Tahquil, ‘explain yourself from your exalted position. Why did you not warn us as promised? Our lives were endangered by a fuath. Had you informed us of its presence we would never have bided by its pool.’

The swans have their own language. Can she understand my words? Is it possible for her to reply?

‘Whaiho,’ presently the swanmaiden deigned to say in a low, mellow voice. ‘Sedulous stealers are squeamish.’

She understands very well. Her command of the Common Tongue is estimable—at any rate, it appears she is adept at alliteration.

‘We are not thieves,’ Tahquil said aloud, ‘nor are we squeamish. Mayhap it is hard for you to comprehend, but we do not wish to be slain. You have promised to do your best to prevent this occurrence, have you not?’

‘Said so,’ replied the swanmaiden. ‘Handsome humans not harmed, ho?’

‘Do not congratulate yourself.’

‘Furtive fuath hungers for horses’ hide.’

‘And would fain feed on further flesh, I fear,’retorted Tahquil angrily, seizing inspiration.

‘Whiath!’ The eldritch maiden tossed her head. At her back, two wide ribbons bordered the length of the eastern horizon. One, of pastel blue, was dry-brushed with white-of-blue cloud puffs. Above it, a delicate lilac-pink band faded up to a dove-grey dome.

‘In the future you must warn us of any imminent danger,’ said Tahquil. ‘You must tell us of the safe paths, the negotiable paths. Inform us of the secure resting places.’

‘Weary wanderers wish for haven.’

‘Aye, we do.’

‘Sentinel shift-swan succours woeful wold-walkers.’ The swanmaiden’s demeanour remained wary, aloof, cold.

‘Precisely. You must help us until we safely cross the northern border of Lallillir. After that, I will set you free from the geas. If we are now agreed, you may depart, but do not go too far away. I might summon you at any time.’

‘Sorrowing shift-swan stays steadfast.’

‘My heart breaks,’ commented Viviana sourly, aside.

‘Your command of the Common Tongue is excellent,’ Tahquil said to the swan-girl. ‘You have the ability to form all sounds. Why speak thus?’

‘Swans speak smoothly. Humans have harsh sounds. Harrowing words wound,’ the marvellous bird-girl said contemptuously, stretching her long neck.

First I am reviled for my ugliness, then for my beauty. Now I am despised for being born into the human race. Ah, but I must recollect—prejudice is merely the shield of the self-loving.

‘If you mislike our speech,’ said Tahquil, ‘teach us yours.’

But she was speaking to emptiness.

The swan took flight against the dawn that blazed over Wold Fell.

The companions ate from the provisions brought from Appleton Thorn—hard black rye bread and dried sea-weeds. Throughout the day they slept, taking turns to watch towards the fell-top, the unprotected side of their nook.

The western sky was glimmering with swirling colours, like the melting of a long spray of red wax roses dipped in gilt, when the travellers arose, stiff and craving more rest, from the stony ground. To rouse their blood they sipped nathrach deirge.

‘We are become nocturnal,’ declared Caitri.

The moon was just past the full; a silver mushroom grown lopsided. Under its umbrella the mortals wended their way again. That night they saw no living thing save hunting owls and other lorraly creatures of the dark hours, yet their scalps prickled continually and they could not shake off the impression that unseen figures were walking near them, keeping pace. Morning unfolded like silk, with no mishap, and they lay down as before. The day brought a light spangle of rain. Sheltered under an overhang, wrapped in their fishermen’s oilskins, the three damsels remained dry.

A shang storm drove through in the evening, and Lallillir dehisced in glitter like a burning palace, so eerie and awful, so splendid that the travellers must halt and behold it. They looked out, narrow-eyed against the dazzle, at rocks of crystal, fern leaves black as jet and powdered with bright sparks, solid silver water, pale golden grass dappled with shifting colours, reeds of gold or silver or tinkling glass. Lighted lamps bestarred thorn bushes. The skies were meadows on fire with flowers.

The display passed away to the west, allowing the travellers to continue on their way. Bats, or perhaps night birds, swooped low out of the firmament. The damsels were forced to duck to avoid collision. Viviana, chewing dulse, passed the time voicing nostalgic reflections about dinners at Court.

Down through the summer night harp-strung with stars, cool as silver in these inland uplands, swept the maiden of the swans. Advice she bestowed: ‘Steer for strong-stream. Shadow fliers harry the heights. Seek shelter. Stay far from standing streams, from foggy fens. Singing suck-spirit sirens sojourn. She scents. She steals. Her hunger’s high-honed hum stabs so shrill. Thus, seeking sip-straws hunt hidden succulence.’

Which the listeners translated as: ‘Turn downhill towards the river. Strange dark birds patrol the ridges. Seek cover, yet keep away from the backwaters—culicidae haunt there, and the whine of hungry Vectors is as thin and piercing as their poisonous tongues.’

They descended to the lower slopes where the trees stood taller, affording cover. As they walked between the boles, sounds began to bubble from somewhere ahead; a hubbub of queer voices. Cautiously the three turned aside. Presently the clamour arose again, in front of them. They altered their course again, but to no avail—soon the cries broke out almost at their feet and unavoidably they stepped out into a market scene.

‘Siofra?’ whispered Viviana.

‘No,’ said Tahquil, although the scene looked almost familiar.

It was a marketplace indeed, but a travelling market, and the vendors differed from the siofra of the mountain forests as scimitars vary from penknives.

So did the wares. At first sight the goods displayed for sale seemed sweeter, the purveyors of those goods fouler, than at any market of the diminutive siofra with their glamoured slugs and withered acorns disguised as meats and cakes. Odd little ‘men’ were these, some with the faces of cats, some with long, skinny tails tufted at the tips, some bent double into a crawling gait, as hunchbacked as snails—or hobbling bug-eyed, like fish or insects, some sprouting absurdly small bat wings from bony shoulders. Several crouched, thick and furry like giant mice, or leaped like sharp-eared, buck-toothed rats. Others came hopping in the manner of toads. Their voices whistled as scavenger birds whistle, were hoarse as parrots, soft as the cooing of doves. They chattered like mynahs, clucked and crowed like barnyard fowls, purred like cats. Winged and tailed, hunched and hairy, toothed and taloned, these wood-goblins—for such they were—lugged between them a wicker basket, an oaken platter and a dish of gold.

The fruits arrayed thereon gleamed. Marvels of perfection, they glistened as though glazed with Sugar-syrup, their colours as vibrant as Autumn, as rich as a treasury. They bloomed with the softness of velvet, or the smooth sheen of silk and samite, glass-glossy, fresh as the breath of mountain mornings, and still with their mint-green leaves attached. Each pericarp and drupe, each ovary and swollen stem plumped full-fleshed and flawless, ripe as wine. There were garnet-red cherries, peridot grapes, apples like great rubies streaked with gold and amber, amethyst blueberries, strawberries glowing like pink charcoal, yellow pears of topaz, lucid gooseberries of translucent green quartz, quinces still on their twigs, melons, pomegranates, polished damsons, figs like blushing drops of jade. Luscious, they promised to fill the mouth with a sweetness, a flavour, a succulence unsurpassable.

Without thinking twice the companions advanced, fastening passionate eyes on these magical treats. In their uncanny voices, the merchants were loudly hawking their wares. Viviana and Caitri heard them cry, ‘Come and buy, come and buy!’, but to Tahquil’s ears the summons sounded like ‘Come and die, come and die.’ Leering, the little mannish creatures crowded around the three damsels, pushing their basket and plate and dish aloft, holding them high, the better to display the delectable delights heaped there. Juicy clusters of grapes overspilled the sides of the dishes, hanging pendants like chandeliers of lapis lazuli, lit softly from within.

‘Don’t touch them!’ cautioned Tahquil, and as her lips formed the words, it seemed a veil was peeled from her eyes. The red of the pomegranates now appeared overhectic, the purple of the blackberries was an angry lividness, and the strawberries resembled nothing more than gobbets of par-boiled flesh. Bilious pears wallowed alongside gelid grapes. On envious leaves, apples rolled like fibroid tumours. Plums winked like giants’ eyeballs, flayed and bleeding.

A nursery tale of wood-goblins returned to Tahquil. She recollected that their wares were far more deadly than those of the pretentious siofra. Once, Sianadh had eaten glamoured victuals at a siofran fair and suffered nothing worse than a bellyache. The fruits sold by wood-goblins, however, were very different.

‘Come and buy!’

Encouraged by the cries of the hawkers, Viviana and Caitri reached out. Tahquil pulled their elbows back.

‘Do not eat!’ she warned urgently.

The cat-faced, rat-eared wood-goblins laughed and jeered while Tahquil’s companions slapped her, wrenched their arms from her grasp, scuffled, quarrelled.

‘No, no!’ Tahquil cried. ‘The ring on my finger lets me see the truth. This display is all glamour. Look through the crook of my arm and you shall pierce these mockeries. These are the fruits of death! Come away, do not look, do not hearken, do not touch!’ The squeakings and howlings of the guileful merchants proved louder and shriller than her voice, as they exhorted the mortals to taste. Yet, when Viviana’s fingers almost alighted on a distended plum the hue of a bruised bladder, the wood-goblins whipped away both dish and plum.

‘Come and buy!’

‘We have no coin!’ despaired Caitri. ‘No gold or silver, nor even bronze.’

‘Will you take my chatelaine as payment?’ beseeched Viviana.

‘Or my silver locket!’ entreated Caitri.

‘You fools!’ Tahquil cried in consternation, dragging them back with strength born of desperation. Again, her friends thrust her aside. The sly wood-goblins, cajoling, joined their various voices in a chorus:

‘The older girl shall give a curl as bright as precious gold.

The younger dear, a silver tear, as pure as ice is cold.’

With alacrity, Viviana took her scissors from her chatelaine and snipped off a lock of her bleached hair. Tahquil knocked it out of her hand—the goblins snatched it up. They took hold of Tahquil by the hair and clothes. Laughing, screeching, fleeting, they leaped to her shoulders and head, restraining her. They kicked, pinched and pummelled.

‘Give me my fruit!’ screamed Viviana. Caitri wept. Next moment, apples and pears and grapes and plums spilled into the hands of the courtier. She sat down on the grass while the wood-goblins poured them into her lap. Tahquil, her hair and clothes caught in wicked hands, must watch helplessly as Viviana, smiling inanely, picked up up a seductive plum, parted her lips on her white teeth, opened her mouth—

A wind like a cold current forced between rocks came blasting. In the heart of that wind was a clapping and a heartbeat of thunder, and a tremendous rustling as of a forest in a gale. Three black snowflakes whirled, and the blast blew away the insidious fruit. It went rolling helter-skelter through the trees, with the wood-goblins at full pelt after it, scampering, scuttling, prancing, shrieking, their empty dishes and basket bowling along the ground, over and over.

The swan’s black wings continued to beat out their fury until all the wood-goblins had fled. Not a trace of them was left, save their cries, fainter and smaller, fading through the wood. And the swan folded her wings.

Tahquil bowed. The bird, larger than lorraly swans, extended her sinuous neck and hissed savagely. Gathering herself, she launched upwards into flight. In the backwash of her departure, yellow filaments eddied. Tahquil caught one between finger and thumb.

‘I wonder how the wights would have served you, Via, had they discovered your gold is counterfeit.’

But Viviana’s gaze was as cold as the pallid oculars of a deep-sea fish.

‘You took it all from me,’ she accused.

‘I shall find you fairer food—Fairbread, indeed.’

‘No. No friend are you.’

Caitri dried her tears but said nothing.

As the hunger of the Langothe increased day by day it wore away Tahquil’s appetite, sleep, strength, joy. Eventually it would wear away life itself. Coupled with this, another unfulfilled longing inexorably drove her towards madness—the hurt that is born of profound passion. Thoughts of one who was all the enchantment of the night and more beautiful than truth were with her always, along with the appalling, intolerable possibility that he might not be living still.

Now it seemed that she had lost also the loyalty of a cherished friend. Viviana, having brushed her fingers against the goblins’ wares, seemed half under a spell.

Food supplies were running low. Thorn had told her: ‘Fairbread is the fruit of a mistletoe which loves only certain trees—apple, alder, hazel, holly and willow, elder, oak, banksia and elm, birch and blackthorn. It will never grow on other trees, and not always on those I have catalogued.’

But where were such trees? None grew here, on the misted heights of Blackwatervale. Maybe willows leaned down by the river itself, down where wights lingered and perhaps mosquito-girls hovered on gauzy wings of spun moonlight.

They foraged as they journeyed, but Lallillir in Summer was not as generous as Tiriendor in Autumn—the lessons learned in one region and season were barely relevant to another. Once, the swanmaiden brought them three small fishes, green-silver as winking waves, to be roasted in the crimson coals of the travellers’ campfire. Tahquil gave her share to the others. Ever since breathing the air of the Fair Realm she had not been able to endure the taste of flesh.

It was not always easy to cross the volatile waters of Lallillir. In some places the gills plashed down vertical drops. In others they split into many channels, as wide networks, or they chiselled deep and narrow clefts to trap clumsy feet, or rushed so quickly that to dare a step in the current was to be swept from one’s footing. In seemingly innocent banks sudden jets squirted where none had been evident. Rocky margins and boggy soaks barred the way. From time to time the travellers must retrace their steps and locate an alternative path, which in turn might prove inconclusive.

The ground, the rocks and water, the green places and the flowers of verge and slope passed arduously or easily beneath the feet of the three companions; however, Viviana remained taciturn and dour of countenance. At length Caitri overcame her own silence—unlike the courtier, she had not actually touched the fatal fruits.

‘I have heard of the Wood-Goblins’ Market,’ she murmured to Tahquil. ‘Those who taste of the juicy wares cannot help but gorge and glut themselves, so delicious are those fruits of gramarye. To taste once instantly outlaws them from ever tasting the goblin fruits again—nor shall their eyes ever again behold the insidious wood-goblins or their wares, nor shall their ears catch the beckoning call to buy. All else becomes as nothing. Longing to taste again, they pine and wither, caring naught for food or sleep, dwelling only on this obsession—to find once more the Wood-Goblins’ Market that they shall never find, and suck the fruits they shall never suck.’

‘The fruits induce a kind of Langothe,’ said Tahquil. ‘A wicked kind, swifter to act but more cruel.’

‘So you say,’ responded Viviana coldly, walking on ahead.

Dawn diluted the sky between the willows that leaned out over a stream. The breeze was in the west. Beneath a green-haired tree, Tahquil stood. She looked to the left and upwards. In the dim light she glimpsed, at the edges of sight, leafy sprouts and amongst them small soft spheres like softly glowing lamps. Reaching up, she plucked them.

‘Fairbread of Willow for our supper,’ she announced to her companions.

The taste was a cream of confectionery with an aftereffect similar to mild intoxication. Fairbread stimulated strength, wellbeing and serenity, energising the heart, firming the sinews, refreshing the blood, sending the very roots of the hair thrusting more vigorously up through the scalp. But it did not cure Viviana of her wood-goblin-induced gall.

Several nights after entering Lallillir, they came to a gorge cut out of the fell-side, between two ferny shoulders. Along its nadir gushed a loud, broad stair of water, so dark and swift in the moonlight that the companions gave it a name—‘Black Force’. This watercourse was too wide and swift to cross on foot, and the swan-girl, during one of her brief visits, had advised the travellers to divert their path to lower levels. She told them that stepping stones crossed the Force where, silted and shallow, it entered the Blackwater.

The deeply cloven rift that birthed Black Force was too stark and precipitous to allow anyone to cross, except goats and other sure-footed beasts. The travellers began to search for another route. Above the cleft, the fell-top hung like a curtain against a roil of hyacinthine clouds, banners heralding a storm. Tahquil tilted her head back and studied the horizon measuringly.

‘I would like to go that way,’ she said at last, ‘but ’tis more than likely the fell-tops are rife with creatures of eldritch, despite the growing light of day, such as it is. Indeed, here we are too close to their roads for comfort. Reluctant am I to say this, but we must go all the way down to the ford of stones.’

‘Let us sleep first,’ said Caitri. Her young face looked drawn and haggard, grey as a crone’s. At her side Viviana sat slouching, hollow-eyed.

‘Sleep,’ said Tahquil gently. ‘I shall keep watch.’

Her two companions lay down in the dawn, beneath the meagre shelter of a jutting rock. New light brushed the ancient, cracked stone, burnishing it with nacre. Dew twinked gold, ruby and sapphire on the beards of grasses.

At dusk, the eerily gorgeous shape-shifter returned.

‘Windwater soon shall skim, sheeting, from far west-away sea,’ she declared. Her flawless alabaster face peered obliquely from the long flowering of black hair. On her brow was bound a headband woven of scarlet geraniums. The white feathers edging the cloak’s front opening glowed palely.

‘From salt-stream steams, water-hoisting winds scull, shimmering,’ she proclaimed, ‘funnelled forcibly high where sharp horns of first fell scrape skies. Soon water-clouds shall shed windwater, wetting Elfinwoodsdale and, hastening for hinterlands, shall shower wild wolds, steeps and summits, hills and heights, hollows and holms, fissures, fosses and furrows. Streams, waters, forces of Blackwatervale shall swell, shape-shifting, forming formidable sluices. Hurry! Hasten! Slow wingless ones ford Swarth Force soon, soon since she’s still small. When windwater falls, fierce, foaming, fulminating waters will forbid further wayfaring.’

‘Your warning is well received. I presume by “Swarth Force” you mean “Black Force”,’ said Tahquil coolly. ‘Yet you did not warn us earlier of the approach of wood-goblins.’

‘Ho-iss!’ The bird-girl raised her narrow arms, the feather cloak fanning from them in jagged folds like wings. ‘Shift-swan slave hoped wingless ones were wiser.’

‘In unfamiliar waters even fowl queens may become ensnared,’ said Tahquil, unable to resist a hint of sarcasm. ‘Warn us of everything. Do not fail us another time.’

‘Hearken,’ hissed the swanmaiden, leaning one degree closer. ‘Sweet-speaking handsome one woos where sprigs hang heavy with fruit. Fair face, fair words, sinister intent. She who falls for shadows shall soon weave her shroud.’

‘You speak of dangers in Cinnarine, which lies far ahead, if we ever reach it. But more immediately, what awaits us in Lallillir?’

‘Water wights haunt shores of Swarth Force—seelie, harmless. Fair or foul, sweet wench of shining hair or wizened hag, slender, well-favoured stalwart or strange, hairy fellow. Speak well. Wet wights wish for fire’s heat. Show hospitality. Say “welcome”.’

‘Gruagachs? You speak of gruagachs?’

‘Sooth,’ said the swanmaiden, or perhaps it was the wind that spoke, for she was no longer there.

Out of sight to the west, far beyond Swarth Fell and Bleak Fell, several thousand tons of water approached rapidly. High above the sea they rolled, driven by powerful atmospheric pressures. Part of the ocean had once again risen, distilled, into the welkin; another quarter-turn of the wheel that forever rotated, pumping the pure and colourless heart’s blood of Aia.

On the fell-sides of Lallillir a poignant wail drew itself out like spun flax and wound itself on night’s spindle—an eldritch storm-harbinger’s alert. The moon like a thin smile stretched itself behind the imminence of rain and was intermittently obscured. Sporadically moonless and starless, the night concealed stumbling blocks, rude fountains and other obstacles. The three who endeavoured to hasten downhill on the southern shore of Black Force had only the tilt of the land to guide them, and brief glimmers of nocturnal radiance, and the shouting waters and a sense of the cold stream-bed at their right hands, steep deep, rugged as broken teeth. Soon this wicked, chuckling, innocent gush would be fed from the skies. The fell-tops, the fell-sides would deliver to it the excess of the saturated air’s bounty in long strands, in shallow blowing sheets, in beaded chains and spatters of glassy globules mirroring the night. Then, Black Force would transform. A brimming, thundering engine, it would grow mighty enough to bruise the bones of Erith, to break trees, to crush those who dared to step across the stones strewn across its terminus.

Before then, would-be traversers must reach the crossing place.

Down alongside Black Force they clambered in a hurry. Fallen logs lay across their way, bright with dinner plates of orange fungus. Here, tiny siofra frolicked. The wights themselves were reminiscent of red-capped mushrooms. They swaggered, slyly peeping and snickering—until Viviana, in a temper, cast a stone at them and they seemed to go up in smoke, leaving only a hollow, heartless emptiness of roaring water that was somehow worse than the petty harassment, and accompanied by the awareness of being studied by antipathetic eyes.

Again, clouds shrouded the stars.

Slipping, staggering, they went blindly in the darkness, crawling sometimes, feeling with their hands for purchase. In this domain of unseelie watchers, Tahquil had no inclination to draw attention by removing her glove to exploit the ring’s illuminative qualities. Hampered by obstacles of rocky outcroppings, cliffs, thickset rearing tree-roots whose soil had been washed from their arches in past times of spate, and deep brakes of fern across their route, the travellers wondered in dread whether it would take the entire night to reach the river.

Thunder gonged the sky in the distance, pushing Tahquil and her companions forward with greater urgency. Progress, however, was protracted; for while speed was paramount, care must be exercised. A turned ankle, a fractured limb would ultimately prove fatal.

Above the dinning of approaching thunder and the cacophony of water could be heard a rattling of shells, a chorus of shrill laughter, an argument of nasty tongues in some unfamiliar patois—yet this might have been imaginary, a hallucination of hearing, brought about by continual high-level noise. Tahquil even considered she could hear an orchestra of violins. The uncanny melody revolved continuously in her head, playing throughout the inmost halls of her brain.

There was no stopping for rest or refreshment. Fat raindrops began to fall desultorily, patting the cheeks of the travellers like fond mothers. The damsels licked their moisture from their lips. No one spoke. No one emitted any sound save an indrawn breath when balance was momentarily forfeited, an involuntary yelp when an unseen rock or twig scored flesh, a muffled exclamation at unexpected eccentricities of the terrain. All night they battled on, the gravid rainclouds pressing lower over their heads, the thunder pounding its premonitory drums ever closer. Static charges were building in the ether. Towards the bleak morning, an eldritch singing started up from all directions—a joining of reedy and croaking and pure, high voices structured in a weird progression and relationship of chords, raising the hair of the listeners.

At uhta, they reached the ford.

For a moment, a rift in the clouds allowed a sidereal gleam to splinter down. The mouth of Black Force smiled wide and shallow. Flat stones spanned it, as promised by the swanmaiden. Dark as polished jet, the torrent ran rapidly between these spray-spattered slabs. The opposite bank of the Force was hidden in an undergrowth of umbellifers—wild angelica, lesser water parsnip, hemlock—their flat-topped blossoms nodding like meringues of white lace.

In that very pre-dawn hour, the heavens unleashed their pent-up tears at last. Rain sprang down in diagonal spars. As though they were aware of the impending increase in their strength, the waters of Black Force noisily poured themselves with greater exuberance around the flat, irregular stones. They spurled in cascades of black sheened with silver, in whirlpools like spiral nebulae, in whale spouts and tiny fountains, all dimpled by the impact of raindrops whose craters were ringed with leaping droplets of displaced water like tiny, split-second coronets. Wet and shiny the flagstones lay, in a lengthy disjointed line. Some low-lying ones were already water-filmed.

‘Too soon the waters rise!’ Cairn’s shouts filtered through the tumult of rain, through the crashing and booming of air rapidly expanding along the paths of lightning. ‘Sorrow take the swan’s foul and paltry advice—we are too late to make the crossing!’

Tahquil turned a rain-lashed face towards the little girl.

‘No. If we do not cross now it might be many days before the Force subsides enough. It is perilous to wait for long in one place—because of what lies ahead, no less than what comes from behind. I dare not waste any more time.’

She pulled a rope from her pack and tied one end about her waist. After paying out a few lengths, she attached Caitri similarly. The other end of the rope she offered to Viviana.

‘Crossing now is folly,’ shrieked the courtier. ‘I remain here.’

‘Solitude in Lallillir is a worse folly,’ bawled Tahquil, securing the straps on her pack. ‘And each moment we stand here in argument, the waters rise a little further. Come!’

She strode to the stony verge of the watercourse. From this point, the distance to the nearest stepping stone was a daunting five feet or more across boiling glass. Stepping back a couple of yards, she ran up and launched herself out over the water, landing jarringly on the barren islet. From there she leaped to the second step.

‘Caitri?’

Presently, the young girl followed. Looking back, Tahquil saw Viviana gaining the first stepping stone. Rain sluiced down in blinding sheets, in drowning torrents, in liquid walls. The air was solid rain. It hammered on their heads, their shoulders and packs. It dragged down their clothing, filled their boots, their eyes, their mouths and ears and overbrimmed the cups of their skulls. Down, down, down, it sang, and down, down, down sang the surging Force meeting the swarming river. Another quarter-turn of the wheel—what rises must fall.

Like improbable frogs, the travellers bounded from one stone to another, and now each landing place was skimmed with the newborn flood. The water was a silver dragon, its surface laminated with scales formed by pelting raindrops. The dragon clashed and steamed.

There was no turning back—the ford’s centre point had been achieved. Now, as much distance divided them from the northern shore as from the southern, and both were invisible. They imagined themselves marooned in a vitreous chamber, close-walled. Tahquil leaped to the next islet. Her foot splashed into the two inches of water racing over it. The vigorous current tugged and she leaned against its drag, leaned on billowing robes of fluidity.

The rope cinching her waist jerked her painfully to her knees. Taut as a gittern-string it dragged at her, stretching like a rod away into the massed armies of rain lances. Caitri, one moment ago a shadowy figure melting through layers of water, had vanished. She had been taken by the waters, and Black Force was rising.

Tilting her weight back, Tahquil braced herself against the submerged rock, contrary to the determined pressure of this tide. She drew hard on the rope. Her sinews cracked. At vision’s edge, the form of Viviana crouched and did the same. The river boiled. Its flow banked up powerfully against the form of Caitri downstream, held against it by the ropes. The driving waters curled like surf over the little girl’s head. When they dragged her in she was conscious, but Black Force had whisked her pack away and the waters were still rising.

Tahquil held Caitri in her arms, putting her mouth to the child’s ear.

‘I have not the strength to support you. Should we jump together and our timing fail, we should both fall. You must do it alone.’

‘Cut the rope,’ gasped Caitri. ‘I cannot.’

‘No.’

Tahquil left her, then, and sprang away through dark curtains. Her only hope lay in desperation. She willed Caitri to follow, and in a moment the antics of the rope indicated hope fulfilled.

The current’s pressure grew. Soon the rising tide would become irresistible and sweep the feet of the travellers from under them, tossing them into the flood like dolls, filling not only their eyes but their lungs, their stomachs, the last moments of their awareness. Squinting through the vertical gloom, Tahquil perceived a ragged, linear darkness—the opposite shore. Breathing water, choking on fire, gasping for breath, they gained it at last.

There in drenched debilitation they lay and allowed panic to drain from them in pools on the ground, letting the rain rinse it from them and course down to suffuse the Blackwater along with the raging waters that had induced that terror.

Fear ebbed and light waxed, but the silver flails of the rain did not let up their scourging. The pewter and grisaille radiance of the day revealed drowning forests on the northern shore of Black Force, and now the travellers were shivering. Beneath a half-fallen tree they sipped the glistening red syrup of nathrach deirge. Somewhat revived, they struggled to their feet and tramped off in search of a dry place to eke out the day in repose.

Nothing remained unwet. Not a leaf, not a sprig nor raceme nor shard did not drip and run with moisture. Not a stick touted itself as fit for kindling.

It rained all day, a shimmering rain. The black bread which was all that remained of their provisions had softened in their packs and turned into black mud. Kept warm by dragon’s blood, the travellers tried futilely to shelter in the lee of fallen logs. Sleep was impossible. The heavy sounds of pouring gallons thundered blankly in the skulls of the three companions. When taking their turn at the watch, they instinctively listened for untoward resonances, notes out of key, any signal of peril approaching. But the water’s roar rose up like a wall all around and would allow no other sound to penetrate. They were forcibly deaf to all save the water’s utterance.

That evening the deluge petered out. In the last light of the day Tahquil haunted the willows, watching for more spheres of Fairbread. Perhaps her eyes were obfuscated with the sands of sleep deprivation. Perhaps the elusive mistletoe did not grow on the sallies to the north of Black Force. In any event, she discovered none.

Caitri found a tree trunk which had fallen across another. So rotten was its underside that she was able to punch right through the cortex. Inside was a mass of fibrous debris, the desiccated pith of the tree, still arid within its rind. Soon the travellers had it piled up in a heap and blazing. Their clothes began to dry.

As night endured, Tahquil stared deeply into the fire. The flames burned themselves into the backs of her eyes. When the ring unexpectedly constricted her finger she looked away, accustoming her vision to the shadows, murmuring a warning to her friends: ‘Wights are nearby.’

A swatch of bullion gleamed. Some marsh flower—a tall, luteous lily perhaps—stood at the brink of darkness. Tahquil’s eyes widened. She held her breath.

Could this be a Talith woman?

The lady in green glided forward. Her hair was the yellow of daffodils, marsh marigolds and buttercups. It draped in silken folds over her shoulders and down past her slight waist, which was girdled with waterlilies. Small green-white blossoms entwined themselves, or conceivably were rooted in that hair. Strikingly attractive was the face, and clearly not human. Sparkles of reflected firelight ran up and down the filaments of her butter-lemon tresses. They coursed along the water runnels which streamed from it, and from the leaf-green gown with the dagged sleeves flowing to the ground where her two bare feet stood in a puddle, like twin fishes.

Comparably with fuaths and the hair of sea-folk, gruagachs could never get dry, though their inherent wetness never stopped them from testing the ignorance of mortalkind.

The gruagach parted the petals of her river-rose mouth.

‘May I dry myself at your fire?’

A husky tone, sumptuous, rich with verdancy and fruitfulness. Tahquil recalled the swanmaiden’s rede—‘Speak well.’

‘You are welcome,’ she said formally, concealing her apprehension.

Viviana and Caitri edged nervously away from the eldritch visitor, who observed them from beneath heavy lids and stretched out long-fingered hands towards the blaze. Water trickled down the slim arms and dripped from the wrists.

‘Star save me,’ whispered Caitri, round-eyed. She clutched at the ragged folds of her garments as a drowning mortal might clutch at floating twigs.

Viviana fingered the knife at her belt. Catching her eye, Tahquil shook her head.

Throughout the night other gruagachs came. They asked the same question, receiving the same answer. The second to come out of the darkness was a manlike wight, naked and shaggy. The third was a comely, slender youth clad in lettuce-green and poppy-red.

‘We ought to be on our way by now,’ Viviana muttered to Tahquil behind her hand. ‘You said we must not tarry.’

‘Do you suggest that we turn our backs on our visitors and walk away?’ asked Tahquil in a low tone. ‘That we take our eyes off them and simultaneously give them offence? Nay. While they remain, we must remain also. Take advantage of this lull. Sleep.’

Ignoring the intriguing phenomenon of wightish masculinity uncovered, Caitri was already slumbering, curled up like a kitten. When Tahquil glanced again at the girlgruagach she saw a crone, wan and haggard, stretching out bony fingers towards the blaze. Water flowed down her skinny arms and drizzled off her wrists. Shuddering, Viviana made as if to rise.

‘Bide!’ Tahquil pleaded, clutching Viviana by the elbow. It was curiously easy to restrain the courtier. Perhaps she had not been so keen to depart after all, or else she could not resist the grip of the ring-hand.

‘Since your hands touched the goblin fruit you have not been the same,’ said Tahquil.

‘It is you who has altered,’ sneered Viviana, yet she made no further move.

Tahquil looked at the crone. She was a fair damsel again, with long, golden hair like Summer sunlight on water. A frog of jade perched on her shoulder.

‘Cows’ milk is sweet,’ suddenly stated the naked, hairy fellow. His skin was slick, his curly brown hair and beard wringing wet as though he had just that instant climbed from a bath. Hirsute mats covered his chest and back. Nests of it clustered under his armpits and at his groin. Hair thickly thatched his arms and sprouted on the backs of his hands.

‘If we had any milk we would share it gladly,’ said Tahquil. ‘Alas, we have none.’

Under bushy brows the gruagach’s eyes scintillated; chips of emerald, like the eyes of drowners. He turned that green gaze back to the fire, stretching out his big, rough hands. Water sputtered and sizzled, going up in tendrils of steam.

The ground canted slightly towards the gruagachs, otherwise the mortals would presently have found themselves sitting in an expanding pool upon which tiny green-white blossoms floated.

‘Shilava shillava, sonsirrilon delahirrina.’ The voice of the handsome youth in grass-green and holly-berry red was a rippling of water over stones, a sighing of shaken reeds.

‘Immerse,’ enigmatically responded the golden maiden.

That was all the conversation there was to be had with the gruagachs pointlessly drying themselves at the fire, and of that fact Tahquil was glad. Seduced, sedated by warmth, it was all she could do to remain vigilant. She noticed that the belle again appeared as a hag, and a most decrepit one.

Make up your mind …

By dawn the water wights had, inevitably, disappeared.

A trail of puddles and miniature green-white flowers led to a backwater down by a loop in the river. The companions followed it to the water’s marge and stood beneath the willows, looking out across the glimmering surface. On slim green stalks, the dart-shaped leaves of arrowhead poked up from the shallows. The plant bore three-petalled blooms, white with a purple blotch at the centre, short-stemmed whorls on long fingers.

‘The tubers of arrowhead are starchy. They are edible,’ said Tahquil.

‘But are not gruagachs dwelling down there?’ asked Caitri, gazing at the black water.

‘I doubt it. I consider that leading us here was their way of rewarding us for our rather useless hospitality.’

Tahquil stripped off her damp clothes and slipped between the greenish water-panes of the billabong. The chill was a sudden violation, like a slap in the face. Mud oozed between her toes. She felt the swollen tubers beneath the mire, dug around them with her feet, gulped air, ducked underwater and pulled them up. Waist-deep she waded among flat discs of pondweed, her hair streaming like wet leaves over the waxy contours of her body. Returning to the banks she reached up and offered the produce to her friends. They took the dripping food from her hands, momentarily in awe of her.

Carefully, Caitri said, ‘My eyes deceive me. You are a semblance of—’

Tahquil flicked water in her face, smiling. ‘I am no water wight! In good sooth, I am weary of wetness and long to be dry. I should not be surprised if my ears soon begin to sprout watercress.’ She dived a second time.

By the time the succulent tubers had been harvested, cooked and consumed, the sun behind the boiling clouds still roofing Lallillir had reached its zenith. Having fed themselves, the travellers fed the fire with the last of the arid fuel and slept until dusk.

‘According to the urisk, Black Bridge crosses the Ravenswater upstream of its conjunction with our friend the Blackwater,’ said Tahquil, stuffing her pack with cooked arrowhead tubers. ‘We must direct our steps uphill again from here, away from the river.’

‘Besides, the swan told us culicidae lurk down here in the sheltered deeps of the valley,’ added Caitri.

‘The rain will have driven them away,’ responded Tahquil, ‘for the nonce. Though, doubtless they will soon return.’

Uphill they went, veering northeast to where they reckoned Black Bridge must lie.

More rain fell throughout that night, in listless curtains of monotony. The fishers’ oilskins by now were too ragged to be waterproof. The travellers’ garments again became waterlogged. Mud sucked at their boots. From beyond the rain curtains came the percussive plink of droplets like glass chimes, and sometimes a light patter as of fingertips drumming on a tabletop. Freshets chortled in channels. Of wind there was no breath. Between showers all was silent, save for the chuckle and tinkle of condensing vapour rolling off leaves. Lallillir loomed pearl-grey, her dripping trees swathed in mist, the nearer trunks glistening dark and wet, the further ones fading as they marched into obscurity.

‘And my hair to grow toadstools,’ said Tahquil to herself, wiping rain out of her eyes and contemplating the advantages of an afternoon in the desert.

On the twenty-fifth day of Uianemis the rain contracted to the east. While the travellers slept, or drowsily kept watch, the sky cleared. The primrose sun of Summer bloomed through skies of raucous blue and Lallillir smoked like a flagon of mulled wine in a night-watchman’s chilblained hands. The travellers stowed their tattered oilskins in their packs.

‘No need to smear my face with mud for disguise,’ said Tahquil to anyone who cared to listen. ‘It has occurred naturally.’

The top of Wold Fell was running down to meet them now, descending towards the east-west arm of Ravenstonedale. Sharply it dropped, and by the closing of the following night the travellers had reached its furthest point.

They stood at the lip of a steep and narrow dene, congested with shadows. Steaming mountain ash trees clad its walls, soaring above tree ferns and low-growing fronds. Tier below hazy tier dropped to the broad band of a river as black as schorl: the Ravenswater.

Further to the right, a high and airy shape could be discerned. Tall, pointed arches grew out of spindly pillars of black stone. Black Bridge was narrow; it seemed to have been drafted and embellished by a fine-pointed pen.

Moving down into the shelter of the mountain ashes, the travellers nestled uncomfortably between their massive roots, and there passed the day in vaporous black-green shade.

Towards nightfall a breeze stirred.

The howl that tore the mantle of evening was like no vocalisation Tahquil had ever heard. No storm-warner, no Boubrie-bird made such a sound. It was a round, melodious, chilling summons that began with a bass yodel, soared suddenly to a high pitch and finished on a descending note—imperative and primitive as instinct, savage as hunger, wild as wind, remote and solitary as the moon. At the noise, Viviana cursed in courtingle and jumped up, tilting her head back to look up into the tree beneath which they sheltered.

‘What yowls?’ cried Caitri, following her gaze as though she expected something deadly to immediately drop out on their heads.

‘How swiftly can you climb a tree?’ cried the courtier. ‘That was the howl of the morthadu!’ She reached for a low branch.

‘Wait,’ said Tahquil. ‘What’s the use of trapping ourselves in a tree? The morthadu might not be able to climb but they will only scent us, and lay siege until we drop down with weakness like starved possums. We are downwind of them—I am certain they have not detected us. See—the breeze that stirs the ash leaves blows from the northeast and that, I suspect, is where the call issued from.’

‘How agreeable,’ said Viviana. ‘That is also the direction of the bridge.’

‘I’d rather,’ said Caitri, ‘cross the bridge and be stuck in a tree in Cinnarine eating apples than stuck in an ash tree gnawing on my knuckles.’

‘Either way you would end up as wight-fodder,’ said Viviana pessimistically.

The howl issued again, wheeling vertiginously across the sky and through the trees.

‘We cannot go back,’ reasoned Tahquil, her voice rising with urgency, ‘nor is there any purpose in turning east or west and remaining in Lallillir. We must depart from this soggy land and the only way is by crossing. the Ravenswater. While the wind continues to blow from the northeast we shall be safe—’

‘Oh yes, and the morthadu shall sit back on their haunches and stay exactly where they are to enable us to avoid them,’ said Viviana.

‘They will roam,’ answered Tahquil. ‘But with luck they will roam upwind. At any rate—’

‘We have no choice,’ Caitri completed the sentence.

As noiselessly as possible, they set off towards the bridge.

Hours later, the sun rose, like a rose.

No light penetrated Ravenstonedale. The high walls of the valley blocked it out. Dark birds floated in circles over the fell-tops.

‘Listen,’ said Tahquil. Her face closed in concentration.

Zephyrs streamed like gauze scarves stitched with the chirruping of birds, the hum and scratch of sequined arthropods, the satiny chains of running water.

At length Caitri said, ‘To what?’

‘The howling. It has ceased.’

‘They are nocturnal, the morthadu,’ said Viviana caustically. ‘I thought it common knowledge.’

‘Perhaps they sleep,’ said Tahquil. ‘But while they sleep we do not. Beneath the day’s eye we shall continue to make our way to Black Bridge and across it.’

None argued, but tiredness bullied them for they had trudged all night. Foodless, fireless, sleepless, they had plodded on like three ragged, filthy beggars. Their fisherfolks’ garb hung in unidentifiable tatters. Their boots, softened by water and minced by uneven ground, were coming apart. Mud sullied them in patches from head to foot. Their hair appeared to be all of the same drab shade—a mousy brownish-grey. In matted hanks it tangled about their shoulders, interwoven with small twigs and leaves. Even their eyes, peering dispiritedly from pinched and grimy faces, were not unblemished. Fine blood-threads knitted across their white ground.

‘What has she put on today, the queen, the queen? What has she put on today, the comely queen?’ sang Viviana. ‘Is it crimson is it yellow, is it purple is it blue? Are there diamonds on her collar, are there rubies on her shoe?’

‘Hold your noise!’ Caitri flared.

Viviana laughed. ‘No, her gown is dirty brown and her hair is falling down, and they’ll run her out of town, the comely queen!’

‘What are you playing at?’ Tahquil demanded. ‘Are you deliberately trying to make our position known? To identify me?’

Viviana shrugged. ‘My singing shall make no difference. What might be aware of our presence is aware already and the morthadu are, presumably, asleep.’ She began to hum.

‘Please, Via.’

The courtier smiled, though not with her eyes, and the humming evolved into something more tuneless.

Caitri said, ‘Via, if you do not stop that, Tahquil and I shall knock you down and stuff rags in your mouth.’

The humming ceased.

‘’Tis a pity the rain could not wash off the taint of goblin fruit,’ sighed Tahquil.

Two pearls crystallised in Viviana’s eyes.

‘I cannot help it,’ she said. Then she blinked, the tears fell and in their dry sources a cold, remote expression returned.

Halfway down the slope the ring bit into Tahquil’s finger. She raised her hand in mute signal and the three of them fluttered like bedraggled thrushes into concealment beneath the shadows of a linden tree. Tahquil extended her senses, probing out into the far reaches of hearing, taste, scent, sight.

Presently she said, ‘I can detect no danger.’

‘Where is the swanmaiden,’ sighed Caitri, ‘when we need her?’

Tahquil’s finger hurt where the ring stung it. She slipped off both glove and ring, weighing the starry gold circle in her palm. No ridged band of reddened flesh marked its erstwhile abode—her finger remained unmarred.

Caitri was shading her eyes with her hand, gazing down towards Black Bridge. ‘I am not certain of it,’ the little girl said, ‘but I think I see things moving down there.’

Tahquil looked again. ‘You may be right.’

With a flash of inspiration she held the ring to her eye like a spyglass. All at once the world expanded, clarified. Every detail appeared intensified, sharp-cut. There, seemingly close enough to touch, was Black Bridge. It stalked across the deep gorge, over waters as smooth and dark as oil. The stone of the bridge was rotten, necrotic. Mosses crawled in the jointed apexes of each arch. Grotesqueries were carved into its stanchions and its ribbed vaulting. This was an ancient structure, mysterious, and desolate, falling into ruin.

At the near end of the bridge and almost out on the span between its low walls, prowled long, lean coagulations of twilight, each one pierced by a double-pronged fork to reveal the red fires smoldering within the black hide. On the river’s opposite bank the long grasses stirred, though there was no breeze.

‘Five walk on this shore, two wait at the near edge of the bridge,’ Tahquil said wonderingly. ‘Wolfseemings. The morthadu. I suspect that more of their kind prowl on the far side of the bridge.’ Slowly, she moved her spy-ring to the right, scanning the rest of the landscape. Two long, feline shapes disconnected themselves from the arch of a fallen tree trunk, then melted elegantly into a fern brake. ‘And that is not the worst of our troubles,’ Tahquil added. ‘A pair of grey malkins lurks nigh. Being lorraly beasts, mortal to the bone, they will have no qualms about crossing the Ravenswater.’

A strand of unkempt hair whipped across her face. ‘Obban tesh! The wind—’tis veering to the east. Should it swing further about they will catch our scent for sure.’

‘What now?’ asked Caitri.

‘What now indeed! Stalemate, for the moment. We have not the power to fight malkins or the morthadu—neither can the swanmaiden drive them off. The great cats would rend a bird to shreds and devour her, eldritch or not—and treat us the same way.’

‘Methinks they fear fire,’ suggested Caitri, hesitantly.

‘And where’s a dry twig to be had,’ interjected Viviana, ‘let alone enough material to make brands to bear with us? And what if it rained and our torches were extinguished? The trees are still laden with water enough to provide their own rainstorms. See?’

Perversely she shook a tree fern, kicked its fibrous stem. Glassy beads came rolling off its fronds and showered down on her. She laughed and shook back her wet hair.

‘Hush!’ said Tahquil. ‘Sound carries on the wind. The beasts of the pack have sharp ears.’

‘’Zooks, that precludes your calling the Bird I suppose,’ said Viviana carelessly. ‘Not that she is much help.’

As if on cue, a shadow passed briefly overhead. The swan sank behind the trees, instantly reappearing in her alter-native shape, pushing through malachite frondery. The feathers of her cloak were ruffled, as was her previous cool aloofness. Birdlike, her head jerked abruptly. She kept glancing nervously over her shoulder. The pupils of her strange, avian eyes had dilated like black suns—her kind detested taking their humanlike shape during the day. Only dire circumstances would have driven her to such desperate measures.

‘Hazard!’ she hissed, without preamble. ‘Unwholesome wolverhounds hold the span. Sly, sneaking malkins hunt hither. The wind wavers and soon sniffing spiracles shall scent humans. Unseelie hounds and feral felines wait, with hidden hopes. Hazard follows subsequently in Lallillir. Foul water wights wander, singing suck-spirits set forth. Three on foot should swiftly surmount strong-streaming watercourse.’

‘How shall we elude the cats and the lupine guardians of the bridge?’ demanded Tahquil eloquently. ‘Surely you cannot lift us and fly us across the Ravenswater?’

‘Several ways suffice to straddle flowing waters. Follow. Follow.’

Down the dene’s sheer sides the travellers plunged in the swanmaiden’s wake, slipping beneath the emerald lattices of tree ferns. Embroideries of spaghnum moss squelched underfoot. Whithiue was leading them towards the left, downstream of the bridge. What her purpose was they could not guess.

‘Is there a second bridge?’ panted Caitri.

‘I saw only one,’ returned Tahquil.

The breeze swung gently to the south. A ululation, pure and sombre, echoed down the valley. The travellers thrust words aside and hastened on. After an hour, or maybe two or three, it came to Tahquil that the thunder of a mighty river rumbled more loudly through her consciousness. By now they must be almost level with the Ravenswater’s swift and terrible tide. Ahead, the tall stalks of tree ferns parted to reveal the gloss of the sombre river only some ten yards below. Although no rocks tore the surface of the Ravenswater and no snags interrupted the smooth race, foam and bubbles whipping past indicated a flood moving at incalculable speeds.

‘I do not care what sort of boat she has waiting!’ declared Caitri. ‘No vessel could navigate that current safely. Even if it withstood the battering, we should be swept down to the sea, for how could we hope to achieve landfall?’

The swanmaiden beckoned. Glistering droplets on her feather cloak captured reflections of leaves, distorting them to a semblance of dark green lace.

She stood beside a low stonework thrusting up out of the hillside, as crumbling and corrupt as Black Bridge itself. Leaf mold and detritus had built up against its buttresses, partially submerging them. Moss and lichens velveted the massive blocks so that only their shape betrayed their mortal-sculpted origins.

The swanmaiden pointed with a bird-bone finger.

Deep in the stonework loomed an arched void—an entrance screened with leaves.

‘Here stair starts,’ their guide said. ‘Step within. Stair sinks subterraneously. Stone-hewn warren sub-fathoms foundations of watercourse. Here’s a historic subway, the hour-honoured under-mine. Wights fail to follow here, for water flows circumjacently, squarely sideways, flawing and fracturing. Finite-span felines fear to stray in such a worm’s warren. Hasten. Sooth, wild ones scent sweet flesh and hunt.’

As she and her companions fumbled through the archway, extending their toes to feel for the stair, Tahquil briefly thought, Why should grey malkins fear to walk down there?

But it was too late to reconsider. Fiendish howls came screaming from every direction. Incandescent-eyed bolts of black energy burst out of the foliage. Instantaneously, a wraithlike darkness shot up and arrowed away into the sky: the swan taking flight. Scissoring jaws followed Tahquil into the orifice of stone, snapping shut on her sleeve, tearing it away. Still ungloved, the ring flashed with the brilliance of magnified stars. The scarlet eyes sizzled and disappeared. The stair treads pushed themselves at the soles of her feet, and with a crunching patter of boots, the refugees passed rapidly underground.

By the saffron effulgence of the ring they descended five hundred and eighty-eight corkscrewed steps that plumbed the ground like a vertical drill. Sometimes the walls pressed close, and the stair bored tightly through. At other times they opened out and the stair hung in emptiness from thin stalks of pillars, with no apparent means of support from beneath. As they went down, a dreadful certitude developed in Tahquil’s thoughts—the vial of nathrach deirge was missing. During that last flight down the valley-side the neck-chain had snagged on something—a twig, perhaps. Momentarily trapped, Tahquil had wrenched free, plunged on heedlessly, dwelling only on escape. Her right hand now sought her throat. Uncluttered, the tender expanse of skin stretched over the slender collarbones, the throbbing carotid. Her throat was indeed bereft of its precious ornament.

The vial shall be sorely missed. Down here, cold reigns.

Yet this stairwell felt different from the under-roads of Doundelding and the Beithir’s lair. In the first place, no friendly wall-fungi conveniently illuminated it, no ionised taste embittered the air. Dead was the air but not entirely, not as air would be that for aeons had failed to circulate through living tissue, nor been stirred through by the passage of living things. It smelled like air that occasionally escaped to be sweetened with sunlight and leaves, before re-entering refreshed. Ventilation must exist, hereabouts.

Possibly also, lungs which required it.

Thoughts berated Tahquil.

Why should malkins fear to walk beneath the Ravenswater? Has she stooped to perfidy at last, the swanmaiden, and betrayed us? But no. It is impossible for creatures of eldritch to break their word—she promised to see us safe to Cinnarine. Yet perhaps she considers this under-mine to be part of Cinnarine …

After treading upon the five hundred and eighty-eighth step, the companions reached a level place. Many gnawings ate at them, not least hunger. But no food was to be obtained, no heartening dragon’s blood was there to be sipped, only water filming the sandstone substrata in random patches. Of course—the stair ended below the uttermost dregs of the minacious Ravenswater.

Caitri collapsed.

How long is it since we slept? Tahquil’s rationality was hampered by a melange of weariness, hunger and longing. My wits are fuddled. I cannot reason aright. I only know that we must keep moving.

‘Caitri has never entirely recovered her strength since being struck by aelf-shot,’ she said aloud to Viviana. ‘A stroke’s effects can linger. By rights, we ought to have left her safe in Appleton Thorn. We must keep moving, for warmth.’

Viviana stated, ‘There’s dragon’s blood.’

‘I do not wish to use it all up,’ Tahquil quickly replied. She had no desire to reveal the truth at this time, thus paving the path to despair.

‘’Tis inexhaustible,’ countered Viviana.

‘Not necessarily. Let us hoard it for more dire circumstances.’

‘What could be more urgent?’

Caitri made a small sound like a sick bird.

‘Lean on me,’ said Tahquil to the little girl. ‘I am no stalwart to bear you on my shoulders, but I can lend you strength.’

For what it is worth.

‘Come, Caitri,’ she urged, ‘think what awaits us at the end of this under-mine—the fair, green orchards of Cinnarine blowing in sunny breezes at the height of Summer.’

Caitri stood up. She hooked her arm around Tahquil’s shoulders. Viviana took hold of her other arm.

‘And fruit,’ the courtier said indistinctly, as though the juices already ran voluptuously in her mouth. ‘Ripe fruit in bunches, waiting to be plucked and slurped.’

They walked on, side by side. Moisture trickled down Tahquil’s face. Unlike the moisture behaving similarly on the walls, it was briny.

The under-mine was decorated with eroded carvings and cracked stone furniture. Pointed arches and ribbings had been incised into the natural sandstone. A gargoyle fountainhead jutted from the wall, spouting a thin jet of water into a worn basin. Further on, other fountains protruded, dry and clogged. The tunnel roared softly, like a predator; the resonance of the overhead current. Close, so close over their heads, the entire mass of the Ravenswater oppressed. Tahquil wondered—How many tons of water? A million? Partitioned only by a layer of rock how thick? Fifty yards, thirty, perhaps in places only ten? That power, generated by water’s flow but unable to be sensed by humankind, would here hold ultimate authority. To pass so close beneath the river would be anathema to wights. No cause for human alarm would emanate from eldritch quarters.

‘Hour-honoured’, and ‘historic’ were the words Whithiue had used to describe this under-mine. Ancient were its supports, old and neglected its rising vaults. What rises must fall. One day, or one night, the river would come crashing down through this roof. Would it be this moment?

Fie! Tahquil chided herself. Light-loving aboveground dwellers typically turn to morbid musings when forced down to the world below, with its connotations of graves and decay. If this secret way has held back the Ravenswater for centuries, there is no reason why it should choose this particular moment to surrender.

The tunnel passed through an archway endowed with carvings of harvest-laden wains, and widened out into a rectangular cavern, high-vaulted. The leaf-ring’s dandelion radiance extended to the walls. Tahquil looked for patches of shadow—evidence of other entrances and exits.

What if this were a maze, like the diggings of Doundelding—a labyrinth to lose, abuse and confuse wanderers? No openings showed themselves, save one archway directly ahead. As they made for it, part of the cavern wall gave a heave.

In Tahquil’s chest, an arrow-impaled bird clapped wings of fear. ‘Keep moving!’ she cried. ‘Hurry!’

But though they tried to run, it seemed as though she and her companions swam through honey. Their limbs, overtaxed, were loath to obey.

On the wall a lustre awoke and ran along a flexuosity. A dorsal wing partially erected itself, brazen, like a half-opened fan. A spangle disclosed then reshuttered its eye. The cavern’s exit dwindled until it was a hundred miles away, unreachable.

‘Hasten!’

Rustlings and scrapings issued from the margins of the chamber. A stone mouth gaped in front of the travellers. Swallowed, they fled the place with many a backward glance.

A sere slithering sounded.

‘What was that?’ Viviana snapped.

‘I know not.’

‘Can it follow us? Is it following?’

Tahquil gave no answer. Caitri’s arm across her shoulders weighed like a collar of iron. Presently, Viviana cried, ‘It comes after.’

‘I know,’ said Tahquil.

That which trailed them equalled their pace, while the river’s ear-numbing roar crescendoed. Onward they hastened. Against the tunnel’s wall, a high-backed chair stood like an empty throne, crudely engraved with motifs of candles and swords. A scrolled pedestal upheld a stone cup.

The flesh of the travellers crawled like corpse-maggots.

It was not until the passageway flared to a second chamber and they had crossed the greater part of it, that a disturbance forced them to halt, whirling to face their pursuer. The sidings of this subsequent dungeon roused now, shimmering from bland stone-grey to coils of iridescence. Fugacious rainbows rippled along reptilian convolutions like oil spilled on water; rubious, rubicelle, aureate, viridescent, argent, cerulean. A fork, nigrescent, flicked out and tasted the air.

‘Fare thee well, dear friends,’ said Viviana sardonically.

Caitri clung to her in unspeaking horror.

‘I never thought to be worm’s food before I met the grave,’ the courtier added, with a bitter smile.

Tahquil held up the ringed hand. The watch-worms, their colours cycling, neither flinched nor drew back.

‘It seems they do not fear the ring’, said Tahquil. ‘But I have met such a worm before, in Gilvaris Tarv.’

‘Tell it your name, then,’ sneered Viviana. ‘Maybe ’twill remember you and smile as it bites.’

‘I wonder, could this be the same one? There’s no way of knowing.’

‘Do they eat humankind?’

‘Yes. Perhaps discerningly.’

‘If discerningly, then you are done for, sweet my lady.’

‘The worm I saw slew only one who had tormented it.’

‘Tell it we adore it, since you two are on such good terms.’

‘Viviana, you are amusing when spiteful.’

‘Die laughing,’ carelessly said Mistress Wellesley, goblin-corrupted, not herself.

Thrice the monstrous beasts circumnavigated the cavern, aiming their crystal eyes from all angles. One, perhaps the one which had followed the travellers, unclosed its maw, unhinging its dislocatable lower mandible to reveal a second set of jaws nestled within. These opened, shut and were closed upon. With a flutter of its dorsal spines and vestigial gill-wings, the oscillating worm recoiled on itself, retracting through the archway. The others subsided against the wall carvings, dulling to an emberous glow as of moonlight seen through stained glass or candlelight shining behind jewels.

‘Reprieved,’ said Tahquil, wiping the sweat from her brow.

‘My life I’d not wager on it,’ said Viviana as they vacated the precincts through a patterned archway, dragging Caitri, half-insensible, between them.

The throaty call of the river drew away and upward. Their way passed through a third worms’ nest in the rock, another stretch of passageway and then a cul-de-sac footing a spiral stair. There, at the limit of endurance, on the naked floor they prostrated themselves and let insentience claim them.

When they awoke after their vulnerable hours, aching and stiff, thin grey scales lay scattered about like coins. Watch-worms had been moving, close by.

Unmolested, the travellers drank from a gargoyle wall-fount. Afterwards they climbed the stair.

This stair seemed endless. The climbers, crawling on hands and knees, eventually resigned from craning their necks in search of a hint of light to indicate that they were approaching the northern exit. At length Tahquil, in the lead, put out her hand to reach the next step and yelped with surprise.

She had encountered a drapery of leaves.

No light gleamed through the interstices of this curtain.

‘It is night outside,’ whispered Tahquil.

‘Have we reached the orchards of Cinnarine? Do you smell the fruit? Do you?’ demanded Viviana, sniffing the air like a dog.

‘No. But grey malkins may be lurking out there. They saw us enter the under-mine, and surely they know the location of this exit. They only have to run across the bridge, surround us and wait for the flies to embrace the web.’

‘Thank you, O swanmaiden,’ Viviana said, rolling her eyes heavenward.

Tahquil took off her pack. With all her might she flung it through the leaves. It landed with a thud, followed by silence. No sound of snarling or rending of fabric by sharp fangs disturbed the quietude.

‘No malkins,’ said Tahquil, and she heaved herself out of the hole, through the foliate curtain, before Viviana could append, ‘At least, none foolish enough to dine upon a hempen pack.’

On a rising slope of darkness she lay. Of fruit-glutted orchards there was no sign. At the top of the slope a row of pointing pines was chiselled in black up a sky heavily sugared with stars. Far below and behind ran a river as heavy and lustrous as polished antimony—the Ravenswater, bisected by the swooping birds’-wing arches of Black Bridge.

They had emerged once more in Ravenstonedale, but on the other side of the bridge.

‘It is perilous to remain here,’ said Tahquil to Viviana as they seized Caitri by the arms and hauled her out of the crypt-like masonry. ‘We must make for the heights. That way lies Cinnarine, for sure.’

The memory of a long, dark cry scoured through her head like lonely winds.

‘Easier to utter than to execute,’ said Viviana. ‘I cannot go much further without nourishment. Fruit is what I need. Just a plum, or a small grape …’

Caitri groaned.

‘Take her by the ankles,’ said Tahquil, hoisting the recumbent form by the shoulders. They began to carry Caitri up the side of the valley, which the night had burned as black as cinders.

The wind remained in the south.

Awkwardly, with their burden, Tahquil and Viviana climbed the slope towards the pines lining the ridge top. Immediately behind the trees, immersed in their witchy shadows, a hedge grew high, untame and recklessly burgeoning. Formed of interlocking hawthorn bushes, this antique row of shrubbery stretched far in both directions. Small birds nested in it, tiny creatures of eldritch scampered in it, but large wights or lorraly beasts could never penetrate its dense and overgrown pleachings or brave its countless cusps. In days of yore the now vanished orchardists of Cinnarine had planted this hedge-barrier along the outer perimeter of the sandstone windwall.

The windwall deflected the south wind and kept out the morthadu roaming in the vale of the sinister river. Those same orchardists had also constructed the undermine, and a door was set in the windwall above the place where the under-mine emerged, but the iron-studded oaken beams of that door had long ago been penetrated and sundered and replaced by a weaving of living thorns, so that now no sign of its erstwhile existence remained.

Tahquil and Viviana studied the hedge behind the pines and guessed its purpose.

‘I would rather be on the other side of that,’ stated Viviana.

The two of them paced it for several yards in opposite directions, searching for a chink, an opening, a gap, knowing in their hearts there was no hope of this and being proved accurate.

They met together beside Caitri. She had dragged herself into a sitting position, resting her back against the rugose flank of a pine tree, her eyes as blank as two extinguished lamps.

‘I expect to hear at any time the hunting notes of the morthadu,’ said Tahquil, ‘or see the baleful eyes of a malkin. Viviana, have you any rope in your pack? I have left mine down by the under-mine and am loath to retrace and retrieve.’

Without a word Viviana pulled out the vortex of hempen rope she had carried all the way from the abandoned cottage of Tavron Caiden near Hunting-towers. Sullenly she watched Tahquil select a pine and hoist herself up into the lower branches, the rope coiled about her shoulder.

The bark of the pines was deeply scored, harsh and unforgiving, like a clay surface baked in a desert sun. It tore at unprotected flesh. The rough lips of each crevice curled back on themselves in a grating snarl. Yet in all other affairs the pines showed benevolence. Their fallen needles mantled the ground with fragrant layers which allowed no growth of nettles or poisonous weeds or throttling undergrowth. Their arms were conveniently spaced and positioned for easy attainment, sprouting low on the trunk, sweeping the ground, offering a facile stair. The trees themselves stood vigorous, strong, noble. Higher up, dark green cone-laden boughs reached right across the top of the hedge of the windwall.

Blood oozed, stinging, from Tahquil’s shins. It gathered in drops on her scraped elbows as she pulled herself up to the next branch and peered over the topmost sprigs of the green-berried hedge.

Almost imperceptibly, the air lightened by one shade. Far, far away—or maybe it was only a fancy—a cock crowed. And there beyond the hedge she beheld a sea of leaves stretching away to the north. It was gently tossed by tendrils of the south wind which flicked lasciviously at the skirts of the orchard trees to reveal, here and there, catching the waning starlight, clusters of hard orbs on their stems.

Tahquil secured the rope around a branch, close to the trunk.

‘Caitri,’ she called down softly, ‘we are come to Cinnarine. Take hold of the rope. We will help you. One last effort and then you may rest.’

‘I cannot do it,’ said Caitri, but the warble of one of the morthadu came wavering from the direction of the river, and she struggled to her feet, stepping on the primary branches, hanging onto the rope. The branches bounced, swishing their tufts of clean, green pins beneath their new burden. Along an extended, horizontal limb she crawled on her belly, inch by inch, the cruel bark abrading. Just underneath the limb, the spikes of the hedge stuck up. They looked harsher than the pine bark, even in their pretty dresses and bunches of jade beads. The long bough dipped flexibly, even under Caitri’s slight weight, as she edged further from the trunk. Down it bent, but she had moved past the hedge and with a cry of relief and despair she fell off, disappearing with a crash on the northern side of the windwall.

Her companions called her name and received an answer—not the answer they had expected, but the loud cries of many of the morthadu, now almost upon them. Viviana shinnied up the tree like a squirrel. She and Tahquil pulled up the rope, as a cock crowed again, far off in some very distant remoteness. The unseelie dog-wolf-simulacra loped into the half-light of uhta and gathered about the foot of the tree, rearing up to put their front paws on the lower branches, gazing up out of furnace eyes and raising the great ruffs on their shoulders like black manes.

These were not mortal creatures, there was no doubting it. Long ago, the child Ashalind had seen some wolves of Erith. The pups tumbled playfully as their parents licked them with long, lolling tongues as pink as newborn voles. Like the pines, erect and graceful, strong and untame, the wolves had possessed a vigour and a nobility unknown by wights of unseelie.

The morthadu, the colour of bereavement, were incarnations of malignance. They and the shadows seemed to belong together, to slide in and out of one another. Fascinated, Viviana and Tahquil stared down at the milling mass.

‘Go, Via,’ urged Tahquil. ‘Cross the wall. Caitri needs us.’

In her turn, Viviana crawled out along the bough. Tahquil, overly conscious of the steady regard of the attentive crowd below, watched the courtier instead. Viviana went as far as she could. When the branch narrowed enough that it was impossible to keep balance, she swung herself down, hung by her hands for an instant and dropped. The morthadu began a terrible chorus as Tahquil also left their scope, but the sky was brightening swiftly now. A blinding ray punctured the east and the treetops of Cinnarine were suddenly turned to flying green-gold. The sun rose over the wild orchards almost as rapidly as Tahquil fell into them.

Now the morthadu fell silent and fled, coursing away in a fleet pack like lean, black waves down the valley. On the other side of the windwall, the warm winds of Summer were tossing hot motes of sunlight like crushed gilt through the trees, and caressing the sweet grasses of Cinnarine.

It was Midsummer’s Day.

4

CINNARINE

Forbidden Fruit

Cinnarine—orchard green, in Summer’s listless noon,

Tourmaline, tangerine, when winds of Autumn croon.

Leafless treen, gnarled and lean when frost bestows its sting—

Cinnarine, Blossom Queen in heady days of Spring.

FROM THE CHAP-BOOK: ‘POEMS OF THE NORTH COUNTRY’

Gentle brooks flowed in the folds and pooled in the hollows of this land. The orchards, for centuries untended, had spread wide and far. Wind and water and birds had borne their seeds away, broadcasting them over acres far beyond the borders of the original plantations, whose ancient moss-bearded trees, or the descendants of them, remained hidden in the secret cores of Cinnarine. Stretching one hundred and seventy miles from south to north, a wild tangle of fruit trees had grown up. They had aged, toppled and decayed in the grassy mold to give nourishment to rank upon rank of succeeding generations.

At this warm season and latitude, early fruit, peeping from beneath chaste leaves, ripened to shades of maroon, jacinth and passion-red, rosamber and cochineal. Already the first astringent apples, cherries, peaches, pears, yellow and red plums were ready to be gathered. Apricot and orange trees, figs and mulberries grew in their midst, fruited with bitter green jewels, for the season was too young for their bounty.

The wild harvest was abundant. Rich-hued raspberries, blackberries and wild strawberries peeped from their luscious bowers; honey dripped down from hollow trees where hives hummed; grasses waved feathery seed-heads; watercress dappled the frequent ponds; daisies rioted and dandelions spattered the ground with splashes of bright yellow.

‘Here is a place to be drunk on sweet nectars,’ sighed Caitri, ‘to gluttonise on ripe flesh until the juices run down one’s chin and one’s belly sticks forth like a sail in the wind.’

‘Pah. These fruits are plaster imitations,’ contested Viviana. ‘Where are the goblin trees?’

‘Where wood-goblins can find them,’ answered Tahquil, measuring a length of rope to use as a belt. Her leather belt had broken as she fell into Cinnarine. Wishing to save the metal against some future need, while leaving no trace of their presence, she strung the iron buckle from the chain of her jade tilhal and buried the severed strap in the loam.

It was now three days since the companions had entered Cinnarine—pleasant days of drowsy sunshine, spent sleeping in mansions of foliage; nights spent wandering northwards, gorging on succulence. Peril seemed far away, allowing Tahquil leisure to dwell only on thoughts of Thorn—yearning, constantly, to be back at his side. Sometimes she half-expected to see him come walking through the trees, emerging from the shadows with that graceful, easy stride.

Viviana remained enclosed in her dark prison of enchanted longing, and only Caitri was free to enjoy fully the bounty of this silvan land.

Embowered, the little girl reached up her hand. A peach filled it, flecked and striped as though spattered with multicoloured wax. Next, it filled her mouth with juices melliferous and tart. As she sat in the bower with late sunshine showering flakes of lime and gold on her skin and hair, she began to notice movements throughout the woods. About forty feet above the ground, it seemed as though the sunlight itself had condensed its rainbow colours to form living things.

Numbers of flimsy creatures were busy at the leaves and branches. Initially, the human watcher believed the quick movements belonged to birds or butterflies, but they proved to be neither. They were intent only on the trees. For this reason, in addition to their diurnal manifestation and benign appearance, Caitri viewed them without trepidation.

Indeed, the tree-beings displayed a preternatural loveliness. Of human height and form they were, but they appeared to be neither male nor female, possessing the genderless look of prepubescent youths or maidens. Although their faces were flesh-coloured, the hue of their skin altered at the shoulders to pale apple-green, deepening to become raiment of dazzling jade which flowed far below their bare toes in long trails like translucent mother-of-pearl.

They glided up and down the arbours, reflecting glints of light like shoals of fish in the sea, rising and falling swiftly as they flew back and forth. The undulations of their diaphanous trains created incessant pleats and flutings of pale rose, saffron, silver and hazy emerald-green. Yet they were not garments at all, these glistening trains, but veils of light or some other form of energy stream descending and spreading from the shoulders. As Caitri watched, the beings faded into the trees.

From time to time in their travels through Cinnarine, the wanderers would spy these and other elementals of the trees flitting rapidly in and out among the trunks or at the height of the topmost boughs. At whiles they floated higher, but they never descended to the ground as they occupied themselves ceaselessly with their esoteric tasks.

‘These nebulous sylphs,’ said Tahquil. ‘Meganwy taught me of such as they—the coillduine, wights of the trees, who dwell in the sun. Lovely they are, but their thought is closed to us. Some say they are almost mindless, like the plants they inhabit.’

Viviana cared nothing for the habits of the coillduine. Perversely, she searched for goblin fruits. The restlessness in her would not die—never was she satisfied, despite that her friends gave her the best of everything.

Would that I knew how to cure this affliction, thought Tahquil despairingly. Now two of us are infected with Yearning. She touched the ring on her finger, wondering how long its power would keep her from the pining-death.

But Tahquil bore her suffering with better grace than the courtier. When Viviana’s frustration overbrimmed its well, she would rail at the trees and kick them, or tear off their brittle boughs and use them to beat the boles.

Towards the close of the third day, the companions rested on a slope of springy turf beneath peach and pear trees. At the foot of the incline, reflections glimmered between the leaves. A pool lay in a depression there, like a dark green eye. They had been wary of pools since encountering the carnivorous fuath in Lallillir, but in this peaceful, wooded region the edge had worn off their apprehension. They had seen no wights save for the harmless tree-sylphs who were neither malign nor benign to mortals, and oblivious of the human race. Relaxed, filled with a drowsiness born of satiation, lulled by a ferment of perfumes and warmth, the maidens dozed late. Each vaguely hoped that another was keeping watch. To inquire who was on guard duty seemed bothersome and would possibly lead to shouldering that responsibility oneself. It was easier to let it be.

And what danger could await in these innocent orchards, here behind the protective sandstone wind-wall with its thorny hedge? The swanmaiden had warned of a ganconer, an unseelie wight whose honeyed words were poison: ‘Sweet-speaking handsome one woos,’ she had said, ‘where sprigs hang heavy with fruit. Fair face, fair words, sinister intent. She who falls for shadows shall soon weave her shroud.’

Yet there had been no sign of wicked things. Conceivably, the ganconer had long since followed eastwards to the musterings in Namarre.

So the travellers dozed. They did not notice this: that some boughs dipped and swayed, though no wind blew, or that the waters of the green pool stirred.

Evening came with beauty to Cinnarine. The richness of it, the deep mazarine blue of the northern horizon, the lather of sombre, white-tipped clouds lavishing the sky-ceiling, the boughs luxuriantly festooned in every shade of green, the layered wall-hangings of leaves—all made it a time for slow and tranquil awakenings. The orchards were tinged with an ambient light which might have been filtered through panes of antique amber glass, or through tannin-rich waters of a mountain stream—mellow, yellow light tinged with bottle-brown.

The leaf-ring quivered. Tahquil’s lids snapped open like two leaden hatches which had been fastening down her eyes.

A man—maybe—came out of the shadows. Roughly, Tahquil seized her companions by the shoulders and shook them out of their lethargy.

‘Awake!’ she said. ‘It is he, the Ganconer of Cinnarine. Stopper your ears and avert your gaze. His words and looks ensnare …’

Like some wild creature he walked, easy, graceful, long of stride. Spying this unexpected manifestation, Caitri, half awake and not yet free from the adhesive webs of dream-illusion, wailed and fled. Tahquil sped after her, lest they should lose her in the wooden maze, and Viviana, not to be abandoned, trailed in pursuit.

Yet, as they ran on they heard muffled thuds on the grass—the pounding of hooves. A grey horse raced up beside them, yet it was riderless. Sharply it veered sideways to head them off in a small glade where moonlight fell like silver snow, and as the horse crossed their path they flung themselves backwards. The beast reared, its forelegs flailing. It swung its head towards the mortals as it came down, and its eyes looked through them, knowing. In terror they retreated, turned in the opposite direction to flee afresh. A shaft of moonlight pierced between leaves and illumined a pair of horns sprouting from a moving skull—the head of a second manifestation which barred their path of flight. They stumbled to a halt.

At Tahquil’s back, Viviana and Caitri clung to each other, pressed hard against the knobbed bole of a hoary plum tree. Under the glove, the ring zapped warning tingles up and down Tahquil’s arm.

‘Rest easy, lasses,’ fluted the horned one. ‘Och, there’s no call tae be afeard. ’Tis seelie we both be and wishin’ ye no harm.’

It was only an urisk.

‘No, I’ll not rest easy,’ cried Tahquil holding up her ringed hand in an effort to ward off wickedness. ‘There is a ganconer here, and that’s as unseelie as ever was.’

The grey horse was no longer in the glade. Instead, there emerged once more the man with the walk of a beast. He went down on one knee and bowed his head. Long, coarse hair slid off his powerful shoulders and hung in curtains as straight as weighted strings. In its glossiness, fluted water-leaves were twined like thin, green ribbons. He was naked from head to middle, clad only in leggings of some rough weave. The long nose drooped, the face too was elongated—strong-boned but not handsome. So pale was his skin that it seemed formed of cloud, and sheened with the polish of water seen by starlight. Smooth slate-grey hair grew thickly along sculpted forearms.

‘I am at yarr sarrvice, maiden,’ he said in strange accents.

‘No ganconer but a waterhorse indeed!’ Tahquil exclaimed. ‘Or is this some glamour?’

‘Nay, maiden,’ said the man-creature. ‘I am av the nygels as ye see me and I have sarrt after ye far many a night, since ye bart me freeness.’

‘I manumitted you? How can this be?’

He raised his head, his lips drawn back in a smile. There was no white to his eyes. They were the eyes of a horse, the centres huge discs of jet set in liquid malt.

‘De ye nat ken me?’

Tahquil’s mind jumped back to the day in the marketplace at Gilvaris Tarv, when her name had been Imrhien and she had possessed a purse filled with gold.

‘A pony for the pony!’ called Roisin.

There was general laughter, but the miller who held the rope said, ‘Is that a genuine offer?’

‘It is.’

Imrhien began rummaging in her purse.

‘What? Be ye turning scothy?’ hissed Muirne.

<<No. Please, show him the money.>>

Nobody outdid the offer. People stepped back, gawping in amazement—few had ever seen a coin of as high value as an angel. The Picktree miller made sure they didn’t get much of a look at it. As soon as he had bitten the heavy golden disc to test its authenticity, he pocketed it, handed the rope halter to Roisin, and disappeared swiftly into the crowd, doubtless afraid he might have become a target for cut-purses or less subtle robbers.

The transaction completed, the bystanders now focused their attention on the new owners, calling out advice and questions. Imrhien stepped up to the terrified wight and slipped off the rope. Instantly the crowd scattered.

‘Oh yes,’ breathed Tahquil, ‘I ken you now.’

‘Then ye’ll ken I credit ye with a favarr,’ said the nygel. ‘Ye served me well.’

‘You owe me nothing, sir.’

Then spoke the urisk: ‘Dinnae be sae swift tae dismiss your debtors, mistress. The favours of the eldritch are not tae be taken lightly.’

‘Nygels are the most seelie of all waterhorses, but they are practical jokers,’ she responded.

‘Aye,’ averred the urisk, ‘yet they can be stark and brawly and true.’

Beneath the plum tree, Viviana and Caitri shivered in each other’s arms. Unconvinced, Tahquil regarded the urisk. The night’s light sketched his strange form indistinctly.

Might this be the same urisk who has helped us before? It is difficult to tell one from another.

‘Are you the urisk of the Churrachan?’

‘Sure, ye’ve misca’ed me in the asking, madam.’

‘If I have insulted you, I am sorry. My vision is not as clear as yours, in the darkness. But are you?’ she persisted.

‘I am.’

‘How came you here?’

‘By Wight’s Way, what ither? And maist deserted it was, for on my journey I met wi’ anly twa. The first was the Glashan itsel’.’

‘The Glashan!’ Tahquil thought she recalled the name. ‘Is that not the handsome waterhorse who is far more dangerous than any nygel? I have met him—once,’ she shuddered, recalling the cottage at Rosedale. Thanks be to fate, that at that meeting I hid the gold of my hair beneath my taltry.

‘Not the Glastyn, mistress, but the Glashan, a hobgoblin. He had words wi’ me—words that might weel be o’ interest tae ye.’

‘What did he say?’ Tahquil asked, momentarily forgetting her apprehension regarding the nygel.

‘“I’m after a huzzie wi’ yellow birss,” quo’ the Glashan uncouthly,’ said the urisk somewhat unintelligibly.

‘“For what purpose?” quo’ I.

‘“For taen her tae the Lord Huon,” quo’ the Glashan, “and the Lord Each Uisge.”

‘“Spier some ither birkie,” quo’ I, and I went on my way.

‘Next, I happed tae meet wi’ the nygel. Quo’ he, couthly, “I’m after a lass wi’ hair of yellow.”

‘“Wi’ what purpose?” quo’ I, for I’s no be the agent of ane that delivers ye to the likes of Huon and his louns.’

Here the urisk bowed neatly to bleach-haired Viviana, who stared at him blank-faced.

‘So the sonsy waterhorse here,’ he continued, tell’d me about his debt. “Come alang wi’ me,” quo’ I. “For gin the luck is wi’ tham, bye and bye the yellow lass and her sisters will arrive in the Talam Meith, the koontrie men call Cinnarine.”’

He paused, frowning.

‘But I see the lass wi’ yellow hair is not the yin ye sought, nygel, and ’tis the dark yin after a’!’

‘How did you know me, sir?’ Tahquil quickly asked the water wight.

‘I did nat, at first,’ he replied, ‘because yarr hair is changed. Nearerr, I catched the tang av ye and the way in yarr standing. Lang back in the city I marked ye well, be sarrtain.’

Tahquil folded her arms and commenced pacing back and forth in agitation.

‘This wight, this Glashan, told you that the Lords of Wickedness hunt after a yellow-haired girl,’ she said abruptly. ‘Tell me more, urisk, prithee. Tell me about Prince Morragan—all that you know.’

‘I ken only what the nygel tell’d me. I’ve fared in faraway corners this many a lang year and hae not ventured into the heigh, broad world. A solitary I be, like all urisks. We only meet once every nine years, on the banks o’ Loch Katrine, and I’ve missed the last couple o’ gatherings.

‘I hae heard no ither news, except that when the black wings o’ the three Crows o’ War unfolded tae darken Erith’s skies and pass intae the west, there was naething o’ eldritch, whether seelie or unket, domestic or wild, shape-shifter or shape-stayer, solitary or trooping, dwelling in high places or low, in water or woods, that did not alarum tae that sally-forth. What hae ye done, that they should hunt ye so?’

Tahquil shrugged and turned her face from the urisk, unwilling to reveal anything to any wight.

Moonlight blinked out in the small glade, blinked on again. A shadow had passed between the sky and the ground. A hooting cry sounded far overhead and the nygel craned his neck skywards. He snorted.

‘What goes there?’ demanded Tahquil, squinting at the sky. Stars sprinkled its dark dome.

‘Ainly a birrid,’ said the mane-haired nygel-man. ‘Sit ye dane and I’ll tell ye the tale ye’ve requested. I’ll tell ye whay all acruss the land the hunt is an for a lass wi’ hair of yellie.’

‘Very well.’ Tahquil nodded guardedly. ‘I am eager to hear your story.’

They lowered themselves onto the grass, Caitri and Viviana at a short distance from Tahquil, wary of the two wights. The nygel began to speak.

He commenced with the story of Morragan, Crown Prince of the Faêran, who had been exiled with his elder brother the High King. For many years after the Closing of the Gates to the Fair Realm, the exiled Faêran lords and ladies had walked the known lands, and that period was known as the Era of Glory. Eventually tiring of Erith, however, these two Faêran lords had both chosen to lie locked in the Pendur Sleep for centuries, surrounded by those of their knights and other retinue who had been exiled with them. Under two hills had they slept—two hills many leagues apart, with the whole of Erith stretched between, for the brothers’ feud had waxed more bitter than ever since the Closing of the Gates to Faêrie.

In the Erithan year 1039, Morragan had woken under Raven’s Howe. Perhaps, as the tales would have it, he had been awakened by some foolish shepherd wandering where he should never have ventured, or maybe something else had disturbed this mighty Prince of the Faêran. Some surmised that he had merely chosen to leave the stasis and the timelessness of the Pendur Sleep in order to experience a variation on eternity. Whatever the reason, out into the world, unlooked-for, he had passed. With him went the knights and ladies who had accompanied him, first in exile and then in sleep under Raven’s Howe.

Meanwhile, under Eagle’s Howe, Angavar High King and his retinue slept on.

Changes had occurred in Erith since the end of the Era of Glory, that early period when Angavar and his knights had imparted much knowledge to humankind, and mighty cities had been raised and great deeds performed, and splendid songs had been wrought. The Crown Prince and his Faêran entourage from Raven’s Howe found a world much altered. Most of the cities lay abandoned and overgrown. Men had forgotten much that had once been known. While the Faêran slept, war had riven the lands. The dynasty of D’Armancourt had been cast down in the Dark Ages and had arisen again with James the Uniter. Stormriders now ruled the skies. Yet wights still roamed, haunting inglenooks and millponds, lurking beneath hearthstones, inhabiting wells. Those of unseelie ilk preyed, as ever, on humanity.

Morragan’s contempt for the races of Men had not diminished. He did not mingle with mortalkind. Eldritch wights were drawn to him, attracted by his power, by the forces of gramarye that played about him like silent, invisible lightnings. Driven to frustration by ennui and hatred of exile, their company he tolerated. He was inclined to favour those of unseelie, whose antics and pranks at the expense of humans proved diverting.

‘An attitude typical of the Faêran,’ Tahquil interjected with bitterness. ‘The deaths of mortals seem of little concern to them—they have no love in their hearts. Merciless are they, unjust and arrogant.’

‘Ye ken not o’ whom ye speak,’ said the urisk, glancing over his shoulder as though fearful of listeners.

‘Behold, I am confirmed. Even the gentlest of wights fears their wrath,’ Tahquil said with a sigh.

Shaking his head warningly, the nygel resumed his narrative.

Long ago the six greatest unseelie wights, sometimes called the Lords of Wickedness or the Nightmare Princes, had formed an Unseelie Attriod, with the formidable Waelghast at its head. Eventually they had been deprived of their leader, without whom the structure of their collective was rent asunder, and the Unseelie Attriod was dispersed.

Locked out of Faêrie at the Closing, these Nightmare Princes had scattered, to wander Erith through the long years, bereft of purpose. When the Raven Prince returned to wakefulness and emerged from Raven’s Howe, the Unseelie Attriod reformed around him. The Lords of Wickedness claimed him as their chieftain, and while he hardly acknowledged their claim, neither did he gainsay it. Grouped in this structure, they once again became a powerful force in Erith. Whiling away their immortal spans, they amused themselves with numerous sports and depredations, including predatory forays against Men. Yet in these Hunts, the Faêran themselves did not take part, being more inclined to chase Faêran deer, a quarry more elusive and worthy of their prowess.

Then the nygel recounted how in Autumn of 1089, in the month of Gaothmis, an intruder had been detected in Huntingtowers, the stronghold of the Antlered One. The spy had escaped, been hunted down and, as it was believed, had perished beneath a cave-in of the old mines. In wrath, Morragan demanded to know how such a mortal intruder had penetrated Huon’s fortress. This was not revealed, until months later a certain duergar was discovered furtively making his way towards the mountains. In his possession was a swatch of golden hair, which had been partially plaited into a whip. In his terror of Huon and hope of deflecting punishment, the hapless duergar loosened his tongue and told all, explaining that he had received the hair in exchange for a foolish mortal’s clandestine entry to Huntingtowers. He had taken the precaution of rendering mute the potential spy, merely out of malice, but he had augured that the wench would not long remain undetected in the fortress of Huon.

Despite his confession, no mercy was shown him. His fate at the hands of Huon’s servants had been most terrible, as was Huon’s way with all those who angered him. Throughout the length and breadth of Erith the word went out from Prince Morragan and from the Unseelie Attriod to all creatures of eldritch—find the yellow-haired spy.

‘Therefarr,’ concluded the nygel, ‘I’ll warrant the Prince is after ye tae take reprisal because ye were eavesdrapping an him. That is a crime utterly candemned by the Faêran. He will nat farrget ye.’

At this point the nygel’s story ended, for he had passed into remote regions and heard no further tidings. Having deserted Millbeck Tarn after his capture there, he had gone looking for another pool to inhabit. He found himself moving northward, impelled by the strange and continuous Call that made all things eldritch lift up their eyes and hearken, and one by one to leave their haunts and respond: the Summoning Call issued by the Raven Prince.

‘Och, but we owe no allegiance tae the great lords,’ interjected the urisk, ‘and although I lo’e the Faêran weel, I’ll not dance to Prince Morragan’s tune gin he’s hand in glove wi’ those who would do ye harm, lass.’

‘You are very kind,’ said Tahquil.

‘Ye’re the make o’ a lassie I once kenned. One o’ the Arbalisters. I hav’nae dwelt wi’ a family for some centuries.’

‘Myself also.’

‘Among them I kept an un-name, a kenning. “Tully” they ca’ed me.’

‘May I address you by that kenning?’

‘Aye.’ The urisk’s eyes shone. He was, after all, a domestic wight and although a Solitary, he belonged at the fringes of company, the outer edges of firelit circles. The wilderness was not his preferred haunt.

Again, Tahquil raised her eyes to the sky, as though she feared a presence there.

‘If Morragan is able to hold converse with the morthadu,’ she said, ‘which I doubt not, then the beasts of Black Bridge might already have sped to him with tidings of three wandering damsels—a notable trio in the wilderness.’

‘Even so,’ agreed the urisk, nodding his cornuted head solemnly, ‘even so.’

‘There’s one av the white kine as dwells in yon green tarrn,’ interjected the nygel, changing the subject unexpectedly—it appeared his equine mind was erratic and seldom able to remain focused. ‘She is av the Gwartheg Illyn and will allow harrself to be milked, this night.’

‘We have no pail.’

‘Suck’t fram her dugs.’

‘’Tis not our way.’

‘Marr’s the pity for ye.’

‘For almost two years,’ Tahquil resumed, directing her discourse at the urisk, ‘Prince Morragan has been toying with the armies of Erith—why, I can only surmise. Possibly, his disdain of mortal men grows and he wishes to set us at each other’s throats, leading to our eventual destruction. Or perhaps the Prince’s brother, Angavar High King, has woken and these two Lords of Gramarye use us as pawns in their war games, to while away the tedious years of Erith.

‘For, who would Morragan wish to harass, if not his brother who exiled him? Of course, one who sleeps dreamlessly beneath a hill is hardly a worthy adversary. I would warrant that, like the Raven Prince himself, Angavar High King of the Fair Realm is indeed awake and walks the lands of Erith or holds Faêran Court with his followers in some remote fastness—even in the leafy bowers of some light-dappled greenwood such as this!’ She paused reflectively. ‘Yet surely there would be some hint of his presence in Erith, some flavour? How could Aia’s greatest potency of gramarye reawaken and it not be sensed in every blade of grass, known in every stone, sung in the wind, borne on the water, shouted in thunder, whispered in the leaves? Does he yet sleep, the High King of the Faêran, or has he woken?’

‘To my knowing,’ said the urisk with a shrug, ‘the Righ Ard sleeps yet. But I ken little o’ the ways o’ the warld. I hae kept tae mesel’ these past decades. Mickle a drap o’ water has passed beneath mony a bridge since Tully last heard fresh tidings.’

There was a short silence, filled with apprehension.

‘Via,’ Tahquil turned to the courtier, ‘it appears Morragan and the Unseelie Attriod and untold numbers of wights hunt yet for a yellow-haired girl wandering in the wilderness. With your bleached locks, in my company, you are in danger. Dark dye for your hair must be found!’

Viviana scowled. Her hair, unkempt, was a tangle of dry yellow straw. Close to the scalp it resembled brown silk threads.

‘And for my own pale regrowth as well!’ Tahquil added. ‘We shall look out for dyestuffs as we travel,’ she promised, rising to her feet. ‘For the nonce, it is urgent that we continue on our way. Sir Waterhorse, if you truly mean to aid me, I shall not discharge you. Accompany us if you will. Your help may prove invaluable during our journey north.’

The nygel bared his square teeth in a horse-smile.

‘I will join ye.’

‘Och, and mesel’ also,’ said the urisk.

‘Oh, fither,’ snapped Viviana, recidivating into broken slingua. ‘Now we must contend with yet another uncouthant half-beast that minces its vowels and otherwise butchers the Common Tongue. Storfable, Es raith-na?’

‘Ignore her—she is half-spelled,’ said Tahquil quietly.

‘I am uneasy with this creature,’ Caitri murmured in Tahquil’s ear. ‘It is one thing to travel in the company of an urisk, a domestic wight, but quite another to journey with a waterhorse.’

‘A waterhorse indeed, but one of the most harmless type of all, and he says he owes me a favour.’

‘Owes you, m’lady.’

‘Depend on it, I shall ensure the favour extends to my friends.’

Faint and far off, a long, eerie stridor issued from the southeast, scraping down the night breeze like a fingernail on slate, and trailing into silence. It was not the voice of a howler predicting storms, nor yet a weeper grieving for a fatality to come, nor yet one of the morthadu yowling. It was a multiple baying and yelping, as from the throats of a pack of hounds.

‘The Hunt is out somewhere tonight!’ said the urisk, glancing up. ‘They havnae been about these parts for many a lang nicht.’

‘Might aerial riders see us through the trees?’

‘Not unless they ride directly over us, or mighty close to’t.’

‘Maybe they have picked up a trail,’ said Tahquil, shuddering in every limb, glad of the shelter of the trees. ‘All the more reason for haste.’

The shadow of a bird fled again between the stars and the ground. Following it, clouds rubbed out the moon. The black ruby of night held all things captive within its prism. Through it, five travellers passed swiftly through the woodlands of Cinnarine until morning brushed the east with colours. At uhta, some boughs dipped and swayed though no wind blew, the waters of a lonely pool stirred and the mortals found themselves walking alone.

In the mornings, the world was the bowl of a crystal goblet, its rim the horizon, pinging with pure resonant notes as though struck by tiny hammers. Birds in their gorgeous livery ushered in the day.

The coillduine flitted through the orchards between sunrise and sunset, lightly clad in opalescent radiance, through which their pale forms were dimly discernible.

‘Peacock feathers brush my eyes,’ murmured Caitri, loath to close her lids against these sights and sleep each morning, but too weary to do otherwise. Despite and because of their seelie escort, the little band must continue its nocturnal existence, remaining alert in the most perilous hours, resting only under the sun.

Northward they traipsed through Cinnarine by night. The urisk Tully openly trotted by their sides, the nygel slithered, a vague shadow in the trees horsing around with things he met along his way, betrayed now and then by a splash, or a mischievous whicker of a laugh that the urisk called ‘nichering’. When narrow brooks crossed their path, the urisk would disappear to skirt them by some mysterious means. After a night or two the mortals became less uncomfortable with the ways and manners of their eldritch companions.

And so it has come about, thought Tahquil, that we three are now six. One escorts us by choice, one by design and, she tilted her head to the dark skies, perhaps another, by obligation …

But it was all she could do to keep going, with the chains of desperate longing dragging behind.

Viviana raged alone among the trees at dusk, bitterness eating out the apple of her heart like codling larvae. A pear dangled like a drop of gilded jade. She plucked it. Could this be fruit of a goblin tree? Her teeth met in its flesh. She spat and flung the spoiled thing away. Thin fluids trickled from her snarling lips.

‘Everything here is so fair and preciously ornamented,’ she cried to no one but the trees, ‘and as dependable as stairs of sand.’ Tearing sprigs from the pear tree, she trampled them underfoot.

Alone she was, having left her companions in a grove of cherry trees, where they broke their fast on fruit and cold water. Unassuaged, stung by restlessness, the courtier had flounced away, as was her wont from time to time, to roam the woods in the lingering heat which was all that remained of the Summer’s day, searching for wood-goblin fare. Hurtful as her wightinduced pining was, she could not guess at the depths of the greater anguish that was about to afflict her. Sometimes, moodily, she sang nonsensical ditties, spontaneously composed—for a kind of madness had taken root in her.

‘Oh, the blue-faced cat is merry when she moos,

With wings of grass to fly on.

And the hog is shod with dainty little shoes

That I should like to try on.

And the fruit-bat spins a web of many grins

That men must hang and die on!’

A stranger’s voice said—

‘Might a nightingale endeavour to sing thus?’

The trees sighed beneath a sudden wind. A thrush ceased its singing and Viviana snapped her mouth shut on her own. The question had risen, with a tendril of mist, from a thicket of close-growing, antique apple trees, whose semirecumbent boughs had surrendered to weariness. It was not the abruptness of the sound nor the surprise at finding herself not alone as she had supposed, nor yet the unmistakable masculinity of the tones which deprived her of movement and speech—it was the thrilling music of the voice, to which she leaned and hearkened without hearing the words.

‘Might it dare, were it audience to superior accomplishment?’ murmured the slender young knight who pushed aside foliage and stepped out of the thicket.

The blood pounded into Viviana’s face.

‘The King,’ she gasped, stretching out a hand to steady herself against a mossy column. She flinched, once, then resumed her stillness. Only a slight quiver scurried back and forth through her, like ripples in a cup—only that. Beneath the apparent stasis, her blood had ignited. She was aflame, she was assailed by dizziness, she was drunk. Her eyes drank him in but already her fever burned unquenchable.

He was clad in bleached linen, buckled over with half-armour in the soft grey tones and pure white highlights of silver; chain mail and plate which lent him the air of a dire machine of metal, or a carapaced insect or a cold-blooded sea-creature, yet within this casing, his excellence was obviously superlative.

Darker than wickedness was his hair, falling unbound past his shoulders. As compelling as forbidden pleasure was his countenance, but ‘Nay, I am mistaken …’ she said, and now she saw clearly that surprise had confused her. This champion whose looks and voice stirred the very marrow of her bones was not the King-Emperor. Slighter of build and somewhat less in height, paler of skin was the one who stood looking down at her from eyes not the hue of storms but black as sloes, eyes as alight with passion as her own—a passion matching in intensity, but very different, had she but known it.

And to Viviana now, any man not possessed of this exact stature, this frame, this hair and skin and eyes, was insufficient. The attractiveness of all good-looking men she had known was like candles to the sun. Never had she beheld anything more desirable, and she willed the moment to last for all time, that he might never leave her sight.

‘What maiden wanders here?’ he said, or sang, and she did not think to ask his name, nor why he cast no shadow. He did not smile; his look was sorrowful, like that of a brilliant poet precociously doomed—a sadness which, if it affected his comeliness at all, enhanced it.

Then he began to speak again, this time in rhyme—rhyme and metre being as natural to the speech of wights as prose, or more so. In fact, ‘ganconer’ was a word the Common Tongue had derived from the original; ‘gean-cannah’, which meant ‘Love Talker’. The words of ganconers were enchantment in its true meaning: snares to the senses. A sonnet was the form his wooing took, that traditional pattern of love’s eloquence. Hearkening to the puissance of his syllables, Viviana did not notice the skew of the narrative or its menace, its obscenity.

‘What maiden wanders here? Whose locks of gold

Frame youth’s fresh looks? What mortal paradigm?

Pulchritude sweet as this ought ne’er grow old

And suffer from the ravages of time.

With such hot passion do I burn for thee

That I would ward thee from that odious fate.

All other joys in life shall worthless be

When once our union is consummate.

The act of love reflects a violent death:

The piercing of the sword, the gasping cry,

Th’expense of spirit and th’expense of breath—

Close, ecstasy and agony do lie.

Now, hearken to the hungers of thine heart—

Let’s lovers be, whom death alone shall part.’

His tragic appearance was concupiscently romantic. Inside Viviana a bird sang shrilly, its beak perforating her heart.

‘You shall find me,’ added this vision of male allure, ‘breathtaking.’

He drew closer and she felt a chill like the utter coldness of a marble tombstone. A phantasmal mist rose out of the trees and twined about them, shutting out the world.

‘Silken of flesh,’ he said, provocatively brushing her cheek with a long finger, ‘hazel of eye and rose of mouth.’ His fingertip trailed across her lips. She trembled frenetically, distracted unbearably by his ardency, his nearness. The potent outline of his face was carved in alabaster against the spilled ink of his hair. Sloe eyes looked into her wide pupils, through her vulnerability to the wellspring of her psyche, and where they looked a wound opened and began to bleed.

‘But why so thirsty,’ he concluded softly, drawing away a finger on whose tip stood out a cloudy bead of pear juice, ‘beloved?’

All senses abandoned Viviana, consumed by obsession. She reached out. His arms closed around her. He filled her embrace with his passion, her mouth with his kisses, her eyes with his blinding hair, her thoughts with chaos, her lungs with his breath.

And that breath was as icy as a comet’s heart.

Tahquil sat with Caitri and the urisk in the grove of cherry trees while evening thickened. It was an unspoken fact that tension always eased with these brief absences of Viviana, who took her ill temper and sarcasm and fidgetiness away with her.

Tahquil’s fingers twirled a closed daisy plucked from the long grasses. She had just seen the nygel in horse-form, kicking up his heels and chasing a bevy of small, white pigs. Now he was feeding down by the nearby brook. From his muzzle trailed long, green ribbons that might have been water-weed or the feathers of a parrot.

Are nygels herbivorous like lorraly horses, or carnivorous like that prince of their breed, the cruel Each Uisge, devourer of mortalkind?

Recollecting her meeting with the Each Uisge under Hob’s Hill, she fell to brooding about her experiences at the Hall of Carnconnor, a thousand years since. ‘Cochal-eater’, the sadistic Yallery Brown had called her.

‘What does it mean, the term “cochal”?’ she idly asked the urisk.

‘Cochal? ’Tis a husk—a glume or a shell, an outer structure.’

‘Why should a wight accuse me of being a cochal-eater?’

‘Only some windy-wa’ blusterer wad scauld like that, lass. Mortals a’, and wights also when dining, eat baith the toradh o’ the fairin’, which is the essential guidness, and the cochal as weel. The cochal is only the appearance, the container, gin ye will, but the toradh’s the prie and the smell and the life-giving powers.’

‘Good sir—Tully—were you to be a little less, ah, parochial in your speech, I should understand you better.’

‘Och, then I mun give feater currency tae my jandering, lass!’

‘How is it possible to consume the one and not the other? To dine upon the taste and goodness of victuals, without eating the unnourishing substance?’

‘It is not possible, for yoursel’ or mysel’. Only the Lords of Gramarye, the Faêran, can take the toradh and not the cochal, leaving the fare to appear untouched.’

‘But food left without toradh must look hollow within—’

‘Not so. Ye mun understand the nature o’ toradh. It cannae be seen, nor touched, but it imbues e’en a pickle o’ wheat, a drap o’ milk.’

‘What would betide, were you or I to eat seemingly whole food from which the toradh had been stolen?’

‘We wouldnae thrive on’t. We might feast forever and niver gain an ounce o’ flesh, a doit o’ strength. In the transports of gluttony we would shrivel.’

‘Would we not notice a difference in the food?’

‘Nay. Though the true taste is removed with the toradh, a semblance remains—enough tae trick the palates o’ sich as you and I. Only the Faêran could tell the difference, and that at the verra crack, at the instant.’

‘Therefore the Faêran eat to live, in the same manner as mortals and wights, is it not so?’

A bird soared silently over the treetops: a swan. The urisk did not reply immediately. He seemed agitated, glancing about at the thick shadows woven by the trees, which his nocturnal eyes could pierce.

‘Nay,’ he said eventually. ‘The Faêran dine for pleasure alone. They hae no need for meat or drink tae support them. Tae sich as they, food is not a source o’ life but a source o’ entertainment. Often wad they come tae feast by night in Erith’s groves before the Closing, but their feast tables were laid with toradh clothed in illusion, or else true fare which in the morning wad lie scattered on the ground.’

The leaves rustled. Drifting into a half-dream, Tahquil invented a scene in which Thorn was lounging idly on the grass close by, and she had only to reach out and she might touch him.

The urisk turned his curly head again, scanning the grove of cherries.

‘I’m waur’t Mistress Wellesley may be tint. She has been gane too lang,’ he muttered, ‘and something unket and kittle roams close by.’

The leaf-ring stung. Tahquil jumped up. Simultaneously, a willowy feminine form materialised out of the trees leading to the brook.

‘Sweet-speaking handsome one haunts here,’ hissed the swanmaiden urgently. ‘Heedless hussie hearkens. She stumbles. She who falls for shadows shall soon weave her shroud!’

Sickness punched Tahquil in the stomach. Her blood drained to her feet.

‘We must find her immediately!’ she cried. ‘Come, Cait! Ho, nygel, now’s the time to render assistance! Obban tesh, I should have known better than to let her from my sight.’ She grasped Caitri’s hand. ‘Stay with me, Caitri. Tully, prithee do not leave us. Against a ganconer we are as sparrows to a hawk.’

‘This way, I ween,’ honked the urisk, leading the way. Into the darkling woods they plunged.

A very faint, faraway music drifted through the arbours of Cinnarine, such tinkling music as might be produced by diminutive needles, delicately tuned, hung and struck with tiny drumsticks of iridium. A light breath of shang wind, only the edge of a greater unstorm rolling towards the east, briefly flicked over Cinnarine in passing. By its fires and velvet darknesses the companions made their way. They passed through colonnades of dark electrum, where silver branches dipped, picked out with mercurial leaves, along fructuous avenues arched over with trees of solid gold and then through silvan palaces upheld with pillars of diamond and emerald, coronalled with flickering lights. Hooded were the mortals—not so the wights. This was their element and would not mock them by replication. The thin sound of singing came threading through the trees. Following it, the searchers found Viviana.

Death by pining is a protracted affair. She was alive, although she had already begun to die, unaware of her condition. Untaltried, she sat alone at the edge of a glade, wearing a pair of long, red gloves. As Tahquil and Caitri approached it became apparent that Viviana’s hands were, in fact, bare. Blood glistened all over them, coating her arms to the elbows. Between her fingers she held a green pulp of nettles and thistles, which she was kneading. The prickles tore her flesh but she worked on without a sound, without complaint. No tear blurred her lily cheek and a woven circlet of willow osiers crowned her sunflower head. In a sweet voice, she sang the old folk song:

‘All around my hat I will wear the green willow,

And all around my hat, for a twelve-month and a day,

And if anyone should ask me the reason I’m wearing it,

It’s all for my true-love who is far, far away.’

The courtier’s shang image hovered around her like an aura. It must have been playing and replaying itself, but no change of expression flitted spectrally across the spectral copy of Viviana’s features; her air-imprinted countenance, shadow-eyed and utterly without mirth, remained stagnant.

They tried to dash the weeds from her hands but she would not relinquish them. Neither would she speak, or look at her companions. Only she sighed deeply as though a wound bled inside her that could not heal.

Pliable she was, and acquiescent. The spirit had been drained out of her. They raised her to her feet and led her away. She complied without demur.

‘She’s fa’en,’ mourned the urisk. ‘The bairn’s fa’en.’

The unstorm fled.

When they were far away from that place, Tahquil said gently, ‘Viviana, give the thistles to me. They are hurting you.’

Viviana shook her head. ‘When the flesh is parted from the fibres, then shall I take the fibres and weave them.’

‘What will you weave, Via?’

‘I will weave my shroud,’ said the courtier, emotionlessly. ‘For I have met the ganconer, in a bitter hour. I thought him a human sweetheart, but his lips were cold on mine and his breath as keen as death. Too late I knew. No longer can I joy in life. He has left me now, but for love of him I must pine to my grave.’

Then Tahquil knew the full meaning of powerlessness, futility and grief. Rage rose like magma to her eyes but streamed out as tears.

‘Three guardians to guide us!’ she railed loudly. ‘Three we have to protect us and not one, not one of you has prevented this. Hundreds of leagues we travelled on our own. A thousand dangers we faced without assistance and we won through. Yet now, under your so-called patronage, one of us is doomed. Tully, you I cannot fault—you gave us life in Khazathdaur, and on the slopes of Creech Hill you succoured us. But what use are you, swan, if you always come too late? And you, horse, what use are you?’

The waterhorse bared his teeth, laying his ears flat. The swanmaiden uttered a sound like escaping steam and raised her arms wide so that her feather cloak spread out like a black-petalled flower.

‘Feather-wielder forgets!’ she hissed savagely. ‘Swan’s sworn fealty in Cinnarine is finished. Honour is fulfilled. Horse of Water has vowed to help freedom-spinner singly. Spelled wench, suffering, heartsick wench, she’s no fret of horse or swan—no holder of wight-service.’

Caitri sobbed. Wringing her hands, Tahquil felt the hard lump of the ring beneath the glove. Somehow that pressure brought reassurance. Thorn’s ring. She regained her composure.

‘You are right,’ she said, ‘I am sorry. I spoke rashly and without thought. Forgive me.’ Putting her arm about the little girl’s shoulders she said in a low voice, ‘Peace, Caitri, be comforted. Do not lose hope. Maybe we shall find a cure.’ But even as the words left her lips, the forlornness of that hope made them clang as hollow as bells.

Both waterhorse and swan folded themselves into the pages of night.

‘They are not far away,’ said the urisk. ‘Ye can be certain they’ll not abandon ye.’

‘The swan has fulfilled her bond. Why does she remain?’

‘In your ain words, tae which she agreed, she mun see ye safe at least tae Cinnarine. Ye hae her at checkmate. There’s a lingering effect o’ such an indefinite phrase. Unwittingly ye might have bound her to ye forever.’

Taking Viviana between them, her bloody elbows hooked through theirs, Caitri and Tahquil resumed their northward journey.

At midnight, when they halted to rest, Viviana would not help them wash the blood from her hands. She would not look at the fruits they piled in her lap.

‘’Tis nae use tryin’ tae reason wi’ her,’ compassionately explained the urisk. Despite his words, born of his ancient knowledge, Tahquil and Caitri tried to tempt their friend with the most succulent of fare. Of course, it availed them not.

At early morn, when the urisk had departed and the sun’s newborn, age-old rays penetrated the canopy, making patterns through interlocking leaf ovoids, Tahquil drew off her gloves.

‘It has dawned on me with the day,’ she said to Caitri, ‘that this ring may have the power to heal.’

She took it off her finger and placed it on Viviana’s. The courtier remained passive, whey-faced, vacant-eyed.

‘Gramercie,’ she said, as automatically as a clockwork musical box might strike its notes.

‘There let the ring remain,’ said Tahquil, ‘in the hope that it will do her some good.’

‘And here let us rest,’ said Caitri. ‘Fain would I sleep now that the night’s wickedness is behind us and the sun comes to drive away fear.’

As they made themselves comfortable in the waving grasses, the coillduines of the plum trees appeared, their auras fanning out in ellipses of coruscating colours, crimson and gold, that rose hundreds of feet into the air. The luminous streamers that swept down to swathe the trees were tinted cochineal, outlined with rarefied gossamers of golden spangles.

Sightless, Viviana’s eyes stared through this glory.

At its going-down, the sun dragged night across the sky in its wake like a lambrequin stitched with baubles. As if caught up in the folds of this fandangled finery, the waterhorse and swanmaiden and urisk reappeared, an unobtrusive but persistent band of bodyguards. The swan flew or walked, scouting ahead; the urisk trotted alongside. In horse-form the nygel patrolled to the rear, irresponsibly playing leapfrog with water-leapers whenever he chanced upon a forest pool.

Two nights had passed since the encounter with the ganconer. Weariness had carved lines into the faces of the mortals, Tahquil and Caitri having alternately watched the unsleeping Viviana through the days. She would sit, her swollen hands trying to knit together the soggy sinews of bruised nettles. The courtier herself was so weak by now she could scarcely walk.

The urisk steered them a straight course by the stars—as straight as could be managed over the pathless, undulating country, so densely arrayed with timber. Up knoll and down brae they went, across brooks by fords or little stone bridges, through starlit glades and around thickets of old wood too dense to penetrate. All the while, Tahquil searched for the stuffs with which to concoct black or brown dye.

‘Look for iris or waterlily,’ she told the waterhorse. ‘Black walnut or sweet chestnut, bird-cherry or oak.’

But only tall reeds and straight-backed rushes grew in the pools of Cinnarine.

Soon after midnight, the nygel came bounding up in man-form, looking like a pleased puppy.

‘Swun is thinking she has seen a stand of aiks dane by yander cleeve.’

‘Not a coppice infested by unseelie wights, I trust!’

‘Nay,’ he neighed.

‘Is it far?’

‘Aye, she said it was, and aff yarr track.’

Tahquil looked at her companions. Viviana lay on the grass, motionless, her eyes open but blank. Caitri dozed beside her.

‘They are not able to travel further than is absolutely necessary. Tully, will you stay here and watch over them while I go? Whithiue,’ partially hidden in tree shadows, the lovely wight bridled as her name was spoken, ‘will you guard them also?’

The swanmaiden gave a soft cry.

‘She agrees,’ the urisk translated.

‘Guard them well,’ admonished Tahquil warmly.

‘As weel as we are able,’ said the urisk. ‘That is a promise, frae the baith o’ us.’

Tahquil nodded, gripped by reluctance.

While she had been speaking the nygel had unexpectedly resumed his horse-shape behind her back. He trotted off and she followed after him.

If this is some practical joke, I’ll cut off his curly tail.

Past the lattices of trees the stars rolled slowly by. The night was clear, so very clear it was extraordinary. Every leaf and blade stood out, articulated by celestial light. Even in the bosks and brakes and coverts the shadows seemed luminous.

‘How much further?’ panted Tahquil pushing through the trees, hot and scratched and hasty.

In answer, the waterhorse whickered.

They emerged from an orangery to find themselves in a clearing ringed by grand oaks, just as the swanmaiden had affirmed. Tahquil began to strip bark from the nearest trunk.

‘This must be soaked, preferably boiled,’ she muttered, more to herself than to the waterhorse, who was nosing inquisitively in some undergrowth. ‘How shall I boil it? And dye needs salt, and a mordant of rusty iron …

The waterhorse neighed.

She followed the upward turn of his long head. Between the branches and far off in the starry southeastern skies, a swirl of darkness could be glimpsed, like ink stirred into clear water. Dimly echoed the baying of hounds.

The Wild Hunt approached.

‘Will they be able to spy us beneath these oak leaves?’ cried Tahquil, panic-stricken.

The horse-wight shook his head, spraying his mane like water. A seashell flew out.

The black swirl hammered through the air, resolving itself into riders and hounds. Excited by the proximity of other eldritch steeds, the nygel caracoled, curvetted.

‘Do you see? Do you see where the Hunt is headed?’ screamed Tahquil, scattering strips of oak bark as she let them fall. Above the orchards and out of them, a gaseous tower arose, a white feather of steam or mist, towards which the Hunt was making rapidly.

‘That smoke!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is coming from precisely where we left the others. A signal! I must return to them. Hold still, if you honour me. Let me jump on your back, horse.’

A moment later, the waterhorse dashed into the trees with the girl clinging to his back. On her neck-chain, the iron buckle and the tilhal pounded against her breastbone.

Caitri had been sitting with willow-crowned Viviana on the grass, dozing in the warm and perfumed honey of the Summer’s night. She was aware of the swan-maiden’s vigilance in the trees and the urisk’s watchfulness by her side as he sat hugging his hairy goat-knees to his chest. She was aware of Viviana’s stillness, her pasty face, her slow, infrequent inhalations, as though she was forgetful of breathing and must try to remember, each time, just before she was about to asphyxiate.

‘You are so cold, Via.’ The little girl wrapped her arms around her friend. The fingers of the trees held stretched between them a starry canopy from which light trickled down. The sky was remarkably lucid, so fathomless and transparent that the world might fall, spinning, into its depths.

Three events then occurred simultaneously. The swan exclaimed, Viviana sat bolt upright and the urisk jumped to his hooves.

‘What’s amiss?’ squeaked Caitri, for nothing else seemed to have altered and she could see no reason for such unnerving behaviour.

‘Something unket this way comes,’ the urisk whispered.

There was nowhere to hide.

Presently, he added, ‘And has arrived. Stopper your lugs …’

Stuffing her fingers in her ears, Caitri swivelled her head. A slender young knight stood watching them, with long hair like waves of grief, and the face of a libidinous prince. His eyes were hungry—two black wolves. Viviana’s gaze, fixed on him, poured adoration from her eyes like a libation.

‘Ask me to tear out my heart, beloved,’ she murmured, ‘and I will.’

But it seemed he was unaware of her existence.

‘The wee lassies belang wi’ mysel’,’ said the urisk, who looked small and feeble compared with the tall, elegant form of the ganconer. The eyes of the predatory knight flicked over Caitri. Meeting that ardent gaze, she wondered, with a rush, what it would be like to sample that finely made mouth, and surprised herself by starting up. The urisk pulled her back, clapping a hand across her eyes.

‘Dinnae luik at him,’ he said crossly. ‘While I am here, he willnae come near ye, gin ye dinnae go toddling tae him like a silly hawkie tae the slaughter.’

Obediently, Caitri looked away. The ganconer was speaking phrases of seduction to her, but she could not hear him. A tenuous mist was creeping along the ground, rising in wisps.

‘A ganconer cloudie,’ said the urisk, uneasily. ‘What’s he at?’

The mist thickened, floating in rings among the trees. Through its laminae, the swanmaiden came stepping lightly like a princess from legend. Her feather cloak lay in a heap at the foot of a mulberry tree and she wore a gown of thin, snowy silk that clung to her lissom form like water.

‘No!’ shouted Caitri, starting up a second time, filled with concern. She whipped her fingers from her ears, gesturing wildly to emphasise her plea. ‘Swan-lady, you must not throw yourself away like this!’

It seemed now that the swan was unaware of Caitri’s existence.

‘But chiel, the gean-cannah cannae harm a down-feather o’ her,’ remonstrated the urisk, pulling her back again, ‘nor could she cowe him, nae mair than twa trees in a forest wad blatter each other. Dinnae fash yoursel’.’

‘What is she doing?’

From somewhere, or everywhere, a slow skirl of bagpipes moaned into being, dimly, as if muffled. The ganconer and the swanmaiden gazed at one another. Mist unfurled in fans around them. Two long, white diamonds of vapour soared to pointed tips at the swanmaiden’s back, like vast moth’s wings hovering at her shoulder blades. The moon-pale chain mail of the ganconer remained undimmed, softly glimmering. Liquid star-shine ran up and down its sheen like quicksilver.

With her swathes of dark hair streaming through the translucent wings, and his shadowy locks cascading over the polished lames of his gorget and pauldrons, they made a breathtakingly striking couple. The eldritch loveliness of them was as poignant as a half-forgotten dream or a long-cherished vision never realised. Caitri knew then that she was witnessing something of eldritch such as mortals were rarely privileged to behold.

The plaint of bagpipes grew louder. It came from under the ground, from some subterranean road where, presumably, an eldritch piper or a long-enchanted mortal slave marched eternally in the darkness. The lonely piper halted directly beneath the spot where Caitri and Viviana sat. The ground stirred. The music’s time signature changed, becoming three quarter notes to the bar and it was ‘Sheemor’ the piper was playing—‘The High Sithean’. Caitri had heard Thomas Rhymer play the lilting melody once at Court, and it was said to have been taught to a Royal Harper of yore by the Faêran themselves. To its rhythm, the immortal couple now moved into a dance of exquisite grace.

‘I trow she is trying tae draw him awa’,’ hoarsely whispered the urisk, but all the time the eldritch mist was pouring upwards, from eddies on the ground, filtering from the trees, rising ever higher between the branches, blotting out the stars.

Dancing, the swan and the seducer seemed to meet but not to touch. Their feet appeared to float just above the ground. Through the fingertips crammed into her ears, Caitri heard and felt the music, which itself played the strings of her nerves, jarred her bones with a kind of ecstasy, thrilling her in ways she had never thrilled before.

Then, through the plugs of flesh and bone, over the music, over the throbbing of her own tides, another sound entered; long, low, bleak, ominous, dreadful. Somehow Caitri knew it was coloured black, the instrument which disgorged that clangour—a hunting horn created from a void.

And a cacophony of hounds.

Caitri was up and dragging Viviana to her feet. The little girl was screeching against the lubricous cadences of the pipes and the tumult of whips and hooves, of savage baying and shrill war cries and deep voices shouting.

‘Get up, get up!’ she screamed, and Viviana slumped like a doll in her arms, a doll made of uncooked dough. The little urisk was trying to prop up the courtier on the other side and failing, and shouting something Caitri could not make out. Branches were cracking, breaking. The mist was shredding, blown by the back-draughts of a swan’s frantically beating wings, or by the massive displacement of air caused by huge horses dropping out of the sky bearing terrible riders on their backs.

Viviana was snatched from Caitri’s arms. Her yellow hair went flying as she was thrown across a saddlebow. Caitri stood, dazed. A grinning horse loomed over her, disclosing pointed teeth. Boring into its muzzle were the most appalling gutters of nostrils she had ever seen, until she beheld the noxious cavities in the head of the apparition straddling its back.

That apparition leaned down. The last thing Caitri saw, looking back at the orchards dropping away as the Wild Hunt rose higher, was a tiny horse and rider wheeling to a halt between the trees on the ground below.

That rider was Tahquil.

Black against the night the trees reared their arms. Ragged ends of unnatural fog slipped between the leaves and dissipated among the stars. The hue and cry died away to the southeast. An owl flew by, hooting like a hollow pipe. A girl sat astride a horse, in Cinnarine. Zephyrs roused her tattered garments and draggled hair, but otherwise a vice of great stillness clamped around her.

She stared towards sunrise, where no sun was yet rising.

The horse beneath her shied. A horned and curly head peered around a cracked bole that oozed rows of resin like amber beads.

‘Be still, Tighnacomaire. ’Tis only I!’ reproached the urisk.

The cord suspending Tahquil’s concentration snapped. She made as if to dismount, but was brought up short.

‘Let me down, Tighnacomaire,’ she lashed out, quick to learn a useful name at need. ‘Have you forgotten who I am to you?’

Released from supernatural stickiness, her hands slipped down the glossy hide. She leaned forward, withdrew her leg over his croup and slid off.

‘How dare you adhere me to your back!’

The waterhorse hung his head humbly.

‘Yarr nat the best av riders. I had tae stick ye an.’

‘The Hunt has ta’en the twa lassies,’ said Tully heavily. ‘The ganconer betrayed us. There was naething we could do—’

‘I know,’ Tahquil acknowledged grimly, ‘you have not the power to match them. Where is he now, the ganconer?’

‘He has gane. The swan draws him awa’ frae here.’

‘It is as I feared—they have mistaken Via for me.’

She sat down on the grass, bowed her head in her hands, and remained silent for a long while. Eventually, looking up, she said, ‘Under my auspices my companions have suffered, despite that they accompanied me by choice. Out of friendship to me they have been brought to this pass. No mortal comrades have I now, and no ring of gramarye, no red vial of strength, no provisions, no means of making fire, no weapons or shields—but I have you, Tully, and you, Tighnacomaire, and I believe the swan remains my ally. In this terrible hour, I must abandon my journey to Arcdur and turn to the southeast, following the Hunt. If my friends live, I will rescue them. If not, I must know their fate, or else be unworthy of honour and deserve no fellowship.’

‘A mad quest, Mistress Mellyn!’ rejoined the urisk.

‘Do ye not ken what lies east and south of this place? The orchards of Cinnarine give way to miles, nay, leagues of country untrod by the races of Men. Beyond that, the mazes of Firzenholt, or Haythorn—call it what you will—and beyond that, barren Wastelands stretch to the Nenian Landbridge. Few mortals be such mollymawks as tae try and cross that sea-causeway—it was ever a kittle road. And the Landbridge leads into Namarre.’

‘If they have been taken to Namarre, Namarre is where I must go.’

‘We dinnae ken for sure—’

The swan fluttered in over the treetops, fell awkwardly through them and emerged as a pristine damsel, demurely smoothing her feather cloak.

‘What news of the Hunt?’ Tahquil rasped peremptorily.

‘Horse and hounds have hastened far with fair friends. Swan saw Huon fly where hedges wander. Swallows say he flies further to fallow, furrowed fields of war and salt-wind seashores.’

‘To Namarre?’ Tahquil demanded.

‘With certainty.’

It was a turning point. Once again, her path had changed direction.

She must abandon the search for the Gateway to Faêrie.

Four hundred and forty miles lay, in a straight line, between Tahquil’s turning point and the outskirts of the hedge-mazes of Firzenholt.

Eastwards and southwards galloped the waterhorse by night, tireless, jumping barriers of wood and stone, evading barriers of moving water, swimming across pools so still and clear they might have been forgotten shards of the sky. Swift and strong he was, beyond the powers of mortal horses. His rider must have fallen from his back many times, were she not fastened there by his sly magicks. Swift and unwearying also was the nimble-footed, leaping wight that ran like a goat at his side every time night’s doors swung around, while away up in the airy heights a long-necked bird kept pace using slow, sure sweeps of her wings. It was a pace no lorraly beast could match.

Strange hawk and hound and horse.

Strange huntress, who is the quarry.

5

FIRZENHOLT and BEYOND

The Laurel Labyrinth

With skilful elegance she skims the sky

And rides the wind like foam upon the sea,

Yet mortal men for love of her would try,

To steal her, in their bold effrontery.

Their fleeting hands of clay should not endeavour

To smirch the likes of she who treads the ground

In eldritch loveliness, unchanged forever,

While flowers spring like fallen stars around,

Or glides, spearheading chevrons on the lake,

Reflected there in lucid symmetry.

No lover nor true artist could mistake

This paragon of femininity—

Where else is such ethereal beauty twined

Than avian and damsel-shape combined?

SONNET FOR A SWANMAIDEN

Riding upon the back of a waterhorse—what mortal had ever stayed in such a seat for so long? On a horse made of cold currents and liquid convergences, jests and trickery, pressed against a hide like the burnished seas of midnight, things looked different to the rider. It seemed to Tahquil-Ashalind that they ran through a different world, a world of shadow and incendiary lambency blown always by the forge bellows of shang winds.

If she was capable of musing at all, if the concepts and passions surging through her head were able to string themselves together in any rational sequence, she wondered if it were possible that Thorn, despite all the terrible risks he faced, still lived. If he did, Namarre would surely be the place to find him. As this fatuous hope took flame, it drew her with redoubled urgency to pursue this mad, new quest.

They went by secret ways, for the Wild Hunt was active every night, screaming around every horizon. Five hundred miles long was their winding course over the wild, wide land. Five times the rising sun had opened its eye to behold that they had covered another one hundred miles or more, despite the brevity of the Summer nights. On the twelfth day of Grianmis they reached Firzenholt. But there on the edge of that place, among the outlying topiaries, they were forced to stop.

Before them lay miles of interlocking evergreen hedges, dense and high, formed of box, privet, juniper, cypress, fragrant laurel. Odd as it appeared to the newcomer, these bushy palisades were trimmed into formal shapes not usually associated with nature. The creatures that predominated in Firzenholt-Haythorn were peripatetic hedge-eaters. These small beasts with their scissor-like mandibles preferred the new shoots, and because it was their habit to travel on straight paths, ingenious cambers and geometric curves, eating as they went, they unwittingly molded the hedges into smooth, rounded forms: wedges, overhangs, blocks, cubes, stairs, archways, cones, ramparts, pyramids and spirals, yet mostly into long, unbroken walls of pruned greenery.

Peculiar to this northeastern region of Eldaraigne, the hedge species of Firzenholt propagated themselves largely by suckers arising from their rootstock below ground level. These shoots always arose in straight lines, only turning corners when meeting an adamant embedded obstacle such as a knotted brain of granite globules or a smooth plane of shale. This gave Firzenholt’s layout the appearance of having been planted in regimental rows by an overzealous and eccentric gardener. Long avenues and short walks forked or turned corners to become cul-de-sacs, concentric paths or a sudden series of elbows and doglegs.

Directly beneath these verdant walls a system of narrow channels and dry dirt paths ran between the thin trunks, with scarcely enough headroom for a fox to creep along without brushing its ears against the lower boughs. Entities were wont to travel along these hidden canals and pathways, and other things lived above: small birds, squirrels and creatures that pranced upon the hedge tops.

Thus was Firzenholt.

At dusk, Tahquil lingered beside a glossy pool bordered with trees. Her long, slim fingers encompassed an orb of Fairbread that glowed softly like a pink pastel smudge beneath the long leaf-curtains of a willow.

It was dusk. Soon the melting sun found the brink of the world and sank beneath it. As this occurred, the willow withies that trailed like slender rain into the waters of the pool suddenly trembled. It was the agitation of the water that had made them do so. Equally suddenly, the cause of that agitation came up, breaking the water’s surface: a horse’s head, its eyes rolling like white marbles in their sockets, ears laid back flat against its skull, water-weed like verdigris interwoven in its streaming mane, its dark lips drawn back in a rictus of tombstone teeth.

Tahquil jumped backwards and fell over.

‘Fancy a ride?’ queried the nygel innocently, heaving himself horsily out of the pool. He nichered in a self-satisfied manner and frisked about, shaking droplets from his hide.

‘I would,’ said Tahquil, picking herself up, ‘but ’tis impossible.’

The nygel looked up at the high ramparts of Firzenholt, now ebony against the last magnolia smokes of sunset.

‘Ah yes, I forgetted.’

He flicked his jaunty tail at an imaginary fly. Tahquil waited for helpful suggestions as to how they should proceed, but none were forthcoming.

‘Can we go around?’ she asked.

‘Wild farrests creep tae the southern marches. Stony peaks cluster at the narrth. Baith are barriers equal tae this.’

‘Och,’ said the urisk, a wild thing crouched among willow roots.

‘Och what?’ said Tahquil.

‘Merely “och”.’

‘I gather that you have no advice as to how we should cross this … this formal garden that wanders in its dotage?’

‘I can gae its paths, for I am small enough that when I reach a dead end I can crawl underneath the bushes and out t’ither side. Nygel can swim the channels. Swan can fly over. But ye?’ The urisk shook his crimp-haired head.

The swanmaiden reported, from green-shadowed torrents of withies, that according to her aerial inspection no route existed along the grassy walks between the hedges—all were blind alleys, at least in the western half of the maze. Beyond the midpoint, a route did exist, albeit a most circuitous course.

Tahquil pondered.

‘I require,’ she said at length, ‘merely the materials at hand.’

With that she took the small knife that remained at her rope-belt and began slicing withies from the willow, stripping the leaves from the flexible stems. By the time the moon had risen, Tahquil, by dint of weaving and tying, had fashioned a pair of items which resembled the racquets with which the courtiers of Caermelor had been wont to play at shuttlecock—but without the handles.

‘Hedge-shoes,’ explained their maker. ‘I intend to walk across Firzenholt. Without such apparati, the hedge-roofs will not support me if I should stand on them—my feet and legs would sink straight in amongst their twigs. Yet those twigs are strong and dense enough to hold up my weight when it is spread over a greater area. In any event, this is my hope.’

She tied the hedge-shoes to her own worn boots and practised walking, to the amusement of the nygel and the disdain of the swanmaiden.

‘Ye’ve the gait of an egg-bound duck, dearie,’ opined the urisk.

‘Aptly described,’ mused Tahquil. ‘And oh, to be able to fly like one, but where might I obtain such flight-feathers?’ And she envied the freedom of the swan-maiden, not for the first time.

Tying the woven platters to her belt she tried to climb the nearest portion of the hedge. At the surface of the green wall, no shoot or sprout was stout enough—they all broke off in her hands. Plunging her arms deep inside the yielding plush nap, she found twigs and sprigs. Further in, her fingertips met small branches. To these she endeavoured to beat her way, but the springy shoots pushed out at her face and body, and would not let her near their supports. Her struggles were in vain.

Inevitably, frustrated, she flung herself aside.

‘At Caermelor, the palace gardeners used to trim the tops of the hedges but they would use ladders to get up,’ she said, panting with exertion. ‘I have no ladder and my knife will not cut through any saplings thick enough to construct one. Is there truly no way around this maze?’

‘It straggles far to the north and south,’ said the urisk, ‘until it meets forests and bleak hills. Beyond lies the coast. The swan says all the coastline is weel guarded at this time.’

‘Ye need nae ladder,’ said the nygel, just as Tahquil had lost all hope. ‘There be a batter way. Jump an me back.’

‘Oh no,’ said Tahquil, as his proposed method dawned on her. ‘That hedge is higher than a cottage roof-gable. If you overshoot, every bone in my frame shall be broken. If you undershoot, every morsel of flesh shall be stripped from me as I fall through the hedges.’

The waterhorse neighed and capered.

‘D’ye think I am a larraly horse with nae marr sense than a fly? My aim never errs. It has never erred sae far,’ he added lamely.

Knowing that this was of course the truth, since wights were unable to lie, Tahquil mounted the horse. Nevertheless, as he walked away from the hedge to allow himself space for a run-up, feelings of trepidation strangled her with blue and skinny hands.

The night drew in, caliginous, gelatinous.

Tahquil could only assume that the nygel was able to see the hedge better than she through the gloom. He began to trot, then to canter and finally to gallop. Sitting back on his rump she was glued to the wightish hide so closely that she felt she was fused to the powerful frame. The outer hedge of Firzenholt loomed, solid sable. With an abrupt lurch her body separated from the horse’s as his hindquarters violently heaved up, and she was flung through the air. For a timeless moment she hung suspended in the night, between firmament and ground—next she was sprawled face-deep in a resinous, scratchy cushion high on the hedge top.

Shouts spurled from below. Crawling to the edge she peered over, waving to nygel and urisk. A winged thing dived at her head, hissing as it passed her ear—Whithiue. The swan veered away in a steep turn and faded to a glimmer on the darkness. Tahquil tied on her hedge-shoes, stood hesitantly, and looked around.

Up here, it is another world.

Acreages of black velvet roads spread around. A conglomeration of shapes like the structure of a city thrust up like cut-outs on the sky. It was a city whose arboreal buildings were bizarre and nonfunctional, whose roadside gutters were carved lethally deep.

And not a herbaceous rooster, not a foliate wishing-well, not a verdurate urn in sight. ’Tis most unlike the topiary gardens of the palace.

To call Tahquil’s stilted progress across the hedge-roofs ‘travelling’, would be a description less than complete. She shuffled like a child wearing its father’s boots, or like an old man crippled beneath the burden of decades. Her thoughts at this time were few—purposefully she shut them out. Creatures of the night fluttered around the wedges, overhangs, blocks, cubes, stairs, archways, cones, ramparts, pyramids and spirals of the hedge-city. There were owls and bats and the sweet-singing nightnoon northmoths sung of in ballads, making tiny melodies with the resonance of their arabesqued and azure wings. Also there fluttered, at odd intervals, a black swan. In her swan-form she—unlike the nygel—could not speak the Common Tongue. Throughout the night Tahquil received no tidings from her, but the presence of the flying wight, despite her overtones of hostility, was reassuring to the mortal damsel as she trod the black roads.

Magenta-flowering vines pleached themselves among the evergreens, their perfume a harmony. Red berries ripened festively on the junipers, and these were not bitter at all, but sweet fare. At midnight and again at uhta the swan fluttered down. Tahquil handed it the waterskin, tied on a string. The bird brought it back clenched in her strong beak, filled with water from the canals below, and the damsel drank deeply.

At daybreak, Tahquil chose a comfortable topiary-helix and lay down on the lee side of it to rest. The hedge-eaters, which had retired into the foliage overnight, now surfaced. She watched them as they mowed across the dewy aerial lawns, their jaws scissoring like shears. They troubled her not, only trimming the shoots around her reclining form before obsessively proceeding on their way.

For seven nights Tahquil trudged, or waddled. She seemed alone, but she had company aplenty. There were the stars and the moon, and the whims of the swanmaiden, and the menace of the Hunt which passing back and forth unseen overhead, left the imprint of its clamour on the wind. And there was the unrelenting pain of the Langothe, and dreams of Thorn so vivid she feared she had already succumbed to madness. Now that the ring no longer encompassed her finger, the agony of loss pierced more deeply.

Gradually her strength was failing.

One evening she woke to see her avian guide, manifested in humanlike form, perched on a leafy trapezium.

‘Slow-walker has succeeded, fairly scoring the centre of Firzenholt,’ said the swanmaiden. ‘From here a floor-way follows hedges as far as the verges—a winding floor-way. Swan shall steer helpless human.’

‘Helpless human hears helpful swan and is grateful,’ replied Tahquil.

Grasping a handful of hedge, she began to slide to the ground. Descent was simpler than ascent. Gravity pulled her, sprigs broke her fall. Between the two forces, she landed, not unscathed, but only slightly so, to be met by the urisk and the nygel.

‘How now, loyal friends.’ Tahquil greeted them with a smile. Her hair was full of twigs—that very hair whose prodigal filaments held open the last Erith Gate leading to Faêrie. ‘Are you hale?’

The calls of hunting night-birds were muffled now by the fur of the great cypress collars standing erect all around, towering into the sky, but the noise of water hurrying along the channels bubbled up from the hedge’s foundations.

‘Hale and hearty,’ replied the urisk cheerfully.

They walked on, now guided by the swan who made low passes overhead to indicate which direction they must take. Once, curious as to the source of sounds of merriment in the hedges, Tahquil drew aside a curtain of fragrant leaves and peered inside. A party of siofra was picnicking inanely on the banks of a channel, and rowing in leaf-boats on the water. They did not notice she who momentarily spied on them. The onlooker was intrigued at their unglamoured feast: the horns of butterflies, the pith of rushes, emits’ eggs and the beards of mice, bloated earwigs and red-capped worms, mandrakes’ ears and stewed thigh of newt, washed down with pearls of dew cupped in magenta flowers.

Later, the whirr of spinning wheels permeated the night, intensifying as the travellers passed beneath an overhang of thick foliage, and dying away at their backs. Once or twice, grinning faces like those of wizened old men poked out at the passers-by.

After a time the sameness of high avenues roofed by stars began to foster the illusion that they were journeying pointlessly, in circles.

‘We’re doubling back,’ said Tahquil. ‘I know it!’

‘Sooth, lass,’ said Tully. ‘But hae ye never walked the tricks and tracks o’ a maze? Ye mun gae backwards tae gae forwards.’

‘This is no proper maze,’ said Tahquil, ‘’tis a random affair. There’s no logic to it. Yet I can do no less than to credit the swan with finding a path out of here. Tighnacomaire … Tiggy—will you bear me again, for the sake of swiftness?’

The waterhorse granted her wish. Five more nights she rode between the hedges then. Only down long boulevards could the nygel speed up to a canter—he must trot along the short lanes and walk around the sharp turns.

Sixteen nights have passed since Viviana and Caitri were taken …

What had happened to them? It did not bear thinking about.

One eve Tahqil and her companions arrived at a place where the flowering vines twined thicker than ever. Here, between the grassy path and the lower stems of the hedges, lay five long canoes of bark.

‘The canals,’ said Tahquil. ‘Do they flow straight to the eastern edge of this place?’

‘Almost straight,’ said the faithful urisk. ‘So says the queen o’ birds.’

‘And do you think the owners of these canoes will become severely enraged if I take one?’

‘That I cannae say. I’ve not set eyes on craft like these. There’s no knowing who made them.’

‘Have you not lived since the world began?’

‘Aye, but I’ve not travelled much. It’s a hame-body I am.’

The nygel was absent-mindedly ripping vines off the hedges and eating them. Their floral scent dizzied the air.

‘Well,’ said Tahquil, ‘I’ve a mind to ride on the water. It will be a route more direct. But how to get to the canal flowing beneath the hedges is a dilemma—there is little space between the lower boughs and the ground. Tiggy, how did you do it?’

In answer, the nygel turned around and with his hindhooves vigorously kicked at the lower portions of the hedge. Broken branches flew in every direction. In a short while he had opened a gap high and wide enough for Tahquil to pass through, stooping. She dragged a canoe with her and slid it into the waterway. Four feet wide, the channel coursed along its low tunnel directly below the hedge wall.

‘Prithee, hold this vessel still for me, Tully.’

The damsel lay down on her back in the vessel of bark. With a splash the nygel sprang into the water downstream and swam away. The urisk pushed the boat. It began to move.

Recumbent, Tahquil glided under the arched trunks supporting the hedge, gazing up into the hollow ribcage of the wall, the secret halls of the hedge worlds. The eyes of the dwellers therein blinked as they stared down at her; voices chattered, and they flung down flowers from the vines. Covered with a blanket of magenta petals she drifted along the waterway, a horse’s head gliding on before, with its weedy mane flowing into the ripples of its wake.

Another night, mauve and languid, floated past like a spent blossom.

At uhta, when many things happen, the nygel blocked the channel with his wide shoulders. The boat bumped against him.

‘We have reached the edge.’

Tahquil opened her eyes—she had been dozing. Instead of the cavernous, ribbed grey vaults of hedge-hulls overhead, there opened a sky as delicately pink as a camellia petal, bedewed with a single star. She climbed from the canoe.

Instantly, a horizontal wind threaded strong fingers through her hair. Atop a soaring cliff she stood beside the waterhorse, beyond the last bastions of the hedges. The canal had indeed brought them to the edge. Now, in company with other waterways flowing out of the maze, it plunged over the jutting brink to tumble seven hundred feet down a sheer precipice. At the foot of the precipice some of the falls splashed into rocky basins which drained into underground systems, while others joined a river thinly meandering across a bleak plain towards the dimly shimmering line of a distant shore.

Pre-dawn light laved the landscape. Up there in the open, it was impossible not to immediately become intensely aware of the sky, which throughout Cinnarine and Firzenholt had merely been a frame for a picture. Now the heavens unrolled to every horizon, becoming the picture itself, a moving portrayal of the moods of the climate roiling across the countryside in a paling, indigo vastness so clear and pure that you could drink it, so wide and dizzying that it seemed strange that the whole world was not spinning up into it.

Eastwards, the horizon was stained with a long crawl of brown smoke, underlit with a dull glare. At their backs the tall barricade of foliage marched north and south—the last ramparts of Firzenholt the Amazing. Before them the east wind, lifting the girl’s hair, tossing the horse’s mane and tail, came rushing up off the plain.

Far away, armies were encamped on those wastelands: the Legions of Erith.

Oh, how I should like to go down and enter that camp, to discover who bides there! If my love is among them, I might fall into his arms and die content … Yet I may not visit, for speed is of the essence …

Questions tormented Tahquil: Is the Prince with them, dear Edward of the sad gaze, who was like a brother to me? Did he survive the destruction of Tamhania, or is Erith bereft of royal leadership? Who is the leader of those armies? If a King-Emperor reigns, who might it be—James XVI or Edward IV?

Yet it makes no difference. Should Prince Morragan’s unseelie myrmidons have failed to destroy their most strategically significant target, should Thorn in fact live, I dare not approach him for fear of bringing danger upon him. Should he not, I have no reason for life other than to see my friends safe. And should they also have perished, then Morragan and his unseelie followers may do their worst to me. I shall care no longer. Ah, may cruel Morragan and all his race depart from this my home, my Erith, and never return.

She lingered long over the scene spread out at her feet.

Down on the plain, a cock crowed. Dawn blazed over the horizon, the sun rising from behind Namarre and striking its rays across the Nenian Landbridge, across the wastelands, casting long shadows from the thousands of tents and pavilions, the makeshift Mooring Masts, the Windships riding at anchor—finally touching their golden tips to the face of the girl with blowing hair who now stood alone on the brow of the escarpment.

But is he there? Is he down there?

It was a hot Summer’s day, fortunately for wanderers who would never have endured a life out of doors at another season. In the shelter of the easternmost hedge, couched in a niche at its roots, Tahquil slept, lulled by the burble and murmur of the canal as it coursed down its channel to fling itself out over the cliff into miles of air. Hawks hovered in the thermals. She did not see them. A bruised flower petal sashayed down from its vine to alight on her arm. She did not feel it. Wrens chirped from their inner bowers of cypress and privet. She heeded them not. The sun blazed on Firzenholt and Cinnarine, then submerged itself, sizzling, in the western ocean, engendering coloured steams which streamed out sideways like scarves of shot silk. Tahquil woke and filled her pockets with perfumed flowers, as camouflage against the sensitive noses of wights.

A waxing moon saw her picking her way down the face of the escarpment, led by a goatlike creature who discovered paths and footholds where at first glance there appeared to be none. By midnight they had reached the ground below. There, thistles grew rank and weeds crawled over rubble. Patches lay bare of growth; shale or dust or hard-packed dirt. Stubby torsos of burned trees poked up like grim monuments. The wind came galloping, unchecked, from the direction of the sea. A waterhorse came galloping from the direction of the thin river. It shook itself as a dog will, drenching the urisk and girl, before rolling enthusiastically in a dust patch.

‘Ye’ll be bringing the Legions of Erith clamouring around our ears,’ grumbled the urisk. ‘Their patrols are sair vigilant.’

A damsel formed of shadows and reflections came walking from a clump of mortified trees whose fingers had woven darkness between them like a cat’s cradle.

‘Whither?’ she questioned, laconically.

‘Onward as before,’ replied Tahquil. ‘If your friends the swallows have the truth of it, Viviana and Caitri have probably been taken to Namarre.’

‘Such happenstance is certainty. Swallows say Wild Hunt steers from fell habitation without variation—from formidable fortress on starry heights.’

‘Huon and his chase use a castle in Namarre as their base?’

‘Faithfully.’

‘I’ll warrant that another bides in that same stronghold,’ muttered Tahquil, ‘and he greater by far than they—as a thunderstorm outranks a spark. How does the land lie between here and there? How shall I cross the Nenian Landbridge?’

‘Hundreds of soldiers stay here in wastelands,’ said the swanmaiden, ‘vigilant fellows fending sallies of harassment. Savage wights violently hold slender strip separating seas.’

‘If the wastelands are held by the Legions of Erith and the Landbridge by forces of Unseelie, my only option is to skirt the bivouacs of the Legions and cross the Gulf Perilous to Namarre by boat.’

‘Seas of strait shelter fell wights,’ insisted Whithiue. ‘Vessels founder. Ships sink. Humans submerge and finish as fodder for ferocious sea-monsters.’

‘If land and sea are dismissed, what remains? Is there a tunnel under the gulf, similar to the under-mine?’

‘Tunnels,’ said the urisk, whose speech forms were nightly adapting to Tahquil’s, ‘are iverywhere. They run aboot like lost worms, ’neath ivery land. Ye’ll likely be standing above one as ye speak. The underground is riddled with roads—the Fridean make them, maistly, and keep them clear. But the passageway beneath the gulf is not for ye. It delves deep, sair deep, and there’s no air in’t—naught fa’ mortal bellows tae suck in.’

‘Air! By air, then—I’ll go by air. I shall stow away on a Windship—’

‘No craft of Eldaraigne will be crossing the Nenian Landbridge while Namarre holds that span.’

Tahquil clapped her hand to her forehead. ‘Of course—you have the right of it. Methinks this diet of juniper is pickling my brain. Oh, to have wings to fly—’ She paused and turned a hard stare on Whithiue, who was preening her long hair.

‘Prithee, Whithiue, lend me your feather-cloak.’

The swanmaiden’s eyes narrowed to two darts. She hissed threateningly, thrusting her long neck forward. Taking a step backwards she raised her arms from her sides, appearing to swell in size.

‘Am I to take it that you refuse?’ inquired Tahquil.

‘Vehemently!’

‘A swan’s cloak to her is as dear as life,’ hooted the urisk. ‘Without it she would be forever trapped in humanlike form, never to take to the skies again.’

‘Ah yes, that I know. I would guard it, I would return it—but no, I understand such a ban.’

And yet, how delicious it would be, to soar unaided, untrammelled, as a bird soars—to feel the lift of invisible currents under my own vanes.

‘But if you will not do me that favour, perhaps you will do me another.’ Tahquil tried to conceal the catch in her voice. ‘When next you fly out across the land, will you try to discover whether he still lives, the King-Emperor of Erith? Nay—I shall be more precise to avoid confusion—’tis James XVI of whom I crave tidings, not his successor. Will the swallows know, or perhaps the other swans?’

‘Swan will furnish favour. Swan will find word of sovereign.’

Emotion surged through Tahquil like a tempest.

‘Swan is valiant,’ she said sincerely.

All four of the nygel’s hooves left the ground simultaneously, their owner’s nose having been pricked by a thistle that thrust its spiny leaves and erect stem between two stones, its green head bristling with purple hair.

‘Have ye heard a word o’ our counsel?’ asked the urisk.

The nygel sneezed.

‘I’ll bear the mistress past the fighters and acrass the bridge,’ he said, blinking as ingenuously as a newborn foal.

‘How so?’ demanded Tahquil.

‘The night I cannat outrun a larraly habby-harrse av land arr sky is the night I pat an a harrness and start palling a plough. And an the landbridge what’s wan mair waterharrse with a dinner av flesh glued tae its back?’

Stroking his goatee contemplatively, the urisk looked a portrait of sagacity. The swanmaiden subsided. Borne on the balmy wind, men’s voices drifted, inarticulate, from the distant encampments.

‘Well said, Sir Nygel,’ complimented Tahquil, ‘I commend you. I believe your plan will work.’

Crickets drilled small holes into the dark metal of night. A thousand fires glittered, a scatter of fireflies across the plain. White moonlight and orange flamelight arced off steel: razor spearheads, thorny spurs, graven helms, shiny aiguillettes adorning uniforms. The wind brought the smack of smoke and snatches of sound—the clink and clash of weapons, the whinnying of horses, the jarring keen of a blade being sharpened on a whetstone, the bark of orders being rapped out, the crystal chime of a different wind on its way.

Two mailed sentries of the Third Luindorn Drusilliers, patrolling the outskirts of their bivouac, crossed paths and hailed one another. Both identified themselves as regulations demanded, to cancel wightish trickery:

‘I am mortal, and loyal to the Empire.’

Thus greeted, they exchanged a few words to keep the vast, echoing voice of night from sending whispers of apprehension down their spines.

‘What news, Fordward?’

‘All is quiet in Slegorn Sector. And you?’

‘The same.’

They leaned on their lances, the wind plucking at the corners of their chequered tabards. A darker darkness began to overcome the night, but the stars bristled more brightly, like fistfuls of pins; bronze, electrum, copper, silver-gilt.

‘The Wild Hunt has been busy scouring the skies this half-month,’ said Fordward.

‘Methinks it ever heads northwest in its excursions,’ said his comrade.

‘Aye, yet ’tis glad I am of the wizard’s weavings about our borders,’ said Fordward. ‘Feulath, and that new wizard who has arrived to replace the outlawed Sargoth.’

‘The newcomer has performed with more gumption than I had hoped, considering he is but a backwoods conjurer from a Stormrider Tower.’

‘The young Prince personally chose him, so I heard.’

‘Is that so? Edward shows discernment, amongst many good qualities. The men love him well, and are keen to prove their loyalty. Thank the Powers he survived the tragedy of the Royal Isle.’

‘Aye, thank the Powers,’ Fordward agreed sombrely, nodding for emphasis.

A tinkling as of tiny bells lapped at the extreme limits of audibility. Neither man commented on the approach of the unstorm—it was an occurrence too common to be remarkable.

‘I would fain see an end to this lull,’ said Fordward softly. ‘The sooner we ride against Namarre, the better.’

‘’Twill be soon, they say,’ replied his companion. ‘We are all eager to see action. Waiting overlong drives men to restlessness.’

They conversed a little more, in the same vein. Rarely was their exchange slanderous or vulgar. All the soldiery held the Dainnan in the greatest esteem and the majority therefore perceived the code of the Brotherhood as the measure of their own conduct. The Dainnan Vow—to right wrong, to punish the guilty, to feed the hungry, help the feeble and obey the King-Emperor’s law—those vows of courage, truth, charity, fidelity and uprightness had made their mark on many of the warriors of Erith, as a shining cup casts reflected light on the beholder.

Hand-picked, these camp sentries were alert and watchful. Even when they met like this, for but a moment, their tongues might wag and their eyes rove but never did their attention lapse. There was no dozing off at the post, especially during the wighting hours. Unseelie incarnations of untold varieties had been straggling through these wastelands for more than a year, coming from the forests in the south or the peaks in the north, making for the Landbridge. Yet the leaguers were forced to position themselves here, camped in an unbroken semicircle around the old fort by the entrance to the bridge, because strategically, it was the best location from which to defend Eldaraigne from Namarran raids. On the naked plain they had found themselves liable to be assailed from any quarter. Along the western line they fenced themselves in with magicians’ sorceries. To the north and south they had thrown up earthworks and spiked palisades.

To the eastern front the armies bent their gaze. To the east they soon would be ready to advance, challenging the wights holding the Landbridge in an effort to clear the way and march through into Namarre to put an end to the uprising. Meanwhile, scouts searched for signs of a possible early Namarran attack on the Legions. Due to the inability of Windships and Skyhorses to cross water, little was known of what doings fermented in Namarre. Only sketchy information had been gleaned from spies who had managed to sail around and land on its opposite shores—those few who had returned to tell of it.

The Wastelands altered illusorily as the unstorm swept down. Emerald faces of thistles bristled with amethyst spines. Ruby-eyed sand-mice with opalescent hides skittered amongst broken jewels pulsing with an ethereal diaphanousness. Numinous forces breathed a mockery of life into tableaux—untaltried men had done battle here long ago. Their graves had grown green these hundred years but still their simulacra fought on, long after their original molds had moldered. A Stormrider in haste crossed the airs of the plain. An aeronaut fell, windmilling, from a flying ship. A company of travellers was pursued by wights and bolted, screaming, their mouths round O’s of silence under the white knobs of their popping eyes.

‘Look there!’ A sentry snapped to attention. Auburn light slithered along the murderous spike of the cavalryman’s lance he hefted in his right hand. A distant fire winked out, winked into incandescence again. Further on, another winked off, winked on. Something was passing silently between the watchers and the fires.

‘I don’t recall seeing that ’un before.’

‘It blocks the light. Therefore ’tis real.’

Shouldering their weapons they ran forward to investigate.

The untamed winds of gramarye raked through Tahquil’s hair, sizzling in her blood like red-hot pokers plunged into mulling ale. She couched along the horse’s spine, her brown-dyed locks escaping from her taltry to mingle into his grey. With eldritch life springing vital beneath her thighs and gramarye streaming hectically all around, she no longer knew who she was; whether a mote scudding through a void, a half-spelled urge winging its way to calumny, an illusion, a drollery, a flung burst of dust.

Like daggers honed on stony resolve, male voices penetrated this detachment.

‘Halt. Who goes there?’

She was unable to identify them through the mirages shifting in the unstorm, nor had she the power to reply in any case; her tongue mimicked wood. For their part, in the fickle illuminations of the shang, the men-at-arms could not clearly make out the intruder.

‘A horse—but ruled by a rider?’ muttered Fordward.

‘In the name of the King-Emperor, halt or be run through!’ shouted his companion.

A spear-cast away, the horse propped, skittishly kicking up its fetlocks.

‘No rider,’ uncertainly said one man.

‘It has broken loose from the pickets and strayed.’

‘Or else ’tis some unlorraly killing-thing, bound for Namarre.’

‘Nay—see? ’Tis only a pony—not a war-horse at all, and too small to be an aughiskie.’

‘Unless it is glamoured.’

‘I carry a strong charm against glamour and I see a pony.’

The object of their attention abruptly galloped away. In a flash it was beyond the range of their lances and had disappeared into the confusing backdrop of shanged fires and stars and plush velvet shadows.

‘Raise the alarm?’

‘Naw. ’Twas only a harmless nygel for sure, and riderless.’

They jogged back to their stations to resume their patrols.

Coated with the thickly fragrant juices of vine-flowers and plastered like a four-limbed starfish to the nygel’s side, Tahquil was carried through the unstorm and the encampments of the Royal Legions. The lightness of the nygel’s hooves, the swiftness of his passing and the bewildering nature of the Wastelands under shang combined to conceal their passage from all but the keenest eyes—which, by the time they blinked, had lost their evidence.

The girl’s cheek was fastened to the living hide. Unable to lift her head, she missed seeing the tall pennons and banners snapping in the breeze. Unnoticed, the King’s Standard and the Royal Banner, the personal flags of the Royal Family, flew from the largest of the pavilions—that which bravely displayed a canopy of purple and the Royal Crest emblazoned in gold on every silken wall.

The shang wind released its hold on the memories of the elements and fled over the shores, out across the sea. The nygel passed beyond the last watchfires of the front line and thence into the ruthless darkness of no-man’s land, where two days since, a skirmish had been fought. He darted past two sprawling, silent shapes with mortified claws where hands once had been, jumped over another that moaned softly, and eluded a strange hulk looming against the sky. He ran past the ruined fort standing deserted on the doorstep of the Landbridge. Foliots had found and claimed it, as they claimed most abandoned halls of men. The empty windows flared with their sudden lights and eclipses.

And then the nygel with its lopsided burden cantered onto the Nenian Landbridge.

In the wake of the unstorm, thick clouds had begun massing up from the southern horizon, until they blanketed half the dome of the sky. Out of the gloaming, eldritch faces leered, wightish forelimbs snatched, eyes darted like spiders on fire, voices sniggered, sobbed and gibbered.

The nygel did not stop. He did not turn his head to inquire after his passenger’s comfort—such an idea never broke into the weird forests of his mind. He cantered on, joyously—for the smell of the sea came from all sides now, telling of swells like black glass mountains, and the heaving muscle of tidal forces, telling of whipped-cream wind-tickled wave crests, of spray and spume smashed against the sky, and cruel currents that mocked humanity, flowing as cold and sensuous as eldritch desire. Like all of their kindred, nygels loved best the sea, that mother of all waters.

Officially, the border between Eldaraigne and Namarre divided the Landbridge exactly in half. Tahquil, semi-insensate, and her steed had almost reached this midpoint when the twilight gave out an unpleasant surprise. Chrysanthemums of fire came blazing at them—brands brandished in the meaty fists of a band of Namarran warriors headed by one of their wizards. With yells of triumph they whirled lassoes above their heads in practised fashion. One man cast his rope. It struck the nygel’s neck and fell short. At the touch of the hated halter, the wight uttered a scream of fear. Feinting and dodging so rapidly that few mortal riders would have remained mounted without the aid of supernatural adhesion, he eluded them, only to run into a second band, the ambushing compatriots of the first. Now desperate, the waterhorse flared his waterlily nostrils and caught the scent of his ultimate resource, that which was his native shelter, his natural—if such a term can be employed for the supernatural—element.

The two bands of wight-tamers converged, rushing together like breakers in a choppy soup. In a burst of desperate speed their quarry slipped out from between them and dived into a pool of water.

A brackish pool it was, lying so close to the sea: a damson-coloured bowl of rock and sedge and salty mosses and secrets. A drowning pool.

Deep under the water sank the nygel. All care for his burden had been chased from the kelp forests of his animus by the urge to escape, the instinct for water, the imperative to elude the rope. Silently he sank and perforce silently Tahquil, attached to his flank, sank with him. A few bubbles rose up like hollow planets, sat like silver thimbles on the surface, and then popped.

The Namarrans, cheated, raged at the brink, cursing and flinging stones. A moment only remained they thus. One, more nervous than the rest and sharper-eyed, called out.

‘Blood’s death! A scavenger! A scavenger moves this way!’

A flurried chaos at the poolside, a clattering of stones, a swishing of bushes and the Namarrans were absent. Only the reflection of a single consumptive star floated wanly on the surface. In the dimness, something crooked shuffled towards the patch of water. Its shambling gait belied a remarkable swiftness of progress.

Down below, Tahquil’s heart pumped frantically. The veins of her temples stood out, cords binding a skull turning inside out in agony.

Down below, the nygel felt a stirring at his side and remembered.

He sloughed her, then braced himself underneath her expiring form and pushed. As she broke through the roof of his liquid haven he boosted her up, out and sideways, depositing her on the shore before subsiding anxiously and immediately. Had his recollection of her presence and mortality arrived an instant later, it must have been too late.

Tahquil lay helpless, coughing up water with spasms of violence, retching, vulnerable, her eyes unfocused. A huge, stooped figure in grey rags bent over her. It swung a voluminous net off its back, dropped it on the ground and unclosed it. The net contained a large, irregular object. To this object, Tahquil was added, still racked and convulsed. The scavenger closed the net, lifted it on its humped back and shuffled away.

The dirty clouds moved north to muffle the entire sky. Only a greenish corpse-candle faltered along the marshy places of the Landbridge.

In this obscurity an urisk was standing beside a murky well. He knocked three times on the brackish water. A familiar long head came up and looked around.

‘Vanished,’ it said, in gloomy astonishment.

6

TAPTHARTHARATH

Smoke on the Water, Fire in the Sky

Red Taptharthar: magma’s pumping

Through below-ground veins, where jumping

Pressure points like hearts are thumping,

Setting mighty boulders bumping.

Up past thinner crusts they’re humping,

Pushing past to swell the tumps. Stings

Of lapilli rain in lumps; rings

Opening in lava sumps bring

Boiling vomit for the dump, fling

Rock bombs high, to fall down crumping

And the slow morasses slumping;

Creeping ooze congealing, plumping.

Flames for trees, rock-melt for lakes—

Red Taptharthar burns and quakes.

NAMARRAN BARDIC CHANT

Metal beaks had embedded into Tahquil’s ribcage, her left arm, her thigh. Over miles of jouncing, they had pecked their way in—the nodes, projections and sawing ridges on which she lay constricted by the tensile web. Throughout a long, strange journey she had lain stupefied, fading in and out of consciousness, shuttled between real nightmares and the nightmare of reality.

The effects of her ordeal had been compounded by the Langothe, whose intensity apparently ebbed and flowed at random, or perhaps was driven by the whims of the various exigencies of existence. During her moments of awareness the longing for the Fair Realm seized her. Images of its star-jewelled mountains, its forests of mystery and its clear, singing rivers formed before her inner gaze; images of such power they seemed to haul the blood from her thundering veins, the tears from their bitter wells behind her eyes.

Hunger had not troubled her, nor thirst—she having lately swallowed enough to quench a hundred thirsts—nor, despite her damp condition, had cold. What she was rammed down upon, that amalgam of iron rims and studs, was warm. In places it gave way to the yielding suppleness of skin—slightly hair-roughened but sensuous, as the metal was agonising; as though she reclined upon a cruel lover.

Nor could she, during periods of awareness, understand where she was or how she had come there. When the jouncing and jabbing ceased, there came a descent, a bump, a groan, the tension of the net slackening, a disoriented rolling, the beaks withdrawing and new ones digging in new locations. She stifled a cry.

The groan had not been hers.

A large presence hovered nearby. Its carrion stench hovered also. Perhaps it noted the paucity of life signs exhibited by its most recent catch. Yet unwounded, merely stunned and temporarily helpless, Tahquil retained a measure of hidden vitality. Presently her captor withdrew to the left. A juicy tearing and a crunching emanated from its proximity. After an aeon, the author of these munchings shambled away with footsteps like anvils being dragged through a quarry.

A moan welled again, close by Tahquil’s ear. She tried to open her eyes but discovered that she had already done so. Bleary red smudges crowded in at the edges of sight, illuminating nothing. Her hands explored.

Across a landscape both unfamiliar and well known her fingertips travelled. Metallic ridges of armour, yes—and the sleek adamant undulations of living thews. A thicket of hair, a contoured field of stubble. A Midsummer breathing, irregular and strained. A slick syrup that might have been blood.

‘Who are you?’ she whispered, but the armoured man made no reply.

Once, in Gilvaris Tarv, Tahquil-then-Imrhien had seen Namarrans passing by. Now, by the shape of the armbands and the earring of this warrior, she knew him to be one of their kindred. His breathing deepened, bubbling and stewing in his chest. The unnerving rattle of it seemed to echo hugely, as though reverberating off the interior of some spacious hollow, a chamber of rock and stone. Perhaps she and her fellow captive had been dumped in some cavern? This did not matter to Tahquil. Of more immediate concern was the tangling snare which bound her to this doomed lover and his accoutrements, this warrior with his overlapping metal scales who, by the sound of his breathing, soon would be cold and breathless as a netted fish.

Her hand slid down his chest to his hip, to the scabbard belted there. A haft protruded. Hampered by ubiquitous cordage, she slid free the blade, groped for a strand and sliced it through. The dagger was keen. It severed the fibres with short, easy strokes. Feverishly she worked in the dark, once stinging her own hand with the paper-thin metal edge. Her fingers slippery with blood, she dropped the dagger, almost. Another cord sprang apart and another—now the gap was big enough. She wriggled through.

Cramp disabled her and she did drop the dagger. Falling, it rang on stone. She doubled over, gritting her teeth, trying to loosen the rigid spasms in her sinews and chafe sensation into seized-up limbs Reviving ganglions prickled like pincushions, shooting outraged spokes from centres that had been crushed by armour’s brazen knuckles.

Somewhere nearby, the Namarran stirred and sucked in an almighty gasp.

‘Six heads have I broken this day,’ he wheezed with foreign pronunciation, ‘and yours shall be the seventh.’

After that he made some choking sounds and fell silent. She touched his chest: there was no rise, no fall.

Heat thrummed from the stones upon which Tahquil crouched. A vibration arose like the thump-thump of a powerful engine. The carrion stink curdled in her nostrils. How long would it be until the monstrous presence returned, dragging its anvil feet? She swung her head around. A dull red patch hove into view—a sulky smear of crimson chalk, not flickering like flames, but steady. For want of a better course, Tahquil began to crawl towards it. The floor of this chamber or cavern was littered with objects. She brushed them with her seeking hands, climbed over or around them, or swept them from her path; things of rock, things of metal, things of bone, scuttling things with articulated carapaces.

The red glow expanded. Jagged shapes became discernible, looming on all sides. Indeed, this was a cavern within rock. Stalactites of solid limestone hung from its ceiling, stretching down towards their dwarfish counterparts growing up from below. Boulders of all sizes strewed the uneven floor. Between the boulders lay bones. Long and smooth were the bones, or small and knobbed, domed or socketed, hinged, splayed, jointed, crenellated, chewed. Weapons and pieces of armour rusted among these relics. Hot to the touch was the metal, and it had been eaten away by airborne acids. None of it was use-able. Scorpions threatened from chinks. Aiodes with leathery hides of stone lay cracked open like eggs, revealing glorious agate linings. Over all, the blood-hued light’s lurid ambience was thrown like frayed gauze.

Perhaps this red opening led to another chamber—to a maze of chambers like the mines of Doundelding. For, surely this grave-cave must be underground. Who would hew an above-ground structure like this, with dismal furnishings such as these?

A hot, scarlet wind rushed towards Tahquil, bearing on its back a reek both alarming and sickening, a stench she knew well but could not immediately identify. It was not the rotted-meat smell roiling in the guts of the cave. Pulling herself upright, she lurched forward with as much haste as she could rally. The wind’s furnace breath blasted stronger. The light strengthened and at length, trembling with synesthesia, Tahquil stepped from the cave mouth into the open air of a surreal landscape.

What the world would have seen, had it possessed an eye and that eye turned upon the girl standing framed by the stone orifice, was this: a figure as tall and slender as a lotus stem, clad in wind-plucked rags. Matted hair, the colour of mud and as filthy, surrounding a smeared face so flawlessly beautiful that the eye, this invented eye of the world, must travel over it again and again in disbelief, searching for the tiny fault which must surely exist but did not. So fair was this countenance, so exquisite the proportions, that it seemed not flesh and bone but a painting come to life, or a sculpture fashioned from the finest-grained and purest marble, by the hands of the most expert artisan.

What the green eyes in that face beheld was this: a wasteland of a new kind. No vegetation grew anywhere. Dark was the sky and low pressed the clouds, underlit with the sullen glare. These were not the fleecy clouds of Spring showers, nor yet the moisture-heavy thunderheads of storms—this was a layer of smoke and steam slathered thickly across the firmament. Sunlight filtered through weakly, the day’s eye showing as a noxious yellow stain in one corner.

Near at hand, pools of water nestled in pockets of barren rock, each one attended by its rising mass of steam. Around these pools, the rocks were coated with a glittering substance like crystallised ice or snow.

Small craters pockmarked the ground. Some gulped emptiness, like fossilised mouths, while others jetted gouts of heated gas to mingle with the smokes and other vapours. At the rims of these vents clustered spiky growths of sulphur crystals, golden-yellow. Strung between them were webs of fine, glassy strands like hair.

Grotesque formations towered up like giant versions of the burned toffee scrapings thrown out by the Royal Confectioner in Caermelor. Gaps between these preposterous twists of rock afforded glimpses of a glutinous river, bright orange in hue. Slow-moving, it glistened gold at the edges. Dark flakes tessellated its surface. Further off reared terraced cliffs of ash, marching away into a louring obscurity. In one place, torrents of amber honey cascaded slowly down their walls like a ponderous waterfall.

Tahquil knew, then, that she had reached Namarre. She had been brought here by a scavenger, a huge, slow-witted entity whose sole intention at any time was to collect provisions for its larder, its preferred fare being the flesh of humankind. Some instinct or habit prompted these creatures to choose victims with enough life left in them that they might keep fresh for a short while, yet with not enough spark that they might offer serious resistance to the scavenger’s culinary arrangements. These sick or wounded creatures they would take to their lairs, there to devour them sooner or later. This one kept his larder in Namarre, in that region abhorred by men which they called Tapthartharath.

From histories taught her in childhood, Tahquil-Ashalind had some knowledge of Tapthartharath. Even after a thousand years, the ground was still restless. Unimaginable fires surged and swelled beneath it. The reek of brimstone was the same odour that had heralded the last days of the Isle of Tamhania. Yet, restless though Tapthartharath was, it was not as dangerous as Tamhania. Its subterranean forces seeped, releasing gradually, never building up to a major explosion.

A road, or what seemed a road, passed near the cave mouth and led away among the fused-Sugar formations. Its surface was billowy and undulating, with a texture like sharkskin, finely detailed with miniature spines. In places this skin was wrinkled, as though formed from skeins and coils of rope, or like the tightly massed roots of a great tree which had turned to stone.

Goaded by an urgent need to get away from the cave of death, Tahquil-Ashalind set out along this way. Heat rose through her boots. She kicked against a scatter of brilliant zeolite crystals. Sweat trickled in runnels down her skin and her throat was scorched with every indrawn breath. At her neck, the iron belt-buckle seared her flesh. Further along, out of sight of the cave, she came to a portion of the road which had collapsed inwards. Tiptoeing warily to the edge of this window, Tahquil looked down upon a red glaze flowing only three or four feet below, moving along a tunnel beneath the surface. The road itself had been formed from the cooling skin of this lava tube as it congealed. In places it might still be only inches thick. Tahquil resumed her journey, keeping to the road’s more solid edges.

Lava lakes lay like mirrors of polished ruby at the feet of slopes where fumes billowed upward in tall plumes, angled against the land like a forest of smoke-trees. Pillow lavas were piled everywhere like flattened balls. A myriad white bubbles of pumice stones spilled from smoky pits. Here and there, treacherous rubbles of scoria underfoot made each step uncertain. Tongues of flame spurted unexpectedly from fumaroles whenever the underground heat built up enough to boil the rocks to froth, releasing their flammable gases. As tall as Mooring Masts these flames leaped, white at the cores, deepening to dazzling colours. Abruptly they would flare out, leaving images burned on Tahquil’s watering eyes.

An angry thirst now plagued her. All about, water lay in sunken jars of stone, but none cool enough or fit to drink. Toxic steams rose from them. All day she walked along the rough flank of the lava flow, because of a need to distance herself from the scavenger’s cave, because no other course of action had offered itself, and because to give up and cease moving would be to admit defeat and lose all hope. She journeyed at right angles to the sun, heading north.

As the smudged sun was blotted up by the western smokes, she found an ashy couch beneath an overhang which, seen from one angle, resembled a shipwreck and, from another, three broken lutes. There, she slept.

At morning, a gas jet ignited, flaring from a fumarole. Its light struck daffodil rays from the facets of sulphur crystals burgeoning like strange, spiky flowers along the rim of a basin. It struck silver glints from shards of black obsidian, and carbuncle glitter from red chunks of hematite. Through eyelets in pylons and tines of rock, thin gases streamed. Waking with a thirst that trammelled her with visions of the cool, clear lakes of Mirrinor and the saturated valleys of Lallillir, Tahquil steadied herself against the broken lutes before journeying on.

The lava flow directed her through an area of bubbling pots in which domes of gas formed up through brilliantly coloured muds, to burst flabbily with flumping, flupping sounds, like simmering porridge. Splats of mud were thrown up and down like paint—vibrant blue-grey, scalding yellow or vivid red.

Amongst this garishness, one aqueous pond of tranquillity attracted her. Parched cravings led her to its brink. As she stood undecided, watching steam scoot across the water’s unblemished surface, a low rumbling noise started up beneath her feet. The pond gurgled. The girl dashed for cover. A violent explosion spewed a gush of water and steam high into the air. Taller grew the geyser, its head vanishing into the clouded air. A plump, hot rain splashed down.

When it was over, she took to the road again. By now, the tiny spines on the epidermis of the pahoehoe flow had wreaked a spiteful damage on the soles of her boots. The flow was veering to the right—ahead, the rounded grey-blue shoulders of ash dunes reared up. To save what remained of her footwear, Tahquil left the lava path and began to climb.

A dust of powdery ash-snow puffed from each footstep. Ankle-deep, she waded uphill. Below, a lake of lava gleamed like a shield of burnished bronze through swathes of dull vapour. Mirages shimmered on the dunes; alluring lagoons. When the sun dangled above her head like a withered dandelion, Tahquil seated herself on the lee side of a formation shaped like a dancing, six-headed bear. Ash and mud streaked her face, mixed with perspiration. Her hair hung rank with airborne particles, plastered down by condensing steam.

Darkness, when it snuffed out the guttering and jaundiced candle of the sun, discovered her there still, curled on her side in the listlessly shifting powders. A breeze blew cinders and dust from seemingly manmade walls protruding from the dunes—high, thin, long dykes formed of black stone blocks, manufactured by volcanic forces.

Dreams or hallucinations acted out plays on the final stage of Tahquil’s thirst-induced trance. Thorn rode at a gallop through a rain-drenched forest, pearls of water being flung from his wet hair. Dripping gruagachs offered overflowing bowls of water in their outstretched hands. A transparent pool opened at her feet, its sheer surface marked only by a sprinkling of sparkles and petals of apple blossom in fragile flotillas. A fountain tinkled into a cool, marble cistern. A vision with hair of moonrays shored her up and brought to her cracked lips a cup containing rain, green with new-minted reflections. She gulped. Coughing, choking, she grabbed the cup, swallowing all its contents.

‘Easy, mistress!’ said the moonray visitation.

‘More. I must have more.’ Mine eyes, let this be no deception.

Brimming, the cup was returned to her. Again she emptied it and demanded further dividends. Repeatedly the cup returned, filled from a gourd by a second manifestation.

‘The swan has been quartering the skies without rest, these two nights and days,’ remarked Tully as he poured.

‘May the fruits of joy be heaped upon you, all three,’ answered Tahquil weakly. She gripped the green cup. It was the half-husk of a seed the size of her fist. She lay a while against the curve of Tighnacomaire’s man-shoulder, her dust-clogged hair falling in tangled locks across her face. Beyond their shelter, the coloured smokes and obfuscating vapours of Tapthartharath glided by in the night. No speech passed between her two eldritch companions. Silence was as natural to their kind as poetry. With the patience of eternity they bided, while her body rehydrated.

Later, between love and madness, Tahquil said, ‘The swan—has she discovered tidings of the King Emperor?’

‘Aye, that she has,’ said Tighnacomaire. ‘And mair. But whatever it may be, she has nat telled us.’

‘I must speak with her. Is she near?’

‘Who can say?’ said the urisk with a shrug. ‘She comes, she goes.’

‘And I go, too. It is high time I left this fried bower. Yet, the night is dark—the fogs hide moon and stars. I cannot see two paces in front of me.’

‘Ye shall nat need yarr eyes,’ said Tighnacomaire. ‘I shall bear ye.’

‘Oh? And shall you drown me again? I believe the mud in the pools here is good for the skin, if one does not object to being cooked.’

Shamefaced, Tighnacomaire ballooned his cheeks and snorted.

‘I’ll nat be diving in these sizzle-pots, nay, nor any mair springs av water neither, with ye an my back, mistress. ’Tis sarry I am.’

‘’Tis feckless ye be,’ added Tully.

‘And if I ride,’ said Tahquil, ‘where shall you take me? Do you know the way?’

‘The way to where?’ vaguely said the pale-skinned, rawboned horse-man.

‘To the fortress, the headquarters of the Hunt, where my friends were taken.’

He slid away. With one fluid movement he left the shelter and trotted around the back of the six-headed bear. Tahquil had scarcely time to draw breath before he dashed back, in horse-form, kicking up swirls of ash.

‘He kens the way,’ said Tully. The nygel stamped a foreleg, switched his tail. Awkwardly, he lowered himself to the ground. Tahquil stepped astride his back. He stood again and away they cantered.

The incendiary landscape of Tapthartharath unfurled beneath the flying hooves of the waterhorse, and on all sides. Over the ash dunes they sped, and hills of coal-coloured pumice, and by the serpentine dykes, tall as cliffs, thin as coffins and black as hearses. The ragged edges of Tahquil’s garments streamed out along the wind of their passing, like sombre flames.

Far away, a river of lava as thick and stiff as honey, moved like an incandescent crocodile. A side flow was diverging in a gout of tangerine syrup, carrying chunks of dark rock. At the head of the branching flow, a wall of burning rocks rolled forward by degrees, panting from thousands of dragon-nostrils. Little fires and spurts of steam and smoke were puffing off it. Parts of its sides tore away, revealing glimpses into the golden flesh beneath the dark crimson and orange scales. The scabby crust pulsated sluggishly, like boiling tallow.

The land was rising. With each stride, the bright drums of the nygel’s hooves hit the ground a little higher up. They climbed through pillars of smoke, columns of steam, and slanting gas towers. They splashed through gaudy muds, leaped over glowing melts from which heat burst forth with incinerating vehemence. Long steams came racing and roaring along the ground in thick curtains, sucked out of smoldering fissures by the wind. Gaping red-lined throats belched white smoke rings. The pall of putrid emissions thickened, darkened, drew in and around like angry lynch mobs. In this obscurity, Tahquil lost sight of Tully, who had been running nimbly alongside. Spasms of coughing wrenched her frame. Seven million pins prickled her skin. Her eyes swam, wept like the sea, combusted in caustic juices.

‘Tiggy, where do you take me?’ she moaned.

He neighed a response. She thrust her face into his mane and simmered there in misery.

All night the waterhorse galloped between smoky walls alleviated infrequently by pockets of less toxic air. He seemed tireless. Many times Tahquil reckoned it must be morning, longed for morning. But when her eldritch steed eventually swung to a halt, no light welled through the blood-panes of her swollen-shut lids, yet the air was pure, clean and sweet on her raw lungs.

Tighnacomaire cancelled his stickiness and his rider slid off. Cold water sluiced her burning face. She drank and lay motionless, utterly exhausted. The combined torments of her recent travails and the Langothe’s savagery had smothered her life-spirit until only a spark remained. Somnolence came like a midnight thief and stole her away.

7

DARKE

Evernight

Dark is the night that blinds the sight and, moonless, hides our paths.

Dark are the shadows of the madness gathered on our hearths.

Dark the storm-cloud, tall, wrathful, proud, whence tears of sorrow rain

And dark my heart that we must part. When shall we meet again?

LAMENT OF FAREWELL

Lie still.’ Tully’s reedy tones brooked no dissension.

Tahquil opened her eyes.

Suspended in the profound heights of a sky as deeply blue as pure essence of amaranth and as intoxicating, brilliant stars, layer upon layer, dwindled to a crystallised haze at inconceivable distances. Indigo, raven and iridium were the colours of the night. In every direction, long, tree-clad slopes marched rank on rank, fading into the darkness. A tingling entered Tahquil’s shoulder blades, seemingly welling up from the ground pressing into her back—black ground, stretching in the north and east to black mountains that raised their blocks along glittering horizons.

Away beyond the southern ridges, above the dimly written fish-bone points of the furthest fir trees, the stars fell short of the world’s rim, obliterated by a wide belt of impenetrable gloom. The width of two fingers, held sidelong at arm’s length, measured the height of it. Higher up, the pall dissipated, drawing back to reveal the silent constellations.

Danger—the air vibrated with it, and other intuitions also: excitement, expectation. Tahquil, obeying the wight’s orders, remained motionless.

After a time Tully announced, ‘They are gone.’

‘Who is gone?’

‘Unket things,’ he replied shortly. ‘But there’s no tellin’ when they’ll come by again. Cover yoursel’ with muck, lass. Smear it thick, that they may not catch the tang o’ ye. Blacken your face.’

Raising herself on her elbow, Tahquil tore up handfuls of moist soil and living leaves the colour of basalt. She did as he bade, then drank again from the seed husk’s hull—long, refreshing draughts. Some way off, Tighnacomaire, in horse-form, was grazing.

‘The night is long,’ the mortal girl said softly, wonderingly, tilting her chin towards the silver magnificence of the universal vault rising, fathomless, overhead.

‘No,’ said Tully. ‘Elsewhere the sun shines. This is Darke, the land of Evernight.’

‘Is it so? Sain me! I have heard tell of this place. They say day never dawns here. But it makes no sense …’

‘From the bottom of a very deep well,’ said Tully with aplomb, as though accustomed to such venues, ‘when ye luik upwards ye’ll see naught but stars in a night sky, no matter gin the sun be shining up there or no. Darke is walled by a half-ring of mountains to the north, and a crescent of high smokes frae Tapthar to the south, which give the same result as a well’s wall. By some trick o’ the winds, the smokes ne’er blow intae this eye.’

‘Evernight,’ repeated Tahquil. ‘A haven for nocturnal wights.’

‘Indeed,’ said the urisk. ‘A pleasant land. If Men dwelled here in their snug cottages, fain would I stay and tend their hearths. But Darke is as much shunned by your kind as is Tapthartharath. Many things haunt here but few are mortal.’

‘Few?’

‘Ainly captured mortals. They dinnae suffer it for lang,’ added Tully uncomfortably. ‘Ye shouldnae have come here, Mistress Mellyn. There’s still time tae turn back noo, gin ye come tae your senses. The horse can carry ye back tae the lands o’ Men, fleet as flight.’

‘I cannot. I must seek my friends.’

‘Och, but there’s hobgoblins hereabouts, lurking in the stones, and other things even more unket. Darke is sair kittle for ye, ’tis perilous.’

‘I doubt it not. But I must face the risks. Where is the fortress?’

‘Atop Black Crag it stands, on the round, high plain, some seven leagues to the northeast. Long ago Prince Morragan had it built, as a retreat where he might take his leisure from time to time. Annath Gothallamor that stronghold is called—the Great Castle of Night, the Dark Fortress.’

Annath Gothallamor. It was a thundering name, like the chord from the bass tubes of some eldritch bellows instrument. A name charged with portent.

‘Has it occurred to ye,’ said Tully, ‘that ye might be walking intae a baited trap?’

‘It has. But now, let us go.’

Tahquil stood, swayed and collapsed. She rubbed her wrist across her forehead.

‘I have not much strength. Do you carry food?’

‘Nay,’ Tully hooted. ‘Water I carried, but here we’ll not need it—springs rise everywhere. Fire I brought from Tapthar—see?’ He uncovered a cone-shaped hollow stone. Within, a lump of rock glowed with inner fires. ‘Heat-bearing rock—cridhe-teth. Hot-Heart, men call it. Warmth and light we have, but no food.’

‘It matters little,’ said Tahquil, levering herself to her feet again. She could not recall when she had last desired food. A greater hunger had her firmly in its grip. Her limbs weighed like congealed metal, her joints had rusted. Tighnacomaire raised his head and peered at her questioningly. His eyes were two gold coins in the night. Silently, she nodded and he trotted over to her. Soon she had mounted and they were on their way once more.

Tahquil sat slightly hunched, a tangle-haired, unkempt rider on a pretty pony. Quietly now went her steed, with the cunning of his kind, his horny feet making no sound, scarcely dislodging a leaf of the grey sedges or strange grisaille grasses. A bubbling spring made a chitinous chinking as of glass goblets. The air stirred, wafting in soft fans against Tahquil’s face. Balmy, it was fragrant with a glistening of secretive leaves—shy, shady leaves nodding in dusky forests, washed clean by starlight.

Beneath the canopy of eternal night they passed over marshy ground where pale lights bobbed, wandering—soft, acid green, soft lightning blue, their flickerings mirrored dimly in sheets of water. Through the waving sedges Tighnacomaire’s sure steps found the ways between hidden bogs and sudden pools.

‘I have seen a light like those,’ the girl murmured, ‘long ago. It almost led a good man to his doom.’

‘Hobby-Lanthorns,’ said Tighnacomaire. ‘Will o’ the Wisps. They love the wetlands, the boggy places.’

‘As do your own kind.’

‘Aye!’ he nichered. ‘I’d have a mind tae dance with them were ye nat riding.’

‘I am flattered you care.’

‘There’s Joan-the-Wad and Jacky Lantern—I ken them all.’

Enticingly, a green luminance tinted a sheaf of ferns, a blue lambency highlighted a rocky prominence.

‘Are they not death omens?’ asked Tahquil.

‘Ainly the spunkies and the corpse-candles are warners. As farr the rest av them, some are cruel as bogles. They’ll lure marrtals intae sticky mires and drown them, orr lead them over the brinks av cliffs. But others are ainly seeking a laugh, same as tricksy boggarts—just seeking tae make a goose out av some drunken farmer weaving his way hame over the fens at night.’

‘Few such farmers weave hereabouts. As for foolish mortals, this is a desert, for I am the only one. Why do they linger here, these marsh-lights?’

‘’Tis the Call. The Call is strong here. It broadcasts from Annath Gothallamor.’

‘It is long since that summons first went forth,’ replied Tahquil, remembering she had originally learned of the phenomenon in Gilvaris Tarv, while staying at the house of Ethlinn Bruadair.

With a faint rustle and a splash the three travellers left the marshes and cantered on under the stars, through a black and silver land, onward and upward, ever higher.

No rain fell in Darke, but every so often, mists rose from the streams and marshes, or rolled in from the sea, muffling the landscape in their thick wool. When they dissipated, they left glassy beads quivering on every leaf and twig, on every blade and web, and the damp loam seeping with moisture, the tree-roots digging deeper, the dark-green frogs gleaming as though oiled, the springs and soaks brimming, the flower cups filled with quicksilver, to spill again.

By degrees, Tahquil-Ashalind’s vision adapted to the ambient illumination of Darke, subtle and changeless. Her perception was perhaps also enhanced by her contact with an eldritch creation. Bent figures she saw, limping amongst hummocks; grey trow-folk, lovers of silver. Swart grotesqueries she glimpsed, sneaking and cavorting in the black forests; hobgoblins, those wights more unseelie than bruneys, more seelie than bogles—pranksters whose tricks might be kind or cruel, or both together. In a forest clearing danced a circle of the vampiric baobhansith, like maidens clad in the colours of sunfall, with poisonous flowers plaited through the smoke of their hair.

From the nygel’s back Tahquil watched the prowlings of these entities. Darke was alive with them. She felt secure, protected by Tighnacomaire’s speed and skill, guarded by Tully’s watchfulness, yet security was tinctured with a certainty that they approached something awful and momentous, and that there was no escape. Somehow, through her link with these eldritch companions, she was beginning to sense the Call.

There was, of course, one who stood at the centre of the Call—its source, its Supreme Commander.

Morragan.

Consideration of that grey-eyed Faêran prince induced panic and shock. It also invoked visions of the Realm. The Langothe sprouted claws and tore at her equilibrium. Weakened by starvation and care, crippled by the devastation of love beyond reach, Tahquil teetered on the brink of insanity. She fell forward on the nygel’s neck and slept without awareness of the transition to oblivion.

A change in the lullaby rhythms of travel woke her. Tighnacomaire was slowing to a halt. Through the tendrils of his weed-twined mane, constellations dazzled. Feeling his hide release her, Tahquil dismounted. The waterhorse cantered off to a silken mere where the images of stars floated like petals. He entered. One circular ripple glided out.

‘He was gettin’ dry,’ tooted the ever-present urisk. He raised a wiry arm, pointing. ‘See there.’

To the north, a rocky butte thrust up suddenly from the land—a plateau wide and high. Thongs of water threaded the draperies of its precipitous sides. From its centre jutted a hill, crowned with an architecture of many towers.

‘We’re gettin’ close now,’ said Tully. ‘Up there on the tabletop they call the High Plain, Black Crag looms. And atop the Crag, the Castle.’

Tahquil’s heart fluttered.

‘The story repeated,’ she said, speaking her thoughts aloud. ‘Another dark fortress. Another Tower Terrible, and he in it, and the Hunt as well. If anyone were to be standing at the edge of that tabletop, he might look out over the whole of southern Darke. Were such a watcher in possession of keen nocturnal vision he might see us, as specks moving through these stands of slim trees.’

‘I’ll warrant,’ said the urisk, ‘that all o’ Darke is subject tae scrutiny, not ainly from the High Plain, but from the skies and aiblens from ither vantage points or scopes ainly available tae those who hold great power in their hands. Yet, they watch for warriors and for mortal spies unaccompanied by wights. For ’tis not usual—nay, ’tis unheard of, for eldritch and lorraly to form such a league as we four. Many times I have thought it strange mysel’, that I should be hurryin’ from my ancient haunts and traipsin’ across the countryside wi’ a wee lass. And for the horse tae bear ye as he does, and for the swan tae even speak tae ye—’tis a marvel.’

‘Why do you come with me?’

The wight scratched his sparse triangle of a beard. ‘I dinnae ken, rightly.’

‘Good taste, no doubt,’ she managed.

His pixie mouth stretched into a grin. ‘Nae doubt!’

Palely glimmering, tree boles stretched up to a star-perforated lattice of leaves. Long tree-roots wound along the edges of a brook. Here, Tahquil lay, drinking. The water cupped in her hands was clear and invigorating, laced with a welter of scintillants dancing like disturbed glitter-dust, a swimming echo of the sky.

Tahquil looked up again, across the rising slopes to the high, black loom of the butte, overhung with its silver canopy.

‘Let’s away,’ she said. ‘I’ll ride on.’

Even as she spoke, a black cross intervened between water and sky. It swooped down into a grove.

‘An eoincaileag!’ exclaimed Tully. After a moment, the swanmaiden emerged. Nothing about her disclosed the nature of the tidings she brought—whether they were good or evil. Tahquil stood up, clutching a tree-stem for support.

‘Say on,’ she said quickly, and without preliminaries.

‘Heihoo! Valiant human friend is wise, wending to Fell Fortress from southern side, from slopes of fire and fume. On far side, further from the Fortress, hosts forgather, summoned. Hordes seethe and swarm on the High Flat.’

‘Dwell not on the manoeuvres of Morragan’s armies! What tidings of James, King-Emperor?’

Tahquil looked into the lovely face of Whithiue. A curious anger was printed there. The swanmaiden would not say more, at first. When she began to speak again she informed her listeners that while she was seeking news of the King-Emperor, other tidings had come to her knowledge. The reason for it was not clear, but it was widely broadcast among wights all across Erith, that Prince Morragan was not the only Faêran lord to seek the yellow-haired maiden. Now the High King of the Faêran himself commanded that whosoever should find her must bring her to him.

‘So, King Angavar too has woken at last,’ Tahquil said, awed, ‘and has heard of my story.’

Again she wondered why she should be hunted—whether her pursuers had guessed, or somehow discovered who she was, and that she had come from the Fair Realm by some secret way.

Whithiue said, ‘Fain would swan serve Angavar and heartily follow his will. He is sovereign. The world’s fairly sworn to submit. Swan’s fealty, homage and sentiment are his.’

‘Pray do not betray me, Whithiue! I would not be a pawn in the games of the Faêran. You do not know why Angavar and Morragan seek me.’ And I shall not tell you! For, if they knew that I could open the Gates to the Realm, my eldritch friends would have me brought to these Faêran lords in a moment. I judge this High King would straightway force me to the Gate, if he got me in his power. Then, to take revenge on his brother, he would return to Faêrie with his retinue, leaving Morragan to give vent to his wrath by allowing unseelie wights to punish Erith until time’s end. I want none of that. I want the Faêran all gone, every last bewitching, ruthless one of them. Aloud, she said, ‘These Faêran monarchs and princes would have no care for the fates of my stolen friends. In the conflict of lord against lord, insignificant mortals perish. Keep my secret, I pray you! Do not betray me!’

‘I’ll no’ play ye false, lass,’ said Tully, ‘and neither will the horse. But dinnae luik sae unkindly on the Faêran. Ye would be well advised not tae speak ill o’ them. And certain, they can be merciful and just.’

‘Just arrogant!’ cried Tahquil.

‘Had swan secured summons from Faêran sovereign’s very hand, swan would hasten to fetch human to his feet,’ said the eldritch girl, tossing back her dark hair.

‘Doubtless,’ rejoined Tully. ‘But ye’ve heard the King’s edict from some witless sparrows or sullen trows. Can ye break faith wi’ the lass for the sake o’ their rumour?’

‘Hearth-wight wheedles well. Swan’s in sore straits,’ said Whithiue undecidedly.

‘Do nat be wildered,’ said Tighnacomaire. ‘Yarr bound tae the mistress by the feather.’

The swanmaiden bowed her long neck; a gesture of concurrence.

‘When friend has viewed fate of sisters, swan shall fulfill vow of fealty to High Sovereign and specify her whereabouts.’

Tahquil, now temporarily safe, repeated impatiently, ‘What tidings of James, King-Emperor?’

Whithiue replied, ‘Sixteenth sovereign so-styled has fallen.’

A white-hot stone knocked in the throat of Tahquil. ‘Say on,’ she said, very, very softly.

‘He failed to survive,’ said the swanmaiden. ‘Some heinous wight slew him. Swan speaks with fidelity. Seagulls voiced story, which wave-wights verified, who viewed his final hour.’

Thorn was dead.

With eyes like empty shells, the mortal girl stared at the immortal—she who was of the kind that could never lie. A heavy door slammed shut with utmost finality, leaving her desolate.

Night birds twittered and grieved.

A descant flute began to play somewhere in Darke’s silver-grey coppices—breathy, burring notes. Others started up. The threads of their separate melodies entwined like tinsel streamers, creating harmonies to break the heart. The breeze was purple with the scent of violets.

‘No,’ said Tahquil-Ashalind. ‘No.’

Reason left her then.

She could not hold back. Over and over the sounds burst from her, like water from a dam whose walls had been breached; a wordless, mindless keening, a long-drawn lament of anguish and desolation more bitter than she had ever known.

The high lamps of Darke shone steadily down on the dim meres and marshes, the groves and glades, the hills and hummocks. Their rays caught the satin sheen on the flanks of an eldritch horse racing up a steep shoulder of the plateau, with a rider on its back. They glanced from the horns of a short figure leaping in the horse’s wake. They caressed the glossy feathers of a long-necked bird sailing the rising airs that flowed to the uplands.

High up, near the edge of the plateau, a shelf jutted. Barren and rocky, it was cut in under a cliff. On this shelf the horse stopped. The rider fell off. Seven hundred feet below the shelf, the twilight hills and lowlands of Darke spread out, the sumptuous velvet and brocade of the shadowy forests decorated with sequins and threads of water.

Tully sat cross-legged beside Tahquil, who lay as she had fallen.

‘Wauken, miss,’ he said, and he murmured a spell of home and hearth, one such minor working as urisks are capable of. She roused, bewildered, blank-faced, and peered around. The wind elevating from below lifted her brown-dyed hair up and back, spreading it out along the currents like ribbons of kelp.

Down a stairway incised into the cliff face drifted Whithiue in maiden-shape, comely as the evening star. She opened her feather cloak. Out tumbled fruity spheres as soft as teased wool, in hues of peach, apricot and melon. One rolled to the feet of Tighnacomaire. He sniffed at it, then, absently, ate it.

‘Ye great lunk,’ said Tully, smacking the nygel on the nose. ‘Go and eat some eel-grass, or grass-eels. These are for the mistress.’

Tighnacomaire rolled his eyes guiltily and laid his ears flat.

Sorrow had gathered to Tahquil-Rohain from all its hiding places in the woods of Darke: from empty nests and buds untimely shrivelled; from a twig upon which a tiny owl sang a lament for his lost mate; from a mighty oak that had fallen on its side, whose last dry leaves, bunches of hands cut out of brown paper, clapped like a death rattle; from wind that grieved among the tree boles, whispering farewell.

The grey raiment of despair was drawn to her, and when she was clothed, the dullness of the garments flowed outwards like the rays of an un-sun, spreading smoky un-light and wrapping even the wild things of Darke in its ragged webs.

But stone and ashes do not weep.

I am sere. I am stone. Desperate, desolate stone, deeply etched with the acid of agony. Let stone turn to ashes, as the stones of Tamhania were burned away. I am nothing, a husk. I will walk on, but the flame has consumed me, then died.

For herself, Tahquil had little care now. She touched some Fairbread to her mouth, moving like one of the clockwork toys from Tana’s gorgeous salons—but she might have been carved from milk-quartz.

If he lives no longer, I must still go on. I will honour my inner promise to rid the world of the Faêran, if I can, and see my friends safe home, if it is possible. After that I will care naught about what happens to me.

‘Far have we come,’ said Tully, after the damsel had broken her fast with three small bites. ‘Gin ye clamber up that stair in the rock, ye shall rise above the rim of the High Plain. Then ye shall see Annath Gothallamor.’

She climbed the stair. The steps were cracked. Mosses and tiny plants grew from the fissures, veiled with nodding white flowers. Near the top she paused, standing on tiptoe. Craning her head, she raised her eyes two inches above the level of the plateau’s brink.

The Plain rolled away like a floor flagged with jet and obsidian. Yet it was not devoid of vegetation. Short grasses sprouted, and in places, bushes squatted in round-shouldered clumps. On their immense black backdrop, the spiky stars glittered more sharply now, huge and close. Against them, climbing up the sky and obliterating the celestial radiance with its bulk, a sudden, massive bulwark rose like the topmost peak of a mountain. And from the culmination of this crag thrust a fortress topped with clusters of spired towers, belfries, conical turret roofs, toothed battlements and flying buttresses, its grim walls pierced by narrow slots with pointed arches. These slots, which seemed miniature by comparison with the great mass of stonework, shone with an inner glow tinted with the dilute blue of uhta, like the lingering colour of the sky on a Summer’s eve, just after the sun has set, like the cold blue of glacial shadows, like moonlight through wood smoke. Menace was implicit in these hundreds of gimlet eyes.

A movement caught Tahquil’s attention. Slowly, she began to subside behind the edge. Gabbling broke out above her head—there had been spriggans in the shadows of the High Plain. She hastened down the stair. When she reached the shelf, Tully pushed her into a crevice. Creaking voices called from above and stones rattled down. Tighnacomaire whinnied. Precariously close to the shelf’s border, he curvetted, his small hooves balancing deliberately. The spriggans on top of the cliff watched him, gibbering argumentatively, then withdrew.

‘Whisht!’ exclaimed Tully. ‘A close shave, that.’

For Tahquil, words would not form. She choked on them, as speechless as the duergar’s lash had once made her. She strove for sanity, half wishing the Langothe would take her instantly, so that she would not have to wait for its slow-wearing effect to grind her down.

When at last she was capable of utterance, she asked, in a bleak monotone, ‘How shall I cross the Plain? There is scant cover.’ It was the first time she had spoken since hearing the swanmaiden’s tidings.

‘Strong-sinewed swans will hoist feeble friend’s slight weight,’ said Whithiue. ‘Sea-folk will surrender a wide fish-net. Four swans seizing hems have strength for ferrying human freight from here to Fell Fortress, flying fast.’

Scarcely comprehending the enormity of this tardily offered privilege, Tahquil nodded. She felt removed from the scene, as though she gazed down a long tunnel at the three wights on this precipitous aerial perch among the night glitter. Reason stood there alongside them, but she was disconnected from it. Tully’s reply to Whithiue seemed to come from a room behind a wall.

‘It cannae be done. The Hunt would find ye, or else watchers on the ground would look up and see the shape o’ ye outlined by the constellations. The lass wants tae creep intae Gothallamor, not be dragged there in chains. Twa prisoners in there is enow—what’s the use o’ three?’

‘How is she to secure her sisters?’ Whithiue now looked exasperated. ‘What’s a scatter-witted half-sensible human fit for? Her fancy’s wandering, frantic. Who wists whether stolen wenches survive? Such a scheme is futile, certainly set for failure. Cease following such folly.’

Doggedly, Tahquil said, ‘You must help me. Take me in secrecy to this Fortress. I will not be thwarted. I must find my friends before I perish.’ She was dully aware that Whithiue looked insulted, Tully puzzled and Tighnacomaire vague. Deep in thought, the urisk stroked his straggly goatee.

‘Tharr’s the Icepipes,’ suggested Tighnacomaire abruptly, ‘the burrows undarr the Plain.’

‘Never heard o’ them,’ declared Tully. ‘Might they be tunnels o’ Fridean delving?’

‘Nat Fridean. Icepipes warr made by atherrs.’

‘Such subways are sealed from swan’s scholarship, veiled from her wisdom,’ murmured Whithiue.

‘Those who fly high see ainly surfaces,’ sagely quoted the nygel. ‘Waterr seeks the underr places and the secret.’

‘Ye’re no’ clashin’ on aboot underground streams are ye?’ hooted Tully. ‘The lass can hardly traipse through tunnels filled with water.’

‘Streams arr lower. Icepipes arr high and dry. Men made them, cleverr men, long ago. Wizarrds of Namarre.’

‘How shall I find a way to these Icepipes?’ asked Tahquil.

‘Wait,’ said Tighnacomaire. ‘I seek.’

He jumped away. As though the steep cliffs were level parklands, he crossed them swiftly and without faltering, his hooves finding secure footholds where none were apparent.

Evernight glistened on. The southerly breeze brought a distant croaking of frogs.

Tighnacomaire returned not a fly’s wing-beat too soon. A commotion was developing at the cliff top above. Spriggans had congregated there again. Their spindle-shanked shapes ranged along the skyline like gesticulating hieroglyphs. Some were shouting, while others had already started down the stair.

‘Ride now,’ said Tighnacomaire. After scrambling onto his back Tahquil was borne away from the rumpus, along a narrow ledge, until they veered around an outflung spur of rock and the spriggans disappeared from view. Tighnacomaire’s sinews bunched and released rhythmically. Beneath his legs, chasms plunged and great holes gasped, filled only by eerie winds. The stars were sparks struck from his hooves. Somehow, he clung to the cliff side and at length arrived at a vertical fissure, deeply cloven, dark and silent. Warily, he poked his nose around a tall boulder and sniffed. Then he stepped through.

Darkness sealed Tahquil’s eyes like tar. She felt the waterhorse under her, moving forward. At the sound of a voice she started and would have fallen had she not been fastened on.

‘Och, where’s a light fa’ the lass?’

Reflected sound waves mocked Tully’s words.

Unexpectedly, light blasted out. It stripped Tahquil’s eyes of tar, peeled them like onions, divested them, it seemed, of eye hatches, of lenses, of cornea, of retina, until they were seared sightless with a white blindness.

As swiftly as it had appeared, this glare vanished. The urisk, who had posed the light question, uttered a short, explosive word.

‘A wee bit stark, that,’ he added.

This time he uncovered the glowing rock of Tapthartharath more slowly. A slim ray shot out under the lip of the stone cover. It bounced off a plane, zigzagged back and forth between multitudinous facets and splintered into a billion and three fragments.

‘Oh,’ sighed Tahquil, raising her awed head from the waterhorse’s neck.

‘Oh, oh, oh …’ the echoes murmured.

From every angle, rainbows dazzled. Wide and high was the Pipe itself, perhaps eighty feet from floor to vault and fifty feet from wall to wall. Here was a duct massive enough to accommodate ranks of a dozen horsemen bearing tall standards.

The inclinations of the wall, ceiling and floor of this tube took the warm tangerine-amber radiations of the Hot-Heart of Tapthartharath and multiplied them to uncountable repeated images, splitting them prismatically into subtle component hues. It was like being inside a wizardly kaleidoscope, but in fact the Pipe was the eaten-out heart of a crystal of unimaginable dimensions; a majestic splendour, yet hard, cold and merciless.

Tighnacomaire stepped now from a wide band of greyish rock—granite or basalt—which had lined the inside of the aperture; an outer casing in which the enormous hollow crystal of the underplain was housed. As his hooves touched the cut-mineral floor it chimed—not the dull thunk of a spoon tapping the bubble of a fine glass goblet and resting there, inhibiting the resonances—quite the contrary. Sympathetic vibrations rushed away from the point of contact, across the floor and up the walls, to flow across the upper choirs, crossing and recrossing, acting upon each other to produce new frequencies of nuance and penetration, and all these ringing notes, clear as water, pulsated against each other in a long, swelling chord.

Tighnacomaire halted, uncertain.

The last note faded, like a reminiscence of the stirring of the jewellery air. The crystal waited.

‘Cannat walk in silence,’ stated Tighnacomaire.

‘Silence, silence, ence, ence,’ sang the vaults, sending off sparkles like pieces struck from the sky, the sea, the sun, fire, ice.

‘Risk it,’ said Tahquil. (Iskit, iskit.)

Tully held high the Hot-Heart and they went forward into a song, a net of rainbows, a web of glory.

It was not unpleasant. Never did the insistent decibels rise to a painful level, nor did the soft illumination of Hot-Heart produce intense beams. Even when they sprang off the facets at their most concentrated, the beams were rods of amber, or scarlet resin, or bolts of gold silk—not swords. Darkness fell away and fled before the interlopers, then closed in behind. They moved in their own orb of radiance, crisscrossed by spokes of astonishing colours. Deep beneath the High Plain they pushed on.

Presently, the nygel stopped again. The last patters of his and Tully’s hooves rang off into the crouching darkness in front and to the rear.

‘Light draws attention,’ remarked Tighnacomaire. (Tenshun, shun.)

‘Indeed!’ Tully snapped shut the stone lid, breaking off the rose-marigold effulgence at its stem. Blackness slammed down; an iron curtain.

They went forward, through a pitchiness so solid it seemed tangible.

Of course, the wights had needed no luminescence to see by; they had provided it solely for Tahquil’s benefit. Yet, none of them had earlier considered the danger they invited upon themselves. Perhaps in the nygel’s case this was understandable—his mind was a bell-jar full of dragonflies darting at their own reflections. And Tahquil, for her part, was verging on delirium. Tully, with the commonsense of a common domestic wight, should have known better. Conceivably, some enchantment in the chant of crystal, some oblique spell zinging off the obliques, something occult in the dark occlusions had laid hands upon his eldritch senses and dulled them, lulled them, culled them, gulled them.

Annulled them.

Tahquil nodded, drooping on the waterhorse’s back. Indeed, when they first entered this place she had, in a confused way, feared instant detection, trusting only that Tighnacomaire, with his sharper instincts, would be able to turn and flee at the first sign of peril, and so outrun it. As they penetrated further into the Icepipes and nothing untoward occurred, she began to relax, turning her muddled thoughts to what obstacles might lie at the journey’s end and how the Fortress might be entered and what might be found therein. Ideas rambled incoherently through her mind, in tablature. She could not pin them down, could not make sense of them. In this state, she was unprepared for the encounter.

The cavern filled with the susurrations of Tighnacomaire sniffing through the velvet pockets of his nostrils.

‘Waterr,’ he whispered. ‘I smell it. And what else—’

The dark exploded.

A clamour went up on all sides. The brief flare of an ignition revealed that, straight ahead, the floor ended. A thin bridge, suspended from above on slender diamond fingers, arched over the chasm. From the centre of this span poured a scrawl of spriggans, brandishing weapons. In their haste they jostled one another. One fell over the side, his fast-receding shrieks overlaying the wild shouts of his fellows.

The nygel whirled to face the direction from which he had come. A second time, he stamped. His hooves ignited sparks. The flash illuminated haemorrhages of yelling wights exuding from cracks in the walls, cutting off the escape route. Their noise fed itself back into the crystal, amplifying with each circuit, drilling through Tahquil’s ears. Under her, the nygel spun like a compass needle. Dizzy, she braced herself for the onslaught. Would these enemies attempt to wrench her from Tighnacomaire’s sticky hide, flaying her in the process? Or would they merely spear her as she sat on his back? Death never seemed inviting, yet at this instant, neither did it appear entirely unwelcome. Her head jerked back as the nygel surged. He bolted. His haunches gathered. He jumped. The ground dropped away, her stomach flew to her gullet. Her arms and hair flew up over her head as she and the horse plummeted like iron weights. In front of her nose, her ragged shirt fluttered invisibly. Her blood thundered with fear and exhilaration. They were falling together into the chasm.

There was no time to scream, no breath for it. The terrible, whistling wind of their falling ripped it from her lungs. She was a rag doll on horseback, diving into a well.

Violently they smashed into something like a slab of adamant. Water filled Tahquil’s skull like hemlock wine.

Pressure clamped down, roaring. Red bubbles popped and fizzed in her eyes. The nygel was drowning her again. Her arms flailed vainly. Tides sloshed in her head. Her brain swam like a frightened frog, and a band of steel tightened across her chest. Her consciousness dwindled to a golden pinprick, yet that tiny point burned bravely and was not yet extinguished.

And then the pressure reversed, crumpling her against the nygel’s shoulders and neck. Fluid streamed from Tahquil like a garment. Sweet air swirled in freely. Tahquil lay along the spine of the waterhorse, sobbing, deprived of sight and hearing, shuddering with the hoarse rasps of her panting and the racking coughs.

When these subsided, she lay quietly in darkness. There seemed to be no movement. The only sound was a gurgling, a whisper of liquid brushing against stone. She was up to her neck in water.

A long time afterwards, the darkness paled. Dimly, the head and ears of Tighnacomaire took shape. Beyond them, an ashen glimmer dawned. As it strengthened, Tahquil made out walls racing along at a staggering rate, and close above, a ceiling going by in a blur. They were not motionless after all, but travelling at enormous speed, propelled by the current of an underground stream. A low archway framed the source of light. Towards this they hurtled.

‘Fear natt!’ lisped Tighnacomaire, regenerating a vestige of her faith in him. Suddenly, the archway had them in its pincers. The current shoved them through. Suspended in midair, Tahquil closed her eyes.

They were falling once more, but it was only a short drop. It took them plunging down a hurrying sluice into a stream, deep and clear, flowing under the open skies of Darke. Tighnacomaire began to swim with the flow, angling towards land. Three hundred yards downstream, he climbed out on the shore, depositing his rider gently beneath the eaves of a coppice of unusual night-poplars. Leaves like coins of swarthy silver fluttered down.

Tahquil, sodden, weakened further by the aftermath of terror, lay dazed and ill, shivering, wretched. The stream, gurgled and babbled, flowing quickly beneath leaning willows and black alders. Glossy ribbons of starlight laced it. The poplars of Darke let their shining leaves drift down, winking bright and dark; leaves that thrived on nebulae of opalescent starfire instead of sunshine’s golden downpour.

As in a dream, Tahquil saw Whithiue glide from the trees. The swanmaiden spread her white arms and between them stretched a space from which the stars had been erased. A warm snow fell on the prone form of Tahquil. It enveloped her in cosiness. Her limbs quieted. She slept.

Down the violet wind slid syrinx melodies, wild as foxes, mad as love, strange as awakening.

Whithiue sat nearby with her knees drawn up, hands clasped around them. She stared at Tahquil, her head cocked to one side.

‘Friend is speckless, spick and span,’ she said. ‘Washed by fresh water.’

Indeed, the muck with which Tahquil had been disguising her scent was gone, and the waters under the High Plain had rinsed the dirt out of the roots of her brown-dyed tresses. Her locks now lay long and damp all around, in spirals and thick swathes, frosted by the starlight.

‘Fair friend is valiant, faithful,’ said the swanmaiden, observing the true colour growing from Tahquil’s scalp. ‘Vahquil of fulvous hair,’ she mispronounced.

Boobooks called across the night. A stumpy bough became a tawny frogmouth, which spread owl’s wings like painted fans and flapped away. Every detail of Darke appeared startlingly clear to Tahquil’s eyes. The night was no longer murky, but luminous. The shadows’ unlikely mysteries lay revealed.

Tully was perched between the spurs of a poplar. Like swanmaidens, urisks were associated with water. In domestic situations, they usually haunted their own pool. Tully had come through the underground stream unscathed. Now, he did not even look wet. Only one droplet, caught in the curls of his hair, shone pellucid; a fragile tear. A spider knitted a web between his stubby horns.

‘They ken that we’re here, noo,’ he said grimly. ‘They’ll have spied ye on the horse’s back. They’ll have issued an alert, lass—their eyes’ll be all aboot, on stalks, and they’ll come for ye any time noo.’ He squinted up at the veil of stars, as though hearing already the howl and thunder of the Hunt.

‘I might run like the wind with ye, acrrass the High Plain,’ said a man, or the semblance of one. Tahquil did not recognise him at first. ‘But they wad catch us befarr we gat halfway,’ Tighnacomaire continued.

It had been several days since he had taken his man-shape. In this form he lay on his side, idly scraping up a dirt wall across an ants’ trail, to flummox them.

‘So,’ said Tully gently, ‘your quest is at an end, mistress. Ye cannae make it tae the grand fortress.’

White hares gambolled on the mouse-fur lawns of Darke, beneath the spray of silver lights from distant worlds and suns. Far off, voiced over and over, a kind of signal or summons echoed repetitively—Ai-ee! Ai-ee! Laughter, sometimes shrill and maniacal, sometimes low and coarse, wound through the night-forests. Heartbroken wailing and lamenting followed.

Tahquil said in a flat tone, ‘If only to see Viviana and Caitri once more, or to know what has become of them, I will remain here and await the Hunt. Unprotesting, I will let them take me. There is no other way.’ Careful, even now, not to thank the wights, she added, ‘You have all been most kind.’

She lowered her lashes, shutters against the world.

The swanmaiden viewed the girl through half-lidded bird’s eyes. She said, ‘Vahquil has fed on Fairbread, seed-fruits of Faêrie. She has voyaged with waterhorse, seen with eldritch viewpoint. Has worn on her finger special circle of strong, shining sorcery. Has sustained healing spell from horned hearth-faun. Vahquil-sister shares wight-ways. See, she’s washed stainless.’

Whithiue stood up. She wrung her azalea hands, then lightly trod a few paces back and forth. For only the second time, the swanmaiden was not wearing the precious cloak of ebony feathers. Her gown seemed fashioned of mist and cobwebs. It was cinched at the waist with a girdle of flashing garnets. Her fabulous hair streamed along the light southerly breeze. She spoke again, hesitantly, her words aimed directly at Tahquil.

‘Scorn surrender! Fly hence, to Fell Fortress. Wights won’t hinder, won’t waylay swan. Friend will venture forth in security. Settle within high walls. Have certainty, swan will visit subsequently, to withdraw feather-cloak. Have certainty, should feathers be spoiled or scattered, vengeful hostility of swan’s family will follow forever.’

The swanmaiden’s words jolted Tahquil’s memory. What was it that covered her and kept her warm, even now, as she lay on the cool lawns of Darke? She looked down at herself. The feather-cloak spread glistening like polished coals over her body. It had warmed her as she slept—maybe it had guarded her from the probing senses of the eldritch night-things that roamed throughout Darke. Swan-cloaks could not be swapped easily from one wearer to another for, like the law by which wights might not step over a threshold unless invited, the use of such a numinous garment required the permission, freely given, of the original owner. What an honour the swan had bestowed upon Tahquil, that she, a mortal, should not only be sheltered by the wight’s most treasured possession, but should be offered the full use of it, with all the powers it could bestow! Gratefulness welled in Tahquil like spring water after a storm. Her eyes burned. She searched for words. Thickly, she said, ‘Whithiue is gracious …’

‘Swan fragrance shall smother human stink,’ interrupted Whithiue, and indeed a certain aviary odour arose from the feather-cloak, reminiscent of the Skyhorse stable-mews. ‘When swan has found feather-cloak afresh, secure and flawless,’ the swanmaiden subjoined sharply, ‘fetters shall shatter.’

‘Yes. After this deed is done, no longer shall you be obliged to me in any way. Never shall I ask anything from you again. This I swear. Rather, I shall be in your debt.’

But not for long, Tahquil thought bleakly, for I sense my life-thread unravelling. Thorn, soon I shall be with thee.

Whithiue fixed her alien eyes on Tahquil. Far off, a wordless ululation of Darke from some unhuman throat rose like mist from a river, like a waterbird from the marshes. The swanmaiden nodded—an odd, abrupt gesture, akin to the darting head of a bird scanning for danger, or hunting the waters for bright, swift fish.

Indeed, for all their appearance, swanmaidens are not human. This must not be overlooked.

Reverently, Whithiue lifted the cloak from Tahquil’s body. The damsel stood up. A thrill of fear shot through her at what she was about to assay.

‘How must this feat be accomplished?’ Her voice cracked.

Whithiue hugged the cascade of feathers in her arms as though it were a cherished child.

‘Celebrate! Have faith!’ she hissed, her eyes alight with anger, or grief, or fear, or maybe some eldritch emotion foreign to mortals. ‘Fly forthwith!’

She tossed the cloak around Tahquil’s shoulders. It settled there.

It settled snugly, warmly—conforming.

Screaming with outrage and shock, Tahquil felt every nerve of her body stretch into the bud of every quill, felt the breeze lifting the outer pinions, already suggesting lightness and flight. The scream became distorted, terminating in a whistling hoot. Unbalanced, Tahquil staggered, waddled. The wind enticed, plucked at her feathers. Except for sensing her connection to living feathers, she felt unchanged.

But the world had changed.

It had changed utterly.

From each eye she perceived one half of this novel universe. Her awareness altered drastically.

On the ground, Darke’s eternal night had turned into a dim green day, as seen through viridian glass. The horizon was an iron band. Everywhere, water lay seductively. Before, she had not noticed so much water. Its glimmer jumped through the grasses and trees. Frogs gave off delicious sounds, like the noises of a kitchen.

Three figures stood nearby. All were very tall. Two seemed indistinct and the third was Whithiue, gorgeous, clad in a gown of stars. Like the beings of Cinnarine’s orchards, these three were auraed by soft, spurling colours.

Tahquil turned her long neck up to the sky, and it was an unknown sky. With another sense, which her humanity translated as sight, she viewed a flow of energies netting the heavens and the ground; force-fields made up of infinitesimal particles threaded screwlike along common lines, like beads on wires. These currents curved from horizon to horizon, forming patterns over and under and through everything. They were of no colour she had ever seen—a new colour, indescribable—and they shimmered, seemingly sentient. In addition to their intrinsic motion they drifted slowly, circling the world anticlockwise. Sometimes they altered slightly, as though adjusting. In places, silent storms and substorms disturbed the patterns with violent discharges.

For miles up the fields extended, further than the reach of the atmosphere, until they met a kind of fast wind coming from the sun, which could not enter the magnetosphere. In this layer of rarefied airs, trapped particles whizzed. Although the south pole could not be seen over the horizon, the brain of the swan-mortal was imprinted with the certain knowledge that at the polar cusps the solar wind plunged these energised particles into the atmosphere to create the southern aurora. Immeasurably higher, the stars gave off similar radiations to penetrate the energy streams.

The trajectories of the currents pulsed in the sky reliably, as obvious as roads. Indeed, they were roads, or rather, signposts. They would serve as a navigational guide to fliers on their journeys anywhere in the world—over land, or over thousands of miles of ocean devoid of landmarks. Belonging to Aia itself as it revolved and rotated, these standing magnetic forces ensured that those capable of perceiving them would always find their way home.

Then Tahquil spread her arms wide. Unconsciously, she let the wind swoop in beneath them. The cloak had changed her, or changed the world. She did not need to be taught how to fly.

Wings beat hard.

A black swan flew up.

The world turned. Girding the world, the shang Ringstorm seethed; a wall separating Erith from the unknown northern half of Aia. Striping the world, shimmering flows of electromagnetic energy shifted delicately. The optics of the swan-mortal could perceive not merely the magnetic fields, but every form of radiation both visible and invisible to ordinary mortal eyes—from the long, low energy waves below red on the spectrum, through thermal infrared and dazzling ultraviolet, to the penetrating X-rays and gamma rays coming in from outer space. Yet all this extra information gave rise to order, not chaos.

The swan’s eyes, unhumanly aligned, scanned along the frame of each of her wings. The strong feathers were working like muscles. Beneath these wings, seen from a height of two hundred feet, the High Plain jutting on its tableland was illusorily flattened against the ground. The fortress on its crag took on a curious perspective, its towers broadening towards their pinnacled crowns, tapering to slim bases among a jumble of roofs.

To the metamorphosed bird flying above with slow, powerful down-strokes, much activity was visible. North of the fortress, armies were massing in readiness to march—battalions of mortal warriors perceived as blotches of infrared. Their numbers were small compared to the Legions of Erith encamped on the other side of the Landbridge, but on either flank of their bivouac, somehow blending with rock and bush, large numbers of other incarnations swelled the forces of Namarre and these glowed infragreen, like sombre marsh-lights. They were not drawn up in lines, nor did they inhabit booths and pavilions. Wights they were, of many descriptions, with one trait in common—their ill will towards humankind. And although their methods of destruction did not resemble those of Men, they could be more terrible.

Some—in particular the hobyahs and spriggans—clustered in groups. For the rest of the unseelie host, there was apparently no discipline, no leader. However, this apparently lawless, motley force was governed, ultimately, by a Commander.

The swan-mortal’s vision raked the landscape. Across the tableland towards the fortress galloped a horse. The jet-stream hair of the rider stroked the wind. Having caught hold of the horse’s tail, a two-legged runner sped along behind, miraculously keeping pace. Southward, fast bands of spriggans patrolled the vertiginous edges of the Plain. Beyond them, on the far horizon, the smokes of volcanic Tapthartharath muddied the sky in a low band, intermittently lit by a dim red glare. And far out towards the west, towards the Nenian Landbridge, a shimmer, a line, as if the sea’s edge trembled there, yet it was not the sea.

It was the war-harness of armies that glistered there.

The wind was kind, a cradle. The sky, with its guide chart, was half-known territory and liberation. Yet the swan-mortal’s wings, unaccustomed to enduring such prolonged efforts, grew tired. She turned against the wind then, preparing to descend. With cool impetus the wind restrained her—but only for a moment. Her senses slipped again into flight mode and she located the buoyant spouts of air upon which a flier could glide without labour, spiralling down towards, and then amongst, the topmost battlements of Annath Gothallamor.

The eyes of the swan-mortal saw, without comprehending, a fantastical and licentious architecture soaring perpendicularly into the starry night. Forests of towers and crocketted pinnacles punctured the drifts of stars, stabbing up from amid decorated gables. Tall ogee arches sprouted leaf finials. Circular oriel windows projected, cantilevered from the facades. Quatrefoil windows bloomed lavishly with flowerlike traceries of stone. Square towers, round turrets and octagonal wings rose from low flocks of flying buttresses, their exteriors banded with fretwork and grotesque imagery. Dripstone molding surmounted every portal and fenestration, fashioned in curious designs both rich and elegant. Gargoyles and waterspouts leered from every roof gutter.

Through these ramparts and keeps the swan fluttered, past arcadings of pointed lancet windows, high and narrow, ornamented with friezes of quatrefoils and other organic illustrations in stone. As she passed, she looked through the coloured glass of these windows, the lavender and indigo and violet panes. Chambers therein she spied—vast halls and small oriel rooms, long galleries and staircases. Slender colonnettes and tall furniture occupied these chambers, and sometimes there were forms moving between. Around she flew, again and again, her pinions sagging with weariness. Small, wightish archers stationed on the roofs took some note, then probably dismissed her presence as unremarkable. Against a high window with a cusped ogee arch she flapped her dark wings, straining to see inside.

Abruptly, terror took hold of her, and she imagined a black sun rising out of the south. Wheeling through the barbs of the crocketted pinnacles she noticed three winged shapes in the sky, speeding towards the fortress, and knew them to be the Crows of War. Frantically, the swan darted around a corner, spied a rose window from whose centre the stone tracery radiated like the petals of a flower, and glanced within. Panic-stricken, she beat at the stained glass with her wings. In the chamber behind the panes the occupant looked up, but drew back. The swan sank, fell away down the tower’s flank, touched down on a canting roof-surface and folded her pinions. She came to rest, and as she did so, the feathers uprooted themselves from her nervous system, parted from her flesh and transformed once more into a cloak, which draped from her shivering shoulders. Its edges lifted slightly in the broken airs, as if it wanted to fly again.

Two columns nearby were carved in the shape of robed men who seemed to be upholding the capitals on their shoulders. Pressed against a wall between them the mortal girl stood like the third statue while the funereal wings of the Crows swept by, their shadows as cold as forgotten sarcophagi. At their passing, even the archers on the battlements cringed. With a long and hideous cry, the birds vanished from sight.

A sharp, black feather floated down.

In the subfusc of the shadows Tahquil paused, frozen with indecision.

Like scraps of black silk, serrated bats flitted in and out of remote niches. On one side of the ridge the roof tiles slanted shallowly down to a lead-lined gutter fenced by crenellated battlements. Spaced at equal intervals, every three merlons apart, stone spires, sharp-tipped, stood like erect spindles wound about with thorns. Gargoyles like winged toads lunged motionlessly overhead.

It occurred to Tahquil that something was now approaching swiftly through the roofs, along the gutters. She scrambled back over the ridge. Here, the canting roof extended behind the tower until it met a high, steeply pitched gable running across at right angles. Stooping low, she eased her way along the tiles, hugging the cold stone of the tower wall. What she might do when she reached the pitched gable was uncertain—its gradient prohibited climbing. A precarious wall-stair had been cut into it, underneath the machicolations. But this led only to a small balcony parapeted with a row of pointed arches, which were draped with petrified ivy.

A narrow ledge jutted from beneath the lancet windows set into the thickness of the tower’s wall. Tahquil glanced up, baulking in surprise. The stifling sense of a presence coming from behind, along the roof-walks, seized her, almost immobilising her with horror, but she reached up and took hold of a projection, stepped on the ledge and pulled herself up, with the feather-cloak swaying at her back. Clambering into the embrasure, she placed her foot on a sill and swung in through the window, whose lower segment had been standing ajar. Clumsily, she sprang down to a flagged floor and stood immobile. Above, a malignancy passed outside the window, which shuddered slightly on its hinges. A raven cawed.

Then, stillness.

Annath Gothallamor enclosed her.

8

ANNATH GOTHALLAMOR

Part I: A Fortress Fair and Fell

And whither have the heroes flown? Unto the bitter shore

And onward to the tableland they call the Plain of War,

O’ershadowed by the starry heights whereon the ravens soar,

To stand before the fortress grim: Annath Gothallamor.

VERSE FROM A NEW SONG CIRCULATING ON THE STREETS OF CAERMELOR

The stars shone like fields of violets behind the intricate patterning of the leaded panes. Suspended from a golden chain, a filigree lamp gave off a frosty moonlight luminance which smacked of gramarye—surely no lorraly flame burned within such a device. The intruder stood upon a landing between a flight of stairs leading up and another leading down. The balustrade was ornamented with repetitive cusped lancets and a trefoil frieze. Along the inner walls of the stairwell, the stems of slender colonnettes rose up, curving gracefully, like lilies, into complex vaults supporting the stairways. Softly, Tahquil began to ascend.

Her feet made miniature sounds upon the steps. The feather-cloak brushed them, whispering. The air exhaled the scent of gramarye. Up she toiled, and now the exhilaration and artificial strength imparted by the swan’s cloak began to fade. Tahquil was weary, as she had never been weary before. She plodded upward, and her mind could not be read, even by its very self.

Three flights she conquered. At the top of the third, a door stood open. She paused on the threshold, peeping in through the portal.

The interior was not large—it was the chamber of the rose window, a circular room. Large areas of the oak-panelled walls were pierced and glazed with coloured glass through which starlight fell in tides of powdered amethyst, shot through with the silver motes strewn by nine golden lamps. These lamps topped pedestals of solid gold, ten feet tall, arched, pinnacled and mouchetted. Their illuminations displayed, thirty feet above, a ceiling gorgeous with lacelike stone tracery and pendant bosses. The spaces between the stonework were stencilled with heraldic motifs.

On the floor beneath this lofty fantasy all the furniture was of oak, ornamented with traceries and carvings of marvellous expressiveness, upon which the greatest industry had been expended. Gilt-spined books rested in stacks on an octagonal table, its base decorated with recessed lancets, its top supported by traceried brackets. Nearby stood a writing desk with linen-fold panelling, a lectern fashioned like a two-tiered tower on a baluster support, and an X-framed chair. Tall, canopied niches in each corner embraced stone urns on pedestals. Inscribed in gold lettering on a high archway, runes shone mellowly, spelling the words:

Is Truth So Hard To Find?

Along this wall, partly concealed by heavy velvet curtains held back by gold cords as thick as a man’s wrist, recessed rows of bookshelves reached almost to the ceiling. Books crammed each level, their spines forming palisades of delicate aurum embellishment on blue vellum. One of these tomes lay open on the lectern. Seated on the X-framed chair, the chamber’s occupant now ceased to study the pages.

A pair of eyes lifted and met Tahquil’s. The intruder advanced three paces into the room, stretched her arms forward in a sad entreaty and dropped to her trembling knees on the tiles.

‘Caitri,’ she said, still reaching out.

‘Are you mortal, and loyal to the Empire?’ querulously inquired the seated girl, clutching the stiff folds of her pearl-encrusted kirtle in a white-knuckled fist.

‘That I am—and you?’

‘Yes!’

Caitri sprang from her chair. Kneeling beside Tahquil she cradled her in her arms, murmuring reassurance over and over in soft tones, like a cooing dove.

‘My lady! Rohain!’ the little girl said at last, in a voice charged with emotion. ‘I can scarcely credit it, that I should find you again. What joy, to behold you. What pain, that it should be in this place.’ Hurriedly wiping away tears with the back of her hand, she led Tahquil to the chair and bade her be seated while she poured wine from a crystal decanter into a chalice oppressed by sapphires. The wine was as black as liquefied night. Silver flecks floated in it, like drowned stars.

‘You have the feather-cloak! Was it you,’ said Caitri, ‘the bird knocking at the window, the wild swan? I should have let you in, but I was afraid. You are ill! Do they know you are here? But of course not. I shall hide you, take care of you until you become hale. Then you shall fly away.’

Spluttering on the wine, Tahquil shook her head. ‘No, no!’

‘Hush! They will hear you. In this place, there is listening done by things which you would not have believed could possess ears. Hush! Now, you must rest.’

The starry wine, no doubt, was not unaffected by the forces redolent in the air, thrilling forces being flung from the lamps, emanating from the walls, imbuing the furnishings of Annath Gothallamor down to the very tassels of the gold silk cords and the bullion fringes on the footstools. The potency of the draught diverged through Tahquil’s veins to the very roots of her hair, to the tips of her toes, as refreshing as a fluid draught of the sidereal sky. Clear-headed, fortified, she laid aside the chalice and spoke.

‘Where is Viviana?’

‘She lies below.’

‘Is she hale?’

‘No—yes. That is to say, she lives and all eldritch longings have left her, but she sleeps in a kind of trance from which I cannot waken her.’

‘Thanks be to mercy that I should find you both unharmed! Are we safe here? Can we whisper undetected?’

‘Let us withdraw to the curtained alcove of the books lest something should look in on us.’

When they had concealed themselves behind velvet draperies, questions began to tumble from Tahquil’s lips. By degrees, Caitri’s story unfurled.

‘When the Hunt took us, I believed we should be slain,’ she said, ‘but the creatures, the terrible things, brought us here and we were taken before him.’

‘Whom?’

‘Why, none other than Morragan, Crown Prince of the Fair Realm,’ said Caitri, and a certain nervous reverence breathed through her pronunciation of that name. ‘The Raven Prince, he of whom you spoke after we came near Huntingtowers and your memory returned.’

A millstone thumped against the back of Tahquil’s chest.

‘And how did he deal with you?’

‘We were questioned—not by the Prince, but in his presence. I think he did not speak to us directly but I, for one, could scarcely bear to glance in his direction or to look away either, so I know not where my eyes rested or what I was saying. Never in my life have I felt thus. I was drawn by him, yet terrified all the while, for there is that about him which is truly perilous.’

‘But you were not harmed?’

‘Oh, no. But, Viviana was in such a state, “mewling and fretting” as one of the attending Faêran lords described it, that something was done to her. Whether it was by a slight gesture of the Prince’s hand or some other means, I know not, but suddenly she quieted and straightened, then curtsied and stood as poised as the trained courtier I first knew her to be. All trouble left her. Glad was I, on beholding this change. She gave answer to each of their questions, and I suppose I did likewise. When he was satisfied, the Prince dismissed us. We were escorted out of that saloon and simply abandoned.’

‘Explain further!’

Our escort deserted us, and we were left to wander the lofty galleries and passageways and stairs alone.’

‘With no direction? No limitation?’

‘No—yes,’ Caitri repeated. ‘No wights harassed us, although frequently we glimpsed them passing along the ends of corridors, bent on their own business—disappearing around corners or up and down stairs. Yet, jailers of a sort imprisoned us—barriers we could not see, which prevented us from entering certain quarters, or from gaining access to Outside. Aimlessly we wandered, probing, seeking exit. Whenever we spoke of hunger or thirst, we would enter the next chamber to discover wine laid on a table. When we spoke of weariness, we would come upon divans piled with cushions. We talked of laving ourselves and sunken baths would be filled with pleasant waters. Noble raiment was provided, as you see.’

‘And when you spoke of leaving?’

‘When we spoke of leaving—nothing. After some days, or weeks—I have no idea of time’s passing—we began to confine ourselves to this tower—the Crossing Tower. It seems the most stable. Elsewhere in the fortress, there is a constant queer shifting of wall, doors, rooms. One can never be certain of finding one’s way around—’tis too easy to become confused. In that way, Viviana became lost. When at last I found her, she lay asleep on the floor. I could not waken her. Some wightish servants came and carried her away. I followed. They laid her on a plinth in the Great Hall at the foot of the Crossing Tower. She sleeps there yet, with hands folded on her breast, but she breathes, and pink roses bloom on her cheeks, and her lips curve, perhaps, as though she smiles at her dreams. I feared lest the same fate should overtake me, but, thank the powers, now you have arrived!’

‘Alas! Poor Via! And you—how do you spend your days, if days they can be called in this place of endless night?’

‘Aimlessly. In changeless solitude. I walk the Tower Stairs, I stand beside Viviana and perhaps adjust a sleeve of her dress, or comb her hair. It grows right quickly, spilling over the plinth’s edges to the floor. Sometimes I trim it with a little pearly knife. All the straw-yellow was rinsed from it in the cleansing waters of the baths—her locks have returned to the pretty colour of chestnuts. At whiles, I retreat to this room, to look at the magnificent pictures in the books. Or I stare out of the windows at Evernight and remain in thought for hours. But I have desperately longed for companionship. Will you take some more wine?’

‘Thank you, no.’

‘We get no food here, only this strange and delicious wine. It is a beverage that sustains like food and drink combined, and whilst living on it, one has no need to perform certain,’ she coughed delicately, ‘functions of the body. These functions being a trait of mortal creatures, and unnecessary to the Faêran, there are none of the usual facilities in this fortress. Whether wights need to—er—execute the same processes as lorraly beings—’

‘I understand, pray continue,’ prompted Tahquil.

‘Yes, whether they need to do that, I am uncertain, but if so, they take themselves far from the walls of Annath Gothallamor, lest they offend the Faêran. It is never cold here, nor hot. One may dress lightly or warmly, as one chooses. Often enough I have seen the fireplaces filled with flames which leap hugely, but are heatless. The fuel is curious, and never consumed or altered by the fire’s rage. I have seen banks of flowers heaped in the grates, or jewels, or burning skulls. Vast and strange is this castle, like a foreign country.’

‘And he—Prince Morragan—do you see him in your wanderings?’

‘Never since the first meeting have I set eyes upon him, or upon any Faêran lord or lady. But now and then I hear the strains of music echoing through the high halls, and snatches of laughter or conversation. Such music—it moves me deeply. When I hearken, I feel that something surpassing fair, something rare and fine that I almost held in my hands, has slipped from my grasp and its like will never more be seen. Every note plucks at my heartstrings with hurt and longing.’

Caitri laid her head against the feather-cloak and closed her eyes.

‘Caitri, my joy, my sister,’ said Tahquil, ‘be not sorrowful. I am come to rescue you.’ The little girl’s brow creased momentarily, then smoothed. Tahquil continued, ‘How close to an exit may you approach before these barriers of gramarye forbid further passage?’

The child answered eagerly. ‘Downstairs, in the Great Hall where Viviana lies, the walls are clothed in richly broidered hangings. Along one wall hangs a series of four tapestries, each one depicting a season of the year. Behind that of Winter, a cleft opens between the stones of the wall. Once I noticed the hem of the Winter arras was twitching by itself, as though a sly draught toyed with it. Lifting one edge, I saw behind it an opening some ten or twelve feet high, perhaps four feet wide. I felt no unseen wall of prohibition pressing against me; nothing forbade me to enter therein. But cold was the breath that issued from that cleft, and I had no mind to venture into its darkness all alone. Perhaps it led Outside, perhaps not—but I could swear the icy draught had a tang on it of forest leaves. Lingering near Winter, I have fancied, on occasion, that I heard deep within the wall dim shouts, or a ringing of bells.’

‘This I must see for myself.’

‘But how, my lady, shall you rescue us?’

‘As we speak, our three eldritch companions make haste towards Annath Gothallamor. It is a fact, they might well be already here. They will enter easily, unchallenged, and will search for me, for us, throughout the windings of this castle.

‘But how shall they find us?’

‘You have already recognised the cloak of feathers I wear upon my shoulders. Whithiue has been gracious, but she will never rest until she regains it. No doubt, even among these currents of gramarye, she will be attracted by the cloak. Then Tighnacomaire shall carry us away on his long back, if we can but find a way past the invisible screens you describe, which imprison mortals. The gap in the walls behind the Winter tapestry sounds promising.’

Caitri nodded, pondering. ‘This is good rede. I only hope it can be done.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘Your hair is gold at the roots, m’lady. By this, and by your face and your scent, they who catch sight of you must surely know you.’

‘The feather-cloak muffles the latter, and I can use it to mask my face in the hope that I might be mistaken for a swan-maiden. But will you darken my hair for me before we depart this chamber? I see an ink pot on the writing desk. Its contents will do the trick. None must recognise me, here. The cloak’s bird stench baffles wightish noses but yellow hair stems would betray me, for sure.’

And so it was done—the hair was dyed again, this time with black ink. As she shook it dry by an open window, Tahquil looked out and saw, far below, a horse and rider pass beneath the outer walls of the fortress, with a runner close behind.

‘I pray that there go Tighnacomaire and Whithiue,’ said Tahquil fervently, ‘and I may be mistaken, but I fancied a figure of slighter stature ran behind them, on two legs, which might be loyal Tully. Come, little sister, lead me to the Great Hall prithee, lest discovery prohibits completion of this enterprise.’

Like the upturned skeleton of a mighty ship, the enormous hammerbeam ceiling of the Great Hall rose one hundred and twenty feet above the floor. At the meetings of their angles, the mighty oaken brackets beneath each rib sported carvings of winged lords and ladies who seemed about to fly across the gulfs of the interior. Slender columns, grouped in clusters, rose from the piers to the springing of the vaulted ceiling, whose load-bearing ribs delineated the support lines of the roof. In the upper vaults, great pendants of stone dangled, suspended from the transverse arches. Beneath long friezes of leaves and grapes, hangings graced the walls. A carved, tri-part screen stood at one end of the Hall. Underfoot, tiles of coloured clay inlaid with terracotta stretched across the plain of the floor, depicting deer, wolves, birds, flowery patterns, and musicians.

Viviana lay like an icon, as Caitri had described, upon a marble plinth most gorgeous with sculptural decoration. Her hair swept back from the pristine flower of her face, swirling to the floor in weighty skeins of dark, honeyed silk. Her dark blue houppelande, bordered with brocade and cloth-of-silver and stitched with stars, was clasped by a girdle of ivory and bone. She was shod with slippers the colour of polished quartz.

‘Fair Viviana,’ breathed Tahquil, kissing her brow, which was warm and living. Tahquil watched for a sign, a flutter of the eyelashes upon that apple-blossom cheek, but there came none. For a time she clasped the courtier’s hand, until Caitri recalled her with a whisper.

‘It is perilous to remain in the open!’

They ran together to the Winter tapestry. As they reached it, a corner of the sturdy fabric was pushed off the wall by a sudden draught. Bitter cold jumped out and smacked them. Tahquil forced back the heavy fold, revealing a rectangular portal delved into the wall behind. A tongue of whistling air whipped out and sucked the tapestry back hard against the portal’s maw with a violence that almost pinned Tahquil to the stones.

‘Ware!’ Caitri hissed, and they shrank against the wall as a group of stooped grey shapes limped past a doorway at the other end of the Hall.

‘There is no cover here,’ said Tahquil as soon as the trows had passed. ‘Let us return upstairs to the chamber of the rose window.’

They were not halfway across the floor when a clatter from beyond a nearby archway startled them again into flight. Pressing themselves inadequately into the angles of a cluster of colonnettes they ceased, momentarily, to breathe. The noises, as of horn striking ceramic, paused then resumed. An unhuman shape loomed monstrously through the archway. High in its skull, two lamps burned. Clack clock, the horse’s hooves rattled on the tiles.

Next moment Tauquil breathed a sigh of relief, for it was the friendly nygel Tighnacomaire who emerged from the shadows of the arch, with Whithiue walking at his side.

Uttering a low cry, the swanmaiden ran towards Tahquil. ‘Safe! Safe!’ she whistled.

‘Take it!’ Under no delusion that the swanmaiden was concerned for much more than the cloak’s security, Tahquil thrust it at its owner, grateful to be released from the obligation of its care, yet panic-stricken at the relinquishment of her protective disguise. An instant she hesitated, before releasing her grip on the cloak. What glamours might be at work in Annath Gothallamor?

‘Are you called Whithiue?’ she demanded.

‘Sooth, swan is so styled.’

‘Then the cloak is yours,’ said Tahquil, her apprehension invalidated. ‘Tig, you must carry us on your back, this very instant. Discovery is surely imminent. Yet Viviana cannot be wakened—what shall we do?’

But the urisk had also arrived. With no preliminaries he stood already at the head of the plinth, murmuring his simple remedies of home and hearth—the same incantations and deft hand movements which had revived Tahquil after her dousing.

Viviana lifted her elbow. She rolled sideways, but Tully was there to catch her in wiry arms and save her from falling. The courtier smiled dreamily.

‘Have I slept?’

‘There is no time for explanations,’ said Tahquil, joyfully, suppressing a desire to laugh and dance. ‘Make haste, Viviana—climb on the horse’s back. Caitri shall ride up behind you, and I last of all, as his back lengthens. Tig my friend—if you can find no other exit for mortals, a secret way opens behind that tapestry.’

Echoes chimed softly off the walls. Somewhere in the vicinity, voices had started up. Approaching footsteps rang on tiles and stone.

‘Why, ’tis Tiggy,’ said Viviana, wide-eyed and as yet oblivious of danger. ‘Greetings, friend.’

The waterhorse extended one foreleg and bowed low before her. ‘How charming!’ began the courtier, stroking his mane. ‘Such courtesy—oh!’

Tully’s strong arms tossed her across the back of Tighnacomaire. The sounds of approach grew louder and the nygel began prancing in fright at this sign of impending discovery.

‘An they catch us, spriggans shall make us pay hard farr helping ye!’ he warned, rolling the whites of his eyes. ‘Get an! Get app!’

Viviana, now comprehending their peril, reached down towards Caitri. Their hands locked together.

‘Jump as I lift you,’ cried Viviana. But as the little girl sprang, a scream raged through the corridors of the fortress, a scream so terrible it could only have been spawned by nightmare. The cacophony came barrelling into the hall of the tapestries like a tornado, buffeting the walls, shaking the furnishings, stabbing through eardrums, boiling with the quintessence of fury, vengefulness and triumph.

Tighnacomaire shied. It was a small movement—his haunches jerked away an inch or so—but it was enough that Caitri slipped and Viviana lost her grasp. In that instant, a flood of mischief, wickedness and madness came pouring into the hall on hooves and talons, on batty wings and large, flat feet.

‘Begone, Tiggy, begone!’ Tahquil shouted desperately.

Hooves clattered, wings whirred. The swan flew up among the high and draughty places of the hammer-beam ceiling. A great rectangle of stiff and heavy fabric lifted off the wall. Into the cold blast that drove forth dashed the terrified waterhorse. Down the hidden way he vanished, bearing Viviana who was stuck to his back. Caitri picked herself up off the floor and looked about.

She and Tahquil stood beside Tully in the centre of a circle. Surrounding them was a crawling net of shadow, a seething assemblage of unseelie manifestations, their eyes burning wells of malevolence. One stood a little apart from the rest, and when she noted him, worms of visceral disquiet began to wriggle in Caitri’s belly. Small in stature was he, and stringy as a dried-out stalk of a weed. He wore garments of mustard-brown and dandelion—indeed, the dagged hems imitated the deep scalloping of dandelion leaves. Small, furred rodents wriggled in his sleeves. Coins of yellow flowers were sprouting from the strings of his lank locks and in the goatee which dribbled from his chin like some fungous growth. His thin and raddled face, the colour of old parchment, was stamped with malice and as remorseless as disease. A look of triumph flickered over it and Caitri felt the blood drain from her head. Here was the source of the blood-curdling scream.

The fellow’s pale lips twisted. From between them emanated a corrosive voice.

‘Ill met by Evernight, erithbunden,’ he grated.

A rat scuttled up his arm.

‘Yallery Brown,’ acknowledged Tahquil, dully.

‘The very same, erithbunden, the very same. Long the chase, and sweet the ending. Spy, listener at the doors, stealer of secrets—you who know the Way Back—now you shall tell all and tell it willingly. Yet, willing or no, the penance for your false deeds shall be exacted.’

There was no escape. That fact had to be accepted.

‘If so be your will,’ replied Tahquil evenly. ‘But release my companions. They have done you no wrong.’

‘The bait, Young Vallentyne’s erstwhile doxy, has been allowed to ride away—but that is not to be her fate,’ the wight said, levelling a skinny finger at Caitri, ‘or yours, either. As for the urisk, he’s nothing more than a horsefly to be swatted, and matters not.’

Then, clear and commanding, a voice spoke out across the echoing interior. Immediately the crowd of wights dispersed—except for Yallery Brown—fleeing away into side passages and hidden galleries.

Three Faêran lords stood in the hall.

Light regaled them, emanating from their breath-taking comeliness. Their hair, crowned with chaplets of silver, seemed immune to gravity. It drifted up and out along invisible spates of air, or of gramarye, as though an unseen lake rose above the heads of these exiled denizens of the Realm. The same force billowed under their dark cloaks, spreading the fabric like fragments torn from stormy skies.

‘Ashalind na Pendran,’ gravely said the tallest of the three, he who had first spoken. In the simple saying of her true name, in the look of fierce yearning in their eyes, Tahquil-Ashalind felt the strength of their desire. They knew her. She represented their unlooked-for hope, their priceless key, their lamp in the night of despair. Here was the one who might show the exiles the way home.

‘Lord Iltarien greets you,’ said the tall Faêran lord, executing a bow in a manner that hinted at mockery.

‘I pray you, release my friends,’ she repeated. ‘They know naught of this business.’

‘Who is here, remains.’

‘I know what you want of me. Yes, I returned to Erith after the Closing. I came through a Gate, but the memory of its location is lost to me. If the Faêran have sought it with no success, what chance have I?’

The face of Lord Iltarien darkened.

‘Follow,’ he said, turning on his heel, and Tahquil-Ashalind, with Caitri at her side and the malignant motivation of Yallery Brown at her back, must follow. But they left Tully behind, for the Faêran hindered him with their arts.

Through the soaring halls and exalted corridors of Annath Gothallamor they went, the two mortals unsure as to whether they walked or glided or somehow flew. Shadows flowed, the colours of the ocean. Light glimmered, radiations of the stars. Gramarye was rife, imbuing the air, crackling in webs between their fingers like handfuls of levin bolts. Yet it was not to be grasped, not by them.

Climbing a stair of amethyst, they came to a high place. The walls shimmered translucent, as though hewn from crystal. Through them, like fire through aubergine lace, sparkled the prismatic stars of Darke. Possibly, there were no walls at all—the Faêran did not love enclosure. Indeed as the mortals entered with their escort, a scent of woodland pine, or rain-clouds, wafted through this spectral eyrie, this turret room, this prison, if such it was.

‘Go forward,’ said the Faêran lords. They themselves withdrew.

He was seated, alone, his back towards the entrance.

At the sounds of their presence he rose to his feet and swung around. Caitri uttered a short, sharp cry.

A shudder rippled through Ashalind at the sight of him—an odd, icy shock, and yet it was not terror or apprehension that she felt; instead it was like a gust of cold wind, or the sting of a chill rain that rouses a restless dreamer. Marvelling, she balanced between joy and terror and was again bereft of speech. His eyes were the colour of rain-filled clouds. The look he bestowed pierced like shafts of the sun.

‘Thorn …’ Ashalind’s voice cracked. She went to him and paused, drowning in the ecstasy of his nearness, beholding him beholding her. A kind of paralysis gripped her—she dared not reach out and touch him lest he prove to be naught but a phantasm. But his smile was tender, wondering.

‘Speak to me,’ he murmured, in the low, melodious voice she knew well.

‘Alas,’ she said, ‘they have made thee a prisoner here too!’

‘A prisoner? Aye.’ He placed his hand lightly on her arm—a gentle contact, yet it leaped through her like a lance.

He laughed then, giving her a curious and unfathomable glance. ‘Indeed, thou’rt a treasure among maidens.’

‘Oh, my love,’ she said softly, ‘I have longed for thee as life longs for breath! Deep joy it is to find thee again, but bitter sorrow that our meeting should happen in this perilous place.’

He studied her, from head to toe. ‘Love’s desire, thou canst set us both free. Only say where lies the last Gate to Faêrie, and how it may be opened, if at all.’

‘I perceive they have told thee my tale, beloved, though I know not how they found out the truth. Would that I might describe the Gate! I only remember that it lies somewhere in Arcdur, and may be unclosed by my hand alone. Would that I might send Morragan and all his kindred through, and rid Erith of that bane forever.’

‘Most sorely dost thou rail against the Faêran.’

‘Which mortal would not? They steal us and toy with us, they trick us and tempt us—to the Strangers, we are no more than playthings to be cast aside or broken. Their cruelty and callousness knows no bounds. In earnestness, my love, if I could recall that Gate I would do so, but in passing through it a geas was laid on me. To that geas I later lost all recollection, until the finding of this bracelet I wear on my wrist. On my seeing it, the vault of my brain was unlocked. Yet even then, memory was not wholly restored. The one fact I most need to remember is beyond my knowledge. Even if I regain that knowledge there is no guarantee that the gate will still be there, for ’tis a Wandering Gate.’

Into his arms he drew her, she half swooning with pleasure. Beneath the storm-blue velvet of his doublet the strength of him was lithe steel.

‘Wandering or not, it will remain where thou last saw it. Recall thou must,’ he insisted. ‘As thou lov’st me, thou must.’

The hyacinthine torrent of his hair fell loose around them both, an enfolding curtain. Raising her hand, she wound her fingers into its luxuriance. Her own heartbeat filled her like the subterranean drumming of Tapthartharath. She was shaken to the core with every beat. Something took hold of her—something like a stirring of the Langothe, like a hunger so terrible it could never be sated, and she longed for his kiss, that it might soothe the agony.

‘A beautiful tyrant is thy passion, at this meeting,’ he said. ‘Why should we deny it?’

She looked up to where the rich embroidery of his collar folded back, revealing the base of his throat, the gentle hollow at the meeting of the two straight collarbones. Above this rose the masculine curve of his throat and the hard swelling there, like a plum slipped beneath the skin, sliding back and forth with each modulated syllable he uttered. Her eyes traced every detail, following the sculpted lines of the jaw, clean-shaven but powdered with a darkness the colour of his hair, along the taut planes, the chiselled bones of a face so handsome that surely no woman could look at him but her heart must split asunder.

‘Sigh no more, pretty bird. Thou shalt have enough of me, and more,’ he said in tones of amusement and delight. ‘I intend to take time to enjoy thee most thoroughly.’

Catching her up in his arms as if she were a child, he laid Tahquil-Ashalind upon a divan of damson silk, its edges embroidered with silver and seed-pearls. His beauty saturated her vision. Her thought focused on him, to the exclusion of all else. Starlight rippled down the length of his hair, striking a sheen from it like the glowing blue sky of evening. His long fingers unbuckled the knife belt at his waist. This, he thrust aside. The dagger’s gem-encrusted hilt struck the floor with a bell sound, a light chink, which for all its softness, seemed incongruous, a peculiarly jarring note, and she was assaulted with a swift recollection of his hand upon her sleeve, moments ago.

Ashalind sprang to her feet, tearing the tilhal and iron buckle from her throat. The chain broke and the jade-leaved tilhal rolled upon the floor. She gripped the belt buckle in her fist. Caitri, until now forgotten, crouched in sudden terror at the furthest end of the room. Embarrassed by the intimacy of the exchange to which she was an involuntarily witness, she had been covering her eyes. Having been blind to events so far, she was now frightened by the noise and sense of sudden movement.

‘My lord,’ Ashalind hesitated, swallowed and breathed deeply. ‘I see that thou dost wear a dagger. How is it that our captors allow their prisoner to remain armed?’

A keen wind gusted through the eyrie.

Or so it seemed.

‘The Faêran have no fear of mortal-wrought blades,’ he coolly replied, regarding her steadily.

‘My lord wears his dagger at his left side. How then may he draw it, unless with his right hand?’

He grinned, a white wolf-smile.

Ashalind’s scalp prickled. ‘Who are you?’

‘Mistress, mistress, what are you saying?’ Caitri appeared at her sleeve, plucking at it. ‘Your Majesty, prithee, pay no heed. My mistress is overwrought—’

Ashalind pushed her away.

‘Who are you?’

‘Dost thou not know me, Elindor?’

His features shifted subtly, or else rods and cones realigned within her retinas, or perhaps certain synapses within her brain altered their impulses. Whatever it was that changed, it was not much. But it was enough.

‘No.’ Aghast, Ashalind vehemently denied, ‘No!’

But yes. It was not Thorn who stood before her, nor—as she had feared for an instant—the wanton ganconer, Young Vallentyne of Cinnarine. She paled like an arum lily.

‘Say my name,’ he commanded.

Tears buzzed like wasps behind Ashalind’s eyes.

‘Say it,’ he said.

‘Morragan.’

‘Even so,’ he answered, without hurry. ‘How tenderly the name of her first love is framed upon a wench’s lips.’

‘You are mistaken, sir. I never loved you.’

He watched her face with a knowing, half-mocking expression.

‘Time after time thou hast taken great pains to seek me in my own domains—twice at Carnconnor, once at Huntingtowers, now at Gothallamor. On each occasion thou cam’st before me in rags. I see that this visit offers no improvement. Canst thou do no better? I might note thee with greater interest, wert thou to present thyself in more advantageous fashion. Thou must needs try harder, sweeting, if thou art to win my regard.’

‘I never sought you out of love.’

‘Didst thou not choose to leave the Realm in order to join me in exile? Thou dost protest of course, as is seemly in a chaste damsel, but thine actions proclaim louder than thy words. It would seem thou canst not keep thyself from me.’

Doubt began to nibble at Ashalind, and in its train, horror. Some grain of truth seemed embedded in his assertions, but how could that be? Again, she averred—though less confidently, ‘You are mistaken.’

Coldly, calculating, he returned, ‘Thou wilt learn thine own mind. Be sure it is soon, lest I grow weary of the novelty of thy countenance, and spurn thee when thou com’st pleading. Thou’rt only mortal, prone to decay. Many, less perishable, vie for my favours.’

‘Oblige them,’ she dared to reply.

The walls, if walls they were, cracked. Veins of silver flame climbed them. Morragan caressed Ashalind’s cheek, ran his hand into her hair and seized a handful. Her scalp caught fire. She resisted the pain, refusing to cry out.

‘I wield iron!’ she cried, thrusting forth the belt buckle in her open palm. ‘Avaunt, or it will burn you!’

He laughed softly. Reaching over, he plucked the buckle from her nerveless hand. It lay in his own, coolly shining. He closed his fingers over the loops and tongue of metal, and when he opened them a pile of reddish dust trickled away.

Ashalind blanched again.

‘Is it come to this?’ she gasped. ‘That a Faêran Prince would force a mortal? Where is your pride?’

‘Easily could I make thee serve me.’ His laugh was low, a lion’s growl. ‘And I mean to do so, yet not in the way thou dost infer. If ’twere pride that prevented me, foolish maid, be sorry, for this reason—that you postpone as sweet a deflowering as mortal maid has ever known. If ’twere scorn that hinders me, that I should disdain to squander my time on an incognisant, inconstant wench, then be awakened to thy status and hope to rise above it by pleasing me better.’

He released her.

‘Go hence,’ the Crown Prince of the Faêran said harshly, his elegant form outlined in stars and cold flames. ‘Rinse and clothe thyself as befits a guest of mine, for guest thou shalt remain, until thou findest for me the Gate. As the water pours and the jewels set their brilliance to illumine thy ephemeral attractions, dwell on my words.’

Confusion tangled Ashalind in a web of indecision. The flames which had ripped seams from floor to ceiling burned silently, tongues of licking moonlight. She cared not whether they might sunder the weird fabric of the walls, causing them to shatter and cave in. For another revelation had flared like lightning across her consciousness, throwing the foundations of every principle into relief—a revelation as profound as it was shocking, and all the more sickening in its belatedness.

Her own longing had deluded her, much as a thirst that plagues body and mind may conjure mirages before the eyes. She who parches beneath the desert sun desires above all to behold an oasis. Soon, her frying brain will provide that sight, complete with shady trees. Clues to reality may be deliberately overlooked—until the stoup of cool water turns to a mouthful of sand. Then, illusion’s veil is cruelly flung back.

On acknowledging the Raven Prince, Ashalind had lost Thorn and found him simultaneously. Exultance bore her spirits up, but froze in midflight. It was a betrayal. She lowered her lids, hoping that Morragan might not have divined her emotions from her reaction—a hope she knew to be fruitless. He had read her agony as plainly as he might scan a book laid out upon a lectern. His smile was derisive.

Before this meeting, the memory of the Prince’s countenance had been unclear to Ashalind, lost with the image of the gate and other elusive memories. In the light of recollection, one thought tormented her. One more question demanded an answer.

The chamber possessed an interior of coloured marble and stone. Fan-vaulting arced to the ceiling, the spreading ribs of the fans blossoming into carved tracery, while the ceiling surface between the vaults was closely decorated with scalloped rosettes. Narrow lancet windows shed starlight onto a floor of blue and gold tiles. Foliate ornament adorned the oaken wall-panelling.

All the furniture was of oak: a sideboard inlaid with ebony, walnut, box and holly; a painted cabinet on a stand; a great oak table, lesser tables, carved chairs, stools, screens, chests and stands. A jug of wine stood on a mahogany side-cabinet with mother-of-pearl and mirrored panels. Like towering scallop shells, wings of sheer electrum rose behind the head of a silk-draped couch. Massive copper candlesticks upheld waxen columns headed with silver flames.

Water gushed from a fountainhead set into a wall, each jet a chain of diamonds flung through the air until it reached the lower basin. There, it transformed to a turbulence of thrashed crystal, constantly flowing away down some hidden drain, constantly being renewed from the rain-showers above. So pure was the liquid that the marble remained stainless, whiter than sunlight on hawthorn blossom. Each drop, alighting from flight, gave out a pleasant note, imbuing the chamber with melody.

This remarkable chamber was forested with clusters of pillars that proved to be, in fact, living oak trees. They spread wide their boughs, clothed in leaves of bronze and verdigris.

Under these trees, Ashalind and Caitri wandered.

‘The idea never occurred to me,’ said Ashalind slowly, effortfully. ‘How strange. Perhaps it was a side-effect of the geas of the Geata Poeg na Déanainn—incomplete recall. When first I met Thorn, I did not see the resemblance. I had forgotten everything, including the appearance of Morragan, Fithiach of Carnconnor. Later, I recalled much that had befallen me before the hound’s kiss stole my memory in the under-delvings of Huntingtowers. Yet, three aspects of my former life always remained as mist to me. The third, the location of the gate. The second, why I should have chosen, at the last instant, to leave the Fair Realm, to renounce everyone I loved and endure the Langothe in Erith. The first, the face of Morragan, Prince of Ravens. When I saw him again, truly saw him, with vision not overlaid by my desire, that mist cleared. Before it did, I confused him with another, and even now I can scarce tell the two of them apart. How can two lords be so different in disposition and appear almost identical? For one reason only, I surmise, somewhat tardily—and that is—’ she choked on the words, ‘they are brethren.’

‘Impossible,’ said Caitri. ‘The Raven Prince had arranged some glamour on himself, to make us believe him to be His Majesty.’

‘No glamour. You overlook, the Faêran cannot lie. I spoke his name and he responded, “Even so.” And it is so, I assure you, Caitri. I recognised him as Morragan. His countenance returned to me as I had seen it first in the halls of Carnconnor, under Hob’s Hill.’

‘But are you saying that the King-Emperor is an impostor? That he is not James D’Armancourt of the dynasty?’

‘Many secrets I concealed from Thorn,’ said Ashalind, speaking more to herself than to her friend, ‘and many he held from me. Yes, he is an impostor. And for that, I thank fortune, while cursing fate. For my lover is immortal. He lives, and I can never cease to love him, meanwhile hating the Faêran race whose blood is his. I am reviled, for becoming the game-piece of such a one, and worse than that, for being so foolish as to love him still, even when apprised of the truth. The King-Emperor of Erith, he who I know as Thorn, is in fact none other than the elder brother of Morragan—Angavar, High King of the Faêran.’ Tears striped her beautiful face like glass ribbons.

‘Impossible,’ argued Caitri again. ‘His Majesty’s birth would have been witnessed, as are all Royal births. He was raised in the public eye, as are all Royal children.’

‘I cannot guess how or when the substitution was accomplished. I do know that there is very little which is beyond the grasp of the Faêran, should they so desire it.’

It surged over Ashalind with redoubled force, the comprehension that Thorn was alive; more than that—he could never die. Ecstasy and aching sorrow collided like two worlds crashing together in a void.

With that, both girls lay down on the winged couch and sobbed inconsolably, until there were no more tears left to weep.

As the hypnotic fume of sleep finally seeped through her brain, Ashalind whispered, ‘I hope with all vehemence that Via has escaped unharmed.’ But Caitri’s eyes were already closed, her lashes two crescents of dark cinnibar, and she was breathing gently.

Time was measureless in Darke, there being no days to mark the passing of it, no seasons to weigh the pendulum of the year. Ashalind and Caitri woke to find the chamber of the oaks unaltered, save that gleaming raiment now hung on the trees.

For Caitri there was an armazine kirtle the colour of a robin’s egg, a houppelande of blue velvet stitched with white nightingales, a girdle of pearls, a cloak lined with rich taffeta and a headdress of silver lace sporting ibis feathers stuck all over with pearls. For Ashalind, a kirtle of patterned baudekyn with narrow sleeves long enough to cover, in part, the backs of her hands, and a tight-bodiced overgown of velvet the colour of the Summer seas, richly fretted with gold. The sleeves of the gown, cut in the bag pattern, were buttoned closely around the elbows. There was also a black velvet cloak powdered with golden lilies, lined with blue satin and fastened with a gem-crusted band upon two sapphire-studded morses. Her costume was completed with a jewelled torque, an elaborate girdle wrought like a chain of lilies, a crespine headdress of gold wire, and a long veil of silver gauze to flutter over her ink-dyed hair, down her back.

The two damsels examined the garments and accoutrements but did not don them.

‘I do not care for bathing or dressing in this place,’ said Caitri. ‘I feel as if eyes are watching.’

Discreetly, they laved their hands and feet in the wall-fountain. The white enamelled bird on Ashalind’s gold bracelet seemed to flutter helplessly.

‘How I kept my father’s gift with me over all the long leagues, I do not know,’ she sighed. ‘It is the one token left to me that I wear blithely. I’ll not wear Faêran gifts,’ she added, but as soon as she had spoken, a flock of crows flew out of the oaks and set upon her, pecking and scratching at her clothes. The travel-stained garb of Appleton Thorn began to fray and unravel. Squawking, the birds flew off.

‘Not only are eyes watching, but ears are listening,’ fumed Caitri, struggling to help Ashalind into the gold-threaded kirtle before the rags fell from her back. ‘Alas you have no tilhal, and mine was torn from my throat by the wicked abductors of the Hunt. Did those birds harm you sorely just now?’

‘Oddly, I remain unscathed,’ answered Ashalind. ‘But alas, that we are subject to such indignities.’

‘Shall you soon recall the location of this Gate, that we may go free?’

‘Even should I recall it,’ said Ashalind, pushing her arms through the bag-sleeves of the gown, ‘the Faêran have issued no guarantee that they would free us. No promise has been given—only an impression. Equivocation is a specialty of that race. If anyone has been tutored on that subject, it is I.’

‘It is of no use to look for escape, I suppose.’

‘None at all. There is potent gramarye at work here and Morragan is the master of it.’

‘Poor Via. I wonder where she is,’ mused Caitri. ‘Will Tiggy take good care of her?’

‘If he has learned to cease hiding in pools.’

‘Where will he take her?’

‘Maybe across the Landbridge, to where the Royal Legions are encamped …’

‘I still cannot credit that the King-Emperor is in truth the Faêran High King disguised,’ muttered Caitri, fastening the sapphire buttons at Ashalind’s elbows.

‘Aye, ’tis a bitter cup to quaff, Cait. I find it hard to swallow. I pictured Morragan’s elder brother as a greybeard of middle years. I was forgetting that the Faêran show no sign of age unless they wish it. Both brethren have lived for centuries.’

It struck home to Ashalind now, for the first time fully, and the recognition of it was like a dousing with ice water. Thorn was indeed the King, the High King of the Fair Realm, the mightiest of the most mighty race was he, and powerful beyond the reach of Men. The winds, the seas, the rain, the thunder and lightning, all were subject to the governance of Thorn-Angavar. The birds and beasts, the insects, the trees and flowers, the very rocks must heed his command. All wights must give him obeisance, even the most feared and unseelie. In the entirety of Aia, he was matchless. Only his brother came close. The High King of the Faêran himself had once, long ago it seemed, stood looking down at the face of a deformed damsel, on the road to White Down Rory, and he had said—

‘… what would you truly ask of me?’

The thought flashed, unbidden: A kiss. She hoped he had not read it on her countenance. In her confusion, her hands faltered, bungling the signs.

<<I would like to tell you with my voice that I wish for your blessing on my enterprise. I go now to the carlin who dwells here in the hope that she might heal my face—restore something of what I was—I ask your good wishes for this undertaking.>>

He nodded and stood a moment as if pondering. Then swiftly, before she understood what was happening, he stepped forward, placed one hand gently under her chin and the other behind her head, and kissed her full on the mouth.

Only twice before had there been direct contact between them. Now, bolts like the Beithir’s, only sweet as ecstasy, went through and through from head to toe, over and over, until she thought she must die; then he released her quickly and strode away up the hill, and she fled, stumbling, weeping, through the trees.

It had been Angavar himself who had placed his hand upon her throat, upon her mute and mutilated throat, once rendered voiceless by the lash of the duergar’s eldritch whip. He had put his mouth fiercely and gently upon hers, with a kiss of piercing sweetness so agonising that it seared every nerve—a kiss scarcely to be borne, almost death to mortals. By this kiss he had bestowed the gift for which she had expressed desire—the healing of her face. It had been he, not the carlin, who had restored her former beauty—and more. The restoration had also enhanced her natural excellence, infusing it with a symmetry distilled from gramarye.

She knew at last that hers was a beauty only a Faêran King could bestow.

And the kiss of the Faêran sovereign was potent as all the forces of nature. Its healing virtues left an unlooked-for legacy, and from that day forth, dreams had returned to Rohain-Ashalind—memory beginning its long awakening. Thorn had intended to make her face and voice whole once more, yet being no less than a sovereign remedy, his power had flowed on, finally overcoming the greater part of the geas of the Geata Poeg na Déanainn.

How the winds had unseasonably raged, after Thorn’s men had failed to discover Ashalind at White Down Rory! Disguised by altered countenance and persona, she had fled on foot and by carriage, to dwell at the Palace. The cutlery had rattled, the corridors had howled, the doors had crashed off their hinges in the turbulence of his fury—the Faêran King’s intent was foiled, he having lost her. In their beauty, their power and arrogance, the Faêran were unaccustomed to being denied. With storms, he had given vent to his ire.

For he could govern the storms.

It was the essential nature of the Faêran to wield elemental powers. Their sovereign was intrinsically the Lord of all Weather-Lords. In hindsight it was easy to recall how he had worked the weather when it suited him, bringing days of idyllic sunshine when they went hawking in the Forest of Glincuith. When out riding, she would laugh up at him, flushed from the exertion, and a wine-gold breeze would fan her face, catching up his Faêran hair of black fire. Once, she had praised the loveliness of rain-showers, only to hear droplets beginning to tap like the hooves of tiny goats dancing on the roofs. In those days the weather had pleased her, had responded blithely to her whims.

During their first journey together, the signs had been plain to read, if only she had noted them. It had been Angavar-Thorn who summoned the Vector-dispersing winds in Mirrinor, who had healed Diarmid’s hurts in Rosedale, who had inspired open admiration in the habitually shy trows dancing under the moon near Emmyn Vale.

If only she had revealed her entire story to him he might have returned to her all that she had lost, then and there—face, voice, complete memory, release from the latent Langothe. But then—what? She would have recalled the Gate’s location and shown Angavar-Thorn the way to return to his Realm. He might have left his mortal playthings in Erith, and never would those days of sharp joyousness at Caermelor have come to pass; those rare, incomparable days she clung to in memory.

It was clear to Ashalind that he had known nothing of who she was, during that period. Even to the hour of their final parting and beyond, he had suspected naught. Had he learned her history, he would certainly have seized the earliest opportunity to quiz her.

How much had he now discovered? Did he believe Morragan pursued her merely to punish her for the crime of eavesdropping, or was he aware she had passed through a Gate from the Realm and might possibly find a way back?

Yet for all his might, Thorn-Angavar had been sundered from Ashalind a second time. Morragan had sent the Crows of War to breach the barriers of Tamhania and stir its submarine forces to explosive rage. After the destruction of the Isle of Mists, what then for the King of the Fair Realm? Why had he not sought high and low for his betrothed, employing his dominion over land, sea and sky to reach her? Was her subterfuge so effective, or was it that he cared no longer?

Caitri sat at a marquetry dressing-table laden with pots of jewelled hairpins. She gazed into the looking-glass while Ashalind combed out her malt-brown hair. Raking and untangling the little girl’s knotted locks, Ashalind began to uncoil her memories of Thorn—the words which had been spoken and the words left unsaid.

My Dainnan name is Thorn, he had stated at their first meeting, in the forest of Tiriendor. Never had he claimed the name of James D’Armancourt. His amazing looks and magnetism, his hunting prowess, his skill in every field, the way the goshawk and indeed all birds and beasts bent to his will—these attributes had once, long ago in the wetlands of Mirrinor, led Ashalind to suspect Thorn of possessing Faêran blood. Using the handspeak she had communicated this conjecture to Diarmid, who had rejected it.

<<The elder race, the … >> She had no sign for ‘Faêran’. <<Fair Folk, the immortals. Is it possible he is of their blood?>>

‘The Fair Folk? Ha! Such immortals passed into legend long ago. Besides, like wights, they could not stand the touch of cold iron. Sir Thorn wields a steel blade, steel-barbed arrows—his belt buckle too, I’ll warrant, is of the same metal. Nay, I’ve no doubt he is a mortal man, but such a man—one of no ordinary ilk. A man for men to follow. Perhaps a wizard, I know not. But ’tis not couch to speak of him this way, behind his back, as it were—I will not discuss this further.’

Therein lay the conundrum—if cold iron was anathema to the Faêran, how might Faêran royalty be immune to it? Was their power mighty enough to thwart their own nature?

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ petitioned Caitri.

‘Oh. I was thinking about the Faêran. About Thorn—that is, the King-Emperor.’

‘Never berate yourself for your love of him,’ said Caitri. ‘Methinks you had little choice in the matter. All the Strangers are beautiful beyond description. My mother used to tell me stories of them. Their effect upon humankind is that we are bound to love them. The more they choose to reveal of themselves, the more we must love them. Ever have our kind been drawn to theirs. And sometimes it is the other way around.’

Each mental vision of Thorn was a spark, touching off a conflagration of joy and pain. He lives! But he is Faêran—my love, my sorrow, my enemy.

‘All unions between mortal and immortal are doomed to end in tragedy,’ Ashalind murmured aloud. A tear dropped, glistening, from her eye.

Before it touched Caitri’s hair it had been captured, and lay on an open palm.

On Morragan’s hand, the tear hardened to diamond. He closed his fist then tossed the jewel into the air, whereupon a white seabird opened its wings and flew away.

‘A tear for Angavar,’ softly said the Raven Prince, revealed in the mirror like a flame of darkness. ‘Prey for the Eagle.’

Caitri jumped to her feet, upsetting the stool.

The dressing-table now stood in a glade of an oak wood by moonlight. Gone were the chests, the stands, the cabinets. Gone were the walls. The ceiling had soared skyward to become the fantastic vault of Evernight. Vanished, too, was the gushing wall-spout, yet its music remained in the songs of nightingales hidden among the leaves.

The stars overhead shone so brilliantly that their radiance fell from the sky like the dilute rays of a silver sun. In long spindle-shafts it struck through the pavilions of the oak wood. The mists which braided themselves like twine among the tree-stems filled each shaft with slowly uncurling smokes.

Carpets of nodding bluebells hazed the ground between the knotted roots, and from them seemed to emanate a dim, supernal ringing, as of miniature bells. Under the scalloped layers of foliage a sweet wind breathed upon the wild thyme cushioning the banks. Ox-lips and violets nodded there, lushly overhung with woodbine and perfumed musk roses. A company of lords and ladies reclined on these flowery banks or strolled beneath the boughs. Some wore gorgeous raiment, others were clad only in nakedness, adorned by the beauty of their bodies, ornamented by flowing hair pleached with flowers. Many were Faêran—to these, a soft glimmer clung, like candlelight on crystal. The rest were otherwise.

Ashalind and Caitri stared.

Yallery Brown was present, and Gull, the Spriggan Chieftain, once glimpsed long ago by Ashalind in the marketplace at Gilvaris Tarv. Bigger than the rest of his kind was he, a full three and a half feet in height. His child’s size belied his strength, for he wielded a long-bow almost twice as tall as himself, drawing it without effort to shoot at small songbirds amongst the branches. Present also was the malignant Each Uisge in mail like the delicate silver scales of fish, and a mantle the colour of seaweed. A fillet of pearls adorned the sleek horse-hair mane which framed the frigid and charming face, as pale as death, as cold as the underbelly of a lamprey.

Flanking the Prince of Waterhorses, two dour and doughty men in ragged plaid and thick calf-hide each held a pike twined with dripping red filaments of spirogyra. Water streamed from their garments. Their eyes were blank as stones. Ashalind recognised them as two of the Each Uisge’s mortal slaves, sons of tragedy, Iainh and Caelinh Maghrain. Another waterhorse she also recognised at once, a dark-haired young fellow with fine, pointed ears half hidden by his dark curls. Noting her eyes upon him, the Glastyn bowed, unsmiling. This unseelie wight had failed to identify Morragan’s quarry when he intruded with malevolent intent upon the cottage of Silken Janet at Rosedale, for her golden hair had been hidden from his sight. On that night, he had knocked at the door …

Instinctively she drew her taltry over her head, pulling it forward so that her appalling visage was blotted out under a cowl of shadow.

Louder this time—three blows landed on the door. Imrhien drew the bolts and opened it.

Only the thickness of a taltry had intervened between freedom and capture, for certainly the Glastyn would have reported at once to the Crown Prince, had he spied the Talith glint of her locks.

Additional ill-met acquaintances loitered with this eldritch company in the oak wood, including a slender young knight clad in white linen buckled over with silver plate and chain mail. Milky streamers of mist issued languorously from the short clay pipe he was smoking. As dark as depravity streamed his hair, and his eyes were the shade of blackthorn fruits. The comely face of this knight was stamped with the look of a brilliant poet doomed to an early grave. The bane of mortal women was he—Young Vallentyne, who had condemned Viviana to a lingering death.

Succulent damsels lolled among the bluebells. None appeared to be above the age of seventeen. Some played a game, tossing a golden ball. Here were some of the feminine counterparts of ganconers—the lhiannan-shee, customarily invisible to all except the mortal men they ensorcelled, and the seductive baobhansith, less subtle and more voracious in their lethal arts. They all passed for human women, if one did not scrutinise them too closely. At first sight they appeared lovely, clad in gorgeous raiment—gowns made from a fabric of living leaves, or from the skeletons of leaves laced together; bodices fashioned of cobwebs laid like silver lace over dark grey mole fur, feathered hats inhabited by owls, leather cloaks clasped at the shoulder by silver cockroaches and beetles with clicking mandibles, chinking ankle-chains and bracelets made from the tiny, gilded skulls of mice or frogs with peridots for eyes, plated earwigs swinging from ear lobes. Neat were the waists of these lovesome girls, graceful their necks and dainty their hands, but now and then, the swish of a hem would reveal a talon or paw where one would have expected a slim white ankle; or the toss of a pretty head would show, beneath the richly coiffed hair, the tufted points of fox’s ears. A raising of lids might uncover the slit-pupilled eyes of a basilisk or a cat. A tasselled girdle trailing from beneath a petticoat might suddenly twitch, betraying itself as a tail.

As part of this assembly, pointy-eared spriggans and hobyahs crouched like toadstools. And, deep in the grey shadows of the wood, a horseman of massive stature, with an antlered head, rode down an aisle between the trees.

Half the members, at least, of the Unseelie Attriod are gathered here with Morragan. Has he become the leader of this Elite Septet of Unseelie, in the same fashion as his brother leads the Royal Attriod, the Chosen Heptad of mighty mortals? Only three of the Nightmare Princes are absent—the Cearb, who is named the Killing One, Cuachag of the Fuathan and the monstrous Athach. Mayhap these wicked lords, too, bide not far away.

Behind Prince Morragan’s shoulder stood his cup-bearer and his bard. At the bard’s neck a slender, diamond-patterned python stared with garnet eyes, and at his belt hung a set of wooden pipes. As soon as she set eyes on the quaint instruments, Ashalind knew them to be those which had once belonged to Cierndanel, Royal Bard to the Faêran. They were the Pipes Leantainn, the very pipes which had first brought grief to Hythe Mellyn and later bestowed power upon the sire of the wizard Korguth in Gilvaris Tarv. Memories of childhood twisted her belly, and a cry escaped her.

A swan-girl lay at the feet of the Prince. Three other swan-maidens mingled with the gathering—one of them, Ashalind noted with astonishment, was Whithiue, crowned with a circlet woven of eglantine. As Morragan’s glance flicked over her, Whithiue curtsied deeply and gave a secretive smile.

Yallery Brown spoke up.

‘My liege,’ he offered, ‘only give me leave and I will wring the recollection of the Gate from the skull of the cochal-eater. When her creamy flesh encounters fire and blade and rope, perhaps her memory may be jolted.’ He threw a rat into Caitri’s lap. It bit her, and she flung it into the banks of thyme. Startled deer jumped from the shadows but did not flee. A silver fox pounced on the hapless rat and ran away with the rodent dangling from its jaws.

‘What wouldst thou do with my fair and forgetful captive, Brown?’ idly inquired the Prince.

The wight outlined his proposition, sparing no detail.

‘Inventive,’ commented the Prince when the wight had finished. ‘Invention deserves a reward. Gull, shoot down yonder pigeon, and Yallery Brown’s it shall be.’

Scowling gleefully, the squint-eyed Spriggan Chieftain raised his longbow, notched an arrow and loosed it. The dart hit the bird, which dropped, still fluttering, into a bank of flowering brambles.

‘Go and fetch it,’ said Morragan to Yallery Brown. The wight stepped into the brambles and picked up the dead bird.

‘Play for me a merry jig, Ergaiorn,’ Morragan said to his bard. ‘I would fain see some dancing.’

The Faêran musician put the pipes of Cierndanel to his lips and began to blow.

Long ago, the music issuing from those pipes had spoken irresistibly. To the rats of Hythe Mellyn, it had described enticing scenes of gluttony. Then, to the citizens the pipes had tendered a different air, promising ponies, swings and sandcastles, hoops and whistles. No man or woman had hearkened to it but they had wept, for they were swept back to the lost days of childhood. However, their feet were glued to the ground. No child heard it but they must cease their games and follow in quest of enchantment and delight. A generation ago these same instruments had forced the citizens of Gilvaris Tary to leap about until they begged for mercy.

Now in the halls of Annath Gothallamor the pipes of Cierndanel played a fast and mirthful tune which set to dancing every wight who heard it. Only the Faêran and Ashalind seemed immune to this enchantment, although Ashalind’s leg ached where it had been broken when she was thrown from her pony as a child. Involuntarily, Caitri jumped up. She began to skip and hop with the rest, a look of astonishment stamped upon her face. Amongst the brambles, Yallery Brown let the pigeon fall, and began to jig and caper. The louder the pipes played, the higher he leaped, and the more the thorns tore his garments and pierced his flesh, ripping to shreds his jacket and breeches. Black blood gushed from his legs and arms. Ergaiorn played all the faster, and seeing the distress of Brown, the spriggans shouted with laughter as they pranced.

‘Gentle Highness,’ gasped the unfortunate wight, ‘prithee, bid Lord Ergaiorn cease ere your servant perishes! Let me go and I swear I shall never again offend you.’

‘How have you offended me?’ casually asked Morragan.

‘I perceive now that Your Highness would not have me torment the captive.’ The wight ended his frantic statement on a scream of agony.

‘Jump out on the other side,’ said Morragan with a silencing gesture to his bard, ‘and get thee gone.’ Yallery Brown made all haste, fleeing into the wood, pursued by the jeering of the spriggans, for the thorns had stripped him almost naked and he was covered in his own blood.

As soon as the music ceased, the spell shattered.

While the wightish dancers fanned themselves with pigeons’ wings after their exertions, a diminutive figure offered Ashalind a cup of midnight wine.

‘Tak’ a wee drap, lass. ’Twill gie ye courage.’

‘Oh, Tully!’ Caitri exclaimed breathlessly, in joy and surprise. Without a word Ashalind accepted the cup, drank, and passed it to her young friend. Witnessing the wight’s torture had sickened her—still her stomach churned.

‘I’m free tae come and go,’ explained the urisk, ‘at His Royal Highness’s pleasure. He bears me no ill will, if he notes me at all.’

‘What news of Viviana?’ asked Ashalind, quickly.

‘The young lass at this moment bides safely among the tents of the King-Emperor’s Legions.’

‘Good tidings indeed!’

‘I wish we might join her. Can you help us escape?’ asked Caitri.

‘Nay, lass,’ the urisk said with compassion. ‘There’s naught a little fellow like me can do. ’Tis laid on me that I may not e’en bear a message for ye. I can do naught aboot it.’

The Raven Prince set his boot against the marquetry dressing-table and overturned it with a crash. The high-backed mirror, instead of shattering, liquefied. Pots of jewelled hairpins spilled to become a confetti of flowers growing around a pool of water, lustrous as burnished platinum. Taking Ashalind by the elbow, Morragan drew her to the pool’s edge, the pressure of his fingers sending arrhythmic shocks of delight through her heart’s chambers.

‘Kneel,’ he said, and she must obey. She looked down through the gleaming meniscus.

Caught through the network of internal forces and currents and intersliding surfaces of the water were shifting impressions of the mighty, ponderous cycle in which each droplet churned forever—the great levees of blowing clouds like stately galleons, the slant of rain falling through a thousand feet of charged air, the dazzle of raindrops splitting asunder as they struck the world’s upturned face, the effervescent tumble down stony gullies, the slow surge and pull of tides, the mist rising like ghostly herons from the sea. The water held its memories in the same way human histories were preserved by the shang.

Morragan spoke to the water.

‘Reveal.’

Reflections of leaves and stars drifted. Their images warped, blurring as the surface shivered. When it cleared, the pool displayed an entirely different landscape.

Arcdur.

Before Ashalind’s eyes unfolded the land of stone and pine, of water and cloud, of jumbled stones and scree slopes, where constant rain and wind swept the rocks clean. Only in the deepest cracks the mosses grew, and the tenacious roots of the blue-green arkenfir. The dove-grey stacks and chimneys rising hundreds of feet high were blemished only by patches of aquamarine lichen and interrupted only by the dark green of fir trees. Wind through the chinks in the formations chanted a threnody in counterpoint to the song of the chuckling, chiming rivulets.

The scene moved and changed, as if the mirror-pool were a roving eye seeking this way and that through the monoliths and piles. Impelled, Ashalind could not look away. It seemed the pool widened like the eye’s pupil, engulfing the edges of vision until Ashalind thought herself propelled, a disembodied watcher, through the fissures and gorges of Arcdur, by the high ways and the profound.

‘Seek,’ said a voice like flawless steel, inside her head. ‘Seek the Gate!’

There seemed to be a barrier to her searching. Time and again, there would come an impulse, a surge, almost, of recognition of a certain pebble or the set of a rocky outcrop. It would seem as though she glided with confidence towards this, only to be met with a wall of glass, slowly clouding from transparency to opacity, and the familiarity of the location would alter to confusion.

After a long time, dizziness overcame Ashalind. She tried to close her eyes, with no success. She tried to disengage herself from these rocky sites but was unable to do so.

‘Let me go,’ she said. ‘I cannot find it.’

A scudding wind blew thistledown across her face. Like a receding tunnel, the frame of her vision shrank. Pink stone, pine trees and blue-green lichen faded. Against a sable sky, canopied oak leaves and distant stars shimmered in the mirror-pool. Puffs of thistledown hovered and a black feather boated on its own reflection.

Released from the spell, Ashalind shook back her hair.

A little way off, the Crown Prince leaned upon a gnarled oak bole, surrounded by the Faêran, his handsome face as grim and brooding as a wintry mountain. For a while he stood in thought, silent in the moonlight, while those around him waited. And then with a sudden impulsive burst of violence he smote the tree with a mighty blow that broke it in twain, sending the trunk and boughs crashing to the ground. Yet already, touched by a Faêran hand, the embedded roots were sending up new green shoots.

‘Anon,’ said the Prince, ‘thou shalt seek again, Elindor.’

Ashalind remained kneeling among the pin-flowers at the poolside.

‘He has set his seal on thee,’ the Prince continued, ‘and thus I am unable to bring thee by my power to full recollection. Only thou, or he, can do that. Approach me.’

She walked to where he leaned. He bent his handsome head to her, and his long hair fell forward, sliding softly against her face with a caress as light as a moth’s wing, as exhilarating as passion.

‘Finding the Gate shall be to thy benefit, Elindor, and mine. ’Tis my desire to take thee with me into the Realm.’

‘And should I find the Gate and open it,’ boldly said she, ‘who else shall pass through it, and who shall remain in Erith?’

Caitri caught her breath nervously. Fear rippled amongst the courtiers, causing some to shudder, but Morragan replied, with a hint of derision, ‘What dost thou augur?’

Like the others, Ashalind was afraid of him, but recklessness born of futile anger at her enforced subjugation made her speak out.

‘I presume ’twill be those of your company who find favour with you. I’ll warrant you shall have no qualms at leaving your brother to languish in exile.’

‘As he endeavoured to exile me, and, so doing, ironically received the same punishment?’ He smiled wonderfully. ‘My brother has chosen to lord it among mortalkind. Let him persevere.’

‘No …’

‘Dost hope for his exile, Elindor, that I may leave him here in Erith for thee? It appears thou didst delude thyself into some attachment, believing him mortal, but how does so-called love permit such secrecy? Why should he not undeceive thee, if he truly loved thee? Make no mistake, he who masquerades as mortal, calling himself Thorn, is indeed my brother. Angavar, High King is he, my twin, the elder by a heartbeat or two. Heir to the Realm by virtue of an accident of time—the Fortunate Son.’

He gave her a long, slow look as if awaiting some response.

‘Yes. This must be so,’ she said. ‘I know it to be no falsehood. And yet I am at a loss as to how such a strange thing might have come to pass.’

A flock of huge ravens swept low through the glade. One, cawing, alighted on a bough near the Prince. Morragan observed it for a moment. Something seemed to pass between the Faêran and the bird. Then the Prince nodded.

‘Thine orders are clear,’ he said. ‘Prepare for battle.’ The raven spread out its glossy wings and departed like hope. Morragan returned his attention to Ashalind.

‘The mirror now displays time past. Gaze upon it.’ He made as if to throw something into the water, but if anything left his hand, it was not to be seen.

A second time the pool’s surface trembled, its frame expanded. For the space of a wingbeat, it seemed that a solemn face looked up out of the depths—the green-haired loveliness of an asrai water-witch. Then a fog blew away like torn cobwebs, or curtains parting on a theatre stage. The scene: a forest of elm, yew and birch. Dew upon the leaves. The primrose light of early morning dappling the grass like fallen petals of the sun. A sea-sound of rustling leaves, the pipes and bells of bird-song. Then, lashing across this tranquillity like the edge of a crimson whip, the stridor of a hunting-horn …

In the year 45 William, King-Emperor of Erith, went hunting one morning from his lodge in Glincuith Forest. The young King, though inclined to brashness and somewhat foolhardy, was brave and strong and he rode the best hunter in Erith. By midday he, following his dogs, had—unintentionally or otherwise—outdistanced his lords and huntsmen. Reining in his steed he found himself alone in a forest glade which gave onto a spacious clearing.

Without warning a magnificent stag flashed across the glade. Close behind it ran a pack of hounds so bizarre they were like no beasts that William had ever seen. Their coats glistened with a silver-whiteness purer than winter frost, and when the sunlight flickered on them through the elms their ears glowed as crimson as forge coals.

In an instant William and his own pack had reached the clearing. The outlandish hounds had already brought down the stag but William drove them off and set his own dogs onto the wounded beast. He ought to have known these were no lorraly creatures and that it would have been prudent not to meddle with them, but in his haste he was careless.

He jumped down, pulled back the head of the dying stag and slit its throat. At the same time there came riding into the glade a tall stranger clothed in dark green, mounted on a splendid grey stallion. The stranger reined in his steed.

‘William D’Armancourt of Erith,’ he said, ‘I know you well enough, but I give you no greeting. Never before have I beheld a man of Royalty and good renown stoop to a deed so unworthy, so discourteous it can scarce be credited. Be assured—although I will not condescend to avenge this wrong by harming your person, yet I intend, nonetheless, to bring disgrace upon you.’

William looked up at the speaker. In his life, he had never known fear, yet meeting that wrathful gaze he was severely shaken. His discomfiture was compounded by humiliation and embarrassment.

‘Lord,’ said he, uneasily, ‘I am most eager to make reparation for my churlishness, and would fain win your goodwill.’

‘By what means?’ asked the stranger.

‘If you will give me your name, I will try to find an appropriate method,’ William replied.

The tall rider answered, ‘Angavar, High King of the Fair Realm, am I called.’

Then William was in no doubt about the peril he faced.

‘Greatest of sovereigns, I wish you well,’ he said. ‘I understand now that I have offended no mortal huntsman, but the most powerful of all Lords of Gramarye. I beg you to bid me do anything within my power and I shall do it, in order to regain your high regard and be of accord with you.’

‘In that case, hearken,’ said the Faêran King. ‘In the Realm of Faêrie I am plagued by the Waelghast, who is Lord of the Unseelie Host. My power is greater than his, for as you know well, I am mightier than any wight, man or Faêran in Aia. Despite this he is forever trying to contend against me, and his followers challenge my knights without cease. In his folly he boasts to his entourage that I shall never overthrow him.

‘It has been decided that once in every Erithan year he and I shall encounter one another in a duel, and the winner shall be proclaimed the stronger. Already we have met once. We are to clash again, twelve of your months from this very morn. I commission you to do duty for me in that contest. If you will do this, I shall put upon you the semblance of myself, and send you forthwith to the Fair Realm, in my place. There, neither Faêran nor wight nor mortal visitor will guess it is not myself who comes home from the hunt. The glamour I will put on you cannot be penetrated by their arts.’

‘Yet, if you have not prevailed in this duel,’ said William, ‘how shall I?’

‘There is one way only. With your first blow you will sorely wound the Waelghast. He will fall to his knees and cry mercy, begging you to deal him a second stroke to release him from the torment of his agony. He will be in the form of a fair and chivalrous knight, and by his words he will try to elicit your compassion. Once I submitted to his appeal, and there is a good chance I will do the same next time. Under no circumstances must you be persuaded, however. Smite him a second time and he will arise whole once more. Deliver a single stroke only, and peace shall reign again.’

‘Must Erith be ungoverned while I reside in Faêrie?’

‘As I will give you my aspect, so I will take yours. In your stead I will go this day to Caermelor, and none will suspect I am not William D’Armancourt.’

William looked down at the noble stag whose throat he had cut. No longer did it sprawl on the greensward with the blood pumping from its neck like a welter of rubies. Its hide was whole once more, white as innocence. Clambering upright, it walked to Angavar and nuzzled his hand.

‘A stag of Faêrie,’ said Angavar. ‘They are bred to the chase. Countless times have I hunted this beast and much sport has he given me.’ To the beast he said, ‘Go thou, Royal Cervidus. The Gate is open.’ Then to William he said, ‘Make haste—we ride this hour. We must reach the outskirts of the Fair Realm before sunfall.’

Together they cantered across the countryside. William was not aware of passing through any Gate, but as the sun slid near the horizon, he perceived that the landscape had altered, and he knew he rode within the Fair Realm.

As soon as they approached within view of a mighty, ancient forest they drew rein. William looked across at the Faêran King and saw himself, astride his own horse. He glanced down, and saw the form of Angavar mounted on the grey stallion. In his amazement, his breath caught in his chest for an instant, and his heart jumped.

‘Your new abode lies before you,’ said Angavar. ‘Return to the Forest of Glincuith in a year and a day. There I will meet you, and we shall revert to our true shapes.’

‘Tarry a moment!’ said William suddenly. ‘One troublous matter has occurred to me. When I fight, my left hand is the dominant. You people will note this …’

‘Fear not,’ said Angavar, ‘your handedness could not be more appropriate. I, too, am sinistral. Now, ride forth.’

They took their leave of one another and Angavar seemed somehow to melt into the woodlands. William, however, with the white hounds following in his wake, rode into the ancient forest.

Here was the abode of Angavar. It was a palace, but not after the fashion of the palaces of mortal Kings. Aisles of growing trees formed the corridors and halls. The chambers were greenwood bowers, hung with leaves and flowering vines instead of tapestries; floored with living mosses instead of carpets, and in places, with smooth, natural slate. This royal dwelling place was open to the sky, yet it was apparent that rain never spoiled the interior. It was lit by stars of extraordinary brilliance and by lamps hung in the trees, and by luminous flying insects. No form of comfort was lacking.

The Faêran lords and ladies welcomed him as the High King. They themselves waited on him, fetching rose-scented water for bathing, and wine for his refreshment. The dusty hunting garments they removed from him, replacing them with raiment of green and gold. Then he sat down to feast in a magnificent hall, wherein was provided every luxury a man’s dreams could invent.

A company of noble lords and ladies occupied the table with William. Their voices were clear and melodious as mountain waters; their faces were fairer far than those of mortalkind, and they were dressed in the richest costumes of gold and green and silver, glittering with gems. Glamoured as they were by the power of Angavar that clung about the interloper, even the greatest among them did not know William for a mortal man, and perhaps this was also a jest on the part of the Faêran High King.

Thus William ruled as High King in the Fair Realm, and so greatly did he relish that year that it fleeted past like a stag before the hunt.

The day for his encounter with the Unseelie Lord drew nigh, and the entire Fair Realm began to seethe in a state of excitement.

The duel was to take place at a river crossing. There, the Faêran companies met the Unseelie Host, and in front of this mighty gathering, one of Angavar’s knights cried loudly, ‘This is no quarrel between kindreds, but between our leaders. Hence, let an oath be sworn amongst us that we shall not offer battle to one another. Instead we shall accept the result of their combat and acknowledge the one who conquers as the stronger.’

A thundering shout of accord arose from both camps, and the Waelghast and William made ready to fight. As Angavar had foretold, the unseelie adversary appeared as a young knight of noble face and graceful bearing. His sword was buckled on his right side and his lance rest was on his left—in the nature of wights, he could choose to lead with either hand, and preferred to mirror his opponent.

Clad in elegantly sculpted armour, the opponents faced one another from opposite banks of the river and closed their visors. A horn sang loudly. At this signal, they lowered and levelled their lances, braced them firmly in the metal niches under their arms, and urged their horses forward. Glittering jets of water sprayed up from the hooves of their chargers as they pounded towards the middle of the ford. They met with a shock that drove down to the roots of William’s heels, but his aim was true and he held steady. His weapon shattered the boss of the Waelghast’s shield and perforated his body-armour. The tip of the lance entered just below the heart of the unseelie warrior, if such a creature could be said to possess a heart. No doubt the lance of Angavar, wielded by William, was saturated with certain qualities of gramarye, since it could inflict a wound on an eldritch entity of such essential power.

The youthful knight fell from his steed into the shallow river, and his blood mingled with the waters. William leaped from his own charger and stood over him, drawing his sword.

In evident agony the comely youth gazed up at him and cried, ‘Angavar King, I conjure you by all that you hold most dear in the Realm of Faêrie to put me out of my pain. Finish your task. Smite me a second time, and more mightily than before.’

As he gazed upon the young knight, the mortal king was reminded of the vigour, impetuousness and enthusiasm of his own recent years. He recalled many an occasion when he had stumbled at the feet of his fencing-master, or been thrown down by his comrades during a wrestling bout. For an instant he seemed to see himself lying there, reaching out his open palm to ask for help, and pity threatened to stir within his mortal breast.

The instant passed, as William recollected that his defeated opponent was not human but an eldritch wight, who had pleaded with him in the name of everything he loved in the Fair Realm.

He did not allow his stern countenance to betray his wry amusement, mingled with his natural compassion, triumph and horror. Bidding his heart petrify to frozen stone, he thought, Had I been, in truth, the sovereign of this realm, he would have snared me easily with this sad petition. There is nothing here I hold dear. All things that I truly love are in my own mortal world of Erith.

He lowered his blade.

‘Your request,’ he replied levelly, ‘is refused. I will not strike you again.’

Perceiving the steel lacing the King’s eyes, the Unseelie Lord called to his followers and bade them carry him from the ford, for he knew that before sunset all his power would fade and he would thereafter be but a shadow of his former self, a ragged, flapping, almost mindless thing, no greater than the least of eldritch wights.

Thus, with one blow, did William of Erith defeat the Waelghast, fulfilling his promise to Angavar and bringing peace back to the Kingdom of the Faêran. The Unseelie Host knelt before him to pay homage, and celebration blossomed throughout the realm. William, however, did not tarry longer than was necessary. He had kept his word and now his sojourn was at an end; he was eager to return to home and hearth. Excellent beyond description was the Fair Realm; yet it was not home to him.

Alone, he rode away to the Forest of Glincuith, seeking the glade wherein he had first set eyes on the High King of the Faêran. There, beneath the nodding boughs heavy with foliage, a horseman silently waited for him; Angavar, in his true form. Glancing down, William discovered that his own shape was already on him once more.

Their second meeting was in striking contrast to the first. This time the two Kings hailed one another in a spirit of joyous camaraderie. There was no need for Angavar to ask how William had fared in the duel; he was aware of all that had passed in the Fair Realm during his absence. Nevertheless, he listened with delight as William recounted his story, and he laughed, congratulating Erith’s King-Emperor on his success.

‘For my part, I have ensured your kingdom’s prosperity and freedom from strife these past four seasons,’ said Angavar. ‘You may be assured that your subjects have not suffered during your absence.’

‘Sir, I doubt you not!’ said William earnestly. ‘On my life,’ he added, with a grin, ‘I never had such remarkable adventures as I have enjoyed this past year in your domain. I am forever grateful, and I swear friendship to you for as long as I live.’

‘And I to you!’ replied Angavar. ‘Rarely have I encountered a man so worthy of honour. Now we must part, but there is something I must do first, if you are to live contentedly from this hour.’

Placing his hand upon the head of William, he said softly, ‘Forget. Forget desire and delight in the land beyond the stars.’

With that they bade farewell to one another, and William rode with haste to Caermelor. When he arrived his guards saluted him, and his household welcomed him back as though he had only departed that very morning. He exulted at the sight of his people and his home, but he was heedful also, and concealed his happiness.

On the following day he called his advisers together and asked them to tell him how they had liked his rule during the past year. They were silent for a moment, pondering why he should ask such a question, then the most venerable among them said, ‘My liege, since you succeeded to the throne you have ruled justly and effectively, but in the year just past you have displayed greater statesmanship and discretion in all affairs of government than ever before. Not until this year have you hearkened so intently to the wishes of the people, and never to my knowledge have the known lands flourished as well as they do now. Appropriately have your subjects named you William the Wise.’ Bending into a deep bow, he subjoined, ‘May it please Your Majesty to continue to govern as you have governed this past twelvemonth.’

‘I shall honour your request,’ said William. ‘Glad indeed am I to hear your report.’ He looked at the honest faces of the councillors before him and noted the faint signs of perplexity written there. Merriment welled up in him until he could contain and hide it no longer. William was not a man who loved deception, and he had had his fill of it that year. ‘No more secrets,’ said he, laughing aloud, and to the amazement of his advisors he proceeded to recount the tale of his prolonged visit to the Fair Realm, concluding with the wonderful tidings of his alliance with Angavar, High King.

His audience rejoiced, yet they kept it a secret amongst themselves, and it was not revealed until after the King-Emperor’s death many years later. For the rest of his long life, William retained his fast friendship with Angavar. It became their custom to meet from time to time and together hunt the Faêran stag in the Forest of Glincuith. Occasionally they would give presents to one another.

William the Wise did not die until after the great Closing of the Gates between the Fair Realm and Erith. Before the Closing, Angavar gave his mortal friend the Faêran-wrought gift of sildron, and advised him how to manage the shang winds which would be released by the rupturing of the borders between the worlds. After the Closing, Angavar in exile knew that some day he would enter the Pendur Sleep, the more easily to let the centuries roll past. Therefore he gave to William the Coirnéad, a hunting-horn of Faêran craftsmanship, promising his help to him and the sons of the House of D’Armancourt, should they ever sound the horn in sore need.

A silver-clasped hunting-horn, white as milk …

Ashalind’s fingertips disturbed the water’s surface. Where two Kings had stood, one old and frail, receiving a gift from the other, young and straight and strong, now there flickered only a dazzle and a haze. The vision dissipated.

‘Thorn,’ she murmured. Time had not scathed him. He was, then, as she knew him now.

A silver and ivory fish leaped from the pool and flopped among the flowers. Caitri touched it, but it was merely a leaf.

‘The founding of this friendship between royal houses occurred before my birth,’ said Ashalind. ‘I have never heard it told at Court or anywhere else. A thousand years on, the story has been lost to mortal-kind.’

‘Save for a pocketful of learned bards,’ amended Tully.

‘Is the tale true?’ wondered Ashalind.

‘Even so,’ Morragan affirmed sharply.

‘Mistress,’ said Caitri, who had been watching in silence, ‘it seems that the Faêran King was too merciful to refuse the last stroke to his enemy.’

‘Do not make me impatient, little one,’ Morragan said gently to her, and there was that in his tone which struck Caitri dumb. Far off, a cry went up from the heart of the wood and, rising penetrating and high-pitched to the stars, faded and died on the wind. The nightingales abruptly ceased their melodies. The courtiers of the Prince murmured amongst themselves like a breeze through fields of barley, and in this solemn quietude, the Each Uisge broke into a horse-laugh, coarse and savage.

‘There is more,’ continued the Raven Prince, unmoved. ‘Less than a dozen years ago, a time of sore of need arrived for the House of D’Armancourt, provoking the winding of the Coirnéad. Fortunately, my brother must have considered awakening to be a pleasant diversion. Even the Pendur Sleep grows wearisome at last. View the glass anew, gulled bird, and be apprised.’

The depths of the looking-pool swirled and cleared.

They revealed a seascape on a clear night. Waves rolled shorewards, long lines of luminous lace. Two human figures, richly dressed and silhouetted in starlight, were strolling along a slender tongue of land that ran between a freshwater loch and the sea. At the nobleman’s side the Coirnéad swung, yet it was not Thorn who walked along the strand. Here was a strapping young Feohrkind monarch, well favoured, walnut-haired—the prototype, in fact, of young Edward, the son of his body. This then, was the true D’Armancourt heir, King-Emperor James XVI, of mortal blood, and beside him his bonny queen.

The scene unfolded …

When sojourning at Castle Taviscot by the sea, it was the wont of the King-Emperor James XVI and his Queen-Empress to bid their guards and courtiers to leave them, that together they might savour each other’s company in privacy. On this night, as they walked beneath the stars, in love and with no presentiment of danger, they became aware of something coming towards them. Its monstrous shape struck fear into them, but with water on both sides they could deviate neither to the right nor the left, and they knew it was unwise to run from supernatural creatures. A glint of hope lay in putting on a bold face and not showing fear in any way, so the royal couple took courage from one another and went unfalteringly, if not swiftly, forward. As the thing approached, they recognised it with horror. It was Nuckelavee.

The lower part of this unseelie incarnation was like a huge horse with flappers like fish’s fins about his legs. His single eye was red as a dying star. Where the horse’s neck should have arisen, there grew instead the torso of a huge man, with arms that almost reached to the ground. Grossly three feet in diameter was his head, and it kept rolling from one shoulder to the other as if it meant to topple from the neck. The mouth was as wide as a shark’s, and from it issued breath like steam from a boiling kettle. But what to mortals appeared most revolting of all was that not a shred of hide or skin covered the monster’s naked body. Hideously, he was flayed all over. The whole surface of him was red, raw flesh, in which blood, black as tar, ran through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as hawsers, twisted, stretched and contracted as the monster moved.

The King-Emperor placed himself before his Queen, shielding her from Nuckelavee. The couple walked slowly, in utter terror, their hair on end, a cold sensation like a film of ice between their scalps and their skulls, and a cold sweat bursting from every pore. But they knew it was useless to flee, and they murmured to one another that if they had to die, then they would rather die together, facing what slew them, than die with their backs to the foe.

As they pressed on, fear threw their thoughts into confusion, tearing from them the ability to reason soundly. Precisely when it was most needed, they gave no thought to the familiar Coirnéad swinging at the King-Emperor’s side, and its power of summoning help. The King-Emperor recalled only what he had heard of Nuckelavee’s aversion to fresh water, and therefore, led his wife to that side of the road nearest the loch. The appalling moment arrived when the lower part of the head of the monster came abreast of them. Its mouth stretched open like an abyss. Its breath was a forge blast on their faces, the long arms stretched out to seize the mortals. To avoid, if possible, the monster’s clutch, they swerved as near as they could to the freshwater loch.

James stepped into the shallows, kicking up a splash onto the foreleg of the flayed centaur, whereat it gave a snort like the rumble of a landslide, and shied over to the other side of the road. Seizing their opportunity they ran with all their might. The wind of Nuckelavee’s swipe whipped the garments and hair of the mortals as they narrowly evaded the monster’s clutches. Urgent need had they to flee, for Nuckelavee had whirled about and was galloping after them, roaring like a tempest-riven ocean.

A shallow channel meandered across the path ahead. Through it, the excess water of the loch drained into the sea. The couple were aware that if they could only cross the running water they would be secure, so they exerted every fibre to the utmost. Bravely strove the Queen, despite the heavy petticoats that hampered her progress. Her husband bore her up, half carrying her. She struggled, but royal, daintily shod feet were no match for Nuckelavee’s pounding hooves and the monster was gaining ground swiftly.

‘The Coirnéad!’ desperately cried Queen Katharine, knowing in her heart that already it might be too late. James reached for the horn but even now several moments were lost before he was able to grasp it, for all his effort was focused on helping his flagging wife reach the rivulet. As they reached the near bank, the long arms made another attempt to seize them. The couple made a desperate effort to spring to the safety of the other side, but they never reached it. Katharine fell.

Seizing her, Nuckelavee bellowed his triumph, but James jammed the horn to his lips and blew upon it with all his strength, before turning to fight the monster.

Pure and clear, piercing as water crystal the Summons of the Coirnéad rang out.

A wondrous and terrible sound was the call of the Faêran Horn. Even Nuckelavee raised his ghastly flayed head as the full and mellow note lifted to the sky like an awakening of the first dawn. The horn’s music roused the blood of all listeners to leap like the waves of the sea. So stirring was it, it might have summoned the very trees to pull up their roots and walk, or bidden the very stones to burst up from the clay and turn over. Strong and compelling, it carried over hill and vale, water and wood, across the leagues of Erith to a certain green hill.

A tall hill was Eagle’s Howe, and fair, the turf growing over it, dense and green, and a crown of oak, ash and thorn at the summit. A hill guarded by gramarye. In days of yore, men had titled it King’s Howe. This was the resting place elected by Angavar and his exiled knights and ladies at the end of the Era of Glory when, growing weary of Erith, they chose to cease dwelling among men and enter the Pendur Sleep.

Here they slept yet.

Another Faêran hill, far off, had sheltered the followers of Morragan for some centuries—but the Crown Prince had already woken and departed forty years since. Some said that a shepherd named Cobie Will woke him, by accident and by foolishness, believing the knights of Faêrie to be warriors of legend who would lend their strength in times of need. Others would have it that those sleepers were not wakened by any mortal, that they woke of their own purpose, weary of sleeping, and that the horn Will blew was merely one of many accoutrements belonging to them and not an instrument placed there for the summoning of Faêran help by mortals in need.

Whatever the reason, the cavities of Raven’s Howe lay empty. But it was to the vaults of Eagle’s Howe, or King’s Howe, that the urgent summons of the Coirnéad came winging like an eagle-owl on the night wind.

Beneath the verdant swell of the Howe there existed a vast and exalted hall, vaulted with ancient tree roots as thick as saplings. Between the arches of these roots the walls shimmered along living veins of precious metals. Gems winking scarlet and leaf-green tossed back light from the fire in the centre of the chamber. In the dim radiance behind the flames a hundred of the finest horses slept, and sixty couple of hounds. Fuelless, the fire flared like a giant flower fashioned of ripped silk, coloured tangerine and opal. Its soft, red-gold luminance lapped a hundred rich couches draped with padded velvets and cloth-of-gold. Hereon lay, like peerlessly carven tomb-effigies, the sleeping forms of the Faêran nobles who had been exiled with their King on the Day of Closing.

Some were garbed in fantastic armour, which had been wrought in the time since the fateful day of the Closing—harness whose lamellae gleamed with the sheen of nacre or emerald, with the polish of lamplight flaring on snow, of starlight dancing on water, of moonlight imaged in ice or sunset reflected in steel. Some wore half-armours and yet others were clad in finery that seemed stitched from leaves and shadows and stars. As for their faces, helmed or unhelmed, the beauty of all the Faêran lords blazed brighter than all the lights of the universe. Yet, one amongst them blazed more brightly than all the rest combined.

Into the long silence of the Howe’s enchanted dome lunged a bronze spear of disruptive sound. Warm and strong, the Summons of the Coirnéad—‘Awake! Awake!’ as if in echo of the thrilling Call to Faêrie long ago, a millennium past. An instant after the sound reached the hall’s bell-shaped interior, clanging within its shining walls, the Sleepers on their couches stirred. A few raised themselves up on their elbows.

But tardily they roused. Already the most sumptuous couch, occupied when silence ruled, lay deserted. Even before the resonances of the horn’s beseechment had faded from the changeless air, Angavar High King, was present no longer.

Not yet fully awake, the knights of the Fair Realm lapsed into the Pendur Sleep once more.

On a starlit beach many leagues distant from King’s Howe the silver mouthpiece of the Coirnéad was shaken from the lips of James of Erith as Nuckelavee, in the manner of a man cracking a whip, snapped the young King’s spine. The monster’s maw hung open, slavering, ready to clamp down over James and crush the last life from his mortal frame.

Yet at the last instant, the wight was stayed.

A voice thundered across the shore, a voice both dangerous and beautiful. A Word was uttered. A command wrote itself in letters of fire across the firmament.

James felt himself lowered gently to the sea-rinsed sand, his wife Katharine lying beside him. He could not move, could not even turn his head, but there was no pain. The lovely face of Katharine bore no mark of savagery and her eyes remained open. They were grey-brown as driftwood, yet it was as though they had clouded over and she waited somewhere else, hidden behind those clouds. Away in the ocean Nuckelavee splashed and bellowed amid a flood of crimson, his almost-immortality on the brink of annihilation. The vengeance of the left hand of Angavar had been laid upon him.

The Faêran King knelt beside the royal couple.

‘It is too late for thy lady,’ he said to James. ‘Death has taken her beyond the reach of my healing. Thee, I can still cure.’

But James sensed the vitality ebbing from him and glimpsed the same clouds drawing in as he had seen in the eyes of his love, and he considered that he might find her if he searched behind them.

‘Nay, friend,’ he said to Angavar, for there existed a bond between them, although they had never before met, ‘nay, friend, I would not be sundered from my Kate. Allow me now to claim the greatest gift given to mortals. And if thou wouldst aid me for the sake of sworn friendship, promise me only this—take my place, as once you took the place of my longfather William. Remain waking, to protect my son Edward until he comes of age and is crowned King-Emperor. Let Erith believe her sovereign lives, lest she tremble on her foundations, lest war tears her apart again. Keep the Empire whole and well governed until it passes into the hands of my son.’ He gasped for breath and a thin red ribbon unrolled at the corner of his mouth. ‘Have I thy word on’t, Angavar King of Faêran?’

‘On this I give thee my oath, James of Erith,’ said Angavar gently, as the light bled from James’s eyes. ‘I swear it shall be so.’

The bodies of James XVI and Queen Katharine were borne back to King’s Howe upon Faêran steeds. There they remained within the atmosphere of enchantment, untouched by decay, to this day.

Three ripples shimmered across the face of the looking-pool and the exposition melted, subtly, into another …

When James’s retainers came hastening at the call of the Coirnéad, which had reached their ears also, they found—as they supposed—the King-Emperor in disastrous straits. He was lying on the beach, half submerged in bloody sea-foam, the waves surging around him.

‘The monster has slain Kate,’ he said as they carried him from that place. But they never found her remains, only the severed arm of a man, part of a horse’s hoof and some pieces of flesh, skinless, disgusting, washed to shore on the tide.

The best wizards were summoned. Under their auspices—presumably—the King-Emperor recovered his health and vigour. In those first days, with the glamour on him, Angavar perfectly resembled James, but while keeping his vow, Angavar desired to be seen as himself after all, and not to go about masked as another. Over the next years his appearance altered, so gradually that the changes went unnoticed by the populace. Simultaneously, the King’s Heads on the coins of the realm metamorphosed, the statues changed, and in the paintings in all the halls and galleries of Erith, the face of James became, subtly, the countenance of Angavar. It was perceived that the King-Emperor had taken to dying his hair black. Therefore the courtiers, ever followers of Royalty’s fashionable whims, emulated this inspiration.

Only four mortals knew the true identity of the King-Emperor of Erith: the young Prince, the two Dukes, and Alys of Roxburgh.

Edward was only five Summers old at the time of his father’s death. As he matured he was told of the fate of his parents. For a time he grieved sorely, but Angavar laid his hand upon the boy’s shoulder and the grieving was not so hard after that. As he grew, Edward grew also to love this extraordinary lord of gramarye who kept his father’s honour and kingdom intact, according to his pledge.

In the King’s Howe, seven mortals had slept the Pendur Sleep beside Angavar after the Closing. Now he wakened them, to keep company with him during his seasons at Court.

Long ago, before the ways to Faêrie were sealed, before the moment Ashalind had first opened her eyes on the world, Thomas Learmont of Ercildoune and Tamlain Conmor of Roxburgh had dwelled in the Fair Realm.

The Faêran had hearkened to the harping of Thomas and they were enraptured by his bardic skill. Asrhydmai of the Harps entered Erith, to lead him along the Green Road to the Fair Realm and he went not unwillingly. He stayed with the Faêran for a long time, playing and singing for their pleasure at the Faêran Court. It was Asrhydmai who had gifted him with the geas of an ever-truthful tongue, as a reward for his music. Angavar was greatly pleased by Thomas, who became a friend to the Faêran High King.

Tamlain Conmor, Duke of Roxburgh, had also been taken to the Fair Realm before the Closing. Like Thomas, he became a favourite among the Faêran, who loved him for his valour. Dear in comradeship were both these men to Angavar and dearly did they both love the Realm. At the end of their time in Faêrie, Angavar released them from the Langothe, which would have destroyed them, and gave them protection from the ravages of Time. ‘Go ye, Thomas,’ he said. ‘Truth and good fortune go with thee.’ And to Tamlain he said, ‘Take thee thy worthy bride, Alys. My benison shall be upon thee and upon thy firstborn daughter, who was conceived in the marches of Faêrie.’

Yet both men remained loath to sunder themselves forever from that place. When Angavar saw this he said, ‘It need not be so.’ And then Thomas and Tamlain dwelled half in the Realm, half in Erith, for they were under the protection of Angavar and often he invited them to join him in a Rade or hawking party, or at feasting beneath the trees.

Mesmerised by these scenes of long ago, Ashalind, kneeling at the poolside, blinked. A single tear dropped into the water; a single, lucent orb swimming with reflections. Glimmers expanded.

The revelations resumed …

The Lady Rosamonde, conceived in Faêrie, was born to the House of Roxburgh, and after that three more bairns. Those years before the Closing were years of great happiness. But after Prince Morragan caused the ways to be sealed, the Bard and the Knight felt it in their hearts bitterly. They could not endure the thought of never more beholding the Realm. For, having walked upon the greensward of that land, having been caressed by its winds and breathed the storm’s-breath, wild and Springtime-blossom scent of it, they could not bear to dwell on in an Erith bereft of all access to the Land Beyond the Stars. Even though the Langothe was not on them, they asked Angavar that they might go beneath Eagle’s Howe and enter the Pendur Sleep until such time as the brushing of the winds of gramarye might cause the Gates to crumble, or else the world to end. So into the long and changeless Sleep they went, and Tamlain’s family accompanied him.

A thousand years these seven mortals had slept without waking—alone at first, later joined by Angavar and his Faêran knights. Then, when Angavar was called by the Coirnéad and forced to become King-Emperor, he woke them.

‘Will you keep me company?’ he asked, and now they readily assented, for they wished to take up their lives again and live them out at last. The desires and whims of mortalkind may change, even in sleep.

Thomas went with Roxburgh and his family to dwell at Court. The King-Emperor returned to them the estates that had been in their possession so long ago, forfeited to the Crown upon their disappearance. It may be that these chosen mortals, companions of Angavar, carried with them some Faêran glamour from beneath the Howe—in any event, upon their return and the restoration of their lands, all other mortal folk forgot that it had ever been otherwise. Prince Edward, Thomas the Rhymer, Tamlain and Alys were the four mortals privileged to keep the Royal secret. Even fair Rosamonde and her siblings were not privy to it, the recollection of their early days and the Sleep having faded from their brains in the manner of dreams, leaving only a legacy of vague wistfulness.

Thus, eight Sleepers from the King’s Howe came to the Court of Caermelor, while the High King’s Faêran knights slept on. But the city could not hold him for long, and often Angavar walked abroad. To confine themselves within castle walls, or any walls, was against the nature of the Faêran. And when he went alone or in company into the wilderness, he went as a Dainnan, as Ashalind had first seen him.

He wore a shirt of fine wool with wide sleeves gathered at the shoulders and rolled up to the elbows; over this, a tunic of soft leather reaching almost to his knees and slit on both sides along the length of his thighs, to allow freedom of movement. Beneath the tunic, leather leggings. At each shoulder, the Royal Insignia was embroidered—a crown over the numeral 16 with the runes J and R on either side. Around his right forearm was wrapped a supple calf-skin bracer laced with leather thongs. From a baldric swung a silver-clasped horn, white as milk, and a smaller, sun-yellow horn mounted in brass. At his belt, a water-bottle, a couple of pouches, and a coil of rope. From a weapon-belt depended a sheathed dagger and a smaller knife, as well as a short-handled axe.

He picked up a second baldric, heavily embossed, slinging it across his chest from his right shoulder. A longbow and quiver protruded from behind that boulder now, and arrows crested with bands of green and gold, fletched with dyed goose-feathers.

At Annath Gothallamor, deep in the looking-pool, an architecture formed and locked together structurally. The liquid condensed, hardened. A fine gold-dust—the pollen of bluebells—scudded across the solid glass plane. The images of the past had evaporated. Ashalind sighed.

‘For whom dost thou sigh, Elindor?’

The way in which Prince Morragan said this caused the humanlike sirens sporting on the flowery banks to spill the golden ball from their lissom hands. It hit the ground with a thud. At the same time, some spriggans who had been leering out of oaken gloom leaped nimbly backwards, falling on top of one another in their efforts to retreat from the peril conveyed by those silken tones.

As of old, Ashalind found herself quite unable to reply.

‘Come hither,’ said the Raven Prince, and she must do so. His gaze was mesmerising. ‘It is high time,’ said he, ‘those illusions of thine were shattered. Sighing for reflections does not become thee. Canst thou doubt that seeing in Angavar an echo of thy first love, thou didst deceive thyself?’

‘Not so,’ said Ashalind, yet her confidence wavered. Long ago, before she had first set eyes on Thorn-Angavar, Morragan had claimed her attention in a rare and extraordinary fashion. At the halls of Carnconnor he had offered a tantalising option.

She recalled it well.

‘Thou hast another choice, Ashalind Elindor,’ said Prince Morragan softly. ‘To go out by neither Door. I have no love for mortals and would not be grieved if thy race all should perish, but thou’rt passing fair among mortals, and faithful, and acute. Bide here now, and I swear no harm shall come to thee under my protection.’

Beneath straight eyebrows, the smoke-grey eyes were keen and searching. Strands of black-blue hair wafted across his arresting features. This Faêran was indeed comely beyond the dreams of mortals, and he possessed terrible power. The Longing for the Realm pained Ashalind like a wound. For moments the damsel struggled, pinned by the piercing blade of his gaze, and then her pony blew on her neck and nuzzled her shoulder. She sighed and lowered her eyes.

‘Sir, I must take the children home.’

Never before in her life had she been prey to such enticement. There was no doubt, she had been close to surrender. Could there be truth in the words of this marvellous Prince?

‘Thorn plighted his troth to me,’ she insisted. ‘He loved me.’ But she began to mistrust her own words.

At Morragan’s laugh the swanmaidens shrank into their feather-cloaks. Young Vallentyne dropped his smoking dudeen in a scatter of sparks, and even the savage Each Uisge flinched. Caitri, gripped by dread of Morragan’s wrath, thought she saw the sunless countenance of the Prince of Waterhorses turn a whiter shade of pale.

‘It appears he toyed with thee a little,’ said Morragan to Tahquil-Ashalind. ‘In exile, time hangs heavily on immortal hands. Long-drawn pleasure is sought after. As much sport is to be had in the chase as in the kill. Reflect, now, Elindor mine. What words of promise did he say to thee?’

And she did reflect, and it was not too difficult, for certain moments were emblazoned on her psyche so thoroughly that she believed no spell or geas could ever remove them.

Isse Tower, at evening: a star-wreathed balcony and someone breathtaking leaning upon the balustrade.

‘I have searched long for you,’ Thorn said. ‘Will you come with me to Court?’

‘I will.’

‘I want you to belong to me, and to no other.’

‘That I do already. I will be yours for my life.’

‘Do you swear it?’

‘Upon the Star, upon my life, upon anything you wish to name, I swear it.’

He held out his hand. She grasped a levin-bolt whose convulsion sizzled from fingers to feet.

‘Now we are troth-plighted.’

The trees in the oak wood shivered. The leaves withered on them like shavings in a fire. Caitri whimpered.

‘He said …’ Ashalind hesitated, distraught now. ‘Ah, alas,’ she was forced to admit, ‘he never promised to be mine.’

‘Art thou surprised, innocent?’Morragan mocked. He rounded on Whithiue, his blue-black hair swirling. ‘Enlighten the mortal, pretty duck.’

The cup-bearer offered the Prince a golden chalice, which he dismissed. Beguiled by attention from the Prince—even were it insulting—the swanmaiden bowed to him and glided forward.

‘Whithiue is no unfriend to gracious lord Morgann Fithiach,’ she enunciated, using a wider range of initial phonemes than had been her wont. ‘Neither is she thus to mortal damsels.’

Caitri started up.

‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘Before this, you used only words beginning with soft sounds. Do you speak the Common Tongue properly after all? Why have you kept that secret from us? And now you seem to take sides against us. We have been deceived in your integrity! What else have you hidden, traitoress?’

The swanmaiden uttered a sound like the rage of snakes and flung out her arms. The cloak fanned from them, a black semicircle.

‘Why should Whithiue speak at all to mortals?’she upbraided. ‘A race of thieves! Ungrateful! Ugly human words not worthy of swan’s speaking. Hooiss shoshalnai souhuena whai mahaan! Yet, of courtesy to wonderful lord, she will speak thus to single-language maidens.’

Morragan shot a dangerous glance towards the wight-girl.

Recollecting her proximity to the Prince she subsided deferentially, subduing her natural antipathy, but the glint of eldritch haunted her avian eyes.

‘Consider,’ she said. ‘How should the Noble Ones esteem your infected race? Humans, who gobble up the husks of food, who consume the flesh of swans and beasts and swallow down roots grown swollen in the mire. Humans, who dine on dead matter and then defile the world with their waste! How might aristocrats adore swine?’

‘Thorn broke bread with me,’ disputed Ashalind. ‘Many times we dined together!’

‘Easily the glamour of the Fair Ones dupes foolish mortals,’ derided Whithiue. Did Vahquil indeed see with her eyes what she thought to behold? Only the toradh was taken and the cochal was whisked away. Or else, the toradh was wrapped in a mere semblance of the food, an illusion.’

That is true! Hindsight reveals I never did see Thorn actually put food to his mouth …

‘Swans sup on worms in the mud,’ remarked Caitri venomously. The blast from the beating feather-cloak bowled her over.

‘Do not vent your vexation upon the child!’ cried Ashalind. Whithiue, once you were our friend. Tell me, if the Faêran consider us so foul, why do they steal us?’

‘As humankind keep companion animals in fond contempt, so might the Fair Ones be diverted by humankind,’ lightly said the swanmaiden.

The wightish onlookers laughed uproariously at that, with howls and caterwauls and shrieks.

‘No. You are wrong,’ Ashalind declared, in the overloud tones of self-doubt.

‘Who but a callow maid swimming in the depths of folly would believe the highest of the high would take a mortal to his very wife? To how many transactions most preposterous has Vahquil been drawn by her vanity?’

‘No!’

‘The swan prevaricates as deliberately as she mispronounces!’ accused Caitri. ‘She speaks in questions, with may and might. She has truly said nothing.’

‘Betimes, union between mortal and immortal has occurred,’ went on Whithiue, ‘often under duress, begat by the stealing of cloaks or skins. All such unions have been doomed to tragedy—has Vahquil not heard?’

‘I will hear no more.’ Tahquil-Ashalind stoppered her ears with her fingertips. ‘Go! Avaunt, swanmaiden! Once you were kind to me, as I thought, but now I see that you wanted only to facilitate my passage into the spider’s lair. You are faithless.’

‘Whisthaey! Vahquil mistakes Whithiue,’ sighed the lovely wight, ‘for swan speaks only to aid hapless human, to peel waterweeds from her obscured eyes. All that swan has done has been in goodwill. If Vahquil has no gratitude for Whithiue, it is a sadful thing.’ And, gracefully folding her cloak about her, she withdrew.

‘Dost thou now perceive Angavar’s intent?’ softly asked the Crown Prince, drawing near.

But Ashalind, sick to the heart and choked with emotion, could not reply. Against grief, she closed her eyes. When she opened them the oak wood and its denizens had disappeared and the colonnaded chamber was reinstated. Withered leaves and golden dust strewed the marble floor. Only she and Caitri remained there with Tully. Riven, the marquetry dressing-table lay in ruins upon the floor, its looking-glass smashed to smithereens.

The echo of an injunction bled away in the shadows:

‘Anon thou shalt seek again, Elindor.’

In hollow halls and shady dells

In oak woods blue with silent bells

On hilltops under cloudy skies

By well and water, stone and rise,

By brakes of thorn and hazelnut

The tall Gates stand forever shut.

FOLK SONG OF LUINDORN

9

ANNATH GOTHALLAMOR

Part II: The Eagle and the Raven

In your dark eyes translucent moonbeams glimmer

And, running swiftly, silver horses shimmer.

But dawn’s whey-pallored light shows you are leaving.

Of pleasure and contentment you’re bereaving

Me. Here I wait, shrouded by midnight’s curtain.

I wait. This sunless place is so uncertain

I cannot know if ’tis a dream I’m seeing,

And even shadows from themselves are fleeing.

LOVE-SONG OF TAVISCOT

In the rose-window library of Annath Gothallamor Tully perched cross-legged on a carpet, a meadow of ripe hay-gold and cornflower-blue. He was playing his syrinx. In a chair by a leaded casement as tall as a spear, its panes standing open to the night, Caitri was seated. She sang:

‘And where shall ye belong if not at home?

Devoid of native heath and doom’d to roam?

The rover’s footsteps quicken as he turns

Towards the hearthstone, where the home fire burns.

Mere shelter may be varied frequently,

But home is where the heart knows it to be.

A wanderer may roam throughout his days

In pathless lands or winding roads and ways,

But in his secret thought, will always yearn

Towards the home to which he would return.’

‘Ah, Caitri,’ sighed Ashalind presently. ‘Pray do not sing those verses. The Langothe is ever present and those words arouse it in me as a bellows awakens coals to flame. Only by delving into these antique books have I been able to divert my thoughts from sorrow and yearning. Poring over their pages is the single activity that can sometimes distract me from our present plight. Even sleep troubles me with heinous dreams.’

She twisted the enamelled bracelet on her wrist. It was beginning to look worn and barbaric, especially compared to the sumptuous exquisiteness of the Faêran jewellery dripping from every garment.

On their solid gold pedestals the nine lamps threw their light up to the ceiling, causing the stone tracery and heavy bosses to flicker indecisively. Lamplight spun in stripes off the gilt spines of the books stacked on the octagonal table. On the lectern, another book lay spread-eagled. Ashalind, seated in the X-framed chair, perused it.

‘Here,’ she said, indicating, ‘I see an illumination depicting a man with a smiling face and another with a weeping face. Between them lies a single red rose, which they are both observing. How may two people look at the same object and react so variously? What can it mean?’

Her companions were as baffled as she. In silence, she read on.

‘With what confidence,’ asked Caitri of the air, ‘might we trust the words of the swanmaiden, or of the Prince? No doubt both are truthspeakers—they have no option. But skilled are they in prevarication. They speak in questions and riddles. They palter and evade. Centuries of practice have made them experts.’

‘True,’ nodded the urisk, who by dint of keeping company with mortals had by now largely lost his habitual manner of speech.

‘And what of the moving pictures shown in the pool?’ Caitri continued. ‘I do not give much credence to the ones purportedly showing the demise of the King-Emperor and his Queen. I know for a fact that they were riding horses along the strand when the dreadful Nuckelavee came upon them.’

‘Give credence to the looking-pool, lass,’ advised Tully. ‘It displays the truth. ’Tis the passing on of words that twists veracity. Tales are apt tae alter with the telling. Spoken stories are likely tae be embroidered upon, if ye get my meaning. The fanciful addition of horses happened in much the same fashion as the spurious notion of the Faêran allergy tae iron.’

Caitri said, ‘What do you mean? Are you saying that the Strangers do not fear iron, that it is not anathema to them?’

‘Aye. ’Tis no lie. Cold iron is the bane o’ wights but ’tis naught to the Faêran. They can wark wi’ it as they wark wi’ gold or sildron any ither metal. In the Dark Years the myth grew up amongst mortalkind, springin’ from our hatred of the cold burning-metal. The Faêran were sleeping, never present tae refute the lie even had they bothered tae do so. The tale gained popularity, since it served the purpose of lending a tad o’ superiority to iron-handling mortalfolk.’

‘Knowledge is power, I have heard it said,’ reflected Ashalind. ‘Had I known the truth long ago, matters might have been different. It was only the sight of Thorn wielding iron that convinced me he was of mortal blood and not of the Faêran.’

‘Then ye’re a canny lass, for the Righ Ard made reet coofs o’ the rest o’ unsuspecting Erith!’ chuckled Tully. ‘Who’d hae guessed the King o’ the Mortals was in truth the King o’ the Realm!’

‘What about the other wights? Did they not know his true identity?’

‘Some did, I suppose, some didnae. I, for one, didnae. And those that were told, seelie or unseelie, were sworn not to reveal the knowledge tae mortal men, lest the Empire be torn asunder.’

‘King Angavar is so powerful,’ said Caitri. ‘Why does he not make a new Gate?’

‘Some things are impossible, even for the High King of the Fair Realm,’ Ashalind said levelly. She returned to her book, and Tully to his reedy music.

A sad wind lamented around the gables of Gothallamor, speaking a hollow language. Presently Ashalind said, ‘I have found the answer to the riddle of the two faces and the rose! The weeping man used to own a garden, the fairest and most extensive in Aia. Now, all that remains for him to gaze upon is this one flower. As for the laughing man admiring the rose, he once was blind.’

‘Riddles, riddles,’ mused Caitri. Her eyes strayed to the open window and the illustriousness of the stars, sewn like burning pearls on the ceiling of the sky. Below the window the tumbled roofs of Annath Gothallamor gave onto the High Plain, whereon movement could be faintly descried.

‘There has come no unstorm,’ she remarked, ‘since we have been in this place.’

‘The Fithiach has banned the shang from the vicinity of Annath Gothallamor,’ explained Tully, ‘because it waukens images of Men. While he is present at the fortress, the unstorm never comes.’

‘Herein is an odd thing,’ said Ashalind, reading from her book, ‘a poem, written about this very fortress. Tully, what does this mean—Riachadh na Catha?’

‘Why, ’tis the auld kenning for the High Plain,’ said the urisk, ‘and its meaning is the Plain of War, or the Battlefield of Kings.’

Ashalind raised her head to the gold lettering inscribed on the archway over the bookshelves:

Is Truth So Hard To Find?

‘Riachadh na Catha,’ she repeated, slowly. She closed the book.

Tully’s reed-music wove a thin wire of melody through soft dunes of starlight sifting through lilac panes. It was a tune Ashalind had heard before, one whose words she could never forget. Once Thorn had sung her this song beneath the luxuriant eaves of the Forest of Glincuith, having crowned her with a garland of flowers …

The west wind is my caress,

Raindrops my kisses on thy mouth.

Clouds race at my bidding, sunshine is my blitheness.

My heartbeat is the tide, my wrath, the tempest.

Mist is my mantle, starlight my diadem,

Frost is my sword, fire, the passion of my heart.

Night and silver water am I,

Autumn bounty and the garlands of Spring.

The long leaves of the woodlands blow in my hair.

Temperate as Summer, I,

Grim as Winter, and as perilous.

The words were imbued with new meaning now. Where was Thorn-Angavar, and did he think of her? Were the words of the swanmaiden true? Had his desire to enjoy her been no more than a passing whim? Such a notion was heartbreaking; yet far worse than his indifference would be his anger. Doubtless it had by this time come to his knowledge that she, Ashalind-Rohain, had lit the flame in Tamhania’s Beacon and ushered in the three Crows of War. She, and no other, had been to blame for the destruction of the Royal Isle. Who could blame Thorn-Angavar if this had aroused his ire and cancelled his ardency?

Perhaps she ought to be grateful that he had merely chosen to neglect searching for her, trusting that she had perished in the conflagration of Tamhania. Worse might have occurred: he might have sought her out for punishment.

Nevertheless he had sent out for her after all, as the wights had made clear. Of course—like Morragan he must have learned, eventually, that in some way she was the key to his Realm. How terrible his wrath would be on receiving this knowledge, on realising too late that the key had actually been within his grasp before Ashalind, still guarding the secret, had slipped through his fingers. Indifference or anger; these were to be expected. After all, the proclamations of Pod and others were historically correct, by all accounts: any union between mortal and immortal was doomed to tragedy.

But how had Morragan first discovered that the intruder at Huntingtowers was in fact a mortal who had entered Erith by way of a Gate? A Gate which, as it turned out, had eluded the words of his own geas and might yet provide passage to the Fair Realm?

The urisk finished his tune with a long and plaintive note that declined into silence.

‘Tully,’ Ashalind said into the quietude, ‘pray tell me all you have found out about the Prince’s discovery of me, for that mystery remains and I would fain solve it.’

‘That is mickle,’ fluted the goat-man, laying aside the instrument. ‘My ears have been waggling, I have been mingling aboot, catching up on a’ that I hae missed during decades of solitude.’

He began to recount all he had learned.

After Ashalind’s presence had been detected in Huntingtowers, after she had escaped and been hunted down and—as it was believed—had perished in a cave-in of the old mines, and after the fleeing duergar had been apprehended with a swatch of golden fibres half plaited into a whipcord—after all these events, some spriggans happened to set eyes on the skein of hair. When they approached it, they sniffed its scent and remembered it, saying, ‘This hair is of a mortal who visited the traverse beneath Hob’s Hill a thousand years since. How came she here? Long ago her bones ought to have moldered to dust!’

For the spriggans were Scrimscratcherer and Spiderstalkenhen, the very spriggans who had escorted Ashalind through the halls of Carnconnor when she went to rescue the children of Hythe Mellyn.

Their news was carried at once to Morragan. One of his knights came before the Raven Prince, bearing the abundance of gilded threads, bowing low on his knee. When the Prince took up the tresses, a sudden hope awakened in his eyes—hope for the first time in the midst of immortal despair, that most appalling of all despairs.

He said, ‘If the spriggans have the right of it, the maid who owned these locks is none other than Ashalind na Pendran, daughter of Niamh, who with her family and the city of Hythe Mellyn, journeyed to the Realm, there to dwell forever. How has she come to Erith? For certain, she was within the Realm at the time of Closing, that much I know. She has come through by a Gate from our world to this. To regain her is to regain a way back to the Realm. It may be there is now hope of an end to exile. She must be discovered!’

To the Unseelie Princes he said, ‘Find the spy!’

‘Your Royal Highness,’ answered Huon, ‘after the spy fled from my fortress the Cearb made the rocks to quake, crushing her covert. Doubt not, the wench lies dead in the old mines.’

‘Then bring me her corpse,’ commanded the Prince. But by that time it was too late. There was no sign of a cadaver, at least not a recent one; a barrow-load of human bones was dug up, but they belonged to miners of yore. It was thought that the bold wench had been scratched up and eaten by wolves, but Morragan questioned the wolves and interrogated the wights and the birds and the beasts of the wild and none had seen a mortal maiden with yellow hair, either dead or alive, save for those folk of the Talith already known and accounted for across the lands. Wights were sent abroad to scour the countryside near and far, with no success. The spy had vanished from the knowledge of men and wights and Faêran.

‘If the maid lives she will seek the High King,’ said Morragan to the first among his knights. ‘But ere she finds him, she shall come to me. And let it not be made known outside this circle why she is sought, for if there is a way back, that knowledge must be withheld from all who are not my steadfast allies!’

There, for a time, the situation remained. Morragan’s knights of Faêrie and their servant wights and the Unseelie Attriod began a Vigil across Erith, watching for any sign of the Talith maiden. Meanwhile in Isse Tower a servant worked with his taltry tied over his ugly head, concealing the cropped stubble of his outlandish locks.

At the commencement of this Vigil, Morragan vowed to divert Angavar’s attention to one place, in order to draw him from the knowledge of Ashalind’s presence, as a cliff-swallow’s aerial acrobatics draw the predator from its nest eggs. To this end, his wightish servants began allying themselves with the malcontents who were already arousing sedition in troubled Namarre. They stirred up unrest among the outlaws, furtively urging the chieftains of their bands to unite, to rise against the Empire. The wights made grandiose allusions to eldritch aid and the assistance of a powerful wizard, in return for the warm corpses and almost-corpses of their hewn enemies when battle was joined. The Namarrans were led to believe that their hordes might crush the Legions and pour down from the north to overrun all countries and unseat the King-Emperor. Enticed by visions of glory and wealth, the brigands joined together in a rough semblance of an army. Morragan-as-Wizard put forth the Call and the Mustering commenced.

It was a lengthy business, since its main purpose was not to hasten war but to prolong pre-war manoeuvres. By means of forays and raids, Morragan’s eldritch côterie intended to keep Angavar-as-James occupied, to keep the Royal Attriod guessing, to ensure that the Empire’s focus was directed towards affairs at the Namarran border. Besides, full-scale conflict was not the wightish way. Like cats, they excelled at skulking, sudden strikes, and ambush in the dark, rather than the direct assaults typical of hounds and men.

This temporising served its purpose. No suspicion entered Angavar’s thought. The secret of the damsel from the Gate remained with Morragan and the foremost among his knights. Not even the Unseelie Attriod was given to know it. As for the two spriggan sentries who had recognised the scent of the hair, Morragan had them imprisoned in the lowest dungeon of Huntingtowers where, deep in compost, they enjoyed the finest worms and slothfulness, season after season.

The Vigil continued.

And this uneasy situation would not have altered, but for a day in Uvailmis of the following year—the same day as the freeing of the nygel. In the marketplace of Gilvaris Tarv, Gull, the Spriggan Chieftain, had been lurking, bent on causing mischief among merchants and cheats. He had spied the yellow hair of Imrhien—as she was then—spilling from under her hood. He summoned others and they gave chase, but the carlin Ethlinn Bruadair outwitted the spriggans.

Fearing to inform Huon and the Prince of their failure, the spriggans mounted their own search, keeping watch on the house of the carlin. Again the wights lost track of the yellow-hair—it seemed she somehow melted from under their long and sensitive noses and they could not locate her again in Gilvaris Tarv. She had eluded capture as before, but now Morragan knew for sure that she lived. By the colour of her hair he knew it, for the few Talith who remained in Erith could be accounted for, and would not be wandering the markets of Tarv. It only remained for the Raven Prince to claim her before she could be claimed by Angavar, should her existence come to the knowledge of the Faêran King.

Meanwhile, a mute girl and her Ertish friend languished in a gilf-house by the river, were rescued and began an ill-fated journey to Caermelor. Travelling in the wilderness under Thorn’s protection, Ashalind remained, for a time, safe.

Ill-founded secrecy built a barrier that stood between the Faêran King and the girl with the clue to the Gate. His twofold identity was deliberately hidden, while hers had been forgotten—yet they became linked, in those Autumn days as they travelled the Road together, and that linking was a passion forged deep and strong.

In the last week of the year the Royal Wizard Sargoth had stolen by night into the forest near Caermelor. There he stood and called out seven words. Soon, a darkness folded about his eyes and he was rushed through the trees to a place where he was brought before the Spriggan Chieftain, Gull. The wizard had long been involved in dealings with unseelie wights, as a few daring mortalfolk were wont in order to gain the favour of the eldritch and thereby be granted power over their fellow Men. Sometimes this worked, usually it did not. Most mortals lived to regret their commerce with unseelie. Only the arrogant, the ruthless or the foolish ever assayed it.

Sargoth had been acting the spy, reporting the deeds of Angavar to Morragan, for of course Morragan knew the role his brother was playing, and the ire of the Crown Prince had waxed the greater that Faêran Royalty should play at being mortal, concerning himself with human affairs. In return for his efforts Sargoth received from Gull various rewards—the setting of spriggans to ambush his enemies, the lending of trinkets fortified with gramarye to shore up the wizard’s trick-shows, the promise of safe passage to wealthy travellers who bore tilhals ‘spelled’ by the Royal Wizard.

Primed by Gull, the venal wizard had also been on the watch for an unknown Talith damsel. When he heard from Dianella the news concerning the true hair colour of the Court’s latest guest, he came straight to the Spriggan Chieftain.

‘I have found the one your lords seek,’ said Sargoth. ‘But abduct her not from Caermelor, for I want no attention drawn to my part in this. I would be of no further use to you should my doings be discovered. Moreover, I require extra payment for this work.’

‘It shall be so,’ agreed Gull, eager to ensure that there were no mistakes this time. In any event, Caermelor Palace was ringed with subtle, strong wards that had been placed by Angavar to safeguard Edward. From the palace, the Talith girl might not be abducted at all. Dianella, and subsequently Sargoth, had suggested that the yellow-hair should be sent, unknowing, to Isse Tower; there to be seized by the Hunt.

‘Who else knows of the wench?’ asked the Spriggan Chieftain.

‘Only Maeve One-Eye the Carlin, and her errand boy.’

The Royal Wizard returned to Caermelor, but Gull commanded that those of his folk who escorted the wizard on his way back should pinch and thump the man until he was black all over, in payment for his insolence in daring to demand additional remuneration.

The Spriggan Chieftain sent his wights after Maeve. She and Tom Coppins were forced to flee, seeking shelter down a dry well. Unable to reach them, the spriggans lidded the well and imprisoned them therein. Word was sent to Huon at Huntingtowers: ‘Make ready.’

At the pre-arranged hour the Wild Hunt descended on the stronghold of the Seventh House of the Stormriders. Had Huon arrived a day sooner, he would have been successful. Unfortunately for the Antlered One and for Gull, their plans again went awry. By then, the wizard’s treachery had been revealed. Angavar-as-James had all along been aware of Sargoth’s spying, and by supplying worthless information had hitherto used it to advantage. Now he came riding sky in fury, and routed the Hunt.

Thus the quarry eluded the Hunt at Isse Tower. The news travelled swiftly to Morragan: Ashalind had returned to reside at Court. It was then, for a time, that the Raven Prince believed all was lost, for surely the identity of the Talith damsel would be revealed to Angavar. Surely she would relate her strange history and Angavar would be first to find the Gate. But the Raven Prince had not reckoned on the geas of the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss. Into this tale of disguise and false identity, so complex as to border on farce, there had entered another factor—forgetfulness. And so, while Ashalind believed Angavar to be James, Angavar, in turn, had no reason to suppose Rohain of the Sorrows was otherwise than she claimed. True to his Faêran nature he lived for the moment and scarcely bothered to explore the past. He knew no fear. The past held no terrors for him. Furthermore, his sovereignty over the very elements, his knowledge of the tongues of all creatures, these and other powers made arrogance inevitable in the High King of the Faêran. Omniscience needs not probe and question. Its only flaw lies in not recognising its own provisionality.

Gradually, Morragan came to ascertain the true situation. Understanding, he marvelled at his fortune.

When the King-Emperor voyaged north with his armies, Ashalind was taken to the protection of the Isle of Tamhania. Morragan gathered his strength to himself again, and put it forth, directing it at the island. He triumphed—the gates of the Seelie Isle were breached and Tavaal-Tamhania was drowned. But she who they hunted so desperately had vanished once more.

In the turmoil of aftermath, the Attriod sought Ashalind. Morragan guessed that Angavar would have set some device on his betrothed to keep her from harm, and guessing this he tried the harder, yet she outfoxed her pursuers, slipping from their net a fourth and final time. Instead of choosing a path back to civilised lands as they expected, she turned north. In the wide leagues of the wilderness she became lost to them. They searched for her in vain.

Through the flowery meads, the gloomy forest, Appleton Thorn and the wet fells, Ashalind and her companions were glimpsed only by wights who rarely strayed from their haunts, who were so mild or lawless or solitary as to remain beneath the contempt of Morragan’s Summons; wights who had heard no news from the greater world or cared little for it if they had. Until, in Cinnarine, a ganconer who was making his way eastwards happened upon three likely victims. Originating from populous haunts, Young Vallentyne had not failed to mark that the Unseelie Princes kept watch for a damsel journeying in secret. Having sated, with one of them, the inclination of his species, he sent a message to Annath Gothallamor.

‘And the rest ye ken,’ concluded Tully. Putting the syrinx to his mouth, he resumed piping.

The eldritch music soared like falcons in flight. Evocative, it freed Ashalind from thoughts of her capture, reviving earlier memories. From down on the High Plain, the flourish of a wightish horn came blaring through the library windows. Coarse and brazen though it was, it brought to mind the purer note of another such instrument, a Faêran horn, sounding the last Call to Faêrie on the Day of Closing. At that time, Ashalind had stood beside her father in the Watchtower while, beyond the Gate, Angavar and Morragan clashed in bitter feud …

… many fled the Watchtower; soon a flood of Faêran, wights, birds and animals poured through the Geata Poeg na Déanainn to aid the King’s return. There was scant chance that they would reach him before the Closing—the combatants fought, in fact, more than a mile from the Gate.

Silently, Ashalind battled an agony of indecision. She lifted her gaze once more towards the knights beyond the Window, staring at the melee. And all at once she forgot to breathe. In that instant her spirit fled out of her eyes and into Frith.

In their reckless sparring the melee of knights parted for an instant, revealing a rider who faced the Gate, although his gaze was not directed at it. Noble of bearing, he moved with the power and grace of the sea. So dark was his hair that it seemed fashioned from the night, glimmering with the polish of water seen by starlight. The force and wonder, the sensual beauty of him knocked commonsense out of the watcher’s head like coins from a flung purse.

‘Father, forgive me,’ she cried suddenly, ‘I must try to return …’

Aghast, Leodogran cried, ‘But why?’

‘Only that—’ His daughter struggled to find words. ‘My future lies in Erith, I think. If the High King does not return in time …’

This newly recalled memory came as a revelation to Ashalind. Through the Gate, she had glimpsed a face—the face of Angavar, seen for the first time, and distantly. It dawned on her that the sight of him, and only this, had demanded her last-moment return, against ridiculous odds, to Erith.

‘Of course. He is Faêran,’ she murmured to herself, ‘and all mortals fall at least half in love with that race as soon as they clap eyes on them. How much more potent must be the attraction of their sovereign? I have been allured, as a moth flies towards the lantern-flame. Yet it pleases me to recall this, that my reason for being here in Erith is Thorn. My love for him is confirmed, albeit not reciprocated. In any case, there would have been no future in such a union.’ And her heart seemed to be suddenly squeezed in a vice.

Into her reverie there broke an interruption.

From the stencilled ceiling high above, a snowflake fluttered down, landing on the lectern. Tully snatched the reed-pipe from his lips. Unfolding the scrap of snow-white parchment Ashalind saw words glimmering there, scribed in ink of argentum which flowed like a living current. Puzzled, she read them aloud:

I have no arms but I reach across the horizon.

My feet for seven years do not walk.

Water is my table, the wind is my bed.

I have no ship but I sail the ocean.

I have no eotaur, though I ride the sky.

The chains of Erith do not bind me.

I, the navigator, overlook them.

A frisson of terror and delight chilled the reader.

‘It is a riddle,’ she concluded, nervously scanning the library, which gave the appearance of being empty save for Caitri and Tully.

‘Gie me a wee moment,’ said the urisk. ‘I shall get the answer o’ it.’

Strong wings beat at the casement. A huge raven alighted on the sill, its claws digging into the wood. Frightened, Caitri ran from her chair and crouched at Ashalind’s feet. The raven’s round eye fixed them with a frigid stare.

‘I s’ll be finding the solution forthwith,’ said Tully briskly. He scratched his curly head.

‘Never mind, Tully,’ said Ashalind, her pulse beating like threshing flails. ‘I know it. The riddle’s answer is a seabird, the elindor.’

‘Thou art overly acute,’ said Prince Morragan regretfully. He stepped from somewhere, or nowhere, and extended his arm. The raven flew through the open window, to perch thereon.

The library brightened. Pellucid light poured down, for the chamber now lay naked to the sky, the ceiling having disappeared without a sound. The nine lamps flared, showing that the tall casements had melted like panes of ice. They left wide interstices through which stars dazzled and the wind careened. Between the empty window-frames the walls remained upright. Stripped of their panelling they revealed themselves as monoliths of solid basalt, capped by stone lintels. Within this primitive and monumental circle the carved furniture and carpeting remained unchanged—incongruous, decadent.

Figures drifted in through the gaps between the monoliths, the courtiers of the Crown Prince mingling with the various wights addicted to the proximity of the Faêran.

Amongst them sauntered the Each Uisge in field armour, a sculpture in metal: the curved ridge of the gardebraces jutted from his shoulders on either side, meeting the rippled shoulder-defences of the pauldrons at a smooth seam. The lamels on both the upper and lower cannons of the vambraces were layered and scalloped like the scales of a fish, adorned by rows of pearly rivet-heads, chased and molded to match the breastplate with its foliate seaweed design.

The couter protecting the left elbow protruded in a great fan-shaped shell of steel, large by contrast with the winged-shell reinforcement on the right elbow. The lamels fitted him closely at the waist. From the body-armour depended shield-shaped tassets ridged and fluted with pointed arches, prolonging the defence of the skirt over cuisses embellished with jagged wave designs which differed on each thigh. Fan-shells glittered on the poleyns, at the outside of the knees. The wave-crests on the greaves arrowed down in reflection of the upreaching peaks on the cuisses. The gauntlets were silver lobsters.

He moved out of view.

Negligently, Morragan stroked Ashalind’s hair, toying with a few tresses.

She burned.

‘Gaze through the window, lhiannan,’ he suggested.

Between two basalt pillars stretched the dew-silvered net of a cobweb. Its strands glittered and thinned, then dissolved. Behind this mesh, a scene was displayed—not the evernight of Darke, but the circadian day of clean-rinsed Arcdur.

Once more the Eye of Gramarye roved through the land of stone and pine. Once more Ashalind could recognise no clue to the whereabouts of the elusive Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss, or if it seemed she was about to do so, some hindrance obfuscated it. Searching, she felt her strength drain away as though the pith was being sucked out of her bones. ‘No more,’ she pleaded, but there was no relenting. The search was long. Her shoulders sagged with weariness. By the time the beautiful voice of Morragan said, ‘Draw back,’ her sinews hurt as though she had been reaping in the fields for three days and three nights.

Just as the scene of Arcdur was fading, another landscape overlaid it for a while—a field of war at sunset. The sky ruptured into long red wounds. Behind a mountain, the merest sliver of a fingernail moon came up in a misty nimbus the colour of spring leaves.

Beneath the bloody light of the dying day Ertish troops confronted Namarran assailants. The troops were organised in battle formation. Each battalion formed themselves an oblong composed of three ranks consisting of heavy cavalry, spearmen, archers and crossbowmen, with light cavalry on the flanks. In the front lines, the spearmen knelt on one knee, holding their shields before them, the lower edges braced upon the ground. Their spears slanted towards the enemy, all at the same angle, like a forest of saplings bowing beneath the powerful vectors of a hurricane. The Finvarnans had rammed their spear-butts into the rocky soil. Behind them, the archers and crossbowmen were arrayed. The archers, also on one bent knee, protected themselves with shields held on the left arm, until the instant they sighted and released an arrow. In the third line waited cavalrymen, shielded by the infantry until the moment was right for a cavalry charge.

The rebels’ horses refused to drive themselves at this bristling hedge of spears. As long as the Ertish infantry remained steadfastly in this formation, they were secure, although without mobility there was small chance of defeating the enemy.

For a long interval the rebel forces subjected the Ertish warriors to an incessant hail of arrows, bolts and javelins. The constant barrage under imposed conditions of impassivity enraged the Erts, to the point that their discipline eventually crumbled. Some of the spearmen sprang to their feet and began to advance. To ensure the integrity of the shield wall, the rest were forced to follow.

As the Finvarnan companies advanced over the rough terrain, their attention fixed on deflecting the onslaught of missiles, they were unable to keep marching in step. Breaches opened in their ranks and into these gaps charged two divisions of the barbarians’ heavy cavalry, javelins levelled. Once in the heart of the fray they fought with sword and mace, hacking, hewing and smiting. Caught in disarray, the Ertish infantry had no chance of withstanding the cavalry charge. They broke ranks and scattered into the waxing darkness. As soon as the barbarian hordes saw their enemy giving ground, they attacked in full force. The Finvarnans were routed.

But this battle had by no means decided the contest. The greater conflict was yet to come.

Between the stone pillars, the image altered.

Early sunlight reached long wands across the Nenian Landbridge, stretching shadows from the long lines of horsemen who rode solemnly, nine abreast, into its oncoming radiance. Beneath their helms, the soldiers of the Legions of Erith narrowed their eyes against the glory of the dawn. Their spears and banners stood up in serried ranks like a glittering forest. Darts of golden light glanced from their armour, visible from miles away. High above, Windships rose and dipped among the clouds, and twelve squadrons of Stormriders passed like flights of great birds of prey. The jangle of stirrup and bridle came ringing faintly on the breeze.

There rode among the Stormriders Lords Voltasus, Ustorix, Isterium, Valerix and Oscenis. Among the Legions was numbered a soldier entitled Second Lieutenant Diarmid Bruadair of the Emperor’s Regiment, his tabard resplendent with the King’s Lion in regimental colours. Nearby rode a more lissom soldier with hair alight and a long quiver at her back—Corporal Muirne Bruadair of the Royal Company of Archers. A taller archer rode at her side; young Eochaid of Gilvaris Tarv.

Further back marched companies of men in less disciplined array. Their war-gear was flamboyant, one might say reckless, being mainly of hard-boiled leather riveted with iron. Some drove chariots, some rode mettlesome steeds, others strode afoot singing lustily, not in the Common Tongue. Their hair caught and tossed the fire of the new day. A roar of laughter could dimly be heard; an ox of a man sat astride his warhorse, brandishing an axe and shield. Sianadh Kavanagh it was, none other—a warrior singing patriotic songs while following Mabhoneen, Chieftain of the Erts of Finvarna and his rallied squadrons.

The Arysk rode with the Legions also—the Icemen, three Rimanian battalions in war-harness glittering like sunlight on snow. And the stalwart brown-haired men of Severnesse rode, as well as those of Luindorn.

The Dainnan were there in silver-white mail overlaid by long surcoats. Among them was Sir Heath with the knights Tide, Firth, Dale, Flint, Gill, Tor and many more chivalry of their thriesnuns. The Royal Attriod rode with the Dainnan—Tamlain, Duke of Roxburgh, and Thomas, Duke of Ercildoune; Octarus Ogier, Lord High Chieftain of Stormriders; John Drumdunach, Lord High Commander of the Royal Guard; Richard of Esgair Garthen, Lord High Sea Admiral; and Istoren Giltornyr, Lord High Sky Admiral.

And he who rode at the head of these thriesnuns, these battalions, these wizards and fleets and squadrons, he came forth like a lion.

Called James XVI, King-Emperor, he stood out from the rest, mounted on his armoured war-horse Hrimscathr. The sword Arcturus was scabbarded at his side, its damasked quillons deflecting the sun’s rays to blinding shards. He was exactly as Ashalind had once pictured him with thought’s invention, shining in golden field-armour with its slender, elegant lines, cusped borders and shell-like rippling. Damascening glinted on the lames, studded metal roses were connected by riveted laminations to shoulder, elbow and knee, and adorned the breastplate. The Lion of D’Armancourt roared upon his breast. His helm was crested with a great golden lion, a star-tipped crown encircling the war-beast’s shoulders. Beneath the metal nose-guard was a glimpse of the high cheekbones, the strong chin, the eyes as keen as knife blades. He smiled at one of his captains and the lean lines of laughter appeared at each corner of his mouth. The Royal Attriod in their plumed splendour surrounded him, armoured cap-a-pie, light splintering off richly ornamented chausses, vambraces, coudieres, genouilliers, tassets, gauntlets. Flanked by standard-bearers, a trumpeter, the Dainnan, the Legions of Eldaraigne and battalions from the armies of every country in Erith with their banners and gonfalons, the gay pennons unfolding their points along the breeze, this sovereign of a lost realm looked towards the wide lands opening out from the Landbridge and advanced steadily into Namarre.

All these scenes came and went in a flash. As Ashalind watched, dusk veiled the landscape and stars shone through it. Knights and men-at-arms dissolved into indigo shadow—the skies of Darke caught in the spider’s net between the monoliths. Limply, Ashalind draped her arms over the sides of the X-framed chair and rested her head upon one of them.

‘Thou must do better in thy search, if thou’rt to soothe me,’ said Morragan, and this time there was a perilous edge to his tone. With a flick of his hand he signalled to his cup-bearer. ‘Shouldst thou not soon find the Gate, Elindor, martial conflict shall recommence in earnest.’

‘Would you make war against your brother and sworn sovereign?’ Ashalind cried, starting up.

Morragan made no reply. He strode away, his cloak unfurling like violent smoke.

The Faêran cup-bearer leaned to the girl, saying: ‘The stirrings of this strife were begat long ago, after thy sly visit to Huntingtowers. A duergar was in possession of a skein of zircon locks and by this love-token, the reality of an active Gate was revealed. Namarran insurrection was engendered in order to distract Angavar from the discovery of thee.’

‘How could you all be so certain the High King was not aware of the Gate?’

‘On learning of its existence, Angavar would certainly have ridden for Arcdur with nine and ninety Faêran knights and ladies. Had he done so, we should have known it instantly. Dost thou underestimate us even now?’

‘The purpose of distraction was achieved. Let there now be an end to conflict.’

‘’Tis His Royal Highness’s desire to crush those who have leagued themselves with Angavar—the Legions of Erith, the Dainnan and the mortal Seven. Mighty are the forces of the Unseelie Host now gathered. Mighty are the Princes of the eldritch Attriod. Namarran warriors have allied also themselves with the Host, although beside the rest, their puny strength is as a javelin of water. By now they understand that more than their own ambitions are at stake, but they see the fulfilment of their goals as an adjunct to any war against the Empire.’

‘For no good reason does your liege harass the men of Erith,’ Ashalind said faintly, collapsing back into the chair and accepting the goblet from the cup-bearer’s hand. ‘They have done him no harm.’

‘Spies and thieves are all men,’ said the Faêran cup-bearer scornfully, ‘liars and meddlers, glutted on greed, lack of generosity, rudeness and selfishness, gloominess, untidiness, disorderliness, undue curiosity, slovenliness, ill temper and bad manners. Yet for all these faults the Fithiach would not deign to wage war upon humankind if not for Angavar, who loves them.’

‘I repeat, there is no reason for war games now that I am here!’

Lord Iltarien stepped close to her, saying, ‘Now that preparations have proceeded this far, our Prince has decided to carry the business through to its apposite conclusion. Angavar is aware thou dost bide with us in Gothallamor, though too late has he arrived at this wisdom. He also knows our Prince is behind the uprising. He will attack. Already he pushes across the Landbridge into Namarre. We are ready.’

Quoth the stylish Each Uisge, gurgling like a drain:

‘The Raven’s wings will spread wide across Erith’s skies when Angavar Iolaire yields and is made a haggard.’

‘Then you are conspirers and treasoners to your King!’ shouted Ashalind, flinging the goblet and its contents at the Faêran knights. ‘Treasoners all!’

The globules of wine solidified in midair. Teardrops of jet and diamond rattled to the floor like a beaded fringe, bringing down in their wake a curtain of darkness so thick that nothing could be seen, and through this utter absence of all light tore a howl of preternatural menace. A subsonic pressure pounded at Ashalind’s ears and she heard Caitri’s thin scream like a scratch on the edge of a vitreous chalice. Then something seized her and flung her to the ground.

10

THE BATTLE OF EVERNIGHT

Of Love and War

Green hills rise up against the skies; behemoths of bygone time,

Silent beneath soft rain, bright sun, and silver star and frosty rime.

Grass covers, like a velvet cloth, the sunken halls where sleepers lie.

Stone caverns hide the gleam of gold, of armour and of jewellery.

Magnificent in splendid state, adorn’d with gorgeous pageantry,

Scutcheons blazoned with a sign—knights of mystic errantry.

Whyfore sleep these men-at-arms as centuries roll slowly past—

Untouched by time, ageless and fair? And what will wake them at the last?

VERSES FROM ‘THE SLEEPERS’, A BALLAD OF YORE

The Faêran singer ceased the song of the Sleepers, the harpist’s fine fingers stilled. The Lady Sildoriel, a member of Prince Morragan’s exiled Court, spoke to Ashalind. She wore a gown sewn of butterflies’ wings and peacocks’ feathers: azure, turquoise, iridescent green.

‘Mortals have been slain,’ she said, ‘for slighter insult than thou hast offered, Innocent. Yet here thou dost recline, gazing upon our feast. Truly thou’rt favoured—for the nonce, at least.’ She smiled, a smile partly of fire and partly of mystery. In truth, to behold the smile of one of the Faêran was to stand, exhilarated, on a height. It was to look out over a plain that stretched to distant hills and was canopied by open sky, and to feel the wind come rushing across vast spaces to lift you. It was to fly.

‘Fortunate,’ gasped Ashalind, somewhat short of breath, ‘am I.’

She shifted closer to Caitri, on their flowery knoll. Her latest gown, of brocade and shot silk, brushed heavily across living buttercups, cowslips, forget-me-nots and clover. A garland of wildflowers adorned Caitri’s brow, placed there by one of the Faêran, but her young face was bloodless. Untouched, a golden dish of strawberries lay on the sward, swelling crimson hearts capped by fresh green coronets and tenderly quilled with tiny seeds. Tully picked one up and bit into it. The crescent-shaped bite revealed, deep beneath the rose-red layer, ice-pink flesh surrounding the delicate albino eye of the core.

After provoking a fit of Faêran outrage and being thrown upon the floor of the library, Ashalind had succumbed to an unexpected and overpowering sleepiness. How long she had slept she could not tell, but she had woken in another place, another interlude or ventricle of Gothallamor. Here flowed a lucent stream where willows leaned, and the elfin faces of green-haired asrai girls peered inquisitively up out of the depths. New gowns hung from the boughs. The old garments had begun to melt away, ephemeral as moths’ wings, perishing like ancient fabric which had lain for decades in a cedar chest. As soon as the girls had clothed themselves, a wooden boat, wreathed and posied with flowers of the meadows, came floating along the water by itself. Gently it bumped into their shore. They embarked, for there was little choice but to do so. The vessel bore them through a long, green tunnel of overhanging leaves, which opened out onto an orchard.

Here, it was like a twilight of late Spring. Apple trees were lathered with pale blossom which seemed to glow with its own radiance, like stars wrapped in translucent tissue. In moonlit glades, and through the trees, lithe figures danced to the liveliest yet most poignant music to which mortal ears had ever hearkened. Ashalind and Caitri watched, entranced and joyous, and it was some while before they comprehended that Tully had joined them. As the dance came to an end, three ladies of the Prince’s Court strolled to where the mortals reclined, spelled with wonder. They rested beside them until the song of the Howe-Sleepers also concluded.

‘It is always dark here in this land,’ said Ashalind, silently quelling her inner anguish, ‘but the music evokes mornings of sunshine. I long for the sun. Why does the Prince dwell in Evenight?’

‘It suits his temper, currently,’ said Sildoriel. ‘But thou mightst alter that.’

Ashalind turned her face away.

‘Soon thou shalt lose thy chance,’ the Faêran damsel said. ‘For this feast and revelry marks the leaving of Gothallamor.’

Ashalind whirled around. ‘The leaving? Where are we to go?’

Sildoriel smiled. ‘Thou’rt not to leave, daughter of Niamh. Battle will soon be joined in earnest. The Prince departs, soon, for the fight. Thou’rt to remain here, awaiting his return.’

A sudden wrench of desolation forced Ashalind to clench her eyes shut. Firelight played behind her lids. She bowed her head. Her hair, flowing free, poured into her lap like wine.

A small, long-eared wight with bulbous cheeks and knobbly knees approached meekly. He was quaintly dressed in a jerkin of lizard-skin and breeches of zebra-hide, and he offered a dish piled high with seashells mottled and whorled with shades of brown and cream. Caitri drew back.

‘Oh no! These sweetmeats are formed of dried mud!’ she protested, waving the wight away. It made as if to scurry off but one of the companions of the Lady Sildoriel stayed it with a gesture.

‘Wait,’ said the Lady Gildianrith. ‘I see, sweet nightingale, that thou art not acquainted with the delights of xocohuatl.’ Taking up a shell like a long, spiral horn, she snapped the point of it, which broke off to reveal not a calcined hollow, but a solid interior, composed of a smooth compound. ‘Xocohuatl is made from the seeds of a Faêran tree which was brought to Erith and grows now in hidden places. Inform the erithbunden, Snafu.’

The wight squeaked importantly, ‘Roast beans. Squeeze butter out of some. Pound up the rest, squash ’em, bash ’em, mix with milk, xocohuatl butter and Sugar. Slop into molds, make cool, make hard. Eat. Yum.’

The Faêran aristocrats eyed the wight with obvious distaste.

‘Pray, perform the chemistry of dining,’ Sildoriel urged the mortals.

‘True Faêran fare,’ said Tully. Blissfully, he crammed a cinnamon-coloured shell in his mouth and helped himself to a handful more, adding, ‘Chocoluatl!’

‘Brown stuff like that would never catch on at Court,’ Caitri whispered in Tahquil’s ear.

The mortals declined the sweetmeat. Snafu scuttled into the trees and was pounced on by a scrawl of hobyahs. Gobbling sounds shortly emanated from that direction, while Snafu escaped, squealing.

‘Your strawberries, my lady,’ observed Caitri boldly to Sildoriel. ‘Or rather, these victuals we see before us—they have the texture, the fragrance of strawberries. No doubt they possess also the taste and the goodness. Are they real?’

‘The nourishment is real,’ said Sildoriel with a shrug, ‘and the taste and fragrance, all that is to be enjoyed. The image only is illusion.’

‘Where then did the goodness come from?’

‘Somewhere in Erith, little maid, there are strawberries which are devoid of goodness. They are merely husks, tempered with a semblance of taste. Whosoever shall eat them shall derive no sustenance therefrom.’

‘The toradh has been stolen then,’ said Caitri, prudently keeping reproach from her tone.

‘Indeed, ’tis so,’ affirmed the lovely courtier, with no trace of remorse. ‘Hast thou never noted that some folk may eat lavish amounts of victuals and yet they waste away to skin and bone? Those folk are eating only cochals.’

‘Why,’ said Caitri, hotly now, ‘do the Faêran take nourishment always from certain mortals, while other folk are permitted to grow fat?’

‘I perceive a note of disapproval in thy tweeting,’ casually said Sildoriel, taking Caitri’s chin in her hand. ‘Take heart, for the Faêran choose randomly or in jest, from here and there, as is our right. But when wights steal, like as not they will steal always from the same victims. Their thieving is done out of spite or jealousy.’ She released the little girl, laughing at the expression upon her face, knowing full well the effect of the touch of the Faêran upon mortals.

After Gildianrith, Sildoriel and the third Faêran damsel had arisen with a rustle of peacocks’ feathers and left the knoll, Tully spoke quietly to the damsels.

‘I hae tidings for ye,’ he said, ‘frae the battle-sward.’

In dread and eagerness, they attended to his words.

‘Not long past, mortal engaged against mortal in western Namarre, beyond the bounds of Darke. The battle began wi’ the archers and crossbowmen firing at each other frae baith sides, in an attempt tae cripple the enemy’s infantry line. The spearmen stood their ground, tae protect the archers. For aye and aye, naught happened but a rain o’ arrows and bolts. I hae witnessed this sort o’ infantry siege before in bygone battles o’ men. Both sides try tae goad the enemy intae makin’ the first charge.’

‘Who attacked first?’ asked Caitri, breathless and wide-eyed.

‘Och, the Imperial troops are weel disciplined. They refused to be drawn by the Namarrans despite continual skirmishing between the archers and light cavalry. Angered by this, the Namarrans in their wrath acted impulsively and launched an opening attack.’

‘Was it successful?’

‘Nay, the first charge niver makes much impression,’ articulated Tully with the air of a seasoned campaigner. ‘Neither side gained the upper hand. The Namarran captains employed their infantry to mask the mustering of their cavalry, after which they ordered a succession of assaults. Meanwhile the Imperial battalions held their defensive formation, letting the Namarrans tire out their troops, like waves dashing fruitlessly agin a cliff. When they judged the rebels had exhausted their strength, they launched a brief, incisive counterattack, winning the day.’

‘Praise Fortune!’ said Ashalind in an undertone. ‘So the King-Emperor is advancing further into Namarre?’

‘Aye,’ said the urisk, ‘further towards us. By now his Legions are no more than one league from the fortress.’

‘So close!’ A pang of agonising delight, mingled with hope and fear, shivered through the damsel.

‘Yet by night,’ the wight added grimly, unseelie wights take toll.’ He was about to say more when the music of hornpipe, shawm and sackbut started up. The dancing resumed. High-pitched giggles and melodious laughter mingled, streaming through the flowering trees. Someone came walking towards the gathering on the knoll, someone who seemed to shape himself out of the twilight. The Faêran princesses hastily rose from their latest flowery couches. They curtsied deeply, three graceful herons admiring their reflections in placid water. Ashalind and Caitri found themselves on their feet also. Without a word, the Raven Prince extended his hand to Ashalind. She took it, although it was as if she grasped the blade of a sword, and she feared her own hand must surely be cut to the bone. Merely, he led her to the dance.

To that measure, in such a place, with such a partner, neither description nor poesy nor flight of fancy can do justice.

The topmost turrets of Annath Gothallamor climbed the sequined sky like black-visored sentinels. On the apex of the highest perched an iron weathervane in the form of a crow holding an arrow in its beak. Chimneys jutted from roofs of mossy slate. Small bridges crossed from turret to turret, and the mouths of waterspouts gaped.

High on the battlements spread a wide courtyard onto which opened several archways leading from the interior, each voussoir chiselled with the raven emblem of the Crown Prince. Out from these mouths rode knights in silver armour, with their eldritch servants following behind them. The machicolations resounded to the ringing of metal plate, the jingle of mail, the clink of harness, the hollow clopping of hooves on stone, the raised voices of restless warriors eager for combat. Yet to battle they were not bound—not yet. Instead they made ready to ride to Arcdur, to search again amongst the serried stones for some hint of a hidden entrance, some chink or flaw which might betray the last Gate to Faêrie. No sildron crescents shod the superlative horses of Faêrie, who could stride across nothingness borne by the power of gramarye. But jewels adorned their caparisons, flashing with the glacial colours of Winter.

Indeed, the capabilities of the Faêran were such that they might have flown unassisted, yet the atmosphere of Aia was not their native milieu; compared with the rarefied airs of the Realm, those of Erith were as syrup to these Faêran knights. To fly horseless was to proceed slowly. Their elfin steeds were better adapted to the world of mortalkind, and able to make swifter progress while levitating.

Here were the Faêran chivalry of Morragan’s retinue, those who had been amongst the hawking party, too far from the Gate when the Last Call to Faêrie had sounded. As they moved, starlight glittered, pure as hoarfrost, from every plane and flute and scallop of their fantastic armours, from every point and edge of their weapons. Proud was their bearing, easily they rode their wingless Faêran steeds.

So astonishing was the sight of this gathering that they appeared to be carved from ice crystal and darkness, hammered from iridium and shadows, embossed with moon-fire. The soft radiance of gramarye clung about them like a mist. They laughed, calling to one another in jest, scenting the fighting in the west as the hound scents the stag. Not one among them was not a warrior of surpassing skill, battle-hardened over centuries. Not one rode among them but he was in the prime of his power and prowess. Like drifts of blossom, the ladies of the Faêran passed among the concourse. Every knight wore a lady’s favour on his sleeve.

At the very edge of the courtyard, where no wall marked the boundary between solid stone and insubstantiality, stood Prince Morragan. He looked out upon the High Plain. At his back, his Faêran equerry waited beside the head of a war-horse some nineteen hands high, and black as the moon’s eclipse. Harnessed with caparisons of silver was this destrier, this noble charger. He shone with the richness of myriad jewels, although the horses of Faêrie needed no trappings and were thus decorated only for the sake of the Faêran passion for loveliness.

The Prince’s squire slid a short-sword into a scabbard at the pommel. Morragan turned towards Ashalind and a wind roused, gusting across the battlements. It pushed Ashalind off balance, for despite the invigorating nature of the black wine, she was greatly weakened by the Langothe. Steadying herself against a wall, she regained equilibrium.

‘Know this,’ said the Prince. ‘As long as thou dost believe in thy love for my brother, thou shalt search in vain for the Gate. When the veil lifts from thy cognisance, when thou dost perceive that this purported love is no more than an image in a glass, when thou dost eschew the strutting eagle and take flight with the raven, then it may be that thy memory shall become translated.’

In her heart she said, You prevaricate. If I did not love Thorn, I should still search in vain, for the last remains of the Gate’s covenant still bind me, and will not yield the final memory.

When she made no reply, he said, ‘Now fare I to Arcdur. Meanwhile, the freedom of the fortress and of the High Plain is thine. Use thy time well. Reconsider. If I return unrewarded, thou shalt endeavour to compensate me.’

The Prince swung himself up onto the war-horse with a movement so fluid it seemed never to have occurred. Grasping the reins in one hand he lifted the other, signalling to his knights. With one last glance down at Ashalind he urged his horse forward, leaping over the roof’s brink with a swift ringing of silver metal, to race away into the sky at the head of his cavalry.

But not before his last words had echoed off stone—‘I will not be denied.’

Ashalind stood at a window, dressed in a layered gown of lavender samite whose intricate lace hems trailed upon the flagstones. Her heart was eaten out like a worm-raddled apple. As ever, she directed her gaze away towards the west. In the chamber behind her, Caitri rested languidly on an opulent couch, one arm crooked behind her head. ‘Why has the Prince left the fortress at this time, with the King-Emperor’s troops not a league away?’ she wondered aloud.

‘Perhaps he has no real care for the battle’s outcome,’ said Ashalind. She mused awhile, then said quietly, ‘Once, in Caermelor, in the days when I rode with glory and fame in the company of great ones, and all the land seemed to lie spread out at my feet, and my hands were heavy with riches and the sun shone daily, you said to me this: “Mistress, I would wish you fortune, but ’twould be in vain, since you lack for naught—neither wealth, nor beauty, nor happiness nor love.” And I gave you this answer: “Caitri, no one may possess every thing unless they hold also a guarantee that all their fortune shall forever remain immutable. Wealth, beauty, happiness, love—all are constantly in jeopardy and may be snatched away in an instant.” Knowing this, the wise woman lives for the moment. The foolish woman dwells in apprehension. Both wise and foolish are we.’

Caitri answered, ‘Be like the smiling man in the riddle of the rose, or like the thirsty optimist who sees a cup filled to midway with wine and rejoices that it is half full, whereas the pessimist, perceiving the same vessel, laments that it is half empty.’

‘Is it not the so-called optimist,’ argued Ashalind by way of diversion, ‘who is truly the pessimist? For had he not expected the cup to be completely empty, he would not rejoice at its being half full. The so-called pessimist, on the other hand, is disappointed, since his expectation was for a measure overbrimming—thus he is in truth the optimist.’

‘Well then,’ Caitri responded merrily, ‘you have outfoxed me with words!’

‘That’s as may be,’ countered Ashalind, glancing over her shoulder at her friend. ‘Words of wit have ever been my allies and my downfall. I have no great strength or swordsmanship, no gramarye at my fingertips. Only may I avail myself of wit and wisdom and knowledge for help in this our time of need. And craft.’

She turned back to gaze through the casement.

‘Behold, all the wights have gone. The Plain is empty. Only armies of stones marshal themselves there, and their shadows are ordered to march at the whim and the wheel of the stars. Yet methinks I spy some movement—indeed, I believe a horse wanders there. Could it be Tighnacomaire? But no—my eyes deceive me. ’Twas naught but a trick of the starlight.’

The slow, dark breeze of Evemight, as sharp as rock and jagged silver, slid in at the embrasure and blew Ashalind’s long hair across her face. Between thumb and forefinger, she took up a strand of the dark tresses. ‘See here, Cait—where drops of the Faêran wine spattered in my hair, its original colour is restored. The ink is bleached out. Flecked am I with pale yellow, like the spotted cats of Avlantia.’

‘Ah yes,’ acknowledged Caitri absently.

‘You are uninspired. But invention strays into my thought. A bowl stands on the table there, beside a ewer filled with wine—will you wash my hair for me now, prithee?’

Ashalind shook the last droplets from the brightness of her new-washed Talith locks. Long necklaces of jewellery spilled from a casket on the table, and some of these she lifted, letting them slither in glittering festoons between her fingers.

‘Your hair is beautiful. Will you let me dress it?’ Caitri asked.

An unstorm was on the way, pricking through Ashalind’s bones, lacing her blood, unlacing her cleanrinsed hair, stirring it with the premonition of its coming. Fine strands of brilliance lifted and floated about her face, the golden fire of the sun an aureole framing a pale and flawless oval from which her wide eyes stared—jewels of eyes, windows looking upon a distant place.

‘The Prince is not here to forbid uncombers,’ stated Caitri. Having attended to Ashalind’s coiffure, she picked up the bowl and tossed the washing-wine out of the window, then leaned out and looked down. ‘And so, I see one comes this way now. I wonder, what spectres will the shang wind disturb, here on such a high and lonely plain? What human events might ever have taken place here, where wights and Faêran have ruled for so long?’

‘I can guess what memories it may arouse,’ replied Ashalind, walking towards the door to the stairway.

‘Where are you going?’ Dropping the bowl, which broke, Caitri sprang to accompany her friend, a note of urgency and dismay lifting her tone. Ashalind paused.

‘He said we are permitted out upon the High Plain, but no further. His words and wards permit no escape past its borders. Out there I intend to venture, now that wights have deserted its stony wastes and moved closer to the front line.’

Caitri, horrified, protested: ‘Are you to simply stroll about down there in that pitted desert of rocks and take the airs as though it were some garden park of Caermelor? Why?’

‘Because I grieve for what is lost, and am half killed by the Langothe. Because I long to escape these un-walls. Because the shang storm approaches.’

Caitri laid her hand on her mistress’s embroidered sleeve.

‘Do not go out …’ she faltered. ‘I am afraid to follow you there.’

‘Stay here,’ said Ashalind with a wan smile. ‘Neither be afraid nor follow. Wait for me.’

She kissed Caitri’s brow, and in a moment was gone.

The unstorm came up over Black Crag to the Plain. It blew across the fortress, lighting the pinnacles with tiny brilliants which outlined every ridge, every crocket and gargoyle, in shimmering pulses of bluish-green, like strings of diamantes. Annath Gothallamor rang and sang, chimed in its interstices and recesses like a mighty carillon, vibrated to the resonances of power in eerie currents of the unnatural wind. Within the castle’s chambers furniture wavered, seemingly transmuted to burning crystal. Walls melted to translucency; the great pendant lamps caught fire and flowers of flame rained from them, vanishing as they touched the ground. Bats with emerald eyes flew in and out. The flagstone floor turned as black as a sink, appearing to subside away altogether. Caitri climbed onto a winged statue upon a pedestal and clung there, hiding her face amongst its stone feathers. Things flew and darted about her ears, rustling like Autumn leaves in a mighty forest, glittering like untold treasure-troves, and a weird singing arose all around. When she dared to open her eyes all fear fled from her and she was filled with wild, unreasoning exhilaration, so that she jumped from her perch onto the midnight floor which after all remained there to catch her, and danced in the wind and was even borne up by it a little, her feet hovering a hand’s breadth from the ground in their satin slippers.

Later, after the shang had passed, when the walls of Annath Gothallamor had resumed their usual grim appearance and shifting habits, Caitri searched for Ashalind. Through cavernous halls webbed with fine tapestries she ran, but could not find her, and she sobbed with terror that she might never see her again. Some dismal trows followed her for a time, then trailed off into subterranean ways.

An arched doorway, high as a man on horseback, opened onto a stair leading down to a courtyard. Its architraves were thickly carved with wreaths of oak leaves and acorns. Here Caitri loitered alone. She sat with her back resting against the wall. Presently she dozed. A small sound awoke her—a light footfall, merely. Ashalind was not there, and then she was.

‘Are you mortal and loyal to the Empire?’ Caitri demanded reflexively, ever distrustful of appearances.

‘I am Ashalind. And you?’ warily responded the other.

‘Your own dear friend Caitri!’ With relief, the two damsels flung their arms about each other’s shoulders. ‘And have you walked through the storm on the High Plain?’

‘I have. First I rode, for I found Tighnacomaire lurking there, and he bore me on his back. To ride through the shang on the back of a waterhorse—oh, that is a wondrous ride indeed, a dream! But not for too long, lest it steal one’s sanity. After that, I walked. Tiggy yet lingers beyond these un-walls, not daring to enter but not wishing to desert us entirely. He has found some darkling pool or puddle to content him for now, although he is forced to share it with one or two other manifestations less seelie than him. I believe he cares not a jot. Now let us to the rose library, if the way makes itself available to us. There on the lectern lies an ivory-handled quill-trimming knife with a sharp blade. I want you to take it Caitri, and cut off my hair.’

Caitri, disbelieving, demanded, ‘Are you mad? Has the unstorm addled your wits?’

‘My wits were addled long before this,’ said Ashalind dryly. ‘Since the Day of Closing, I believe, when I looked through a Faêran window, past a Faeran Gate, upon a Faeran face … Come, if you will not help me, I must do this thing by myself.’

To the rose-window library they went, the two mortal damsels. There, Ashalind seated herself in the X-framed chair while Caitri gathered heavy handfuls of her bullion hair and sliced them off close to the scalp. When it was done, Caitri stepped back and surveyed her shorn mistress, whose tresses lay in swathes at her feet, like a golden tide.

‘Now,’ said Ashalind, ‘he will not like me any more. He has no use for ugly mortals and will put me from him. We shall be made free.’

She lifted her hand to her head and felt the short stubble there. For an impossible instant it seemed she was back in Isse Tower with Grethet. Shrugging off the memory, she smiled.

Caitri said, shaking her head, ‘It is no use, of course. It makes no difference. You remain beautiful, still.’

‘Well,’ said Ashalind, ‘I have another reason for wanting him to think of me as the Shorn One, a mere simulacrum of my former self. I hope he might come to consider that the real Ashalind has slipped from his grasp and been replaced by another, plainer, less adequate copy. He might then be shocked if he should ever glimpse me as I was.’

‘A vain hope.’

Ashalind seemed not to hear.

‘Let us burn this harvest,’ she said, plucking a lighted candle from its filigree bracket.

Hours beat by like blind crows. A tapping started up in the walls; knockings and hammerings reminiscent of the tunnels of Doundelding. Sudden lights flared in high windows. A grinding noise emanated from below a hearthstone in the rose library, as though someone were churning underneath the floor, and an ill-favoured hobgoblin was seen in the corridors and byways, prowling about on its splayed feet. Once, darting through a doorway to hide from this creature, the mortal prisoners came upon an unfamiliar stair. On climbing it they discovered a candlelit turret room, small and round, wherein sat a bevy of—ostensibly—little old women, industriously working at whirring wooden wheels. The scene recalled the spinners in the mines of Rosedale. Entering the room, Ashalind slammed the door behind them. One of the wizened hags looked up from her work. Her long nose was hooked, and her chin turned up to almost meet it in front of her mouth.

‘Come in, come in,’ she croaked belatedly, without missing a beat of her hobnailed boot upon the treadle. ‘Sit ye down.’

‘There’s a hobgoblin on the stairs …’

‘And he’ll not bodder ye here,’ replied the goodwife comfortably.

‘Aye, he’ll not bodder ye,’ chorused the rest of the spinners.

‘But we are mortal,’ Ashalind pointed out. ‘Do you not mind if we stay and watch you?’

‘Tisk task,’ chuckled the goodwife. ‘Dere’s more to ye dan mortal by now, daughters. Do ye not ken it?’

Reassured by the clucking and nodding of the seelie wights, the damsels seated themselves on three-legged stools to watch the spinning and await the departure of the lurking hobgoblin. Beside each wheel lay bundles of straw, which the little women were spinning into gold thread. Beyond marvelling, the girls made no comment but merely sat listening, alert for hobgoblin sounds outside the door.

‘And we’re spinning dis tread to be weaved into cloth o’ gold,’ explained the goodwife. ‘Maybe ’twill be used to line a cloak for hisself.’

‘Aye, for hisself,’ nodded the rest, as their wheels whirred and clacked and the spindles grew fatter, like golden cocoons, and the straw never ran out.

The rhythm of the machines was a lullaby, and the fragrance of the straw was warm and friendly, the rich, amber aroma of a haystack on a Summer afternoon. The visitors were in no hurry to leave, and as an added incentive, the spinners began to tell stories amongst themselves. Mostly, their tales concerned Prince Morragan—sagas of adventure or famous hunts, descriptions of his prowess at games and sport and love, of his generosity, of his vengeance upon mortals who breached Faêran rules or otherwise displeased him.

‘It were hisself as bade Nuckelavee assail da mortal Queen-Empress and her man,’ the spinners mentioned in passing. ‘He itched to make mischief on mortals.’

‘Itched and itches,’ rejoined one, sagely.

‘And some say he did it to make her man sound de Coirnéad and waken Angavar King,’ rejoined the good-wife. ‘Hisself was bored in his exile and craved comp’ny of da Fair and Royal kind.’

Ashalind could contain herself no longer. ‘Wicked is the Prince!’ she exclaimed, outraged. ‘Wicked and hateful, to order such a terrible execution!’

With a clap all the candle flames went out. As the eyes of the mortal damsels readjusted, starlight revealed to the visitors all that remained in the room—some aged candle stubs and a few heaps of moldy straw strewn about the floor.

‘Well,’ commented Caitri thoughtfully, ‘the Prince may not have intended for Nuckelavee to slay the Royal couple. He might have supposed that King James would blow the Coirnéad immediately, so that Angavar would have time to save their lives …’

‘Are you too under his spell?’ cried Ashalind scornfully. Heedless of hobgoblins she flung open the door of the turret room and strode downstairs. Fortunately, the prowler was nowhere to be seen.

An uncanny wind swept through the fortress. The building, if such it was, trembled on its foundations. Thunder boomed from one quarter, then another. From the distance, a fanfare threaded, liquid notes strung on the starry airs of Evernight like chains of water.

Minor wights went shrieking through the halls of Annath Gothallamor.

‘What is happening?’ Caitri wondered, clutching Ashalind’s hand. The two friends stood within a remote and barren ventricle of the fortress, peering through a slot in the wall that faced west.

‘I do not know.’

Soon, they learned.

With a patter of small hooves, Tully came running in.

‘Where have you been?’ they exclaimed.

‘Luikin’ out for ye, lasses,’ he panted, ‘gleaning tidings. Morragan returns from Arcdur. He approaches now.’

Ashalind’s heartstrings twisted like snarled cordage. All at once she felt ill. Her fingers flew to touch her shorn scalp. A desire to hide came over her, absurd because there was nowhere to hide. Caitri’s face greyed to the colour of wet chalk.

‘What shall we do?’ she moaned.

‘What else can we do,’ answered Ashalind, ‘but wait? Our fate is not in our hands, not yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ Caitri plucked at her sleeve. But there was no time for explanations. The thunder roared again, closer, and mixed in it, the ringing of silver caparisons on Faêran horses whose hooves pounded against the great pressure patterns that were the roads of the sky. A magnificent host galloped out of the west; black-maned horses, dark-cloaked riders, flashing with metal and jewels like flocks of splendid birds. They barrelled in amongst the roofs of the fortress, which shook under the force of their landing as though it must surely topple. Shouts and cries of command pierced the thunder.

As the last outriders circled before landing, Tully said quietly, ‘Well noo. It seems the Fithiach is back.’

A thread of steel tautened across Annath Gothallamor.

Ashalind drew a heavy velvet cowl up over her cropped head. Its shadow draped across her face.

‘Mayhap he will not notice,’ agonised Caitri, wringing her hands.

‘It will scarcely escape his eyes. No doubt he is already aware of my new mode. Squirm not! Do you consider him our tutor, to rap our knuckles for misbehaviour? As though there has been some wrong-doing? And if my hair is cut off, what is it to such as he?’

‘He will be angry. It is certain.’

‘My coiffure is my own business. A fig for the wrath of Morragan,’ said Ashalind carelessly, but she trembled.

An odour of brine and rotting vegetation penetrated the dreary chamber. Two men appeared under an archway festooned with stone ivy. Around them, spriggans emerged from the shadows, their tails switching with vindictive impatience. The wights bowed peremptorily to the damsels, then twitched and jumped as though they had been stung. Obviously it sorely irked them to be forced to make obeisance to mortalkind.

‘You—come,’ their driftwood voices creaked.

The two men stood rigid, still, impassive. Passing close to them as she and Caitri joined the spriggan sprawl, Ashalind noted they were the doomed mortal servants of the Each Uisge, bound in eternal, ageless servitude. Pallid as drowned flesh, blank of eye, they turned with precision to fall in behind the damsels and their unseelie entourage, completing the escort.

‘May we all be sained,’ muttered Caitri in tones of dread, snatching a glance at the identical Maghrain brothers who strode silently, their sea-blue Ertish eyes fixed on some point in eternity. Caitri’s hand fluttered to her neck, where a tilhal would have hung, had the charm not been torn off during the wild flight with the Hunt. Ashalind pulled the velvet cowl a little closer around her face and the spriggans jabbered peevishly amongst themselves. She longed to ask them for some tidings of battle, but their malign and sidelong glares deterred conversation.

Through the spacious halls of the fortress they hastened—halls wide and high as clearings in an ancient forest, which diminished those who passed through their mighty interior spaces, making of them mere beetles crawling across the floor. Fifty feet above, in the intricate beamwork of the ceilings, grotesque or beauteous faces peered down, smiling serenely or scowling. Tongues protruded obscenely, cheeks bulged like iris corms. Most of these effigies were fashioned from wood or stone. Others were not.

‘Do you mark something?’ Ashalind asked Caitri from the corner of her mouth.

‘No. What?’

‘The sounds of mining in the walls. They have ceased.’

Caitri listened past the rusted-hinge phonetics of the spriggans.

‘So they are!’ She shuddered. ‘Even dunters dare not arouse his ire.’

Ashalind glanced back over her shoulder.

‘Iainh!’ she called. ‘Caelinh!’

The men of the Isles made no response. Not by so much as a flicker of an eyelid did they indicate whether they had heard their names uttered.

‘Sons of the Maghrain!’ Ashalind called. The spriggans now hopped as though they danced on a red-hot griddle. Their tails spun madly, their squinting eyes flashed.

‘No talking!’ they screeched. ‘Be silent!’

Their slanting slits of eyes glinted with malice. The prisoners did not speak again to the human slaves of the Each Uisge.

On they wended, ascending many vast and tortuous stairs, across a pillared courtyard of green marble where sunken pools brimmed with languid reflections. Leafy vines twined about the pillars; from them, flowers budded, sprinkling pink petals on the water. Here was a window—which was not a window at all, but an interval between the crook of two branches, framed by a collage of leaves. A glimmer there caught Ashalind’s eye, and breaking away from their escort, she climbed into an embrasure, a bower of foliage. Peering through the trelliswork of the tree boughs she saw across a great distance, as though the clear air of Darke magnified her perception, mysteriously allowing vision far beyond the borders of Evernight to the west of Namarre.

In the gloom of uhta two armies, ranged rank on rank, faced each other across a strip of heathland severed by a stream which gleamed like a metallised ribbon. On the Namarran side, a few clumps of pine trees pointed up into the pre-dawn sky, like spindles from thorny undergrowth. The sparsely wooded land swept up to a ridge, whereon stood the ruins of a stone castle. Western Namarre lay breathless, silent, brittle as dark crystal; a lacuna of uncanny stillness.

At an appointed moment, a roar erupted from the throats of thousands of Imperial troops. A tremendous barrage opened from the Imperial side, with a deluge of arrows and the thunderous explosion of burning projectiles from Windship-borne catapults. Instantly, the Namarran lines across the intervening space of No Mortals’ Land broke into one long seething flame of white-hot bursting naphtha. Hurled by Imperial catapults, blazing missiles as large as barrels of cider, with tails of fire as long as lances, thudded into the ground like volcanoes. The soil came down like a hailstorm for minutes afterwards.

Under cover of this fire, Imperial troops threaded their way in single files through the tangle of undergrowth to the centre of No Mortals’ Land, with arrows tearing overhead on their way to the Namarran lines. There they paused, awaiting signals from platoons supporting on either flank. The barrage from the Royal Archers and armed Windships was already creeping forward, and, fearing to wait longer, the Imperial troops began to advance. Soon they came up to the curtain of missiles which had reached the Namarran front line and their rate of advance from then on was simply regulated by the speed of the barrage. They crossed the enemy front line without stopping. Such rebels as survived had fled to the shelter of the pines, from which they emerged later to surrender in small groups. Some of the legionaries ran into their own barrage and fell, wounded.

‘Come away!’ hissed the spriggans at Ashalind’s side. They tugged at her elbows. ‘Hasten!’

She ignored them, intent on the unfolding scene.

Following the barrage closely, the Imperial troops crossed through a denser belt of pines. Some twenty yards behind this belt ran a ditch, occupied by a number of the enemy who fled at the sight of the Imperial forces. They were all shot down.

Up the slopes of the ridge yellow naphtha fires flared like unnatural flowers, stinking of brimstone, gushing oily black smoke. They burned fiercely, yet without spreading out of control in the rain-soaked vegetation. Throughout the area behind the Imperial line there was keen elation at the news that the whole attack was going successfully. The reserve battalions, taking up position on the slope of a hill, looked out upon the ridge opposite and on the whole scene: the Windships flying and fighting against a dawn sky striped with carnation and topaz, the naphtha missiles punching black smoke plumes from the ruins on the summit, the troops for the later attack lining up under the coloured flags of their battalions, chariots marshalling in the shadowy meadows, companies of cavalry moving up through the heath with a jingle of metal plate, and the reserve archers swiftly stringing their crossbows.

The first objective having been taken, an infantry brigade continued its attack up the southern shoulder of the ridge, west of the stream, with the King-Emperor’s Battalion still advancing immediately east of the water. Meanwhile, a company of knights pushed forward along the top of a low rise west of the stream. By their watchfulness, it appeared they expected strong opposition at the ruins of the old castle in the Namarran second line. This ruin, a few low piles of stones overgrown with brambles, sheltered many barbarian warriors. It lay immediately behind a wide ditch, screened by a narrow hedge.

The spriggans began to pinch Ashalind’s arms. Impatiently she pushed them off.

‘Budge now!’ they creaked. ‘Too long at the window she has spent.’

‘I shall come soon! Soon!’ said Ashalind, unable to wrench her gaze from the battlescape.

By now, dust and smoke from burning projectiles were making it impossible to see for any distance. Unable to take their bearings from landmarks, the chivalry pressed on, following the rising ground, keeping as close to the barrage as possible so as to be able to make the best use of their striking force whenever opposition was encountered. These tactics proved effective. On several occasions, at the instant the barrage lifted, the Empire’s troops rushed to attack, causing the enemy to scatter in panic. Some hand-to-hand combat took place, the combatants hewing at each other with sword and axe, but generally the opposition was feeble.

By now the spriggan escorts were dancing up and down in a fury of panic, trying to stamp on Ashalind’s toes. With no compunction she kicked out at them.

‘Hurry! Hurry!’ they squawked. ‘Must answer the Summons or master will be angry!’

‘One moment—just one moment more,’ she cried.

The Royal Company of Archers with infantry, assailing the defences immediately north of the ruins, had been met by the discharge of two rapid-fire mangonels emplaced on the top of a stone buttress. This forced the troops in that area to ground, and the check seemed likely to become dangerous. For a few moments they watched the barrage of projectiles play on the place, and as it lifted and the enemy arrows commenced to whine, they charged. One of the Royal Archers, an outstanding markswoman, slew three of the shotmen attending the mangonels with swift arrows from her longbow. The rest fled. Assured of the idleness of the war-engines, the captain rushed forward with a lieutenant and the men nearest them. The moment they surged past the crumbling walls, panic seized the Namarran defenders. In a solid line, they abandoned their weapons and fled, many of them shot through by arrows as they ran, others being killed as they ran into the continuing catapult barrage.

The fight was over in a very short time, and two catapults captured. The Royal Archers stood among the ruins along the horizon and shot the rebels down, doing great execution and taking vengeance for crimes by land and sea.

The Severnesse Eighth and the King-Emperor’s Battalion bivouacked at their final objective, one hundred yards beyond the alignment of the old castle. Reserve divisions were brought up and it could be clearly perceived that it would not be long before the entire ridge was securely held, all objectives taken.

The Legions of Erith were advancing towards the High Plain. Morragan’s raiders and brigands fell back before them, retreating without putting up much resistance. Of unseelie wights, oddly there was no sign.

Ashalind drew away from the window.

‘Master will be wrathful! Depart instantly!’ creaked the spriggans angrily, hefting their pikes in their grimy paws. Leaves fell into place, obscuring the view.

She whispered to Caitri, ‘The Imperial troops have the advantage!’

As they left the embrasure, Ashalind looked back at the leaf curtain. Had it been but fancy? It seemed there had been a certain flash of gold upon the small finger of a hand, the ungauntleted hand of the Imperial Army’s Supreme Commander …

The green marble courtyard gave onto a luxurious salon, carpeted in sombre yellow. It was filled with massive wooden furniture upholstered in tawny shades of marigold and spice. Here and there fires burned in small, pierced braziers of bronze. Lizardlike saurians darted on bats’ wings from fiery nests to mantelshelves, their lithe forms armoured in copper scales. The chairs were adorned with hideous feet, clawed and taloned. Grotesque faces grinned from chair backs. One of these moved its mouth and spoke. It was in fact attached to a shrivelled body which sat like a toadstool in a squat chair, its hands clutching the armrests.

‘You thought yourself rid of me, eh, erithbunden?’

Yallery Brown grinned like a row of old candles. A skinny rat peered from among the withered dandelions growing in his hair. Ashalind heard Caitri’s sudden indrawn breath. She herself flinched, but hurried on after a brief glance at the unsavoury wight.

‘Make haste, make haste,’ he jeered at their retreating backs. ‘Yallery Brown will not be far behind!’

The yellow salon opened onto a gallery the colour of apricots. Underfoot, fallen leaves formed a carpet. Sombre amber paper lined the walls, stamped with leaf motifs. The furnishings and hangings were of coppery velvet. From the crevices of the bracketed ceiling high overhead fell a continuous shower of leaves in Autumn hues: ochre, scarlet, saffron, umber. The spriggans pranced and capered in the rustling drifts, sniffing for larvae.

Stolidly the foundered Maghrain brothers marched on behind their charges. Here, time seemed drawn out, spun like thread from a sack of lint. As they walked, one day might have passed, or several—doubtless one of the tricks played by the bewitched fortress, but surprisingly, the two damsels experienced no discomfort or undue fear.

‘The Lady of the Circle arrives!’ a clear and lilting voice declared.

Two Faêran lords stood on either side of a door. Lofty was this portal, Winter-white, hinged and studded with lustrous metal. Indeed, it soared thrice the height of the Faêran knights. Ashalind tightened her grip on the folds of the cowl beneath her chin. Leaves whispered, swirling in gouts and streamers, lightly brushing her cheek. Had Morragan’s lords found the Gateway in Arcdur? Doubtless not—they would not appear so equanimical had they discovered their way home. Indeed, they would not have returned to Annath Gothallamor.

The eyes of Lord Iltarien rested upon Caitri, not unkindly. Leaning down, he laid his hand lightly upon her head.

‘Accompanied by her pet nightingale,’ he added to his previous announcement. Stepping back, he said, ‘Enter!’

The white door swung open.

A blast of icy air assaulted Ashalind and Caitri, and went hunting after the swirling leaves. The mortals walked forward into a parlour wherein miniscule motes drifted like swans’ down.

A snowy ballroom.

It seemed Winter dwelled here. Icicles depended from chandeliers, where slender tapers burned with a glacial flame. Snow sifted like Sugar-dust across the floor and piled up in banks against the legs of couches and sideboards, the walls of shimmering ice. Star patterns frosted great mirrors. Rime edged everything with silver stitchery. Through this freezing haze, the shapes of furnishings loomed indistinct. Slowly the mortal girls wandered into the mist.

The Prince’s bard appeared.

‘Someone left the window open,’ commented Ashalind.

Ergaiorn laughed. With a movement so swift it might have been imagined, he cast something from his hand. Gratingly, like the rim of an iron wheel on gravel, a sphere of crystal came rolling along the floor. It ground to a halt in front of Ashalind. Her gaze was drawn and clinched into its limpid heart, where an image developed.

‘Behold!’ said Ergaiorn. ‘The Legions of Erith are come to Evernight.’

Below gaunt turrets, the outer walls of Annath Gothallamor dropped, sheer and vertical, to join the folded and crevassed skirts of Black Crag. A narrow road wound down to the open flat of the High Plain which spread out to form a circle half a mile in radius. Gibbous rocks covered this tableland—curious, lumpy stones in odd shapes and sizes, some of which seemed to roll of their own accord, or to suddenly sprout skinny limbs, or to dissemble into shadows between equally queer-shaped bushes and stunted trees racked by the wind. The High Plain teemed with wights.

Visible beyond the rim of the plateau lay a vast sea of winking lights: the campfires of the five armies of the Empire.

‘See the Legions of Erith,’ said Ergaiorn as Ashalind contemplated the crystal’s moving pictures, ‘encamped some small distance from the foot of the escarpment. They have defeated the mortal brigands of Namarre—all are taken prisoner or slain or fled. Far have the Legions advanced, but they are mistaken if they believe victory is within their grasp, for although the wights of eldritch have harried and harassed them, they have not as yet mounted any genuine adversity. Having beguiled the Legions with a hollow simulation of battle, giving ground before them to lead them on, now the Unseelie Host is ready for encounters more devastating. Should eldritch powers in earnest be brought to bear, mortals shall find themselves sore oppressed. And though the men of Erith might zealously use the tight-sprung limbs of their battery against these saucy foes, they shall fling missiles in vain, for gramarye eludes brute force and passes it by, to smite with stealth from the flank most unguarded, using the very frailties of men to great advantage.’

Ashalind dragged her gaze from the jewel’s heart. In the Winter room she stood at Caitri’s side, and despite the snow her blood ran warm and rosy. Ergaiorn’s hand enclosed the crystal sphere. The Leantainn Pipes hung at his side, ebony wood mounted in silver.

‘What frailties?’ she demanded of him. ‘Hearts that rule our heads? Fear of the dark? These are not frailties. Merriment lacking in deep joy, passion that knows no true love—those are true frailties, and they belong not to my race!’ She stepped closer to the Bard, driven to boldness by sorrow and anger. ‘Have you a conscience, Ergaiorn? You are forsworn! You and all of Morragan’s gallants are forsworn! By opposing Angavar, you have broken your oath of fealty to your sovereign.’

Coolly he replied, ‘Only because thou art favoured of the Fithiach do I have reason enough to justify the deeds of Faêran knights to thee, erithbunden maid, and because of the beauty of thy face. Ephemeral beauty remains ever a cause for leniency among us. ’Tis true, all Faêran lords swore never to take arms against our High King. This vow we keep intact. We swore never to succour his enemies. This vow also remains virgin. No promise was made to hinder his enemies and we hinder them not. Wights may plague the human race as they have done for millennia—what is it to us?’

‘Then you contrive at semantics,’ cried Caitri, ‘like the lawyers of Erith, to thwart and pervert the very purpose of the contract!’

‘Thy tongue rattles overloose in thy head, sweetness,’ warned the bard with a cold smile. ‘Beware lest it grow so long as to trip thee and make thee fall. The Legions of the Empire outnumbered the defeated barbarians,’ he continued, tossing the translucent orb from hand to hand and spinning it on his fingertip, ‘naturally. They have advanced into Evernight. At Plain’s Edge the vanguard is forced to halt. At that place they are vulnerable to attacks launched from the plateau above, from secret forests on either flank and from Fridean delvings underground. Be not mistaken, the battle plan has been drawn. The strategy of the Fithiach is certain. When the Imperial forces threaten Annath Gothallamor they shall find themselves at the mercy of the Raven. With but a simple gesture, how easily the Fithiach might strike them down.’

Carelessly, he threw the ball into the air and let it fall. With a harsh clangour that forced a squeal from Caitri, it smashed to brittle diamonds on the floor.

‘But the men of the Empire have a protector,’ Ashalind challenged tremulously.

‘Dost thou believe that Royalty would use gramarye against Royalty? That Angavar would use it to oppose his brother? True, the High King and the Crown Prince have drawn lightswords against each other before the Gate at the Hour of Closing, but no more than that.’ His voice roughened. ‘Should the Royal brethren unleash upon one another the fullness of their powers, why, then the forces of nature would be waked to a struggle which must shake the very roots of the mountains, and cause the seas to boil and overbrim. They would darken the skies with wild storms to lash the cities of men with terrible winds and cast down living things with utmost violence. Nay—lords of the Realm have no desire to be the destroyers of Erith. Full well do we love the land of mortals despite its several shortcomings and uncouth inhabitants.’

‘Uncouth!’ cried Caitri, her vexation again breaking its bonds. ‘How can you so miscall mortalkind? Is it couth to keep us here against our will?’

‘The nightingale’s throat has lost its sweetness,’ said a masculine voice.

A darker figure shaped itself out of the pastel haze, moving with the gracefulness of vitality, emerging and sharpening into the form of a tall warrior, staggeringly handsome. He was clad in the close-fitting buckled leather harness usually worn beneath armour. At his back, nebulous others seethed and waited.

Here stood Prince Morragan, of that there could be no doubt. Snowflakes did not dare to touch him, or maybe they melted if they did.

The mortals curtsied low, fixing their gaze on the floor, for there was that about the Prince which hurt their eyes when they tried to look directly at him. Words rose like dust in Ashalind’s throat, stuck there and disintegrated. Inside the icy shell of her flesh she burned like a cresset.

‘Fly away,’ said the Prince. At the caress of his hand, a bird flew up from where Caitri had been standing. It circled once, twice, thrice, then, with a piercing cry, winged its way towards a high, dim window and disappeared.

Aghast, Ashalind stared into the swirl and mist.

‘No! ’Tis too cruel. What will become of her?’

Without replying, Morragan stripped the cowl from Ashalind’s head. Snowflakes nipped and brushed her ears, the smooth white dome of her skull, her bare neck. She stood silent while he studied her intently. His features remained without expression, betraying no sign of any passion. Presently, at his signal, his cup-bearer came forward. After pouring some wine, he presented the goblet to the Prince with a bow.

‘Drink.’ Uttering this command, Morragan held the rim to Ashalind’s mouth with his own hand. She could not help but sip and swallow.

Instantly, the liquid raced through her blood, like molten gold from a crucible. This was not like any wine she had known. It drove through her veins, branching and rebranching as wildfire races along the limbs of a tree to its outermost extremities. She choked, spluttered, caught her breath, and now the wine’s intolerable potency rushed into her fingertips, her toes; it fountained upward into her skull and filled it, pushed through the scalp into the roots of the hair and exploded there with a great lifting and a bursting forth. The blood roared in her temples. She squeezed shut her eyes, tottered and fell, was caught by lightning and let down, crumpled, to the floor.

Her lids lifted.

Ashalind kneeled within an arbour curtained with gold filaments, through which streamed primrose light. Gold rained down past her shoulders and waist to her knees, in a falaise of hair thicker and more luxuriant then ever before. With her hands she parted the curtains and shook back the heavy tresses, opening her view.

The snow had ceased to fall in the elegant, white room.

With a look which might have been anger and tenderness mingled, Morragan spoke her name.

‘Recall the Geata Poeg na Déanainn,’ said he, ‘or consider thyself the destroyer of the Legions.’

Rising to her feet Ashalind recalled instead, something Tully had once told her.

‘For the Fair Ones to take arms against mortals, there is no honour in that.’

‘You would not use your power to smite mortal men, who are without gramarye with which to defend themselves,’ she said, rallying her resources. ‘You are more chivalrous than that, sir. Your threats are merely implications.’

‘In sooth I would not treat them so, lhiannan, nor would my knights. Howbeit, there are many here who joy in bloody work amongst mortalkind and would fain be hard at it. With one recollection can thou restrain them.’

‘Should you set all the wights of unseelie upon the men of Erith, still Angavar would force them back!’

Thorn’s true name tasted strange on her tongue.

‘Shouldst thou desire to make a test of it?’ mocked Thorn’s brother.

Visions of large-scale slaughter unfurled across Ashalind’s mind. At once she could no longer meet the challenging gaze of the Prince, whose piercing grey eyes seemed to penetrate her very thoughts, almost to unlock that final memory. Averting her face she let the new-sprung hair swing across for concealment. After a moment she said, ‘No. Let me search for the Gate once more. I will try to find it.’

Another mineral bubble was placed into her hands, cool and hard. Distantly, Ashalind wondered at the fact that her blood ran warm, even in the wintry room. Then the oracular pearl seized her concentration.

Scarcely had the search begun when it was interrupted. The new-budded images of Arcdur clouded. She looked up. A messenger had been conducted into the room and was bowing on one knee at the Prince’s feet.

He was a mortal warrior, a doughty Dainnan captain—none other than Sir Tor of the Fifth Thriesnun. Leather armour covered him and his buckles were of bronze. He bore no iron—as an emissary he was bound to come unarmed and unshielded to the stronghold of the enemy. Beneath his walnut-brown beard, his visage was the colour of ashes. No comely man was he, yet she looked long and lovingly upon him, as the first mortal—other than Caitri, Viviana and the supernaturally preserved Maghrain brothers—she had seen since leaving Appleton Thorn.

‘Disgorge thy tidings,’ languorously bade the Raven Prince.

‘Your Highness, I bring word from the King-Emperor.’

Immediately, a dullness clung about Ashalind’s head as if wadding had been applied to her ears. The Dainnan captain spoke, yet his words were muffled, unclear, as though spoken under water. When he ceased, Prince Morragan’s voice cut through the wadding like a glaive.

‘Bold mortal, to enter these walls. Brave servant of Angavar, thy false sovereign. Hasten not to return to him, for other harbingers shall expedite my answer forthwith.’ A net of fire, the cold hue of lightning, rippled over the Prince and dispersed. ‘Get thee hence, lout, get from my sight.’

With that, the frozen walls clarified to transparency. From high in the battlements a chilling cry came sliding like a steel rasp grating ice. Sir Tor, backing away, shuddered and grabbed a rooster tilhal at his breast.

A storm of flapping ashes swept down from above, with the clamour of mad dogs. The Wild Hunt, led by Huon the Antlered One, catapulted forth from Annath Gothallamor like a swift thundercloud. But the Hunt was not unaccompanied. Like distorted reflections in an ill-made mirror, the Nightmare Princes of the Unseelie Attriod rode with them—the Each Uisge mailed in his cold malignancy; Gull, Chieftain of Spriggans, the pitiless Cearb, the Killing One who had caused the cave-in at the mines of Huntingtowers, Cuachag, the most terrible of fuaths; and the Athach, apotheosis of shape-shifters.

Westwards the mounted Host sped, until they reached the winking fires of the encampment. Blacker than the night sky, smoke against the stars, the Unseelie Host swirled and spiralled, swooped down on the Legions of Erith. And although the attack was taking place at least a mile off, it seemed to Ashalind that she heard the blood-baying of hounds, the snap of jaws, the twang of bowstrings, the whirr and smack of arrows and the clash of blades, the sizzle of sparks as swords smote armour, the yelling of men, the shrilling of horses, the hideous clangour of riven metal, the long, desperate pumping of mortal blood. Her heart was bursting with terror.

‘I pray thee, put an end to this slaughter,’ she begged, but she might as well have pleaded with a stone. Morragan turned his shoulder and paid her no heed. He remained watching the scene of the attack, the elegant fingers of his right hand resting upon the jewelled pommel of his sword. The Raven Prince was not to be approached.

A dirty ice-carving in a corner now proved quick. Thin cracks zigzagged across its surface. Sloughing jagged fragments, Yallery Brown took to capering hideously, his elbows and knees akimbo, delighting at the devastation wreaked on the men of Erith, which was clearly visible from the tower.

The unseelie creatures that had been assembled on the Plain now flooded down towards the encampment. Yet the battle was not one-sided, for the Lords of the Royal Attriod were everywhere, protected by powerful tilhals bestowed on them by their sovereign. Even Thomas Rhymer, the gentle Bard, rode with the light of battle-lust shining from his eyes. It drove him on. Perhaps he was shielded by some gramarye lent by the High King of the Faeran. Indeed, an aura surrounded the seven chosen comrades of Angavar; a soft, quivering light which gave them the appearance of warriors from ancient sagas, cast in the mold of the Faêran, and it might have been by this power they were able to withstand the onslaught of the dire and unseelie manifestations which sought their heart’s blood.

The page boy from Caermelor Palace who had once been a cabin boy was now a standard-bearer. He hoisted high the King-Emperor’s oriflamme, tied to a lance. Of bright red samite, with three tails and with gold silk tassels between, the flag was as conspicuous as befitted a rallying point in the confusion of combat. From the boy’s open mouth issued the battle cry of the King-Emperor’s Battalion. Tall black figures against the flames, men strove against the forces of the uncanny with blows that rang by stone and wood.

Overhead the Host soared and dived, eluding the ponderous Windships with their aerial manoeuvres, outracing the Stormriders as the falcon overtakes the blackbird. Where Cuachag and the Cearb stooped, men fell. Where Gull and the Athach plunged, tents collapsed and went up in flames. The Each Uisge galloped in horse-form through the encampment, cutting a trail of blood and slaughter.

Ever at the head of the airborne fray charged the rider with the terrible branches rooted in the bone of his skull: Huon the Hunter, his longbow bent in his brawny arms. He was an engine of slaughter, continually drawing and firing with uncanny accuracy, until a rider like a comet flew against him and Huon plummeted from the skies, the great racks of his antlers hacked from his severed head by the sword in the left hand of Angavar. For it was indeed Angavar who fought in the thick of the engagement. Power and assurance declared themselves in his every movement.

Then, from far away, arose the clarion call of a Faeran horn. In Annath Gothallamor, an infinitesimal ripple murmured among the audience of Faêran chivalry and courtiers. They appeared instantly charged with expectation, or perhaps amazement. They leaned towards the source of the call, strained towards it, poised, riveted.

Faint in the southwest a fragile membrane of light opened and began to grow, and it was like the pellucid light of dawn, where dawn could never be. Described by its radiance, a company of riders. Tiny brilliants glittered from their arms and armour. Their trumpets sang out a paean of challenge. Pale wings of radiance streamed from their hair.

‘The Awakened!’ cried a voice Ashalind knew as her own, and it seemed that a multitude of other voices cried out simultaneously.

The watchers stirred at the sight.

Tall, terrible and beautiful were the approaching riders. Their swords flamed and spangled, their spears glistened. Their hair was a total eclipse woven with stars.

Against the Unseelie Host rode the Faêran knights of Angavar, newly roused from their slumber beneath Eagle’s Howe. In the formation of a spearhead, the avengers rammed through the black helix, broke it apart, scattered the unseelie hunters, hewed them out of the skies with bright Faêran blades. The Unseelie Attriod and those eldritch horsemen who escaped the shock assault fled in disarray through the sky, while on the ground below, the unseelie flood retreated into the forest, or sank beneath pools or rocky crevices under the ground, vanishing from sight. Dimly, there arose across the Plain a mighty cheering from the throats of thousands of men.

Ashalind’s joy at this turn of events was short-lived.

The stirring within the fortress had become tumult. At a word from their Prince, Morragan’s knights armed themselves and sprang upon their fretting horses, eager for action. Some feral wind, spawned in gramarye, raged in gusts through the Winter chamber. It shattered the ice walls, darkening their translucency, transmuting them to ruined stone. Through crumbling rifts the Faêran chivalry launched their steeds, leaped out and away from the fortress.

Yet already the Knights of Eagle’s Howe were careering towards the plateau. Having vanquished the Hunt, they drove its remnants before them. Over the rim of the High Plain they came flying, at the same moment as Morragan’s retinue descended from the heights. Unseelie things scattered from beneath the hooves of the Faêran horses when they landed on the Plain in faultless formation. The two companies reined in, wheeled and surveyed one another without engaging. They held their long lances upright, starlight glinting off the points as it glittered off their harnesses of gold. The streamers decorating these shafts fluttered out horizontally over the nodding plumage of the knights’ helmets, the gently blowing lambrequins of gold and silver tissue attached to the backs of their helms, mantling their shoulders.

In this manner they poised, motionless.

Each party regarded the other across a wide strip of gibbous rock from which scribbled shapes vanished like the sea at low tide. Below the Plain, the Legions ranged across the lowlands of Darke roared and clashed their weapons on their shields, eager to advance and seek vengeance, though their commanders held them now in check. Around Annath Gothallamor, rearward of Morragan’s knights, unseelie wights moved within a pitchy darkness they had gathered about themselves like veils of black muslin, from which issued howls and laughter, screams and sobbing, sudden frenzied knockings and threatening silences; an orchestration realised from fevered dreams. Among Prince Morragan’s company, his knights took precedence, while the five who remained of the Unseelie Attriod must fall back into the shadows, mingling with their own kind.

Macabre slouched the shadows, luminous gleamed the highlights on the rocky Plain beneath the vigilance of the stars. Faêran armour—etched with running vines, strapwork arabesques and double-knots—shimmered with an ethereal sheen. Its gold was tinged with cobalt amongst the knights of the Crown Prince, while those who surrounded the High King glinted with a tint of alizarin, as though sunset flowed in fluid lines of flame over their war-harness.

For he was there at their head, of course—Angavar, mounted upon winged Hrimscathr, with the sword Arcturus now scabbarded at his side, starlight glancing off its damasked quillons. He wore no helm. The dark blaze of his hair framed the sculpted cheekbones, the eyes as keen as swords, the unsmiling mouth. The Royal Attriod flanked him, armoured cap-a-pie, their horses in full bard.

Morragan, Fithiach of Carnconnor, looked down from the towers of the fortress upon those who stood forward in challenge and those who awaited his command. He looked upon the face of Angavar, his brother, sovereign, rival.

‘Iltarien,’ he said to one of the three Faêran lords who had remained at his side, ‘go thou down to the Plain and speak on my behalf. When my brother issues his challenge, tell him this.’ And he gave Lord Iltarien a message in the language of the Faêran.

That tongue was unknown to Ashalind, who remained standing at his side, and yet familiar in some deep and inexplicable way, as the song of birds falls upon mortal ears and is almost understood, as the peal of bells or the roar of the ocean calls to humankind. When Morragan ceased to speak she was left with no knowledge of his words, but a lilting melody which danced round and round in her head.

‘Victory is almost within my grasp,’ murmured the Prince as Iltarien’s horse launched itself from the stonework. ‘Yet a premonition assails my thought. To go down to the Plain is to go to meet my doom. There is one who shall betray me—shall it be thee?’

‘Master,’ said a weaselly voice, ‘should the erithbunden prove perfidious—’

‘Yallery Brown, this is a daughter of mortalkind. How canst thou expect other than treachery? A daughter of Men, no less … but one who might have been more.’

Morragan bent his head towards Ashalind.

Every particle of her lightened and drifted apart until she became part of the plenum, and the plenum invaded her existence, and her blood flowed with the currents of rivers, and the ocean surged in her skull, whose tides were the slow heartbeat of the moon. Long green leaves streamed from her scalp and sap rose in her veins with the Spring, and a soft wind like dark hair swept across an unexplored landscape. She was lifted up to a region where stars shone out from behind the panes of her eyes, and somewhere within, the deep fires of the sun ran molten.

The Raven Prince had brushed his mouth against hers.

‘Wight,’ he said presently to Yallery Brown, ‘if thou shouldst harm so much as a hair of this maiden’s head, I swear I shall unseam thee from nave to chaps.’

The Prince’s Faêran breath was as sweet as cloves.

Far below, Iltarien’s steed came to land among the chivalry of Raven’s Howe, and Angavar held converse with him. Clearly, Angavar challenged Morragan’s tenure of the High Plain and the fortress, and demanded something more besides. Grim-faced and proud, Lord Iltarien delivered the reply his Prince had conceived with foresight, for who should foretell another’s motives better than his twin? There could be no doubt of the tone and intent of that reply. Challenge was met with challenge. Nothing was conceded; no ground was given, no hope of reconciliation.

Angavar’s voice rang out strongly in the common tongue, for all to hear.

‘Then, my brother, since there is to be no accord between us,’ he cried, ‘thou must needs face me in battle.’

With that, he ordered his own Royal Attriod to ride back through the lines of his loyal knights and down the ramps over the rim to fall in with the Legions below, leading and defending them against the forces of Unseelie.

But upon the Plain, trumpets sounded. The lances of the foremost ranks of both companies of Faêran chivalry, which had been pointing to the black and zodiacal sky, were now lowered to the horizontal. The knights couched the butts of the weapons in the lance rests beneath their armpits. In the middle ranks, swords slid from scabbards with a long ringing rasp of thirsty steel. War-horns sounded a second signal, and both sides charged at full gallop. With a terrible roar they met like thundering ocean breakers, and the shock of that collision caused the ground to tremble to its uttermost foundations.

As the Faêran knights engaged, down in the lowlands Attriod rose against Attriod, and a thick mist poured out of the forest and from every well and waterway, to twine about the struggling Legions. Through these smokes, fell shapes could be glimpsed issuing from among the trees, from pools and subterranean clefts, and there could be no doubt of their murderous intent. Yet eldritch manifestations of another kind moved also in their midst, defending the soldiers of Erith. Never visible to a direct stare, they could only be seen from the edge of one’s eye—urisks, and fierce men with silky grey hair wielding tridents, black dogs as large as foals, stunted fellows hefting pickaxes, cowled figures upholding lanterns, and other beings too elusive to perceive at all.

Faêran blades rose and fell, a-glitter with stars. The conflict appeared to Ashalind a milling chaos, a jostling, seething dance of death and destruction. She, transfixed in disbelief, could only watch from the ruined tower, unable to deflect her gaze.

Angavar did not join his knights in their battle. Instead, he galloped through the ranks of the knights of Morragan, ignoring them, as though they had never taken part against him. In amazement, they fell back at either flank without offering resistance. Splendid he rode in vengeful majesty, and the chivalry of Raven’s Howe were reminded afresh that he was indeed their King, that they themselves were treasoners.

On powerful pinions the eotaur Hrimscathr bore Angavar to the lowlands, where he fought beside the Royal Attriod, opposing their malevolent counterparts, defending the mortal Legions. The great Cuachag fell beneath the blade of Arcturus, and the Athach also was overthrown, but Octarus Ogier was toppled from his eotaur by Gull, mightiest of spriggans. He fell among the blazing tents, to be ripped limb from limb by the Each Uisge, while the Cearb impaled bold John Drumdunach through the heart before Angavar could hew his way through the melee to aid his comrades. When this happened, it was clear that Angavar’s wrath reached greater heights and he began to smite the incarnations of unseelie to right and left with a terrible vengeance. The clear light of Arcturus became dimmed with lurid blood.

High in the blasted keep of Annath Gothallamor where ivy sprawled over the corroded stones and lilies sprang within crevices, a Faêran stallion pranced agitatedly, scraping the floor with his silver forehooves, throwing up his long head. His master’s eyes rested thoughtfully upon Ashalind. He was armoured now, she noted dully, and some steady purpose resided in his glance.

She was angry with herself for being unable to deny his Faeran power, even though she was aware that it would be useless for any mortal to try to resist. It hurt her pride to know that although she might rant and struggle, it would do her no good. What little dignity remained, she clutched to her like the remnant of a torn cloak. She did not and would not protest, knowing that to do so would not only be futile, it would bring humiliation. Thus she appeared compliant, while beneath the facade her passions seethed.

The Prince lifted her up. He placed her sideways on his horse’s back and sprang up behind her. They travelled not through the air, but clattering down the tower stairs, out through the main gates of Annath Gothallamor, to descend the road which twisted itself about Black Crag. At their backs rode Morragan’s cup-bearer, his bard and the ladies of his court. A multitude of wights followed in the wake of the Faêran.

The Crown Prince was going to parley with his brother.

Through her indignation, and the delirium induced by the nearness of Morragan’s Faêran vigour, and the dizziness brought on by his every incidental touch, Ashalind alternated between dread and desire for the fast-approaching rendezvous with Angavar-Thorn. The imminence of the meeting thrilled her. She longed to see him again, but to what measure he might scorn her was difficult to reckon. His slightest revulsion would be too much to bear.

‘And how dost thou like riding upon my Faeran steed?’ murmured Morragan at Ashalind’s ear.

The uncharacteristic posing of the question struck a warning note. Ashalind made to reply but a coin of lead weighed upon her tongue and she could not lift it. Morragan laughed. She felt the thrum of his laughter through her shoulder.

‘Didst thou think I kissed thee for love?’ he said. ‘Vain and foolish damsel. Alas, that thine expectations are dashed.’

Outrage and despair laid hold of Ashalind. With his kiss, he had rendered her mute. Her one fragile thread of hope had depended on the use of that intrinsically mortal weapon—the lying tongue. Once more she had been deprived of speech, and for an instant there came on her an irrational dread that all the other injuries would befall her again, and she would become misshapen, abandoned, reviled and amnesiac. Somehow, the foresight of Morragan must have warned him of her intentions—There is one who shall betray me—shall it be thee? For in truth, she had intended to cry out and betray him, if she could, and now that gate was closed.

Yet, even while she rode with the Prince down Black Crag, an alternative aspiration born of desperation took form, feebly, and began to grow.

As Morragan and his entourage approached the battlefield a great shout went up from the Faêran chivalry, and the two companies disengaged, drawing apart. Faêran chargers wheeled to a halt and a stillness spread from them like ripples in a tarn. All across the lowlands the fighting paused, as unhuman things suspended their quest for mortal blood. Drawn by some elemental intuition, the soldiers of Erith turned their heads towards the High Plain.

The Eagle and the Raven converged.

A short distance apart, all riders dismounted; however, Morragan kept hold of his captive, encircling her wrist lightly with his fingers. Seeing Thorn again triggered in Ashalind a rush of excitement. Warriors made of flame and shadow, tall heroes out of legend, these Royal brothers who now faced one another in bitter feud were both handsome enough to stop the heart and take the breath away. Dangerous they looked, and too beautiful to comprehend.

This was the first time Ashalind had set eyes on Thorn without the screens of assumed personae, the first time he had beheld her stripped of all pretence. No reproach stained his glance, no bitterness that she had not confided her secret to him. He looked upon her with such fervent intensity and sorrow, it came to her that if it were possible for the Faêran to love deeply, then such a passion she was perceiving in his eyes. At that she marvelled, and was overcome with joy so intense it was torment. And she felt humbled, to think that she had doubted him so undeservedly and was chastened by understanding, at last, perhaps too late.

Angavar-Thorn did not smile at her, nor, after his first brief flicker of appraisal in which so much had been conveyed, did he look at her again. He seemed to turn his full attention to Morragan, dismissing Ashalind from further consideration. She knew him well enough to be aware that what appeared to interest him least actually intrigued him most—that his ostensible carelessness cloaked his prime focus. He was, in fact, conscious of her every movement.

‘I have the key in my grasp,’ said Morragan without preamble.

Angavar replied, and the clear tone of his voice was gentle, like a calm ocean concealing lethal undercurrents.

‘No key, but a damsel. Hadst thou the key, thou wouldst now be standing upon other shores.’

‘She is the key, as thou know’st,’ returned Morragan, ‘knowing too late. I might slay or petrify her with a thought, before thou couldst prevent it.’

‘An thou dost so, where is thy key?’

‘An thou dost act against me, what care I if the key is destroyed, as long as thou art denied access to the Realm? What care I for exile if it means thine exile too?’ The Prince’s smile was insulting.

Ashalind wanted to say to Angavar-Thorn, ‘He would not do it, he would not hurt me,’ but her tongue was a wooden stick in her mouth and her wrist burned where Morragan’s fingers encircled it.

Angavar said, ‘Thou wouldst not harm this caileag. Thou dost forget, I wist thy humours.’

‘Not I,’ said Morragan. ‘Others might.’

Furtively, Yallery Brown, who had sidled close, fidgeted.

‘At thy bidding only,’ parried Angavar evenly.

‘Shalt thou put me to the test?’ inquired his brother.

Silence descended—a hot, tense silence of barely leashed fury. The two Faêran lords held each other’s gaze without flinching, as though an iron girder joined them, eye to eye. So terrible was that regard that no mortal could stand to look at them, and they must turn their heads away.

‘An she dies at thy command, I shall never rest until thy heart is riven by my blade,’ said Angavar in bizarre echo of his brother’s earlier words. ‘I swear it.’

‘How tedious, to be without rest for eternity.’

Another silence, more imminently dangerous than the first.

‘Thus we return to the beginning,’ Morragan remarked. ‘Stalemate.’

‘There is no gain to be had in this parley,’ said Angavar, harshly now, ‘or in full-scale battle. Our knights are equally matched. I might vanquish thine unseelie hordes single-handed. Further slaughter is without purpose. Thou and I shall meet in single combat, without use of gramarye, to decide the outcome.’

‘We shall cross swords if thou dost like it,’ answered Morragan offhandedly, ‘at another time. For the nonce, I have something thou dost want. If thou carest aught for it, swear to lay down thy weapons.’

Angavar spoke in a voice of steel. ‘Thou hast tarried long in thy dark keep, mi fithiach. Thou hast been missing the action.’

‘Better action was to be found in the fortress, brother,’ said Morragan provokingly, ‘since the company there was pleasant. Fain would my weapon remain oft in the sheath, it filled that receptacle so well.’

From some abyss beyond time blasted a frost-bitten wind. The gusts lifted the long hair of the High King in streamers that flowed from his brow like the rays of a black sun. Now softly spoke Angavar, and perilously.

‘Is the sword at thy side so rare that you are loath to notch it, Crow-Lord? They say the coward’s blade never needs reforging.’

Morragan’s hand jumped to his sword belt.

‘He who fights carrying no shield is called a swordsman of valour,’ continued Angavar, throwing a swift glance towards Ashalind. ‘He who shields himself behind a woman deserves a worse name.’

At that, Morragan thrust Ashalind aside and Lord Iltarien caught her. There came the sweeping rasp of a crystalline zing! as sweet and poignant as morning bells. The Raven Prince had drawn his sword, Durandel. Arcturus gleamed, already in the grip of Angavar.

Angavar’s lords started forward to wrest Ashalind from the grasp of her guard.

‘Stay!’ Iltarien roared at them. ‘It is to be single combat. Do not try to take her!’

The Faêran King weighed his sword deliberately.

‘Now,’ he said to his rival, ‘feel the wrath of the left hand of Angavar.’

All of Erith was centred around the vortex of the storm’s eye. From every corner of the known lands, beings both mortal and immortal grew still and looked towards Namarre.

In the forests, mortal woodcutters, well guarded by charms, stood beside trees part-hewn, with their axes hanging limply in their hands and dusty sweat trickling unheeded from their brows—they knew not why. From verdant waterways the asrai water-maidens lifted their lovely forms, ivory draped with green silk, with innocent, passionless gazes fixed upon the distance. By village ponds, goose-girls forgot to shepherd their wayward flocks. Their long whip-sticks of willow dragged on the ground, but the geese had given up their honking. They grew tranquilly vigilant, craning their long necks towards the horizon.

Under Rosedale, eldritch spinning wheels lost momentum and ran down. The spinners raised their large heads from their work; the thread ceased to run through their knobbed fingers. Beneath Doundelding, all sounds of industry were interrupted. Not a pick-axe, not a hammer smote another blow; not a wheel performed another revolution. Out in the oceans, the wild seal folk emerged to sit upon rocky isles, hearkening to the north wind.

In Stormrider stables, winged horses quit their whickering and stamping. Not a pinion bustled, not a stirrup jingled. Blacksmiths stood idle at their forges. Farmers ceased their toil in the fields. Wizards left off supervising esoteric experiments and hiring out their astute observations. On Windships and Seaships, captains found themselves giving orders to slacken the sheets and lose the wind. Sails flapped as flaccid as empty bellies, until even the wind tapered off, and they dangled limply.

In the abodes of Men, the hearth-fires died down as if they crouched to listen. Where rain had been falling the clouds dried up, withholding their bounty. The leaves of yew and myrtle, pine and lime hung static as though splintered from precious stones. On walls of dominite stone, tiny lizards stopped their scurrying and became statues of miniature dragons, or tiny, jewelled brooches. The ocean itself waxed calm and slow, with the watchful, awful serenity of controlled violence.

Amber lions woke watchfully in the tawny ruins of Avlantian cities where red leaves scraped cracked pavements. In Finvarna, the herds of giant elk browsing on the grasslands swung up their heavy heads, their gigantic racks of antlers upholding a racing sky. In Rimany, the snow bears paused like carvings upon icicle-draped cliffs. Spiders hung transfixed upon the lace wheels of their webs in the spidersilk farms of Severnesse.

Flocks of swallows gathered in the skies of Erith, swooping to perch amongst the topmost boughs and sway there, beaks closed, heads cocked to one side. In the wide, rolling lands beneath a peppercorn tree, there existed a horse-shadow the colour of translucent quartz. The cuinocco jerked its finely made head, flourishing the glistering icicle jutting from its brow, and looked to the north.

Sheep and cattle stood immobile in the meadows, as though embroidered on green baize. Fish hovered in deep caverns of indigo gloom. Heartless mosquito-queens folded tenuous wings about their wasp-sting forms. Flies swarming above the marshlands settled like iridescent beads on slender stems of water-grasses. Silent, Erith held its breath.

And no birds sang.

Perhaps even in Faêrie they felt it, even behind closed Gates—this conflict between the mightiest of Faêran lords.

Ruby and sapphire the Faêran broadswords flashed upon the High Plain, and never was such swordsmanship seen in Erith, before or since. So swift was every parry, thrust and riposte, that mortal eyes could not follow—could only make out a brilliant, glittering star-burst, like crystals shattering repeatedly—the awesome, bright shafts of the light-swords clashing together in a wicked storm of sparks like sharp flames of ice, like jagged shards of cobalt and copper. And somewhere in the core of this icy blaze, glimpsed or imagined, two terrible warriors met in a deadly dance of unimaginable precision, speed, strength and timing. Thunder shook the roots of the mountains of Namarre. Lightning climbed, aghast, the skies of Darke.

The onlookers had pulled well back from the site of the duel, giving the combatants a wide berth, careful not to step within range. Such virulent sparks could burn a tiny hole right through flesh and bone, through bone and sinew, through the very essence of being, drilling through body and spirit a keyhole or porthole to look out upon the long, grey desert of annihilation.

In a wide circle the mounted knights of Eagle’s Howe and Raven’s Howe viewed the struggle, intent, their Faêran vision missing nothing. The survivors of both Attriods watched also, despite the agony of their wounds, and so did many men-at-arms of the Legions who had ascended the cliffs of the Plain. Dainnan warriors and Stormriders were there, and wights both malign and benign, including scrawls of spriggans, sprawls of hobyahs and the mad goblin Red Cap with a dead, red rooster swinging from his belt.

Yallery Brown was close by, and Withiue and Tully, holding the mane of Tighnacomaire. The goblin Snafu was there, and the enchanted brothers Maghrain, and Young Vallentyne with his brother ganconers Romeus and Childe Launcelyn, and other wights too numerous to mention.

The eyes of all the Faêran were dark with pain.

‘Has it come to this?’ muttered Lord Iltarien. ‘That the best among us, the jewels of the Realm should take up arms against each other? Cursed was the day I followed the Fithiach, yet I could not do otherwise, for I hold him dearer than a brother and my loyalty cannot swerve.’

‘Thus we continue to support him,’ murmured Lord Ergaiorn, ‘out of fierce comradeship, and honour, and perversity, and beloved folly.’

As they watched, it became apparent that Angavar and Morragan were well matched, for neither was gaining the upper hand. But Tamlain Conmor cried out, ‘Angavar King is already weary from battle. Morragan is fresh from the fortress. There is no justice in the Prince’s advantage!’

At his words, roars of agreement and disagreement broke out on both sides, but no one could gainsay him, and Ashalind, standing untouched but helpless at Iltarien’s side, felt the chill of fear. The blue sword flashed so swift, so keen, every stroke a masterstroke.

Abruptly, all argument ceased, for the two masters of land and sky and sea and fire had drawn apart. Throwing off their armour by means of gramarye, they stood challenge now in shirtsleeves and full-length breeches. For a time they stood, gasping, flinging back their long hair which was wet with the sweet sweat of their exertion yet fragrant as pine. It was a respite from their mighty striving, mutually admitted. Appraisingly they regarded one another, readiness to retaliate against sudden attack written in the tense lines of their stance. Morragan spoke fleeringly to Angavar in the language of the Strangers. Angavar replied in kind.

Apparently by chance, Angavar had positioned himself facing Ashalind, to whom Morragan must necessarily turn his back in order to keep up his guard. In full view of Angavar, Ashalind’s hands gestured silently.

Catching her eye, he nodded, almost invisibly.

Many of those who looked on realised that some communication had passed between the two, but what it had conveyed they could not fathom.

‘False bitch!’ squalled Yallery Brown springing at Ashalind, but Lord Iltarien repulsed the wight. Before Morragan could glance back over his shoulder Angavar had lunged at him, uttering a wordless cry from deep in his throat, and with an answering roar from Morragan, the duel began anew.

‘What hast thou done, erithbunden?’ Iltarien cried, but Ashalind, her tongue paralysed by the gramarye of Morragan, could only shake her head.

Then, penetrating the profound rumblings of thunder by virtue of contrast, there came a tintinnabulation as of sequins falling gently upon bells of glass. It had been approaching for some while before the playful breeze started up, darting between the storm gusts generated by the Faêran combat to snatch at cloaks and hems, to snip at hair, to stir the manes and tails of horses.

The High Plain darkened further, and broke out in sudden, pricking lights.

Pincushion stars glowed incandescent, fanned by the bellows of the unexpected shang wind, and Riachadh na Catha, the ancient Battlefield of Kings, awoke.

Pale monarchs stood up once more to fight, their antique crowns and armour alive with a preternatural sheen. Once before, in recent time, the shang wind had swept its random tides across the High Plain. Then, Ashalind had walked out from Annath Gothallamor steeped in grief and taltryless, etching her image wherever she went—a ghost among ghostly warriors, a spectre to keep faith for her in unvarying repetition should the shang rise again.

And risen it had, just now, at Angavar’s command.

Sure enough, at this moment Ashalind now looked upon that ghost, the image of herself-who-was, walking away across the plain, lifting her skirts to step lightly over the stones. The simulacrum halted and looked back. Ashalind saw herself as others saw her, and was amazed. Her hair, shining like moonlight on bronze, swept past her waist. Ropes of pearl and sapphire were loosely braided through those tresses. Edged with miniver, her layered gown of lavender samite was richly netted in gold braid and seed pearls, the full sarcenet sleeves foaming with delicate white lace. And the face—an oval of flawless symmetry, of darling enchantment. A mask to hide sorrow.

At that moment, Angavar glanced towards this evocation and cried out. Stunned by the passion of that cry, Ashalind felt three heartbeats pass before she comprehended he had called her name.

Morragan, however, had responded instantly. He turned his head, looked straight at the shang image and faltered. It was only a blink of distraction, before he realised the vision was a sham—a hesitation so brief it took less time than a moth’s wing incinerating in a candle flame, yet it was enough. So evenly matched were these adversaries that one of them needed merely the slightest opportunity to slip past the other’s guard and drive the advantage home.

A tongue for telling lies had not, after all, been necessary.

Sianadh’s tale of Callanan, the hero who tricked the warrior woman Ceileinh with a similar ruse, had remained with Ashalind; had inspired her.

<<Bring unstorm,>> she had signed to Angavar in the silent language she had once taught him in the forest of Tiriendor. <<My ghost walks therein.>>

A momentary suspension of commonsense had been sufficient to distract Morragan. Beginning to tire, concentrating solely on the tactics of swordplay, it had taken him the space of a fleeting thought to comprehend the truth of what passed before his eyes.

Prince Morragan regained his judgement too late—by then Angavar’s blade had pierced his side. Blood trickled from the wound—not black in the moonlight like the blood of Men, but crimson, tinged with Royal blue. He staggered, yet did not fall. Angavar drew back, lowering his weapon.

The Lord Iltarien uttered a shout. Seizing her chance, Ashalind fled from him, but scarcely had she darted forward when Yallery Brown had leaped up to drive his rat’s teeth and venomous talons into the flesh of her shoulder, biting to the bone, clinging to her like a steel trap. In agony she screamed, once, then Morragan was at her side. He threw off the wight, who rolled over the stones of the Plain. With an assured, cruel movement and supreme effort, Morragan brought his sword down and fulfilled his oath to Yallery Brown.

A blackness fizzed and dissipated on the stones. A leprous cockroach crawled under one of them and Morragan set his boot-heel on it.

With his right arm, Angavar gathered Ashalind to him. His touch went through her like a javelin, healing her instantly and obliterating all physical pain.

But Morragan’s effort had cost him dearly. The violence of his exertion had torn apart the wound in his side. The blow of Angavar’s sword alone had not been ruinous, but the effort expended in smiting Yallery Brown severely exacerbated the injury. The blood that had been a trickle now gushed, and a look of wonderment crossed the Prince’s face; he, the immune made vulnerable, the immortal glimpsing the void at last, as fate came to meet him.

He fell to one knee. His fingers opened and the sword Durandel clattered to the ground.

‘Farewell, lhiannan,’ he said to Ashalind, with the slightest and most haunting of smiles, which did not reach his grey eyes.

The numbness lifted from her tongue.

‘Nay sir, pray do not leave us …’ she blurted. Words petered out in futility and hot tears.

‘Weep,’ he whispered, swaying, ‘for me.’

The sword Arcturus stood up, shivering, where Angavar had cast it aside. Its point was stuck fast into the rock of the Plain. The Lords Iltarien and Ergaiorn, the Prince’s cup-bearer and all the chivalry of Raven’s Howe gathered around the Prince on their knees, their heads bent, silent. They had taken off their helms. The Eagle knights and the Royal Attriod dismounted also, and all the kindreds of beings upon that Plain bowed down. The upper sleeve of the Faêran King was slit open—a long red-purple scratch showed through the fine linen. Now he knelt by his brother. Morragan sank down further, until he lay stretched upon the ground with his head and shoulders cradled in the arms of Angavar.

Softly, compassionately, the Faêran King spoke to the Raven Prince.

‘I cannot heal this wound,’ he said, ‘or any wound begat by my own hand. The blow was not lethal, yet by thy subsequent actions thou hast made it so. O, ionmhuinn brathair, mi cairdean, mi fithiach de cumhachd, laidir a briagha—dost thou recall the Fields of Lys? We fought and sported there, but never was the sport so hard as this. Alas, how pride has cheated us. Do not depart, I pray thee. Not before thou hast walked again with me upon the sward of home—’ His beautiful voice cracked. He bowed his head and spoke no more.

The Plain glimmered like a galaxy. Slowly the warrior kings of the unstorm faded.

Murmuring, Morragan spoke in the Faêran language and Angavar replied. Then the Crown Prince made to say something more, but before he could do so, his head fell back. In stark contrast against the coal-black satin of his hair, his beautiful face seemed chiselled of fine-grained marble, pale as paper. Still and silent he lay, with all of Erith still and silent about him.

Once, long ago in the Realm of Faêrie, a chorused cry had ascended when the Gates were Closing, exiling Angavar and Morragan. The second time Ashalind had heard such a cry was when the Awakened Knights of Eagle’s Howe had appeared to do battle on the High Plain.

Now a third cry issued from myriad throats, and it was hardest of all to bear, and this time not all of the voices were Faêran. It seemed to come from near and far, from high above and deep below, and in it was an anguish, a sense of loss past compare.

From Angavar’s arms a huge raven flew up on wings of shadow.

Empty-handed, Angavar rose to his feet and watched it fly away. The tranced stars went out in the shape of a cross and blinked once more alight.

Metallic, frosty, gigantic shone the stars. It was as though the sky were a pane of black glass against which unnumbered comets had flung themselves, smashing pinholes from which glistening lines of fracture radiated like the spokes of wheels.

Morragan was gone.

A shouted order rang out from the lowlands, followed by the twang and purr of arrows in the air: a salute from the warriors of Erith. Ten thousand arrows shot straight up against the sky, hung poised at the top of their arc and rained down harmlessly, rattling upon the encampment. Then Ergaiom put a golden horn to his mouth and blew the ‘Ceol na Slán’—the ‘Song of Farewell’. At that music, even hardened warriors wept.

Those serried ranks of fair and noble knights who knelt on the Plain remained on their knees. They paid homage now to the victor, the High King of the Fair Realm. All wights of eldritch also made obeisance to him, save for the remnants of the Unseelie Attriod, who were nowhere to be seen, for they had fled far away.

Around the standing sword, where the blood of the Raven Prince had spilled upon the stones, there sprang now a garden of strange poppies with translucent petals like flames of white samite.

‘These flowers will multiply,’ said Angavar in a voice that rang across the landscape, ‘until they cover this stone table. All of Riachadh na Catha will become a garden. But I will banish the siangha from Erith. Never more shall they wander pathless, the winds of gramarye.’

He took Ashalind’s hand, making a sea-storm of her senses.

‘Let us go from here, Goldhair eudail,’ he said. ‘Now thou must needs teach me how mortals grieve.’

Farewell, black bird. Under the stars

On silent wings, begin your flight.

It seems a sudden shadow flees

Across the night.

Fly swift, black bird, on faithful winds,

With rhythm strong, soar straight and free.

Yet something wonderful and rare

Shall leave with thee.

Fly on, black bird, do not look back

At those from whom thou must needs part.

Thy wings thresh airy currents like

A beating heart.

Fly high, black bird—do not look down.

Thy destiny is in no doubt,

But somewhere in the world below

A light goes out.

And didst thou wist so many hearts

Would go with thee?

ERGAIORN’S LAMENT

(Translated from the Faêran)

11

THE BITTERBYNDE

Part I

Faêrie, have my bones. Forever may I live,

But of deathless years I vow that I would give

All, to walk once more beneath thy singing trees,

Else to glimpse again the jewels of thy seas,

Or to breathe once more the wind that scours thy sky.

Faêrie, have my bones, and peaceful shall I lie.

A SONG OF THE EXILES

Upon the back of the Skyhorse Hrimscathr, borne on the tumult of his wings, Ashalind rode with Angavar down to the encampment on the lowlands. For her, theboundaries between wakefulness and sleeping had blurred. In a drowsy suspension of awareness she thought she viewed herself from a vast distance, as though her movements were no more than images printed on a shang parchment while her real self hovered or floated elsewhere. But Angavar’s arms encircled her, and that was all that could be desired—sufficient to numb the senses and ward off all painful reflections, for the nonce.

She leaned against him. Beneath the warm folds of the linen shirt his heart beat, slow and strong. Three rings shone on his hands, which rested, empty of reins, along her forearm. Any steed he rode would obey him without the compulsion of harness. Once, the ring-finger of his right hand had carried the heavy gold signet ring of D’Armancourt, but no longer—the Seal of the Fair Realm took its place now, marvellously wrought, set with jade and emerald. On the smallest finger of his right hand, halfway along, he wore the gold leaf-ring which Ashalind had bestowed on Viviana as protection—afterwards restored to Angavar. Twisted into a thin band on the ring-finger of his left hand, three golden hairs glinted.

She looked up. Past the curve of his throat, the sculpted jawline, past the fall of hair the colour of ripest black cherries spilling luxuriantly down over his shoulders, shone the multitudinous stars of Darke. The sky was a sheet of polished silver metal, spattered with ink-drops.

‘My friends,’ Ashalind murmured against the susurration of the wind. ‘Viviana and Caitri.’

The Faêran King inclined his head. His breath was warm against her neck, spice scented.

‘Cured of all ills, thy lady’s maid waits at the tents to attend thee. Hast thou mislaid the child?’

‘Caitri was spelled into a bird’s shape.’

‘Then birds shall send to seek her.’

‘The goshawk Errantry—he would likely kill a wayward fledgling.’

‘Have no fear of that, ionmhuinn.’

As graceful as a swan, Hrimscathr alighted beside a booth of rippling gold sendal, pitched near the Royal Pavilion. With a sound like the rustling of poplar leaves, the war-horse folded the great arcs of his wings and allowed himself to be led away by an equerry. Angavar and Ashalind, accompanied by a retinue of officers, passed along an avenue lined by Royal Guards standing to attention, and entered the lamplit tent. Within walls glowing like the cupped petals of a great primrose, Ashalind was met by Viviana. Many were the tears of joy they shed as they embraced. They conversed at some length, and at last Ashalind asked, ‘What did you see that made you fall into such a coma in Annath Gothallamor?’

Viviana could not account for it. Possibly the Faêran had tired of her and put the sleep on her, or else some of the wights did it, or some stray gramarye mesmerised her. It remained one of the many mysteries of the stronghold on the High Plain.

Soon, exhausted by travail, Ashalind lay down to sleep on a fur-strewn couch, with her friend seated alongside. Angavar departed with his officers and passed swiftly among the Legions to heal the wounded as only he could heal, with the touch of gramarye.

The interior of the tent was luxurious, furnished with a table and chairs of carven ash, a lectern of rosewood. Light tapestries lined the walls. At one corner, pieces of armour and mail hung on a stand, shining sombrely like dislocated seashells and spiderwebs ravelled. Awake now, Ashalind swallowed the last morsel of the meal she and Viviana had shared.

She ached.

Angavar entered. His courtiers waited outside. With a smile and a nod to Viviana, Angavar both acknowledged her and bade her leave. Wide-eyed, the courtier bobbed a curtsey and backed away, casting many glances towards Ashalind. Her flushed face and flustered movements betrayed her excitation as she darted out through the tent flap.

‘Quietude at last,’ said the Faêran King to Ashalind, throwing down his cloak. ‘Now we may compensate for much lost time without converse.’

Lightly she touched his sleeve.

‘I must ask a boon of thee,’ she said, in pain.

‘Anything.’

‘The Langothe consumes me—’

‘The Langothe, is it?’ He probed no further—merely, his eyebrow flickered. ‘That is easily assuaged. Look to me.’

Her eyes locked with his. Long he looked at her with his Faêran eyes, grave and attentive. Deep and far off, a world spun behind that gaze.

‘Forget,’ softly he said at last. ‘Forget desire and delight in the Land Beyond the Stars.’

And the Langothe, that bone-gnawing heart-freezing longing which had become so familiar it seemed part of existence, like breathing, was gone.

Ashalind experienced a boundless sense of freedom, as if her spirit had become a swan.

Angavar said, ‘Long ago, when we parted on the doorstop of White Down Rory, I was nigh to asking thee if ever thou hadst visited the Realm. There was that about thee which hinted of it. Yet I thought it impossible. I did not trust my own senses, did not believe it could be true. Would that I had asked!

‘Soon thou shalt unlock thy memory,’ he continued, ‘and next the Gate, that we may return to my kingdom, there to be wed among my kindred. Fain would I hie thence without delay, but my pledge to James binds me yet. Until Edward is crowned, I cannot leave Erith.’

As though she had not heard him, Ashalind remained as motionless as a jewel cached in the heart of a mountain. Like a curtain, the Langothe had been withdrawn from her inner vision.

All was now clear.

Where the longing had ached, a picture opened. Here had lain the source of the pain—birth and death, the exacting portal, the wellspring of Langothe which had beckoned to Ashalind and drawn her relentlessly, calling to the very essence of her being, although she had not known it.

A tall grey rock like a giant hand, and a slender obelisk leaning towards it, coloured as the lip of a rose petal. Both monoliths capped by a lintel-stone shaped like a doorstep. Near at hand in a granite hollow, a dark pool of water fed by a spring.

‘I see the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss,’ she murmured, ‘etched upon the air.’

At her side, Angavar abruptly stilled, as utterly as some wild creature sensing hunters on the wind.

At length he said, in a controlled tone, ‘And the way to reach it?’

‘Not that, not yet. But I know the Gate now, I recognise it. And I will find it.’

‘How does it appear, the Way to Faêrie?’ His voice was almost casual now.

All she could recall, she told him. She sensed a keen and desperate restlessness in him, a longing so urgent, so terrible she feared it.

‘Methinks thou dost want to make haste,’ she said. ‘Shall we take ship straightway for Arcdur? Even if thou mayst not leave Erith yet, we can locate the Gate in readiness. It can be opened, and thy subjects will be able to pass to and fro.’

A shadow darkened his features. He brooded. ‘Nay,’ he said. ‘Mayhap, during the days and nights of Arcdur, those three strands of thy hair have blown away or been washed forth or subtracted by beasts of the wilderness.’

‘Is it possible the Gate has closed by itself?’

‘Even so. Yet while naught is confirmed either way, the chance remains that the Realm may be regained at last. For the nonce, I prefer to dwell with that chance, rather than realise bitter disappointment. There is no need for haste. The last day of eternity draws no nearer.’

‘But while we hold back the chance grows fainter—for the rain and wind and the beasts and insects of Arcdur are as busy at their work of displacement as they have ever been.’

‘No, they are not.’

Of course—she had overlooked the extent of his governance. His influence was such that he could arrest the eroding effects of natural forces. A smile tugged at the corners of her lips. The west wind is his caress, raindrops his kisses on my mouth …

Against the dandelion shimmer of the tent walls, her mind’s image of Arcdur hung dissolving like a grey stain. Unwarned of, a flapping darkness crossed her vision, fragmenting it. Ashalind shook her head as if to clear it of confusion. Her face sharpened into an expression of wistfulness.

‘The Raven …’ she murmured.

‘What of him?’ Angavar flung back with a frown.

‘He is gone,’ she stammered, bemused, ‘yet remains with us, in a way. Will the Raven fly into Faêrie, when the gate is opened? At the least, he can now no longer demand that second boon of Easgathair White Owl. The Gatekeeper has fulfilled the first—he locked the Gates, as Morragan demanded. It was no fault of his that I was enclosed inside the actual structure of a Gate, hidden neither within the Realm nor without it. Now that Morragan has lost his Faêran shape, surely Easgathair is not beholden to the second pledge—or even if he is, Morragan has no voice to command it. With the Password to unseal the Casket of Keys known to all and sundry, all the Gates may be reopened, never to be locked again. Faêran and mortal may traffick again, as in days of yore!’

‘In Raven form,’ sombrely said Angavar, absently twisting a strand of her hair around his finger, ‘most of his powers have indeed been bled away. Not all. Some rudimentary power of speech remains. He is of Royal blood—it is not easy to disable us. Should he meet again with Easgathair White Owl, the Raven yet has a chance to command obedience. I would fain discover him, render him mute, else bind him with gramarye, or by his own word. I would find him, but he is not yet to be caught. Thus, it remains perilous to open any Gates.’

‘Why didst thou let him fly away?’

‘’Twas mercy that stayed my hand. How could I, who showed mercy to the Waelghast, do less for my brother?’ The attention of the Faêran King seemed to turn inward, his beautiful countenance tempering to the bleakness of a Winter sky. ‘My brother, in whose downfall I played a significant part.’ After a brief pause, he continued, ‘I was uncertain whether he might merely wing away to some remote forest, seldom to be glimpsed again, or whether in the strange reaches of a bird’s mental flickerings there existed a desire to regain the Fair Realm. And my qualms tendered him the advantage.’

Wide, her eyes drank him in, noting every detail. He was a fire and she a candle too near. He drew her close. Catching the cinnamon scent of him, she pulled away. He did not smell of sweat and leather, his breath did not reek of onions nor his hair of wood smoke. She could overlook no longer—this was no mortal man.

Perplexed, half angry, he said, ‘Do not withdraw from me!’

She hesitated, unable now to meet his gaze.

‘Thou art of Faêran blood. I am not.’

‘What’s thy meaning?’

A cudgel pounded on the inner cage of her chest.

‘How canst thou love me?’ At the backs of her eyes, tears welled. ‘To thy kind, we must seem as beasts.’

‘Never say that!’ he exclaimed in a voice rough with some elusive passion—and then, incredulously, ‘Dost thou doubt me?’

‘I am of the imperfect race. By my troth, if I view my kind through Faêran eyes—’

‘So. It seems thou dost doubt my love.’

She raised her face to his at last, and what she read thereon threatened to stop her pulse.

‘No.’

He said, ‘Never doubt me, Goldhair. Never.’

Ashalind’s throat ached, as though she had swallowed her own heart.

‘Long have we been parted,’ she said, ‘yet never hast thou been from my thoughts. Day and night, I have seen thy face before me. In my mind thy voice spoke. Each brush of the wind was a touch from thee, every dream a reinvention of thy form. At this instant thou art before me, and sometimes I am afraid. For I might blink and thou shalt have vanished again. Ah, but every fibre of my being cries out for thee.’

‘And mine for thee, be assured of it.’

From beyond the tent came the rumour of men’s conversation, distant singing, a medley of muffled hoofbeats as horses moved about the camp.

Ashalind recalled Morragan and his provoking words to his brother—Fain would my weapon remain oft in the sheath, it filled the receptacle so well. Another Faêran way of twisting the truth; using ambiguity to deceive without perjury.

To Angavar she now said, ‘Taunting thee he implied that it was so, but Morragan did not lie with me.’

‘I know it.’

He gathered her into his arms, resting his face against the top of her head. His hair poured down over her and she became lost in the maze of it, each filament a fine chain to bind the heart, a line to lure thought astray.

Among his race, the act of love was commonly regarded as sport and pleasure rather than as a mutual celebration of lasting passion. Tales of the Faêran made this clear. To hold him, feeling the tension through his shoulders so vehement that he trembled, to be kindled by the heat of his heartbeat—to know the effort it cost him, resisting his own nature; this moved Ashalind profoundly. By this, she understood how he esteemed her.

As instinctively, as irresistibly, mortals were attracted to the Faêran. The immortals of the Realm were designed for love and for laughter, as birds are fashioned for flight. In showing equal restraint, Ashalind acted with no less honour than her extraordinary lover.

In denial, affirmation.

‘It is my wish to honour thee,’ he whispered. ‘Soon shalt thou be my bride. When we lie together, thou and I, there shall be delight such as mortalkind can only dream of, and rarely do—such joy as might prove unendurable.’

‘Two worlds dost thou rule,’ she said. ‘Thou lack’st for naught, some might say. Gold thou mightst have in oceans, and rivers of jewels. I cannot give such treasures. Yet, when we have made our wedding vows, I can only surrender to thee a gift that no one else in either world can bestow, and which can only be given once, by any maiden.’

‘A gift to be enjoyed lifelong.’

It suddenly struck Ashalind that her lifespan and his would be unevenly matched. Mortal years could be prolonged in the Fair Realm, but humankind could not become immortal. He might continue to walk the green hills of Erith for many lives of kings, long after she rested beneath them. She dismissed the thought, vexed that she had allowed it to mar happiness.

A soft breeze stirred the tent’s fabric, causing shadows to waver as though underwater. The wind carried the sounds of the bivouacked armies more clearly through the thin sendal partitions—songs of victory, laughter, the jingle of harness. Flaring campfires threw the shadows of armed men on the rippling walls. Sentries marched along their circuits, messengers went to and fro.

‘Long have I searched for thee,’ Angavar said gently, ‘sending birds and beasts and eldritch wights to the task. All that time, every road and byway was watched. Every city and village in the populous regions was under the surveillance of my servants. Thou didst confound them with both thy fragrant disguise and the unexpected path thou didst pursue. Of recent days, thy bodyservant has told me much concerning thy travels. Would that I had known then what I know now. Time after time my searchers returned, having failed to gain so much as a hint of thy whereabouts, and tumult would surge again within my heart. It seemed thou hadst vanished out of all knowledge. Fain would I have sought thee myself, yet I could not be spared from the effort of the Legions. What makes thee so clever at concealing thyself from me? Few could achieve such artfulness! I have dominion over the sea, the sky and all the corners of the land. The Royal Raven may hide from me, for the nonce, but no mortal could do it—save thee. And twice thou hast done so!’

Ashalind shook her head. ‘I know not why, unless due to luck, or ill luck, or fate. Alas, would that thou hadst been able to save Tamhania from destruction!’

‘I knew naught of the isle’s danger until too late. No one at Tana heeded the warning signs, therefore they sent no early plea for help. When at last the ill tidings came to my ears I sped there forthwith, but by the time my Skyhorse reached the latitude of the Royal Isle, all was in ruins.

‘After the island was drowned, didst thou not presume I had perished during its fall?’

‘The denizens of the sea reported thou wert not numbered among the dead. Yet then, for a time, I did think thy life had ended, for my servants had scoured Erith and thy absence appeared to indicate thy total destruction. Shouldst thou have been slain, and thy body rendered unrecognisable then they would never have discovered thee.’

‘Unrecognisable? In what manner?’

‘Crushed, dissolved, incinerated, eaten. But let us speak no more of hateful matters. I have found thee, Goldhair. That compensates for all.’

‘Now at last we may enjoy the company of one another,’ she whispered, somewhat shyly.

‘Even so!’ he replied. ‘And share our full histories as previously we could not and did not!’

In a corner of the Royal Pavilion, Errantry roosted on a tall stand. At the centre stood a table carved of walnut and oak, inlaid with hawthorn wood. Ashalind found Thomas of Ercildoune and Tamlain of Roxburgh seated at this table with Richard of Esgair Garthen and Istoren Giltornyr, battle-weary yet unwounded—or if they had been wounded there was now no sign of it.

‘It is a joy to meet again with the Royal Attriod,’ said she.

They bowed, murmuring their greetings. True Thomas kissed her hand.

‘Valiantly you fought,’ she said to them.

Roxburgh’s face was grim. ‘Aye, lady, but our success was not timely enough.’

He fell silent.

‘Drumdunach and Ogier are sorely missed,’ said Ashalind, seating herself at the table.

‘Those who slew them have paid the price,’ answered Roxburgh heavily. ‘Now at last peace has returned to Erith—’ He glanced at Ashalind and she saw in his look that same hunger she knew so well. ‘And there is a way back …’

She nodded. ‘Yes. There is a way. I shall find it again.’

A page poured wine, but the goblets stood untouched.

‘They say you have discovered our secret, my lady,’ softly said Ercildoune, ‘as we have discovered yours. For if you are a thousand years old, we are older. Our exploits of yore are the stuff of legend.’

‘Indeed,’ Ashalind replied. ‘I recall, when I was a child in Avlantia my nurse used to tell me tales of the Bard who dwelled half in the Fair Realm and half in Erith. Even then it was thought to be naught but moonshine, a fabrication of the Storytellers to while away long Winter nights. But what of you, sir?’ she said to Tamlain Conmor. ‘I surmise that you also were once in that place, but I cannot fathom how it came to pass.’

‘A distraction from our present grief would be welcome,’ said the Bard, before Roxburgh could reply. ‘Allow me to regale you with that story.’ She nodded, and he proceeded.

‘There is on Roxburgh land a green vale called Carterhaugh,’ he began. ‘In that vale lies a secret bower, filled with wild roses in Springtime. Long ago, before the Closing, strange things began happening at Carterhaugh. It came to pass that roses bloomed there all year round, even through the snows of Winter, and they were double roses, gorgeous blooms with richly coloured petals like flounced silk underskirts, the like of which had never before been seen in Erith. The fragrance alone, it was said, was enough to intoxicate anyone who went near.

‘Few dared approach them, for this unseasonable burgeoning was a sure sign of supernatural activity in the area. Indeed, parents forbade their children to travel to Carterhaugh, lest some harm overtake them. But the attraction proved too strong for some, especially for young maidens who wished to pluck these extraordinary roses for their sweetness, in order to strew the petals amongst their linen or wear the flowers twined in their hair.

‘After a time a rumour began to fly about. It was whispered that any mortal maiden who strayed in Carterhaugh would be captured by a young knight who appeared as the guardian of the roses. He would not let her go free until she gave him a token, and that token was either her cloak or her maidenhead. Knowing that if they returned home without their mantles they would incur their parents’ wrath and inquisition, and perceiving this strange knight so well made and bonny, many a maiden came home with her mantle still upon her shoulders and nobody the wiser.

‘Yet truth has a way of revealing itself.

‘Soon the infamy of the unknown knight of Carterhaugh became widely known. It was said that he was one of the Faêran, and now with even greater urgency and direr threats, fathers forbade their daughters to go anywhere near that enchanted rosy grove. But one headstrong—and some would say foolish—maid, the daughter of a nobleman, decided to venture there despite the warnings, or because of them, for she wanted to see this comely knight for herself. This was somewhat of a contrary wench. She was wont to wear green and flaunt it, just to show her indomitable spirit. Without breathing a word to anyone, she went to Carterhaugh alone.

‘When she arrived at the bower of roses, the scent of them filled her with a joyous languor. She looked about amongst the nodding stems, which bowed almost to the ground beneath the weight of those heady blooms, but no sign could she see of any living thing.

‘Greatly daring, she began to gather the roses. She had not plucked more than two when the young knight stood before her.

‘“Lady, gather no more,” said he. “Why come you to Carterhaugh without permission from me?”

‘Boldly this saucy maiden planted her hands on her hips and looked him in the eye. “I’ll come and go,” she replied, “and ask no leave of you!”

‘She returned to her father’s hall that night with her mantle still wrapped about her, but her gown was crumpled and there were small rents in it as though it had caught on some briars. Nobody thought anything of it, for this maiden was not one to care overmuch for the daintiness of her garments. But she went often to Carterhaugh after that, and no one suspected.

‘Then one day her father summoned her. He was a kindly gentleman and he loved his daughter well—perhaps too well, for that was why she had been able to get her own way for so long.

‘“Alas, daughter,” said he, not angry but mild and meek, “By the signs, I fear you are with child. Name the father and if he be one of my knights you shall have him to wed.”

‘“Well, if I am with child,” she made reply, “myself shall bear the blame, for there’s not a knight about your hall, father, who shall give his name to the baby. I’ll not exchange my own true love for any knight you have.”

‘“Then who is your love?” her father appealed.

‘“Alas!” cried the daughter in her turn. “He is not of Erith, but a knight of the Fair Realm. The steed he rides is lighter than the wind. Its forehooves are shod with silver and the hindhooves with gold.”

‘Then the father bowed his head in sorrow, for there was naught he could do.

‘As soon as she could, this young gentlewoman combed her hair, put on her golden snood and hastened back to Carterhaugh. There she saw the young knight’s steed grazing alone, but there was no sign of its rider until she had plucked a rose or two, and then he stood before her, and he was full bonny, there was no denying.

‘“Lady, gather no more!” said he. “Why do you come here breaking roses? For to lie with me might kill the bonny babe we made between us.”

‘She was not afraid.

‘“Tell me, my love,” she begged, “were you ever a knight of Erith? Are you a mortal man?”

‘“Aye,” said he. “I was out hunting in the greenwood, and I rode swifter than the rest and outstripped them. I was alone, and eventide had fallen, when I spied a strange and splendid procession riding at leisure through the trees. At its centre was a green silk canopy borne on four spears by four mounted knights, gloriously accoutred. Under the canopy rode a Queen of the Fair Ones, on a white palfrey. At once all sense of peril deserted me and it seemed that I must catch up with her. Spurring my horse, I rode furiously, but no matter how fast I galloped, I could not catch the slow-trotting pageant.

‘When at last I came near my heart’s appetence, my horse stumbled and I fell from its back. I might have died from the fall, but that she caught me—a Queen among the Faêran, Leilieln of the Yellow-Flowered Broom. She took me to the Fair Realm to bide with her, for she saw I was comely of face and strong and lithe, and there I have stayed for nigh on seven years. Pleasant it is to dwell there, but now I have reason to wish to leave, and that reason stands before me now.

‘“A right-of-way opens from the Fair Realm into Carterhaugh,” he said. “I am permitted to pass through it and linger awhile, here in the world of mortals. But I must not stray too far, for my task is to guard the roses of Leilieln, exacting a pledge from thieves. But tonight is Jack o’ Lantern Eve,” the knight continued, “the night when the Faêran Court ride at the murk-and-midnight hour. Those who would win their true love must go to the well at the crossroads, and bide there.”

‘“The Faêran will perceive I am by,” said she, “and will try to conceal you in their midst. How shall I know you amongst all those brave and gallant knights of Faêrie?”

‘“Lady,” says he, “first let pass the black horses and then let pass the brown. Quickly run to the milk-white steed and pull down the rider. I shall ride on the white steed, nearest to the town, for I was a knight of Erith—they give me that fame. My right hand will be gloved, lady, and the left hand will be bare. My hat shall have a feather in it and combed down shall be my hair. Those are the tokens I give you. I shall be there.”

‘“How will they try to foil my purpose?” said she.

‘“They will turn me in your arms into a newt or a snake, but hold me fast and fear not, for I am your baby’s father.”

‘“I will hold you fast!” said she bravely.

‘“Then they will turn me in your arms into a bear and then a roaring lion, but hold me fast as you shall hold our child, and fear me not.”

‘“I’ll not be afraid!” she said.

‘“Then they will turn me in your arms into a red-hot cauldron of iron, but hold me fast and fear not for I’ll do you no harm.”

‘“Their tricks shall not drive me away,” declared she.

‘“Then,” said he, “they will turn me in your arms into a burning sword. Throw me into the well-water and I’ll be a naked knight. Cover me with your mantle and keep me out of sight.”

‘“I heed all you have said,” she answered him.

‘That evening she went alone to the well at the crossroads and hid herself. All was deadly still and silent. The face of the silver moon was the only other face she saw. In the middle of the night, she heard the ringing of bells and bridles, and after the silence of Jack o’ Lantern Eve, she was as glad of that sound as of any lorraly noise. The Faêran Rade came by, riding at a trot. Richly caparisoned they were, and many fair ladies and comely knights rode among them. First the black horses passed by the well, and then the brown. As soon as she saw the white horse, the girl ran and pulled the rider from its back.

‘When the Faêran Queen turned and saw what had happened, a storm of gramarye arose. This mortal damsel, Alys, she was no laggard, no milksop. She had heeded well what the enchanted knight had told her and she held him fast throughout all the shapes of horror they put upon him, and when at last she won him she covered him with her mantle.

‘Then Queen Leilieln of the Yellow-Flowered Broom spoke in anger, saying: “She that has got this knight has got a stately groom. Woe betide her ill-faur’d face! An ill death may she die! If I had known what now this night I see, I’d have looked him in the eye and turned him to a tree.” So pronouncing this curse, she rode off, with her Faêran company following behind her.

‘But Tamlain Conmor wed his victorious sweetheart, and the child that was conceived in the blossomy bower—a traverse between Faerie and the realm of mortals, where numinous roses bloomed, touched by gramarye—that child they named “Rosamonde”.’

‘When Rosamond was older,’ said Roxburgh, taking up the tale, ‘with her mother and me she entered the Pendur Sleep beneath Eagle’s Howe.’ His grim features softened when he mentioned his daughter’s name. ‘After we awoke she accompanied us to Angavar’s Court. Rose and Prince Edward spent their childhood together, and a bond of steadfast friendship has grown between them, as doubtless you already know.’

Indeed, the affection between Edward and Rosamonde was common knowledge at Court, and it was expected that some day they would wed.

‘What of Leilieln’s curse?’ asked Ashalind.

‘Angavar brushed it aside.’

‘A marvellous tale,’ she said. ‘I am now enlightened! But, Thomas, how could your honest tongue evade revealing these stories?’

‘Cannily,’ said Ercildoune, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Much as the Faêran and wights are experts at verbally skirting the truth, so have I also become a master of prevarication.’

‘And now we are drawn together,’ said Ashalind. ‘Three mortals who have walked there, who have breathed the air of the Realm and gazed upon it.’

‘As perhaps we were drawn from the first moment you entered Caermelor,’ said Ercildoune, ‘recognising a fellow traveller in some ineffable way. There is no mortal who can enter the Realm and return unchanged.’

‘Shall you rediscover the open Gate?’ asked Roxburgh suddenly. There was a wildness to him as though his warrior’s blood, roused to battle, had not yet cooled.

Earnestly Ashalind held the Dainnan Chieftain’s gaze.

‘I shall do all in my power,’ she said. ‘This I vow.’

Amid the tents, all talk centred around the wonders that had taken place, not least of which was the sight of the King-Emperor wielding a Faêran sword to fight a Faêran Prince. Angavar commanded the Royal Attriod to inform his captains of the true tale at last, so that it might be passed on to the men. Edward now was of an age to be crowned and take his rightful place on the throne—Angavar’s pledge to James was nearing fulfilment. Word spread like the plague through the Legions: ‘King James is dead, long live King Edward!’

But many of the men could not fully comprehend what had happened, and thought that the King-Emperor had been slain in the recent battle; thus, in later years, despite the celebrations soon to occur in Caermelor, the truth eventually—inevitably—became reshaped and altered by historical perspective. And the songs made by the bards about the sovereign they loved, about the wise and just reign of the Faêran King, in future years became songs about King James XVI, the sire of Edward.

Angavar passed sentence upon the defeated chivalry of Raven’s Howe, banishing them indefinitely to the Pendur Sleep beneath the hill. In this he was lenient: high treason was a crime punishable by execution.

‘Already you are exiles,’ he said to them, ‘and now you shall remain so, at my pleasure. When we return to the Realm, traitors will not be among us.’

But while the knights of Raven’s Howe knew only blackest despair, the knights of Eagle’s Howe were jubilant, knowing the time approached when they might regain the Fair Realm at last.

Not so Ashalind. On silken cushions in the gold tent, she wept with a desolation she could not define. Even Viviana could not comfort her.

The curtains parted with a faint swish and Angavar was there once more, returned from the Royal Pavilion where he had held council with his commanders and the Attriod.

‘Leave us,’ gently he bade the courtier. Viviana withdrew, curtsying awkwardly, overwhelmed.

Without haste, Ashalind raised her face to the Faêran King. She could not yet look at him quickly—her breath would catch in her throat and choke her wordless until the shock of seeing him had faded.

‘What ails thee?’ he asked.

‘Grief, it is,’ she admitted. ‘I have found thee, beloved, and that is my greatest happiness, but I feel have lost something I cannot name …’

For a damsel not yet eighteen, she had witnessed much horror during the Battle of Evernight, and the aftermath of shock lingered. Coming on the heels of all her other travails, it was no wonder such strife had engendered a melancholy mood. As well, she could not help but recall, again and again, the downfall of Prince Morragan.

On her attainment of freedom, Viviana had relinquished the leaf-ring, returning it to the King. He had worn it since. Now he replaced it on Ashalind’s finger, drying the tears from her face with kisses like the touch of the sun.

‘Yea, the loss of such a one as he,’ he affirmed, ‘is a weapon to slay joy.’

Then he amended, ‘But not forever.’

It was not in the nature of the Faêran to allow themselves to be touched deeply by sorrow, or for long.

Ashalind returned to Caermelor with Angavar and Viviana, borne in the Windship Royal D’Armancourt. There, Prince Edward waited. Against his own wishes the Prince had been sequestered at Caermelor, prevented from joining the fighting. As sole heir, his life was too precious to be risked.

As the Windship plunged out of the smokes surrounding Darke, and her flying keel once more broached the bright, sun-rinsed airs, the goshawk Errantry stooped from high altitudes with a half-dead bird clutched in his talons. He dropped it on the surging deck, where it became the pale and crumpled form of Caitri, lying streaked with blood. Angavar raised her up with his hands and she stood before him, instantly healed but dazed. Ashalind kissed the little girl and held her in her arms.

‘Cait, no longer must you serve me, or anyone,’ she said. ‘You and Viviana shall be given your own estates, your own households. Until your affairs can be made ready, I invite you both to remain with me at Caermelor Palace.’

Even before the Windship approached Caermelor, a troupe of riders on eotaur-back came barrelling out of the clouds, with Prince Edward in the lead. Having received the news from Stormriders, he was eager to greet Angavar and Ashalind upon their triumphant return. Skillfully he steered his steed to alight on the decks, whereupon he dismounted, doffed his helm, knelt and bowed his head.

‘Majesty and matchless lady, I do heartily recommend myself to you.’

Bidding him welcome, Angavar raised the young man to his feet, but as Ashalind looked into Edward’s face she perceived his skin was pale, his cheeks hollow, his eyes shadowed as though he had scarcely slept for weeks, or had suffered some illness.

‘I have been sorely troubled, due to your absence,’ he explained, his eyes flicking from Angavar to Ashalind. ‘Mightily glad am I, at your return.’

His brow was flushed, as if fever burned there, and his chest rose and fell like that of a drowning swimmer.

‘Are you hale, Edward?’ Ashalind asked, concerned.

‘I am hale,’ he replied, flashing a warm, yet strained smile. ‘This welcome homecoming has made me so.’

‘Then let us rejoice!’ said Angavar.

So it was that she who had been called Butterfly and Lady of the Sorrows and Warrior, now entered again the Royal City. Once, she had entered it alone, in a carriage; once riding on a horse’s back with the King-Emperor, and this time—yan, tan, tethera—she came in a ship of the air, on the arm of a lover to whom only the words of poets might do justice, and all truths were at last revealed.

Yet their story was not ended.

On foot and horse, the Legions of Erith departed from Darke and returned to the lands of daylight. Through Namarre they passed, across the Nenian Landbridge and into Eldaraigne. Thence they travelled towards Caermelor to parade through the city in a triumphal procession, before dispersing to their native lands.

As they marched, they found themselves constantly overtaken by unseen presences which caused the hair to rise on their necks. They were disturbed by flickerings and fittings which disappeared when stared at directly, and by noises in the night and troubling dreams which woke them in a foment of horror. Yet these phenomena were naught but the ebbing of a tide, the return of unseelie wights to their traditional haunts of old—to well, stream and spring, to mine and cavern, to hilltop, mountain and wood, to roofless towers and the forsaken buildings of humankind. Fewer wights returned than had set out, just as fewer soldiers returned to home and hearth, for that is the equation with armies and battles.

Overhead, vast flocks of birds darkened the soft blue skies of late Teinemis like an unseasonable migration, despite that the lovely waning of Summer was on Erith, wreathing the known lands with flowers tied up in corn-yellow ribbons of sunshine. The legionaries sang as they tramped, and looked up at the flocks wheeling like torn nets of black knotwork, seeing this as a portent of some sort, or perhaps a celebration of their victory, or merely another manifestation of the restlessness in the world about them. For the entire land seemed to have awakened; the rivers and streams purled swifter and more joyously, the winds blew sharp and clear, excitement laced the leafy depths of the forests, the blossoms sprang more vigorously, and wild animals, shedding their timidity, were glimpsed with unprecedented frequency everywhere except near the columns of the travelling armies, whose troops were wont to shoot them for food.

Summer, the blithe girl with corn-silk hair, gave way to mature, red-haired Autumn and Arvarmis, the Cornmonth. In Caermelor a tumult of rejoicing greeted the Legions. The triumphal procession, showered with flower petals, wended down the main thoroughfare. Amid the celebrations, preparations were set in train for the state funeral of King James, whose remains were to be brought at last from Eagle’s Howe for interment beside his Queen in the Royal Crypt. A ceremonial farewell was held for the two fallen lords of the Royal Attriod, Octarus Ogler of the Stormriders and John Drumdunach of the Royal Guard.

For nigh on a year, lavish arrangements had been underway for the forthcoming coronation of Edward. At the palace, the Seneschal—who was responsible for the supervision of feasts—worked frantically, by night and by day. The Lord High Chancellor, the Head Steward and others of the Senior Household collaborated. Gifts began to arrive for the Prince, who was to reach his sixteenth birthday on the day of the coronation. Added to this frenzy of activity, the common people were making ready for the imminent Samdain Festival of the Autumn Equinox with its harvest fairs, apple cider, vines, garlands, gourds and cornucopias.

To the astonishment of the citizens and nobles and courtiers of Caermelor, the gorgeous knights and ladies of Eagle’s Howe went openly among them in high merriment, telling tales and singing songs of the Fair Realm. Borne on a wave of ubiquitous jollity, Ashalind put aside the melancholy induced by witnessing the violence of war, and cast off the ineffable impression of bereavement that had been plaguing her. After the funeral for King James, there were many, many reasons to rejoice. Only kindness, justice, hope, goodwill and love surrounded Ashalind. Laughter rang through the halls of Caermelor Palace and along the streets of the city.

Sianadh was back at Court, limping ostentatiously due to a leg wound he had received in some mysterious manner (and which had been healed seamlessly by Angavar). He roared and clapped people heartily on the shoulders, broadcasting his bold feats as a Windship captain—which increased in valour with each telling—to all and sundry. Diarmid and Muirne accompanied him, having themselves won glorious reputations in battle. The carlins Ethlinn and Maeve were invited to stay at Court for the celebrations, with Eochaid, Roisin Tuillimh and the carlin’s lad, Tom Coppins, who was always willing to recount the story of how he and the carlin had fled to the well in the woods, and were besieged by wights, before being rescued by the Dainnan.

Far and wide, Relayers rode sky bearing more invitations to the coronation. Silken Janet Trenowyn arrived at Caermelor with her father, her newfound mother Elasaid, her seven wild, rescued brothers whose hair was as glossy as rooks’ plumage, and a small black rooster sitting upon her shoulder. On her left hand, the smallest of Janet’s fingers was missing.

‘Frostbite, me dove,’ she explained unconcernedly to the King-Emperor’s betrothed. ‘T’ fingerlock was freezed.’

Janet’s garden had become a talking point for miles around Rosedale. It burgeoned luxuriantly and unaccountably. In its fertile soil strange plants sprang, producing the best of fruits and flowers. The insects that flew there were the biggest and most brilliant, attracting colourful songbirds. And the hens that roamed about eating the insects were huge and glossy, each laying at least two eggs per day.

‘It was dust from Faêrie that made your garden bloom,’ whispered Ashalind to Janet.

As for the sons of Trenowyn, for so long had they remained under enchantment that their nature was still influenced by it. Boisterous as rooks they were, rowdy and untame. They did not fit well with the ways of city folk; indeed, these sturdy lads seemed half to belong to the world of eldritch. Like the beauteous Rosamonde of Roxburgh, the childhood of these mortals had been touched by gramarye. They seemed no longer quite human, as if they had more in common with the Faêran, to whom they were greatly attracted. For their part the Fair Ones were as fond of the boys as they were of any wild creatures.

Some old friends were absent. The death toll from the destruction of Tamhania had been high. Roland Avenel had perished in the sea; his body was never found. Yet somehow, in the exigencies of the storm, he had saved the lives of Annie and Molly Chove, the two maids from Tana. The Wade family, naturally, had survived—theirs was a close tie with the ocean. Georgiana Griffin had sailed out of peril in the company of Master Sevran Shaw. Soon afterwards, they were married.

With joy and surprise, Ashalind greeted the Caiden family, the fisher-folk who had once lived in the cottage near Huntingtowers. Tavron and Madelinn beamed as she loaded them with gifts. Tansy and Darvon brought the white whippet on a leash. It jumped up and tried to lick Ashalind’s face. Laughing, she gathered the dog into her arms and caressed its ears.

‘Your tongue is as wet as it is loving!’ she exclaimed. ‘But the geas is lifted—you cannot wash away my past now, little rascal!’

A Windship was dispatched to Appleton Thorn. It returned bulging with passengers. Almost the entire village had accepted the once-in-a-lifetime invitation.

Ironmonger and Wimblesworthy turned up dressed in their brigandines and mail, highly oiled and polished. Bowyer, Cooper, Spider, the new water bailiff, Farrier, the Village Hornblower, the reeve, the village bailiff, the steward, the Keeper of the Keys and the constable all arrived with their families. Betony and Sorrel Arrowsmith were among the passengers, but their brother did not accompany them. There was a new Village Master—he who had been the water bailiff, Falconer by name.

‘Galan never came back,’ said Betony sadly. ‘Only his horse returned, with a bit of seaweed tied in its mane.’

‘And yet,’ ventured Sorrel, with the air of one who seeks hope in the wastelands of despair, ‘my heart tells me we might well greet him anon.’

Lord Voltasus, Storm Chieftain of the Seventh House, had fallen in battle. Lord Noctorus—the new Chieftain of Stormriders—unexpectedly posted the heir of Voltasus, Lord Ustorix, to a lonely port at the Turnagain Islands. Controversially, he announced that Ustorix’s sister Heligea would become the new head of the Seventh House. She was invited to Court and travelled to Caermelor by Windship, accompanied by her mother Lady Artemisia; the Lords Sartores; Isterium, Callidus and Ariades; their new wizard, Andrath; and several servants from Isse Tower, including Brand Brinkworth, Keat Featherstone, Dain Pennyrigg, Tren Spatchwort, Carlan Fable and Teron Hoad.

Above Caermelor the clouds billowed and surged like drifts of blown apple-blossom. Keels sliced through the vapours, which frayed to reveal towers of piled-up sails bellying taut, straining with the wind. Windships sailed in from each of the Twelve Houses of Stormriders, each escorted by squadrons of outriders. Heligea’s sister Persefonae attended with her husband Valerix, Lord Oscenis of the Fifth House, and Lady Lilaceae.

The Lady Dianella had been betrothed to an elderly earl in the Sorrow Isles. She was not invited to attend the festivities. Of her uncle the wizard Sargoth, a hunted man and an outcast, there were scant tidings. Some while ago a group of foresters in eastern Eldaraigne had glimpsed a vagabond, barefoot, wasted to the bone and clothed in rags. He had shrieked incantations at them, warning them to beware, and not to approach him, for he was a wizard and could easily cast them down. Yet, he was bereft of wizardly contraptions. The foresters laughed, and passed the madman by.

The towering, square bulk of the keep overlooked the Autumn Garden of Caermelor Palace. The five-lobed leaves of the ornamental grape, deep crimson, embroidered the stone walls of the park. Beneath the spreading tupelo trees with their long red leaves and tiny fruits of vivid blue, clipped hedges burgeoned richly with scarlet berries. The hedges were a glorious medley of autumnal vegetation—the purple barberry, whose oval leaves were turning from deep bronze to flame, the garnets of glossy evergreen cotoneaster, dense, dark holly hung with bunches of blood-red beads, and the orange-crimson baubles of pyracantha, the firethorn.

Around the roots of the winter cherry trees bright hard orbs lay scattered, as though necklaces of topaz and carnelian had broken, spilling their gems. Lillypillies scattered the shiny cherries of their own fruiting, deep magenta, like rose quartz struck with light through purple glass. Errantry sat brooding on the boughs of a ginkgo tree, whose fanlike leaves stood out crisply against the cloudless sky of morning, a striking display in clear, bright yellow. On the flowering cherries, standing erect and columnar, the foliage was changing from green-bronze to red-veined amber. Camellias bloomed, their rosy or creamy petals pleated like dancers’petticoats. Leathery-skinned coppery fruits the size of a woman’s fist were ripening on the boughs of the pomegranates. Immobile among leaves piled up like surf, a watch-worm twined its rainbow coils about the pediment of a mounted statue of King William the Wise. A thick, sweet fragrance permeated the garden, exuded by the double flowers of gardenias, white as starched ruffles. Birds were singing.

In the days leading up to the coronation of Edward, two richly dressed people strolled along the paths of the Autumn Gardens, deep in conversation. As they went, they pushed aside the long branches of golden willows which drooped to the ground. The withies poured like softly swaying curtains. Their faded yellow leaves fluttered through the air, as thick as snow.

Over a dark-green tunic, Angavar wore a long, deep-red surcoat of velvet, worked with his own Faêran Royal Arms: the eagle gorged with a star-tipped crown, wreathed with hawthorn blossoms. A magnificent cloak covered his shoulders, fastened by a jewelled strap across the breast, lozenge-shaped clasps and golden cords. Its heavy folds were stitched with a pattern of hawthorn leaves. Holly-green breeches were tucked into cuffed boots reaching to midthigh, and a plain golden fillet encircled his brow.

His companion was clothed in a gown of rustling, lime-coloured silk, embroidered with gold cinquefoils. Its tight-buttoned sleeves extended well down below the wrist. About her neck she wore a collar of red-gold studded with emeralds and rubies. Her heavy hair, which shone like the flowers of broom, flowed loose. It was garlanded with Autumn leaves and berries on gold wire, fashioned from beryls and carnelians. Strings of miniature emeralds were wound loosely through her tresses. Her costume included a super cote-hardie lined with ermine, which was caught up on one side to reveal the silken gown beneath. Her girdle was composed of a series of square, jewelled brooches to match the collar.

‘How did it all begin?’ mused Ashalind aloud. ‘Thou didst go hunting, and William of Erith tried to steal thy quarry. Yet thou wert lenient with him, and thus the bond of friendship sprang up between Erith and Faêrie. Now, methinks thou dost no longer savour the chase.’

‘Faêran stags run no longer in Erith,’ he replied. ‘It is Faêran practice to hunt only beasts of gramarye, which do not perish but spring to life after they fall. Such beasts are well versed in evasive manoeuvres, and great skill is necessary to outwit them. They do not fear pain and death, for there is none. They take joy in the thrill of the chase, much as children delight in their games of hide-and-seek.’

He reached up to touch a sprig of fading willow leaves. ‘From years of dwelling amongst humankind I have grown to honour the fragile lives of mortal creatures as never before. But this new compassion has become a great burden to me.’

Ashalind understood. Her lover possessed a kind of reverence for life which the Faêran did not normally own. It was against his nature. He had lost something of the carelessness innate to all immortals. Immortals could not care too deeply—it would destroy their hearts and minds. For who could know better than they that forever is a long time?

Sunlight through the willows dappled Ashalind’s skin, its touch like syrup. He who walked like a tiger at her side was the fragrance of leaves, the essence of sunlight. His hair glinted as though droplets of dew were caught therein. Fragments of an old, clumsily translated Talith song strayed into Ashalind’s thoughts.

All the day was his, and the night,

Wind and rain, sun, moon and stars,

Snow and ice, frost, fire, stone.

His was the power of the storm and ocean tides,

And of the quake that sunders rock,

Of the fire-mountain, the whirlwind, the o’ertowering wave.

The drop of dew quivering on a web,

Caught in a spangle of dawn glow,

The painted butterfly’s wing,

The jolly bud, the leaf nodding on the twig,

The blackbird’s song—they were his also.

The white owl in the hollow tree,

The red fox and the golden eagle,

The carp leaping the waters, mailed in silver,

And all that was fair and wondrous,

Every thing rare, joyous and awe-ful.

Laughter, merriment and song,

Wrath and vengeance, these were his too.

And the rising of the sun was his,

And the going down of the sun.

Her spirit was suddenly moved with a desire to see the Realm again.

‘I can give the world to thee,’ said Angavar, pausing among the amber-threaded willow curtains. ‘Is there aught thou dost desire, which is not already in thy possession?’

Against the rim of her awareness, a black bird brushed its wings. Ashalind ignored it.

‘Yes!’ she cried. ‘Together, let us right all wrongs. Let all slaves be sought out and freed, and slave-traders be pursued unmercifully. Let the beating of servants be outlawed, and domestic wights be installed in all domiciles, especially of the Stormriders, to enforce this precept. Let the treasure taken from Waterstair be distributed among the deserving poor of Gilvaris Tarv and wherever else they may dwell!’ The words tumbled forth as she warmed to the subject. ‘Let us gift Appleton Thorn with a new gorse mill, a sturdy plough, a dozen scythes of Eldaraigne steel and twenty stout draught-horses. Oh, I have so many aspirations—I shall think of them all presently. Not least, to revise the dining etiquette of the Court!’

Lean lines of amusement briefly bracketed Angavar’s mouth. ‘As thou wish’st,’ he said, ‘so shall it come to pass. But do not forget, it is Edward who must henceforth decree new laws for Erith, not I.’

‘I am assured of his agreement, should the suggestions proceed from thee. He loves thee well, and honours thy wisdom.’

‘As perhaps thou dost not—it appears thou wouldst upset my erstwhile governance willy-nilly!’

‘Not at all! Fie—thou dost tease me! Hadst thou been aware of the mistreatment of servants, thou wouldst have remedied the situation straightway, I’ll guarantee! When I was a child in Avlantia I never heard of such ill handling as later was laid upon me at Isse Tower. I feel certain that no such cruelty towards menials occurred in those days when thy people passed often to and fro between Erith and the Realm, seldom glimpsed by mortals. They deplored unjust abuse and would have punished hard masters.’

‘How dost thou know aught of Faêran practice?’

‘In Hythe Mellyn the lore-masters taught us what they knew of Faêran ways. My teacher was Meganwy, a carlin well versed in the code followed by …’ Ashalind faltered. All her life hitherto, whenever conversation had touched upon the sovereign of the Fair Ones, he had loomed as a fabulous figure in her imagination, a remote and glorious legend enduring since time’s birth, only to be dreamed of, never to be glimpsed, no more to be reached than the stars. It was difficult to reconcile this entrenched vision with the fact that he was standing beside her, that she was speaking with him, that he was Thorn. ‘… the code followed by thy subjects,’ she continued shyly, for a moment incapable of looking in his direction. ‘I know how strictly thy laws are enforced.’

‘We condemn slovenliness,’ observed Angavar frankly. ‘Slatterns deserve punishment.’

‘Perhaps, but not with blows,’ said Ashalind. ‘That is where we differ, thou and I.’ She hesitated again then spoke, though hardly knowing what she was saying: ‘We differ in many ways. The more I know of thee, the stranger it feels.’ Her breath escaped in a soft sigh. ‘But how that strangeness stirs my blood …’

‘Boundaries,’ answered he, ‘can be crossed.’

He leaned towards her, holding out a small jar of enamelled glass as green as flames from burning copper wire. Intricate decorations of foliage and birds twined about the sides, so beautiful and lively that they put Ashalind in mind of the leaf-ring.

‘Wist thou the contents herein?’ he asked.

A lock of his long hair swung from his shoulder, brushing against her cheek like thistledown, and for a moment she was unable to speak. From the highest boughs of a gingko tree a blackbird whistled three notes. Ashalind cleared her throat with a discreet, dry cough and regained her equanimity.

‘I have not seen its like before, and yet methinks I know of something similar—I have heard a tale.’

Angavar twisted off the lid, revealing an ointment the colour of new spring grasses. Dipping a fingertip in the stuff, he touched it to her eyelids. She blinked. ‘Good faith!’ she said in wonder. ‘And is that not the self-same salve accidentally used by the midwife in the tale of Eilian? The old woman who attended Eilian in childbirth, after the damsel wedded a Faêran lord?’

‘Even so.’

‘Now I shall be able to see thy people, when they are hidden to other mortals!’

‘Indeed. No mortal can see the Faêran unless they wish it. But, anointed, thou mayst see them whether they wish it or no. And thou mayst pierce all eldritch glamour besides.’

‘A useful faculty! Yet all appears unchanged,’ she added uncertainly.

‘No illusion is yet nigh.’

Gleefully, Ashalind laughed. ‘This is fun! Thou’rt indulgent with thy gifts!’

‘Ask for more. Thy pleasure pleases me.’

‘Yes I will ask for more. A boon comes to me now. Would that it had occurred to me beforetime—long have I yearned for the freedom of the servants of the Each Uisge, whose lives were ruined in a single moment of youthful folly.’

‘Ere the sun has thrice set, they shall be discovered.’

She laughed again, in amazement and relief. How easy it all was!

‘I can scarcely credit that this should be happening.’

Angavar’s slow smile was beautiful, a stab of sunlight.

‘Believe it,’ he said.

Never had the Court of Caermelor seen such a gathering.

Like living jewels the Faêran danced and strode among them. Their poetry and songs enchanted mortal hearts with a keen delight, despite that sometimes the last echoes of the lyrics might leave the hearers imbued either with heart-bursting joy or an ineffable sense of tragedy and loss. The villagers of Appleton Thorn, servants from Isse Tower and Tana, an ebullient family from Rosedale, a crazy Ertishman with his swaggering niece and nephew, a chandler from Rope Street in Gilvaris Tarv, children with webbed fingers and hair the colour of pewter—all were welcomed as equals with the courtiers, whose initial dismay at this motley concourse turned first to fascination, then to pleasure. The cut-glass manners of Court, seen as baffling and pointless by the newcomers, quickly became redundant. The lords and ladies of Caermelor Palace found themselves charmed and diverted as never before. Goblet the Jester formed a firm friendship with Sianadh, which proved dangerous to the dignity of almost everyone. There was no end to the larks of these two, but most folk learned to take their mischief in good part.

Others were glimpsed at Court, usually by night—in the gardens, or the Royal Quarters. It might be an urisk, or a small innocuous looking waterhorse, or a dark-haired youth dressed in leaves and moss, with a small pig trotting at his heels. At times when Angavar walked beside the leaf-strewn pools of the Autumn Garden with his betrothed, a gorgeous swanmaiden dallied there too, her slender frame reflected in the water like a burning hibiscus. Soon the Autumn Garden began to be shunned by the courtiers and most of the mortal visitors—it was considered to be haunted. Rumour had it that the ponds were connected to the sea by underground waterways, that merfolk and benvarreys and silkies came up through them, and sea-morgans also, and merrows, and the maighdeanna na tuinne, and something completely festooned with shells which laughed inordinately, and dripping gruagachs with the sheen of flowing water gleaming down their ankle-length hair. Of course, the citizens were not surprised that numerous eldritch manifestations should be attracted to Caermelor Palace, because the tidings of an amazing event had spread—the High King of the Faêran had come to Court with his retinue. For that same reason there was not a lady’s heart that did not yearn, not a single human being who remained unmoved.

Vinegar Tom and various domestic imps lurked among the Autumn Garden’s rufous hedges. High in the golden fire of the trees small figures moved, laughing and chattering in an arboreal language of Khazathdaur, stringing up ropes and ladders until the treetops of the garden were webbed with them. Like butterflies, the coillduine flitted rapidly in and out of the crystalline brilliance of the foliage, trailing auras of soft fire. Unseelie things also gathered to haunt the palace domains, for they loved the Faêran no less than their seelie counterparts—but some enchantment prevented them at this time from wreaking their mischief upon the mortal citizens of Caermelor.

Even Finoderee loped in one evening, dressed in his new clothes.

As for Edward, now King-Emperor uncrowned, he seemed at once merry and melancholy. The members of his Household whispered understandingly that the prospect of sovereignty surely filled the young man with both eagerness and dread.

‘I urge this upon you,’ Edward said to Ashalind, ‘that you go now with Angavar to seek the Geata Poeg na Déanainn in Arcdur. Now, before the coronation. You must go by sea, for there are no Mooring Masts in that northern land. All my Seaships are at your disposal.’

‘If we pass through into the Fair Realm it might be years before we come back to Erith,’ Ashalind reminded him. ‘Besides, Angavar’s vow to your father is not yet fulfilled.’

‘Then do not yet pass through the Gate but mark it only, and set guards upon it to await your return.’

‘You are eager to find the Gate.’

‘No. But I wist well how Angavar and the others of the Faêran yearn and cannot rest. Mayhap, finding it shall soothe them, for a time.’

‘You are generous.’

But when she put the proposal to Angavar, he looked sombre, thoughtful.

‘Edward suggested this?’

‘Yes, and I am glad to discover what has been vexing him, for of late he has been as doleful as a—’ She had been about to say ‘crow’, but thought better of it. ‘—as a weeper.’

‘Methinks it is not the restlessness of the Faêran that eats him.’

‘Then, what? The approaching coronation?’

But he would not say.

All over Erith, people wondered where the shang winds had gone. No longer did tableaux glow and shimmer in a numinous twilight, no more did ancient cities awake from slumber to relive their glory days. Angavar had banished the unstorms. As days and weeks went by, folk began to realise that the shang would visit them no more, but they were reluctant to abandon the old, ingrained habit of the taltry.

Since the return to Caermelor, Angavar laid aside the Lion of D’Armancourt and openly displayed his own eagle escutcheon, the sigil of Faêran Royalty. The couriers and everyone in the kingdom who knew him by sight were fully apprised of the truth—King James had asked the Faêran High King to rule in his place until Edward came of age. Surprisingly, or perhaps predictably, this truth did not affect history as it existed in the minds of the soldiery and the majority of the citizens of Erith, who recognised the face of their sovereign only from crudely stamped images on coins. The King-Emperor had come to be regarded as a sovereign without parallel, a paragon, the most popular ruler in history. The people would have followed him into any sort of danger. They found it difficult—nay, impossible to accept the idea that the entire Empire had been under glamour’s illusion for so many years, that this monarch they loved was in fact not of their race. Popularly, the obvious explanation was that the King-Emperor had been slain at the Battle of Darke, and his ally the Faêran High King had subsequently arrived to stamp out those of his enemies who remained alive.

Now from every country came, at last, the Talith. The scattered remnants of that race gathered at Court to meet the Lady Ashalind, the betrothed of the Faêran King—she whose hair now glimmered with a golden sheen to match their own. Old and young, they came—the few who were well off and lived on the bounty of their estates; the few who were poor and who generally sold their tresses for wigs or who had gone into service, such servants being much sought after for their looks; and the majority, who dwelled in middle-income comfort.

If the Talith wondered at this newcomer in their midst, in their delight they put aside their questions. It may be that their natural curiosity was dulled by the gramarye hanging in heavy veils about the palace, drifting like incense through the corridors and halls. Avlantia’s dispossessed formed a coterie about Ashalind, reviving the ancient songs and lore of their northern land, polishing their innate skills of eloquence, sharpening their scholarship, revelling in poetry, music and theatre, showing off their skills in the sports of field and track.

With her anointed eyes, Ashalind perceived the wakened Faêran of Eagle’s Howe here and there at Court, sometimes where others could see them, sometimes not. They preferred to spend their time in the gardens, or riding and hawking in the Royal Game Reserves of Glincuith, rather than enclosed within walls. She thought them selfish, sternly moral, callous, cruel and kind, with a love of courteousness and an infinite capacity for joy. They were as swift to punish as to reward. She glimpsed them helping people with a wave of their hand, or bidding small (also generally unseen) wights pinch lazy servants and frowzy courtiers until their flesh appeared smudged with cobalt and charcoal.

Yet it could be argued that they were neither better nor worse than mortalkind, and in any case this sanctioning of vice and virtue was not a frequent occurrence. In general, the Faêran ignored mortals, taking more interest in their own affairs. Sometimes they mingled with the Talith, but only half a dozen mortals commanded their whole-hearted attention—Ashalind, Prince Edward, Ercildoune, Roxburgh, Alys and young Rosamonde.

One evening a flight of eotaurs came hurtling out of the sunset. Stormriders had brought tidings of the brothers Maghrain.

‘Your Majesty,’ panted the Wing-Leader of the Royal Squadron, bowing low, ‘they were found as you described, standing beside the black loch. The waters were boiling, as though some violent storm raged beneath the surface.’

‘A storm indeed,’ said Angavar.

‘As we speak, the Dainnan bring them here aboard a patrol frigate.’

‘You have done well.’ The King dismissed them.

That night the Dainnan Windship docked at the Mooring Mast of Caermelor Palace. The Maghrain brothers were brought before Angavar and Ashalind.

She looked with joy and horror upon the red-haired men. They stood to attention, their faces blank. Neither spoke. Water trickled from their clothes. Kelp was tangled in their wet hair.

Turning to her betrothed she said, ‘Enchanted they remain! Wilt thou free them, prithee?’

‘Goldhair,’ said Angavar, ‘these men have existed in Erith far beyond the span of their years. Unlike thee, they have lived and breathed every mortal moment of the last millennium. Dost thou understand what will happen, should the spell be broken?’

She paled.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That I had not considered.’ She paused pensively, for the space of six heartbeats. ‘Does one still speak only untruth, while the other is honest?’

‘Nay. That was laid on them only for the purpose of thy test. Yet two words only may be uttered by them. Down the centuries they have been permitted only “yea” or “nay”, for the Each Uisge detests the sound of men’s speech.’

She went to the Ertishmen, searching their dispassionate faces.

‘Do you wish to remain enchanted?’ she asked.

‘No,’ replied one of the brothers. A vein stood out at the side of his neck, pumping hard. Every sinew seemed knotted, as though he strove against some mighty force. Yet he and his brother faced no visible opposition.

‘Do you know what will become of you, when you are freed?’

‘Yes,’ said the other brother, whose brow was beaded with seawater, or possibly sweat. His jaw was clenched, his knuckles white, as though he strove to speak but could not.

Ashalind bit her lip. She kissed each brother on the cheek. Cold was their flesh, which for centuries had known only the touch of water under stone.

‘Then may goodness and mercy go with you, and the sun to shine upon you, and the wind ever at your backs.’

Angavar placed a hand briefly on each waxen brow.

‘Sain thee,’ he said.

The brothers turned towards one another. Expressions of joy slowly spread across their faces. With hoarse shouts they opened wide their arms to embrace each other, but even as they leaned into the embrace, time caught up with them. Before they could meet, two columns of dust rained down upon the floor. So fine was this pollen that a slight breeze was enough to lift the particles, and they blew away.

Sometimes it was a terrible thing, to be at the side of the Master of Gramarye.

But it could also be exalting.

Always, to be in the presence of the Faêran was an exhilaration. It was like experiencing the prelude to a storm when the wind rises, the skies darken and the air is charged with magic. On the doorstep of storms the world is an altered place where anything is possible, where you become so buoyant that at any moment that gusting wind will whip you off your feet and carry you up, over lashing treetops to its elemental domain of turbulent air and purple steams. That is what it was to be with the Faêran.

How much more intoxicating to be close to the Faêran King.

‘When I am with thee, I believe I can fly!’ Ashalind exclaimed.

At that, Angavar laughed aloud.

‘It would please me to see thee take thy pleasure of the sky,’ he said, and he took her flying.

To fly, without visible means of support, is an ancient dream. Mortals have forever desired to fly like a bird—this was not that way of flying. It was not the way of a swan, dependent on muscular effort and skillful balance in gliding the lofty currents. Nor was it the sildron-borne way, the courtly, mechanised glissanding, with a flying belt for hoisting and ropes for propulsion.

The Faêran manner of levitation was like that of a mote, of thistledown, of a butterfly, a leaf, a fly, a blackbird, an arrow, an eagle, a firework a storm cloud, an ideation and more, combined—for it permitted ascents far beyond the reach of the highest flying birds, to thousands of feet above the ground where temperatures dropped to extremes and the sparse air would have been hard to breathe, had not the forces of gramarye sustained life in effortless comfort.

It was to float, weightless, amongst lofty leaves on fragile twigs, passing through bowers of foliage which swung like green spearheads—as birds could never do without breaking their feathers. It was to hang suspended above a limpid pool or the wavelets of a wide, grey mere, and then to let down one foot and dip the toes into the water. It was to jump from a cliff top, arms wide-spread, and hurtle out into the abyss, descending in a gentle curve, only to bank and climb into the low cumulus, or catch an updraught back to the cliff top, or alight halfway down the rocky face on some precipitous ledge, impossible to gain by any other means. It was to be as light as gossamer, to walk across a bed of flowers without crushing a single petal, to ride on the back of a storm with the thunder exploding in your ears and the wind racing unchecked through your veins, the outraged thunderheads towering all around like a giant city. It was to feel every nuance of change in air pressure, wind speed and direction, yet to master every fluctuation; to be as conscious, as capable of altitude and flying speed and navigation as perambulatory land-bound creatures are sensible of the act of walking.

Yet for the Faêran, flying was purely a leisurely pastime. It was no use for long-distance travel, for it was too slow—especially in the heavy airs of Erith. As a swimmer labours in the wake of a sailing ship, as a walker falls behind a chariot, that is how Faêran levitation compared to riding on winged horses or voyaging in Windships.

Thus, Ashalind and her lover made a progress on eotaurback, visiting many of the regions of Erith they loved best. When they arrived at each location they dismounted and flew, unsupported, except by gramarye.

In Lallillir, they swooped over the misty fells and down into the damp river-combes where gruagachs, like slender iris flowers, combed their buttercup hair beside reedy pools.

To Haythorn-Firzenholt they rode. There they alighted on hedge tops, disturbing their close-growing foliage no more than would a fallen leaf, for they could walk light-footed where any Erith-bound creature would sink into the green mass.

At twilight in the rolling hills of cuinocco country, a slender white ‘horse’ shyly approached the couple and bowed its horned head, trembling with delight as Angavar’s hand caressed the moonbeam arch of the neck.

‘My people title him unicorn,’ he said.

In Rosedale the briars bloomed out of season, powdering the entire valley with a profusion of pink and white rosettes, dainty as kittens’ paws. How different Erith looked, seen from above, as the sun’s eye saw it. Forest leaves reached to the source of light, spreading their arms so as to receive its fullest out-pourings. Tender shoots of palest green and gold hid the old and faded bark below.

The swan-girls of Mirrinor gathered around Ashalind and Angavar like dark flowers, as in a boat of glass the couple skimmed the placid lakes or stood balanced on the water before slowly sinking together into the diaphanous world of the asrai.

The laval meres of Tapthartharath scorched them not, and they flew among the black spires, immune to vapours and noxious gases arising from that desert landscape.

Flying itself was a source of hilarity. Far from the eyes of courtiers—indeed, out of range of human vision—the fliers tumbled on aerial currents as pups play on a lawn. Free from gravity’s constraint and garbed in the woodland dusken of the Dainnan, Ashalind learned how to somersault in the air, how to make loops, dives, steep turns, rolls and other aerobatic manoeuvres. She was a child again. Not since the age of ten, a millennium ago, had she indulged in such foolishness. Never had she been abetted by such an accomplice in frolicsome absurdity, lawless in the streaming air, a dance partner whose beauty made her weak.

Errantry looked on with a frigid eye. To raptors, flight was a livelihood.

‘I would like to remain in levity always,’ said Ashalind, floating with Angavar among the outermost leaves of an oak. ‘Gravity is too grave a condition.’

‘Alas, thy race is not designed for constant lightness,’ he said. ‘Their bones lose density, their sinews shrink. In idleness, the mortal heart shrivels.’

‘Then I call it a shame!’ said Ashalind, swimming in deep-green, scalloped foliage. ‘Yet it matters not, if I may fly with thee sometimes.’

‘Where next?’ inquired Angavar.

‘To Tiriendor, now. I would fain see that fair forest in Autumn, as I shall always love it best.’

In Tiriendor, the liquidambars were formed from jewels of light showered from the sunset, and the oaks were hung with balconies of bronze. The air had a dreamlike cast, as if a haze of gold dust floated through the trees. Bright leaves bubbled past, whirling, escaping in sudden outbreaks from the boughs, glimmering and whispering in the sunlight. They lay on the ground, palms upturned and empty, like begging hands. Wild quinces ripened on their boughs like gold-green lanterns, and scarlet-capped toadstools resembling goblins’ caps thrust up from the mold.

This time, brambles failed to catch at Ashalind’s apparel. Briars and thorns waved themselves aside. Nor did animals and birds flee—on the contrary, they came willingly to Angavar’s hand, docile and unafraid. Some, he called to his side; others came seeking him. Timid fawns and wary wolves, gentle doves, falcons, bears, squirrels—all approached him with trust, seeking his caress. Even the white moths of eventide fluttered in circlets above his head, crowning his dark beauty with cold flames flickering palely.

‘Why did the animals not gather thus when first we passed this way?’

‘I bade them stand aloof. Wouldst thou not have suspected a Dainnan with a retinue of wild creatures?’

‘I suspected thee nonetheless!’ she answered with a smile.

More flocks of swanmaidens visited them, and the baobhansith in great numbers, and wights of every kind. Few had discovered the true identity of Erith’s erstwhile King-Emperor. His Royal glamour had remained too strong, impenetrable. Those few that had learned of it had heard the truth from the Unseelie Attriod, who had been apprised of it by the Fithiach.

Seelie or unseelie meant nothing to the Faêran, who had naught to fear from wights. Whereas a mortal King might have punished them, Angavar had made no reprisal against those of the Unseelie Host who had answered Morragan’s Call. According to Faêran Code they had done no wrong. It was neither treasonous for wights to gather at the summons of a Faêran Prince, nor criminal for them to harry mortals and assail them. Customarily, the Faêran did not concern themselves with dealings between wights and mortals.

While fulfilling his pledge to protect the Empire, and when fighting his way through wight-invaded Isse Tower to find Ashalind, Angavar had ridden against the Unseelie Host. Yet the greater part of the wights who had been defeated at the hands of Angavar and his knights bore no malice against their conquerors. Even the Waelghast, once Chieftain of the Unseelie Hosts, had challenged Angavar out of pride only, and a perverse desire for sport, no matter how perilous. They might at times provoke an engagement with the Faêran, for it was in their nature to be battle-hungry, but it was nigh impossible for wights of eldritch to nourish hostility towards them. There were, perhaps, exceptions to this rule amongst the remaining lords of the Unseelie Attriod, but they were now scattered.

Underground they passed, Angavar and Ashalind, with their Faêran retinue. Below the graves and sarcophagi of men, they visited caverns of the Fridean, and the workings and delvings of knockers and eldritch miners. Everywhere, diminutive fellows crowded around, laying down their picks and shovels, bowing low in awe.

‘Is it hisself? Hisself indeed!’ they twittered amongst themselves, drawn irresistibly by the presence of the Faêran King.

To the land of the fells their Skyhorses flew. The true wolves of Ravenstonedale, beautiful and dignified, approached the Faêran King and his companion with timid grace. They offered no hurt, and even proudly brought their cubs to show to the visitors. It seemed they had complete trust in Faêrankind—faith enough to accept Ashalind’s presence with merely a sniff of query.

‘In the manner of their species,’ said Angavar, fondling the ears of a playful cub, ‘they are not wont to prey on thy race. Their howls are not the voicing of hunger and blood lust, but a communication between their kindred. The fireside legends humans spin amongst themselves do great injustice to the wolves. They hunt for food, play with their young and dwell in harmony with the forest.’ He laughed. ‘As merciless killers, they cannot begin to approach the achievements of humanity!’

Plundered of their Faêran-wrought treasures, the halls under Waterstair stood empty. They echoed to strands of mortal and Faêran laughter that intertwined like chains of field-daisies and stars.

‘Verily,’ confirmed Angavar, ‘this treasure was wrought by my people during the Golden Era. Before we went under the hills to lie down in the Pendur Sleep, we hid it away. The writing on the portal—these are the words of the swan-music riddle. If the word “swan” is spoken aloud in the Faêran tongue, the doors will open.’

‘True Thomas was able to translate the riddle for us,’ said Ashalind. ‘Do swans indeed sing as they fly? I have been a swan. I did not notice it.’

‘Thou hast not been a true swan, Goldhair. The feathers of true swans possess unusual properties, and make a poignant music as they glide through the air,’ said Angavar. ‘But not all ears are able to hear it.’

Above mountains Ashalind floated with her lover, and across sunset seascapes. They drifted over the riven snowscapes of Rimany, the filatures of Severnesse, the crocus fields of Luindorn, the wild shores of Finvarna and Avlantia’s ruined and forsaken cities.

In the long, long rays of equinoctial radiance, it seemed forever to be the beginning of a golden day. The sun glided low in the northern sky, mellow and amber, sweet as a honeyed peach, its attenuated beams casting spindly shadows across the land. Low-angled, the light was richly tinted. The season brought not the hard white-gold of Summer hammering straight down from the noon arc, but soft, malleable bars of yellow-gold which speared slantwise through the trees. They changed every leaf into a sliver of stained glass, panes of old gold, blood-garnet and russet, and they painted each tree with translucent gilt on one side, freckled shadow on the other. Eternal morning reigned in that long, low, corn-yellow light—Autumn Evermorn.

As the season’s glory deepened, they returned to the bustle of Caermelor.

In the solar of the palace a pile of logs and pine cones burned in the grate of a fireplace luxuriantly carved with the arms and supporters of Eldaraigne. The walls of the solar gleamed with a faint gold tinge emitted by the chromium compound which had been mixed with the plaster. Against this lily sheen the tapestries stood out in startling, brilliant colours.

Two brindled greyhounds lounged on the patterned hearthrug, wearing strong collars of rubies. Near them stood a small inlaid table of oak, with a chess set of jasper and onyx disposed on top of it. On another table squatted a jewel casket with etched and filigreed lock-plates, its matching keys lying carelessly alongside. Forests of candles blazed in chandeliers and atop tall candelabra.

A footman stood to attention, bearing a silken cushion. A musician leaned upon a high stool, dreamily plucking the strings of a great golden harp. Notes rained from it like frozen tears of the sun, for the young sovereign was present in the solar, and he was rarely without music.

Viviana and Caitri sat in the window niche, busy at embroidery and whispers. Edward had consented—with a distracted wave of his hand as though they were may-flies he brushed away—to their remaining seated in his presence. A roseate glow silhouetted the demure profiles of the two girls. Beyond the embrasure, the sky seemed slashed and split like a ripe persimmon. The red light of sunset streamed in, clear shafts; elongated crystals of ruby. The uncrowned King-Emperor, Edward, stood resting an elbow against the mantelpiece. Moodily, he ran the toe of his boot along one of the fire-irons. Beside him stood Ashalind.

‘Prithee look at this, Edward,’ she was saying. ‘What is your judgement? Do you think it will be to my lord’s taste?’

Edward turned his attention to the small, glittering circle in her upturned palm. He took it between thumb and forefinger. The outer wall of the band was worked cunningly with a pattern of eagles’ feathers entwined with seabirds’ plumes. On the inner side were engraved the words ‘I love thee’.

‘It is a noble thing,’ the young King-Emperor commented, examining it closely. ‘Excellent work. One would expect no less from the Royal Goldsmith.’

‘I gave him my white bird bracelet to be melted down,’ explained Ashalind, touching her wrist where the ornament used to encircle it. ‘“This gold is only twelve carats,” said he to me. “When it is purified there will be less metal to work with.” “Enough for a ring?” I asked. “In sooth,” said he.’

‘But your bracelet!’ protested the scion of D’Armancourt, handing back the ring. ‘Did you not tell me ’twas your father’s gift?’

Ashalind slipped the ring into a small pouch of green velvet, tied with gold ribbon.

‘Yes, but you see, Edward, it was the only article in my possession which my lord has not given me. My father would not think it amiss. To me, the value of the bracelet extends far beyond its material worth. I desired some rare thing to give my betrothed in token of our vow. And the ring possesses a secret. Pressed snugly within an internal conduit are three strands of my hair.’

‘How inventive,’ said Edward, scrutinising the flames.

The harp stilled. An unfamiliar silence stalked the solar.

‘Play,’ Edward said over his shoulder. Instantly the musician’s hands found business.

‘Your birthday approaches so quickly,’ said Ashalind, finding cheery words to dispel the discomfort which seemed inexplicably to have arisen. To gain the age of sixteen and to be crowned King-Emperor on the self-same day—what a momentous day for you.’

Good sooth! she thought. I myself am not much older. There is no great number of years between us. Or maybe a thousand …

‘Have you seen your latest gifts?’ she continued hastily, hoping to smooth his furrowed brow with lively chatter. ‘There are so many, they have been forced to store some of them in the Upper Wardrobe.’

‘People are generous,’ he murmured. ‘As we speak, a gift that I have commissioned for you is being crafted. ’Twill be something else not given you by Angavar.’

‘What is it? Tell me, prithee!’

‘A gift to suit you perfectly. A looking-glass …’

She caught her breath, coughed discreetly behind her hand to cover it. There had been that in his tone, and in the way he lowered his head, darting a quick glance at her, which suggested some hidden meaning. But then he looked away.

‘There he is,’ squeaked Viviana, letting her embroidery fall and pointing out the window. Both maids craned forward to look into the grounds below. A captain of the Royal Guard strode past. Glancing up, he saluted briefly, giving a wry smile.

‘Your heart’s out the window, Vivi,’ said Ashalind. ‘You may follow it if you wish, but use the stair.’

‘May I?’

‘Of course! You too, Cait.’

The two damsels curtsied gracefully and exited the solar. As they did so, a page in Royal livery entered, dropping to one knee in front of Edward.

‘Speak,’ the young man said brusquely.

‘Your Imperial Majesty, I bring greetings from Lady Rosamonde of Roxburgh, who awaits in the antechamber.’

‘Gramercie, Griflet. I shall call for her anon.’ Edward waved the page away. ‘Anon.’

‘Pray excuse me, Edward,’ said Ashalind, clutching the green velvet bag. ‘There are matters to which I must attend.’ She curtsied.

‘Queens do not curtsy,’ he said. A roughness edged his voice.

The blood rose to her cheeks.

‘I am not yet a queen. You, now, are my King-Emperor, my sovereign.’

He did not reply, but took her hand, kissed it and nodded. As she went out the door, he turned back to the fireplace.

Ashalind descended the spiral stairs and followed a darkening hallway. Her footsteps seemed to echo, which was odd, because rich carpets covered the wooden floors. The echoes slowed, although her pace did not slacken. She stopped in her tracks. Something familiar lurked nearby. She could smell it.

The silence was utter.

Neither the buzz of conversation from the Great Hall, nor the soft-footed shuffle of pages lighting the lamps and flambeaux came sifting down the corridor. From the courtyard, not the creak and scrape of the well-winch, nor the dusk cooing of doves in the dovecote, nor the barking of hounds in the kennels, nor the clatter of hooves on the cobbles—none of the normal sounds of the palace could be heard.

‘Come out,’ she pronounced into the quietness.

Nothing altered.

‘Come out, you,’ she insisted, more loudly. ‘I know you are there.’

The hallway remained dark and still.

Impatiently she cried, ‘If you do not show yourself, I shall have you squeezed out, like whey from a cheese!’

A small figure slid from a wall niche. It stood twiddling its thumbs nervously.

He always made her irritable. She pitied him, he with his pathetic sidling about in dark places, his abstruse fears, his club-footed limp: pitied him, fearing him the while.

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘good luck be with you, Pod of Isse. I see you stowed away after all.’

Pod twiddled his thumbs faster. His face was blank as an unwritten page.

‘Why did you come here?’ she asked. ‘Do you seek me? Or a cure, perhaps—do you seek the High King of the Faêran, to cure you of your deformity? He will do so if I ask him—’

‘No!’

The lad had shouted. The shout crashed off the walls, cuffing Ashalind’s ears. She took a step back.

‘Well, what then?’ she snapped, hiding her discomfort with peevishness.

‘I wanted to see the palace. Wanted to get away from Heligea.’

‘Heligea too came hither, simple gull. And I’ll warrant she does not know you exist.’

‘Does.’

‘Does she not like you? Why? Did you tell her something she would rather not have heard?’

Pod’s lip trembled.

‘Don’t be vexed,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’

Ashalind softened. ‘That’s easily dealt with,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you the way to the kitchens. Come.’ But he held back.

‘Too many people.’

‘Oh. I understand. You and I, we avoided company, we never cared for the staring, did we? Come down to the kennels. The hound-boy will give you bread and meat. Only he and the hounds shall see you. Howbeit, you can be healed, like I was. He can heal you, and maybe you will grow up to become a great wizard or the like. You have a gift—’

‘No,’ said Pod vehemently. You shan’t take it!’ He stared at her in horror, or hatred.

‘Nobody can take away your gift. Who should wish to do so?’

‘The henk, the henk I mean, you holiday fool!’

It came to the damsel, now, that he believed his club foot was connected with his random capacity to prophecy, much as a carlin’s sacrifice of faculties was a prerequisite for power.

‘Should you be healed, your gift would remain with you,’ she stated.

He thrust out a sullen lip.

‘If you do not believe me, hear it from my lord, who cannot lie!’

Pod remained obstinate.

‘You stupid boy,’ she cried at length, exasperated. ‘Why do you refuse help?’

‘Don’t want your help,’ he blurted, looking wildly about as though she had trapped him and there was no escape.

‘Then I will offer it no longer! In any case, you are not as clever as you thought. Your predictions are not worth a pinch of snuff. They are fickle and maggoty. You said that he and I should never find happiness together—you were wrong. Wrong—do you hear me? I am to wed my lord in the land of Faêrie, and no thing shall ever come between us!’

An inexplicable feeling of dread came over her as the words left her mouth. Fervently she wished that she had never spoken them. Once, she had heard Thomas of Ercildoune quoting, in a rare moment of pessimism, ‘At man’s moment of utmost happiness, that is when the axe is about to fall. Some contend that great joy is in fact the harbinger of great sorrow.’

Ashalind waited without breathing. Pod’s eyes glazed over. He opened his mouth. ‘Such as you and he—’

‘Hold your tongue!’ she cried, her hands jammed over her ears. ‘I will not listen to you. I will not!’ She turned and fled. So that the dire words would not penetrate, she began to sing a ditty Caitri had been warbling that morning before breakfast—a silly love song in an outmoded tongue.

‘Sweven, sweven, sooth and winly,

Blithely sing I leoth, by rike.

Hightly hast thou my este,

Mere leofost.’

Down the passageway she hastened, sweven, sweven, and around a corner, sooth and winly, blithely sing I leoth. But even through thicknesses of stone, and filtering between her trembling fingers, the last intoned words of the warped boy came trickling—‘… shall never find happiness together …’

‘Sorrow take you, lying wretch,’ she sobbed. ‘Sorrow take you!’

But already, it had.

The coronation of the new King-Emperor, Edward IV of the House of D’Armancourt and Trethe, High King and Emperor of Greater Eldaraigne, Finvarna, Severnesse, Luindom, Rimany and Namarre, King of His other Realms and Territories—this investiture took place on a bright day in Gaothmis, the Wind-month. Contrary to its usual wont at this season, the wind was not strong or gusty, for it had been prevented from becoming anything but the lightest breeze, merely enough to send a sparse confetti of leaves wafting through the mild air to shower as lightly as kisses on the procession. Blue were the skies, as acres of cornflowers. Billowy clouds piled up around the horizon in opaque puffs edged with silver.

The quality of the daylight was notable. It poured from the skies like clear water, sparkling with the lustre of crystal. Nightly, the sky was an ebony shield lavishly pitted with silver, and the air wafted in mild currents, exceptionally balmy for the time of year.

Kings and nobles gathered from every corner of the Empire to swear their fealty to the new King-Emperor and do him homage. Six thousand guests attended the coronation festivities, which lasted for three days and nights. Each day as the sun westered, open-sided pavilions were set up on the tourney field. Upon the high embankment at the northern end, the Royal Pavilion stretched the width of the field, glorious in purple and gold. In the glow of afternoon, the entire site bloomed with colours like a flowered meadow, forested with tall poles from which streamed flags including the Banner of the Fair Realm with its eagle, crown and hawthorn, the Empire Standard, the Royal Banner of D’Armancourt, the Eldaraigne Jack, flags of the other countries of the Empire, the Standard of the Royal Attriod and numerous standards and banners of the Dainnan, Wizards, Stormriders and other nobility; Windship flags; tattered oriflammes from ancient battles; pennons; a hundred and twenty pennoncels three and a half yards long, charged with shields of the Royal Arms; four and eighty streamers thirty-two yards long, of red worsted, charged with gold lions and white lozenges; fifty streamers forty-five yards long, decorated with swords and lilies; fifteen hundred small swallow-tailed flags called gittons, with swans, stags, greyhounds, watch-worms and falcons; hundreds more gittons striped red and white; and three hundred streamers thirty yards long chequered gold and white, sprinkled with green and red roses.

The Coronation Festival of Edward IV became known as the Festival of Wonders, for with discretion, the Faêran had influenced every aspect of its organisation. At the nightly feasts, courses were served in number and deliciousness far surpassing any feast in history. Never had roasted meats tasted more succulent or worts more savoury, never were sweetmeats more fragrant and appetising. None could recall wobbling jellies which towered higher on their dishes without collapsing, whipped cream that melted more agreeably on the tongue, or richer truffles, or more plentiful.

A hundred tuns of purple grape wine from newly broached casks was pronounced the best vintage ever. In addition there flowed sarceal, paxaretta and topaz, three hundred tuns of ale, one pipe of hippocras and a cordial of wine and spices.

A partial inventory of the food included fifteen hundred quarters of bread, one hundred and four oxen, six wild bulls, twelve boars, nine hundred sheep, three hundred and four calves, three hundred and four herons, two thousand geese, a thousand capons of high grace, two thousand pigs, a hundred and four peacocks, assorted pigeons, pheasants, grouse, hens, rabbits and curlews, eleven thousand eggs, five hundred stags, bucks and roes, fifteen hundred hot pasties of venison, six hundred and eight breams and pikes, twelve porpoises and seals, a hundred and twenty gallons of milk, twelve gallons of cream, thirteen hundred dishes of jelly, two thousand cold baked tarts, ninety gallons of hot and cold custards and countless Sugared delicacies and wafers. The variety of dishes was improbable. Each pie was made with forty-eight different kinds of meat, except for the largest. When it was opened it proved to contain twenty-six live musicians, who, on being revealed, struck up on their instruments. The tourney field was filled with harmonies played on sackbut and serpent, on ophicleide, gittern and lute.

Such divertissements took place between the courses as were discussed by the guests for years to follow. Every entertainer performed his act flawlessly—even a novice juggler who, awed by the multitudinous and splendid company, allowed his concentration to lapse for an agonised instant, found the dropped bottle somehow back in his hand and immediately whirling through the air with its fellows as though naught had ever been amiss. Not one of the musicians plucked or blew a wrong note.

By virtue of the sight conferred on her by the green ointment, Ashalind perceived more than did the other mortals at the feasts. It took some time for her to be able to differentiate between the sights visible to all, and those visible only to herself and the Faêran. The first time she spied a Faêran lady passing among the guests and taking food from their plates, she was scandalised.

‘Oh, why should Lady Lindorieth be thieving so brazenly?’ she whispered to Ercildoune. ‘The guests will object, and then she may become angry and put some spell on them. Is there nothing to her taste at the tables of the Faêran?’

The Duke frowned and looked blank.

‘Your reference eludes me, Ashalind,’ he said.

Angavar sat so close by Ashalind that his hair caressed her shoulder when he moved, and each time, a tingle ran right through her skin. He now raised one eyebrow. Only a whisper was necessary.

‘Lindorieth takes what she wants, where and when she desires it,’ he murmured. ‘As is her right. Some among us choose to waive that right. Others do not.’

Ashalind saw then that none of the diners whose plates had been looted seemed to notice their lack. The Faêran lady, exquisitely lovely, was taking only the toradh of the food, leaving its semblance still on the dish.

‘But she mostly removes fare from the platters of the lean guests!’

‘Which is why they are lean.’

‘There is no logic in this.’

Angavar bent his grey gaze on her. ‘Thou hast much to learn of our ways, Goldhair,’ he reminded her.

‘I believed that the Faêran habit was to penalise overeaters.’

‘Dost thou note the way that those singled out by Lindorieth wolf their fare? They eat and yet wane, never waxing.’

‘They do not appear hale. Yet others look enviously at them, for being able to consume so much rich fare and remain as slender as reeds. Is taking their toradh a punishment or a reward? It is a mystery …’

‘To thee.’ Her lover appeared amused by her perplexity. ‘Look there!’

He indicated a table lined with bejewelled courtiers. The face of the Marquess of Early—whose waistline threatened to split the gorgeously embroidered silk of his doublet—bore a look of pain. He had pushed his gilt and velvet chair back from the table and was using a lace-edged satin handkerchief to mop his brow. A lithe young Faêran lord had just prodded his bulging abdomen with a crosier, in passing. Another, without breaking stride, casually trod on the toes of the gouty marquess. The elderly gentleman groaned, picked up his foot and massaged it.

‘The Marquess suffers for being an overzealous trencherman,’ remarked Ercildoune, following the line of Ashalind’s stare.

‘No, no,’ she protested indignantly. ‘’Tis Faêran mischief.’

‘Thomas speaks only the truth,’ said Angavar. ‘The man is a glutton. He requires lessoning.’

‘These laws of thine are hard,’ sighed Ashalind. ‘If Early can be persuaded to change his habits, wilt thou cure him of the gout?’

‘He will then cure himself,’ said Angavar with a laugh.

The sound of his laugh, and the look of him, promptly drove all speculation about the Marquess of Early from Ashalind’s mind. Angavar’s Faéranness dizzied her with an inebriation of the mind she was hard put to resist. With an effort she marshalled her thoughts, blinked and focused her attention once more on the tourney field.

Every evening, as the trestles and pavilions were being disposed, Feulath—now Royal Wizard in place of Sargoth the Discredited—would put on a show of fireworks so spectacular as to disgrace all his former displays as a bonfire makes pallid a candle. After the fireworks were over, pastel-coloured orbs of light would spring up around the revellers, lining the edges of every tent and flag, lying strewn upon the grass. They could not be picked up, and vanished when anyone tried, only to reappear later.

Around the tourney field, elevated stages had been set up for bards, and for the pie musicians, and there were platforms for dancing. To the delight and astonishment of the dancers, their feet skimmed the wooden boards like soap bubbles blowing across water.

Throughout the feasting many a song was sung, many a speech orated, many a cup raised in honour of Erith’s new sovereign, and the Faêran King from under the hill, and his bride-to-be. Following the orations and toasts for the two Kings, True Thomas jumped to his feet and made a speech in praise of Ashalind. Without divulging the complexities of her past, he expounded upon her travails in the wilderness in such eulogistic frames that, listening with amusement, she began to wonder whether it were she he was talking about, or some stranger. Sianadh was lauded as the champion who had helped on her first journey, while Viviana and Caitri were extolled for their loyalty and resourcefulness on later treks. The roles Diarmid and Muirne had also played were not forgotten.

Ercildoune courteously concluded his speech with a mention of having once danced with Ashalind at Court, and how honoured he felt to have partnered the next Queen of Faêrie.

It was only then that Ashalind fully comprehended the enormity of the step she was about to take. The excitement of the past few months had kept her from seeing it. In being wed to Angavar-Thorn she would become the Queen of the Fair Realm itself. It seemed improbable, a wild dream—exhilarating yet terrifying. Her gaze rested upon her handsome lover. He was of the Faêran—the terrible, beautiful race that loved and hurt her own kind. And unions between these two kinships had always been doomed … yet such tragedies all lay in the past. For certain, matters could be different now!

Beyond the barriers and gyves of difference, her love for Thorn was strong and steadfast—as it were, the steely shaft of a pin that could clasp together two halves of a brooch, the one made of diamond, the other of glass.

There were toasts to Sianadh, and to Viviana and Caitri. Then, from a table set a little apart from the rest, a man stood up. He bowed in the direction of the high table and the company fell silent.

‘Speak,’ commanded Edward in a clear voice. ‘You must know, all sealfolk are welcome amongst us. Your fealty is sworn and the sea-gifts you have brought are deemed most worthy.’

By the grey sheen of his shaggy head, Ashalind now comprehended that the standing man was in fact Galan Arrowsmith. On his right sat a girl-woman. Her smile was enigmatic, her hair the colour of the ocean illumined by lunar reflection. To his left were seated Betony and Sorrel, now joyously reunited with their brother.

Arrowsmith said, ‘Our Sovereign of Erith is generous. Long may he reign.’ A murmur of approval ran through the gathering. He resumed: ‘We have heard how the Bear of Finvarna has performed many services for Lady Ashalind. This may be so, but once, not so long ago, I too accompanied her along her perilous way. My lady, had I known to whom you were betrothed—’

She interrupted, ‘Galan Arrowsmith—to you, my friends and I owe much.’

He bowed.

‘You gave us the shelter of your village and more,’ she continued. ‘You lent us your steeds and your strength. Such kindness shall ever be remembered.’

‘Yet methinks that for all I did ’twas not enough,’ said Arrowsmith. He added wryly, with a momentary glance at Ercildoune, ‘And I never danced with thee, my lady.’

A sudden, tense silence fell across the audience. The speaker had dared to imply that he, a mere half-silkie, wished to take in his arms the promised bride of the Faêran High King. Moments later a ripple of laughter spread through the assembly. Ashalind glanced at Angavar and saw that he was smiling. Perched on his chair-back, Errantry roused his feathers fiercely.

‘Well then, get up on the floor,’ Ashalind challenged Arrowsmith, and she left her seat.

He strode up to the dancing-floor, where Ashalind met him. He kissed her hand, the musicians struck up, and the two danced a few steps to the accompaniment of cheers and applause. When the music stopped, Arrowsmith bent over her hand once more.

‘Methinks it will take me a good while to soothe the hammering of my pulse,’ he said loudly, but only half in jest. Flicking his gaze towards a table dominated by Ertishfolk, where Sianadh sat, he added with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Kavanagh, devour your red heart!’

Sianadh, drunk as a lord, roared a jovial but unintelligible reply and saluted Arrowsmith with a brimming tankard raised aloft, spilling ale on all and sundry.

‘I never danced with him either,’ said Ashalind.

Arrowsmith turned his fey sea-eyes on her. All at once the company grew silent again, hearkening, watching both Angavar and the couple on the dance floor. Those assembled were fully and horribly cognisant of what the jealousy of the Faêran, if aroused, could mean.

‘Ah, what he missed!’ Ashalind’s dance partner audaciously pronounced.

At the high table, one corner of Angavar’s mouth twitched.

A sigh fled through the gathering.

Gallantly, Arrowsmith conducted Ashalind back to the high table and dropped to one knee before Angavar.

‘Your pardon, Majesty, if I have offended you.’

‘My betrothed dances with whomsoever she wishes,’ said Angavar, clearly untroubled. ‘That she has chosen you is a panegyric, for the lady knows how to choose well.’

He was merely amused at the seal-man’s bold praise of his betrothed. Jealousy was far from him—he knew Ashalind too well to doubt her, and besides, he was Faêran and had every reason to be complacent.

A murmur of laughter came from all sides. All tension broke like an eggshell, and relief flooded over the guests. The festivities resumed.

By day, the field was cleared for sports and games, jousts and tournaments. The Faêran knights eagerly took the field for a hurling match, that being a favourite game of theirs. Following its conclusion, where the vanquished team had stood, suddenly they stood no more, and a horde of flying beetles went up over the tourney field, darkening the skies. The price they must pay for defeat was to fly across Eldaraigne in this form, but they took no harm from it and good-naturedly endured the penance, which they would have inflicted on their opponents had their fortunes been reversed.

But eventually the day was over, and all festivities came to an end. Soon a Seaship—the Royal D’Armancourt—would depart from Caermelor. Escorted by six Dainnan cruisers she would set sail for Arcdur’s stony, lichened wastes, carrying Ashalind and Angavar, Ercildoune, Roxburgh and the other survivors of the Royal Attriod. They would be accompanied by the Faêran knights and ladies of Eagle’s Howe, all of them desperately keen to find the Gate. Such a mighty entourage must prove invincible against any lingering dangers that might be encountered along the way. Yet their foes had been conquered; what could possibly threaten?

Ashalind’s parting from Edward had been painful.

‘You must go,’ he had insisted, at a private moment. ‘You must simply leave, the sooner the better.’ He could not hide the fact that he fought against tears.

‘But we shall not be apart for long,’ she reassured him. ‘When my lord and I find the Gate, all Gates will be opened once more! Time will no longer run awry between the worlds, for my lord has promised that when we return to Faêrie he will match the time-stream of the Realm with Erith’s continuum. Everything shall return to the way it was before the Closing, save that the inconsistent passing of years in one realm and hours in the other will be annulled. There will be open exchange between the worlds, and you and I shall be able to visit one another at any time.’

‘That is not what I mean,’ he said, and she finally understood how blind she had been.

‘Besides,’ he stammered, ‘somehow, in my heart I fear the parting will be longer than you surmise. I fear …’ He could not go on.

‘Have no fear. How can there be harm, when I am beside him?’

Immediately she regretted this statement. He threw her a look of anguish.

‘Yes. He can give you anything,’ he said. ‘Everything. I love you both. I wish you both every happiness. Of all mortals I have ever seen,’ he added earnestly, ‘I have never beheld such exquisite beauty. When you use the looking-glass, think of me.’

In sudden confusion, she could only nod, tight-throated. Thus they took their leave of each other.

From Caermelor’s estuarine docklands the Arcdur expedition departed by Seaship in the morning. The masts of the clipper Royal D’Armancourt pierced a pale blue sky. A light, fresh breeze was blowing. The passengers looked back at the pier and the numerous docks and jetties where ships and boats of all sizes were moored, rocking gently, their masts and rigging seeming to knit and unravel like some crazy spider’s web. Southward, past the stem, the crag of the Old Castle thrust up out of the water. The tide was high, wavelets covering the causeway. Facing this gaunt sentinel of rock stood the hill of Caermelor, its skirts laced with foam. The palace, at the summit, loomed dark against the sky. Its roofs, towers and turrets were alive with flags which snapped and flapped like hundreds of wings. A sudden spear of golden light glanced off the armour of a guard moving high on the battlements. Pennants flew also from the roofs of many of the buildings perched on the hillside, in celebration of the coronation.

To starboard the land rolled back into an Autumn haze, the shoreline curving around to a headland, the Cape of Winds. To port, the open sea sparkled like a polished goblet of crystal filled with blue-green wine, clear and cool. The water flashed as though strewn with diamond chips. Far off in the waves, sleek shapes dived. Sometimes they surfaced near the ship, calling greetings, waving to the Faêran and mortals on board.

The ship was steering northwest, hugging the coast. She kept on that heading until she rounded the Cape of Winds. From there, the captain turned her north to cross the mouth of the Gulf of Mara. In the days that followed, her great keel passed over the place where once the fair isle of Tamhania had risen from the ocean. There was no sign that an island had ever existed. The sea rolled bland and innocent over Tamhania’s sunken tomb, and the Autumn sun shone upon it softly, a yellow pearl. At one point, the ship hove to and the voyagers paused while songs of remembering were sung, and flowers were strewn over the water.

Angavar summoned a brisk southerly airstream which sent them on their way again. The clipper heeled over and now she began to plough the waves, slicing through them, keen as a honed blade. She plunged in up to the hawse pipes and bounded up, water pouring off her hull like ribbons of molten glass. A curling wave, foam-ridden, opened out in a long chevron from her bows. Tier upon tier, the great crescents of her heraldic sails snapped taut and hard, brimming with the power of the wind.

Those aboard could see, away to the east, the low grey line of the coast. It drew nearer as they approached the Cape of Tides. Soon the cliffs of the promontory loomed on the starboard side and the ship was passing through a narrow sea lane between the mainland and the islands of the Chain of Chimneys.

After that, the shoreline retreated once more. They turned northeast, the wind obligingly swinging with them. Remaining parallel with the coast they sailed on at a rapid pace, retracing the journey Ashalind had once made in a fishing boat. A sense of unease grew on her as they neared Arcdur. Too many memories came crowding in. As she stood at the rail watching the approaching shore, a line of dark birds rose flapping from the trees and flew away inland. High in the rigging, Errantry opened his hooked beak and screamed. It seemed some sort of omen.

A shock jolted through her. She looked up to see Angavar—he had joined her, unnoted, and placed his arm lightly around her waist. Together they stood, looking out across the intervening water towards the land.

‘Why did the Raven’s knights betray their King?’

‘Thou hast set eyes on him, Goldhair. Thou hast been subject to his influence. Almost, thou didst allow thyself to be lured.’

Ashalind cast her mind back, to Hob’s Hill in Avlantia, and a traverse which passed beneath it—a long green tunnel of overarching trees beyond which shone the hills of Erith in the saffron morning. Larks were singing, and a merlin hovered in the sky, and the hedges were bare and black along the fallow fields, and blue smoke stencilled the distant skies. Somewhere, bells were tolling.

There had been a clear and compelling voice, like dark metal, and that voice saying,

‘Bide here now, and I swear no harm shall come to thee under my protection. I can take thee through fire as through castles of glass. I can take thee through water as through air, and into the sky as through water, untrammelled by saddle or steed or sildron. Flight thou shalt have, and more. Thou bast never known the true wonder of the favour of the Faêran.’

That voice had pronounced her name, and she had stumbled. But the warm, hay-scented breath of her pony had recalled her to Erith, and the sound of children’s footsteps pattered through her brain, bringing visions of her lost brother.

‘Ashalind.’

This time she fell to her knees and could not arise. The children hurried by. To look over her shoulder, to see one who governed gramarye standing there with the whole of the Fair Realm at his back and that world promised to her—it would be so easy. So sweet it would be, to watch him pivot on his heel and walk away, and to follow. Slowly she clambered to her feet. Despite her desire, she neither looked back nor turned around. She pressed on, her feet and legs heavy, as though she waded through honey.

How could this Prince have nursed such bitter hatred against humankind? How could she have allowed such a one to twist the strings of her heart? That he no longer lived, except as a kind of abstraction, suspended her between relief and sorrow. The tugging of the opposing forces was perplexing, tearing open a wound with no comprehensible source.

Recalling her attention, the deck of Royal D’Armancourt rocked under her feet. Angavar was watching her, quizzically. She said to him, ‘Now I understand. The charisma of Morragan lured them to it. They loved thee first, but they loved him too. You were absent—and there was no pony, no child to remind them of their fealty.’

‘Few could resist his influence should he decide to make them change their path.’

‘I did.’

‘That I know. He knows also, too well, and he never shall forget.’

‘But the power of gramarye is lost to him now!’

‘A bird lifts itself on the air. It stoops to kill. Is there no power in that?’

She could find no reply.

‘I regret allowing him to fly forth, the Raven,’ said Angavar, turning his eyes towards the horizon. ‘I ought to have captured him, caged him. For all his lack of strength he is out in the World now, free to cleave the skies like arrows shot by some mad archer, choosing targets at random.’

The clipper’s slim bows slid into a deep natural harbour, a rocky sound. There, between high cliffs of gaunt stone, she came about. The indigo-coloured sails lost the wind, hanging in great soft loops from the yards, their golden lion devices obscured by the folds. From the gently canting deck, crewmen clewed in the canvas, hauling hard on the lines, throwing back their heads to squint up at masts so tall they tapered like ladders into the sky. The anchor was lowered with a rattle of iron chain. Ropes were flung ashore and tied to trees and rocks. As the first mate barked orders, landhorses and baggage-laden packhorses were led down a ramp from the fo’c’sle where they had been stabled, and across the gangplank onto dry land.

The passengers mounted their steeds. The expedition set off, winding northwards through the landscape of tall stones and natural, granite-lined wells.

The news of the Geata Poeg na Déanainn had spread rapidly, and all creatures of eldritch were by now aware of the possibility that a way back to the Fair Realm might indeed exist. All the Faêran knew it, but only a few mortals had been made party to the knowledge. The tidings had not been broadcast among the mortal populace of Erith, for the Faêran considered it was their own business and not a matter to be bandied about by gossiping humankind.

Thus it was that few mortals rode amongst the company. The ninety Faêran lords and nine Faêran ladies of Eagle’s Howe accompanied the expedition, and Thomas of Ercildoune and Roxburgh as well, and Alys beside her lusty husband, although Istoren Giltornyr had remained at Caermelor with Richard of Esgair Garthen. With such a fellowship no force of mortal wizardry or men-at-arms was required, and besides, who would stand against them now? Nonetheless the two powerful carlins Ethlinn and Maeve had come to Arcdur, and the best knights of the Dainnan. And there was Sianadh, who had lost his Windship in a card game and, undeterred, was looking for excitement; and four of Silken Janet Trenowyn’s unruly brothers, who had gained some fey qualities while under the influence of enchantment, and who sought the same goal as the Ertishman.

Yet it seemed to Ashalind that she and Angavar were escorted only by the mortals of the retinue, for the Faêran passed noiselessly and swiftly among the monoliths, as outriders. She caught only fleeting glimpses of them riding through the landscape on either hand, and they seemed to her like beautiful images in watercolour, painted on the most fragile of tissue, so ephemeral they were already fading into the rain-washed pines, the rills that tumbled, tinkling, through jumbled stones and the moss that clambered over the rocks.

Cradled in the interstices between the monoliths, mists nestled like teased handfuls of raw silk. Lichen, like pale blue-green forests in miniature, clung to rocks. Heat and cold had worked upon the rocks of Arcdur’s bones. Flakes of granite which had split from the parent boulders lay like tiny islands of lichenous leafage. At their old sites, clean-cut shapes remained; perfectly matched facets of pink rock.

Arcdur’s outward appearance had not altered much since Ashalind’s last visit—save in one marked respect. Throughout all her journeys through the lands of Erith, she had been accustomed to seeing wild birds and beasts flee at the approach of humankind. Now, on the contrary, the creatures of the wilderness came eagerly to the sound of their horses’ hooves. Birds flew close and alighted on rocky ledges within arm’s reach. At whiles Angavar would bid Errantry fly far off. Then he would raise his hand and small birds would come down to perch on his wrist. Sleek foxes and untame, topaz-eyed goats emerged from crevices to watch the riders pass. Lethargic snakes uncoiled. Glittering beetles spangled the air and lost themselves in the arcane drifts of Angavar’s hair. Even nocturnal animals roused themselves and came forth from their hiding places to greet the Faêran riders and their King.

If the outer character of the land had changed but little, all else was different. Once, the scars and crags and granite stacks of Arcdur had withstood the attacks of wind and water with equanimity, even indifference. They had stood dreaming for millennia, lost in some remote mineral reverie, wreathed, from time to time, by mists, while year by year the ancient lichens flourished and grew on their hides at a pace so slow as to be apparent to no mortal creature.

Now, it seemed to Ashalind, the stones had awakened, and the trees and the waters also. She sensed a watchfulness, an excitement, everywhere. The air and the ground seemed charged with a kind of eldritch awareness. It was not difficult to guess the cause. Now that Angavar had thrown off his mortal guise and allowed his identity to be known, there was no thing unliving or living, no entity either lorraly or eldritch, that could be near him and not be stirred by the presence of that elemental power. As birds and beasts were attracted by this fair company, so also were the incarnations of eldritch. They, who typically would have fled or vanished in the blink of an eye, now showed themselves openly.

Large numbers of wights were seen by the mortals of the retinue. Many more were visible to the anointed eyes of Ashalind, and she saw they were diverse: hideous and fair, malign, tricksy and beneficent. She shuddered, and was thankful that she rode in the company of one who might subdue them all, if he chose.

Lesser wights crowded in rocky crevices or lingered on gravelly shingles by the brinks of winking pools. The waters of those pools would flurry momentarily. Sly eyes squinted from beneath sills. Beside a pebbly beck, the ferns abruptly twitched and nodded, as if something had waited amongst them but was already gone. Seated high on giant boulders, in places impossible for mortals to reach save by mountaineering or the use of sildron, pale damsels serenely combed their hair. At times, faint snatches of music rose from beneath the horses’ hooves. Every shadow, every gnarled trunk, every crag seemed inherently, subtly, to harbour some manifestation. Every well and water sheltered some weird distillation, and if one watched for long enough, the lines of the land might shift to reveal another form. Even when the wind soughed through the pine needles, it sang with voices other than its own.

Angavar was fully aware of the attention, and permitted it, and did not ask for salutations or other acknowledgments of his sovereignty. That was not the way of the Faêran. That he alone was the ultimate sovereign of gramarye was incontrovertible. It needed no further proof, no validation.

From horizon to horizon, this country afforded an almost unimpeded view of the sky. The cloudscape arrayed it with awesome spectacle. Purple-grey cumulonimbi were piling up to great heights, crowding in from the west, borne on the back of a keen salt wind. They overtook the sun, blotting it out, haloed in silver by its hidden light. A dim veil of shadow crept across the landscape. Three strands of hair escaped from Ashalind’s headdress and fluttered about her cheeks. A heaviness weighed down the air, a presentiment of rain. Like the quick stab of a pin, a single, miniature water-drop fell on the back of her hand.

Angavar was riding ahead of her, leading the party, for the country was so rocky they must progress in single file. The goshawk rode on his shoulder. She saw Angavar glance skywards. That was all—he did not gesture with his hands, nor did he call out some incantation. If he murmured any words at all, she was unable to catch them.

The wind veered. It swung around to the south, and now, overhead, the towering castles of mist were moving with it, as though on wheels. They billowed and altered shape, seeming to slowly explode from within and reinvent themselves in fantastic forms. Ragged holes and rents appeared, letting sunlight fall through in patches. As the rain clouds drew away from the sun’s cool face, a wash of pale gold spilled over the stony heights of Arcdur, rinsing bluish shadows through chinks of rock.

Ashalind’s servants rode at her heels. She heard them murmur, ‘Behold, he has averted the storm.’ Her maids and all the Dainnan remained in awe of him, of what he had become. Angavar turned in his saddle and smiled at his betrothed, and at the brilliance of that smile her heart was lit, and sped like a hunted thing.

‘Do we continue upon the right path?’ he asked.

She nodded, endeavouring to calm her pulse. ‘I believe so.’

And indeed, recollection and some inner voice told her that their heading was correct, that somewhere to the north lay the place from which she had stumbled in the rain, long ago, driven from the delights of the Fair Realm of her own volition, gripped by a need to live in the same world as one whose face she had glimpsed through a window, more than a millennium ago.

Soon she would pass through the Gate at Angavar’s side. Then she would ride into his world, a fantastic world, wild and strange, where dwelled her family, and her friends, and all the Talith who had abandoned Avlantia. She would meet them again, embrace them. And this time, she would stay.

The path which was not a path widened, and Angavar dropped back beside her. A small rock-goblin jumped squeaking from beneath the hooves of his Faêran steed. Angavar’s laugh was captivating, contagious, and she must laugh with him.

But the landscape of Arcdur continued to roll monotonously by, offering no familiar sign to Ashalind.

‘Is it possible,’ she said anxiously, ‘that the outward appearance of the Gate has changed during the years since I last saw it?’

‘Possible,’ Angavar said, ‘but not probable. Wind and weather would not alter the stones much in such a short span, although if the ground has shifted, the angles of the rocks may have subtly altered—some may have fallen.’

‘But if a trembling of the ground has moved the foundations of the Gateposts, then the Gate itself may have snapped shut or been thrown wide open!’

‘Not so. The gramarye of the traverses is not easily tampered with. No mere quaking of the ground may open or close a Gate between the worlds. Be assured of it.’

It had taken several days for Ashalind to cross this region of Arcdur on foot, wandering pathless and weak from hunger. This time, the sun set only once upon her journey. That night they rode on for many leagues under the stars until the mortal riders grew weary.

The sky over Arcdur was filled with a jewelled splendour so brilliant, so vast, it was as though the land was roofed by a dome thickly encrusted with crystals in a multitude of sizes and intensities, prisms which split their own light into every twinkling colour.

‘There once was a time,’ said Angavar as they rode on, ‘when the peoples of a world now in ruins dwelt in mighty cities so wreathed about with smoke and fume, nightly so ablaze with light powered by the harnessing of the energies of levin-bolts, that they could but dimly view the stars, if at all. These people of an era long past could not understand why their ancient poets praised the glories of the night, for they saw the stars merely as faded pinpricks in the crown of the firmament. Only by journeying to the highest desert places, furthest from their cities and closest to the sky, were they able to behold their stars as we now behold these of Erith. As for the stars of the Realm—why, those they glimpsed only in dreams.’

As he spoke, Ashalind watched him. His face glimmered with the sheen of far-off suns; his hair eclipsed them. Wonder and passion exulted her spirits with a force that was almost palpable. And it may be that the Faêran were sensible to such forces.

After a while, Angavar said, ‘I love thee. How I love thee.’

He chose to make their bivouac in the shelter of a great stand of arkenfirs, down among the roots where fragrant needles had fallen in layers season after season, building up deep, dry cushions. Bolts of satin were thrown over these cushions, and the softest of beds they made. Lights kindled themselves amongst the boughs, and fuelless fires sprang up, whose flames gave out gentle warmth yet did not blacken the resinous mulch. No silken pavilions blossomed, decked with proud banners to proclaim that this was the stopping place of a king. There was no need for shelter. The rain would not fall upon them, nor would any wind steal into their midst like a thief to pry at their garments with fluttering fingers, or slip keen edges between their ribs. It was not necessary to set a watch for danger.

Beneath the arkenfirs a feast was held. Afterwards the Dainnan found repose, and Ashalind’s servants also, and Ercildoune and Roxburgh.

‘Good night,’ whispered Angavar as he left Ashalind’s side.

But she lay waking among her maids, twisting the leaf-ring about her finger.

‘Fear no harm from wights now, betrothed,’ he had told her, ‘nor from any mortal creature. For when I am with thee, thou’rt safe from all harm. When I am not, I shall leave thee in the care of others who can protect thee, or else thou shalt bide in some secure place.’

Overhead the bristling boughs nodded, black against the pale night sky. She watched the stars moving in slow arcs of monstrous magnitude, uncounted miles away. She was tired, wanting to sleep, but she ached for Angavar’s presence and her lids and ears were held open by the songs of the Faêran, whose forms she glimpsed like pastel glows drifting among the rock formations. For the Fair Ones did not sleep, not on this eve—she wondered whether they ever slept. All through the night they roamed in distant groups, singing songs so deeply moving they made her want to laugh and weep, and when she did find slumber, it was filled with the most poignant of dreams.

Next morning, the expedition crossed a ridge clothed with conifers. To the west, a glimmer along the horizon betrayed land’s end, the ocean-washed shores. In a shallow valley below the ridge a clear beck chiselled its way through rocks of chalcedony. Their horses splashed through the water, kicking up spray which glittered like crystals threaded on a thousand silver filaments.

They were climbing then towards the sky, the wind soughing in their ears and pushing against their backs as though to nudge them on their way. Reaching the next hilltop they reined in to survey the land that lay before and below them. Errantry soared up and was lost in the sky’s pearl-blue expanse. Choughs gliding on updraughts darted after winged beetles. The grey pallor of the stacks and chimneys was broken only by patches of pink lichen and a few stands of blue-green arkenfir. Wind chanted through the chinks in the formations. Running water chuckled and chimed. Hundreds of feet high, the stacks of Arcdur resembled dishes cooked in a monumental kitchen—one was formed like loaves of bread; further away, another towered like a pile of giant pancakes.

Ashalind’s pulse quickened. These landmarks she recognised.

‘We are nearing the place,’ she said. ‘We are close!’

Angavar only nodded, but she could perceive by the set of his features how deeply her tidings affected him. They started down the slope, their horses searching for footholds in mossy fissures. Soon they rode amongst the pinnacles of another valley. Ashalind’s face grew flushed, her eyes burned as though fevered. ‘Somewhere here! We are on the very threshold!’ She cast about intensively, scrutinising each rock formation with utmost deliberation. ‘We must go slowly. If I approach from the wrong angle, I might miss it.’

‘A tall grey rock like a giant hand,’ Angavar chanted softly, repeating her earlier words, ‘and a slender obelisk leaning towards it, coloured as the lip of a rose petal. Both monoliths capped by a lintel-stone shaped like a doorstep. Near at hand in a granite hollow, a dark pool of water fed by a spring.’

Fleetingly, Ashalind wondered at the random events or the thread of destiny that had drawn her to this particular place and time over the span of more than a thousand years.

The Faêran riders drew in at either hand. The muted ringing of their bell-hung bridles recalled the unstorms that would never more blow across Erith to waken its past.

Between the pinnacles, a dark smear appeared in the eastern sky. Like a patch of smoke borne on a current in the upper airs it approached rapidly, eventually interpreting itself as a great, wheeling flock of birds. Raising his hand, Angavar came to a halt, and the whole retinue drew rein. The goshawk fell out of the sky, stooping to latch its talons onto the leather band encircling Angavar’s wrist. As Angavar drew his hand down, the bird flapped, regaining his balance before folding his wings. He hissed and whistled urgently, his gold-orange eyes as bright as burning coins. Ercildoune and Roxburgh rode up beside their leader, who called out to the Faêran in their own tongue. Many of them pointed to the sky. In grim tones Angavar said, ‘It is he. The Raven cometh.’

And there was a sting in Ashalind’s heart, as though the utmost tip of a whip had lashed it.

‘What now?’ she breathed.

‘He approaches too near to the Gate. It is essential he is not nigh when it is flung wide, lest in his rage and vengeance he devises a way to slip through ahead of me and close it against us. I will not be exiled a second time!’

The birds flew closer now. Their hoarse croaks scarred the wind. Crows, rooks and jays were they, and ravens, their plumage glossy black.

Now that she understood him more intimately, Ashalind glimpsed the tide of raw emotion surging behind the stern set of her lover’s features. She surmised that although he was aroused to anger by the sight of the Raven, his brother in altered form, he also desired that sight, for he had loved Morragan, and mourned him, in his own way.

Again Angavar’s voice rang forth and again the Faêran hearkened.

‘Let us drive the Raven forth!’ cried Roxburgh in fury, standing in his stirrups and shaking his fist towards the skies. ‘Let us hunt him hence!’

The face of Ercildoune grew pinched with alarm. ‘Hunt and capture,’ he growled urgently, ‘ere some mighty harm befalls us.’

‘Sooth, yet such a task is beyond the reach of mortals,’ said Angavar swiftly. ‘I will do it, with half my knights.’ To Ashalind, he added, ‘Goldhair, this hunt is no enterprise for thee. Thomas and Tamlain shall remain at thy side, with the rest of the Faêran and the Dainnan knights. While I am gone, continue to seek the Gate. I will return anon.’

With a sudden, graceful gesture, he flung Errantry into the air. The goshawk soared up.

Horror caught hold of Ashalind. It came to her that should Angavar-Thorn ride away now, she would never see him again.

‘Do not leave me, my lord,’ she begged. ‘I pray thee.’

From his saddle, he leaned close to her ear. His breath was warm and sweet against her cheek.

‘Why so doubtful, eudail?’ he asked softly, wonderingly. ‘Be unafraid. Half the knights of Eagle’s Howe shall surround thee, led by the first among my knights, Dorliroen and Naifindil. And yet, what can there be to fear?’

‘It is not for myself, but for thee …’

He laughed. ‘What can hurt me?’ Taking her chin in his hand, he kissed her roundly. ‘I must not tarry. Already the flock veers to the south and away. Farewell for but a moment.’

His steed sprang forward with a sound like the rushing wind.

Just like that, he was gone.

Fifty Faêran lords followed him, and Faêran ladies besides. At preternatural velocity their steeds raced among the stacks and towers and soon were lost to view. A gasp arose from the servants of Ashalind’s retinue. Shading her eyes with her hand, Ashalind peered at the empty lands where the Faêran had vanished. She thought a second vast company of birds beat their way up from the chimneys, as though startled by the riders, to fly off in pursuit of the Corvidae. Hooked were their beaks; and their wings smote the air with mighty strength. They were birds of prey—hawks, or perhaps eagles.

‘I conjecture my lord is drawn to his brother,’ Ashalind said aloud, in troubled tones. ‘Perchance that is why he goes after him, even though the flock has already turned aside. Yet Morragan now lacks his former strength, so why do the crows and rooks follow in his wake? Are they unseelie? Do they mean to work us ill?’

‘They are only true birds, colleen,’ replied Maeve One-Eye, who had drawn near, ‘not wights! They are neither threatening us nor helping the Raven, but merely accompanying him. Like others they are drawn to him, but for a different reason: to the birds, he is one of them but with an aura of gramarye such as they have never known, and they are fascinated, compelled.’

‘I mislike this business,’ grimly said Thomas of Ercildoune.

‘Pshaw!’ snorted Roxburgh. ‘There is naught to mislike about it, Tom, only that I have been thwarted in my desire to hunt the Raven.’

‘Ride on, Ashalind,’ cried Alys. ‘We follow.’

As she could find no reason not to go on, Ashalind did so, casting many a backward glance. At her side rode Alys. The Dukes flanked the ladies, while behind them came Sianadh and the two carlins, their wands slung at their backs. Mounted on mettlesome black steeds, four stalwart young riders accompanied them also—the eldest sons of Trenowyn. The Dainnan rode close by, their horses not outpacing those of the Faêran who had remained with the mortals.

The sky of Arcdur took on an ominous look. A dark stain was creeping in at the edges. A hush fell across the land, and as if night had fallen, or a bitter frost, the warblings of birds no longer rang out.

The monoliths that now towered around Ashalind did not seem familiar, but she was experiencing a growing sense of significance that brought with it a certainty that the Bitterbynde Gate was close by.

A rumbling started up beneath their horses’ feet. The ground shook.

The horses propped and pranced, snorting their disquiet. Images of the death throes of Tamhania flashed into Ashalind’s thoughts.

‘What’s amiss?’ shrilled Alys.

But the Faêran knights knew.

‘The Cearb comes this way!’ cried the Lord Dorliroen, peering into dark valleys between rocks.

Naifindil’s horse reared. ‘And with it, the last lords of the Unseelie Attriod!’ he shouted.

Their blades glittered, sliding from the sheaths. ‘We are ready,’ called the knight-lords of Faêrie, but they were laughing now, flourishing their swords above their heads so that the supernatural metal sang a song of death.

The rocks and the soil shuddered at the coming of the Cearb, the Killing One—he who wore the three-cornered hat and possessed the ability to fling hills, and move the very ground—yet he was not the only unseelie lord that now appeared. The waters of Arcdur welled in their springs as the Prince of Waterhorses approached. Scorpions and vipers scattered at the sight of Gull, largest and swiftest of all spriggans. These three Princes of Unseelie had sworn vengeance against the mortalfolk who had taken up arms against them. And yet they were greatly outnumbered. It appeared certain their onslaught would lead only to their destruction.

‘A madness is with the wicked ones,’ Ashalind heard Maeve One-Eye murmur in astonishment.

Indeed a madness seemed to be upon the very fabric of Arcdur. The stones walked.

Or else, they appeared to be walking. As if they had uprooted themselves from their age-old positions they waddled from side to side, impelled by subterranean vibrations. Pebbles bounced and rolled along. Small fissures began to unseam themselves.

‘Fear not, Lady Ashalind!’ said Lord Naifindil, riding up to speak with her. ‘We shall prevent these monsters from reaching thee. The Dainnan warriors surround thee, and the two carlins also. They will protect thee while we indulge in the pleasure of defeating those who dare to challenge us. Prithee, ride on in peace, fair mistress! Seek the Gate!’

Ashalind perceived the Faêran were beckoned by the opportunity of a skirmish. ‘Go to it!’ she said. The Faêran lord bowed, murmuring a courteous reply, and wheeled his steed about, before cantering away.

The remaining Faêran knights rode forth to meet their foes while the mortal retinue gathered around Ashalind. The standing stones of Arcdur obstructed a clear view. Between the tall, broad-shouldered monoliths, little could be seen of the encounter between eldritch wights and Faêran, save only flakes of smashed granite jetting high in fountains, and sundry flashes of brilliant light. But, even as the mortals watched, these signs of conflict were moving further off.

Ercildoune scowled. ‘Three wights pitted against more than two score Faêran knights!’ he said. ‘By rights the clash should be decided in a trice. Yet it appears that instead of engaging, those corrupt plague-sores are deliberately drawing the Faêran away from us. What they hope to achieve by such strategy, I cannot guess. They are mad! We have been made secure from all peril of eldritch origin.’

‘Methinks the appearance of the Raven was also a ruse,’ said Alys with suspicion, ‘intended to lure Angavar and his bonny knights from us so that the wicked ones could strike. Have we been so easily gulled?’

‘Is it that Angavar himself has been beguiled?’ barked Ercildoune, made short-tempered by frustration. ‘No wiser counsel have I ever known than his!’

‘I suspect his judgement was clouded,’ murmured Ashalind.

‘Fain would I join the Fair Knights in battle!’ Roxburgh shouted furiously, but he had given his word to remain at Ashalind’s side and would not be forsworn. Even as the last words left his lips, a vast crack unclosed in the stony ground right under their horses. Three of the Dainnan riders slipped sideways into it and vanished.

‘We stand upon a delving of the Fridean!’ cried Ercildoune. ‘Ride to safety, all!’

Generated by the violent percussions of the Cearb’s footsteps, the foundations of Arcdur were disintegrating, collapsing into hungry crevasses. Close beneath the surface the ceilings of Fridean tunnels were caving in, for throughout this region of Arcdur the ground was perforated, honeycombed with wightish caverns and rights-of-way. Ashalind and her companions looked about desperately for some sign of firm footing, but, hemmed in by natural architecture, could not discover which direction led to safety. Everywhere they turned, rock and gravel was dropping away, massive stones were toppling. Riders, undermined, were sliding into abysms. The carlins drove their wands into these cracks. Great grappling roots thrust forth like muscular fingers, driving through the shifting soils to grasp the particles and hold them together. Yet the gramarye of the two Daughters of Grianan was not sufficiently swift or encompassing. Horses and men floundered as the unstable ground subsided beneath them. Ashalind and her companions were rendered helpless against a peril that was not directly of eldritch origin.

Far off, several of Angavar’s Faêran knights saw what was about and swerved their horses, veering away from the attack and racing toward the stricken riders. A misty light, like that which clung about the Faêran, now bloomed all around the struggling mortals, enfolding them. They were lifted, so that their horses’ hooves no longer slipped and sank into the treacherous ground.

In the confusion, Ashalind was separated from her mortal bodyguard, but two Faêran lords rode up to her and led her steed to solid ground. The mare stood trembling and sweating beneath a tall arkenfir. One of the Faêran knights held the reins.

‘Lady Ashalind, you must stay here while we put an end to the enemy,’ he said. ‘The roots of this fir tree go deep and grip hard. They bind the rocks together with strong force. Who bides beneath these boughs stands upon sound foundations. Do not move from this place, no matter what happens. As long as you remain here, you shall remain secure until our return.’

With that warning they left her alone and rode away to join their comrades.

But even as the mortals were being plucked free from the disintegrating foundations of Arcdur, the greater number of Ashalind’s Faêran guardians had finally joined battle with two of the lords of Unseelie. Only the Cearb somehow still evaded them.

At this, Ashalind wondered. So many against so few—with such odds, the skirmish would soon be over. The Cearb seemed curiously elusive—conceivably, their delight in the thrill of the chase had caused the Faêran knights to prolong their enterprise longer than was necessary.

Unexpectedly the Cearb himself, a massive figure clad in tricorne and black coat, emerged from behind a cluster of boulders close by. He strode past, producing his curiously shattering effect, and the terrain began to crumble in places that had previously appeared secure.

Falling stones slammed into the ground, throwing thick clouds of dust into the atmosphere which blotted out the scenes of chaos surrounding Ashalind. No matter how hard she stared, she could barely make out the figures of riders moving in the haze, or the receding back of the Cearb as he moved away, apparently without noting her. It was like looking at reflections through breath-misted glass. Only the trunk of the arkenfir, towering close, seemed real. Out of the fog issued the ringing shouts of the Faêran, the shrill war cries of the rook-youths and a stream of bellowed curses in Ertish.

The fog swirled and came together in a blot. The blot dissipated like smoke, and where it had been stood seven duergars, the leader holding a whip.

They pinned Ashalind with their baleful eyes and stepped forward.

‘Avaunt!’ she cried.

Her mare threw up her head and made to run off, but Ashalind held her hard, pulling on the reins. ‘You cannot frighten me,’ she snapped at the unseelie dwarves. ‘I stand in a protected place and from here I shall not budge. Be off!’

The duergar leader grinned, raised its arm high and cracked the whip. In panic, the mare reared on her hind legs, and by the time Ashalind had steadied her, the wights had disappeared.

The ears of the mare flicked and swivelled. New sounds grew amongst the clamour. They did not arise from within the land-bound fog but instead pierced it from without and above, cutting across all other noises as scythes sever murmuring rushes.

Three strident calls grated against the sky—three creaky doors, three unoiled hinges—like a guttural keening of strange children, hoarse prophets predicting the end of the world. A trio of huge black birds flapped out of the fog. Crazed with fear, Ashalind’s mare jumped sideways, threw her rider off and dashed away. Dazed, Ashalind grabbed hold of the arkenfir’s stem and heaved herself to her feet. Like a triad of tombstones the hoodie crows perched sombrely, with folded wings, atop a monolith. One by one their black beaks opened like pincers and snapped shut. The eyes of these manifestations seemed not to be eyes at all, but empty sockets into which one dared not look for fear of being drawn into the unspeakable regions of madness beyond. Ashalind felt utterly alone, abandoned and vulnerable. There came over her an urgent desire to flee.

‘Get you gone,’ she sobbed violently. ‘Macha, Neman, Morrigu—do you think I do not know you? Do you think I do not perceive you are trying to drive me hence? You shall not have your will of me. Here I stay!’

For one long moment the Crows of War regarded the mortal with their profane vacuums of eyes. Then, as if in answer to a signal, they extended the great arcs of their wings and flapped their way slowly, deliberately, into the sky.

The sounds of conflict had ceased. The encounter was over and the dusts of aftermath were settling now, revealing the broken landscape and a ragged pool of water lying spilled at the foot of a pile of granite boulders. Ashalind glimpsed riders, both Faêran and mortal, cantering back towards the arkenfir where she stood. She fancied she heard them calling her name, but could not be certain. The sensory battering of noise, choking dust and turmoil she had experienced had been overwhelming. Exhausted by confrontations with the wights, she felt wrung out like a mop-head, wishing only to find some haven. For a fleeting instant it seemed to the beleaguered damsel that her lover had abandoned her. She felt that she could endure no more fear, having expended her strength and been left vulnerable.

Close by, the water in the pool stirred. Out of it climbed a one-eyed man with a huge, lolling head. His torso was growing out of a horse’s body. Stinking white vapour poured from his mouth. Completely devoid of skin, his entire surface was red raw flesh, in which blood, black as tar, ran through yellow veins, and great white sinews, thick as horse tethers, twisted, stretched and contracted as the monster moved, stretching out his extraordinarily long, single arm.

At this first actual sight of Nuckelavee, Ashalind’s courage failed her. The vision she had seen in Morragan’s looking-pool, and all the well-known tales about this monster, burst upon her mind with the impetus of sheer horror. According to the practice of the Faêran, Angavar had defeated but not destroyed the creature. By far the most hideous of all unseelie wights, this abomination had slain the parents of Prince Edward. Uttering a half-smothered cry she fled, darting and dodging amongst the stones.

As she ran she could hear her name urgently being shouted, but louder still was the rampant clatter of eldritch hooves on disintegrating stone, and a rhythmic hissing as of a steam kettle boiling. Underfoot, the ground was treacherous, mazed with cracks. Out of them, like maggots from a disturbed corpse, scuttled the small, light-fearing denizens of the underworld whose dwellings had been disturbed by the quakes. Ashalind’s blood roared in her ears like tormented bulls. Heat scalded the nape of her neck as though the blast of Nuckelavee’s breath were already singeing her flesh. She dared not slow her progress by glancing back to find out how close he was, but in the recesses of her mind she took some courage from the sounds of grating and sliding that came to her as Nuckelavee’s hard hooves slipped on the broken ground. Surely this labour must impede his progress! Still, her shoulders tensed against the blow that must soon fall from his flayed fist, crushing her against jagged edges of granite.

Wildly, as she ran, she scanned her surroundings for some hope of rescue. Between the towers and stacks glimmered a satin sky of the palest blue deepening to indigo in the east. Fine strands of cloud streaked it like chalk marks. Straight ahead loomed a tall grey rock in the shape of a giant hand. A slender obelisk leaned towards it, coloured as the lip of a rose petal. Both monoliths were capped by a lintel-stone shaped like a doorstep. Near at hand in a granite hollow welled a dark, spring-fed pool.

Seemingly just another rocky crevice among many, it stood motionless and unnoticeable in the deep shadows of afternoon, as it had stood for many lifetimes of kings: the Gate she had left behind. Yet not quite as it had always stood—a crack was pencilled down one side of it where it remained slightly ajar.

Here was a safe haven to lock out what pursued her.

Her fingernail slid swiftly into the almost invisible opening. At her touch, the massive portal swung gently aside as though it were feather-light. A shadowy haven lay within, but even as a flying pebble dislodged by eldritch hooves rebounded off the gatepost, the refugee hesitated, struck by that familiar sensation of having forgotten some matter of crucial importance.

In that elusive moment, beneath the unstable ground near the Gate, a thin barrier of silt responded to the Cearb’s vibrations and gave way. A handful of gravel poured from a pocket. This undermining shifted the stones which had roofed that pocket. On the surface above, a boulder which had been balancing precariously atop a stack now tilted. Motivated by its own momentum, it crashed down. The shock of the bouncing impact split open new crevices. A rat jumped out from a fissure and ran over Ashalind’s foot.

It was too much.

Fear and revulsion spurred her. With a scream of outrage she slipped inside the Gate, kicked aside three strands of hair and a broken knife, and slammed the portal shut.

Slumping against a wall, Ashalind rested to regain her breath. A radiance, ambiguous and strange, illuminated a distorted passageway sealed by a door at either end. The vaulted ceiling was cracked. In places it sagged down like a bag of water. As the walls approached the nearest portal they melded into rough-hewn granite. At the far end where they met the silver Realm Door with its golden hinges, they transmuted into living trees whose boughs interlaced overhead. This, the fateful Gate-passage between the Realm and Erith, had not altered.

On the floor lay the haft and snapped-off blade of the horn-handled knife Ashalind’s father had given her at their parting. Nearby was the shrivelled leaf of an eringl tree. In the uncertain gloom, it was impossible to make out the three strands of hair which had faithfully served to keep open the gate during her travails in the world of humankind.

‘Gate, oh Gate,’ whispered Ashalind, between two realms.

A sound of sweet, sad singing circulated in Ashalind’s head. She grew calm, and with tranquillity came the recollection for which she had been striving, just before she had set foot inside the Gate-passage.

‘Fear no harm from wights now, Betrothed, ‘Angavar had told her, ‘nor from any mortal creature. For when I am with thee, thou’rt safe from all harm. When I am not, I shall leave thee in the care of others who can protect thee, or the thou shalt bide in some secure place.’

Once, Sianadh had instructed, ‘Put fear aside, for only then will ye see your way clearly.’ His words had proved apt. Terror had been her undoing, for it had driven out rational thought. Neither the duergars, nor the Crows of War, nor Nuckelavee could possess the power to scathe the chosen bride of the Faêran High King, if only she had trusted his word and stood her ground. As for the scuttling rodent (at the thought of which, she flinched), it was no more than a lorraly creature hurrying to shelter.

As soon as the girl in the Gate-passage reached these conclusions, she thought of something else. How long had she been lying there? Perhaps five minutes? Perhaps ten? Lunging for the Erith Door, she flung it wide.

Beyond, the land of granite towers and riven rocks lay naked to the night. It seemed empty, frozen, scoured of all living beings. White stars frosted a sky so black it seemed to suck out the essence of her being. Their light bleached the flanks of the monoliths, carving enigmatic shadows in secret crevices and deeply cloven interstices.

Some unknown measure of time had passed.

She was alone.

A profound pang of loss and grief tore through the very core of Ashalind’s spirit. She cursed the legacy of humankind, that fear should ever drive out reason and set the world awry. Her cry rang out over the desolation of cold stone and clear water and dark pine, but it could not summon what had passed forever.

It could not turn back Time.

12

THE BITTERBYNDE

Part II

‘I’d teach you of her looks and of her ways,

Her lilting voice, the tincture of her hair,

Her lucent eyes as bright as Summer days.

I’d teach you this and more, but she’s not there.’

OLD TALITH SONG

In the soft sibilant eventide belonging to the land of stone and pine, a wind the colour of water crooned along gullies and canyons, whistled through chimneys and narrow fractures, piped in clefts and rifts and sang amongst soaring columns. Under its caress the tiny beards of mosses nodded. A small rain fell from belts of arkenfirs where each needle was beaded with a glister of water-drops condensed from the mists. It fell on the surface of cold, black waters that lapped new margins of fused glass and congealed stone. Ripples unrolled like ribbons of platinum.

A lake, where no lake had been before.

Not far from the lake’s edge there reared a tall grey rock like a giant hand. A slender obelisk leaned towards it, coloured as the lip of a rose petal. Both monoliths were capped by a lintel-stone shaped like a doorstep. As softly as the sighing of the wind, someone stepped from the shadows of the rocks. Her hair streamed out, lustrous, a swathe of gilt threads. Her eyes were two green flowers brimming with dew.

‘What have I done?’

Stooping, she placed some glinting strands carefully in the shadows at her feet. She set her hand on a lofty slab and it shifted, though this time it was harder to move. Something in the door’s framing had skewed. The portal stuck fast and she could not close it. Leaving it partway unclosed she walked along the shore, into the night. In crevices of stone, the wind’s breath carried away her final words like a passing thought which brushes against the brain and is almost remembered.

‘I must find him.’

But she had not been quite alone.

One single fluke of fortune had at that very moment chosen to strike a man whom Fortune appeared to have cast aside. He was a vagabond, a cowled wanderer who lived each day, each year of his life on the borders of lunacy, tormented by fear. Hunted by minor eldritch wights that were held at bay only by his desperate trickery, he was also banished from the haunts of humankind. subject to a king’s warrant that he be arrested on sight. Once he had lorded it at the Court of the King-Emperor, wielding power with an uncompromising hand. Now he stooped, creeping like a shabby and demented beggar through the remote places of Eldaraigne. It was he at last who stumbled accidentally upon good luck. Finally, at the exact time and place that would best realise his vengeful dreams, he was there.

This outcast was observing Ashalind from another shadow, spying from a distance, carefully noting her every move. He watched until she was out of sight. Furtively, he glanced over his shoulder, as if he expected pursuit. It seemed his expectations were well founded. Not far from where he stood, the stones—or the umbras of the stones—seemed to be alive. They were swarming towards him with a fluid movement, humping and lumping. Once they paused, lifting their heads as though to taste the air.

The watcher glided swiftly to the place from which Ashalind had departed.

The Gate stood open—wide enough that a gaunt man might enter easily, if he turned sideways.

Which he did.

As the tattered hem of his cloak disappeared, several of the bobbing, crouching rock-shadows flowed in after him.

For a while, the rest of the spriggans snuffed about where his trail had ended. Then they too vanished, dissolving into the landscape.

Ashalind stepped around the shore of the new lake that had formed during the unguessed span of time she had lain inside the Gate—formed, perhaps, within one of the subsidences caused by the quakes. How long had it taken for such a wide depression to fill with rainwater? And why were the rocky margins melted, as though from the heat of a volcano? She had no idea, nor did she care to ponder. One purpose only possessed and drove her—to find Angavar again.

In the lee of a scaffold-sized boulder stood a stained rag of a tent and the blackened remnants of a campfire, unexpected and somehow grotesque against the clean lines of the landscape. It appeared deserted. The abandoned campsite of some mortal hermit could offer no succour, no evidence of her lover’s whereabouts, so she passed it by.

For three nights and three days she wandered through Arcdur, drinking from its clear springs and streamlets, finding nothing of substance to sustain her, as once before. The land was broken and jagged. The split faces of the rocks were pristine—no moss or lichen had taken root, and for this sign she wept with thankfulness. Perhaps she had not been gone for too long after the quake, after all. Slowly she wended over miles, until her feet were bleeding, her knees bruised from many tumbles. Yet she met no living thing, no bird, no insect, not even a solitary Wight. Once, while she slept, there came a strange dream of fleeting beauty, and she thought she must have dreamed of the Faêran Rade at Hob’s Hill.

At sunset on the third day, she glimpsed upon a distant hill a tower not built by upheaval nor shaped by wind and water. It looked to be a man-made edifice, yet its height was less than the towers usually built in Erith, not tall enough to be either a watchtower or mooring turret. If men had raised it, perhaps they dwelled there still. The sight gave her new strength and she hastened up the slope.

Yet when she came at last under the shadow of the tower, she encountered neither mortal nor immortal—only silence and stillness. There was no sign of human activity, save for a few crumbs of mortar and clean chips of stone lying about the outskirts.

The tower’s base was constructed on tall, open arches facing four directions. Grilles of iron covered them over. Peering into the gloom beyond the diamond-shaped perforations of these lattices, Ashalind made out a pale form lying stretched out on a raised table of stone. It lay quite still, as though unalive. The sun’s last rays slanted lower, piercing the dimness. They described a statue: a figure asleep on its back, the hands crossed over the breast. Roses of white marble were piled like ice crystals at its head and feet. Yet this was no sleeper—this was an effigy of the dead, recumbent upon a catafalque. The tower, then, was a monument, a mausoleum.

Ashalind slumped against the iron trellis and as she did so, it swung ajar. She stumbled into the chamber of the statue. The gate squeaked once and fell silent again, resting on its hinges.

There is something about the statue of a human form which draws the eye. The girl glided towards the catafalque and stood looking down at the tranquil face. For a moment or two she remained thus, before the significance of what she beheld penetrated her weary mind. Then she simply sank to the floor next to the plinth. Hours later, when darkness had long since covered Arcdur in velvet, she remained slumped there, beside the stone effigy, the perfect image of herself.

The night wasted away. In the morning, the silence was broken by the clatter of hooves, the tinkling of bridle bells and the lilt of men’s voices. Two riders leading a packhorse climbed the hill. The men dismounted and entered the mausoleum. Soon they backed out rapidly, ran partway down the hill and halted, staring at each other in fear and disbelief, before drawing their blades and cautiously approaching the tower a second time.

As they entered the open lattice they whistled and rang bells. They jingled their iron harness and muttered a few rhymes.

‘Sure and it’s the lady, no other,’ they said in hushed tones.

Ashalind opened her eyes and asked for food, which they gave willingly after they had satisfied themselves that she was neither wight nor illusion. Yet they were still half afraid of her.

‘How came you here, lady?’ they inquired.

‘I came through a Gate,’ she said, as bewildered as they. The shock of discovering her own tomb had rendered her numb, light-headed, detached and uncomprehending. She must have wept during the night, for her face felt stiff as a mask of plaster, her eyes stung raw with salt.

‘What gate? This iron one?’

‘No. A Faêran Gate.’

The two men exchanged another significant glance.

‘His Majesty must hear of this,’ said one. ‘Send off the pigeons, Robin.’

Robin fetched a cage that had been fastened to his saddle bow. Painstakingly he wrote the same message three times on three tiny scraps of parchment. He tied them to the legs of a trio of pigeons and freed the birds.

‘Where is Angavar?’ she asked.

Their grim faces closed, as though they had drawn shutters across them.

‘Lady, we shall take you to His Imperial Majesty, King Edward,’ they said guardedly, ‘but as regards all else, we will say naught.’

‘I do not understand!’

‘We think it unwise, m’lady. Our knowledge is limited; unintentionally, we might convey false impressions. It will be best if all the answers to your questions are given to ye from His Majesty’s own lips. We are merely servants sent to tend your—the lady’s tomb.’

‘Just let me know one thing only,’ she begged. ‘How long have I been gone?’

‘Seven years it is since the lady was last seen,’ they reluctantly divulged, still doubting their own eyes. Then they would answer her no more, despite that she pleaded piteously.

The men gave Ashalind a cloak with a deep hood attached. They set her upon the best of the three horses, then led her through pathless Arcdur to the coast. A Seaship came to meet them and as they waited for the rowboat to pick them up from the beach. Ashalind’s rescuers bade her pull the hood up over her head and face.

‘If we are to keep ye safe,’ they warned, ‘your discovery must be known only to us. There be too many persons of doubtful character who might be interested in news of the whereabouts of a lady such as ye. We do not know who can be trusted among the crew; therefore, we trust none. Hide yourself.’

She did not quarrel with them. It seemed, after all, a familiar thing to do.

In fair weather, with a stiff nor’-easterly following, the ship set sail for the south. It had not long departed from the Arcdur coast when something happened which set the teeth of the crew on edge and started their spines crawling, and made them look askance at the hooded passenger. Some muttered that she had brought ill luck; others suggested she was some simulacrum, and ought to be cast overboard.

What happened was this: the seas rolled calm and flat and the skies were clear, when suddenly there arose all around a sound like the sighing of many voices and a rustling as of yard upon yard of clean silk. With that sigh came a rush of air, and all those on board felt as if a throng passed close by, lightly brushing them with soft fabrics. The sun’s light mellowed to the colour of a rose in amber, tinting the sky and sea from horizon to horizon. The curve of every wavelet became a camellia petal. At the same time a fragrance drifted down the breeze, a scent of wildflowers so sweet and evocative it was nothing less than heartbreaking, and many of those who breathed it fell to their knees on the deck, sobbing. The ship surged forward on the crest of a wave and then the sigh passed with the strange light, away across the sea, leaving behind the creaking of the rigging and the slap of water on the hull.

It was as though a lamp had gone out.

After many hours, the flower scent faded.

None could guess what it might mean, but all were certain of one thing: that after this, the world could never be the same. Neither did any man speak of the phenomenon, despite that it had touched all of them deeply, or because of it. But they suspected the passenger. To her good fortune, not all on board were common sailors—some were King’s men and Dainnan knights. They had pledged protection to the passenger and she was let alone.

The ship sailed without further event to Caermelor, where it was met by mounted guards. From the harbour they carried the hooded girl in a closed litter, ever cautioning her not to show her face. The guards rode close around, but she peeped through the curtains of watered satin. The city had changed during those seven years. Gone were the Mooring Masts and the great Tower of the Stormriders. No Windships bobbed high at anchor.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ cried Ashalind, but no man would look around or give reply.

‘Keep within, my lady,’ Robin nervously admonished, tying the curtains shut.

With all speed she was brought, hooded, before Edward. She found him in the solar of the palace, his knights and musicians and servants having been dismissed from his presence. Only a page boy loitered half asleep and overlooked in a corner, awaiting his liege’s instructions.

Where a young prince had stood, now stood a grown man of three and twenty years. Edward’s glance was grave and thoughtful, weighty with significance. On beholding him, Ashalind threw back her hood. They looked upon one another and neither found word to speak.

Edward reached out his hand. His fingers were trembling.

‘Sit by me,’ he said hoarsely.

Side by side they sat at the tall window. Its arches framed grey clouds rolling in from the west, bringing rain. Dusk was drawing in. An owl wheeled past on wings as silent as thought.

‘Do you know how long I have waited for you?’ asked Edward.

She nodded. Dread was an imminent flood, barely dammed by fortitude. ‘Seven years, methinks. And Angavar? What of Angavar?’

‘He is gone.’

‘Gone? No!’

‘Aye, Angavar and the Faêran are gone. We shall never see them more.’

‘I cannot credit it!’ cried Ashalind, in distress. ‘How can this be?’

His eyes never left her face. He looked upon her wonderingly, as though for the first time. Gently, he took her other hand. ‘Do not fret, Ash,’ he soothed. ‘All shall become clear in due course. By the Powers, you are alive—you who I thought never to see again. How came this miracle?’

‘I was with Angavar. The Raven came and he followed it. I found the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. Fear drove me inside and I shut the Gate behind me. Time runs out of kilter in those marches, and when I stepped forth moments later, seven years had passed by. Prithee, tell me now of Angavar, for I cannot bear to wait another moment to hear tidings of him.’

He told her this—

Seven years ago, in Arcdur, the unseelie things assailing the knights of Eagle’s Howe had been defeated and the Raven had again been driven away. It was concluded, in hindsight, that Morragan’s presence in Arcdur—even in raven form—had exercised a pull on the unseelie lords, and with them had come other wicked wights such as duergars, and Nuckelavee. By ill fortune, Ashalind had become separated from her companions. When she had vanished, so it was thought, no trace of her had been left behind; nor was there any evidence of a Gate. For, when closed seamlessly, such Gates never betrayed themselves.

Since the most powerful of the Faêran could not detect her living presence underground, above it, in water or in air, it came to be believed that Ashalind must be dead and her body devoured. Neither Faêran nor wight could discover any shred of her flesh or clothing. Her disappearance caused such an imbroglio of grief and dismay that the possibility of her having found and entered the Gate was not even imagined.

The Gate itself was never found. A searcher might look for a tall grey rock like a giant hand with a slender obelisk leaning towards it, coloured as the lip of a rose petal, both joined by a capstone shaped like a doorstep. However, seeking a sight that has been described in words is very different from seeking that which one has seen with one’s own eyes, and in Arcdur, the land of stone and pine, such an edifice could by no means be unique. Among thousands of millions of obelisks and monoliths, menhirs and dolmens, their shades varying between granite grey, moss green and lichened pink, one more configuration becomes unremarkable.

Nuckelavee had been found wandering near the place Ashalind had last been seen, and Angavar, fevered with searching, was certain the wight had slain and devoured his beloved. He asked no questions. In his rage he blasted Nuckelavee with such violence that a crater was blown in the rock upon which the unseelie creature stood. In later years, this cauldron filled to become a lake which some named King’s Revenge, a place shunned by bird and beast. Legends grew up that Nuckelavee lurked still in its depths, even though that was impossible.

Angavar had told her that if she stayed where she was, she would be protected. He had presumed he would in most cases be with her, to save her from harm, and that if he were not, her bodyguards would shield her, else she would be in a safe place. Yet, as it eventuated, events had not unfolded that way.

Possessed by terrible grief and bitterness Angavar cursed his exile in Erith, for he had lost both his lover and his Realm. He gave vent to his passion in several ways, one of which was by unmaking the power of sildron—the power which once had been his gift to Erith. All across the Empire, the towers and Mooring Masts, which had depended on sildron for their construction, now toppled. All the Windships came to rest like wounded doves upon the ground. Relayers no longer rode sky, and the Twelve Houses of the Stormriders were ruined.

So severely hurt was the Faêran King that he went back to Eagle’s Howe and re-entered the Pendur Sleep, saying, ‘I love not this land any more. I will not wake in Erith.’ With him went Ercildoune and Roxburgh, and the family of Roxburgh, except their daughter Rosamonde.

But Edward had a monument raised in Arcdur and it was inspected now and then by his servants, so that no stain should mar its snowy marble, and no weed should take root, or vine climb the walls.

‘And now you have come back,’ said Edward, ending his tale. ‘And I will tear down that bitter memorial that I may unremember the last seven years and be blithe.’

Something was tapping or flapping at the window.

She said, ‘But can it be that Angavar sleeps forever? The Gate is open again—I left it propped ajar. Where is the Coirnéad? It must be sounded at once, to waken the dreamers. All is not lost! The Realm can be regained and I shall ride with Angavar to see my own family!’

Edward looked long at Ashalind. After a time he said, ‘But do you not love me?’

Startled, she said, ‘Of course I love you, Edward. You are as dear to me as my own brother.’

A swift shadow of pale wings crossed the chamber.

Unexpectedly, Edward leaned forward and kissed Ashalind’s mouth.

As he withdrew his lips from hers, she remained as waxen and still as a doll.

He smiled. She showed no reaction.

‘What is my name?’ he murmured.

She hesitated, perplexed, then shook her head. His smile did not fade. ‘It is Edward,’ he said clearly, as though speaking to a small child, ‘and you are Ash, my beloved, my betrothed.’

Behind the windowpanes, a white owl flew away.

‘Am I?’ she said. Her eyes were wide and innocent and empty as a new babe’s.

‘Oh, yes.’

For seven years the people of Erith had struggled to find ways to repair their way of life, which had collapsed now that the traditional lines of communication and trade had been severed. For the unmaking of sildron had affected everyone—peasant and lord, merchant and thief, baker and armourer, carlin and wizard, aristocrat and prince, child, woman and man. It was as though the bones supporting the nations had been taken away, leaving only the struggling flesh.

After the Namarran wight-wars, followed by seven years of hard work and suffering, the people were eager to hear good tidings.

Bells pealed joyfully across Caermelor. The King-Emperor was to take a bride, at last. Yet this bride was not to be the one they had expected—it had been deemed by one and all that the popular Lady Rosamonde of Roxburgh would become their Queen. Instead, Edward had chosen the Lady of the Sorrows.

The known lands were rife with talk of Ashalind’s return. Famed for her beauty, she had survived seven years lost in the wilderness. The lady had endured her share of misery, they said, as befitted her name. It was a sorrow for her that he to whom she had first been handfasted (whose name must be spoken in whispers) had disappeared out of all knowledge. And ’twas a further shame the lady had endured such trials in the wilderness, for although she had returned alive, she was no longer hale. So fragile was she, she must be kept in isolation, tended by the King’s best wizards and dyn-cynnils. Until her strength returned, she was to receive no visitors nor step outside the walls of Caermelor Palace. But her beauty had not faded, so it was rumoured, and the young King-Emperor was greatly enamoured of her, to the dismay of the Lady Rosamonde, who, it was said, had loved him unswervingly since the days of their childhood.

The seasons turned.

Late at night, Ash was seated in the library in the company of two ladies-in-waiting. Often she could be found among the books and scrolls, searching—for what. she did not know. Information of some kind, knowledge … Hours ago, the ladies had fallen asleep. Ash herself was nodding, when a fluttering in the wall-tapestries caught her eye. She looked up to behold a small face which appeared both old and young, like a child burdened with wisdom beyond its years. Beneath the face, a beckoning hand. Ash rose to her feet. Smoothing the heavy folds of her gown of purple velvet, she tip-toed across the chamber to investigate. A young man was holding up a corner of the arras. One of his shoulders humped higher than the other, and he stooped.

‘Come with me,’ he said mysteriously, one finger on his lips.

Amused, she inquired, Who are you? What do you want? How did you come here?’

He shook his head. ‘Follow Pod and you will find out.’

She, untroubled by bad memories, knowing only kindness and perhaps tedium, feared nothing. Stepping into the gloom behind the wall-hanging, she saw him duck into a dark opening, like a narrow door in the stone wall. After him she went, along hidden, dusty corridors in the palace walls and up narrow flights of stairs, directed by the light of his candle. The corridors branched at many junctures but her guide did not hesitate, pressing on as though certain of his bearings, as though this strange between place was home territory to him. After a long time he halted in the passageway and pushed on the wall. A panel swung forth, opening onto a confined chamber bereft of furnishings, lit by a fitfully flaming brand in a wall-sconce. Ash followed him into the room.

A slit of a window appeared to be the only other aperture. It afforded a glimpse of black sky sprinkled with a frosting of silver. A cold draught pierced the window like a sliver of ice. The air blowing in was fresh and clear, tasting of mountain streams under boundless stars.

Two figures waited therein: a young Feohrkind woman dressed in the fine clothes of the gentry, and a little fellow with thick, curly hair. A pointy beard sprouted from his chin. On seeing Ash, the young woman rushed towards her, then stopped short. Her arms dropped by her sides. She curtsied awkwardly.

Ash smiled. ‘An intriguing scene. What is this play about? Tell me of your game. Who are you?’

The young woman curtsied again and spoke. Her voice sounded strained, tense as a wire. ‘I am Caitri Lendoon, my lady. I was your friend, once.’

‘Were you indeed? But Edward has not told me about you …’

‘Perhaps he does not tell you everything, m’lady.’

This time, Ash frowned. After a moment her expression cleared. ‘I suppose there has not been enough time yet to recall everything to me. He is so busy and there is so much to learn!’ She paused, as if sniffing the air. ‘How sweet is the breeze from the window …’

Caitri spoke earnestly. ‘I have come today from open fields,’ she said. ‘They are thick with yellow dandelions. And the white butterflies were rising like steam, blowing in drifts across the meadows as though a wind had shaken clouds of blossom from an orchard. And the sun was sinking down on the one hand, in bright pink and gold, while on the other—beyond dark-green belts of pine—the sky was piled high with blue-black thunderheads. Long shadows striped the grass. Golden stretched the field, white-hazed against the storm’s purple wall.’

‘How entrancing is the picture you paint. Long has it been since I walked out,’ said Ash, glancing towards the slot in the wall.

‘How came your memory to be stolen away, m’lady?’

‘I was lost in the wilderness. I fell and my head hit a stone.’

‘No, no! You entered the enchanted portal a second time, and, as before, following your exit you were kissed by one who was Erith-born!’

‘Your words make no sense. But wait—what business is this of yours? I am curious to know your purpose. Enough of your questions! Who are these two fellows with whom you keep company?’

‘He is Pod, m’lady,’ said Caitri, gesturing to Ash’s erstwhile guide, ‘and this is Tully.’

The goateed little man bowed briskly. The flickering shadows laved the lower part of his body, so that he could not clearly be seen.

‘I wish to tell you a tale,’ said Caitri.

‘Go ahead, my dear, but make it short, I pray you.’ Ash lifted the hem of her velvet gown free of the dust flouring the floor. ‘This room is close and chilly, more like a cupboard than a room.’

‘It is a secret place, m’lady, and the way for mortals to find it is known only to Pod. We have brought you here because there is much you must learn before you are wed to Edward. You may have been misled.’

Ash frowned again. ‘I mislike this conversation,’ she said, abruptly turning to leave. But Pod barred her path with his wizened form. ‘Step out of my way, prithee, sir,’ said Ash coldly. ‘I will hear none of this. Why I followed you in the first place is a mystery to me.’

‘Because,’ he said obtusely. His mouth snapped shut.

‘That is no answer. Out of my way, I say.’

‘Wait, I beg of you, my lady,’ said Caitri. ‘There may never be another chance. I will be succinct.’

‘Very well.’ Seeing that she was not going to be able to shift the obstinate Pod, Ash acquiesced.

Caitri began to speak, clearly and fluently.

‘The House of D’Armancourt is an honest House by long reputation. I feel certain there have been no lies told you, yet there may have been many false impressions conveyed by omission. You were once betrothed to another.’

Ash’s sudden intake of breath hissed through her teeth.

‘This other,’ continued Caitri quickly, ‘thought you dead when you were lost in the wilderness. In his grief at losing you, he and his retinue passed beneath a green hill, and there they fell into a deep sleep of enchantment which they call the Pendur Sleep. Rightly, they thought never to be woken in Erith, and in fact there was no way to waken them, for the Coirnéad, the horn which might have done so, was sundered when sildron was unmade, and may never be sounded again.’

‘An enchanted sleep? Who was this lover you claim was mine?’

‘He was the High King of the Faêran.’

Ash laughed uncertainly. ‘You astonish me.’

Caitri met Ash’s eyes squarely. ‘Aye, ma’am, ’twas the High King of the Land Beyond the Stars who loved thee. Can you tell me truly, that even now, even under the spell of the Bitterbynde Gate, you have not felt a hint of it? Some subtle tapping at the blind windows of memory? Greater was his power than any force, and great was the love between you as the love of the moon and the tides.’

Ash retorted, ‘Speak not thus. Pray, complete your tale speedily, that I may leave this melancholy cell.’

‘Even so,’ acceded Caitri in disappointed tones. ‘Not long before this very night a strange thing happened. It was just before your ladyship was brought back to the city—indeed, it must have occurred while you were sailing from Arcdur. No doubt you felt it, and perhaps also others on board your ship. All the world felt it. Weird it was, piercing like crystal blades, with a beauty that burned. There was a fragrance of flowers. It was the Coming of the Faêran.

‘For by an odd twist, all the gates to the Fair Realm were reopened, and through them the Fair Ones poured into Erith like a rainbow flood, and they went to Eagle’s Howe where their King slept among his knights, and they bore him away, still sleeping.’

‘No man saw it, but the wights say his people took him in a boat across Lake Amarach, through the mists which ever twine above the surface of that water. In the lake’s centre rises an island, and on the island they passed through an open Gate into the Fair Realm and were seen no more by Erith-dwelling mortals.’

The pause that followed seemed hollow, and somehow profoundly sad.

‘A fetching fireside tale,’ said Ash at length, ‘no doubt learned from a wandering jongleur or Storyteller. How came these so-called Gates to suddenly open?’

‘The wights know, and one will tell.’

The little man with the pointy beard stepped forward. His goat’s legs and hooves were now revealed to Ash, who recoiled.

‘Do not fear, m’lady—he is not dangerous,’ assured Caitri. ‘In fact, he is a dear friend. As are Sianadh and Viviana and Ethlinn, and all who conspired to bring us here. Oh, my lady, if you only knew …’

Tully bowed once more. ‘Wean, the full story was quo’ tae me by yin who kens it weel. Somehow a wayward wizard—an escaped prisoner o’Caermelor—fand his entry intae the Realm. He crept in by the Geata Poeg na Déanainn. Some spriggans who were hunting him chased in after. When the Faêran of the Realm clapped e’en on this touzled birkie—the first and only traveller to come from Erith syne the Closing—och, the news spread like unbound sheaves in a heigh hurly, ye may be sure. To gain importance for hisself, this wizard, naming hissel’ Sargoth, tell’d the Faêran he had opened the Gate wi’ a wee finger-bone he had fand among the stanes of Arcdur and then had tossed awa’.’

‘I do not follow you, sir,’ said Ash. ‘Much of your speech is unfamiliar.’

‘Och,’ muttered the wight, ‘my brogue’s thickened again. I hae been too lang awa’ frae mortalkind.’

Caitri explained, ‘Tully says a wizard got into the Fair Realm by the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss. When the Faêran discovered him, he claimed to have opened the Gate by himself, using a bone.’

‘Into the Fair Realm?’ repeated Ash, as if confused.

‘Yes m’lady,’ the courtier replied. ‘I had assumed that such an incursion would be impossible, given that the Raven Prince forbade the passage of Faeran, wights and mortal men between the Realm and Erith—but I was wrong. That edict, it seems, only holds when the Gates are locked. This one stood not only unlocked, but also open!’ Clasping her hands in an attitude of earnest beseeching, she added, ‘This wizard, Sargoth, held an old grudge against you, my lady. Indirectly, you caused his downfall, as well as that of his niece, Dianella. No doubt he saw you make your exit from the Gate, but he lied to the Faêran, to spite you. Shortly thereafter the Fair Ones, perceiving him to be an obnoxious rogue of the kind with whom they desired no truck, threw him out of their Realm. I heard tell some vindictive wights were lying in wait for him, and carried him off. No one has heard of him since.’

Ash shrugged impatiently. ‘Continue.’

The urisk said, ‘But within the Fair Realm, the spriggans that had followed him from Erith tell’d the Password to the Casket of Keys. For a thousand years it had been common kenning among tham thegither. What they could bicker, the Faêran unlockit a’ the Gates. They gaed intae Erith tae bring back their braw king and his bauld knights.’

‘He says the spriggans told the Password to the Faêran. This enabled them to open all the Gates. They came into Erith and took their King back with them,’ said Caitri.

‘Of course. I understood.’

‘When Angavar King gaed back tae his Realm he waukened,’ continued the wight. ‘Then he lookit aboot at his bonny kingdom and was blythe, but the Faêran could not fail to note the sair sorrowing which marred his blytheness.

‘“I’ll dree no reminder of Erith,” quo’ Angavar, and he ca’d for the Gates atween the warlds tae be closed again, this time truly foriver. Yet first he ca’d oot of Erith his brother, whose form had been bent to the cast of a Raven, for the King was niver so cruel as to coup his ain kin who had been brought low. The Raven Morragan feeled the pull o’ unbarred Faêrie and came winging like an arrow tae the open traverse. But while the black bird flied in at the Realm Gate, a white owl flied oot intae Erith and the Gates clapped thegither.’

‘You say,’ said Ash, ‘that this King could bear no reminder of Erith and ordered all Gates to be closed for all time. That before they were closed, he allowed his Raven brother to enter the Realm but at the same time a white owl flew out. Of what relevance is this?’

‘Self-banished,’ said Caitri. ‘Easgathair White Owl, Gatekeeper of the Faêran, exiled his geas with him, so that the Lord Morragan, dwindled to a bird but still able to form utterances, would never be able to invoke that last boon.’

‘What boon? What Gatekeeper? It makes little sense.’

‘Easgathair was once the Gatekeeper of the Faêran. He believed he deserved to be exiled as punishment, because of the shame he had brought upon himself. He considered that the blame for all the troubles of the Faêran lay at his feet, for it was he who, long ago, had granted two unspecified boons to Crown Prince Morragan. One boon had been fulfilled, but the other remained. The Gates were being locked again; however, the Raven-That-Was-Morragan could ask that they never be reopened.’

A wistful expression crept over Caitri’s fine features. ‘If Easgathair the Gatekeeper is not present in the Fair Realm, Morragan’s second boon can never be fulfilled and Angavar High King has the option of opening the Gates, if ever he changes his mind. Yet alas, I fear that such an alteration of a passionate, wounded heart will never come to pass.’

‘And if all this happened in a Realm to which we no longer have access, how could you have learned these matters?’

‘’Twas the Gatekeeper hisself who told me this tale,’ concluded the urisk. ‘Though he be in owl-shape, yet urisks may still hold converse wi’ him.’

In the wall-sconce, the flaming torch sputtered and gasped. Ash turned her face away from its light. She paced the chamber: three steps east, three steps west.

‘So this is your story, is it?’ she murmured at length. ‘That I was betrothed to an immortal being who shall never be seen again? That these Fair Ones of legend are gone forever? That in Erith there flutters, immortal, a white owl which is not in sooth a bird but a seeming-thing of gramarye?’ She shrugged again. ‘Of what use is this intelligence to me? Even if ’tis true, which I doubt, how may any make use of it? ’Twere better left unsaid. Allow me my happiness, prithee. Do not spoil what I have left to me.’

Muffled sounds rumbled through the walls. ‘Methinks my absence is discovered,’ said Ash. ‘Let me go, before your hiding place is uncovered and yourselves are discomfited.’

Pod backed into the hole in the wall, giving way before her.

Urgently, Caitri began again to speak, and this time the words tumbled forth as if somersaulting from her mouth in their eagerness to be heard.

‘King Edward is our worthy sovereign, yet one flaw mars his goodness: his desire for your hand in marriage overrides his cognisance of good and evil. It makes him willing to put aside the Lady Rosamonde, and to forget his loyalty to the Faêran King who aided him and his family in their time of need. He is even willing to trick you, my lady, in order to secure you for himself. There is no doubt in my mind that from the first moment he saw you he loved you. I have friends among the palace servants. There is one who overheard what passed between you and His Majesty when you returned from the mausoleum in Arcdur, while your memory was still intact. The King-Emperor told you Angavar slept forever, implying he was therefore unattainable. Then, in order to find out if you were willing to accept that state of affairs and take him as a substitute, he asked you if you loved him. He hoped you might accept the idea that the Sleepers could not be awakened, but he was wrong. So upon you he bestowed the salute of love, bringing on you once more the bitterbynde of the Gate.’

‘How can you spout such nonsense?’ cried Ash. The young woman’s words had aroused in her such a tempest of conflicting passions she thought she teetered on the brink of madness.

But Caitri’s eyes brimmed. Unchecked, the salt water coursed down her cheeks. ‘Edward is our sovereign now,’ she said rapidly, ‘and no one dares gainsay his decrees. Yet, to be safe, he decided to keep you sheltered from your old acquaintances until you are wedded to him. He—and others close to him—has been beguiling your thoughts, much as you were misled in Isse Tower when old Grethet deluded you. You have been bewildered! Trusting His Majesty, you believe all he tells you, and he says you are not ready to go out into the wider world yet. The Lady Rosamonde, who has loved him all her life, was desolate at hearing he had passed her over, and has vowed never to marry another—’

But Ash interrupted. ‘Enough of your treasonous and disgraceful lies!’ she burst out, making for the exit. ‘I comprehend them not, and will endure no more!’

Yet she hesitated before she left the room, apparently struck by second thoughts. ‘I deem you all acted in good faith,’ she said, ‘thinking your extraordinary behaviour beneficial in some manner. Therefore, take this.’ Tossing a purse of coins on the floor, she stepped through the opening. Her velvet skirts softly swept the floor.

Caitri stood without speaking. She stared at the gap in the panelling, her hands pressed tightly against her mouth. She could only recall, streaking the dust on Ash’s face, the glimmering tracks of unbidden tears.

EPILOGUE

‘On my word

I want thee,

And it will be so

While I have life.’

LOVERS’ VOW

When the Gates were Closed for the second time, it is not known for sure whether they were ever again opened. It was said in tales that they were.

Once.

The reign of Edward lasted many years. Certain it is that the shang unstorms never more came and went, except within the violence of the Ringstorm roiling around the waist of the world. Certain it is that sildron-powered ships no longer flew, nor did Stormriders rule the skies, and that their once-great Houses declined, becoming squabbling, land-bound clans.

It was maintained (and indeed it was set down thus in the annals of Erith) that the bride of Edward, King-Emperor, was a damsel of great beauty, although her ways were strange, quiet and remote, and the marriage was childless. She outlived her husband by many years. When he died, a distant relation of the House of D’Armancourt came to the throne and Edward’s widow retired to a country estate, where she lived for an extraordinary length of time. Her beauty, though it faded in the end, faded slowly.

But others added a fanciful twist.

They avowed that she who became the wife of Edward, King-Emperor of Erith, was not his heart’s choice but a substitute, and that he never loved her as deeply. According to their version, his first bride was stolen away in the very hour they were to be married. On the day of the Royal Wedding, into the midst of the ceremony walked a tall stranger, more beautiful than the night, and a white owl flew above his shoulder, and no man could touch either of them. Before the marriage vows were exchanged, the stranger demanded a boon of Edward, and to the amazement of all those present, it was granted. Whereupon the stranger took the bride in his arms and kissed her.

Then the whole Court stood back, staring in astonishment. For where the visitor had stood, a great eagle rose up. By its side flew a white seabird, and the two were linked by a golden chain. The roof opened like a flower to let them pass.

They flew away and were never seen more in Erith.

The End

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ON THE OPTIONAL CHAPTER FOR THE BATTLE OF EVERNIGHT:

So many readers were upset when they interpreted the story’s ending as being sorrowful, that I felt prompted to write a clarifying chapter.

That chapter follows. You may choose to read it or not. Alternatively, you may choose to read only the introduction.

‘I was devastated,’ wrote one reader, ‘when I first finished the Bitterbynde series, so I read the extra chapter straight away, but then realized I actually liked the ambiguous ending more.’

I have been asked whether I prefer people to read the optional chapter or to close the book after the epilogue.

My own preference is for the original ending which, for me, is not ambiguous at all but the happiest of all possible outcomes.

Sain thee,

Cecilia Dart-Thornton

CHAPTER 13

INTRODUCTION

The glamour of the Faêran us beguiles;

How they amaze our senses with their wiles!

Fine clothes or rags? Gold thread or common straw?

Ah! Who knows what the truth is any more?

Retelling tales would seem, at first, to be

Safe bet to save them for posterity,

Yet stories change while passing door to door,

And who knows what the truth is, any more?

In domed mind-vaults we archive history

To keep it sound, in perpetuity.

Yet when retrieved, ’tis altered from before,

And who knows what the truth is, any more?

When sleep’s false dreams our waking visions cloud

And fractured memories the past enshroud,

What chance have we to know what came before?

Who can know what the truth is, any more?

It was those who were disparaged as being ‘fanciful’ who really understood the truth. The rest of the population were sadly deceived. How could it be, that this ‘fanciful twist’ had remained in the minds of some of the citizens of Erith, while contrasting opinions had taken hold in everyone else? The answers lie in the workings of human minds, and in the influence of the Faêran illusions that so adeptly confound the senses of mortal creatures.

Throughout history, different interpretations of the same event commonly evolve. In some cases, the natural effects of time and erratic memories are accentuated by clever bewilderments worked by the Faêran.

It was Rosamonde whom Edward eventually married; she who had always loved him. The daughter of Tamlain Conmor was indeed a damsel of great beauty, whose ways were strange, quiet and remote. The life of Rosamonde had been unusual and tinged with gramarye. This was the reason for her distant manner—doubtless she often dwelled on the wonders of days gone by. While her father was a captive in Faerie she had been conceived among the roses of Carterhaugh. Furthermore, she had mingled with immortal beings; by these influences, her lifespan was greatly lengthened. She was content in her marriage, even happy, this gentle, gracious queen.

To understand the power and the reach of Faêran guile, one need only recall what happened in the years that followed the Battle of Evernight:

Since the return to Caermelor, Angavar laid aside the lion of D’Armancourt and openly displayed his own eagle escutcheon, the sigil of Faêran Royalty. The couriers and everyone in the kingdom who knew him by sight, were fully apprised of the truth—King James had asked the Faêran High King to rule in his place until Edward came of age.

Surprisingly, or perhaps predictably, this truth did not affect history as it existed in the minds of the soldiery and the majority of the citizens of Erith, who recognised the face of their sovereign only from crudely stamped images on coins. The King-Emperor had come to be regarded as a sovereign without parallel, a paragon, the most popular ruler in history. The people would have followed him into any manner of danger. They found it difficult—nay, impossible to accept the idea that the entire Empire had been under glamour’s illusion for so many years, that this monarch they loved was in fact not of their race. Popularly, the obvious explanation was that the King-Emperor had been slain at the Battle of Darke, and his ally the Faêran High King had subsequently arrived to stamp out those of his enemies who remained alive …

The scattered remnants of the Talith race had gathered at Court to meet the Lady Ashalind, she whose hair glimmered with a golden sheen to match their own. If the Talith wondered at this newcomer in their midst, they put aside their questions. It may be that their natural curiosity was dulled by the gramarye hanging in heavy veils about the Palace, drifting like incense through the corridors and halls.

For certain, Angavar was able to cast nets of illusion over the Talith, and over the entire populace of Erith. He had already employed such glamours to ensure that the exchange between himself and the real King-Emperor passed unnoticed. When he snatched Ashalind—who had become ‘Ash’ after her memory was taken a second time—from the scene of her wedding to Edward, and returned with her to Faerie, he left a legacy of confusion veiling the minds of most of Erith’s people.

For he did steal her away, of that there is no doubt.

And this is how it came to pass:

After Ashalind exited the Gate for the final time there was a short period during which both she and Angavar actually dwelled in Erith simultaneously, before he was borne, Sleeping, from Eagle’s Howe into Faerie. Certain minor wights, and wild creatures such as birds spied Ashalind emerging from the Gate and making her way to the monument that was her own memorial. Several of these creatures slipped into the Fair Realm when the Faêran carried Angavar back to his own kingdom. After he woke, one of these informants revealed to him that his truelove still lived. Whereupon he opened the Gates immediately, and rescued her from Edward on the very wedding day.

Angavar and Ashalind flew away to Faerie, where he restored her memories and she was reunited with her family and friends.

13

THE WEDDING

An eagle and a white sea bird linked by a golden chain flew across Lake Amarach, through the mists that cling to the surface of that water night and day, coiling slowly in a dream-like dance. A steep island rises at the lake’s centre—an isle never inhabited by humankind—and it was there that the two birds passed through a Gate into to the Fair Realm.

They went alone.

Of the moment after they arrived in Faerie, when Angavar drew the disguises from himself and Ashalind, or the next moment when he restored her memory and they found one another again for the final time, never to be parted, nothing can be told, for there were none to bear witness. That interval was theirs alone, in any case, and not to be trespassed upon.

But some time later—and it might have been seconds, or hours or days; it is hard to tell when time passes so capriciously in Faêrie—it came to Ashalind that the white plumage she had worn while in bird shape had not returned to being the dress of silk and diamonds and pearls in which she was to have married Edward. Instead, her costume now matched Angavar’s. Shades of chartreuse played through the weave of the lovers’ garments—the sunlight-through-greenery hues of golden ash trees, and golden cypress—and the edges of their trailing sleeves were as dagged as dandelion leaves.

Angavar lifted her off her feet and swung her around in a circle, three times, both of them laughing. She had never seen him so happy; neither had she ever felt such utter joy. For the present she could think of nothing else. The ecstasy of being with her beloved, safe in his kingdom, was all that mattered.

Angavar exulted, fired with energy. Happiness enhanced his extraordinarily good looks a thousandfold. Each time Ashalind set eyes on him the shock was as great as ever. She recalled the first occasion: In that brief glimpse, it had come to her that to describe him as ‘handsome’ would be doing him an injustice. It would be as inadequate as applying the word ‘pretty’ to a sable sky jewelled with stars, and those stars lowering their reflections like glimmering nets into a wintry sea. Lean and angular was his face, the features chiselled, high-boned. Beneath straight eyebrows his dark eyes seemed to burn with a cold fire, piercing. His jaw was strong and clean-shaven, although brushed with rough shadow. Young he seemed, yet as old as Spring, and all in that flash she had noted he was tall and broad of shoulder, with the hard-thewed look of a warrior. There had been no defect. Quite the reverse.

‘I will show thee my realm, eudail,’ he told her now, ‘the high and the deep, the greatest and the least, the tardy and the swift. Thou shalt see wonders beyond description. Would that please thee?’

With a rush of excitement she assured him that indeed, it would. In fact she cared not what happened next, as long as nothing parted them.

He took her by the hand.

Together they soared higher than the highest clouds, then plummeted groundwards to alight atop a living volcano. On the scorched rim of the crater they balanced, their garments whipping madly in the heat-blast. Far below bubbled a maelstrom of magma and smoke, steam and flaming gases. Angavar raised his arm and made as if hurling some missile into the fiery soup, whereupon the mountain roared, exploding with such force that the caldera collapsed. Unscathed and whooping like exuberant children the lovers plunged into the erupting pit, passing through the superheated flows of underground as if they were no more than cool rivers of oozing raspberry syrup, amongst pillars of cloud, and exotic gardens of glassy blossoms.

Angavar conveyed Ashalind down to the lightless abysms of an ocean, where impossible monsters lit themselves with rows of electrical lights, like weird submarine ships cruising through the gloom. From the ocean the lovers emerged, with not a drop of water wetting them. They shrank to the size of ants and entered right into the heart of a flower, walking among the stamens and anthers as if through some outlandish grove. Between the precise walls of a snowflake’s hexagonal maze they danced for a while, tiny as motes, before returning to their proper size.

As their feet kissed the ground in a sunlit valley Ashalind, exhilarated by the sheer abandonment to pleasure and power, cried, ‘Now show me the tardy and the swift!’

Angavar smiled. He opened his hand, and a green butterfly was standing on his palm, its wings like two triangles cut out of emerald. ‘He has stolen the colour of your eyes,’ murmured the Faêran King.

The insect took flight, but with exquisite slowness—or so it seemed to Ashalind. Every detail of its movements was clearly discernible. Its wings rotated with a ballerina’s grace, rather than the rapid flitting usually associated with butterflies, clapping together at the apex of the backswing, but never meeting on the downstroke. The butterfly rowed hypnotically away into the rose-pink daylight of Faêrie. When Angavar unclosed his fingers a second time a furry bee flew out of his grasp, as leisurely as its predecessor, every beat of its vanes so measured as to be easily contemplated. When the bee had drifted out of sight, Angavar gave Ashalind a longbow, which she recognised as the bow he had carried when first she met him as Thorn in the wilderness, or an exact copy.

‘I cannot draw this hardy weapon,’ she murmured, hardly heeding her own words, for he was standing behind her shoulder with his arms about her, guiding her hands on string and grip. The contact between them was intense. She could feel the warm vitality of him up and down the length of her body, and almost dropped the bow from her nerveless fingers.

‘Try.’ He nocked an arrow.

She pulled back the bowstring easily, sending the arrow up and away in a transcendent arc, but its progress was deliberate; instead of whizzing in a blur, it seemed to glide unhurriedly along its trajectory. Ashalind laughed at the incongruity of the sight.

A moment later her hands were empty, and she stood arm in arm with her beloved on a hillside. He lifted his head and spoke to the sky, and all around, the landscape itself began changing in astounding ways at incredible speeds. The sun began to flash repeatedly across the sky, accelerating until it eventually vanished.

Twilight reigned. Lit by its wan glow, tall cliffs weathered away, dwindling in height until they existed no more. Rivers rapidly gouged out deep ravines Mountains stood up and thrust their heads skywards. The jagged mouths of earthquakes snapped open and shut in the ground, and a glacier raced down the valley. Forests spread out in great waves, seethed like stormy oceans of foliage, then appeared to dry up like puddles on a Summer afternoon.

‘Now I have seen everything,’ Ashalind said contentedly. She leaned into the arousing embrace of her lover, feeling his heart beat strongly enough to fuse with her own.

‘On the contrary, this is but the beginning,’ he said. Locks of his hair tumbled down across her face and arms, soft as the brush of feathers.

‘But what about everyone else?’ Ashalind said, turning her face up to his, but only for an instant, in case looking too long made her swoon, or die, or fasten to him in a fierce embrace and never let go. ‘Will your people not be thrown into confusion by what is occurring?’

‘It happened for us alone. This is Faêrie,’ Angavar whispered in her ear, ‘and all took place within a span so brief that for others it was like the passing of a thought.’ As he spoke, the contortions of the landscape slowed, and all returned to its normal state, if spectacular panoramas of haunting strangeness and splendour could be considered normal.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘it is time to make ready for a wedding, and for the revelries that will follow.’

‘A wedding!’ Ashalind echoed softly, her heart so full she could not say more. Presently she added, ‘How long will the preparations take?’

‘Too long.’

‘I understand,’ Ashalind said ruefully. ‘The nature of the Faêran inclines them to sport rather than industry. I daresay they are not used to busying themselves with wedding preliminaries.’

‘Nonetheless they will be making particular efforts for you and me. Indeed, the banquets over the next days and weeks and months are likely to be quite sumptuous.’

‘Oh?’ Ashalind recalled the arrival of the Avlantians in Faêrie, when the newcomers perceived that a feast was laid out on the starlit lawns, beneath spreading boughs heavy with scalloped leaves. There had been pies and puddings, flans and flummeries, saffron seed-cakes, cloudy white bread and soft yellow butter, raspberries, pears, strawberries and honeyed figs, creamy curd, truffles and crystal goblets encircling dark wine. Entranced by the music of fiddle and harp, the yellow-haired people of Hythe Mellyn had danced and feasted in the warm evening. Their cares had been discarded with their belongings on the flower-starred lawns. Caught in the ecstasy of the moment, Ashalind had cast off her travelling cloak and prepared to join in. Yet at the last, she did not.

‘Never have I tasted food in the Fair Realm,’ said she.

‘Then a treat is in store for you,’ Angavar said gravely. ‘Porridge and gruel, perhaps, if we are fortunate; maybe even with a couple of sprigs of parsley on the side.’

‘Dare we expect one or two grapes?’ Ashalind enquired, suppressing a smile.

‘One may hope.’

‘Oh but I have been forgetting,’ the damsel exclaimed, ‘how could I? It is unforgivable of me. My family and friends! I have not yet seen them since my return!’

‘Hardly unforgivable,’ he returned. ‘You arrived but a moment ago. Besides—’ and he speared her with an intense look—‘had you not given that moment to me I would surely have fallen prey to madness.’ More light-heartedly he added, ‘Let us go to them now!’

Ashalind, on the arm of Angavar, stepped blithesomely down through a sloping woodland of silver birch trees. Spinning swirls of thistledown showered them both, like handfuls of confetti cast in welcome. In their wake thronged the Faêran, singing and rejoicing, while hosts of eldritch wights came frolicking also. Ashalind was going to greet her loved ones for the first time since she had left them and slipped through the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss, so long ago in Erith-time.

Three of Ashalind’s Erithan companions discovered her immediately—the hound Rufus came bounding up, wagging his tail and spinning around in delight; the horses Peri and Satin blew their warm breath against Ashalind’s neck and nuzzled her in welcome. She lavished loving caresses upon them before they pranced away to revel again in the sweet freedom of the Land Beyond the Stars.

For the humanfolk she had left behind it seemed that only eight days had elapsed; eight days of quiet sadness, followed by sudden, fragile hope. Despite having reached the land of Faêrie, their heart’s desire, Ashalind’s family and friends were neither feasting nor dancing on verdant lawns in forest glades, as they might have been. Anxiety had postponed their joy. Ashalind, who had brought back the stolen children and been the instrument of Hythe Mellyn’s rescue from the Langothe, was not among them to share the fruits of her labours. Her presence was acutely missed.

Angavar had been borne to Faêrie, still wrapped in the Pendur Sleep. After he woke, the wights and birds who had returned with him announced that Ashalind lived, whereupon he departed into Erith immediately. He left Faêrie without notice, but word spread—he had gone to fetch her back. Ashalind’s family waited impatiently, dreading that some unforeseen circumstance might prevent her from returning to them. Maybe the wights and birds had been mistaken, or maybe after they had glimpsed her, some tragedy had befallen her. They waited, barely daring to hope, with no idea how long Angavar’s quest would take, for the passing of time in the Fair Realm never matched its counterpart in Erith.

Barefoot and clad in soft draperies the Avlantians were reclining listlessly on wide stairs leading down to lakes of utmost tranquillity. Around them soared an arcade of majestic marble columns, entwined with foliage. Some folk were trailing their fingers in the water; others were staring at their reflections or gazing at the stately swans that drifted on the lake. A youth plucked plaintive airs on a lute. Low-angled sunlight, rich as honey, shattered through the thick drifts and festoons of pastel blossoms that dripped from trees overhead, the slanting rays patterning the columns and gigantic stone urns with delicate dapples like the thinnest shavings of gold-leaf. Desultory flowers fell from the bowers above, to alight on the flawless surface and float away without a single ripple. From the far shore of the motionless waters, cliffs tiered upwards into a soft haze that indicated the spray from hidden waterfalls. The craggy precipices, lavender-shadowed, glowed like peaches where the light illustrated them.

Ashalind’s small brother, Rhys, had discovered a swing suspended from one of the blossomy boughs reaching over the lake. Seated thereon, he gripped the ropes above his head and leaned idly on the crook of his elbow, one shoeless foot pointing down towards his reflected image, the other resting on the swing-seat, which gently rocked.

An old man and a young sat hunched on the broad steps at the water’s edge; Leodogran na Pendran, Ashalind’s father, and Pryderi Penrhyn, who had loved Leodogran’s daughter in Erith and loved her still.

Leodogran’s housekeeper, Oswyn, loitered amongst that wistful company, and the learned wizard Razmath also, and Meganwy, the Carlin of the Herbs. Some of the other families who had left Hythe Mellyn tarried there as well, lost in poignant musings, supine upon the cool paving or seated with their backs against the columns.

But beyond their view Ashalind and Angavar with their astonishing retinue emerged from the thistledown birch groves and pushed through thickets of hydrangeas encrusted all over with powder-blue and rouge posies. They walked lightly between rose-arbours, and beneath the perfumed froth of plum trees in bloom, until they reached the lakeside. At their backs the marvellous Faêran hosts paused, half-concealed by the foliage, and waited courteously.

The mortals who loitered by the lake heard a voice, and turned to behold those two standing before them.

At first they did not know what they saw, for Ashalind was transformed. She knew such ecstasy that her beauty shone brighter than ever and as for Angavar, it hurt the eyes of the mortalfolk to look at him.

Such was the gladness of these two lovers.

The human company bowed their heads and bent their knees before the High King of the Fair Realm, but Ashalind left Angavar’s side and walked towards her people, smiling and holding out her arms, and at last they comprehended that she was the very one they longed for and had missed so sorely, and they rose to their feet as if awakening from sleep.

At first, Leodogran could not speak; he could only weep for happiness. Rhys jumped from his swing but something in the air of Faêrie caught him, so that he fell not into the water. On the contrary, he floated like a bubble until his toes touched the shore, whereupon he ran to his sister where Leodogran clasped her in his arms, and hugged them both, and laughed and jumped and could not keep still. Razmath and Meganwy greeted Ashalind effusively. Oswyn was overcome by the sight of the Faêran King and fell to her knees, but Ashalind raised her up and embraced her. All were blithe, save for Pryderi.

After the first instant of disbelief had turned to rapture he glanced once in the direction of Ashalind’s companion and a look of despair closed upon his features. He suffered her to kiss him, then drew back, nodding politely and murmuring that he wished her joy.

‘Well Pryderi,’ said Ashalind, ‘I wish you joy also,’ but it was plain he believed that could never be.

Ashalind’s heart ached for the young man, but one of the Faêran came forward—the lady Rithindel of Brimairgen, whose loveliness was a poem. Her midnight hair, bound in a silver net laced with stars, reached to her ankles. Her gown was viridescent silk embellished with spangled moths’ wings. Smiling, she took Pryderi’s hand, saying, ‘Be comforted.’ He turned his anguished eyes upon the lady of the Fair Realm and when he met her gaze he faltered. By that hesitation Ashalind knew that all would be well in due course, for to look upon the Faêran is to love them, and the affections of many mortal creatures can eventually be swayed. Pryderi would find contentment in the Fair Realm.

Everyone was keen to hear Ashalind’s story, humanfolk and Faêran alike, so she sat down beneath the columns and the festoons of pastel blossoms, and told it to all. Angavar remained close at her side, as if he suspected that if he let her from his sight she might disappear.

Cierndanel the Royal Bard was among the audience, with his live asp twined about his neck; and Liriel, jewel-smith of Faêrie, and Giovhnu the Faêran Mastersmith. From far and near the entire population of Faerie listened to the tale, hearkening by their own arcane methods, and the telling took as long as it needed to take, and that might have been a day or a year.

When it had been told it was discussed at length by all and sundry, and Leodogran murmured to his daughter, ‘Perhaps you have not yet revealed all, elindor. It might be wondered what retribution Angavar wreaked upon the scoundrel Edward for his act of treachery that came nigh to blighting our eternity.’

She replied earnestly, ‘The ways of the Faêran are not the ways of men, father.’

‘Perhaps,’ Rhys prompted, eager to learn whether his sister’s betrayer had been suitably punished, but too much in awe of Angavar to address him directly, ‘the King’s Majesty left an enchantment behind when he flew away with you, Ashli—a spell that struck Edward down, or blasted his brains from his skull!’

‘I think not! Thorn—that is to say Angavar,’ Ashalind subjoined a little self-consciously, darting a quick look at the breathtakingly handsome lord who watched her attentively while reclining at his ease nearby—‘promised Edward’s father, King William, that he would protect him. Edward had once been his ward and his charge!’

Cierndanel, who had overheard this exchange, smiled his dazzling smile. ‘Recall also that traditionally the Faêran are wont to make allowances for love’s folly,’ he said in that voice like the sound of rain on leaves. ‘We are fond of lovers, and inclined to indulge them, even when they fall into error.’

Then, unexpectedly, Angavar spoke. Hearing those deep, rich tones Ashalind could not help but be thrilled, though she knew them so well.

Said the Faêran King to her brother, ‘Thou must understood Rhys, that, unlike Pryderi, Edward will suffer, all his life, a form of Langothe—a longing for the love he will never know; and that longing will hurt him like some deep wound that never heals.’ His audience listened in silence as the impact of his words drove home. ‘Compared to that,’ said Angavar, ‘any blow I might have struck could seem inconsequential. Besides,’ he went on, a smile quirking the corners of his beautiful mouth, ‘Reprisals take time. On the day I last saw Edward I was in too much of a hurry.’

Cierndanel laughed, and others joined in.

‘I daresay any Faêran as powerful as you, sir,’ Rhys piped up boldly, ‘would not deign to smite a man so manifestly unequal to himself, in any case.’

And Angavar agreed that this was so.

‘But what about dear Rosamonde?’ Ashalind asked suddenly. ‘She loved Edward all her life. Is he never to return her affection?’

‘As to Edward’s affections, ionmhuinn, I would rather dismiss them from my consideration,’ said Angavar, ‘but if thou seekest knowledge, here is one who will satisfy thy curiosity, for she is mistress of concealed lore, and knows something of what is yet to come.’

After giving Ashalind a quick kiss, light as the touch of a wind-blown leaf, he sprang to his feet and strode down the stairs until he was standing in the water. She felt as if life had been drained from her, that she should be parted from him by even such a slight distance, but he called out a name, and the placid lake finally stirred.

From its centre the upper edge of a pale and fluted moon erupted in one slow, powerful thrust, massive sheets of water pouring from it as brine pours from the flukes of a diving whale. As it rose, it revealed itself to be part of a creamy scallop shell the height of a carriage; a gleaming, calcined fan vertically positioned. Its hinge was attached to the other half of the shell, which rested on the flood like a boat. A woman stood inside the open bivalve.

Of course, no mortal woman.

Nimriel, the Lady of the Lake, was clad in long, corrugated strands of chlorophyta, bordered with lace-leafed aquatic mint. At her hip she wore a scabbarded sword. Her amber hair—as wavy as wind-rippled sand—flowed free from beneath a garland of water-lilies. A girdle encrusted with blue periwinkle-shells clasped her waist, while jade water-snakes coiled themselves like polished bangles up and down her arms. In one hand, as a magician would hold his staff, she gripped a dark green stalk of giant arrowhead, topped by its sagittate blade.

Groups of water-girls appeared, pushing the hull shorewards, but, overwhelmed and somewhat frightened, the humanfolk jumped up and scrambled away from the brink. When the shell touched the steps Angavar held out his hand to the Faeran Lady and she took it, stepping gracefully from her curious vessel.

The Lady Nimriel was to be feared and esteemed, but Angavar led her amongst the gathering and she knelt at the feet of Ashalind.

‘I do honour to you,’ she said gravely, ‘Ashalind na Pendran.’

Awkwardly, Ashalind returned the greeting, though Angavar reassured her; ‘From now on all my subjects will bow before you, Goldhair eudail,’ he said. ‘Be not discomfited. It is our way.’

When Nimriel rose to her feet Ashalind could not help but call to mind their first meeting. The Lady seemed as unchanged yet as altered as the ocean. Her tranquillity was that of the calmness of a vast loch at dawn. It could not be doubted that she was mistress of all the wisdom hidden in deep places; in drowned valleys and starlit lagoons; beneath mountain meres where salmon cruised in the dim, peaty fathoms.

‘Tell what you would ask of me,’ the Lady said, speaking soft and low.

‘Prithee, what of Rosamonde of Roxburgh and Edward D’Armancourt?’

‘They will be married,’ said Nimriel. ‘He will be kind to her, Ashalind, for his attachment to her is second only to his affection for you.’

‘Art thou happy now?’ Angavar murmured, drawing Ashalind to him and wrapping her in his arms. There was no need for her to reply in words.

Rhys, however, wanted more. He tugged at his sister’s arm. ‘What about Sianadh?’ he asked, ‘and Tully, and Caitri, and Viviana and Ethlinn, and Pod? And the good Gatekeeper? And the waterhorse, the nygel? What will happen to them?’

‘Oh!’ Ashalind exclaimed, forcing herself to awaken once again from the dream-inducing bliss of her lover’s embrace, ‘How could I have overlooked the opportunity to discover the fates of my dearest friends?’ Suddenly torn between dread and hope she said, ‘Gracious Lady Nimriel, will you tell us what you know of them?’

The Lady smiled. ‘They live,’ she said, ‘happily ever after.’

‘But surely that cannot be all we shall ever learn!’ Ashalind cried in dismay. ‘Those worthy folk performed the greatest of services for me. I cherish them!’

Nimriel beckoned, upon which Rhys followed her to the lower steps at the lakeside. Ashalind did likewise, but not until she had received Angavar’s assurance that he would go with her, for she could not bear to be more than three paces away from him at most. The lake-maidens had removed the shell-boat and the water had returned to its previous stillness. Not a flaw marred the surface, which was as sheer as a silken drum. Ashalind and Nimriel seated themselves, partly submerged, so that their garments floated around their knees like seaweed, whereupon the Lady of the Lake pointed into the depths and cried, ‘Behold!’

It reminded Ashalind of looking into the weird mirrors of Morragan, when he had forced her to seek for the Gate of Oblivion’s Kiss; yet there was no compulsion here. The reflective water revealed a series of scenes. First, two noblewomen seated at a table by a velvet-curtained window, playing cards with two gentlemen. All were attired in fashionable raiment and all wreathed in smiles.

‘Who are those ladies?’ Rhys wanted to know.

‘Why, they are my friends Viviana and Caitri!’ answered his sister, enchanted by what she saw.

Viviana leaned across the table give the elder of the two gentlemen a peck on the cheek, and Ashalind recognised Dain Pennyrigg who, it seemed, had risen from the station of stable-hand to that of a lord. A wedding ring gleamed on his hand, and on Viviana’s also. As the game concluded a nursemaid approached, carrying a lively infant in her arms. Viviana jumped up and took the child from the woman, cradling it tenderly. Dain Pennyrigg spoke playfully to his wife, who responded in kind, while Caitri and the younger gentleman, now sitting side by side, joined hands and engaged in conversation, focussing on each other as if they were the only two people in the world.

Nimriel stirred the water with her finger. The scene broke up, giving way to another.

On a wide green lawn under the sun, a hurling match was about to begin. The audience, ranged around the sidelines, was already in a raucous mood; everyone was cheering, shouting, bawling insults and waving flags. Ashalind exclaimed with delight when she spotted Sianadh’s sister Ethlinn, with her children Muirne and Diarmid among the bystanders. Three young men, three young women, an ancient crone in a wicker chair and a hive of very small children accompanied them.

‘See,’ came the voice of Nimriel, ‘there is Ethlinn with her grandchildren, and Muirne with her husband, and Diarmid with his wife.’

‘I never guessed Ethlinn could abandon herself so completely to jubilation! Who are the others?’

‘Kavanagh’s grandmother, astonishingly long-lived. And his two children, grown to adulthood, with their spouses and bairns.’

‘Sianadh’s entire tribe!’ Ashalind clapped her hands in glee. She stared eagerly at the picture. ‘But where is he, the Bear himself? Is he playing at hurling? I would have thought his hurling days were well past …’

‘Look well!’ advised Nimriel. ‘Do you spy him on the northern boundary?’

‘Even so! What is he doing there?’

‘One team hails from the north of Finvarna and the other from the south. Each side has chosen an older man as their mascot, to stand on the side-lines, a tribute to warriors of yore. The southern team drafted the one-time hurling champion of Severnesse for their talisman, one Lusco Barrowclough. The appointment of his inveterate unfriend was too much for Sianadh. I can tell you, his beard bristled like a fox’s brush, and his ire knew very few bounds. Convinced that honour was at stake—and made brash by a long drinking session with some Ertish friends—he demanded, and received, the equivalent position on the side of the northern team. The players hailed his fervour.’

‘Oh yes,’ Ashalind said with feeling. ‘Sianadh was ever a man eager to defend his account.’

‘See,’ Rhys cried eagerly, ‘the match commences!’

After the ball had been thrown up between the two teams the fun began, to the skirling music of pipes and the cheering of onlookers. They were hurling away with astonishing skill and vigour, when the southern team began to get the upper hand. That his rival’s party should appear to be winning plainly irked Sianadh more than he could endure. Spontaneously he threw himself into the game and began helping the northern team. Bellowing his rage, Barrowclough made a run at the Ertishman, but Sianadh shirt-fronted him, bowling him clean over. Rhys, seeing this, doubled over with laughter.

The two men took to fisticuffs and the match was suspended while they fought it out. Their reflexes being somewhat impaired by the quantity of spirit in their blood, they moved erratically, like two lethargic bulls. Eventually they crashed head to head, fell flat on their backs and remained prone, groaning. The spectators cheered, the rivals were dragged from the field and the game resumed.

Eventually the northerners won the day, to Sianadh’s considerable joy. There was much mirth and jollity on both sides, for the match had been a vigorous one and no ill-will had brewed on the field, except between the two mascots. Sianadh crowed like a rooster despite his sore head, and swore he’d never let Barrowclough forget the day.

Tears of laughter were streaming down the faces of Ashalind and Rhys as the scene dissolved.

‘Oghi ban Callanan, but there’s a man of gumption,’ Ashalind gasped. Cupping her hands around her mouth she called out at the disappearing image, ‘May you never change, you red pirate!’

Abruptly sobering, Rhys turned and looked up at Angavar. ‘Sir, does Sianadh think that Ashli lost her memory and became the wife of that horrid Edward?’ he asked. ‘Do all her friends believe the lie?’

Angavar replied, ‘I never allowed the nets of glamour to touch them. I left them with the truth.’

‘Hooray!’ said Rhys, hopping up and down, splashing drops everywhere.

‘Be still, child,’ warned Nimriel ‘or you will shatter the images.’

The boy obeyed, and as the ripples vanished another episode unfolded.

A cottage stood on the banks of a fast-running stream, its stone walls overgrown with honeysuckle, its roof thatched with heather. The garden burgeoned with foxgloves, pansies and marigolds. Children played by the front gate, whistling tunes on white dead-nettle stalks, or skipping with ropes of marram grass. On the porch sat an elderly man, weaving a withy-basket.

As twilight drew in a faceless figure came riding past the cottage on a wide plank carried along by two burly men. He was dressed in old clothes stuck all over with burdock burrs so that not a particle of fabric showed. A burry mask obscured his face and a flower-covered hat topped his head. He carried two staves, one in each hand. From these staves flapped two flags, the Royal Standard of Eldaraigne and the Empire Jack, and spring flowers decorated the handles. The disguised villager stopped at the front gate to collect small coins, flowers and food from the occupants, after which they joined his procession, the children singing songs and shrieking.

Ashalind realised what she was witnessing. ‘It is Flench Ridings Night at Appleton Thorn,’ she said in wonderment. ‘The villagers are on their way to the inn.’

‘And that house,’ said Nimriel, ‘is the home of the Arbalisters.’

‘The Arbalisters? But Tully told us that the sons of the Arbalisters left their home on the Churrachan and sailed across the ocean, where he could not follow. He said the cottage had fallen into ruin.’

‘The great-great-grandsons will return to Ishkiliath,’ said Nimriel. ‘They will rebuild the cottage. Take note!’

Now that the cottage was empty of human beings, a small figure could be seen busying itself about the place. It emerged from the front door, carried a pail of cinders into the garden and emptied it carefully around the base of the pear tree. After bustling indoors it reappeared with a mop and bucket, filled the bucket from the well and trotted inside again. The creature had a face and torso and arms like a man’s, but legs like a goat. Horns protruded from his shaggy head. It was obvious, by the movement of his lips, that he was singing as he worked.

‘Is that Tully?’ asked Rhys.

‘It is indeed!’ Ashalind said, beaming. ‘He looks as happy as a lark.’

‘Happy to be doing housework?’ her brother grimaced.

‘He is an urisk. They are, by nature, helpful wights, like bruneys.’

‘Observe another who is happy,’ said the Lady of the Lake, sketching a symbol on the water.

They looked.

In a forest glade a small grey horse was standing in a pond. Pleated water-leaves like thin, green ribbons twined in its glossy mane and in its tail, which curled up over its back like a half-wheel. Water lapped around the horse’s long, sculptured legs as it bent its neck—proudly arched—and dipped its nose into the pond After jerking its head in a tearing motion the creature came up with a mouthful of waterweeds, which it chewed, wearing a look of deep contentment on its long face.

‘Happy Tighnacomaire!’ cried Ashalind. ‘Dear friend!’

Shadows dimmed the Lady’s mirage. In the lake stars pricked out, one by one. The final spectacle showed another familiar figure. It was Pod, the clubfooted servant boy from Isse Tower. All alone, he was lying on his back in some remote spot, gazing at the moon. Or perhaps not entirely alone, because a white owl swooped past, silent as a spectre. As the watchers gazed Pod turned his head towards them, and Ashalind uttered a startled cry. For it had seemed to her that he winked at them before he turned away.

The image evaporated.

‘I do believe Pod could actually see us.’ Ashalind said in astonishment.

Nimriel smiled. ‘That is not impossible,’ she replied.

‘My Lady, your visions have lightened my heart,’ said Ashalind. ‘For that I am profoundly grateful.’

But Nimriel inclined her head, saying, ‘It was my delight.’

After the discussions about Ashalind’s story had concluded, a feast of welcome was held, which continued for days. As soon as it was over Angavar convened a meeting with the highest of his lords and ladies, announcing that he would make Ashalind his queen—a circumstance they had all guessed in any case—and if there was any resentment on the part of the Faêran, it was not displayed. They were so overjoyed that their High King Angavar Iolaire was back in their midst and grateful to Ashalind for the part she played in returning him to them, that they honoured her as if she were not Erith-born, but one of themselves.

Therefore, witnessed by all, Ashalind and Angavar pledged themselves to one another and it was done.

Then there would have been a betrothal feast, but Angavar wished to dispense with any further time-consuming matters and get straight to the wedding, and Ashalind was of one mind with him, so preparations began immediately. And such preparations! It was to be a celebration the like of which had never been seen in Aia; a wedding that that could only have taken place in the Land Beyond the Stars. The denizens of Faêrie put forth their inventiveness to please their King and his betrothed, and the first stage, the Attiring of the Bride unfolded like some fabulous saga.

Attended by Oswyn and Meganwy, Ashalind shed her garments and bathed in a limpid pool edged with mosses and ferns, where crisp, creamy-petalled water-lilies stood up like cupped hands. It was a lively water, lacking the grave serenity of the colonnaded lake by which the people of Hythe Mellyn had paused in meditation. Piquant breezes ruffled the ferns, a series of silvery cascades emptied into the pool from the surrounding embankments, and the sky hung down in blue banners from the great arch of a rainbow.

Green-haired mermaids waited upon Ashalind, sometimes singing weird and lovely ocean-songs, at other times pausing to let song-birds give voice to their wild melodies; blackbird and magpie, grey shrike-thrush and currawong. The sea-girls untangled Ashalind’s golden tresses with their coralline combs, and the Gwragged Annwn, the lake-maidens, anointed her with dewy unguents. Mild-tempered silkies and other water-wights ministered to her as well, but Leodogran’s daughter would not have wicked ones near her, especially none of the fuathan. The fuathan, a motley assortment of unseelie grotesqueries, had never been kind to Ashalind. Her restored memories included vivid recollections of such fuathan as the murderous woman-goat thing she and her friends had fended off in Lallillir, with its fence of teeth as long and pointed as stakes, yellow as old parchment, and stained slime-green. Such encounters, to Ashalind’s relief, were safely behind her and not worth dwelling on. As Angavar’s queen, nothing could harm her in the Fair Realm; nonetheless she did not like to be reminded of the terrors of bygone days.

When at last she rose from her bath, with water running off her body like cords of raw silk and sliding pearls, she felt that all the travails and sorrows of the past had been rinsed away.

The fragile water-damsels called asrai came swimming to clothe her in an improbable chemise made from thin membranes of transparent water ceaselessly pouring; a fabric as rare and opalescent as the wings of dragonflies. Lake-maidens dressed Oswyn and Meganwy in gowns of Spring-green leaves overlaid with a fine mesh of leaf-skeletons, crowning them with garlands of newly-budded ivy. All three mortals were placed in a boat draped with rich folds of silk, which glided on its own across the water.

‘Are you to be wed in see-through, Ashalind?’ Oswyn wondered. ‘Is that the custom here? After all the marvels I have seen, nothing would surprise me.’

Ashalind laughed. ‘The asrai murmured as they put it on me, this is an undergarment.’

‘How does it feel,’ asked Meganwy, ‘to wear pouring water?’

‘Not wet at all. It feels dry to the touch, like silk, only your fingers go right through it. See?’ Ashalind lifted the hem of the garments and showed it to her companions. ‘How it can be handled at all it is a miracle. This stuff is like nothing I have ever known.’

The boat beached itself amidst banks burgeoning with spring blossoms. Swanmaidens waited in those gardens, with their long dark hair sluicing down over their cloaks of inky feathers and a long red jewel shining, bright as fresh blood, on the brow of each. They loved Ashalind, deeming her exceptional among mortals, and vied with one another to tie forget-me-nots in her hair, giving her a petticoat sewn from magnolia petals to wear over the implausible chemise. Ashalind glimpsed her reflection mirrored in still water, and wondered greatly, believing for a heartbeat that she beheld someone else.

Clouds of pollen hovered like gold scintillants, and the air of the garden was flooded with a fragrance of hyacinths, heady as opium. Leodogran’s daughter walked amidst fanfares of daffodils, carillons of lily-of-the-valley and salutations of sword-irises, her handmaidens flanking her. Oswyn and Meganwy were as enchanted with the proceedings as she, and exclaimed at every new turn of events until, intoxicated with gorgeousness, they became lost for utterances.

Now different music wafted to their ears; the melodies of the Faêran themselves, played upon harps and lutes and other stringed instruments. A small following of feminine wights collected in their wake; miniature folk such as grigs and siofra, all giggling, and bearing rosebuds in their minute hands. Ashalind wondered if they were to make a bouquet for her, but the bouquet, when it arrived later, came from another source.

The Faêran next led the three mortals through a Summer meadow overgrown by tawny grasses, redolent with the smell of new-mown hay. Here Ashalind received an astonishing overskirt of some rippling gauze shot with iridescence, apparently fashioned from real flames that blazed but could not cause harm, much as the water of the chemise poured continually and never flooded or dried up. Unburning sparks settled in her hair, and sweet-throated trumpets sounded. Oswyn tried to catch some sparks but they evaded her flailing hands, like wary insects.

Faêran hands held up a mirror of polished bronze, but Ashalind hardly recognised herself. Small trow-boys joined her wightish following, solemn and clearly awe-struck. The birds of Summer flitted everywhere, especially honeyeaters. She spied a certain hummingbird that had a familiar look, and welcomed the idea that her lover had taken care of everything, down to the last detail.

Once she fancied she glimpsed the swooping shape of a large black bird, or the shadow of one, somehow ominous—no songster, she was certain—and, lost as she was in her delirium of happiness, she experienced a mild curiosity at spying a creature that seemed somehow out of place. Now that it came to mind, she recalled having seen that same bird in the Spring garden, but had scarcely heeded it.

Throughout the Fair Realm the wind was rising. Further Ashalind progressed with her companions, and as they entered an Autumnal woodland her excitement grew, for this was the next-to-last halt before she reached the place where the ceremony was to be held.

Haughty little princes of the siofra, belted with swords the size of toothpicks, raced between the blowing trees on saddled mice, while pint-sized queens and kings went bowling along in hollow-pumpkin carriages drawn by prettily-caparisoned rats. How the wheels of such small conveyances could plough through the deep carpet of leaf-litter was anyone’s guess. Pheasants foraged in the undergrowth, and ptarmigan, and peacocks, and other splendidly-plumaged fowl whose discarded feathers were snatched away by the gusts. The sudden tympanic roar of thunder blended with the cry of the wind, skilfully orchestrated—perhaps by Cierndanel, perhaps by Angavar himself—to create a resounding, stirring anthem; a paean in praise of all those who had ever struggled to triumph over hardship.

‘Such music!’ Oswyn cried exuberantly, reaching her hands towards the heavens. Scooping up handfuls of leaves as bright as dyed paper scraps, the high-spirited damsels flung them at one another as if they were children mock-warring with snowballs.

The wind swept through Ashalind’s hair, adorning it with fireflies. Their glow was soft azure, in contrast to the hard ruby and topaz of the unburning sparks, and when she gazed into a looking glass the Faêran placed in front of her, she imagined that a thousand diminutive jewelled lamps had become snagged in her locks. Contrary to all expectation, there was no strident clash of colours, no garishness. The denizens of the Fair Realm were too artful to allow that. Even when the forest wind let out another cinnamon breath, attiring Ashalind in an ethereal dress made of sunset-tinted leaves, or of the ghosts of those leaves, there was no gaudiness; for nature is the most artistic designer of all, and the Faêran worked according to her ways.

Meganwy flinched and cried out, then brushed her hand across her eyes. ‘I thought for an instant I was blinded and deafened by a seething of wings,’ she said, recovering her composure. ‘A murther of crows, it seemed … but it was nothing.’

‘Nothing?’ echoed Ashalind.

‘No. Nothing at all. Be of good cheer!’

Gradually the thunder drummed its way into the distance and faded. Leaves continued to spiral through the air, wind-stripped from the trees. The further the swelling bridal procession travelled through the woodland, the barer became the branches, until all trees stood leafless, their twigs forming starkly elegant traceries against the clouds. Sooty wings rushed through the boughs and flapped away with slow pulses. A harsh cry overrode the wind’s music and the susurrus of the leaves; or perhaps it was merely the rubbing together of two creaking limbs …

Belatedly, Ashalind wondered whether Morragan, the Raven Prince was nearby; and she felt astonished that she had not considered the possibility before. A disturbing seed took hold inside her; a seed of what, she could not say.

But the Faêran placed Ashalind upon an eldritch horse the colour of purity, whose bridle glittered with little bells like chains of frozen snowdrops. Accompanied by Oswyn and Meganwy on two sorrel steeds, she was led beneath trellises festooned with vines and heavy with bunches of purple grapes. As the wind’s strength began to ebb, twenty-one Faêran ladies joined the cavalcade, dressed in gowns of emerald tissue and mounted on grey steeds. Their voices rang out, combining in fantastic harmonies. Seelie waterhorses gambolled at the fringes of the pageant and, from distant bells, clear chimes pealed out joyously.

The wedding hour was approaching.

Winter is hard on warm-blooded creatures in Erith. It can be dismal and ugly also, when leaden plates seem to batten down the sky, when ice turns to slush, and when dead sparrows lie frozen beneath thorn-hedges. Even in the land of mortals, however, the exquisiteness of Winter’s incarnation in the Fair Realm can sometimes be glimpsed; a stand of stately evergreens, their canting foliage heaped with a milky lather; a sunlight morning alight with winking frost-prisms; a window pane patterned with a filigree of icy ferns … The loveliness of Winter was concentrated and magnified a thousandfold in Faêrie.

The steeds of the three companions set them down in a rolling, snow-mantled landscape. At their backs soared the black fretwork trees of the Autumnal woodland. Before them, a frozen wonderland.

Lambent daylight, clear and diffuse, seemed to emanate from ground and sky; from everywhere rather than from any particular source. Sugar-cones of spruce, pine, and fir scattered themselves across the scenery, every needle hoarfrost-powdered, as stiff as starched tinsel. Willows gushed like frosted fountains, their tumbling withies daintily etched in sable and ivory and shades of twilight. Flutes and pan-pipes made haunting music. As Ashalind and her friends stood barefoot and warm in the whipped-meringue drifts, the Faêran bestowed the final wedding garments.

The ornamentations of Erith echo Faêran adornments to the same extent that a painted portrait echoes its living subject. For Angavar’s bride there were no jewels of bloodless stone mimicking the brightness of stars; nor any needlework representations of nature’s ephemerae. The Faêran robed Ashalind in a gathered gown of actual snowflakes-made-watered-satin, attached to a train several yards long. The entire glistening confection was appliquéd with lacework of orb spiderwebs—each filament exquisitely rimed. The skirts were ruched with imperishable sea-foam and inviolable frost-flowers, and embroidered with living rosebuds that would never wilt. Instead of seed pearls or diamonds, sparkling constellations of ice crystals the size of tears picked out the contours of the bodice. Upon her head they placed a shimmering veil, not of gauze or tulle, but sheets of real mist, translucent, streaming to her ankles, rippling as she moved.

Then aerial flocks of larks and nightingales came thronging, carrying sprigs in their beaks. The Faêran bridesmaids wove these sprays together, and crowned Ashalind with a circlet of tiny white rosebuds, dew-glinting. The bridal bouquet came to Ashalind borne by a blizzard of doves; a collection of perfect snowy flowers tied up with ribbons—rosebuds, gypsophila, and gardenias; stephanotis, jasmine and wisteria. Living butterflies flitted in and out amongst the blossoms, whose stems trailed to her feet.

She saw herself mirrored in an ice sheet; her own image in a glimmering haze, all silver and vestal white with a hint of gold, and it came to her abruptly, finally—‘I am his bride!’

A vanilla-scented cloud lifted up Ashalind and her companions, and carried them through the air. When their feet touched the snow once more, they found themselves among a vast concourse of the Faêran. As ever, their voices musical, modulated, fell like flower-petals on water, ringing like birdsong in the morning. They spoke in a language Ashalind now understood; a tongue as smooth as polished silver, as rich as the jewel-hoards of dragons. Some wore scarlet and gold and amber, like leaping flames, some were clad in green and silver like moonlight on leaves, some in soft grey like curling smoke. Others amongst them appeared to be as naked as needles, graced only with the beauty of their comely forms and their flowing hair, which was threaded with jewels and flowers …

‘I am truly to be the Queen of the Faêran!’ Ashalind whispered to herself.

But it was all too much to comprehend.

Oswyn and Meganwy arranged the snowflakes-made-watered-satin train of Ashalind’s gown, spreading and smoothing it. Ashalind kissed her friends, whispering, ‘I am glad you are with me!’ and indeed she was, for her heart was pounding at thrice its normal rate. She was grateful for the knowledge that her two staunch friends stood by.

The crowds of Faêran parted, creating a wide aisle in front of Angavar’s bride. To a flourish of trumpets, composed for the occasion, she walked down the long passageway. The length of this parade was unguessable, but in Faêrie anything was possible. It might have been twelve yards or twelve miles or twelve hundred miles long for all she could tell. Time passed in a twinkling and she felt neither hunger nor cold; indeed she was not sure what she felt; she might have been numb. Faêran lords and ladies smiled at her from either side as she passed. They were interspersed with wights of every description and every persuasion; the good, bad, ugly, the mischievous and the tricksy, the comely and the bizarre. Of them, Ashalind was scarcely aware. Near the end of the promenade her father waited, and Rhys, and Pryderi, and all the folk from Erith, but the beating of wings caught her eye and she descried again the looming chevron of darkness; midnight in corvine form. The disturbing seed within her burst into full-blown fright. She forced herself to move on.

Winter is a bride.

Her snowy landscapes, veiled in mist and glittering with frost-jewels, are the epitome of chaste loveliness. Ashalind’s wedding was at the heart of Winter, snow-covered and soaring, glittering with splendour, bright with light-splintered droplets. Effortlessly she walked on, until there, waiting for her, was Angavar, and all fear fled. His hair, glossy black as a raven’s wing, tumbled nearly to his waist; a cloud of soft darkness, a cascade of shadow. He was almost too beautiful to look at.

It seemed to Ashalind that he and she were alone together at Winter’s core, though she understood that all of Faêrie was watching. Ashalind was so struck by his presence that she thought herself in a fever; her heart so full it was on the point of exploding, pounding painfully, as if hammering to get out of her chest, her joy so terrible she hardly knew whether it was happiness or torment. The knowledge that she would soon be his wife was almost too intoxicating to withstand. He smiled at her and she thought she might melt through the snow.

But a storm of black plumage blustered in her ears, and, terrified that even now she might lose him she raised her face to her beloved and whispered, ‘He is here, Morragan-as-Raven.’

‘I know, caileagh faoileag,’ Angavar said softly, taking her hand and pressing it to his heart. ‘He can do no harm.’

He gestured, and she looked up to see the numinous coal-black bird watching from on high. ‘Nothing can sunder us,’ said Angavar. ‘I will marry thee.’ And as soon as she heard those words her fears finally left her forever.

The rings were forged in view of the guests as the wedding ceremony took place. A fire as red as rubies sprang in the snow; beside it, an anvil where Giovhnu the Faêran Mastersmith plied hammer and tongs. Rhys na Pendran diligently worked the bellows. While Ashalind and Angavar made their vows to one another, Lord Giovhnu melted precious metals and poured them into a mold, then cooled the rings in snow and inscribed them with certain mottos.

It was not Leodogran’s part to give his daughter away, for she was hers to give, not his. It was his part, however, and a part in which he rejoiced, to carry the newly-forged rings on a cushion of almond silk to the Lady Nimriel of the Lake, who offered them in turn to bride and groom.

Angavar pushed Ashalind’s ring onto her finger while uttering the last words of the vows, then she did likewise. He bent his head and fiercely kissed her mouth. Dizzy with euphoria, she was barely aware of a stupendous roar, as of thousands of birds in unison taking off from some vast stretch of marshland. When the lovers drew apart, Morragan-as-Raven was nowhere to be seen.

And that is how Ashalind married her true love.

Conch shells and golden trumpets and silver bells broadcast exultant fanfares. Rejoicing broke out over the entire Fair Realm, and the revelries began. Subsequently there could only be ecstasy, and surely it must have been endless, for how could the love and the vows of one such as the Faêran King fail to bestow immortality? Happiness so great can scarcely be imagined, let alone described.

It was set down in the annals of Erith that when the Gates of Faêrie were Closed for the second time they were never opened again. Some storytellers, however, added a fanciful twist.

And they were right.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The fairies … all set great store by golden hair in mortals. A golden-haired child was in far more danger of being stolen than a dark one. It was often a golden-haired girl who was allured away to be the fairy bride … sometimes, too, the fairies adopted girls of especial beauty, and above all golden-haired, as their special charges; and when they could not protect them they avenged their wrongs.

A DICTIONARY OF FAIRIES, KATHARINE BRIGGS

‘Ellum do grieve …’ The chorus of a traditional Somerset folk song collected by Ruth Tongue in Forgotten Folk Tales of the English Counties, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970.

‘I walk with the owl …’: Quoted from ‘The Life of Robin Goodfellow’, a seventeenth-century pamphlet republished by J. O. Halliwell-Phillips in Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare Society, London, 1845.

Finoderee: ‘[I can] clear a daymath in an hour and want nothing better than a crockful of bithag afterwards.’

‘Cap for the head, alas poor head!’ etc …

‘… [He whisks] horseloads of stone and wrack about the countryside like a little giant …’

‘… [he folds in] wild goats, purrs and hares along with the sheep.’

The quotations above, and the inspiration for Finodoree’s tale, are from Walter Gill’s A Second Manx Scrapbook Arrowsmith, London, 1932; also from anecdotes told by Train in his Account of Man and quoted by Keightley in The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries, Bohn Library, London, 1850.

The poem ‘The Nimble Mower’ is translated from ‘Yn Folder Gastey’, a traditional song about Finoderee, or Fenodoree as he is sometimes known. The translation, by Walter Gill, is quoted from A Second Manx Scrapbook, Arrowsmith, London, 1932. This poem can be viewed on the Internet at http://www.dartthornton.com

The Burry Man: Inspired by an actual ceremony that takes place in South Queensferry, West Lothian in the United Kingdom, every year on the second Friday in August.

Beating the Bounds: Inspired by an ancient custom once an integral part of daily life in Britain, which still flourishes to this day at occasions such as the Sheriff’s Ride at Lichfield, Staffordshire, and at other places, including Berwick-upon-Tweed; Morpeth, Northumberland; Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, and Richmond, North Yorkshire.

The Pumpkin Scrambler: Also inspired by a colourful British custom that survives from olden times.

‘If Ye Call Me Imp or Elf …’: Adapted from Popular Rhymes of Scotland by Robert Chambers, W & R Chambers, Edinburgh, 1870.

The Shock: ‘… a thing with a donkey’s head and a smooth velvet hide …’

‘… seized lthe thing], it turned suddenly around, snapped at [his] hand and vanished.’

The quotes are from County Folk-Lore, Volume 1, Gloucestershire. E. S. Hartland (ed), 1892, Folklore Society County Publications. The episode of the Shock is inspired by this book.

Gentle Annie: Inspired by a description in A Dictionary of Fairies, Katharine Briggs. Penguin Books, 1976.

It: Inspired by Shetland Traditional Lore, Jessie Saxby, Norwood Editions, 1974.

Bawming the Thorn: No resemblance to the actual ritual as performed every year in the English village of Appleton Thorn is intended, other than the adorning of the tree.

Burning the Boatman: Inspired by ‘Burning Bartle’ (not intended to portray the custom as performed annually in West Witton, North Yorkshire, England). The chant, as given here, is derived from the ancient version, still sung during the performance of this living tradition:

‘At Penhill crags he tore his rags,

At Hunter’s Thorn he blew his horn,

At Capplebank Stee he had the misfortune to brak’ his knee,

At Grassgill Beck he brak’ his neck,

At Wadham’s End he couldn’t fend,

At Grassgill End we’ll make his end,

Shout, boys, shout!’

The Hooden Horse: Inspired by the many hobby horse ceremonies and customs still practised in the United Kingdom.

The Bullbeggar: Inspired by County Folk Lore, Vol VIII, collected and published by Ruth Tongue.

The place names in Chapter 3: Drawn from the English countryside; for example, ‘By Kingsdale Beck we go,’ said Arrowsmith, ‘and past Churnmilk Hole. By Frostrow and Shaking Moss, and Hollybush Spout.’

The Wood-Goblins: Inspired by Christina Rosetti’s magnificent poem ‘The Goblin Market’, 1862.

The Coillduine: Inspired by the imagery of early twentieth-century clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson, in Fairies at Work and Play, The Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill., USA.

The Siofran Feast: ‘The spy was intrigued at their unglamoured feast; the horns of butterflies, the pith of rushes, emits’ eggs and the beards of mice, bloated earwigs and red-capped worms, mandrakes’ ears and stewed thigh of newt, washed down with pearls of dew cupped in magenta flowers.’ This menu is partially drawn from the poem ‘Oberon’s Feast’, written by Robert Herrick (1591–1674), published in 1647.

The Ganconer/Love-Talker: A wonderful poem about this deadly supernatural seducer was written by the well-known Irish poet Ethna Carbery (1866–1902). It has been reprinted in The Four Winds of Eirinn, an anthology of her verse, and can also be viewed on Ms Dart-Thornton’s website, at http://www.dartthornton.com

Viviana’s song: ‘All around my hat I will wear the green willow …’ etc is a traditional English folk song.

The Two Kings: Inspired by the traditional Welsh fairy-story about Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, and his encounter with the faêrie king, Arawn.

Nuckelavee: Based on an article by Traill Dennison in the ‘Scottish Antiquary’, which was reproduced in Scottish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales, Sir George Douglas, Walter Scott, London, 1873. For the sake of accuracy, the anecdote herein is partially quoted from this source.

The Tale of Thomas Rhymer, Duke of Ercildoune: Adapted from the traditional ‘Ballad of True Thomas’ which tells the story of Thomas Rymour of Erceldoune. It can be found in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Child, F. J. (ed), Little, Brown; Shepard, Clark & Brown, Boston, 1857–8; definitive edition: 5 vols., The Folklore Press in association with the Pagent Book Co., New York, 1957. The ballad is based on a fourteenth-century romance which can be read in Fairy Tales, Legends and Romances Illustrating Shakespeare, by W. Carew Hazlitt, F & W Kerslake, London, 1875.

The Tale of Tamlain Conmor, Duke of Roxburgh: Adapted from another beautiful traditional ballad, ‘Young Tam Lin’, of which there are many versions. The fullest version is #39A in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Child, F. J. (ed), Little, Brown; Shepard, Clark & Brown, Boston, 1857–8.

Scottish Vernacular: Learned from Bawdy Verse and Folk Songs Written & Collected by Robert Burns, Macmillan, London, 1982.

Battle Scenes: Researched in The Wars of the Crusades 1096–1291, Terence Wise, Osprey Publishing P/L, 1978. Information was also gleaned from the World War I diaries of Squadron Leader W. Palstra.

The Coronation Feast: Inspired by menus from actual medieval feasts, recounted in The English Medieval Feast, W. E. Mead, 1931; and More Medieval Byways, L. F. Salzman, 1926.

The musicians in the pie: Adapted from a document by Olivier de la Marche, fourteenth-century chronicler.

The Battle of Evernight: Also draws inspiration from the great fairy love story of Ireland, ‘Midhir and Etain’, which has prompted many poets and dramatists to produce works based thereon.

SOME WORDS FROM THE ELDER TONGUE
briagha: beautiful
caileagh faoileag: sea-gull damsel
cirean mi coileach: literally, ‘cockscomb, my rooster’. It means ‘cocksure boy’.

cochal: the husk or appearance of food, after the toradh has been removed
eudail: darling (ferm.)

fallaise: a beautiful, falling torrent
ionmhuinn: beloved
nathrach deirge: literally, ‘dragon’s blood’, is a draught to warm and nourish the traveller
rade: a processional cavalcade of Faêran riders
sabhailte: safe
seirm ceangaif: bind-ring
siofra: (pl.) small, human-like wights. Although they can be mischievous, they are harmless and not overly cunning. One of their favourite activities is to mimic human behaviour.

toradh: the nutritional value of food
uhta: the hour before sunrise

‘Il Bacio’ (‘The Kiss’) by Francesco Hayez, 1859

Some Ertish Words and Phrases
alainn capall dubh: beautiful black horse

Amharcaim!: Look there!

chehrna: dear damsel
clahmor: terrible, tragic.

cova donni: blind shotman
daruhshie: self-destructive fool
doch: damned
hreorig: ruinous
inna shai tithen elion: we have lived the days
lorraly: in the natural order
manscatha: wicked ravager
mo: my
mo gaidair: my friend
mo reigh: my pretty
mor scathach: an unseelie rider that sticks to the shoulders of its prey, becoming as heavy as stone, and rides the life out of it
obban tesh: an expletive
oghi ban Callanan: Callanan’s eyes
pishogue: glamour; a spell of illusion
samrin: milksop

Sciobtha!: Hasten!

scothy: mad, crazy
sgorrama: stupid (noun or adjective)

shera sethge: poor, unfortunate
skeerda: bad/devious person

Ta ocras orm! Tu faighim moran bia!: I am hungry! I need a lot of food!

tambalai: beloved
tien eun: little one
uhta: the hour before sunrise
uraguhne: despicable scum

A Short Pronunciation Guide

Baobansith: baavan thee

Buggane: bug airn

Cuachag: cooachack

Each Uisge: ech-ooshkya

Fuath: foo-a

Gwragedd Annwn: gwrageth anoon

Glossary of Terms
andalum: a dull, blue metal which has the power to neutralise sildron’s repulsion of the ground
candlebutter: gold
culicidae: (plural) deadly, mosquito-like creatures—they are not eldritch
dominite: black stone, laced with points of talium trihexide—used for building, as it blocks out the effects of shang storms
eldritch: supernatural
eotaurs: winged, horned skyhorses bred for their ability to ‘ride sky’ when accoutred with sildron eringl: a red-leafed tree growing only in Avlantia
gilf: a person who deliberately goes bareheaded in a shang storm, or is forced to do so, in order to imprint an image
glissanding: gliding through forests in a sildron harness, using branches and/or ropes as a means of propulsion
gramarye: magic
hattocking: the process of an eotaur over uneven ground
onhebbing: raising and lowering anything sildron-borne by means of sliding andalum by varying degrees between the sildron and the ground
seelie: benevolent towards humankind
shang: a random wind of gramarye which leaves imprints of human passions
sildron: a lustrous, silver metal with the intrinsic property of repelling the ground at a constant distance. Also known as King’s Biscuit, Rusty Jack’s friend, sinker, cloudpaver, moonrafter, frostbite, The Gentry’s Farewell, Moonbeam etc.

taltry: a hood lined with talium metal mesh to protect the wearer from the influence of the shang
tilhal: an amulet which may protect against unseelie wights of the lower orders
unket: supernatural
unseelie: malevolent towards humankind
unstorm: a nickname for shang winds—also known as ‘uncombers’

Runes

A: atka, the thorn, the spindle, the arrowhead

B: brod, the loaf

C: ciedré, the moon

D: déanor, the bow

E: enen, the fork

F: faêrwyrd, the key

G: speal, the scythe or sickle

H: droichead, the bridge

I: idrel, the sword

J: crúca, the hook

K: kinoré, the dancer

L: clúid, the corner (the turning point)

M: margran, the mountain

N: nenté, the stitch

O: orinel, the ring

P: meirge, the flag, the pennant, banner

Q: sciath, the shield

R: sirrig, the sail

S: slégorn, the dragon

T: tiendir, the tree

U: uldris, the cup

V: vahlé, the valley or the furrow

W: wirroril, the wave or the water

X: glas, the crossroads or the lock

Y: draíochta, the dowsing rod

Z: geata, the gate

Wight Lore

The high-tide mark is the boundary between the territories of land wights and sea wights.

Although they can prevaricate and trick, wights cannot lie. By the same token, if you make a promise or give your word to a wight you are bound by gramarye to keep it.

Household wights, best exemplified by bruneys (brownies), do not necessarily react adversely to the touch of cold iron. All others do.

Trooping wights wear green coats and red caps, while Solitaries wear red coats.

To steal a swanmaiden, take her cloak of feathers so that she cannot fly. To abduct a mermaid or merrow, take her comb. To kidnap a silkie (selkie), take his or her seal-skin, without which these wights cannot travel underwater. Be aware, it is unkind to do any of these things!

Silkies will not harm you unless you harm them. If you do them a good turn they will return it to you.

Most unseelie and seelie land wights cannot cross running water, especially if it flows south.

An ‘awe band’ can be put on mortals to stop them telling what they have seen of wights.

Giving wights a gift or verbal thanks means ‘goodbye’ to them ie, they have been paid therefore their services are no longer required. Some wights take offence at being thanked in any form, and permanently withdraw their services out of sheer indignation. Therefore, thanking wights or the Faêran is taboo.

Warding off Unseelie Wights

Holding Fast, a Steady Look and Silence are three powerful charms against wights.

Conversely (and confusingly), acknowledging their presence by looking at them can be detrimental to them. (Perhaps this is only true outdoors, as The Steady Look has been recorded as being used indoors.)

Having The Last Word is effective in certain cases; also, Rhyme has power over wights.

Many wights are powerless after cock-crow.

To show fear is to give them power over you, to allow them to strike. The ringing of bells is anathema to them. Charms against unseelie wights include ash keys, ground-ivy (‘athair luss’) and daisies.

A Chant to Repel Wights

Hypericum, salt and bread,

Iron cold and berries red,

Self-bored stone and daisy bright,

Save me from unseelie wight.

Red verbena, amber, bell,

Turned-out raiment, ash as well,

Whistle-tunes and rowan-tree,

Running water, succour me.

Rooster with your cock-a-doo,

Banish wights and darkness too.

Shapeshifting

Even shapeshifters must abide by the laws of their own nature. Not all wights are shapeshifters. For example, urisks are not. Spriggans can alter their size but not their shape. Some wights command two forms. Swan-maidens may become damsels or swans. The Each Uisge and all other waterhorses can take the shape of a man or a horse.

Other wights have the power to metamorphose into three different guises. Two of the waterhorse types, brags and phoukas, have a third native shape; brags, that of a calf with a white handkerchief tied around its neck and phoukas, a bat.

Bogey-beasts and their ilk are true shapeshifters; their possible forms are countless. Some examples include the wight which changes into a bundle of sticks, the Trathley Kow (based on the ‘Hedley Kow’) which can imitate the form of a man’s sweetheart, or any other form it chooses, purely for the purpose of mischief-making and a thing called ‘It’, which can turn itself into a variety of strange objects.

Note: shapeshifting should not be confused with glamour. Glamour is an illusion, a spell cast over the senses of mortals so that they see what is not there. True shapeshifting is more powerful.

Books by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY

BOOK 1: The Ill-Made Mute

BOOK 2: The Lady of the Sorrows

BOOK 3: The Battle of Evernight

THE CROWTHISTLE CHRONICLES

BOOK 1: The Iron Tree

BOOK 2: The Well of Tears

BOOK 3: Weatherwitch

BOOK 4: Fallowblade

About the Author

Cecilia Dart-Thornton is the author of numerous bestselling fantasy novels, notably the Bitterbynde Trilogy, which includes The Ill-Made Mute, The Lady of the Sorrows, and The Battle of Evernight. The daughter of an architect and an academic, Dart-Thornton holds a bachelor of arts degree and a post-graduate diploma of education from Monash University. Having started out as a schoolteacher, she became a full-time writer in 2000, after her work was “discovered” on the Internet and brought to print by a New York publishing house. She is a strong supporter of animal rights and her interests include music, the fine arts—particularly Pre-Raphaelite paintings—and edible gardening. Visit her website at www.dartthornton.com.

Author photo © Vika Czwetisza

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Ill-Made Mute copyright © 2013 by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

The Lady of the Sorrows copyright © 2013 by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

The Battle of Evernight copyright © 2013 by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Cover designs by Connie Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1906-4

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

- Cover Page
- Praise for the Bitterbynde Trilogy
- Title Page

- The Ill-Made Mute

- Title Page
- Introduction
- 1 Founding
- 2 The House of the Stormriders
- 3 The Windships
- 4 The Forest
- 5 Waterstair
- 6 Gilvaris Tarv
- 7 The Road
- 8 Mirrinor
- 9 Doundelding
- 10 Rosedale
- Acknowledgments

- The Lady of the Sorrows

- Title Page
- Introduction
- The Story So Far
- 1 White Down Rory
- 2 Caermelor, Part I
- 3 Caermelor, Part II
- 4 The Tower
- 5 Caermelor Part III
- 6 The Island
- 7 The Cauldron
- 8 Avlantia
- 9 The Langothe
- 10 Downfall
- Acknowledgments

- The Battle of Evernight

- Title Page
- The Story So Far
- 1 Khazathdaur
- 2 Ishkiliath
- 3 Lallillir
- 4 Cinnarine
- 5 Firzenholt and Beyond
- 6 Tapthartharath
- 7 Darke
- 8 Annath Gothallamor
- 9 Annath Gothallamor
- 10 The Battle of Evernight
- 11 The Bitterbynde
- 12 The Bitterbynde
- Epilogue
- Author’s Note
- Chapter 13 Introduction
- 13 The Wedding
- Acknowledgments
- Some Words from the Elder Tongue

- Some Ertish Words and Phrases
- Glossary of Terms
- Runes
- Wight Lore
- Books by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
- About the Author
- Copyright Page