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## THIRTEEN

### The Tree of Stones and Swords

She knelt with the rain still dripping off the leaves, a dew upon them both, and very still and pale the intruder lay beneath the mortal moon. Iron tainted him, and yet he had torn through into her forest—if only for a moment; had brought iron there, and Death. She was stirred to anger, and to fear, and to a longing which had not been in her heart since the child had broken it. To have entered her Eald, to have found that very heart of it and to have stolen an elvish sword . . . it was no common thief, this Man, and no common need could have forced him. Perhaps his mortal eyes had been affected by that terrible wound he bore, so that he fled with truer sight than most; but never in many a hunt had Lord Death failed.

Eald had stretched far once, before the coming of Men; and once, before her folk knew much of Men, there had been a few of halfling kind, for elvish loves and dalliances among these fatal strangers. Still, she thought, there might be elvish blood drawn very thin in some, halflings who had never felt the call across the dividing sea, who had never faded. In hope she tried to draw this stranger with her, but the iron weighted him and he could not stay.

She endured the anguish of handling it, undoing buckles, putting it off him, every bit and piece. So she uncovered a terrible wound in his side, and drew on her power to begin its mending, healed the little scratches with a single touch. And when she had rested a moment, it was not hard to bear him away with her, simply a holding of his head in her lap, and a thinking on elvish things. Then the trees became what they truly were, straight and beautiful, and the sun of her day shone down with kindly warmth in that grove.

He slept long, while the wound healed itself, while the lines of mortality faded from his face and left it beautiful, with that beauty which might be elven heritage. She did not leave him in all this time, waiting for his waking with all her heart.

And at last he did stir, and looked about him, and looked into her eyes, seeming much confused. He began at once to fade into the mortal world, into darkness, being in his own mind again, but she took his hand and drew him back before he could slip away. “Beware of going back,” she said. “Death has a part of you. Too, too easy for him to call you into his shadow as you are. You are much safer here.”

He tried to rise, still holding to her hand, maintaining that deleciate hold on here. She lent him strength, the green force which sustained the trees themselves, and after a moment he was able to stand and to look about him. Wind whispered through the leaves and the sun cast its own glamor, while deer stared at them both wise-eyed from the green shadow, in the grove of swords and jewels.

“I was dead,” he said.

“Never,” she assured him.

“My heart hurts.”

“So it may,” she said, “for it was torn. And that healing is beyond me—What is your name, Man?”

Dread touched his eyes. “Ciaran,” he said then quietly, as a guest ought. “Ciaran’s second son of Caer Donn.”

“Caer Donn. Caer Righ, we called it, the King’s domain.”

He feared, but he looked her in the face. “And what is your name?” he asked.

“I shall tell you my true one, that I do not give to mortals; for you are my guest. It is Arafel.”

“Then I must thank you with all my heart,” he said earnestly, “and then beg you set me on the road from here.”

In so many words he healed her heart and wounded it . . . and a regret came into his eyes as if he had seen the wounding. He held up before her his right hand, on which he bore a golden ring, worked with a seal.

“I have a duty,” be said. “On my honor, I have to go and do it, if there is still time.”

“Where is this duty?”

He lifted a hand as if he would give a direction, and nothing was the same. “There are armies,” he said in his confusion, pointing where he might mean the Brown Hills. “There is war on the plain; and my King has won. But the enemy has drawn off this way, which is a valley where they might hold long in a siege if they could take it. And lord Evald of Caer Wiell is riding with the King. Do you understand, lady Arafel? War is coming up the dale. Caer Wiell must not be deceived. They must hold firm, whatever the false reports and fair offers from the enemy, must hold only a little time, until the King’s army comes this way. Lord Evald’s hold—must hear the message I bear.”

“Wars,” she said faintly. “They will not be wise, who set foot in Ealdwood.”

“And I must go, lady Arafel. I must I beg you,” Already he began to fade, discovering the power of will within himself.

“Ciaran,” she said, a summoning, and held him by his name, still within the light of her sun. “You are determined. But you do not count the cost. The Huntsman will seek you out again. Once in the mortal world, you are a prey to him; he has never lost a hunt, do you see? And it is not finished.”

“That may be,” he said, pale-faced. “But I have sworn.”

“Pride,” she said. “It is empty pride. What arms have you, what means to pass through all of Eald against such enemies?”

He looked down at himself, armorless and empty-handed. But he wavered toward a parting, all the same.

“Wait,” she said, and went to the old oak, took from its branches one of the jewels which hung among the others, pale green like the one which hung at her own throat, though dimmed, for its master was ages gone. It sang to her, the dreams of an elf named Liosliath, a part of his soul, such souls as her kind had. “Take it. You borrowed his sword in your need, but this will serve you better. Wear it always about your neck.”

“What are these things?” he asked without taking, and looked about at all the trees which held such treasures, jewels and swords glimmering silver and light among the leaves. “What place is this?”

“You might liken it to a tomb; this you robbed . . . my brothers and my sisters, my fathers and mothers. It is elvish memory.”

“Forgive me,” he whispered, stricken.

“We do not die. We go . . . away; and when we are gone, what use are these things to us? Yet they hold memories. That is their use now. The sword, you could not fully use. But take this stone. Liosliath would not grudge it to a friend of mine. He was my cousin: he was young as our kind go, and so it may be safest for you. The shadows feared him.”

He took it in his hand, and his eyes widened and his lips parted. Fear . . . perhaps he felt fear. But he held it fast, and it sang to him, of elvish dreams and memories.

“It too is power,” she said. “And danger. It does not make you a match for Death; but ’twill fight the chill . . . if you have the heart to use it.”

He gathered the silver chain and hung it about his neck. His fair clear eyes clouded in the power of the dreams. But he was not lost in them. She touched her own dreamstone, and called forth the faintest of songs, a sweet, bright harping. “Do not trust in iron,” she warned him. “That and this . . . do not love one another. And come, since you must. Come, I shall walk with you on your way. Eald will take you there more safely than you might walk in the world of Men.”

“This is given for a baneful place,” he said.

“Walk it with me, and see.”

She offered her hand. He took it, and his was warm and strong in hers, human-broad but comfortable. He walked with her, and for all his apprehension a wonder came into his eyes when he saw the land, the trees of elven summer, the glamored meadows abloom with glistening flowers, the timid, wide-eyed deer which stared at them as they passed.

Stone sang to stone, his heart to hers, and the wind grew warm beneath that other sun. She felt something which had long frozen about her heart melt away, and she knew companionship for the first time in human ages, a fellowship lost since Liosliath himself had faded, last of all elves save herself.

(“Forgive me,” Liosliath had said, this Man’s unwitting words and her cousin’s last, which had tugged at her heart “I have tried to stay.” But he had had that look in his gray eyes which was the calling, and once it had begun in his heart, the fading began, and all her wishing could not hold him—nor could she go with him, for her heart was here.)

“It is beautiful,” Ciaran said.

“Not so wide as once,” she said. And, remembering: “We held Caer Donn once.”

“The grandfathers say—there are your sort still there.”

She tossed her head, stung. “Faery folk. Silly nixes. And sad. They have few wits. They shapeshift so often they forget themselves and cannot get back again—That is not to say they are not dangerous when crossed.”

“That is not your kind.”

“No,” she said, laughing, in better humor. “Not mine. We were the greater folk. Elves. The Daoine Sidhe. The faery-folk live in our ruin. They never loved us.”

“And others of your kind?”

“Gone,” she said. “But myself.”

He let go her hand to look at her, and in letting go he drifted, cried out in fear, for they were on Caerbourne’s edge, a bright stream, willow-bordered, and here its name was Airgiod, the Silver. She took his hand again and steadied him.

“Beware such lapses. You might fall. Caerbourne has eroded deep in human years, and his banks are steep. And worse, far worse, there is no knowing how deep he has sunk in the shadows. Lord Death’s geography is a darker mirror of this, but mirror nonetheless, and I should not care for his river. Remember your wound when you walk in Eald.”

He shivered; she felt the dread keenly, a chill in the stone upon her breast. She touched it and warmed it, and him.

“Use the stone,” she bade him. “He shall not have the rest of you if you but know how to walk in Eald. Your heart’s wish can bring you here, only so you do not stray too far; your heart’s wish can take you away.”

“It is a great gift,” he admitted at last “But they say all gifts in this world have cost.”

“Not among kinsmen.”

He looked up at her as deer look at hounds, wary and distraught

“There’s elvish blood in you,” she said. “Do you not know? You could not have come, else. We once ruled, I say, in Caer Donn.”

“So they say.” She felt the beating of his heart, like something trapped in the stone within her hand.

“Is it so terrible,” she asked, “to discover such a kinship?”

“I am my father’s own son, no changeling.”

“Then by father or mother, you carry blood of mine. You are no changeling, no. There is nothing of the little folk about you. Is it sire or mother stands taller than most?”

Fear filled him, a tumbling down of all truths he knew. Father, she thought, catching this from his mind. He said nothing. She felt a chill in him, self-aimed. She perceived memories of old stones near Caer Donn, recollections of childhood terrors, of ill legends and human hate, and shivered herself.

“I am sorry,” he said, sharing this. His mind was awash with fear, and with thoughts of his own duty, and of dying, and the black hounds. He touched the chain of the stone about his neck, making to draw it off, but she caught his hand and gently forbade that

“You will not die,” she promised him. “I will take you where you will go. Come, it is not far.”

The forest edge lay up the bright streamcourse, that place where sight stopped in mist, the edge of her world. She led him into that gray place, walking blind, but one hand she kept on the stone which remembered the world as it had been, and so she brought some substance out of nothingness, enough to find her way beyond the edge. She remembered Caer Wiell as it had once been, a fair green hill with a spring never failing; and so she came to it, and still held his hand fast. Half in the shadow-ways there was a dimming, a glare of fire, the shouts of war, ghosts of battle swirling about them.

Other things were there too. Death was one. “Pay him no mind,” she said to Ciaran, who turned and faced the shadow. “No. Hold to the stone and come with me.”

She set them more and more surely in mortal night, with the din of war about them, with Caer Wiell’s black walls above. She knew the gateway. It did not have wards against her. She set him through.

“Fare well,” she said. “And fare back again.”

So she stepped clear of Caer Wiell, back into the swirling shadow-din outside.

She felt a presence by her, a shadow which had drawn a moment out of the battle, a blackness sullen and cold.

“Hunt elsewhere,” she told him.

“You have had your will,” Lord Death said, making ironic homage.

“Hunt elsewhere.”

“You give this mortal uncommon gifts.”

“What if I do? Are they not mine to give?”

The shadow said nothing, and she walked away through the grayness, and into bright Eald, into her own. The phantom deer stared at her curiously in elven sunset; and she walked back to the grove of the circle, touched the stones which hung from the ancient oak, harked to precious memories which they sang as the wind blew among them. One voice was stilled now from the chorus, that which had been Liosliath’s.

“Forgive,” she whispered to him, who was far across the dividing sea, far from hearing her. “Forgive that it was you.”

But a strange companionship shivered through her still, after ages in solitude. She walked, and mingled with the eldritch harping which was the peculiar song of her stone of dreams, came the whisper of another heart, human-tainted, but true as earth. She was appalled somewhat at the nature of it, for he had known war; he had killed—but so had she, in the cruel, cold anger of elves. Human anger was different, all blood and blind rage, like wolves. He knew passions she felt strange; he knew strange fears; and self-doubts. It was all there, drowning Liosliath’s clear voice. He feared Liosliath; he denied, human-stubborn, the things his own eyes had seen in Eald.

But there was no hate in him.

She sank down at the base of the tree of memory, and drew her cloak about her, and dreamed his dream.

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