The Summer Tree Page 16

Without speaking, Kevin picked his way forward over the bodies on the floor. He took the guitar from Diarmuid, who slipped down from the window seat, leaving it for him. The window had been thrown open; he felt a light breeze stir the hairs at the back of his neck, as he tuned the guitar.

  It was late, and dark, and quiet. He was a long way from home, and tired, and hurting in a difficult way. Paul had gone; even tonight, he had taken no joy, had turned from tears again. Even tonight, even here. So many reasons he could give. And so:

  “This is called ‘Rachel’s Song,’” he said, fighting a thickness in his throat, and began to play. It was a music no one there could know, but the pull of grief was immediate. Then after a long time he lifted his voice, deep when he sang, in words he’d decided long ago should never be sung:

  Love, do you remember

  My name? I was lost

  In summer turned winter

  Made bitter by frost.

  And when June comes December

  The heart pays the cost.

  The breaking of waves on a long shore,

  In the grey morning the slow fall of rain,

  And stone lies over.

  You’ll bury your sorrow

  Deep in the sea,

  But sea tides aren’t tamed

  That easily—

  There will come a tomorrow

  When you weep for me.

  The breaking of waves on a long shore,

  In the grey morning the slow fall of rain,

  Oh love remember, remember me.

  Then the music came alone again, transposed, worked on harder than anything he’d written in his life, especially what was coming now, with his own stupid tears. The part where the melody hurt, it was so beautiful, so laden with memory: the adapted second movement of the Brahms F Major Cello Sonata.

  The notes were clean, unblurred, though the candles were blurred in his sight, as Kevin played Rachel Kincaid’s graduation piece and gave sound to the sorrow that was his and not his.

  Into the shadowed room it went, Rachel’s song; over the sleeping bodies that stirred as sadness touched their dreams; among the ones who did not sleep and who felt the pull as they listened, remembering losses of their own; up the stairway it went to where two women stood at the railing, both crying now; faintly it reached the bedrooms, where bodies lay tangled in the shapes of love; and out the open window it went as well, into the late night street and the wide dark between the stars.

  And on the unlit cobblestones a figure paused by the doorway of the tavern and did not enter. The street was empty, the night was dark, there was no one to see. Very silently he listened, and when the song came to an end, very silently he left, having heard the music before.

  So Paul Schafer, who had fled from a woman’s tears, and had cursed himself for a fool and turned back, now made his final turning, and did not turn again.

  There was darkness for a time, a twisting web of streets, a gate where he was recognized by torchlight, and then darkness again in corridors silent save for the footfalls that he made. And through it he carried that music, or the music carried him, or the memory of music. It hardly mattered which.

  He walked a matrix of crossing hallways he had walked before, and some were lit and others dark, and in some rooms he passed there were sounds again, but no one else walked in Paras Derval that night.

  And in time he came, carrying music, carrying loss, carried by both of them, and stood for a second time before a door beyond which a slant of light yet showed.

  It was the brown-bearded one called Gorlaes who opened to his summons, and for a moment he remembered that he did not trust this man, but it seemed a concern infinitely removed from where he was, and one that didn’t matter now, not anymore.

  Then his eyes found those of the King, and he saw that Ailell knew, somehow knew, and was not strong enough to refuse what he would ask, and so he asked.

  “I will go to the Summer Tree for you tonight. Will you grant me leave and do what must be done?” It seemed to have been written a very long time ago. There was music.

  Ailell was weeping as he spoke, but he said what was needful to be said. Because it was one thing to die, and another to die uselessly, he listened to the words and let them join the music in carrying him with Gorlaes and two other men out of the palace by a hidden gate.

  There were stars above them and a forest far away. There was music in his head that was not going to end, it seemed. And it seemed he wasn’t saying goodbye to Kevin after all, which was a grief, but it was a lost, small, twisting thing in the place where he had come.

  Then the forest was no longer far away, and at some point the waning moon had risen as he walked, for it brushed the nearest trees with silver. The music still was with him, and the last words of Ailell: Now I give you to Mörnir. For three nights and forever, the King had said. And cried.

  And now with the words and the music in his head, there had come again, as he had known it would, the face for which he could not cry. Dark eyes. Like no one else. In this world.

  And he went into the Godwood, and it was dark. And all the trees were sighing in the wind of the wood, the breath of the God. There was fear on the faces of the other three men as the sound rose and fell about them like the sea.

  He walked with them amid the surging and the swaying of the trees, and in time he saw that the path they were following had ceased to wander. The trees on either side now formed a double row leading him on, and so he stepped past Gorlaes, music carrying him, and he came into the place wherein stood the Summer Tree.

  Very great it was, dark almost to black, its trunk knotted and gnarled, wide as a house. It stood alone in the clearing, in the place of sacrifice, and clutched the earth with roots old as the world, a challenge to the stars that shone down, and there was power in that place beyond the telling. Standing there, he felt it calling for his blood, for his life, and knowing he could not live three nights on that tree, he stepped forward, so as not to turn again, and the music stopped.

  They stripped him of his garments then and bound him naked to the Summer Tree at the waning of the moon. When they had gone, it was silent in the glade save for the ceaseless sighing of the leaves. Alone upon the Tree, he felt within his flesh the incalculable vastness of its power, and had there been anything left to fear, he would have been afraid.

  And this was the first night of Pwyll the Stranger on the Summer Tree.

  Chapter 8

  In another wood east of Paras Derval, the lios alfar were still singing as Jennifer drifted towards sleep. Under the stars and the crescent of the risen moon, their voices wove about her a melody of sorrow so old and deep it was almost a luxury.

  She roused herself and turned on the pallet they had made for her.

  “Brendel?”

  He came over to her and knelt. His eyes were blue now. They had been green like her own the last time she looked, and gold on the hillside that afternoon.

  “Are you immortal?” she asked, sleepily.

  He smiled. “No, Lady. Only the gods are so, and there are those who say that even they will die at the end. We live very long, and age will not kill us, but we do die, Lady, by sword or fire, or grief of heart. And weariness will lead us to sail to our song, though that is a different thing.”

  “Sail?”

  “Westward lies a place not found on any map. A world shaped by the Weaver for the lios alfar alone, and there we go when we leave Fionavar, unless Fionavar has killed us first.”

  “How old are you, Brendel?”

  “I was born four hundred years after the Bael Rangat. A little more than six hundred years ago.”

  She absorbed it in silence. There was nothing, really, to say. On the other side Laesha and Drance were asleep. The singing was very beautiful. She let it carry her into simplicity, and then sleep.

  He watched her a long time, the eyes still blue, calm, and deeply appreciative of beauty in all its incarnations. And in this one there was something more. She looked like someone. He
knew this or he sensed it to be so, but although he was quite right, he had absolutely no way of knowing whom, and so could not warn anyone.

  At length he rose and rejoined the others for the last song, which was, as it always was, Ra-Termaine’s lament for the lost. They sang for those who had just died by Pendaran, and for all the others long ago, who would never now hear this song or their own. As the lios sang, the stars seemed to grow brighter above the trees, but that may have been just the deepening of night. When the song ended, the fire was banked and they slept.

  They were ancient and wise and beautiful, their spirit in their eyes as a many-coloured flame, their art a homage to the Weaver whose most shining children they were. A celebration of life was woven into their very essence, and they were named in the oldest tongue after the Light that stands against the Dark.

  But they were not immortal.

  The two guards died of poison arrows, and four others had their throats ripped apart by the black onrush of the wolves before they were fully awake. One cried out and killed his wolf with a dagger as he died.

  They fought bravely then, even brilliantly, with bright swords and arrows, for their grace could be most deadly when they had need.

  Brendel and Drance with two others formed a wall about the two women, and against the charge of the giant wolves they held firm once, and again, and yet again, their swords rising and falling in desperate silence. It was dark, though, and the wolves were black, and the svarts moved like twisted wraiths about the glade.

  Even so, the shining courage of the lios alfar, with Drance of Brennin fighting in their midst as a man possessed, might have prevailed, had it not been for the one thing more: the cold, controlling will that guided the assault. There was a power in the glade that night that no one could have foretold, and doom was written on the wind that rose before the dawn.

  For Jennifer it was a hallucination of terror in the dark. She heard snarls and cries, saw things in blurred, distorted flashes—blood-dark swords, the shadow of a wolf, an arrow flying past. Violence exploding all around her, she who had spent her days avoiding such a thing.

  But this was night. Too terrified to even scream, Jennifer saw Drance fall at last, a wolf dying beneath him, another rising wet-mouthed from his corpse to leap past her to where Laesha stood. Then before she could react, even as she heard Laesha cry out, she felt herself seized brutally as the hideous svarts surged forward into the gap and she was dragged away by them over the body of Diarmuid’s man.

  Looking desperately back, she saw Brendel grappling with three foes at once, blood dark on his face in the thin moonlight, then she was among the trees, surrounded by wolves and svart alfar, and there was no light to see by or to hope for anywhere.

  They moved through the forest for what seemed an endless time, travelling north and east, away from Paras Derval and everyone she knew in this world. Twice she stumbled and fell in the dark, and each time she was dragged, sobbing, to her feet and the terrible progress continued.

  They were still in the woods when the sky began to shade towards grey, and in the growing light she gradually became aware that amid the shifting movements of her captors, one figure never left her side: and among the horrors of that headlong night, this was the worst.

  Coal-black, with a splash of silver-grey on his brow, he was the largest wolf by far. It wasn’t the size, though, or the wet blood on his dark mouth; it was the malevolence of the power that hovered about the wolf like an aura. His eyes were on her face, and they were red; in them, for the moment she could sustain the glance, she saw a degree of intelligence that should not have been there, and was more alien than anything else she had come upon in Fionavar. There was no hatred in the look, only a cold, merciless will. Hate, she could have understood; what she saw was worse.

  It was morning when they reached their destination. Jennifer saw a small woodcutter’s cabin set in a cleared-out space by the forest’s edge. A moment later she saw what was left of the woodcutter as well.

  They threw her inside. She fell, from the force of it, and then crawled on her knees to a corner where she was violently, rackingly sick. Afterwards, shivering uncontrollably, she made her way to the cot at the back of the room and lay down.

  We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair. And so Jennifer Lowell, whose father had taught her, even as a child, to confront the world with pride, eventually rose up, cleaned herself as best she could, and began to wait in the brightening cottage. Daylight was coming outside, but it was not only that: courage casts its own light.

  The sun was high in a blank sky when she heard the voices. One was low, with a note of amusement she could discern even through the door. Then the other man spoke, and Jennifer froze in disbelief, for this voice she had heard before.

  “Not hard,” the first man said, and laughed. “Against the lios it is easy to keep them to it.”

  “I hope you were not followed. I absolutely must not be seen, Galadan.”

  “You won’t be. Almost all of them were dead, and I left behind ten wolves against the stragglers. They won’t follow in any case. Enough of them have died; they wouldn’t risk more for a human. She is ours, more easily than we might have hoped. It is rare indeed that we receive aid from Daniloth.” And he laughed again, maliciously amused.

  “Where is she?”

  “Inside.”

  The door was flung open, letting in a dazzling shaft of sunlight. Momentarily blinded, Jennifer was dragged into the clearing.

  “A prize, wouldn’t you say?” Galadan murmured.

  “Perhaps,” the other one said. “Depending on what she tells us about why they are here.”

  Jennifer turned towards the voice, her eyes adjusting, and as they did, she found herself face to face with Metran, First Mage to the High King of Brennin.

  No longer was he the shuffling old man she’d seen that first night or watched as he cowered from Jaelle in the Great Hall. Metran stood straight and tall, his eyes bright with malice.

  “You traitor!” Jennifer burst out.

  He gestured, and she screamed as her nipples were squeezed viciously. No one had touched her; he had done it himself without moving.

  “Carefully, my dear lady,” Metran said, all solicitude, as she writhed in pain. “You must be careful of what you say to me. I have the power to do whatever I want with you.” He nodded towards his source, Denbarra, who stood close by.

  “Not quite,” the other voice demurred. “Let her go.” The tone was very quiet, but the pain stopped instantly. Jennifer turned, wiping tears from her face.

  Galadan was not tall, but there was a sinuous strength to him, a sheathed intimation of very great power. Cold eyes fixed her from a scarred, aristocratic face under the thatch of silver hair—like Brendel’s, she thought, with another sort of pain.

  He bowed to her, courtly and graceful, and with a veiled amusement. Then that was gone as he turned to Metran.

  “She goes north for questioning,” he said. “Unharmed.”

  “Are you telling me what to do?” Metran said on a rising note, and Jennifer saw Denbarra stiffen.

  “Actually, yes, if you put it that way.” There was mockery in his voice. “Are you going to fight me over it, mageling?”

  “I could kill you, Galadan,” Metran hissed.

  The one named Galadan smiled again, but not with his eyes. “Then try. But I tell you now, you will fail. I am outside your taught magic, mageling. You have some power, I know, and have been given more, and may indeed have greater yet to come, but I will still be outside you, Metran. I always will be. And if you test it, I shall have your heart out for my friends.”

  In the silence that followed this, Jennifer became conscious of the ring of wolves surrounding them. There were svart alfar as well, but the giant red-eyed wolf was gone.

  Metran was breathing hard. “You are not above me, Galadan. I was promised this.”

  At that, Galadan threw back his fierce, scarred head, and a burst
of genuine laughter rang through the clearing.

  “Promised, were you? Ah well, then, I must apologize!” His laughter stopped. “She is still to go north. If it were not so, I might take her for myself. But look!”

  Jennifer, turning skyward to where Galadan was pointing, saw a creature so beautiful it lifted her heart in reflexive hope.

  A black swan came swooping down from the high reaches of the sky, glorious against the sun, the great wings widespread, feathered with jet plumage, the long neck gracefully extended.

  Then it landed, and Jennifer realized that the true horror had only begun, for the swan had unnatural razored teeth, and claws, and about it, for all the stunning beauty, there clung an odour of putrescent corruption.

  Then the swan spoke, in a voice like slithering darkness in a pit. “I have come,” she said. “Give her to me.”

  Far away yet, terribly far away, Loren Silvercloak was driving his horse back south, cursing his own folly in all the tongues he knew.

  “She is yours, Avaia,” said Galadan, unsmiling. “Is she not, Metran?”

  “Of course,” said the mage. He had moved upwind of the swan. “I will naturally be anxious to know what she has to say. It is vital for me in my place of watch.”

  “No longer,” the black swan said, ruffling her feathers. “I have tidings for you. The Cauldron is ours, I am to say. You go now to the place of spiralling, for the time is upon us.”

  Across the face of Metran there spread then a smile of such cruel triumph that Jennifer turned away from it. “It has come then,” the mage exulted. “The day of my revenge. Oh, Garmisch, my dead King, I shall break the usurper into pieces on his throne, and make drinking cups of the bones of the House of Ailell!”

  The swan showed her unnatural teeth. “I will take pleasure in the sight,” she hissed.

  “No doubt,” said Galadan wryly. “Is there word for me?”

  “North,” the swan replied. “You are asked to go north with your friends. Make haste. There is little time.”