The Last Light of the Sun Read online

  Tonight the world had altered, very greatly, because there was also the other thing, which ought to have been pushed away or buried deep or lost in all the bloodshed, but wasn’t. Alun ab Owyn had ridden an Erling horse out of the yard, pursuing the archer who’d shot at her father. He hadn’t yet come back.

  Brynn ordered a pit to be dug in the morning, beyond the cattle pen, and the bodies of the slain raiders shovelled in. Their own dead—nine so far, including Dai ab Owyn—had been taken into the room attached to the chapel, to be cleansed and clothed, laid out for the rituals of burial. Woman’s work after battle, when it could be done. Rhiannon had never performed these rites before. They had never been attacked at home before. Not in her lifetime. They didn’t live near the sea.

  They tended the wounded in the banquet hall, the dead in the room by the chapel, lights burning through Brynnfell. Her mother stopped by her once, long enough to look at her neck and then lay a salve—briskly, expressionlessly—and wrap the two wounds with a linen cloth.

  “You won’t die,” she said, and moved on.

  Rhiannon knew that. She would never now be sung for a pure white, swan-like neck, either. No matter. No matter at all. She carried on, following her mother. Enid knew what to do here, as in so many things.

  Rhiannon helped, as best she could. Bathing and wrapping wounds, speaking comfort and praise, fetching ale with the servant girls for the thirsty. One man died on a table in their hall, as they watched. A sword had taken off most of one leg, at the thigh, they couldn’t stop the bleeding. His name was Bregon. He’d liked fishing, teasing the girls, had freckles on his nose and cheeks in summer. Rhiannon found herself weeping, which she didn’t want but couldn’t seem to do much about. Not very long ago, when tonight had begun, there had been a feast, and music. If Jad had shaped the world differently, time could run backwards and make it so the Erlings had never come. She kept moving a hand, touching the cloth around her neck. She wanted to stop doing that, too, but couldn’t.

  Four men carried Bregon ap Moran from the hall on a table board, out the doors and across the yard to the room by the chapel where the dead men were. She looked at Helda and they followed. He used to make jokes about her hair, Rhiannon remembered, called her Crow when she was younger. Brynn’s men had not been shy with his children, though that had changed when she came into womanhood, as did much else.

  She would lay him out for burial—with Helda’s help, for she didn’t know what to do. There were half a dozen women in the room, working among the dead by lantern light. The cleric, Cefan, was kneeling with a sun disk between his hands, unsteadily intoning the ritual words of the Night Passage. He was young, visibly shaken. How could he not be, Rhiannon thought.

  They set Bregon’s board down on the floor. The tables were covered with other bodies already. There was water, and linen clothing. They had to wash the dead first, everywhere, comb out their hair and beards, clean their fingernails, that they might go to Jad fit to enter his halls if the god, in mercy, allowed. She knew every man lying here.

  Helda began removing Bregon’s tunic. It was stiff with blood. Rhiannon went to get a knife to help her cutit away, but then she saw that there was no one by Dai ab Owyn, and she went and stood over the Cadyri prince where he lay.

  Time didn’t run backwards in the world they had. Rhiannon looked down at him, and she knew it would be a lie to pretend she hadn’t seen him staring at her when she’d walked into the hall, and another lie to say it was the first time something of that sort had happened. And a third one (a failing of the Cyngael, threes all the time?) to deny that she’d enjoyed having that effect on men. The passage from girl to woman being negotiated in pleasure, an awareness of growing power.

  No pleasure now, no power that meant anything at all. She knelt beside him on the stone floor and reached out and brushed his brown hair back. A handsome, clever man. Needful as night’s end, he had said. No ending to night now, unless the god allowed it for his soul. She looked at the wound in him, the dark blood clotted there. It occurred to her that it was proper that Brynn’s daughter be the one to attend to a prince of Cadyr, their guest. Cefan, not far away, was still chanting, his eyes closed, his voice wavering away from him like the smoke from the candles, rising up. The women whispered or were silent, moving back and forth, doing their tasks. Rhiannon swallowed hard, and began to undress the dead man.

  “What are you doing?”

  She’d thought, actually, that she would know if he came into a room; that already she would know when that happened. She turned and looked up.

  “My lord prince,” she said. Rose and stood before him. Saw the cousin, Gryffeth, and the high priest behind, his face grave, uneasy.

  “What are you doing?” Alun ab Owyn repeated. His expression was rigid, walled off.

  “I am … attending to his body, my lord. For … laying out?” She heard herself stammering. She never did that.

  “Not you,” he said flatly. “Someone else.”

  She swallowed. Had never lacked courage, even as a child. “Why so?” she said.

  “You dare ask?” Behind, Ceinion made a small sound and a gesture, then stood still.

  “I must ask,” Rhiannon said. “I know of nothing I might ever have done to Owyn’s house to cause this to be said. I grieve for our people, and for your sorrow.”

  He stared at her. It was difficult, in this light, to see his eyes, but she had seen them in the hall, before.

  “Do you?” he said finally, blunt as a hammer. She couldn’t stop thinking of hammers. “Do you even begin to grieve? My brother went outside alone and unarmed because of you. He died hating me because of you. I will live with that the rest of my days. Do you realize this? At all?”

  There was something hot, like a fever, coming off him now. She said, desperately, “I believe I understand what you are saying. It is unjust. I didn’t make him feel—”

  “A lie! You wanted to make every man love you, to play at it. A game.”

  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, a
s 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?”

  That hollow, in his heart. “But after? What happens … to him?”

  Grave as a cleric, as a wise child, as something so much older than he was. “They go from the Ride when she tires of them.”

  “Go where?”

  So sweet a music in this voice. “I am not wise. I do not know. I have never asked.”

  “He’ll be a ghost,” Alun said then, with certainty, on his knees under stars. “A spirit, wandering alone, a soul lost.”

  “I do not know. Would not your sun god take him?”

  He placed his hands on the night grass beside him. The coolness, the needed ordinariness of it. Jad was beneath the world now, they were taught; doing battle with demons for his children’s sake. He echoed her, without her music. “I do not know. Tonight, I don’t know anything. Why did you … save me in the pool?” The question she hadn’t answered.

  She moved her hands apart, a rippling, like water. “Why should you die?”

  “But I am going to die.”

  “Would you rush to the dark?” she asked.

  He said nothing. After a moment, she took a step nearer to him. He remained motionless, kneeling, saw her hand reach out. He closed his eyes just before she touched his face. He felt, almost overwhelmingly, the presence of desire. A need: to be taken from himself, from the world. To never come back? She had the scent of flowers all about her, in the night.

  Eyes still closed, Alun said, “They tell us … they tell us there will be Light.”

  “Then there will be, for your brother,” she said. “If that is so.”

  Her fingers moved, touched his hair. He could feel them trembling, and understood, only then, that she was as afraid, and as aroused as he was. Worlds that moved beside each other, never touched.r />
  Almost never. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak again he felt a shockingly swift movement, an absence. Never said what he would have said, never knew what he would have said. He looked up quickly. She was already ten paces away. In no time at all. Standing against a sapling again, half turned, to fly farther. Her hair was dark, raven black.

  He looked back over his shoulder. Someone was coming up the slope. He didn’t feel surprise at all. It was as if the capacity to feel that had been drained from him, like blood.

  He was still very young that night, Alun ab Owyn. The thought that actually came to him as he recognized who was climbing—and was gazing past him at the faerie—was that nothing would ever surprise him again.

  Brynn ap Hywll crested the ridge and crouched, grunting with the effort, beside Alun on the grass. The big man plucked some blades of grass, keeping silent, looking at the shimmering figure by the tree not far away.

  “How do you see her?” Alun asked, softly.

  Brynn rubbed the grass between his huge palms. “I was in that pool, most of a lifetime ago, lad. A night when a girl refused me and I went walking my sorrow into the wood. Did an unwise thing. Girls can make you do that, actually.”

  “How did you know I … ?”

  “One of the men Siawn sent to report. Said you killed two Erlings, and were mazed in the pond till Ceinion took you out.”

  “Does he … did Siawn … ?”

  “No. My man just told me that much. Didn’t understand any of it.”

  “But you did?”

  “I did.”

  “You’ve … seen them all these years?”

  “I’ve been able to. Hasn’t happened often. They avoid us. This one … is different, is often here. I think it’s the same one. I see her up here sometimes, when we’re at Brynnfell.”

  “Never came up?”

  Brynn looked over at him for the first time. “Afraid to,” he said, simply.

  “I don’t think she’ll hurt us.”

  The faerie was silent, still by the slender tree, still poised between lingering and flight, listening to them.