The Last Light of the Sun Page 23

  Guthrum swore again, viciously. He killed the last Anglcyn himself, almost absently, a sword in the chest, ripped out as soon as it went in, wiped dry on the grass, sheathed again. The riders came back. The accursed horn was still sounding, shredding the dark.

  “You five ride back,” he rasped. “Tell Brand to land a ship’s worth of men, start this way. You guide them. Look for us. We’ll be coming fast as we can, the way we came. But if we’re chased we might be caught, and we’ll need more men in a fight.”

  “Forty enough?” Atli asked.

  “No idea, but I can’t risk more. Let’s go.”

  “I want a horse!” said the small, vicious man who’d caused all this, sitting up now on the grass. “I’ll lead them back.”

  “Fuck that forever!” said Guthrum savagely. “You wanted to come ashore with us, you’ll run back with us. And if you can’t keep up we’ll leave you for Aeldred. They’d like a Volganson, I imagine. Get on your feet. Steady run, all of you. Riders, go!”

  The horn was still blowing, fading east as they started back west themselves. Ivarr got up promptly enough, Guthrum saw. Ragnarson wiped at his mouth, spat blood, then started running with them. He was light-boned, quick-footed. Kept spitting blood for a time, but said nothing more. In the moonlight his features were stranger than ever, the whiteness not entirely human. Ought to have been exposed at birth, Guthrum thought grimly, looking like that as he came into the middle-world. Would have been, in any other family. He’d been threatened with death by this one, Siggur Volganson’s heir. It didn’t occur to him to be afraid but he did regret not killing him.

  An earl, he kept thinking, as they went. An earl! Aeldred’s friend from childhood. They could have taken the prodigious ransom for Burgred of Denferth, turned straight around, and rowed home for a rich and easy winter in the Jormsvik taverns. Instead, they had a hard, dangerous run ahead; the horn would bring riders in the dark—riders who would learn what had happened, and who knew the terrain far better than they did. They could die here.

  He might have been a farmer by now, Guthrum thought. Repairing fences, eyeing rainclouds before harvest time. He actually amused himself, briefly, with the thought, running through night in Anglcyn lands. It had never been likely. Farmers didn’t go to Ingavin’s halls, or drink from Thünir’s horn when they were called from the middle-world. He’d chosen his life a long time ago. No regrets, under the blue moon and the stars.

  The moon was over the woods, Bern saw, awakening. Then he grasped that he was lying on grass, looking up at trees, beside a river in the dark.

  He’d been pissing in the alley and …

  He sat up. Too quickly. The moon lurched, stars described arcs as if falling. He gasped. Touched his head: a lump, the stickiness of blood. He cursed, confused, his heart hammering. Looked around, too quickly again: the dizziness assaulted him, blood loud in his ears. He seemed to be holding something. Looked down at the object in his hand.

  Knew his father’s neck chain and hammer, immediately.

  No doubt, no hesitation, even here, so far away from home, from childhood. Small sons could be like that, memorizing each and every thing about the father, a figure larger than anything in the world, filling the house, then emptying it when he left, on the dragon-ships again. There were thousands of necklaces like this one, and there was not one like it in the world the gods had made.

  He was very still, listening to the river running over stones, the crickets and frogs. There were fireflies above the water and the reeds. The forest was black beyond the stream. Something had just happened that he could never even have imagined.

  He tried to think clearly, but his head was hurting. His father was here. Had been in Esferth, had knocked him out—or rescued him?—and taken him outside the walls and left … this.

  As a sign of what? Bern swore again. His father had never been a man to make anything clear or easy. But if he could take any idea from being here and holding Thorkell’s necklace, it was that his father wanted him out of Esferth.

  Suddenly, belatedly, he thought about Ecca, who was—significantly—not here outside the walls. Bern stood up then, wincing, unsteady. He couldn’t stay where he was. There were always people outside a city, especially now with the king present, and all his household, and a late-summer fair beginning soon. There was a second city’s worth of tents around to the north. They’d seen them earlier, when they’d come up.

  Finding so many people here had been a large issue. Ecca had wrestled with considerable anger as they’d come to understand what was happening in Esferth and near it. That supposedly unfinished burh on the coast, Drengest, was entirely complete, walls secure, defended, a number of ships already built in the harbour.

  Not even remotely a place where five ships’ worth of men could raid and run, which is what they’d been told they could do. And Esferth itself, which was supposed to be half empty, exposed to an attack that would shape a legend, was thronged with merchants and the Anglcyn fyrd, and Aeldred himself was here with his household guard. It was not a mistake, not a misreading of signs, Ecca had snarled. It appeared they had been lied to, by the man who’d paid them to come.

  Ivarr Ragnarson, the Volgan’s heir. The one everyone whispered ought surely to have been killed when he came out of his mother’s womb white as a spirit, hairless, a malformed freak of nature, unworthy of life and his lineage.

  It was that lineage that had saved him. Everyone knew the tale: how a volur in her trance had spoken to his father and forbidden him to expose the child. Ragnar Siggurson, hesitant by nature, too careful, never the strongest man (following a father who had been the strongest of men), had let the child live, to grow up strange and estranged, and vicious.

  Bern had his own thoughts about volurs and their trances. Not that it mattered. He was desperately unsure what to do. Ecca was a shipmate, his companion on this scouting mission. A Jormsvik raider didn’t leave companions behind unless he had no choice at all; they were bound to each other, by oath and history. But this was Bern’s first raid, he didn’t know enough yet, didn’t know if this was a time when you did leave to carry an urgent message back. Should he return to Esferth when the gates opened at sunrise and look for Ecca, or find Gyllir in the wood where they’d left the horses and hurry to the ships with a warning?

  Was that the meaning in Thorkell’s necklace, in his being out here alone? Was Ecca taken? Dead? And if not, what would happen if he returned to the ships after Bern did and asked why his companion had left without him? And just how, in fact, Bern had gotten outside the walls? How he’d explain that, Bern had no idea. And what if Ecca rode back and the ships were gone because Bern had told them it was wiser to cast off?

  Too many conflicting needs, conjured thoughts. Hesitations of his own devising (another son of a strong father?). He didn’t know, standing unsteadily alone by the water, if he was … direct enough for this raiding life. He’d be dealing more easily with all of this, he thought, if his head didn’t hurt so much.

  Something caught his eye, south and east. A bonfire burning on a hill. He watched that light in the darkness, saw it occluded, reappear, vanish again, return. He realized, after a moment, that this was a message. Knew it could not possibly be good for him, or for those waiting by the ships … or for Guthrum’s party ashore to the south.

  The bonfire made his decision for him. He placed his father’s necklace over his head and slipped it inside his tunic. The necklace was meant to tell him that it was a friend (his father a friend, the irony in that) who’d taken him out of Esferth. If he was supposed to be out of Esferth, that meant trouble inside. And he knew there was trouble, they’d seen it this morning, passing through the gates amid the crowds for the fair. They had planned to stay only tonight, learn what they could in the taverns, ride back to the coast in the morning, carrying their message—and warning.

  And now a message in fire was lighting the night. This was, in no possible way, a safe place to be coming ashore to raid. The burh was walled and
garrisoned, they already knew that, and Esferth was thronged to bursting. He had that message to deliver, above anything else. He took a breath, put aside, as best he could, the fierce, hard awareness that his father was out here somewhere in the night not far away, and had, evidently, carried him to this place like a child. Bern turned his back on torchlit Esferth and entered the stream to cross it.

  He was midway into the river, which wasn’t cold, when he heard voices. He dropped down instantly, silent amid reeds and lilies, only his head above water in the dark, and listened to the voices and the pounding of his heart.

  Alun had seen the glimmering twice on the journey east, travelling here with Ceinion. Once in the branches of a tree, when they’d camped by a stream running out of the wood and he awoke in the night, and once on a hillside behind them, when he looked back after dark: a shining at twilight, though the sun had set.

  He’d known it was her. Wasn’t sure if he’d been meant to see, or if she’d come closer than she’d intended. Cafall had been restless all through that coastal journey. The Erling had thought it was the nearness of the spirit wood.

  She was following him. He ought, perhaps, to have been afraid, but that wasn’t what he felt. Alun had thought about Dai, the night he died, that pool in the wood, souls lost and taken, and it had occurred to him that he might never make music again.

  His mother had taken to her chambers when he and Gryffeth and the cleric had brought the tidings home. She had stayed there a fourteen-night, opening only to her women. When she’d come out her hair had changed colour. Not as a faerie’s did, shimmering through hues, but as a mortal woman’s did, when grief has come too suddenly.

  Owyn had covered his face with a hand, Alun remembered, and turned and walked away, at first word of Dai’s death. He had drunk a great deal for two days and nights, then stopped. Had spoken after, privately, with Ceinion of Llywerth. There was a history there, not entirely a benign one, but whatever lay behind the two men seemed altered by this. Owyn ap Glynn was a hard man, everyone knew that, and he was a prince with tasks in the world. Brynn had said that same thing to Alun, too. He had a new role, himself. He was heir to Cadyr.

  His brother was dead. More than that. Those who told him that time and faith would assuage, meaning well, drawing on experience and wisdom—even his father, even King Aeldred, here—were unaware, had to be unaware, of what Alun knew about Dai.

  Armoured in faith, as Ceinion and the Anglcyn king were, you could anneal the burning of loss with a belief that the souls of those who had gone were with Jad and would be until all the worlds ended and the god’s purposes were revealed and fulfilled.

  Faith was no help at all when you knew your brother’s soul had been stolen by faeries on a moonless night.

  Alun prayed, as required, morning and evening, with urgency. It seemed to him sometimes that he heard his own voice echoing oddly as he chanted the responses of the liturgy. He knew things, had seen what he had seen. And heard the music in that forest clearing, as the faeries passed him by, moving across the water.

  There was a blue moon tonight, spirit moon, high above the woods, hanging over them like some dark blue candle in a doorway. These were part of the same forest they had skirted to the south. A valley sliced westward, pushing the trees back halfway down to the sea, and the old tale was that the colder danger lay in the south, but this was still named a ghost wood, whatever the clerics might say.

  He stood a moment, looking at the trees. He needed to walk through this doorway. Had known he would, from first sighting of her that night when he’d woken, and again on the hill two days later, at twilight. Forbidden, heresy: words that meant much, but so little to him now. He had seen her. And his brother. Dai’s hand in the faerie queen’s, walking on water, after he died. Alun was unmoored and knew it, a ship without rudder or sails, no charts by which to navigate.

  He had left the king’s feast, made his excuses as courteously as he could, aware that the Anglcyn court—alerted by Ceinion—would feel genuine compassion for what they thought was his pain.

  They had no idea.

  He’d bowed to the king—a compact man, trimmed grey beard, bright blue eyes—and to the queen, made his way from that crowded, loud, smoky room, dense with the living and their concerns, and gone alone to the chapel he’d seen earlier in the day.

  Not the royal one. This one was small, dimly lit, almost an afterthought on a street of taverns and inns, and empty this late at night. What he needed. Silence, shadow, the sun disk above the altar barely visible in this still space. He had knelt, and prayed for the god to lend him the power to resist what was pulling him. But in the end, rising, he gave himself dispensation for being mortal, and frail, and so not strong enough. There was a need in him, and there was also fear.

  He had a thought, a memory, and paused by the door of the chapel. In that gloom, lit only by a handful of guttering lamps too far apart on the walls, Alun ab Owyn unbuckled his dagger and belt and set them down on a stone ledge in the half-darkness. He’d worn no sword tonight. Not to a royal feast, as an honoured guest. He turned in the chapel doorway, looked back in the gloom a last time to where the sun disk hung.

  Then he went out into the night streets of Esferth. Cafall fell in beside him, as always now. He spoke to a guard at the gates and was allowed to pass. He’d known—with certainty—that it would be so. There were forces at work tonight, beyond any adequate understanding.

  Alun went into the meadow beyond the Esferth gates and walked steadily west. The direction of home, but not really. Home was too far away. He came to the stream, crossed through, water to his waist, Cafall splashing beside him, and on the other side he stopped and looked at the woods and turned to Brynn’s dog—his dog—and said quietly, “No farther now. Wait here.”

  Cafall pushed his head against Alun’s wet hip and thigh, but when he said it again, “No farther,” the dog obeyed, staying there beside the rushing water, a grey shape, almost invisible, as Alun went alone into the trees.

  SHE KNOWS THE INSTANT he enters among the first oaks and alders, apprehending his aura before she sees him. She stands in a glade by a beech tree, as she did the first time, a hand laid on it for sustenance, sap-strength. She is afraid. But not only that.

  He appears at the edge of the glade and stops. Her hair goes to silver. Purest hue, essence of what she is, what they all are: silver around them in the first mound, gleaming. Now lost, undersea. They sing to greet the white moon when it rises.

  Only the blue one tonight, hidden from where they stand within the wood. She knows exactly where it is, however. They always know where both moons are. The blue is different, more … inward; hues one does not always share with others. Just as she has not shared her coming east, this journey. She took a soul for the queen at the beginning of summer, will not suffer for this following. Or not at the hands of the Ride. There are others in the wood, though, nearby and south. To be feared.

  She sees him step forward, approaching over grass, amid trees. A dark wood, far from home (for both of them). There is a spruaugh somewhere about, which had angered and surprised her, for she dislikes them all, their green hovering. She’d shown her hair violet to him earlier, and seethed, and he’d retreated, chattering, agitated. She scans with the eye of her mind, doesn’t find his aura now. Didn’t think he would be anywhere near after seeing her.

  She makes herself let go of the tree. Takes a step forward. He is near enough to touch, to be touched. Her hair is shining. She is all the light in this glade, the trees in summer leaf occluding stars and moon, shielding the two of them. A shelter, between worlds, though there are dangers all around. She remembers touching his face on the slope above the farm and the blood-soaked yard, as he knelt before her.

  The memory changes the colour of her hair again. It is not only fear she feels. He does not kneel this time. No iron about him. He has left it behind, coming to her, knowing.

  They are silent, leaves and branches a canopy above, the grass of the glade shimmerin
g. A breeze, slight sound, it dies away.

  He says, “I saw you, twice, coming here. Was I meant to?”

  She can feel herself tremble. Wonders if he sees it. They are speaking to each other. It is not to happen. It is a crossing-over, a transgressing. She doesn’t entirely understand his words. Meant to? Mortals: the world they live within, time different for them. The speed of their dying.

  She says, “You can see me. Since the pool.” Isn’t sure if that is what he meant. They are speaking, and alone here. She reaches a hand backwards, after all, touches the tree again.

  “I should hate you,” he says. Said that, also, the other time.

  She answers, as before, “I don’t know what that means. Hate.”

  A word they use … fire in how they live. A flame and then gone. That fire a reason she has always been drawn. But unseen, until now.

  He closes his eyes. “Why are you here?”

  “I followed you.” She lets go of the tree.

  He looks at her again. “I know. I know that. Why?”

  They think in this way. It has to do with time. One thing, then another thing from it, and then a next. The way the world takes shape for them. She has a thought.

  ALUN FELT AS IF HIS MOUTH were dry as earth. Her voice, a handful of words, made him despair again of the idea of making music, of ever hearing anything to match. There was a woodland scent to her, night flowers, and the light—changing, always—about her, in her hair, the only illumination here, where they were. She was shining for him in a forest, and he knew all the tales. Mortals entangled and ensnared within the half-world who never made their way back or were found all changed when they did, companions and lovers dead, or aged, bent into hoops.

  Dai was with the faerie queen, walking upon water amid music, coupling in the forested night. Dai was dead, his soul stolen away.

  “Why are you here?” he managed.