Moon’s heart plunged, and she closed her eyes. “Alder Owl.”
“You cannot win her back. There was no treachery there. She, at least, I took fairly, for she greeted me by name and said I was well met.”
“No!” Moon cried.
“She was sick beyond curing, even when she left you. But she asked me to give her wings for one night, so that you would know. I granted it gladly.”
She thought she had cried all she could for Alder Owl. But this was the last death, the death of her little foolish hope, and she mourned that and Alder Owl at once with falling, silent tears.
“My test for you, then.” He stretched out his hands, his mailed fingers curled over whatever lay in each palm. “You have only to choose,” he said. He opened his fingers to reveal two rings, one silver, one gold.
She looked from the rings to his face again, and her expression must have told him something.
“You are a witch,” said the King of Stones, gently mocking. “You read symbols and make them, and craft them into nets to catch truth in. This is the meat of your training, to read the true nature of a thing. Here are symbols—choose between them. Pick the truer. Pick the better.”
He pressed forward first one hand, then the other. “Silver, or gold? Left or right? Night or day, moon”—she heard him mock her again—“or sun, water or fire, waning or waxing, female or male. Have I forgotten any?”
Moon wiped the tears from her cheeks and frowned down at the rings. They were plain, polished circles of metal, not really meant for finger rings at all. Circles, complete in themselves, unmarred by scratch or tarnish.
Silver, or gold. Mined from the earth, forged in fire, cooled in water, pierced with air. Gold was rarer, silver was harder, but both were pure metals. Should she choose rareness? Hardness? The lighter color? But the flash of either was bright. The color of the moon? But she’d seen the moon, low in the sky, yellow as a peach. And the light from the moon was reflected light from the sun, whose color was yellow although in the sky it was burning white, and whose metal was gold. There was nothing to choose between them.
The blood rushed into her face, and the gauntleted hands and their two rings swam in her vision. It was true. She’d always thought so.
Her eyes sprang up to the face of the King of Stones. “It’s a false choice. They’re equal.”
As she said the words, her heart gave a single terrified leap. She was wrong. She was defeated, and a fool. The King of Stones’ fingers closed again over the rings.
“Down that trail to a granite stone, and then between two hazel trees,” he said. “You’ll find him there.”
She was alone in the clearing.
Moon stumbled down the trail, dazed with relief and the release of tension. She found the stone, and the two young hazel trees, slender and leafed out in fragile green, and passed between them.
She plunged immediately into full sunlight and strangeness. Another clearing, carpeted with deep grass and the stars of spring flowers, surrounded by blossoming trees—but trees in blossom didn’t also stand heavy with fruit, like a vain child wearing all its trinkets at once. She saw apples, cherries, and pears under their drifts of pale blossom, ripe and without blemish. At the other side of the clearing there was a shelf of stone thrust up out of the grass. On it, as if sleeping, lay a young man, exquisitely dressed.
Golden hair, she thought. That’s why it was drawn in so lightly. Like amber, or honey. The fair face was very like the sketch she remembered, as was the scholar’s hand palm up on the stone beside it. She stepped forward.
Beside the stone, the black branches of a tree lifted, moved away from their neighbors, and the trunk—Not a tree. A stag stepped into the clearing, scattering the apple blossoms with the great span of his antlers. He was black as charcoal, and his antler points were shining black, twelve of them or more. His eyes were large and red.
He snorted and lowered his head, so that she saw him through a forest of polished black dagger points. He tore at the turf with one cloven foot.
I passed his test! she cried to herself. Hadn’t she won? Why this? You’ll find him there, the King of Stones had said. Then her anger sprang up as she remembered what else he’d said: I will let you free the prince of Hark End.
What under the wide sky was she supposed to do? Strike the stag dead with her bare hands? Frighten it away with a frown? Turn it into—
She gave a little cry at the thought, and the stag was startled into charging. She leaped behind the slender trunk of a cherry tree. Cloth tore as the stag yanked free of her cloak.
The figure on the shelf of stone hadn’t moved. She watched it, knowing her eyes ought to be on the stag, watching for the rise and fall of breath. “Oh, what a stupid trick!” she said to the air, and shouted at the stag, “Flower and leaf and stalk to thee, I conjure back what ought to be. Human frame and human mind banish those of hart or hind.” Which, when she thought about it, was a silly thing to say, since it certainly wasn’t a hind.
He lay prone in the grass, naked, honey hair every which way. His eyes were closed, but his brows pinched together, as if he was fighting his way back from sleep. One sunbrowned long hand curled and straightened. His eyes snapped open, focused on nothing; the fingers curled again; and finally he looked at them, as if he had to force himself to do it, afraid of what he might see. Moon heard the sharp drawing of his breath. On the shelf of stone there was nothing at all.
A movement across the clearing caught Moon’s eye and she looked up. Among the trees stood the King of Stones in his gray armor. Sunshine glinted off it and into his unsmiling face, and pierced the shadows of his eye sockets. His eyes, she saw, were green as sage.
The prince had levered himself up onto his elbows. Moon saw the tremors in his arms and across his back. She swept her torn cloak from her shoulders and draped it over him. “Can you speak?” she asked him. She glanced up again. There was no one in the clearing but the two of them.
“I don’t—yes,” he said, like a whispering crow, and laughed thinly. He held out one spread and shaking hand. “Tell me. You don’t see a hoof, do you?”
“No, but you used to have four of them. You’re not nearly so impressive in this shape.”
He laughed again, from closer to his chest this time. “You haven’t seen me hung all over with satin and beads like a dancing elephant.’
“Well, thank goodness for that. Can you stand up? Lean on me if you want to, but we should be gone from here.”
He clutched her shoulder—the long scholar’s fingers were very strong—and struggled to his feet, then drew her cloak more tightly around himself. “Which way?”
Passage through the woods was hard for her, because she knew how hard it was for him, barefoot, disoriented, yanked out of place and time. After one especially hard stumble, he sagged against a tree. “I hope this passes. I can see flashes of this wood in my memory, but as if my eyes were off on either side of my head.”
“Memory fades,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
He looked up at her quickly, pain in his face. “Does it?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry—did you tell me your name?”
“No. It’s Moon Very Thin.”
He asked gravely, “Are you waxing or waning?”
“It depends from moment to moment.”
“That makes sense. Will you call me Robin?”
“If you want me to.”
“I do, please. I find I’m awfully taken with having a name again.”
At last the trees opened out, and in a fold of the green hillside they found a farmstead. A man stood in the farmhouse door watching them come. When they were close enough to make out his balding head and wool coat, he stirred from the door; took three faltering steps into his garden; and shouted and ran toward them. A tall, round woman appeared at the door, twisting her apron. Then she, too, began to run.