The Last Light of the Sun (51 page)

It was clear now, Ceinion thought. It was achingly clear. “And so she will go to Retherly.”

Aeldred was looking at him. He nodded his head. “To pray each day and night for me until one of us dies. She sees it as her first duty, in love and in faith.”

A burst of laughter, off to their right, somewhere behind. Men riding home in triumph, knowing songs and feasting awaited them.

“She might be right, of course,” said the king, his tone light now, as if discussing the coming barley harvest or the quality of wine at table. “You should be denouncing me, Ceinion. Is that not your duty?”

Ceinion shook his head. “You seem to have done that to yourself, for twenty-five years.”

“I suppose. But then came what I did last night.”

Ceinion looked quickly over. He blinked; then this, too, slipped into understanding.

“My lord! You did not
send
Athelbert into that wood. His going there is no punishment of you!”

“No? Why not? Is it not sheerest arrogance to imagine we understand the workings of the god? Did you not tell
me
that? Think! Wherein lies my transgression, and where has my son now gone?”

Wolves and snakes,
Ceinion had said, foolishly, moments ago. To this man who was bearing more than
two decades of guilt. Trying to serve the god, and his people, and carrying these … memories.

“I believe,” Aeldred was saying, “that sometimes we are given messages, if we are able to read them. After I taught myself Trakesian, and sent out word I was buying texts, a Waleskan came to Raedhill—this was long ago—with a scroll, not more than that. He said he’d bought it on the borders of Sarantium. I’m sure he looted it.”

“One of the plays?”

The king shook his head. “Songs of their liturgy. Fragments. The horned god and the maiden. It was badly torn, stained. It was the first Trakesian writing I ever bought, Ceinion. And all this morning I have been hearing this in my head:

When the sound of roaring is heard in the wood

The children of earth will cry.

When the beast that was roaring comes into the fields

The children of blood must die.

Ceinion shivered in sunlight. He made the sign of the disk.

“I believe,” Aeldred went on, “if you will forgive me, and it is not an intrusion, that you did not denounce what I have just said because … you also have some knowledge of these things. If I am right in this, please tell me, how do you … carry that? How do you find peace?”

He was still half in the spell of the verse.
The children of earth will cry.
Ceinion said, slowly, choosing words, “I believe that what doctrine tells us, is … becoming truth. That by teaching it we help it become the nature of Jad’s world. If there are spirits, powers, a half-world beside ours, it is … coming to an end. What we teach
will
be true, partly because we teach it.”

“Believing makes it so?” Aeldred’s voice was wry.

“Yes,” said Ceinion quietly. He looked at the other man. “With the power we know lies in the god. We are his children, spreading across his earth, pushing back forests to build our cities and houses and our ships and water mills. You know what is said in
The Book of the Sons of Jad.”

“That is new. Not canonical.”

He managed a smile. “A little more so than a song of the horned god and the maiden.” He saw Aeldred’s mouth quirk. “They use it as liturgy in Esperaña where it was written, have begun to do so in Batiara and Ferrieres now. Clerics carrying the word of Jad to Karch and Moskav have been told by the Patriarch to cite that book, carry it with them—it is a powerful tool for bringing pagans to the light.”

“Because it teaches that the world is ours. Is it, Ceinion? Is it ours?”

Ceinion shrugged. “I do not know. You cannot imagine how much I do not know. But you asked how I make my peace and I am telling you. It is a frail peace, but that is how I do it.”

He met the other man’s gaze. He hadn’t denied what Aeldred had guessed. He wasn’t going to deny it. Not to him.

The king’s eyes were clear now, his flush had receded. “The beast dies, roaring, not the children?”

“Rhodias succeeded Trakesia, and Sarantium, Rhodias, under Jad. We are at the edge of the world here, but we are children of the god, not just … of blood.”

Silence again, slightly altered. Then the king said, “I did not expect to be able to speak of this.”

The cleric nodded. “I can believe that.”

“Ceinion, Ceinion, I will need you with me. Surely you can see that? Even more, now.”

The other man tried to smile but failed. “We will talk of that. But before, we must pray, with all piety we may
command, that the Erling ships sailed for home. Or, if not, that your son and his companions pass through the woods, and in time.”

“I can do that,” said the king.

Rhiannon wondered, often, why everyone still looked at her the way they did, concern written large, vivid as a manuscript’s initial capital, in their eyes.

It wasn’t as if she spent her days wan and weeping, refusing to rise from her bed (her mother wouldn’t have allowed that, in any case), or drifting aimlessly about the farmhouse and yard.

She had been working as hard as anyone else all summer. Helping to bring Brynnfell back from fire and ruin, tending to the wounded in the early weeks, riding out with her mother to the families of those who’d suffered death and loss and taking what steps needed to be taken there. She devised activities for herself and Helda and Eirin, ate at table with the others, smiled when Amund the harper offered a song, or when someone said anything witty or wry. And still those furtive, searching looks came her way.

By contrast, Rania had been allowed to leave. The youngest of her women (with the sweetest voice) had been so terrified in the aftermath of the raid that Enid and Rhiannon had decided to let her go. The farmhouse had too many images of burning and blood for Rania just now.

She had left them early in the summer, weeping, visibly shamed despite their reassurances, with the contingent of men who would spend the summer by their castle towards the wall. The land there needed defending in summertime; there was little love lost between the men of Rheden and the Cyngael of the hills and valleys north of the woods; cattle and horses had
been stolen on both sides, sometimes the same ones back and forth, for as long as anyone could remember. That was why Rheden had built the wall, why Brynn (and others) had castles there, not farmhouses. Her parents were here, though, attending to Brynnfell and its people.

So Rania had gone away, and everyone seemed to understand why she had been so distressed, to accept it as natural. But Rhiannon was right here, doing whatever needed to be done, undeterred by night-memories of an Erling hammer smashing her window, or a blade held to her throat in her own rooms by a screaming, blood-smeared man vowing to kill her.

She made her morning visits to the labourers’ huts, carried food to the men repairing the farmyard structures, offered a smile and a word of encouragement with their cheese and ale. She attended at chapel twice a day, spoke the antiphonal responses in her clearest voice. She shirked nothing, avoided nothing.

She just wasn’t sleeping at night. And surely that was her own affair, not shared, not proper cause for all those thoughtful glances from Helda and her mother?

Besides, these past few days, as the rebuilding drew to a close and preparations for the harvest began, her father seemed to be afflicted in the same way.

Rhiannon, rising quietly—as she had been doing all summer—stepping past her sleeping women to go out into the yard, wrapped in a blanket or shawl, to pace along the fence and think about the nature of a person’s life (and was there something wrong in that?), had found her father out there before her for three nights now.

The first two times she’d avoided him, turning back another way, for wasn’t he to be allowed his own solitude and thoughts? The third night, tonight, she gathered her green shawl about her shoulders and walked across the yard to where he stood, gazing up at the slope south of
them under the stars. The blue moon, a crescent, was over west, almost down. It was very late.

“A breeze tonight,” she said, coming to stand beside him at the gate.

Her father grunted, glanced over and down at her. He was clad only in his long nightshirt, and barefoot, as she was. He looked away into the darkness. A nightingale was singing beyond the cattle pen. It had been with them all summer.

“Your mother’s troubled about you,” Brynn said at length, a finger going to his moustache. He had trouble with these conversations, she knew.

Rhiannon frowned. “I can see she is. I’m beginning to get angry about it.”

“Don’t. You know she leaves you alone, usually.” He glanced at her briefly, then away. “It isn’t … right for a young girl to be unable to sleep, you know.”

She gripped her elbows with both hands. “Why a young girl only? Why me? What about you, then?”

“Just the last few days for me, girl. It’s different.”

“Why? Because I’m supposed to go singing through the day?”

Brynn chuckled. “You’d terrify everyone if you did.”

She didn’t smile. Smiles, she’d admit, tended to be forced now, and in the darkness she didn’t feel she had to.

“So, why are you awake?” she asked.

“It’s different,” he repeated.

It was possible he was coming out to meet one of the girls, but Rhiannon didn’t think so. For one thing, he obviously knew she was in the yard at night, everyone seemed to know. She didn’t like it, being watched that way.

“Too easy an answer,” she said.

A long silence this time, longer than she was happy with. She looked over at her father: the bulky figure,
more paunch and flesh than muscle now, hair silver-grey, what was left of it. An arrow had been loosed from this slope above them, to kill him that night. She wondered if that was why he kept looking up at the shrubs and trees on the rise.

“You see anything?” he asked abruptly.

She blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Up there. See anything?”

Rhiannon looked. It was the middle of the night. “The trees. What? You think someone’s spying on … ?” She was unable to keep fear from her voice.

Her father said quickly, “No, no. Not that. Nothing like that.”

“What, then?”

He was silent again. Rhiannon stared up. Shapes of trunk and branch, bushes, black gorse, stars above them.

“There’s a light,” Brynn said. He sighed. “I’ve seen a Jad-cursed light for three nights now.” He pointed. His hand was steady enough.

A different kind of fear, now, because there was nothing at all to be seen. The nightingale was still singing.

She shook her head. “What … what kind of light?”

“Changes. It’s there now.” He was still pointing. “Blue.”

She swallowed. “And you think … ?”

“I don’t think anything,” he said quickly. “I just
see
it. Third night.”

“Have you told … ?”

“Who? Your mother? The cleric?” He was angry. Not with her, she knew.

She stared into emptiness and dark. Cleared her throat. “You … you know what some of the farmers say. About the, our woods over up there?”

“I know what they say,” her father said.

Only that. No swearing. It frightened her, actually. She was gazing up the slope and there was nothing there. For her.

She saw her father’s large, capable hands gripping the top rail of the fence, twisting, as if to break the bar off, make it a weapon. Against what? He turned his head the other way and spat into the darkness. Then he unlatched the gate.

“Can’t keep doing this,” he said. “Not every night. Stay and watch me. You can pray if you like. If I don’t come back down, tell Siawn and your mother.”

“Tell them what?”

He looked at her. Shrugged, in the way that he had. “Whatever seems right.”

What was she going to do? Forbid him? He swung open the gate, went through, closed it behind him—habits of a farmyard. She watched him begin to climb. Lost sight of him halfway up the slope. He was in his nightshirt, she was thinking, carried no weapon. No iron. She knew that that was supposed to matter … if this was what they were so carefully not saying it might be.

She wondered suddenly, though not unexpectedly, since it happened every night, where Alun ab Owyn was now in the world, and if he hated her still.

She stayed by the gate a long time, looking up, and she did pray, like one of the Sleepless Ones in the dark, for her father’s life, and the lives of all those in the house, and the souls of all their dead.

She was still there when Brynn came back down.

Something had changed. Rhiannon could see it, even in darkness. She was afraid, before he spoke. “Come, girl,” her father said, re-entering through the gate, moving past her towards the house.

“What?”
she cried, turning to follow. “What is it?”

“We have much to do,” said Brynn ap Hywll, who had slain Siggur Volganson long ago. “I cost us three days, not going up before tonight. They may be coming back.”

She never asked who
they
might be. Or how he knew. But with the words she felt a seizure, a roiling spasm within herself. She stopped, clutching at her waist, and bent over to throw up what was in her stomach. Shaking, she wiped at her mouth, forced herself to straighten. She followed her father into the house. His voice could be heard, roaring an alarm like some half-beast come down from the trees, rousing everyone from sleep.

Everyone, but not
enough
of them. Too many of his men were north and east. Days away. Even as she re-entered, tasting bile, that thought was in her head. Then another one: swift, blessedly so, for it gave her a pulse-beat of time to anticipate.

“Rhiannon!” her father said, wheeling to look at her. “Get the stablehands to saddle your horses. You and your mother—”

“Must ride out to alert the labourers. I know. Then we’ll begin preparing to deal with any wounded. What else?”

She stared at him as calmly as she could, which was not easy. She had just been physically sick, her heart was pounding, there was sweat cold on her skin.