The Last Light of the Sun

Her heart was pounding now. “You are … unjust, my lord.” Repeating herself.

“Unjust? You tested that power every time you entered a room.”

“How do you know any such thing?” How did he know?

“Will you deny it?”

She was grieving, her heart twisting, because of who it was, saying these words to her. But she was also Brynn’s daughter, and Enid’s, and not raised to yield, or to cry.

“And you?” she asked, lifting her head. Her bandage chafed. “You, my lord? Never tested yourself? Never went on … cattle raids, son of Owyn? Into Arberth, perhaps? Never had someone hurt, or die, when you did that? You and your brother?”

She saw him check, breathing hard. She was aware that he was, amazingly, near to striking her. How had the world come to this? The cousin stepped forward, as if to stop him.

“It is wrong!” was all Alun could manage to say, fighting for self-control.

“No more than the things a boy does, becoming a man. I cannot steal cattle or swing a sword, ab Owyn!”

“Then go east to Sarantium!” he rasped, his voice altered. “If you want to deal in power like that. Learn … learn how to poison like their empresses, you’ll kill so many more men.”

She felt the colour leave her face. The others in the room had stopped moving, were looking at them. “Do you … hate me so much, my lord?”

He didn’t reply. She had thought, truly, he would say yes, had no idea what she’d have done if he did so. She swallowed hard. Needed her mother, suddenly. Enid was with the living, in the other room.

She said, “Would you wish the Erling hadn’t thrown his hammer to save my life?” Her voice was level, hands steady at her sides. Small blessings, he wouldn’t know how much this cost her. “Others died here, my lord prince. Nine of us now. Likely more, before sunrise. Men we knew and loved. Are you thinking only of your brother tonight? Like the Erling my father killed, who demanded one horse when he had men taken with him?”

His head snapped back, as from a blow. He opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. Their eyes locked. Then turning, blundering past the cleric and his cousin, he rushed from the room. Ceinion called his name. Alun never broke stride.

Rhiannon put a hand to her mouth. There was a need to weep, and a greater need not to do so. She saw the cousin, Gryffeth, take two steps towards the door, then stop and turn back. After a moment, he went and knelt beside the dead man. She saw him extend a hand and touch the place where the blade had gone in.

“Child,” whispered the high cleric, her father’s friend, her mother’s.

She didn’t look at him. She was staring, instead, at the open doorway. The emptiness of it, where someone had gone out. Had walked into the night, hating her—the way he’d said his brother had left him. A pattern? Set and sealed with iron and blood?

You can’t have what you want, Helda had said, even before everything else.

“How did this happen?” she asked, of the cleric, of the world.

Holy men usually spoke of the mysterious ways of the god.

“I do not know,” Ceinion of Llywerth murmured, instead.

“You’re supposed to know,” she said, turning to look at him. Heard her voice break. Hated that. He stepped forward, drew her into his arms. She let him, lowered her head. Didn’t weep, at first, and then she did. Heard the cousin praying over the body on the floor beside them.

Three things not well or wisely done, the triad went. Approaching a forest pool by night. Making wrathful a woman of spirit. Drinking unwatered wine alone.

They did things by threes in this land, Alun thought savagely. Obviously it was time for him to claim one of the wine jars and carry it off, drain it by himself until oblivion came down.

He wished in that moment, striding through the empty farmyard without the least idea where he meant to go, that the Erling arrow had killed him in the wood. The world was unassuageably awry. His heart had a hollow inside it where Dai had been. It was not going to fill; there was nothing to fill it with.

He saw a glimmering of light on the treed slope beyond the yard.

Not a torch. It was pale, motionless, no flickering.

He found himself breathing shallowly, as if he were hiding from searchers. He squeezed shut his eyes. The glow was still there when he opened them. There was no one else in the farmyard now. A spring night, the breeze mild, dawn a long way off still. The stars brilliant overhead, in patterns that told their stories of ancient glory and pain, figures from before the faith of Jad came north. Mortals and animals, gods and demigods. The night seemed heavy and endless, like something into which one fell.

A shining on the slope. Alun undid his belt, let fall his sword, walked through the gate of the yard and up the hill.

SHE SEES HIM drop the iron. Knows what that means. He can see her now. He has been in the pool with them. For some of them, after that, the faeries can be seen. Her impulse, very strong, is to flee. It is one thing to hover near, to watch them, unseen. This is something else.

She makes herself stay where she is, waiting. Has a sudden, fearful thought, scans with her mind’s eye: the spruaugh, who might tell of this, is curled asleep in the hollow of a tree.

The man comes through the gate, closes it behind him, begins to climb the slope. He can see her. She almost does fly away then, though they can’t really fly, not any more. She is trembling. Her hair shivers through its colours, again and again.

SHE WAS SMALLER than the queen, half a head smaller than he was. Alun stopped, just below where she stood. They were beside the thicket, on the mostly open slope. She’d been half hidden behind a sapling, came out when he stopped, but touching it. Utterly still, poised for flight. A faerie, standing before him in the world he’d thought he’d known.

She was slender, very long fingers, pale skin, wide-set eyes, a small face, though not a child’s. She was clad in something green that left her arms free and showed her legs to the knee. A belt made of flowers, he saw. Flowers in her hair—which kept changing colour as he looked, dizzyingly. The wonder of that, even under stars. He could only see clearly by the light she cast. That, as much as anything, telling him how far he’d come, walking up from the farmyard. The half-world, they named it in the tales. Where he was now. Men were lost here, in the stories. Never came back, or returned a hundred years after they’d walked or ridden away, everyone they knew long dead. He could see her small breasts through the thinness of what she wore. Did they feel the cold, faeries?

There was an ache in his throat.

“How … how am I seeing you?” He had no idea if she could even speak, use words. His words.

Her hair went pale, nearly white, came back towards gold but not all the way. She said, “You were in the pool. I … saved you there.” Her voice, simply speaking words, made him realize he had never, really, made music with his harp, or sung a song the way it should be sung. He felt that he would weep if he were not careful.

“How? Why?” He sounded harsh to his own ears, after her. A bruising of the starlit air.

“I stopped your horse, in the shallows. They would have killed you, had you come nearer the queen.”

She’d answered one question, not the other. “My brother was there.” It was difficult to speak.

“Your brother is dead. His soul is with the Ride.”

“Why?”

Reddened hair now, crimson in summer dark. Her shining let him see. “I took it for the queen. First dead of the battle tonight.”

Dai. No weapon, when he had gone out. First dead. Whatever that meant. But she was telling him. Alun knelt on the damp, cool grass. His legs were weak. “I should hate you,” he whispered.

“I do not know what that means,” she said. Music.

He thought about that, and then of the girl, Brynn’s daughter, in that room by the chapel, where his brother’s body lay. He wondered if he would ever play the harp again.

“What … why does the queen …?”

Saw her smile, first time, a flashing of small, white teeth. “She loves them. They excite her. Those who have been mortals. From your world.”

“Forever?”

The hair to violet. The slim, small body so white beneath the pale green garment. “What could be forever?”