The Last Light of the Sun

Brynn sighed. “I’d heard that.”

“And if so, there goes that rivalry on the other side of the Wall, which we’ve relied upon. Our danger is if we remain … the old sort of princes.”

There were three oil lamps burning in the room, one set in the wall, two brought in for a guest: extravagance and respect. In the mingling of yellow lamplight, Brynn’s gaze was direct now. Ceinion, accepting it, felt a wave of memory crash over him from a terrible, glorious summer long ago. This happened more and more as he grew older. Past and present colliding, simultaneous visions, the present seen with the past. This same man, a quarter-century ago, on a battlefield by the sea, the Volgan himself and the Erling force they’d met by their boats. There had been three princes among the Cyngael that day but Brynn had led the centre. A full head of dark hair on him then, far less bulk, less of this easy humour. The same man, though. You changed, and you did not change.

“You said he’s after clerics from Ferrieres?” Picking up the other thing that mattered.

“So he wrote me.”

“It starts with clerics, doesn’t it?”

Ceinion gazed affectionately at his old friend. “Sometimes. They are notoriously aloof, my colleagues across the water.”

“But if not? If it works, opens channels? If the Anglcyn and Ferrieres join to push away the Erling raiders on both sides of the Strait? And mayhap a marriage that way, too …?”

“Then the Erlings come here again, I would think.” Ceinion finished the thought. “If we remain outside whatever is happening. That’s my message to Beda, when I get there.” He paused, then added the thought he’d been travelling with: “There are times when the world changes, Brynn.”

A silence in the room. No noises from the corridor either, now; the household abed, or most of them. Some of the warband likely dicing in the hall still, perhaps with the young Cadyri, money changing hands by lantern light. He didn’t think there would be trouble; Brynn’s men were extremely well trained, and they were hosts tonight. The night breeze came through the window, sweetened with the scent of flowers. Gifts of the god’s offered world. Not to be spurned.

“I hate them, you know. The Erlings and the Anglcyn, both.”

Ceinion nodded, said nothing. What was there to say? A homily about Jad, and love? The big man sighed again. Drained his cup one more time. He showed no effects from the unwatered wine.

“Will you go to him? To Aeldred?” he asked, as Ceinion had expected.

“I don’t know,” he said, which had the virtue of being honest.

BRYNN LEFT, not down the corridor to his own bedchamber, but for one of the outbuildings. A young serving lass waiting for him, no doubt, ready to slip out wrapped in a cloak as soon as she saw him go through the door. Ceinion knew it was his duty to chastise the other man for this. He didn’t even consider it; had known ap Hywll and his wife for too long. One of the things about living in and of the world: you learned how complex it could be.

He doused two of the lamps, disliking the waste. A habit of frugality. He left the door a little ajar, as a courtesy. With Brynn outside, the lord of the manor would not be his own last visitor of the night. He’d been here, and in ap Hywll’s other homes, before.

Somewhat as an afterthought, while he waited, he went to his pack and drew from it the letter he was carrying with him north-west to Beda on the sea. He took the same seat as before, by the window. No moons tonight. The young Cadyri princes would have had a good, black night for a cattle raid … and they’d have been slaughtered. Bad luck for them that Brynn and his men would have been here, but you could die of bad luck.

Jad of the Sun had allowed him to save lives today, a different sort of gift, one that might have meaning that went beyond what a man was permitted to see. His own prayer, every morning, was that the god see fit to make use of him. There was something—there had to be something—in his arriving when he did, looking up the slope, seeing movement in the bushes. And following, for no very good reason besides a knowing that sometimes came to him. More than he deserved, that gift, flawed as he knew he was. Things he had done, in grief, and otherwise. He turned his head and looked out, saw stars through rents in moving clouds, caught the scent of the flowers again, just outside in the night.

Needful as night’s end. Needful as night.

Two subtle offerings in the triad game, then a song, improvised as they listened. Three young people here, on the cusp of their real existence, the possible importance of their lives. And two of them would very likely have been lying dead tonight, if he’d been a day later on the road, or even a few moments.

He ought to kneel and give thanks again, feel a sense of blessing and hope. And those things were there, truly, but they lay underneath something else, more undefined, a heaviness. He felt tired suddenly. The years could creep up on you, if a day lasted too long. He opened the letter again, the red, broken seal crumbling a little.

“Whereas it has for some time been our belief that it is the proper duty of an anointed king under Jad to pursue wisdom and teach virtue by example, as much as it is our task to strengthen and defend …”

With the lamps doused, there wasn’t enough light to read by, particularly for a man no longer young, but he had this committed to memory and was communing with it more than actually considering the contents again, the way one might kneel before a familiar image of the god on one’s own stone chapel wall. Or, the thought came to him, the way one might contemplate the name and stone-carved sun disk over a grave visited so many times it wasn’t really seen, only apprehended, as one lingered one more time until twilight fell, and then the dark.

In the dark, from the corridor, she knocked softly then entered, taking the partially open door for the invitation it was.

“What?” said Enid, setting down the tall candle she carried. “Still dressed and not in the bed? I’d hoped you’d be waiting for me there.”

He stood up, smiling. She came forward and they kissed, though she was kind enough to let it be a kiss of peace on each cheek, and not more than that. She wore some sort of perfume. He wasn’t good at naming these woman-scents but it was immediately distracting. He was suddenly aware of the bed. She’d intended that, he knew. He knew her very well.

Enid looked at the wine cups and the wide-necked flask. “Did he leave any for me?”

“Not much, I fear. There may be some, and water to mix.”

Enid shook her head. “I don’t really need.”

She took the seat her husband had so recently vacated to go out with whichever girl had been waiting for him. In the softer light she was a presence sitting near to him, a scent, a memory of other nights—and other kisses of peace when peace had not been what she’d left behind when she went away. His restraint, not hers, or even Brynn’s, for these two had their own rules in this long marriage and Ceinion had, years ago, been made to understand that. His restraint. A woman very dear.

“You are tired,” she said after a moment’s scrutiny. “He gets the best of you, coming first, and then I arrive—always hoping—and find …”

“A man not worthy of you?”

“A man not susceptible to my diminishing charms. I’m getting old, Ceinion. I think my daughter fell in love tonight.”

He took a breath. “I’ll say, in sequence, no, and no, and … perhaps.”

“Let me work that out.” He could see she was amused. “You are finally yielding to me, I am not yet old in your sight, Rhiannon might be in love?”

There was something about Enid that always made him want to smile. “No, alas, and yes, indeed, and perhaps she is, but the young always are.”

“And those of us not young? Ceinion, will you not kiss me? It has been a year and more.”

He did hesitate a moment, for all the old reasons, but then he stood up and came forward to where she sat and kissed her full upon the lips as she lifted her head, and despite his genuine fatigue he was aware of the beating of his heart and the swift presence of desire. He stepped back. Read her mischievous expression an instant before she moved a hand and touched his sex through the robe.

He gasped, heard her laugh as she withdrew her touch.

“Only exploring, Ceinion. Fear me not. No matter what you say to be kind, there will come a night when I can’t excite you any longer. One of these visits …”

“The night I die,” he said, and meant it.

She stopped laughing, made the sign of the sun disk, averting evil.

Or trying to. They heard a cry from outdoors. Through the window, as he quickly turned, Ceinion saw the arc of a thrown and burning brand.

Then he saw horsemen in the farmyard and screaming began.

ALUN THOUGHT HE’D SEEN his brother this way before, if not quite like this. Dai was restless, irritable, and afraid. Gryffeth, staking out the left side of the just-wide-enough bed, made the mistake of complaining about Dai’s pacing in the dark and received a blister-inducing torrent of profanity in return.

“That wasn’t called for,” Alun said.

Dai wheeled on him, and Alun, in the middle of the bed (having drawn the short straw), stared back at his brother’s straining, rigid outline through the darkness. “Come to bed, get some sleep. She’ll still be here in the morning.”

“What are you talking about?” Dai demanded.

Gryffeth, unwisely, snorted with laughter. Dai took a step towards him. Alun actually thought his brother might strike their cousin. This anger was the part that wasn’t quite as it had been before, whenever Dai had been preoccupied with a girl. That, and the fear.

“Doesn’t matter,” Alun said quickly. “Listen, if you can’t sleep, there’s sure to be dicing in the hall. Just don’t take all the money and don’t drink too much.”

“Why are you telling me what to do?”

“So we can get some rest,” Alun said mildly. “Go with Jad. Win something.”

Dai hesitated, a taut form across the room. Then, with another flung, distracted curse, he jerked the door open and went out.

“Wait,” Alun said quietly to Gryffeth. They waited, side by side in the bed.

The door swung open again.

Dai strode back in, crossed to his pack, grabbed his purse, and went back out.

“Now,” said Alun, “you can call him an idiot.”

“He’s an idiot,” Gryffeth said, with feeling, and turned over in bed.

Alun turned the other way, determined to try to sleep. It didn’t happen. The tapping at their door—and the woman’s voice from the corridor—came only moments later.

IT WAS OBVIOUS from Helda’s expression, and her darting glances at Rhiannon, that she was concerned. Their young cousin had thrown herself on her bed as soon as the four of them had returned from the hall to her chambers. She lay there, still in the green, belted gown, an extravagance of light blazing in the two rooms (with Meredd away, forever now, among the Daughters of Jad, Rhiannon had claimed the adjoining chamber for the other three women). She looked, if truth were told, genuinely unwell: feverish, bright-eyed.

Without a word spoken the three had resolved to humour her, and so nothing had been said in opposition to her immediately voiced demand for all the lights to be lit, or the next request, either.

Rania had the purest voice, in chapel and banquet hall, and Eirin the best memory. They’d gone off to the other room together, murmuring, and now returned through the connecting doorway, Eirin smiling, Rania biting her lip, as she always did before singing.

“I won’t do very well,” she said. “We only heard it once.”

“I know,” Rhiannon said, unusually mild, her voice at odds with her look. “But try.”

They had no harp here with them. Rania sang unaccompanied. It was well done, in truth, a different tone given by a woman’s voice in a quiet (too-bright) room, late at night, as compared to the same song heard in the hall as the sun was going down, when the younger son of Owyn ap Glynn had given it to them:

The halls of Arberth are dark tonight, No moons ride above. I will sing a while and be done.

The night is a hidden stranger, An enemy with a sword, Beasts in field and wood.

The stars look down on owl and wolf, All manner of living creature, While men sleep safe behind their walls.

The halls of Arberth are dark tonight, No moons ride above. I will sing a while and be done.

The first star is a longed-for promise, The deep night a waking dream, Darkness is a net for the heart’s desire.

The stars look down on lover and loved, All manner of delight, For some do not sleep in the night.

The riddle of the darkest hours Has ever and always been thus, And so it is we can say:

Needful as night’s end, Needful as night, By the holy blessed god, they are both true.

The halls of Arberth are dark tonight, No moons ride above. I have sung a while and I am done.

Rania looked down shyly when she finished. Eirin clapped her hands, beaming. Helda, older than the other three, sat quietly, a faraway look on her face. Rhiannon said, after a moment, “By the holy blessed god.”

It was unclear whether she was echoing the song, or speaking from the heart … or whether both of these were true.

They looked at her.

“What is happening to me?” Rhiannon said, in a small voice.

The others turned to Helda, who had been married and widowed. She said, gently, “You want a man, and it is consuming you. It passes, my dear. It really does.”

“Do you think?” said Rhiannon.

And none of them would ever have matched this voice to the tones of the one who normally controlled them all—the three of them, her sisters, all the young women of household and kin—the way her father commanded his warband.

It might have been amusing, it should have been, but the change cut too deeply, and she looked disturbingly unwell.

“I’m going to get you wine.” Eirin rose.

Rhiannon shook her head. Her green cap slipped off. “I don’t need wine.”

“Yes, you do,” said Helda. “Go, Eirin.”

“No,” said the girl on the bed, again. “That isn’t what I need.”

“You can’t have what you need,” Helda said, walking over to the bed, amusement in her voice, after all. “Eirin, a better thought. Go to the kitchen and have them make an infusion, the one for when we can’t sleep. We’ll all have some.” She smiled at the other three, ten years younger than she was. “Too many men in the house tonight.”

“Is it too late? Could we have him come here?”

“What? The singer?” Helda lifted her eyebrows.

Rhiannon nodded, her eyes beseeching. It was astonishing. She was pleading, not giving a command.

Helda considered it. She wasn’t sleepy at all, herself. “Not alone,” she said finally. “With his brother and the other Cadyri.”

“But I don’t need the other two,” Rhiannon said, a hint of herself again.

“You can’t have what you need,” Helda said again.

Rania took a candle and went for the infusion; Eirin, bolder, was sent to bring the three men. Rhiannon sat up in the bed, felt her own cheeks with the backs of her hands, then rose and went to the window and opened it—against all the best counsel—to let the breeze cool her, if only a little.

“Do I look all right?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Helda, maddeningly.

“I feel faint.”

“I know.”

“I never feel this way.”

“I know,” said Helda. “It passes.”

“Will they be here soon?”

ALUN DRESSED AT SPEED and went to find Dai in the banquet hall, leaving Gryffeth in the corridor with the girl and the candle. Neither of them seemed to mind. They could have gone to the women’s rooms around the corner and waited there, but they didn’t seem inclined to do that.

He carried his harp in its leather case. The woman had specifically said that the daughter of Brynn ap Hywll wanted the singer. The brown-haired girl, telling him this at the door, before Gryffeth got out of bed, had smiled, her eyes catching the candlelight she carried.

So Alun went to get Dai. Found him dicing at a table with two of their own friends and three of the ap Hywll men. He was relieved to see that Dai had a pile of coins in front of him already. His older brother was good at dice, decisive in betting and calculating, and with a wrist flick that let him land the bones—anyone’s bones—on the short side more often than one might expect. If he was winning, as usual, it meant he might not be too badly disturbed after all.

Perhaps. One of the others noticed Alun in the doorway, nudged Dai. His brother glanced up, and Alun motioned him over. Dai hesitated, then saw the harp. He got up and came across the room. It was dark except for lamps on the two tables where men were awake and gaming. Most of those bedding down here were asleep by now, on pallets along the walls, the dogs among them.

“What is it?” Dai said. His tone was curt.

Alun kept his own voice light. “Hate to take you from winning money from Arberthi, but we’ve been invited to the Lady Rhiannon’s rooms.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t make that up.”

Dai had gone rigid, Alun could see it even in the shadows.

“We? All of …?”

“All three of us.” He hesitated. Told truth, better here than there. “She, um, asked for the harp, I gather.”

“Who said that?”

“The girl who fetched us.”

A short silence. Someone laughed loudly at the dicing table. Someone else swore, one of the sleepers along the wall.

“Oh, Jad. Oh, holy Jad. Alun, why did you sing that song?” Dai asked, almost whispering.

“What?” said Alun, genuinely taken aback.

“If you hadn’t …” Dai closed his eyes. “I don’t suppose you could say you were sleepy, didn’t want to get out of bed?”

Alun cleared his throat. “I could.” He was finding this difficult.

Dai shook his head. Opened his eyes again. “No, you’re already out of bed, carrying the harp. The girl saw you.” He swore then, to himself, more like a prayer than an oath, not at Alun or anyone else, really.

Dai lifted both his hands and laid his fists on Alun’s shoulders, the way he sometimes did. Lifted them up and brought them down, halfway between a blow and an embrace. He left them there a moment, then he took his hands away.

“You go,” he said. “I don’t think I am equal to this. I’m going outside.”

“Dai?”

“Go,” said his brother, at some limit of control, and turned away.

Alun watched him walk across the room, unbar the heavy front doors of Brynn ap Hywll’s house, open one of them, and go out alone into the night.

Someone got up from the gaming table and barred the doors behind him. Alun saw one of their own band look over at him; he gestured, and their friend swept up Dai’s purse and winnings for him. Alun turned away.

And in that moment he heard his older brother scream an urgent, desperate warning from the yard outside. The last word he ever heard him speak.

Then the hoofbeats of horses were out there, drumming the hard earth, and the war cries of the Erlings, and fire, as the night went wild.

Chapter III

She is curious and too bold. Always has been, from first awakening under the mound. A lingering interest in the other world, less fear than the others, though iron’s presence can drain her as easily as any of them.

Tonight there are more mortals than she can remember in the house north of the wood; the aura is inescapable. No moons to cast a shadow: she has come away to see. Passed a green spruaugh on the way, seethed at him to stop his chattering, knows he will go now, to tell the queen where she is. No matter, she tells herself. They are not forbidden to look.

The cattle are restless in their pen. First thing she knows, an awareness of that. The lights almost all doused in the house now; shining only in one chamber window, two, and in the big room beyond the heavy doors. Iron on the doors. Mortals sleep at night, fearfully.

She feels hooves on the earth, west of them.

Her own fear, before sight. Then riders leaping the fence, smashing through it into the farmyard below and fire is thrown and iron is drawn, is everywhere, sharp as death, heavy as death. She hasn’t come for this, almost flees, to tell the queen, the others. Stays, up above, unseen flicker in the dark-leaved trees.

Brighter and lesser auras all around the farmyard. The doors bursting open, men running out, from house, from barn, iron to hand in the dark. A great deal of noise, screaming, though she can screen some of that away: mortals too loud, always. They are fighting now. A feeling of hotness within her, dizziness, blood smell in the yard. She feels her hair changing colour. Has seen this before, but not here. Memories, long ago, trying to cross to where she is.

She feels ill, thinned by the iron below. Clings to a beech, draws sap-strength from that. Keeps watching, cold and shivering now, afraid. No moons, she tells herself again, no shadow or flicker of her to be seen, unless a mortal has knowledge of her world.

She watches a black horse rear, strike a running man with hooves, sees him fall. There is fire, one of the outbuildings ablaze now. A confusion of dark and roiling mortal forms. Smoke. Too much blood, too much iron.

Then something else comes to her. And on the thought— quick and bright as a firefly over water—between her shoulders, where they all had wings once, she feels a spasm, a trembling of excitement, like desire. She shivers again, but differently. She spies out more closely: the living and the dead in the chaos of that farmyard below. And yes. Yes.

She knows who died first. She can tell.

He is face down on the churned, trampled earth. First dead of a moonless night. Could be theirs, if she moves quickly enough. Has to be fast, though, his soul fading already, very nearly gone, even as she watches. And such a long time since a mortal in his prime has come to them. To the queen. Her own place in the Ride forever changed if she can do this.

It means going down into that farmyard. Iron all around. Horses thundering, sensing her, afraid. Their hooves.

No moons. The only time this can be done. Nothing of her to be seen. Tells herself that, one more time.

None of them has wings any more or she could fly. She lets go of the tree, finger by finger, and goes forward and down. She sees someone on the way. He is hurrying up the slope, breathing hard. He never knows that she is there, a faerie passing by.

He had to get to his sword. Dai screamed a warning, and then he did it again. Men sprang from pallets, roaring, seizing weapons. The double doors were thrust open, the first of their people hurtling into the night. Alun heard the cries of the Erlings, Brynn’s warband shouting in reply, saw their own men from Cadyr rushing out. But his own room, and his sword, were back along the corridor the other way. Terribly, the other way.

Alun ran for all he was worth, heart pounding, his brother’s voice in his ears, a fist of fear squeezing his heart.

When he got to the room, Gryffeth—who knew battle sounds as well as any of them—had already claimed his own blade and leather helm. He came forward, handed Alun his, wordlessly. Alun dropped the harp where they were; he unsheathed the sword, dropped the scabbard, too, pushed the helmet down on his head.

The woman with Gryffeth was not wordless, and was terrified.

“Dear Jad! There are no guards where we are. Come! Hurry!”

Alun and Gryffeth looked at each other. Nothing to be said. The heart could crack. They ran the other way, farther down the same dark hallway, the brown-haired girl beside them, her hand somehow in Alun’s, candle fallen away. Then north, skidding at the hall’s turning, up the far wing to the women’s rooms.