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## FOURTEEN

### Caer Wiell

They brought him as a prisoner into the torchlit hall, with the sounds of battle dying. They had handled him ungently, but it was their lord’s own ring upon his finger, and they had changed their manner quickly enough when he insisted to show them that. “Sit,” they told him now, showing him a bench, and he was only too glad to do so, weary as he was.

Another came—Old wolf, Ciaran thought at that grim broad face, besweated and flushed with battle-heat He straightened himself at once when that man came in with more men-at-arms behind him. He set himself most carefully on his feet. “Scaga?” he ventured, for he was very like his son, a huge man and red-haired. “I come from the King; and from your lord.”

“Let me see this ring,” Scaga said; and Ciaran thrust out his hand, which the old warrior took roughly, turning the ring to the firelight. Scaga let it go again, his scarred face still scowling.

“I have a message,” Ciaran said, “for your lady’s ears.” And became he could guess the keep’s want of hope: “Good news,” be urged on Scaga, though he was charged to take it higher.

“Then it comes welcome, if true.” Scaga turned his face toward the open door, where sounds of battle had much faded, then looked back again, looked him up and down. “How came you here?”

“My message,” he said, “is for lord Evald’s lady.”

Scaga still frowned; it might be the nature of his face, or of his heart: this was, Ciaran thought, a fell man to cross. But Evald trusted him as steward, in a hold beset with enemies: he was then a man of great worth and faithfulness.

“With neither armor,” said Scaga, “nor weapon . . . How came you into the courtyard?”

“Your lord’s ring,” Ciaran insisted. “I speak only to your lady.” He felt the stone which lay hidden within his collar, a presence, a warmth which seemed greater than natural. It frightened him, with that against his heart and the like of Scaga staring into his eyes, full of suspicions.

“You shall go to her,” Scaga said, and motioned to the stairs. “Boy!” he called. “See my lady roused.”

A lad scampered up the steps at a run. Ciaran shivered in weariness and cold, for wind blew through the door. He wished desperately for a cup of ale, for a place to lie down and rest himself.

And there was none, for Scaga looked on him with narrowed eyes and offered nothing of hospitality—motioned men-at-arms to go before and behind him and led him up the steps to another hall within Caer Wiell’s thick walls, which at least was warmer, with a fire blazing in the hearth.

“Beware,” a voice seemed to whisper in his hearing, and it startled him. He wondered could all the rest hear it; but the others did not turn: it was for him alone. “Beware this hall. They do not love elven-kind. And do not show them the stone.”

A stone wolf’s-head was set above the fireplace. It seemed he had seen it before; that he had sat here, a man, and that a harp should hang so, upon the rightward wall—he looked, and was dismayed to find a harp hanging there, just where he had thought it should. He had then dreamed this place.

Or she had. There was a great scarred table once had sat a chair, before the fire. He blinked it clear, went to it, leaned there wearily against the table, while weary men guarded him.

And women came, so soon that he supposed they had not been asleep. Surely they had not been, with the enemy hurling fire against the hold. They came from the inner door which opened on this hall, one woman older and somewhat grayed. This was Meredydd, he surmised, Evald’s own lady; and Meredydd the stone whispered in his heart, confirming it. The other of the twain was young, bright of hair—and that name came whispering through his heart as well: Branwyn. Branwyn. Branwyn. He stared without meaning to, for so much of anguish and of anger came whispering with that name. This Branwyn stopped and stared at him, blue eyes seemed bewildered and innocent of such pain.

“Your message,” Scaga’s harsh voice insisted.

Ciaran looked at Lady Meredydd instead, took a step toward her, but hands moved to weapons about him, and he did not go nearer. He tugged the ring from off his finger and gave it over to Scaga, who gave it to the lady. She took the ring as something precious, looked on it closely, lifted anxious eyes. “My husband,” she asked of him.

“Well, lady, he is well. I bring his love and my King’s word: Hold, defend, and do not be deceived by any lies of the enemy or accept any terms. The King has won a great battle at Dun na h-Eoin, and the enemy hopes for this valley as their last holding place. Only hold this tower, and the King and your lord will come as soon as possible against their backs. They know this. Now you do.”

“Now bless your news,” the lady wept, and even Scaga’s frown was eased. Meredydd came and offered her hands to him in welcome, but he felt Scaga’s heavy hand on his shoulder, pulling him away.

“There is more to hear,” said Scaga. “This man came over the walls somehow, with no armor, no arms—unmarked through the lines outside. There are questions should still be asked, my lady, however good and fair the counsel seems. I beg you, ask him how he came.”

For a moment doubt shadowed the lady’s eyes.

“My name is Ciaran,” he said, “Lord Ciaran of Caer Donn is my father. And as to how I came—lightly, as you see; by stealth. While your enemies struck at the gates—I came another way. I shall show you. But armed men could not take it.”

He was not used to lies. He felt fouled, wounded when the lady pressed his hands. “You will show us where,” Scaga said, and gave him in his turn a bearish embrace, gazed at him with emotion welling up—hope, it might be, where hope had been scant for them before. Branwyn too came and kissed his cheek; and weapons were done away as men came at last to clap him on the back and to hug one another for joy. A cheer lifted in the hall, and there was such desperate happiness—He felt a stirring through the jewel too, a presence, a distressing realization that he had said nothing on his own which ought to have convinced them and so relieved their hearts, but that some strangeness overlay him and his words, making them better than they were.

They gave him wine, and brought him upstairs to a princely room—her lord’s when he was young, the Lady Meredydd said; and true, everything there showed some woman’s love, the fine-pricked stitchery of coverlet and tapestries, the hangings of the bed. Branwyn herself brought a warm rug for the floor, and maids brought water for washing, while Lady Meredydd with her own hands brought him bread hot from the morning’s baking. He took it gratefully, while the lady and her daughter lingered to ply him with questions, how fared Evald and kinsmen, cousins, friends, men of the hold, a hundred questions during which maids eavesdropped and men-at-arms contrived to listen on pretext of errands. Some few men he knew; sometimes the news was sad and pained him; and most often he knew only a name, or less—but it gave him joy when he could report some loved one safe and well. Scaga’s son was one, for Scaga bent enough to ask. “He is well,” Ciaran said. “He led a good portion of Caer Wiell’s men at Dun na h-Eoin, first of those that broke the shields of the Bradhaeth while lord Evald cut off their retreat. He came out of the battle well enough; he was by lord Evald when we parted, in the King’s own tent.” The old warrior did not smile to hear it, but his eyes were bright.

“He must sleep,” Meredydd declared at last. “Surely he has travelled hard.”

“I fare well enough,” Ciaran said, for he ached after human company, for noise of voices, for all these sights and sounds of humankind.

“Before he sleeps,” said Scaga, “he must show us this weak place in our wall.”

The warmth drained from him. He nodded consent, not knowing what he was to do, but compelled to go. He swallowed a bit of bread gone dry in his throat, drank a last sip of the wine and set the cup down. “Aye,” he said. “Of course. That will not wait.”

Scaga rose, waiting at the door. Ciaran took his leave of the ladies, walked with the old warrior through the hall, his heart beating hard within his breast.

“I do not know if I can find it easily,” he said to prepare his excuse, and hating the lie. “From all the turnings of this place inside . . . I cannot be sure.”

Scaga said nothing, which seemed Scaga’s way. It gave him no comfort And when they had come up on the walls, Ciaran looked about him in deep distress, seeking something to confirm his lie.

“Look east,” the softest of whispers came to him, like the touch of a breeze. “Turn east and look down.”

He walked that way along the battlement, with Scaga treading heavily beside him. He paused at a place and looked down, where the stonework of the walls was oldest and roughest, where here and there brush had rooted itself in the gaps between the stones and man-made walls thrust crazily above the jagged stone of the underlying rocks. Of a sudden his eye picked out a way, weaving from one such foothold to another among brush rooted in the wall, a peril to the hold. “There,” he said. “We are a mountain hold, we of Caer Donn. And I climbed cliffs as a lad. There, do you see, Scaga? There and there and there.”

Scaga nodded. “Aye. That does want clearing, and watching. Our eyes must have been blind to it. A man sees things too often and so not at all: I had not marked how the brush had grown.”

“Rains, perhaps,” Ciaran said hoarsely, but in his heart he knew differently. He shivered, for his wool shirt was not enough against the wind, and felt Scaga’s friendly grip fall upon his shoulder.

“Come. Our thanks, young sir. Come in.”

He walked, glad of the wind-breaking shelter of walls on the one side of the battlements, gazed back as they walked, and suddenly down at an opening out of the walk. The courtyard was below, jammed with livestock and with village folk, a noise which welled up at him thinly, the wail of children and the listless bleating of goats. But it was a well-ordered place, Caer Wiell, and some of the men on the walls were country folk, light-armed, but goodly looking men, quick of eye and brisk about their business. Women were climbing up the inside scaffoldings which gave access to the battlements before the gates, bearing baskets of bread. There was then no hunger here, nor would there ever be thirst, because of the spring which named the hill, out of reach of the enemy. Ciaran felt much cheered by what he saw of the defense, even with the ominous smoke of enemy fires rising before the walls. He walked farther out than Scaga would have had him go, walked the wall to the area of the main gates and looked west.

Then he was less cheered, for the extent of the black ruin before the walls. The grass and fields were burned and trampled into mire. The enemy had carried away their dead and wounded; no corpse was left but the carcasses of slain horses, to draw the black birds; and beyond that trodden ground the hills were seared with fire, villages and farms burned, surely, from here to Caer Damh. The smoke rose in countless plumes from the hills, where a vast host camped, a crescent of smokes from the Caerbourne’s forested verge to the barren hills to the right, that spread itself on the winds and darkened the sky.

The attack could not have been this far advanced when he was on the road, riding from the King. He had passed one night—surely one night—in Eald.

How much of time? he asked that sometime whisper in the stone, feeling uncertainty all about him. How long did you hold me? He was betrayed. He knew it in his worst fears.

The fires would soon grow more and more, as Dryw and the King over the hills drove others into retreat. Or had it happened already? And what more had happened, and what men he just had named living might have died? And what stayed the King from coming?

Hold here. How old was the message, that Scaga was so grim, that lady Meredydd and her daughter caught so desperately at this hope he gave them? And how long had the King delayed to come?

“It seemed the fires had grown in number,” said Scaga out of his silence. “Now we know why.”

“Aye,” Ciaran said, wishing to say nothing at all.

He went back into the tower, and sat in the hall at the table by the fire, victim again of questions from those humbler folk who had not asked them before; and a few common folk who served there came only to look at him with their hopes unspoken in their eyes, and to steal quickly away. He sat there most of that long day, alone some of the hours, and sitting with Scaga in the afternoon, who brought some of his trusted men to question him at length—how great the strength of the enemy, what condition their arms, what number yet might come. He answered what questions he could as wisely as he could, hinting nothing, and was glad when they had gone away.

No more of lies, he wished of Arafel. You have tangled me in lies, more and more of them. They break my heart. What is truth? What should I say to them? Should I make them doubt the very hope I came to give them?

She had no answer for him, or did not hear.

But that evening after supper a young man came and took down the harp from off the wall, and played songs for him and for the ladies. Then he felt a warmth near his heart, a sweet, sad warmth. Then was peace, for the first time in the day. From the enemy there was no stirring, and the pure notes of the harp found another rapt listener: a joy flooded back from the stone, and filled Ciaran’s heart. He smiled.

And looked by chance into Branwyn’s eyes, who smiled too, in her hope. The smile faded to gravity. The eyes stayed upon his, flower-fair.

“No,” a whisper came to him from the depths of the stone.

The blue eyes were nearer, and had a glamor of their own. He gazed entranced while the harper sang.

“Cling to the stone,” the whisper came again, but he had Branwyn’s fair hand within closer reach of his upon the table. He touched her fingers and they clung to his. The harper sang of love, and heroes. Ciaran held her hand for more tangled reasons, that it was of this world, and that it too had power to hold.

At length the harper ceased. Ciaran drew back his hand, lest others remark it, for she was a great lord’s only daughter, however dire the times.

And in time he went alone to his bed in the room which had been Evald’s in his youth, the vast soft bed of broidered hangings. He stripped off his clothing, shivered in the wind which blew in out of the dark, through the slitted window—stripped off all that he wore but the stone on its silver chain and lay down quickly, drawing the heavy quilts over him, tucking up his limbs until he could warm him a spot in the bed. He reached out again to snuff the wick of the lamp on the table, drew the arm quickly back beneath the covers, as dark settled strange shapes over the unfamiliar objects of the borrowed room. There were creakings and movings, from outside and in; a child cried somewhere in the dark, from the courtyard on the other side, far, far away. His own slit of a window faced the river. He heard a distant whisper of leaves or water: wind, he thought; and somewhere hounds belled, a sound greatly out of place in besieged Caer Wiell. He clutched the stone in his hand, drew warmth from it, and no longer heard the dogs.

He dreamed of groves, vast trees; and of a hill. This was Caer Wiell; but he called its name Caer Glas, and there was no well, but a clear spring bubbling out over white stones, flowing unhindered to Airgiod’s pure waters in the vale, and the view was clear and bright toward the Brown Hills. He rode the plain, tall and bearing the same pale stone on his breast—rode among others, with the blowing of horns and flourishing of banners. Arrows came down like silver sleet, and the sullen host before them fled, seeking the mountains, the dark places at the roots of the hills. The Daoine Sidhe warred, and in the sky glittered the jeweled wings of dragons, serpent-shapes passing like storm in the blowing of horns and the clash of arms.

Then were ages of peace, when the pale sun and green moon shone down without change, and harpers sang songs beneath the pale, straight trees.

There came the age of parting, when the world began to change, when Men came, and Men’s gods, for the vile things were driven deep within the hills, and Men found the way now easy. Came bronze, and came iron, and some there were of the Sidhe who abided the killing of trees, small wights who burrowed in the earth close to Men; but the Daoine Sidhe hunted these, in bitter anger.

Yet the world had changed. The fading began, and the heart left them. One by one they fell to the affliction, departing beyond the gray edge of the world. They took no weapons with them; took not even the stones they had treasured—for it was the nature of the fading, that they lost interest in memory, and in dreams, and hung the stones to stay in rain and moonlight to console those still bound to the world. Most parted sadly, some in indirection, simply bewildered; and some in bitter renunciation, for wounded pride.

He felt anger, a power which might have made the hills to quake—Liosliath, the stone whispered in his mind, and he drew breath as if he had not breathed in a long, long age, and looked up and outward, forcing shapes to declare themselves in the mist which had taken the world, trees and stones and the rush of wind and water.

Ciaran waked, caught at the bed on which he lay, all sweating and trembling, for his heart beat in him far too loud. He stared into the shadowed beams above him, wiped the sweat from his face with hands callused and coarser than the hands he had had in his dream, rested them on a body rough with hair and sweating, with the pulse jarring at his ribs—not at all the body he had worn in the dream, slim and shining fair, with the stone aglow with life and light, with bright armor and a slim silver sword which shadows feared and no Sidhe enemy wished to face.

Liosliath, star-crowned, prince of the Daoine Sidhe, the tall fair folk.

And himself, who was earthen, and coarse, and whose power was only that in his arm and his wits.

He shivered, sweating as he was, and tears ran from the edges of his eyes. He tried again to sleep, and dreamed of Arafel, of sunlight and silver, and the phantom deer leaping in and out of shadow, for it was her waking and his night. The pale elven sun shone, blinding, and she walked the banks of Airgiod, up to the point where it faded into mist and nothingness, as near to him as it was easy for her to come.

Kinsman, she hailed him. It was as if she had suddenly turned her face toward him. He waked with a start in his own darkness, and in trembling, put off the stone, laid it and its chain on the table by the bedside, by the lamp. He wished no more such dreams, which tormented him with what he was and was not and could never be, which thrust an elflord into his heart with all the melancholy doom of the fair folk, all their chill love and colder pride. They were dread enemies when stirred: he knew so; and so, he thought, might she be, who had been kind to him.

Kinsman she had hailed him; but it was Liosliath who was her cousin, Liosliath whose cold pride wished to live again, Liosliath, the terrible bright lord whose sword had slain Men.

“A terrible enemy,” a shadow whispered.

And far away, even waking, Arafel cried to him: “The stone, Ciaran!”

He was dreaming then. He was naked and a part of him blew in tatters. There was a forest like the Ealdwood where a wild thing fled, and he was that creature. Limbs rustled, black branches, and even the leaves were black as old sins; the sky was leaden, with a moon like a baleful dead eye.

“Terrible,” it said again, and a wind blew through the inky leaves.

Behind him. It hunted him and he must not look at it, for he was in its land, and if he saw the enemy’s true face it would be real.

“The stone!” a voice wailed on the wind.

He reached for it, straining all his heart into that reaching. It met his fingers, and his hand glowed with that moonbright fire. Shadows yielded, as he retreated out of that third and dreadful Eald. He passed other creatures less fortunate, shadows which cried and pleaded for aid he could not give. Elf prince, some wailed, asking mercy; elf prince, some hissed, spitting venom. He dared not shut his eyes, dared not look.

Then he lay again within walk of stone, and Arafel’s voice was chiding him. He shivered in his borrowed bed, with the stone safe in his fingers. He lay shivering, with sullen day breaking through the windowslit. A chill breeze stirred his hair. Thunder rumbled outside.

He took the cold silver chain in his hands and slipped it again about his neck, lay still a time holding to the stone with both hands, shivering at the flood of elvish memories . . . of old quarrels with this shadow-lord. The courage seemed bled out of him, through the wounds the hounds had made in his soul. He knew himself maimed—maimed forever, in a way which others could not see and he could not forget. The stone must be forever about his neck to shield him, and it was more powerful than he. His hands were cold that clutched it, and would not warm easily; they were mortal, and that jewel was elvish memory—of one who had not loved Men.

He stirred at last, hearing others astir in the keep, the calling of voices one to the other, ordinary voices, recalling him to a world no longer fully his. He rose, his teeth chattering, and pulled on his breeches and went to the windowslit, hugging his arms about him. He saw the muddy hill, the forest verge, wet green leaves and gray sky. Of attackers there was no sign but the marks which had been there before. The rain was nothing but dreary mist. He turned back and sought after his shirt and the rest of his clothing. He tucked the stone within his collar, tied the laces which concealed it at his throat. He dared not leave it . . . ever.

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