The Last Light of the Sun

“Edrys was? His castle? It is, of course, north-east by Rheden and the Wall. And there are other farms. This is the largest one. He’s here now, as it happens.”

“What? Here? Himself? Brynn?”

Alun worked to breathe normally. Dai sounded stunned. His brother, who was always so composed. This, too, could almost be funny, Alun thought. Almost.

Ceinion of Llywerth was nodding his head, still leading the way downwards. “He’s here to receive me, actually. Good of him, I must say. I sent word that I would be passing through.” He glanced back. “How many men do you have? I saw you two climbing, but not the others.”

The cleric’s tone was precise, suddenly. Dai answered him.

“And how many were taken?”

“Just the one,” Dai said. Alun kept quiet. Younger brother.

“His name is Gryffeth? That’s Ludh’s son?”

Dai nodded.

He’d simply overheard them, Alun told himself. This wasn’t Jad’s gift of sight, or anything frightening.

“Very well,” said the cleric crisply, turning to them as they came out of the trees and onto the path. “I’d account it a waste to have good men killed today. I will do penance for a deception in the name of Jad’s peace. Hear me. You and your fellows joined me by arrangement at a ford of the Llyfarch River three days ago. You are escorting me north as a courtesy, and so that you might visit Amren’s court at Beda and offer prayers with him in his new-built sanctuary during this time of truce. Do you understand all that?”

They nodded, two heads bobbing up and down.

“Tell me, is your cousin Gryffeth ap Ludh a clever man?”

“No,” said Dai, truthfully.

The cleric made a face. “What will he have told them?”

“I have no idea,” Dai said.

“Nothing,” Alun said. “He isn’t quick, but he can keep silent.”

The cleric shook his head. “But why would he keep silent when all he had to say was that he was riding in advance to tell them I had arrived?”

Dai thought a moment, then he grinned. “If the Arberthi took him harshly, he’ll have been quiet just to embarrass them when you do show up, my lord.”

The cleric thought it through, then smiled back. “Owyn’s sons would be clever,” he murmured. He seemed pleased. “One of you will explain this to Ludh’s boy when we are inside. Where are your other men?”

“South of here, hidden off the road,” Dai said. “And yours, my lord?”

“Have none,” said the high cleric of the Cyngael. “Or I didn’t until now. You are my men, remember.”

“You rode alone from Llywerth?”

“Walked. But yes, alone. Some things to think about, and there’s a truce in the land, after all.”

“With outlaws in half the forests.”

“Outlaws who know a cleric has nothing worth the taking. I’ve said the dawn prayers with many of them.” He started walking.

Dai blinked again, and followed.

Alun wasn’t sure how he felt. Curiously elated, in part. For one thing, this was the figure of whom so many stories were told, some of them by his father and uncle, though he knew there had been a falling-out, and a little part of why. For another, the high cleric had just saved them from trying a mad attack on another legend in his own house.

A man of Cadyr might be worth two Arberthi, but that did not—harp-boasting and ale-born songs aside— apply to the warband of Brynn ap Hywll.

These were the men who had been fighting the Erlings before Dai and Alun were born, when the Cyngael lived in terror of slavery and savage death three seasons of every year, taking flight into the hills at the least rumour of the dragon-prows. It was clear now why Gryffeth had been captured so easily. They’d have had no chance trying to attack this farm tonight. They’d have been humiliated, or dead. A truth to run back and forth through the mind like the shuttling of a loom.

Alun ab Owyn was very young that day, a prince of Cadyr, and it was greenest springtime in the provinces of the Cyngael, in the world. He’d no wish to die. Something occurred to him.

“My cousin was only carrying the harp for me, by the way. If anyone asks, my lord.”

The cleric glanced back over his shoulder.

“Gryffeth can’t sing,” Dai explained. “Not that Alun’s much good.”

A joke, Alun thought. Good. Dai was feeling himself again, or starting to.

“There will be a feast, I expect,” Ceinion of Llywerth said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

“I’m actually better with siege weapons,” Alun said, not helpfully. He was rewarded by hearing his older brother laugh, and quickly smother it.

“YOUR ROYAL FATHER I knew very well. Fought against him, and beside him. A disgraceful youth, if I may be blunt, and a brave man.”

“It would be too much to hope that we might one day receive such a judgement from you, my lord, but to that we will aspire.” Dai bowed after he spoke.

They were in the great hall of Brynnfell, beyond the central doors. A long corridor behind them ran east and west towards the wings. It was a very large house. Gryffeth had already been released—from a room at the end of the eastern corridor, as the cleric had guessed. Alun had had a whispered word with him, and reclaimed his harp.

Dai straightened and smiled. “You will permit me to add, my lord, that disgrace among the Arberthi is sometimes honour in Cadyr. We have not always been favoured with the truce that brings us here, as you know.”

Alun smiled inwardly, kept his expression sincere. Dai had had a lifetime shaping this sort of speech, he thought. Words mattered among the Cyngael, nuance and subtlety. So did cattle-raiding, mind you, but the day’s game had changed.

The scarred older warrior—a head taller than the two brothers—beamed happily down on them. Brynn ap Hywll was big in every way—hands, face, shoulders, girth. Even his greying moustache was thick and full. He was red and fleshy and balding. He wore no weapon in his own home, had rings on several thick fingers and a massive golden torc around his throat. Erling work: the hammer of the thunder god replaced by a suspended sun disk. Something he’d captured or been offered as ransom, Alun guessed.

If Ceinion of Llywerth felt displeasure at seeing something made to hold pagan symbols of Ingavin, he didn’t show it. The high cleric was not at all what Alun had expected him to be, though he couldn’t have said what he had expected. Certainly not the man who had been kissed so enthusiastically by the Lady Enid, as her husband smiled approval.

Alun had a recollection that the cleric’s own wife had died long ago, but he was murky about the details. You couldn’t remember everything a tutor dictated, or a tale-spinning father by the fireside.

“Well spoken, young prince,” Brynn boomed, bringing Alun back to the present. Their host looked genuinely pleased with Dai’s answer. He’d a voice for the battlefield, Brynn, one that would carry.

Their arrival at Brynnfell had gone easily, after all. Alun had a sense that things tended to go that way when Ceinion of Llywerth was involved. If there had been something odd about the cleric arriving with a Cadyri escort when he usually walked alone to his destinations, and was widely known not to have spoken to Prince Owyn for a decade and more … well, sometimes odd things happened, and this was the high cleric.

Brynn was prepared to play along, it seemed, whatever he might privately think. Alun saw the big man’s gaze slide to where Ceinion stood, smooth face benign and attentive, slender hands folded in the sleeves of his robe. “Indeed, it would seem you have set your feet on the path of virtue already, serving as escorts to our beloved cleric, avoiding the scandalous conduct of your sire in his own youth.”

Dai kept a level expression. “His lordship the high cleric is persuasive in his holiness. We are honoured and grateful to be with him.”

“I’ve no doubt,” said Brynn ap Hywll, just a little too dryly.

Dai was afraid Alun would laugh, but he didn’t. Dai was fighting to control exhilaration himself … this was the dance, the thrust and twist of words, of meanings half-shown and then hidden, that underlay all the great songs and deeds of courts.

The Erlings might choose to loot and burn their way to some glorious afterlife of … more looting and burning, but the Cyngael saw the glory of the world— Jad’s holy gift of it—as embodied in more than just swords and raiding.

Though that, perhaps, might explain why they were so often raided and looted—from Vinmark overseas, and under pressure from the Anglcyn now, across the Rheden Wall. He’d said it himself today: poems over siege engines. Words above weapons, too often.

He wasn’t dwelling upon that now. He was exulting in the presence of two of the very great men of the west, as a springtime raid conjured out of boredom and their father’s absence, hunting without them (Owyn was meeting a mistress), had turned into something quite otherwise.

Young Dai ab Owyn was, in other words, in that elevated state of mind and spirit where what occurred that evening could almost have been anticipated. He was alert, receptive, highly attuned … vulnerable. At such times, one can be hammered hard by a variety of things, and the effect can last forever—though it should be said that this did happen more often in tales, bard-spun in meadhalls, than on an impulsive cattle raid gone strange.

Just before the meal began Alun had taken the musician’s stool at the Lady Enid’s request. Brynn’s wife was tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, younger than her husband. A handsome woman with no shyness among the men in the hall. None of the women here seemed shy, come to think of it.

He was tuning his harp (his favourite crwth, made for him), trying not to be distracted. They were playing the triad game in the hall, drinking the cup of welcome after the invocation by Brynn’s own cleric, before the food was brought. Ceinion had predicted a feast and had been proven right. They were drinking wine, not ale. Brynn ap Hywll was a wealthy man.

Some of the company were still standing, others had taken their seats; it was a relaxed gathering, this was a farmhouse not a castle, large and handsome as it might be. The room smelled of new rushes, freshly strewn herbs and flowers—and hunting dogs. There were at least ten wolfhounds, grey, black, brindled. Brynn’s warband, those with him here, were not men to put great weight on ceremony, it seemed.

“Cold as …?” called out a woman near the head of the table. Alun hadn’t sorted the names yet. She was a family cousin, he guessed. Round-faced, light brown hair.

“Cold as a winter lake,” answered a man leaning against the wall halfway down the room.

Cold was an easy start. They all knew the jokes: women’s hearts, or the space between the legs of some of them. Those phrases wouldn’t be offered now, before the drinking had properly begun, and with the ladies present.

“Cold as a loveless hearth,” said another. Worn phrases, too often heard. One more to complete the triad. Alun kept silent, listening to his strings as he tuned. There was always one song before the meal; he was being honoured with it, wasn’t sure what he wanted to sing.

“Cold as a world without Jad,” said Gryffeth suddenly, which wasn’t brilliant but wasn’t bad either, with the high cleric at the head table. It got him a murmur of approval and a smile from Ceinion. Alun saw his brother, next to the cleric, wink at their cousin. Mark one for Cadyr.

“Sorrowful as …?” said another of the ladies, an older one.

Trust the Cyngael, Alun thought wryly, to conjure with sorrow at a spring banquet’s beginning. We are a strange, wonderful people, he thought.

“Sorrowful as a swan alone.” A thin, satisfied-looking man sitting close to the high table. The ap Hywll bard, his own crwth beside him. An important figure. Accredited harpists always were. There was a rustle of approbation. Alun smiled at the man, received no response. Bards could be prickly, jealous of privilege, dangerous to offend. More than one prince had been humiliated by satires written against him. And Alun had been asked to take the stool first tonight. A guest indeed, but not a formally trained or licensed bard. Best to be cautious, he thought. He wished he knew a song about siege engines. Dai would have laughed.

“Sorrowful as a sword unused,” said Brynn himself, leaning back in his chair, the big voice. Predictable pounding of tables as the lord of the manor spoke.

“Sorrowful,” said Alun, surprising himself, since he’d just decided to be discreet, “as a singer without a song.”

A small silence as they considered it, then Brynn ap Hywll banged a meaty hand down on the board in front of him, and the Lady Enid clapped her palms in pleasure and then—of course—so did everyone else. Dai winked again quickly, and then contrived to look indifferent, leaning back as well, fingering his wine cup, as if they were always offering such original phrasings in the triad game back home. Alun felt like laughing: in truth, the phrase had come to him because he had no song yet and would be called upon in a moment.

“Needful as …?” suggested the Lady Enid, looking along the table.

A new phrase this time. Alun looked at Brynn’s wife. More than handsome, he corrected himself: there was beauty there still, glittering with the jewellery of rank upon her arms and about her throat. More people were seated now. Servants stood by, awaiting a signal to bring the food.

“Needful as warmed wine in winter,” someone Alun couldn’t see offered from down the room. Approval for that, a nicely phrased offering. Winter memory in midsummer, the phrase near to poetry. Their hostess turned to Dai, politely, beyond her husband and the cleric, to let the other Cadyri prince have a turn.

“Needful as night’s end,” Dai said gravely, without a pause, which was very good, actually. An image of darkness, the fear of it, a dream of dawn, when the god returned from his journey under the world.

As the real applause for this faded, as they waited for someone to throw the third leg of the triad, a young woman entered the room.

She moved quietly, clad in green, belted in gold, with gold in the brooch at her shoulder and on her fingers, to the empty place beside Enid at the high table—which would have told Alun who this was, if the look and manner of her hadn’t immediately done so. He stared, knew he was doing so, didn’t stop.

As she seated herself, aware—very obviously aware— that all eyes were upon her, including those of an indulgent father, she looked down the table, taking in the company, and Alun was made intensely conscious of dark eyes (like her mother’s), very black hair under the soft green cap, and skin whiter than … any easy phrase that came to mind.

And then he heard her murmur, voice rich, husky for one so young, unsettling: “Needful as night, I think many women would rather say.”

And because this was Rhiannon mer Brynn, through that crowded hall men felt that they knew exactly what she was saying, and wished that the words had been for their ears alone, whispered close at candle-time, not in company at table. And they thought that they could kill or do great deeds that it might be made so.

Alun could see his brother’s face as this green-gold woman-girl turned to Dai, whose phrase she had just echoed and challenged. And because he knew his brother better than he knew anyone on the god’s earth, Alun saw the world change for Dai in that crossing of glances. A moment with a name to it, as the bards said.

He had an instant to feel sorrow, the awareness of something ending as something else began, and then they asked him for a song, that the night might begin with music, which was the way of the Cyngael.

Brynnfell was a spacious property, well run by a competent steward, showing the touch of a mistress with taste, access to artisans, and a good deal of money. Still, it was only a farm, and there were a dozen young men from Cadyr now staying with them, over and above the thirty warriors and four women who’d accompanied ap Hywll and his wife and oldest daughter here.

Space was at a premium.

The Lady Enid had worked with efficiency informed by experience, meeting with the steward before the meal to arrange for the disposition of bodies at night. The hall would hold fighting men on pallets and rushes; it had done so before. The main barn was pressed into use, along with two outbuildings and the bakehouse. The brewhouse remained locked. Best not to put such temptation in men’s way. And there was another reason.

The two Cadyri princes and their cousin shared a room in the main house with a good bed for the three of them— honour demanded the host offer as much to royal guests.

The steward surrendered his own chamber to the high cleric. He himself would join the cook and kitchen hands in the kitchen for the night. He was grimly prepared to be as stoic as an eastern zealot on his crag, if not as serenely alone. The cook was notorious for the magnificence of his snoring, and had once been found walking about the kitchen, waving a blade and talking to himself, entirely asleep. He’d ended up chopping vegetables in the middle of the night without ever waking, as his helpers and a number of gathered household members watched in rapt silence, peering through the darkness.

The steward had already determined to place all the knives out of reach before closing his eyes.

In the pleasant chamber thus yielded to him, Ceinion of Llywerth finished the last words of the day’s office, offering at the end his customary silent prayer for the sheltering in light of those he had lost, some of them long ago, and also his gratitude, intensely felt, to holy Jad for all blessings given. The god had purposes not to be clearly seen. What had happened today—the lives he had likely saved, arriving when he did—was deserving of the humblest acknowledgement.

He rose, showing no signs of a strenuous day, or his years, and formally blessed the man kneeling beside him in prayer. He reclaimed his wine cup, subsiding happily onto the stool nearest the window. It was generally believed that the night air was noxious, carrying poisons and unholy spirits, but Ceinion had spent too many years sleeping out of doors, on walks across the three provinces and beyond. He found that he slept better by an open window, even in winter. It was springtime now, the air fragrant, night flowers under his window.

“I feel badly for the man who yielded me his bed.”

His companion shifted his considerable bulk up from the floor and grasped his own cup, refilling it to the brim, without water. He took the other, sturdier chair, keeping the flask close by. “And well you should,” Brynn ap Hywll said, smiling through his moustache. “Brynnfell’s bursting. Since when do you travel with an escort?”

Ceinion eyed him a moment, then sighed. “Since I found a Cadyri raiding party looking at your farm.”

Brynn laughed aloud. His laugh, like his voice, could overflow a room. “Well, thank you for deciding I’d sort out that much.” He drank thirstily, refilled his cup again. “They seem good lads, mind you. Jad knows, I did my share of raiding when young.”

“And their father.”

“Jad curse his eyes and hands,” Brynn said, though without force. “My royal cousin in Beda wants to know what to do about Owyn, you know.”

“I know. I’ll tell him when I get to Beda. With Owyn’s two sons beside me.” The cleric’s turn to grin this time.

He leaned back against the cool stone wall beside the window. Earthly pleasures: an old friend, food and wine, a day with some good unexpectedly done. There were learned men who taught withdrawal from the traps and tangles of the world. There was even a doctrinal movement afoot in Rhodias to deny marriage to clerics now, following the eastern, Sarantine rule, making them ascetics, detached from distractions of the flesh—and the complexities of having heirs to provide for.

Ceinion of Llywerth had always thought—and had written the High Patriarch in Rhodias, and others—that this was wrong thinking and even heresy, an outright denial of Jad’s full gift of life. Better to turn your love of the world into an honouring of the god, and if a wife died, or children, your own knowledge of sorrow might make you better able to counsel others, and comfort them. You lived with loss as they did. And shared their pleasures, too.

His words, written and spoken, mattered to others, by Jad’s holy grace. He was skilled at this sort of argument but didn’t know if he would be on the winning side of this one. The three provinces of the Cyngael were a long way from Rhodias, at the edge of the world, the misty borders of pagan belief. North of the north wind, the phrase went.

He sipped his wine, looking at his friend. Brynn’s expression was sly at the moment, amusingly so. “Happen to see the way Dai ab Owyn looked at my Rhiannon, did you?”

Ceinion took care that his own manner did not change. He had, in fact, seen it—and something else. “She’s a remarkable young woman,” he murmured.

“Her mother’s daughter. Same spirit to her. I’m an entirely beaten man, I tell you.” Brynn was smiling as he said this. “We solve a problem that way? Owyn’s heir handled by my girl?”

Ceinion kept his look noncommittal. “Certainly a useful match.”

“The lad’s already lost his head, I’d wager.” He chuckled. “Not the first to do so, with Rhiannon.”

“And your daughter?” Ceinion asked, perhaps unwisely.

Some fathers would have been startled, or offered an oath—what mattered the girl’s wishes in these things? But Brynn ap Hywll didn’t do that. Ceinion watched, and by the lamplight saw the big man, his old friend, grow thoughtful. Too much so. The cleric offered an inward, mildly blasphemous curse, and immediately sought—also silently—the god’s forgiveness for that.

“Interesting song the younger one sang before the meal, wasn’t it?”

There it was. A shrewd man, Ceinion thought ruefully. Much more than a warrior with a two-handed sword.

“It was,” he said, still keeping his own counsel. This was all too soon. He temporized. “Your bard was out of countenance.”

“Amund? It was too good, you mean? The song?”

“Not that. Though it was impressive. No, Alun ab Owyn breached the laws for such things. Only licensed bards are allowed to improvise in company. Your harper will need appeasing.”

“Spiky man, Amund. Not easily softened, if you are right.”

“I am right. Call it a word offered the wise.”

Brynn looked at him. “And your other question? About Rhiannon? What sort of word was that?”

Ceinion sighed. It had been a mistake. “I wish you weren’t clever, sometimes.”

“Have to be. To keep up in this family. She liked the … song, you think?”

“I think everyone liked the song.” He left it at that.

Both men were still awhile.

“Well,” Brynn said finally, “she’s of age, but there’s no great rush. Though Amren wants to know what to do about Owyn and Cadyr, and this …”

“Owyn ap Glynn isn’t the problem. Neither’s Amren, or Ielan in Llywerth. Except if they cling to these feuds that will end us.” He’d spoken with more fire than he’d intended.

The other man stretched out his legs and leaned back, unruffled. Brynn drank, wiped his moustache with a sleeve, and grinned. “Still riding that horse?”

“And I will all my life.” Ceinion didn’t smile this time. He hesitated, then shrugged. Wanted to change the subject, in any case. “I’ll tell you something before I tell it to Amren in Beda. But keep it close. Aeldred’s invited me to Esferth, to join his court.”

Brynn sat up abruptly, scraping the chair along the floor. He swore, without apologizing, then banged his cup down, spilling wine. “How dare he? Our high cleric he wants to steal now?”

“I said he’d invited me. Not an abduction, Brynn.”

“Even so, doesn’t he have his own Jad-cursed holy men among the Anglcyn? Rot the man!”

“He has a great many, and seeks more … not cursed, I hope.” Ceinion left a pointed little pause. “From here, from Ferrieres. Even from Rhodias. He is … a different sort of king, my friend. I think he feels his lands are on the way to being safe now, which means new ambitions, ways of thinking. He’s arranging to marry a daughter north, to Rheden.” He looked steadily at the other man.