Fionn slept, and waked at last by sunrise, blinking and looking
about him in plain fear that trees might have grown and died of old
age while he slept. His eyes fixed on Arafel last of all and she
laughed in elvish humor, which was gentle if sometimes
cruel. She knew her own look by daylight, which was indeed as rough
as the weed she had named herself. She seemed tanned and thin and
hard-handed, her gray-and-green all cobweb patchwork, and only the
sword stayed true. She sat plaiting her hair to a single silver
braid and smiling sidelong at the harper, who gave her back a
sidelong and anxious glance.
All the earth had grown warm in that morning. The sun did come
here, unclouded on this day. Fionn rubbed the sleep from his eyes
and opening his wallet, began looking for his breakfast.
There seemed very little in it: he shook out a bit of jerky,
looked at it ruefully, then split off a bit of it with his knife
and offered half his breakfast to her—so small a morsel
that, halved, was not enough for a Man, and a haggard and hungry
one at that.
“No,” she said. She had been offended at once by the
smell of it, having no appetite for man-taint, or the flesh of any
poor forest creature. But the offering of it, the desperate
courtesy, had thawed her heart. She brought out food of her own
store, a gift of trees and bees and whatsoever things felt no hurt
at sharing. She gave him a share, and he took it with a desperate
dread and hunger.
“It’s good,” he pronounced quickly and laughed
a little, and finished it all. He licked the very last from his
fingers, and now there was relief in his eyes, of hunger, of fear,
of so many burdens. He gave a great sigh and she smiled a warmer
smile than she was wont, remembrance of a brighter world.
“Play for me,” she wished him.
He played for her then, idly and softly, heart-healing songs,
and slept again, for bright day in Ealdwood counseled sleep, when
the sun burned its warmth through the tangled branches and brambles
and the air hung still, nothing breathing, least of all the wind.
Arafel drowsed too, at peace in mortal Eald for the first time
since many a tree had grown. The touch of the mortal sun did that
kindness for her, a benison she had all but forgotten.
But as she slept she dreamed, and there were halls in that
vision, of cold gray stone.
In that dark dream she had a Man’s body, heavy and reeking
of wine and ugly memories, such a dark fierceness she would gladly
have fled it running if she might. She felt the hate, she felt the
weight of human frame, the reeling unsteadiness of strong
drink.
He had had an unwilling wife, had Evald of Caer
Wiell—Meara of Dun na h-Eoin was her name; he had a small son
who huddled afraid and away from him in the upstairs of this great
stone keep, the while Evald drank with his sullen kinsmen and
cursed the day. Evald brooded and he hated, and looked oftentimes
at the empty pegs on his wall where the harp had hung. The song
gnawed at him, and the shame gnawed at him, bitter as the
song—for that harp came from Dun na h-Eoin, as Meara
came.
Treason, it had sung once, and the murder of kings and bards.
Keeping it was his victory.
So Evald sat and drank his ale and heard the echoes of that
harping. And in her dream Arafel’s hand sought the moonstone
on its chain and found it at his throat
She had laid a virtue on it in giving it, that he could neither
lose it nor destroy it. Now she offered him better dreams and more
kindly as he nodded, for it had that power. She would have given
him peace and mended all that was awry in him, drawing him back and
back to Eald. But he made bitter mock of any kindness, hating all
that he did not comprehend.
“No,” whispered Arafel, grieving, dreaming still
before that fire in Caer Wiell. She would have made the hand put
the stone off that foul neck; but she had no power against the
virtue she herself had given it, so far, so wrapped in humankind,
while he would not. And Evald possessed what he owned, so
fiercely and with such jealousy it cramped the muscles and stifled
the breath.
Most of all he hated what he did not have and could not have;
and the heart of it was the harper and the respect of those about
him and his lust for Dun na h-Eoin.
So she had erred, and knew it. She tried to reason within this
strange, closed mind. It was impossible. The heart was almost
without love, and what little it had ever been given it folded in
upon itself lest what it possessed escape.
He had betrayed his King, murdered his kinsmen, and sat in a
stolen hall with a wife who despised him. These were the truths
which gnawed at him in his darkness, in the stone mass which was
Caer Wiell.
Of these he dreamed, and clenched the stone tightly in his fist,
and would never let it go: this was all he understood of
power—to hold, and not let go.
“Why?” asked Arafel of Fionn that night, when the
moon shed light on the Ealdwood and the land was quiet, no ill
thing near them, no cloud above them. “Why does he seek
you?” Her dreams had told her Evald’s truth, but she
sensed another in the harper.
Fionn shrugged, his young eyes for a moment aged; and he
gathered his harp against him. “This,” he said.
“You said it was yours. He called you thief. What then did
you steal?”
“It is mine.” He settled it in his arms, touched the
strings and brought forth melody. “It hung in his hall so
long he thought it was his, and the strings were cut and
dead.”
“And how did it come to him?”
Fionn rippled out a somber note and his face grew darker.
“It was my father’s and his father’s before him,
and they harped in Dun na h-Eoin before the Kings. It is old, this
harp.”
“Ah,” she said, “yes, it is old, and one made
it who knew his craft. A harp for kings. But how did it come
to Evald’s keeping?”
The fair head bowed over the harp and his hands coaxed sound
from it, answerless.
“I’ve given a price,” she said, “to keep
him from it and from you. Will you not give back an
answer?”
The sound burst into softness. “It was my father’s.
Evald hanged him in Dun na h-Eoin, in the court when it burned.
Because of songs my father made, for truth he sang, how men the
King trusted were not what they seemed. Evald was the least of that
company, not great; petty even in that great a wrong. When the King
died, when Dun na h-Eoin was burning, my father harped them one
last song. But he fell into their hands and so to
Evald’s—dead or living, I never knew. Evald hanged him
from the tree in the court and took the harp of Dun na h-Eoin for
his own. He hung it on his own wall in Caer Wiell for mock of my
father and the King. So it was never his.”
“A king’s own harper.”
Fionn never looked at her and never ceased to play. “Ah,
worse things he has done. But that was seven years ago. And so I
came, when I was grown—wandering the roads and harping in all
the halls. Last of all to Caer Wiell. Last of all to him. All this
winter I gave Evald songs he liked. But at winter’s end I
came down to the hall at night and mended the old harp. So I
fled over the walls. From the hill I gave it voice and a song he
remembered. For that he hunts me. And beyond that there is no more
to tell.”
Then softly Fionn sang, of humankind and wolves, and that song
was bitter. Arafel shuddered to hear it, and quickly bade him
cease, for mind to mind with her in troubled dreams Evald heard and
tossed, and waked starting in sweat.
“Sing more kindly now,” she said. “More
kindly. It was never made for hate, this harp, this gift of my folk
to the Kings of Men. There were such gifts once long and long ago,
did you not know? It sounds through all the realms of Eald, mine
and thine and places far darker. Never sing dark songs. Harp me
brighter things. Sing me sun and moon and laughing, sing me the
lightest song you know.”
“I know children’s songs,” he said doubtfully.
“Or walking songs. The great songs—well, it seems an
age for dark ones.”
“Then sing the little ones,” she said, “the
small ones that make Men laugh—oh, I have need to laugh,
harper, that most of all.”
Fionn did so, while the moon climbed above the trees, and Arafel
recalled elder-day songs which the world had not heard in long
years, sang them sweetly. Fionn listened and caught up the words in
his strings, until the tears ran down his face for joy.
There could be no harm in Ealdwood in that hour: the spirits of
latter earth which skulked and strove and haunted Men fled
elsewhere, finding nothing in this place that they knew; and the
old shadows slipped away trembling, for they remembered.
But now and again the elvish song faltered, for there came a
touch of ill and smallness into Arafel’s own mind, a cold
piercing as the iron, bringing thoughts of hate, which she had
never held so close.
Then she laughed, breaking the spell, and put it from her. She
bent herself to teach the harper songs which she herself had almost
forgotten, conscious the while that elsewhere, down in Caerbourne
vale, on the hill of Caer Wiell, a Man’s body tossed in
sweaty dreams which seemed constantly to mock him, with sounds of
eldritch harping that stirred echoes and sleeping ghosts.
With the dawn, she and Fionn rose and walked a time, and shared
food, and drank at a cold, clear spring she knew, until the
sun’s hot eye fell upon them and cast its numbing spell on
all the Ealdwood.
Then Fionn slept in innocence, while Arafel fought the sleep
which came to her. Dreams were in that sleep, her time to dream
while he should wake, Evald, the lord in the valley, and
those dreams would not stay at bay, not as her eyes grew heavy and
the midmorning air thickened with urging sleep. They pressed at her
more and more strongly. The Man’s strong legs bestrode a
great brute horse, and his hands plied the whip and his feet the
spurs, hurting it cruelly. She dreamed the noise of hounds and
bunt, a coursing of woods and hedges and the bright spurt of blood
on dappled hide—Evald sought blood to wipe out blood, because
the harping still rang in his mind, and he remembered . . . harper, and hall, and the
harper who sang the truth of how he served his king. He hunted
deer and thought other things. She shuddered at the killing her
own hands did, and at the fear that gathered thickly about the
valley lord, reflected in his comrades’ eyes, reflected in
his wife’s and son’s pale faces when he came riding
home again with deer’s blood on his clothes.
It was better that night, when the waking was Arafel’s and her
harper’s, and sweet songs banished fear and dreams. But even
then Arafel recalled and grieved, and at times the cold came so
heavily on her that her hand would steal to her throat where the
moongreen stone had hung. Her eyes brimmed once suddenly with
tears. Fionn saw that, and tried to sing her merry songs instead.
They failed, and the music died.
“Teach me another
song,” he begged of her, attempting distraction. “No
harper ever had such songs. And will you not play for
me?”
“I have no art,” she said, for the last true harper
of her own folk had gone long ago to the sea. The answer was not
all truth. Once she had played. But there was no more music in her
hands, none since the last of her folk had gone and she had willed
to stay, loving this woods too
well in spite of Men. “Play,” she asked of Fionn,
and tried desperately to smile, though the iron closed about her
heart and the valley lord raged at the nightmare, waking in sweat,
ghost-ridden.
It was that human song which Fionn had played in his despair on
the hillside, bright and defiant that it was: Eald rang with it;
and that night the lord Evald did not sleep again, but sat
shivering and wrapped in furs before his hearth, his hand clenched
in hate on the stone which he possessed and would not, though it
killed him, let go.
But Arafel quietly began to sing, a song of elder earth unheard
since the world had dimmed. The harper took up the tune, which sang
of earth and shores and water, the last great journey, at
Men’s coming and the changing of the world. Fionn wept while
he played, and Arafel smiled sadly and at last fell silent, for it
was the last of all elvish songs. Her heart had gone gray and
cold.
The sun returned at last, but Arafel had no will now to eat or
rest, only to sit grieving, because she had lost her peace. She
would have been glad now to have fled the shadow-shifting way back
into otherwhere, to her own fair moon and softer sunlight. She
might have persuaded the harper to come with her now. She thought
now perhaps he could find the way. But now there was a portion of
her heart in pawn, and she could not even take herself away from
this world: she was too heavily bound to thoughts of it. She fell
to mourning and despair, and often pressed her hand where the stone
should rest. It was time, the shadows whispered, that Eald should
end. She held in ancient stubbornness. And she felt some feyness on
her, that many things together had gone amiss, that even on her the
harp had power.
He hunted again, did Evald of Caer Wiell, now that the sun was
up. Sleepless, driven mad by dreams, he whipped his folk out of the
hold as he did his hounds, out to the margin of the Ealdwood, to
harry the creatures of the woods’ edge—having guessed
well the source of his luck and the harping in his dreams. He
brought fire and axes across the Caerbourne’s dark flood,
meaning to fell the old trees one by one until all was dead and
bare.
The wood muttered now with whisperings and angers. A wall of
cloud rolled down from the north on Ealdwood and all deep
Caerdale, dimming the sun. A wind sighed in the faces of the Men,
so that no torch was set to wood for fear of fire turning back on
the hold itself; but axes rang, all the same, that day and the
next. The clouds gathered thicker and the winds blew colder, making
the Ealdwood dim again and dank. Arafel still managed to smile by
night, hearing the harper’s songs. But every stroke of the
axes by day made her shudder, and while Fionn slept by snatches,
the iron about her heart grew constantly closer. The wound in the
Ealdwood grew day by day, and the valley lord was coming: she knew
it well.
And at last there remained no rest at all, by day or night.
She sat then with her head bowed beneath the clouded moon, and
Fionn was powerless to cheer her. He sat and regarded her with deep
despair, and reached and touched her hand for comfort.
She said no word to that offering, but rose and invited the
harper to walk with her awhile. He did so. And vile things stirred
and muttered in the shadow of the thickets and the briers,
whispering malice to the winds, so that often Fionn started aside
and stared and kept close beside her.
Her strength was fading, first that she could not keep these
voices away, and then that she could not keep herself from
listening. Ruin, they whispered. All useless. And
at last she sank on Fionn’s arm, eased to the cold ground and
leaned her head against the bark of a gnarled and dying tree.
“What ails?” he asked, and patted her face and pried
at her clenched and empty fingers, opened the fist which hovered
near her throat, as if seeking there the answer. “What ails
you?”
She shrugged and smiled and shuddered, because even now by the
glare of fires and torches in the dark, the axes had begun again,
and she felt the iron like a wound, a great cry going through the
wood as it had gone ceaselessly for days; but he was deaf to it,
being what he was.
“Make a song for me,” she said.
“I have no heart for it.”
“Nor have I,” she said. A sweat stood on her face,
and he wiped at it with his gentle hand and tried to ease her
pain.
And again he caught and unclenched the hand which rested, empty,
at her throat. “The stone,” he said. “Is it
that you miss?”
She shrugged, and turned her head, for the axes then seemed loud
and near. He looked that way too—and glanced back deaf and
puzzled, to gaze into her eyes.
“ ’Tis time,” she said. “You have to be
on your way this morning, as soon as there’s sun enough. The
New Forest will hide you after all.”
“And leave
you? Is that what you mean?”
She smiled, touched his anxious face. “I’ve paid
enough.”
“How paid? What did you pay? What was it you gave
away?”
“Dreams,” she said. “Only that. And all of
that” Her hands shook terribly, and a blackness came on her
heart too miserable to bear: it was hate, and aimed at him and at
herself and all that lived; and it was harder and harder to
fend away. “Evil has it. He would do you hurt, and I would
dream that too. Harper, it’s time to go.”
“Why would you give such a thing?” Great tears
started from his eyes. “Was it worth such a cost, my
harping?”
“Why, well worth it,” she said, and managed such a
laugh as she had left to laugh, that shattered all the evil for a
moment and left her clean. “I have remembered how to
sing.”
He snatched up the harp and ran, breaking branches and tearing
flesh in his headlong haste, but not, she realized in horror, not
the way he ought—but back again, to Caerdale.
She cried out her dismay and seized at branches to pull herself
to her feet; she could in no wise follow. Her limbs which had been
quick to run beneath this moon or the other were leaden, and her
breath came hard. Brambles caught and held with all but mindful
malice, and dark things which had never had power in her presence
whispered loudly now, of murder.
And elsewhere the wolf-lord with his men drove at the forest
with great ringing blows, the poison of iron. The heavy human body
which she sometime wore seemed hers again, and the moonstone was
prisoned near a heart that beat with hate.
She tried the more to make haste, and could not. She looked
helplessly through Evald’s narrow eyes and saw—saw the young
harper break through the thickets near them. Weapons lifted, bows
and axes. Hounds bayed and lunged at leashes in the firelight
Fionn came, nothing hesitating, bringing the harp, and himself.
“A trade,” she heard him say. “The stone for the
harp.”
There was such hate in Evald’s heart, and such fear, it
was hard to breathe. She felt a pain to the depth of her as
Evald’s coarse fingers pawed at the stone. She felt his fear,
felt his loathing of the stone. Nothing would he truly let go. But
this—this, he abhorred, and was fierce in his joy to lose
it.
“Come,” the lord Evald said, and held the stone
dangling and spinning before him, so that for that moment the hate
was far and cold.
Another hand took it then, and very gentle it was, and very full
of love. She felt the sudden draught of strength and
desperation—she sprang up then, to run, to save—
But pain stabbed through her heart, with one last ringing of the
harp, with such an ebbing out of love and grief that she cried
aloud, and stumbled, blind, dead in that part of her.
She did not cease to run; and she ran now that shadow-way, for
the heaviness was gone. Across meadows, under that other light she
sped, and gathered up all that she had left behind, burst out again
in the blink of an eye and elsewhere.
Horses shied in the dark dawning and dogs barked; for now she
did not care to be what suited men’s eyes. Bright as the moon
she broke among them, and in her hand was a sharp silver sword, to
meet with iron.
Harp and harper lay together, sword-riven. She saw the
underlings start away from her and cared nothing for them; but
Evald she sought, lifted that fragile silver blade. Evald cursed at
her, drove spurs into his horse and rode down at her, sword
swinging, shivering the winds with a horrid sweep of iron. The
horse screamed and shied; he cursed and reined the beast, and drove
it for her again. But this time the blow was hers, a scratch that
made him shriek with rage.
She fled at once. He pursued. It was his nature that he must.
She might have fled elsewhere and deceived him, but she would not.
She darted and dodged ahead of the great horse, and it broke down
the brush and the thorns and panted after, hard-ridden.
Shadows gathered, stirring and urgent on this side and on that,
who gibbered and rejoiced for the way the chase was tending, to the
woods’ blackest heart—for some of them had been Men;
and some had known the wolf’s justice, and had come by that to what
they were. They reached, these shadows, but durst not touch him:
she would not have it so. Over all the trees bowed and groaned in
the winds and the leaves went flying as clouds took back the dawn
in storm: thunder in the heavens and thunder of hooves below,
cracks of brush scattering the shadows.
Suddenly in the dark of a hollow she whirled, flung back her
dimming cloak and the light gleamed suddenly: the horse shied up
and fell, casting Evald sprawling among the wet leaves. The shaken
beast scrambled up and evaded its master’s reaching hands and
his threats, thundered away on the moist earth, breaking branches
as it went, splashing across some hidden stream in the dark, and
then the shadows chuckled. Arafel stood still, fully in his world,
moonbright and silver. Evald cursed, shifted that great black sword
of his in his hand, which bore a scratch now that must trouble him.
He shrieked with hate and slashed.
She laughed and stepped into otherwhere as iron passed where she
had stood, shifted back again and fled yet farther, letting him
pursue until he stumbled with exhaustion and sobbed and fell in the
storm-dark, forgetting now his anger, for the whispers came loud,
in the moving of the trees.
“Up,” she bade him, mocking, and stepped again to
here. Thunder rolled above them on the wind, and the sound
of horses and hounds came at distance.
Evald heard the sounds. A joyous malice came into his eyes at
the thought of allies; his face grinned in the lightnings as he
gathered his sword.
She laughed too, elvish-cruel, as the horses neared
them—and Evald’s confident mirth died as the sound came
over them, shattering the heavens, shaking the earth—a Hunt
of a different kind, from a third and other Eald.
Evald cursed and swung the blade, ranged and slashed again, and
she flinched from the almost-kiss of iron. Again he whirled his
great sword, pressing close. She stepped elsewhere, avoiding the
iron, stepped back again with her silver blade set full in his
heart and suddenly here. The lightning cracked—he
shrieked a curse, and, silver-spitted—died.
She did not weep or laugh now; she had known this Man too well
for either. She looked up instead to the clouds, gray wrack
scudding before the storm, where other hunters coursed the winds
and wild cries wailed across belated dawn—heard hounds baying
after something fugitive and wild. She lifted then her fragile
sword, salute to lord Death, who had governance over Men, a
Huntsman too; and many the old comrades the wolf would find
following in his train.
Then the sorrow came on her, and she walked the otherwhere path
to the beginning and end of her course, where harp and harper lay,
deserted, the Wolf’s comrades all fled. There was no mending here.
The light was gone from his eyes and the wood of the harp was
shattered.
But in his fingers lay another thing, which gleamed like the
summer moon in his hand.
Clean it was from his keeping, and loved. She gathered the
moonstone to her. The silver chain went again about her neck and
the stone rested where it ought. She bent last of all and kissed
him to his long sleep, fading then to otherwhere.
And the storm grew.
Fionn slept, and waked at last by sunrise, blinking and looking
about him in plain fear that trees might have grown and died of old
age while he slept. His eyes fixed on Arafel last of all and she
laughed in elvish humor, which was gentle if sometimes
cruel. She knew her own look by daylight, which was indeed as rough
as the weed she had named herself. She seemed tanned and thin and
hard-handed, her gray-and-green all cobweb patchwork, and only the
sword stayed true. She sat plaiting her hair to a single silver
braid and smiling sidelong at the harper, who gave her back a
sidelong and anxious glance.
All the earth had grown warm in that morning. The sun did come
here, unclouded on this day. Fionn rubbed the sleep from his eyes
and opening his wallet, began looking for his breakfast.
There seemed very little in it: he shook out a bit of jerky,
looked at it ruefully, then split off a bit of it with his knife
and offered half his breakfast to her—so small a morsel
that, halved, was not enough for a Man, and a haggard and hungry
one at that.
“No,” she said. She had been offended at once by the
smell of it, having no appetite for man-taint, or the flesh of any
poor forest creature. But the offering of it, the desperate
courtesy, had thawed her heart. She brought out food of her own
store, a gift of trees and bees and whatsoever things felt no hurt
at sharing. She gave him a share, and he took it with a desperate
dread and hunger.
“It’s good,” he pronounced quickly and laughed
a little, and finished it all. He licked the very last from his
fingers, and now there was relief in his eyes, of hunger, of fear,
of so many burdens. He gave a great sigh and she smiled a warmer
smile than she was wont, remembrance of a brighter world.
“Play for me,” she wished him.
He played for her then, idly and softly, heart-healing songs,
and slept again, for bright day in Ealdwood counseled sleep, when
the sun burned its warmth through the tangled branches and brambles
and the air hung still, nothing breathing, least of all the wind.
Arafel drowsed too, at peace in mortal Eald for the first time
since many a tree had grown. The touch of the mortal sun did that
kindness for her, a benison she had all but forgotten.
But as she slept she dreamed, and there were halls in that
vision, of cold gray stone.
In that dark dream she had a Man’s body, heavy and reeking
of wine and ugly memories, such a dark fierceness she would gladly
have fled it running if she might. She felt the hate, she felt the
weight of human frame, the reeling unsteadiness of strong
drink.
He had had an unwilling wife, had Evald of Caer
Wiell—Meara of Dun na h-Eoin was her name; he had a small son
who huddled afraid and away from him in the upstairs of this great
stone keep, the while Evald drank with his sullen kinsmen and
cursed the day. Evald brooded and he hated, and looked oftentimes
at the empty pegs on his wall where the harp had hung. The song
gnawed at him, and the shame gnawed at him, bitter as the
song—for that harp came from Dun na h-Eoin, as Meara
came.
Treason, it had sung once, and the murder of kings and bards.
Keeping it was his victory.
So Evald sat and drank his ale and heard the echoes of that
harping. And in her dream Arafel’s hand sought the moonstone
on its chain and found it at his throat
She had laid a virtue on it in giving it, that he could neither
lose it nor destroy it. Now she offered him better dreams and more
kindly as he nodded, for it had that power. She would have given
him peace and mended all that was awry in him, drawing him back and
back to Eald. But he made bitter mock of any kindness, hating all
that he did not comprehend.
“No,” whispered Arafel, grieving, dreaming still
before that fire in Caer Wiell. She would have made the hand put
the stone off that foul neck; but she had no power against the
virtue she herself had given it, so far, so wrapped in humankind,
while he would not. And Evald possessed what he owned, so
fiercely and with such jealousy it cramped the muscles and stifled
the breath.
Most of all he hated what he did not have and could not have;
and the heart of it was the harper and the respect of those about
him and his lust for Dun na h-Eoin.
So she had erred, and knew it. She tried to reason within this
strange, closed mind. It was impossible. The heart was almost
without love, and what little it had ever been given it folded in
upon itself lest what it possessed escape.
He had betrayed his King, murdered his kinsmen, and sat in a
stolen hall with a wife who despised him. These were the truths
which gnawed at him in his darkness, in the stone mass which was
Caer Wiell.
Of these he dreamed, and clenched the stone tightly in his fist,
and would never let it go: this was all he understood of
power—to hold, and not let go.
“Why?” asked Arafel of Fionn that night, when the
moon shed light on the Ealdwood and the land was quiet, no ill
thing near them, no cloud above them. “Why does he seek
you?” Her dreams had told her Evald’s truth, but she
sensed another in the harper.
Fionn shrugged, his young eyes for a moment aged; and he
gathered his harp against him. “This,” he said.
“You said it was yours. He called you thief. What then did
you steal?”
“It is mine.” He settled it in his arms, touched the
strings and brought forth melody. “It hung in his hall so
long he thought it was his, and the strings were cut and
dead.”
“And how did it come to him?”
Fionn rippled out a somber note and his face grew darker.
“It was my father’s and his father’s before him,
and they harped in Dun na h-Eoin before the Kings. It is old, this
harp.”
“Ah,” she said, “yes, it is old, and one made
it who knew his craft. A harp for kings. But how did it come
to Evald’s keeping?”
The fair head bowed over the harp and his hands coaxed sound
from it, answerless.
“I’ve given a price,” she said, “to keep
him from it and from you. Will you not give back an
answer?”
The sound burst into softness. “It was my father’s.
Evald hanged him in Dun na h-Eoin, in the court when it burned.
Because of songs my father made, for truth he sang, how men the
King trusted were not what they seemed. Evald was the least of that
company, not great; petty even in that great a wrong. When the King
died, when Dun na h-Eoin was burning, my father harped them one
last song. But he fell into their hands and so to
Evald’s—dead or living, I never knew. Evald hanged him
from the tree in the court and took the harp of Dun na h-Eoin for
his own. He hung it on his own wall in Caer Wiell for mock of my
father and the King. So it was never his.”
“A king’s own harper.”
Fionn never looked at her and never ceased to play. “Ah,
worse things he has done. But that was seven years ago. And so I
came, when I was grown—wandering the roads and harping in all
the halls. Last of all to Caer Wiell. Last of all to him. All this
winter I gave Evald songs he liked. But at winter’s end I
came down to the hall at night and mended the old harp. So I
fled over the walls. From the hill I gave it voice and a song he
remembered. For that he hunts me. And beyond that there is no more
to tell.”
Then softly Fionn sang, of humankind and wolves, and that song
was bitter. Arafel shuddered to hear it, and quickly bade him
cease, for mind to mind with her in troubled dreams Evald heard and
tossed, and waked starting in sweat.
“Sing more kindly now,” she said. “More
kindly. It was never made for hate, this harp, this gift of my folk
to the Kings of Men. There were such gifts once long and long ago,
did you not know? It sounds through all the realms of Eald, mine
and thine and places far darker. Never sing dark songs. Harp me
brighter things. Sing me sun and moon and laughing, sing me the
lightest song you know.”
“I know children’s songs,” he said doubtfully.
“Or walking songs. The great songs—well, it seems an
age for dark ones.”
“Then sing the little ones,” she said, “the
small ones that make Men laugh—oh, I have need to laugh,
harper, that most of all.”
Fionn did so, while the moon climbed above the trees, and Arafel
recalled elder-day songs which the world had not heard in long
years, sang them sweetly. Fionn listened and caught up the words in
his strings, until the tears ran down his face for joy.
There could be no harm in Ealdwood in that hour: the spirits of
latter earth which skulked and strove and haunted Men fled
elsewhere, finding nothing in this place that they knew; and the
old shadows slipped away trembling, for they remembered.
But now and again the elvish song faltered, for there came a
touch of ill and smallness into Arafel’s own mind, a cold
piercing as the iron, bringing thoughts of hate, which she had
never held so close.
Then she laughed, breaking the spell, and put it from her. She
bent herself to teach the harper songs which she herself had almost
forgotten, conscious the while that elsewhere, down in Caerbourne
vale, on the hill of Caer Wiell, a Man’s body tossed in
sweaty dreams which seemed constantly to mock him, with sounds of
eldritch harping that stirred echoes and sleeping ghosts.
With the dawn, she and Fionn rose and walked a time, and shared
food, and drank at a cold, clear spring she knew, until the
sun’s hot eye fell upon them and cast its numbing spell on
all the Ealdwood.
Then Fionn slept in innocence, while Arafel fought the sleep
which came to her. Dreams were in that sleep, her time to dream
while he should wake, Evald, the lord in the valley, and
those dreams would not stay at bay, not as her eyes grew heavy and
the midmorning air thickened with urging sleep. They pressed at her
more and more strongly. The Man’s strong legs bestrode a
great brute horse, and his hands plied the whip and his feet the
spurs, hurting it cruelly. She dreamed the noise of hounds and
bunt, a coursing of woods and hedges and the bright spurt of blood
on dappled hide—Evald sought blood to wipe out blood, because
the harping still rang in his mind, and he remembered . . . harper, and hall, and the
harper who sang the truth of how he served his king. He hunted
deer and thought other things. She shuddered at the killing her
own hands did, and at the fear that gathered thickly about the
valley lord, reflected in his comrades’ eyes, reflected in
his wife’s and son’s pale faces when he came riding
home again with deer’s blood on his clothes.
It was better that night, when the waking was Arafel’s and her
harper’s, and sweet songs banished fear and dreams. But even
then Arafel recalled and grieved, and at times the cold came so
heavily on her that her hand would steal to her throat where the
moongreen stone had hung. Her eyes brimmed once suddenly with
tears. Fionn saw that, and tried to sing her merry songs instead.
They failed, and the music died.
“Teach me another
song,” he begged of her, attempting distraction. “No
harper ever had such songs. And will you not play for
me?”
“I have no art,” she said, for the last true harper
of her own folk had gone long ago to the sea. The answer was not
all truth. Once she had played. But there was no more music in her
hands, none since the last of her folk had gone and she had willed
to stay, loving this woods too
well in spite of Men. “Play,” she asked of Fionn,
and tried desperately to smile, though the iron closed about her
heart and the valley lord raged at the nightmare, waking in sweat,
ghost-ridden.
It was that human song which Fionn had played in his despair on
the hillside, bright and defiant that it was: Eald rang with it;
and that night the lord Evald did not sleep again, but sat
shivering and wrapped in furs before his hearth, his hand clenched
in hate on the stone which he possessed and would not, though it
killed him, let go.
But Arafel quietly began to sing, a song of elder earth unheard
since the world had dimmed. The harper took up the tune, which sang
of earth and shores and water, the last great journey, at
Men’s coming and the changing of the world. Fionn wept while
he played, and Arafel smiled sadly and at last fell silent, for it
was the last of all elvish songs. Her heart had gone gray and
cold.
The sun returned at last, but Arafel had no will now to eat or
rest, only to sit grieving, because she had lost her peace. She
would have been glad now to have fled the shadow-shifting way back
into otherwhere, to her own fair moon and softer sunlight. She
might have persuaded the harper to come with her now. She thought
now perhaps he could find the way. But now there was a portion of
her heart in pawn, and she could not even take herself away from
this world: she was too heavily bound to thoughts of it. She fell
to mourning and despair, and often pressed her hand where the stone
should rest. It was time, the shadows whispered, that Eald should
end. She held in ancient stubbornness. And she felt some feyness on
her, that many things together had gone amiss, that even on her the
harp had power.
He hunted again, did Evald of Caer Wiell, now that the sun was
up. Sleepless, driven mad by dreams, he whipped his folk out of the
hold as he did his hounds, out to the margin of the Ealdwood, to
harry the creatures of the woods’ edge—having guessed
well the source of his luck and the harping in his dreams. He
brought fire and axes across the Caerbourne’s dark flood,
meaning to fell the old trees one by one until all was dead and
bare.
The wood muttered now with whisperings and angers. A wall of
cloud rolled down from the north on Ealdwood and all deep
Caerdale, dimming the sun. A wind sighed in the faces of the Men,
so that no torch was set to wood for fear of fire turning back on
the hold itself; but axes rang, all the same, that day and the
next. The clouds gathered thicker and the winds blew colder, making
the Ealdwood dim again and dank. Arafel still managed to smile by
night, hearing the harper’s songs. But every stroke of the
axes by day made her shudder, and while Fionn slept by snatches,
the iron about her heart grew constantly closer. The wound in the
Ealdwood grew day by day, and the valley lord was coming: she knew
it well.
And at last there remained no rest at all, by day or night.
She sat then with her head bowed beneath the clouded moon, and
Fionn was powerless to cheer her. He sat and regarded her with deep
despair, and reached and touched her hand for comfort.
She said no word to that offering, but rose and invited the
harper to walk with her awhile. He did so. And vile things stirred
and muttered in the shadow of the thickets and the briers,
whispering malice to the winds, so that often Fionn started aside
and stared and kept close beside her.
Her strength was fading, first that she could not keep these
voices away, and then that she could not keep herself from
listening. Ruin, they whispered. All useless. And
at last she sank on Fionn’s arm, eased to the cold ground and
leaned her head against the bark of a gnarled and dying tree.
“What ails?” he asked, and patted her face and pried
at her clenched and empty fingers, opened the fist which hovered
near her throat, as if seeking there the answer. “What ails
you?”
She shrugged and smiled and shuddered, because even now by the
glare of fires and torches in the dark, the axes had begun again,
and she felt the iron like a wound, a great cry going through the
wood as it had gone ceaselessly for days; but he was deaf to it,
being what he was.
“Make a song for me,” she said.
“I have no heart for it.”
“Nor have I,” she said. A sweat stood on her face,
and he wiped at it with his gentle hand and tried to ease her
pain.
And again he caught and unclenched the hand which rested, empty,
at her throat. “The stone,” he said. “Is it
that you miss?”
She shrugged, and turned her head, for the axes then seemed loud
and near. He looked that way too—and glanced back deaf and
puzzled, to gaze into her eyes.
“ ’Tis time,” she said. “You have to be
on your way this morning, as soon as there’s sun enough. The
New Forest will hide you after all.”
“And leave
you? Is that what you mean?”
She smiled, touched his anxious face. “I’ve paid
enough.”
“How paid? What did you pay? What was it you gave
away?”
“Dreams,” she said. “Only that. And all of
that” Her hands shook terribly, and a blackness came on her
heart too miserable to bear: it was hate, and aimed at him and at
herself and all that lived; and it was harder and harder to
fend away. “Evil has it. He would do you hurt, and I would
dream that too. Harper, it’s time to go.”
“Why would you give such a thing?” Great tears
started from his eyes. “Was it worth such a cost, my
harping?”
“Why, well worth it,” she said, and managed such a
laugh as she had left to laugh, that shattered all the evil for a
moment and left her clean. “I have remembered how to
sing.”
He snatched up the harp and ran, breaking branches and tearing
flesh in his headlong haste, but not, she realized in horror, not
the way he ought—but back again, to Caerdale.
She cried out her dismay and seized at branches to pull herself
to her feet; she could in no wise follow. Her limbs which had been
quick to run beneath this moon or the other were leaden, and her
breath came hard. Brambles caught and held with all but mindful
malice, and dark things which had never had power in her presence
whispered loudly now, of murder.
And elsewhere the wolf-lord with his men drove at the forest
with great ringing blows, the poison of iron. The heavy human body
which she sometime wore seemed hers again, and the moonstone was
prisoned near a heart that beat with hate.
She tried the more to make haste, and could not. She looked
helplessly through Evald’s narrow eyes and saw—saw the young
harper break through the thickets near them. Weapons lifted, bows
and axes. Hounds bayed and lunged at leashes in the firelight
Fionn came, nothing hesitating, bringing the harp, and himself.
“A trade,” she heard him say. “The stone for the
harp.”
There was such hate in Evald’s heart, and such fear, it
was hard to breathe. She felt a pain to the depth of her as
Evald’s coarse fingers pawed at the stone. She felt his fear,
felt his loathing of the stone. Nothing would he truly let go. But
this—this, he abhorred, and was fierce in his joy to lose
it.
“Come,” the lord Evald said, and held the stone
dangling and spinning before him, so that for that moment the hate
was far and cold.
Another hand took it then, and very gentle it was, and very full
of love. She felt the sudden draught of strength and
desperation—she sprang up then, to run, to save—
But pain stabbed through her heart, with one last ringing of the
harp, with such an ebbing out of love and grief that she cried
aloud, and stumbled, blind, dead in that part of her.
She did not cease to run; and she ran now that shadow-way, for
the heaviness was gone. Across meadows, under that other light she
sped, and gathered up all that she had left behind, burst out again
in the blink of an eye and elsewhere.
Horses shied in the dark dawning and dogs barked; for now she
did not care to be what suited men’s eyes. Bright as the moon
she broke among them, and in her hand was a sharp silver sword, to
meet with iron.
Harp and harper lay together, sword-riven. She saw the
underlings start away from her and cared nothing for them; but
Evald she sought, lifted that fragile silver blade. Evald cursed at
her, drove spurs into his horse and rode down at her, sword
swinging, shivering the winds with a horrid sweep of iron. The
horse screamed and shied; he cursed and reined the beast, and drove
it for her again. But this time the blow was hers, a scratch that
made him shriek with rage.
She fled at once. He pursued. It was his nature that he must.
She might have fled elsewhere and deceived him, but she would not.
She darted and dodged ahead of the great horse, and it broke down
the brush and the thorns and panted after, hard-ridden.
Shadows gathered, stirring and urgent on this side and on that,
who gibbered and rejoiced for the way the chase was tending, to the
woods’ blackest heart—for some of them had been Men;
and some had known the wolf’s justice, and had come by that to what
they were. They reached, these shadows, but durst not touch him:
she would not have it so. Over all the trees bowed and groaned in
the winds and the leaves went flying as clouds took back the dawn
in storm: thunder in the heavens and thunder of hooves below,
cracks of brush scattering the shadows.
Suddenly in the dark of a hollow she whirled, flung back her
dimming cloak and the light gleamed suddenly: the horse shied up
and fell, casting Evald sprawling among the wet leaves. The shaken
beast scrambled up and evaded its master’s reaching hands and
his threats, thundered away on the moist earth, breaking branches
as it went, splashing across some hidden stream in the dark, and
then the shadows chuckled. Arafel stood still, fully in his world,
moonbright and silver. Evald cursed, shifted that great black sword
of his in his hand, which bore a scratch now that must trouble him.
He shrieked with hate and slashed.
She laughed and stepped into otherwhere as iron passed where she
had stood, shifted back again and fled yet farther, letting him
pursue until he stumbled with exhaustion and sobbed and fell in the
storm-dark, forgetting now his anger, for the whispers came loud,
in the moving of the trees.
“Up,” she bade him, mocking, and stepped again to
here. Thunder rolled above them on the wind, and the sound
of horses and hounds came at distance.
Evald heard the sounds. A joyous malice came into his eyes at
the thought of allies; his face grinned in the lightnings as he
gathered his sword.
She laughed too, elvish-cruel, as the horses neared
them—and Evald’s confident mirth died as the sound came
over them, shattering the heavens, shaking the earth—a Hunt
of a different kind, from a third and other Eald.
Evald cursed and swung the blade, ranged and slashed again, and
she flinched from the almost-kiss of iron. Again he whirled his
great sword, pressing close. She stepped elsewhere, avoiding the
iron, stepped back again with her silver blade set full in his
heart and suddenly here. The lightning cracked—he
shrieked a curse, and, silver-spitted—died.
She did not weep or laugh now; she had known this Man too well
for either. She looked up instead to the clouds, gray wrack
scudding before the storm, where other hunters coursed the winds
and wild cries wailed across belated dawn—heard hounds baying
after something fugitive and wild. She lifted then her fragile
sword, salute to lord Death, who had governance over Men, a
Huntsman too; and many the old comrades the wolf would find
following in his train.
Then the sorrow came on her, and she walked the otherwhere path
to the beginning and end of her course, where harp and harper lay,
deserted, the Wolf’s comrades all fled. There was no mending here.
The light was gone from his eyes and the wood of the harp was
shattered.
But in his fingers lay another thing, which gleamed like the
summer moon in his hand.
Clean it was from his keeping, and loved. She gathered the
moonstone to her. The silver chain went again about her neck and
the stone rested where it ought. She bent last of all and kissed
him to his long sleep, fading then to otherwhere.
And the storm grew.