The Last Light of the Sun Read online

  “I’m used to it?” Kendra said mildly.

  Gareth snorted. Unwisely. Tried, urgently, to turn it into a cough. Judit took a step towards both of them.

  “I’m a … deep sleeper?” Kendra amended hastily. “And perhaps your courage is such that what seemed a piercing scream to you was really only—”

  “I tore my throat raw,” her sister said flatly. “It was the middle of the Jad-cursed night. I was exhausted. I lay down upon a cold, hard, muddy skull in my bed. I believe,” she added, “the teeth bit me.”

  Hearing that last, ruminative observation, Hakon suddenly found himself in extreme difficulty. He looked over at Gareth and took comfort in what he saw: the thrashing desperation of the younger prince’s suppressed hilarity. Gareth was weeping with the effort of trying not to howl. Hakon found that he was no longer able to stay upright. He sank to his knees. His shoulders were shaking. He felt his nose beginning to run. Whimpering sounds came from his mouth.

  “Oh, my, look at those two,” said Kendra in a pitying voice. “All right, this is what we will do. Judit, put down the sword.” She was displaying, Hakon thought, what was, under the circumstances, an otherworldy composure. “Athelbert, stay exactly where you are. Close your eyes, hands at your sides. That was a craven, despicable, unworthy, extremely amusing thing to do and you must pay a price or Judit will make life intolerable for all of us and I don’t feel like suffering for you. Judit, go and hit him as hard as you can, but not with the sword.”

  “You are judge here, little sister?” Judit said icily.

  “Someone has to be. Gareth and Hakon are peeing in their hose,” Kendra said. “Father would be displeased if you killed his heir and you’d probably regret it afterwards. A little.”

  Hakon wiped at his nose. These things did not happen back home. Gareth was flat on his back, making strangled noises. “Teeth!” Hakon thought he heard him moan.

  Judit looked at him, then at Kendra, and finally over at Athelbert. After a long moment, she nodded her head, once.

  “Do it, fool,” Kendra said promptly to her older brother.

  Athelbert swallowed again. “She needs to drop the sword first,” he said, cautiously. He still looked ready to flee.

  “She will. Judit?”

  Judit dropped the sword. There remained an entirely forbidding bleakness to her narrowed gaze. She pushed windblown hair back from her face. Her tunic was green, belted with leather above the riding trousers she liked to wear. She looked, Hakon thought suddenly, like Nikar the Huntress, swordbride of Thünir, whom, of course, his family no longer worshipped at all, having come from bloody sacrifices to the … less violent faith of Jad.

  Athelbert took a breath, managed an almost indifferent shrug. He closed his eyes and spread his legs, braced to absorb a blow. Gareth managed to lever himself into a sitting position to watch. He wiped at his eyes with the back of one hand. Kendra had an odd look to her ordinarily calm, fair features.

  Judit, who would one day be saluted the length of the isle and across the seas as the Lady of Rheden, be honoured through generations for courage, and mourned in poets’ laments long after the alignments and borders of the world had changed and changed again, walked across the sunlit morning grass, not breaking stride, and kicked her brother with a booted foot, hard (very hard) up between the legs where the sword had almost gone.

  Athelbert made a clogged, whistling sound and crumpled to the ground, clutching at himself.

  Judit gazed down at him for only a brief moment. Then she turned. Her eyes met Hakon’s. She smiled at him, regal, gracious and at ease in a summer-bright meadow. “Did you four drink all the wine?” she asked, sweetly. “I have a sudden thirst, for some reason.”

  It was while Hakon was kneeling, hastily filling a cup for her, splashing the wine, that they saw the Cyngael come walking up from the south, on the other side of the stream.

  Four men and a dog. They stopped, looking towards the royal party on the grass. Athelbert was lying very still, eyes squeezed shut, breathing thinly, both hands between his legs. Looking across the river at the dog, Hakon suddenly shivered as if chilled. He set down Judit’s cup, without handing it to her, and stood up.

  When your hair rose like this, the old tale was that a goose was walking over the ground where your bones would lie. He looked over at Kendra (he was always doing that) and saw that she was standing very still, gazing across the river, a curious expression on her face. Hakon wondered if she, too, was sensing a strangeness about the animal, if this awareness might even be something the two of them shared.

  You might have called the wolfhound beside the youngest of the four men a dark grey, if you’d wanted to. Or you could have said it was black, trees behind it, sun briefly in cloud, the birds momentarily silenced by that.

  CEINION OF LLYWERTH SQUINTED, looking east into sunlight. Then a cloud passed before the sun and he saw Aeldred’s older daughter recognize him first and, smiling with swift, vivid pleasure, come quickly towards them across the grass. He made his way through the stream, which was cool, waist-deep here, that she might not have to enter the water herself. He knew Judit; she would have waded in. On the riverbank, she came up to him and knelt.

  With genuine happiness he made the sign of the disk over her red hair and offered no comment at all on its unbound disarray. Judit, he had told her father the last time he’d been here, ought to have been a Cyngael woman, so fiercely did she shine.

  “She doesn’t shine,” Aeldred had murmured wryly. “She burns.”

  Looking beyond her, he saw the younger sister and brother, and what appeared to be an Erling, and belatedly noted the crumpled figure of Aeldred’s heir in the grass. He blinked. “Child, what happened here?” he asked. “Athelbert … ?”

  His companions had crossed the stream now, behind him. Judit looked up, still kneeling, her face all calm serenity. “We were at play. He took a fall. I am certain he will be all right, my lord. Eventually.” She smiled.

  Even as she was speaking, Alun ab Owyn, the dog at his heels, walked over towards Aeldred’s other children, before Ceinion had had a chance to introduce them formally. The high cleric knew a brief but unmistakable moment of apprehension.

  Owyn’s son, brought east on impulse and instinct, had not been an easy companion on the journey to the Anglcyn lands. There was no reason to believe he would become one now that they’d arrived. A blow had fallen on him earlier this year, almost as brutal as the one that had killed his brother. He had been direly wounded within, riding home to tell his father and mother that their first-born son and heir had been slain and was buried in Arberthi soil, then drifting through a summer of blank, aimless days. There had been no healing for Owyn’s son. Not yet.

  He had agreed, reluctantly and under pressure from his father, to be an escort to the Anglcyn court for the high cleric on the path between the sea and the dense forest that lay between the Cyngael and the Anglcyn lands.

  Ceinion, watching him surreptitiously as they went, grieved for the living son almost as much as for the dead. Surviving could be a weight that crushed the soul. He knew something about that, thought about it every time he visited a grave overlooking the sea, at home.

  KENDRA WATCHED the young Cyngael come over to them, the grey hound beside him. She knew she ought to go to the cleric, as Judit had, receive his blessing, extend her own glad greetings.

  She found that she could not move, didn’t understand, at all. A sense of … very great strangeness.

  The Cyngael reached them. She caught her breath. “Jad give you greeting,” she said.

  He went right past her. Not even glancing her way: straight brown hair to his shoulders, brown eyes. Her own age, she guessed. Not a tall man, trimly made, a sword at his side.

  He knelt beside Athelbert, who lay motionless, curled up like a child, hands still clutching between his legs. She was near enough, just, to hear her older brother murmur, eyes closed, “Help me, Cyngael. A small jest. Tell Judit I’m dead. Hakon will help you.”r />
  The Cyngael was still for a moment, then he stood. Looking down at the heir to the Anglcyn throne, he said, contemptuously, “You have the wrong playmate. I find nothing amusing about telling someone their brother is dead, and would lie in torment eternally before I let an Erling … help me … with anything. You may choose to eat and drink with them, Anglcyn, but some of us remember blood-eaglings. Tell me, where’s your grandfather buried, son of Aeldred?”

  Kendra put a hand to her mouth, her heart thudding. Across the meadow, in morning light, Judit was standing with Ceinion of Llywerth, out of earshot. They might have been figures in a holy book, illuminated by clerics with loving care and piety. Part of a different picture, a different text, not this one.

  This one, where they were, was not holy. The lash of the Cyngael’s words was somehow the worse for the music in his voice. Athelbert, who was, in fact, considerably more than simply a jester, opened his eyes and looked up.

  Hakon had gone red, as he was inclined to do when distressed. “I think you insult both Prince Athelbert and myself, and in great ignorance,” he said, impressively enough. “Will you retract, or need I chastise you in Jad’s holy name?” He laid a hand on his sword hilt.

  Aeldred’s younger daughter was considerably milder of manner than her sister, and was thought, therefore (though not by her siblings), to be softer. Something peculiar seemed to be happening to her now, however. A feeling, a sensation within … a presence. She didn’t understand it, felt edgy, angry, threatened. A darkness in the sunlight here, beside it.

  Fists clenched at her sides, she walked towards her brother and their longtime friend and this arrogant Cyngael, whoever he was, and, as the stranger turned at her approach, she swung up her own booted foot to kick him in the selfsame way Judit had kicked Athelbert.

  Without the same result. This man did not have his eyes closed, and was in the state of heightened awareness that cold fury and a journey into unknown country can both instill.

  “Cafall! Hold!” he rasped, and in the same moment, as the dog subsided, the Cyngael twisted deftly to one side and caught Kendra’s foot as she kicked at him. He gripped it, waist high. Then he pushed it higher.

  She was falling. He wanted her to fall.

  She would have, had the other, older man not arrived, moving quickly to support her. She hadn’t heard the cleric coming over. She stayed that way, her boot gripped by one Cyngael, body held from behind by another.

  Outraged, Hakon leaped forward. “You pigs!” he snarled. “Let her go!”

  The younger one did so, with pleasing alacrity. Then, less pleasingly, he said, “Forgive me. The proper behaviour here would be … what? To let an Erling tutor me in courtesy? I was disinclined to cut her lungs out. What does one do when a woman betrays her lineage in this fashion? Accept the offered blow?”

  This was difficult, as Hakon had no good answer, and even less of a notion why Kendra had done what she’d done.

  “I am entirely happy,” the Cyngael went on, in the absurdly beautiful voice they all seemed to have as a gift, “to kill you if you think there’s honour to defend here.”

  “No!” Kendra said quickly, in the same moment Ceinion of Llywerth released her elbows and turned to his companion.

  “Prince Alun,” he said, in a voice like metal, “you are here as my companion and guard. I am your charge. Remember that.”

  “And I will defend you with my life from pagan offal,” the younger Cyngael said. The words were ugly, the tone eerily mild, flat. He doesn’t care, Kendra thought suddenly. He wants to be dead. She had no least idea how she knew that.

  Hakon drew his sword and stepped back, for room. “I am weary of these words,” he said with dignity. “Do what you can, in Jad’s name.”

  “No. Forgive me, both of you, but I forbid this.”

  It was Athelbert, on his feet, clearly in pain, but doing what needed to be done. He stumbled between Hakon and the Cyngael, who had not yet drawn his own blade.

  “Ah. Wonderful. You are not dead after all,” the one who appeared to be named Alun said, mockingly. “Let’s blood-eagle someone in celebration.”

  At which point, in what might have been the most surprising moment of a profoundly unsettling encounter, Ceinion of Llywerth stepped forward and hammered a short, hard, punishing fist into the chest of his young companion. The high cleric of the Cyngael was not of the soft, insular variety of holy men. The punch knocked the younger man staggering; he almost fell.

  “Enough!” said Ceinion. “In your father’s name and mine. Do not make me regret my love for you.”

  Kendra registered that last. And the fact that the dog did not even move despite this attack on his master, and the pain in Ceinion’s voice. Her senses seemed unnaturally heightened, on alert, apprehending some threat. She watched the young Cyngael straighten, bring a hand slowly to his chest then take it away. He shook his head, as if to clear it.

  He was looking at Ceinion, she saw, ignoring Hakon’s blade and Athelbert’s intervention. Judit, uncharacteristically, had kept silent, beside Gareth, whose watchful manner was normal, not unusual.

  The two Cyngael servants had remained by the stream. It was still morning, Kendra thought, late-summer, a bright day, just south and west of Esferth. No time had passed in the world, really.

  “You will note that my sword is still sheathed,” Alun said at last, softly, to Ceinion. “It will remain so.” He turned to Kendra, surprising her. “Are you injured, my lady?”

  She managed to shake her head. “My apologies,” she said. “I attacked you. You insulted a friend.”

  The ghost of a smile. “So I gather. Evidently not wise, in your presence.”

  “Judit’s worse,” Kendra said.

  “I am not so! Only when—” Judit began.

  “Jad’s blood and grief !" Gareth snarled. “Hakon! Sheathe your blade!”

  Hakon immediately did so, then turned with the others and saw why.

  “Father!” cried Judit, in a voice that might actually have made one believe she was purely delighted, feeling nothing but pleasure as she stepped forward and made a showy, elaborate, attention-claiming curtsy in the meadow grass.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Gareth muttered to the high cleric. “Language. Profane. I know.”

  “The least of all transgressions here, I’d say,” murmured Ceinion of Llywerth, before going forward as well, smiling, to kneel before and rise to be embraced by the king of the Anglcyn.

  And then to offer the same hug, and his sun disk blessing, to scarred, limping, large-souled Osbert, a little behind Aeldred and to one side, where he always was.

  “Ceinion. Dear friend. This,” said the king, “is unlooked for so soon, and a source of much joy.”

  “You do me, as before, too much honour, my lord,” said the cleric. Kendra, watching closely, saw him glance back over his shoulder. “I would present a companion. This is Prince Alun ab Owyn of Cadyr, who has been good enough to journey with me, bearing greetings from his royal father.”

  The younger Cyngael stepped forward and performed a flawless court bow. From where she stood, Kendra couldn’t see his expression. Hakon, on her right side, was still flushed from the confrontation. His sword—thanks be to Gareth and the god—was sheathed.

  Kendra saw her father smiling. He seemed well, alert, very happy. He was often this way after his fever passed. Returning to life, as from the grey gates to the land of the dead where judgement was made. And she knew how highly he thought of the Cyngael cleric.

  “Owyn’s son!” Aeldred murmured. “We are greatly pleased to welcome you to Esferth. Your father and lady mother are well, I trust and hope, and your older brother? Dai, I believe?”

  Her father found it useful to let people realize, very early, how much he knew. He also enjoyed it. Kendra had watched him for a long time now, and could see that part, too.

  Alun ab Owyn straightened. “My brother is dead,” he said flatly. “My lord, he was killed by an Erling raiding party in Arberth
at the end of spring. The same party blood-eagled two innocent people, one of them a girl, as they fled to their ships after being defeated. If you have assigned any of your royal fyrd to engage the Erlings anywhere in your lands this season, I should be honoured to be made one of them.”

  The music, still there in his voice, clashed hard with the words. Kendra saw her father absorbing all of this. He glanced at Ceinion. “I didn’t know,” he said.

  He hated not knowing things. Saw it as a kind of assault, an insult, when events took place anywhere on their island—in the far north, in Erlond to the east, even west across the Rheden Wall among the black hills of the Cyngael—without his own swift and sure awareness. A strength, a flaw. What he was.

  Aeldred looked at the young man before him. “This is a grief,” he said. “My sorrow. Will you allow us to pray with you for his soul, which is surely with Jad?”

  From where she stood, Kendra saw the Cadyri stiffen, as if to offer a quick retort. He didn’t, though. Only bowed his head in what could have been taken for acquiescence, if you didn’t know better. That eerie, inexplicable sensation: she did know better, but not how she knew it. Kendra felt an uneasy prickling, a tremor within.

  She became aware that Gareth was looking at her, and managed an almost indifferent shrug. He was shrewd, her younger brother, and she had no way of explaining what it was she was … responding to here.

  She turned back and saw that her father was now gazing at her as well. She smiled, uncertainly. Aeldred turned to study Judit, and then his sons. She saw him register Athelbert’s awkward stance and the sword on the grass.

  She knew—they all knew—the expression he now assumed. Detached, amused, ironic. He was a much-loved man, Aeldred of the Anglcyn, he had been from childhood, but he dealt out his own affection thoughtfully, and given what he was, how could he not? Their mother was an exception but that, all four children knew, was also complex.

  Waiting, anticipating, Kendra heard her father murmur, “Judit, dear heart, don’t forget to bring my longsword back.”

  “Of course, Father,” said Judit, eyes downcast, her manner entirely subdued, if not her hair.