The Last Light of the Sun Read online

  She turned onto an elbow in the grass, looked at him a moment. “You fear us even more than we fear you.”

  He thought about that. “I think we fear what you might mean.”

  “What can I … mean? I am just here.”

  He shook his head. Reached for clarity. “But here for so much longer than we are.”

  Her turn to be silent. He stared at her, drinking slender grace with his eyes, the otherness of her. Her breasts were small, perfect. She had arched her body back above him, before, in the light she made. He wondered, suddenly, how he would pray from now on, what words he could use. Did he ask forgiveness of his god for this? For something the clerics taught did not even exist?

  She said, finally, “I think the … speed of things for you makes the world more dear.”

  “More painful?”

  Her hair had slipped, by invisible degrees, towards silver again. “More dear. You … love more, because you lose so quickly. We don’t know … that feeling.” She gestured, one hand, as if reaching. “You live in … in the singleness of things. Because they go from you.”

  “Well, they do, don’t they?”

  “But you come into the world knowing that. It cannot be … unexpected. We die, as well. It just takes … ”

  “Longer.”

  “Longer,” she agreed. “Unless there is iron.”

  His belt and dagger were in the chapel in Esferth. He felt a renewed grief: one of the suspended feelings here. What she had just said. Loving more, because losing.

  He said, “Is my brother still with the queen?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

  “But he won’t be, always.”

  “Nothing is always.”

  Born into the world, knowing that.

  She saw he was distressed. “It takes a long time,” she said, “before she tires. He is honoured, much loved.”

  “And he will be lost forever, after. That is always.”

  “Why lost? Why see it so?”

  “Because we are taught that. That there is a harbour for our souls, and his was taken and will not find the god now. Maybe … that is what we fear. In you. That you can do this to us. Perhaps long ago we knew it, about the faeries.”

  “It was different, once,” she agreed. And then shyly, after a moment, “We could fly, then.”

  “What? How?”

  She turned, still shy, to show him her back. And so he saw the ridges clearly, hard, smaller than breasts, inside her shoulder blades, and he understood that these were all that now remained of what had been faerie wings.

  He imagined it, creatures like her, flying under blue moon or silver, or at sunset. An ache in his throat, the envisaged beauty of it. In the world, once.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He reached out, brushed one with a hand. She shivered, turned back to him.

  “There it is again. The way you think. Sorrow. It is so much in you. I … we … do not live with that. It comes with the speed, doesn’t it?”

  He thought about this, didn’t want to even guess how old she was. She spoke Cyngael the way his grandfather had.

  He said it: “You speak my language so beautifully. What does your own sound like?”

  She looked surprised a moment, then amused, the hair flashing it. “But this is my own tongue. How do you think your people learned it?”

  He gaped, closed his mouth.

  “Our home is in those woods and pools,” she said. “West, towards where the sun lies along the sea at day’s end. There was not always so much … distance between us.”

  He was thinking, as hard as he could. Men spoke of the music in the voices of the Cyngael. Now he knew. A knowing, like this night, that shifted the world. How was he going to pray? She was looking at him, still amused.

  He said, “Is this, is tonight … forbidden to you?”

  She took a moment to answer. Said, “The queen is pleased with me.”

  He understood, both answer and hesitation. She was protecting him. In her way, a kindness. They could be kind, it seemed. The queen was pleased because of Dai. The taken soul.

  He said, looking at her, “But it is still … seen as wrong, isn’t it? You have some licence because of what you did, but it is still … ”

  “There is to be distance, yes. Just as for you.”

  He laughed this time. “Distance? You don’t exist! To say you are even here is heresy. Our clerics would punish me, some would cast me out from chapel and rites, if I even spoke of it.”

  “The one from the pool wouldn’t,” she said quietly.

  He hadn’t realized she’d seen the cleric that night. “Ceinion? He might,” Alun said. “He likes me, because of my father, I think, but he wouldn’t allow talk of faeries or the half-world.”

  She smiled again. “Half-world. I haven’t heard that in so long.” He didn’t want to know how far back in the past something would have to be for her to think that way. The slow uncoiling of time for them. She stretched, feral and sleek as a cat. “But you are wrong about that one. He knows. He came to the queen when his woman was dying.”

  “What?”

  She laughed aloud, quicksilver sound, flutter and ripple in the glade. “Softly. I can hear you,” she murmured. She touched him, idly, a hand on his leg. He felt desire, again, was very nearly defined by it. She said, “He came to the mound and asked if one of us might come with him, to help her live. She was coughing blood. He brought silver for the queen, and he wept among the trees outside. He couldn’t see us, of course, but he came to ask. She pitied him.”

  Alun said nothing. Couldn’t speak. He knew, everyone knew, about Ceinion’s young wife and her death.

  “So do not say to me,” the faerie added, stretching again, “that that one, of all of you, would deny us.”

  “She didn’t send anything, did she?” he asked, whispering.

  Both eyebrows arched, she regarded him. “Why think that? She sent eldritch water from the pool and a charm. She is gracious, the queen, honours those who honour her.”

  “It didn’t … help?”

  She shook her head. “We are only what we are. Death comes. I did what I could.”

  He almost missed it. “She sent you?”

  Her eyes on his, no distance between them, in one way. He needed only move a hand to touch her breast again.

  “I have always been … most curious.”

  He sighed. So great a strangeness, the world altering moment by moment as the stars turned above them. Was it slow, or fast, that movement overhead? Did it depend on who was asking?

  He said, “And tonight is … being curious?”

  “And for you, is it not? What else is there for it to be?” A different note in her voice now, under the music.

  He was gazing at her. Helpless to look away. Small, even teeth in the wide, thin mouth, pale skin, achingly smooth, the changing hair. Dark eyes. And vestiges of wings. Once, they could fly.

  “I don’t know,” he said, swallowing. “I’m not wise enough. I feel as if I could weep.”

  “Sorrow, again,” she said. “Why does it always come to that, for you?”

  “Sometimes we can weep for joy. Do you … can you understand that?”

  A longer silence. Then she shook her head slowly. “No. I would like to, but this is your cup, not ours.”

  The … otherness, again. This sense that he was both in and entirely outside the world he knew. He said, “Tell me Esferth and the others will be there when I go from here?”

  She nodded, calmly. “Though some of them won’t be.”

  He stared. A hard thumping of the heart. “What do you mean?”

  “They are starting to ride out. There is anger, men taking horse, bearing iron.”

  He sat up. “Holy Jad. How do you know?”

  She shrugged. The question, he realized, was foolish. How could he understand how she knew things? How could she answer him? Even in the tongue they shared, the language her people had taught his.

  He stood up.
Began putting on his clothes. She watched him. He was aware, might always be aware now, of the haste of his doing this, seen through her eyes. The way he and the others lived. “I must go,” he said. “If something has happened.”

  “Someone died,” she said gravely. “There is sorrow. The aura of it.”

  The speed of their dying. He looked at her, holding his tunic in both hands. He cleared his throat. “Don’t envy us that,” he said.

  “But I do,” she said simply; small, sleek, shining otherness in the grass. “Will you come back into the wood?”

  He hesitated, and then a thought came that could not have come a night before, when he was younger.

  “Will you sorrow if I do not?”

  Her eyebrows lifted again, but in surprise this time. She moved a hand, same gesture as before, as if reaching for something. Then, slowly, she smiled, looking up at him.

  He pulled on his tunic. No belt, because of the iron. He turned to leave. He hadn’t answered her question, either. He had no answer to give.

  He looked back from the glade’s dark edge. She was still sitting there on the grass, unclothed, in her element, sorrowless.

  The voices in the darkness began moving away to the north. Bern remained where he was in the stream. He had a thought, broke off a reed; might need to submerge himself. He heard shouting, men running. Someone rasped a curse, an obscenity directed at Erlings everywhere, and the scabrous, pustulent whores who gave them birth.

  Not a good time for this Erling to be discovered.

  He’d been right, then. The signal fire had meant nothing good at all. It was still burning. More shouting now, farther away, towards Esferth, where the tents were: the tents outside an overflowing city on the eve of a fair. A city they’d been told would be almost empty, one that they might even loot in a raid that would give rise to songs for generations to their glory, and Jormsvik’s.

  Glory, Bern decided, was going to be hard to come by now.

  He thought quickly, keeping his breathing shallow and slow. Skallson’s party had gone east from the ships. A waste of time, some had thought—and the same had been said about Bern and Ecca going into Esferth, once they had learned about the fair. But if they were to leave here—and it seemed evident they were—without anything taken at all, at least learn something before they went, it had been decided.

  Salvage pride, a flagon’s worth, by carrying home report of Aeldred’s lands. They might be mocked a little less by their fellows for returning empty-handed, swords unreddened, no tales to tell. A wasted journey at raiding season’s end. His own first raid.

  Right now, Bern thought, mockery might be the best they could hope for, not the worst. There were worse things than fireside jibes in winter. If that bonfire was an alert, it most likely meant Guthrum Skallson’s party had been found. And from the fury in the Anglcyn voices (still heading away from him, Ingavin be thanked) something had happened.

  And then he remembered that Ivarr had been with Skallson’s party. Bern shivered in the water, couldn’t help it. You shivered like that when a spirit passed, someone newly dead, and angry. In that same instant he heard a soft splashing as someone entered the stream.

  Bern drew his dagger and prepared himself to die: in water again, third time now. Third time was said to mark power, sacred to Nikar the Huntress, wife to Thünir. Three times was a gateway. He had expected death in the night waters off Rabady. And again in the dawn surf outside Jormsvik. He tried to accept it once more, now. An ending waited for all men, no one knew his fate, everything lay in how you went to your dying. He gripped his blade.

  “Stay where you are,” he heard.

  The voice low, terse, barely audible. Utterly and entirely known all the days of his life.

  “Spare me the knife,” it went on softly. “I’ve been stabbed at already tonight. And keep silent or they will find and kill you here,” his father added, moving, unerringly, towards where Bern was hidden, submerged to his shoulders, invisible in darkness.

  Unless you knew he was here. Not a mystery, then, this part at least. He’d gone straight into the stream from the place on the bank where his father had left him. Not magic, not some impossible night vision, brilliant raider’s instinct.

  “I didn’t think they’d offer me wine,” he murmured. No greeting offered. Thorkell hadn’t greeted him.

  His father grunted, coming up. “How’s your head?”

  “Hurts. Want your neck chain back?”

  “I’d have kept it if I wanted it. You made a mistake in that alley. You know the saga: Have thine eyes about you / in hall or darkness. Be wary ever / be watching always.”

  Bern said nothing. Felt his face redden.

  “Two horses?” Thorkell asked calmly.

  His father’s dark bulk was beside him, Thorkell’s voice close to his ear. The two of them together in a stream at night in Anglcyn lands. How was this so? What had the gods decided? And how did men take hold of their own lives when this could happen? He realized his heart was thumping, hated that.

  “Two horses,” he replied, keeping his voice steady. “Where’s Ecca?”

  Small hesitation. “That what he was calling himself?”

  Was calling. “Right,” Bern said bitterly. “Of course. He’s dead. You know, the same poet says: No good ever, whatever be thought / was mead or ale to any man. Are you drunk?”

  The backhanded blow caught him on the side of the head.

  “By Ingavin’s blind eye, show respect. I got you out of a walled city. Think on it. I went to warn him, he drew a blade to kill when I used his real name. I made a mistake. Is your horse a good one?”

  A mistake. One could weep, or laugh. Killing the second man on the isle had been the mistake, Bern wanted to say. He was still trying to wrap his mind around what was happening here. “My horse is Gyllir,” he said. Struggled to keep anything out of his voice his father might read as youthful pride.

  Thorkell grunted again. “Halldr’s? He didn’t come after you?”

  “Halldr’s dead. The horse was for his burning.”

  That silenced his father, for a moment, at least. Bern wondered if he was thinking of his wife, who had become Halldr’s, and was widowed now, alone and unprotected on Rabady.

  “There’s a tale to that, I imagine,” was all Thorkell said.

  His voice had not changed at all. Why should it change, though all the world Bern knew had been altered entirely? “Leave Stefa’s mount,” his father said. “They’ll need a horse to find, after they get his body.”

  Stefa. With an effort Bern kept his hand from going to his head. The stars had swung again with the blow. His father was a strong man.

  “They’ll see the signs of two horses where we hid them,” Bern said. “Won’t work.”

  “It will. I’ll find his horse and bring it out. Go now, though, and quickly—some fool killed Burgred of Denferth tonight. Aeldred’s riding out himself, I think.”

  “What?” said Bern, his jaw dropping. “The earl? Why didn’t they—?”

  “Take him for ransom? You tell me. You’re the mercenary. He’d have been worth your raid and more.”

  But that answer, in fact, he knew. “Ivarr,” he said. “Ragnarson’s paying us.”

  “Ingavin’s blind eye! I knew it,” his father rasped. His old oath, remembered from childhood, familiar as smells and the shape of hands. Thorkell swore again, spat into the stream. He stood waist-deep in the water, thinking. Then: “Listen. That one’s going to want you to go west. Don’t go. It isn’t a raid for Jormsvik.”

  “West? What’s west of here? Just … ” And then, as his father said nothing, Bern finally thought it through. He swallowed, cleared his throat. “Blood,” he whispered. “Vengeance? For his grandfather? And that’s why he—”

  “That’s why he bought your ships and men, whatever else he told you, and that’s why he wouldn’t want a hostage. He wants to go after the Cyngael. But with ransom paid for an earl you’d turn and go home. He was with the shore party, wa
sn’t he?”

  Bern nodded. It was sliding into place.

  “I’ll wager you land we don’t own any more they’ll find Burgred with an arrow in him.”

  “He said the burh was still unwalled, that Esferth would be almost empty.”

  Thorkell grunted, spat downstream again. “Empty? During a fair? Serpent-sly, that one. Poisons his arrows.”

  “How do you know that?”

  No answer. It occurred to Bern that he’d never spoken in this way with his father in his life. Nothing remotely resembling this terse conversation. He didn’t have time, no time at all, to unwind his own held-in rage, the bitterness for lives marred. Thorkell still hadn’t asked about his wife. Or Gyllir. Or how Bern had come to be in Jormsvik.

  Fireflies darting around them. Bern heard bullfrogs and crickets. No human voices, though; they’d gone north towards the walls and tents. And would be coming out, back this way, heading for the coast. King Aeldred leading them, his father had said.

  Guthrum’s party was on foot, would be running for the ships right now. If they weren’t dead. He had no idea where they’d been when they …

  “Where are your horses?”

  “Just west, in the woods.”

  “In those woods?” Thorkell’s voice rose for the first time.

  “Are there others?”

  “I’ll hit you again. Show respect. That’s a spirit wood. No Anglcyn or Cyngael will enter it. Stefa ought to have known, if you didn’t.”

  “Well,” said Bern, attempting defiance, “maybe he did know. If they don’t go in, it’s a good place for our mounts, isn’t it?”

  His father said nothing. Bern swallowed. He cleared his throat. “He only went in a few steps, tethered them, got out right away.”

  “He did know.” Thorkell sounded tired suddenly. “You’d best move,” his father said. “Think the rest of it out while you ride.”

  Bern moved, climbing up the western bank. He said nothing but as he looked around, crouching, Thorkell added, “Don’t let Ivarr Ragnarson know you’re my son. He’ll kill you for it.”

  Bern stopped, looking down at the dark figure of his father in the stream. A tale there, too, obviously. He wasn’t going to ask. He wanted to say something harsh about how late it was for Thorkell to be showing signs of looking after his family.