But another breathing grew at his heels, the whuff of a running horse, the beat of hooves which broke no brush as it came.
He spun about to face attack, but there was nothing there but the blackness, and the wind and a cold which settled about his heart. Then he feared as he had never feared in battle, and ran as if effort before this were nothing. The ache in his side was more than want of breath; he pressed his swordhand’s wrist there and felt the ebb of blood.
He was weakening. He heard a chuckling and now knew the name of that rider which followed him, and the name of the wood into which he had strayed. And when he was nigh to falling he set his back against an aged tree in a space clearer than the others, where it seemed that he might at least have the grace of seeing his enemy come on him.
Shadow came, and a spatter of rain, a rattle of thunder, and the baying of hounds. Shadows flooded among the trees, black bits of night which rushed and leaped for him. His sword swept through them, nothing hindering, and a coldness fastened and worried at his arm, numbing all the way to his heart.
He cried aloud and tore free, ran, leaving a fragment of himself in the jaws, and the sword was no longer in his hand. The shadows coursed behind him, and the hoofbeats rang like the pulse in his ears and the hoarse breathing was like his own. The enemy was not behind him, but lodged in his side, where the wound worked at his life. A part of his soul was theirs, and they would tear him to nothing when they came on him again, a rending far worse than the first. Rain spattered into his face and blinded him, dampened the leaves so that they clung to him and his armor was soaked so that he did not know now what was blood and what was rain. He stumbled yet again, in a crash of thunder, and of a sudden as surely as there was a horror behind him he conceived of safety in the trees ahead, where seemed a mound overgrown, a swelling of the land with life, where the trees grew vast, and strong, stretching out their limbs in sympathy.
He reached it, entered it, sped in strange freedom of limb where trees were gnarled and straight at once, barren and flowered with stars, and aglitter with jewels like hanging fruit, with treasure of silver laid upon the white branches, swords and shining mail, cloth like morning haze, spiderweb among pale green leaves.
A sword hung before him, offered to his hand . . . he tore it from the leaves in a scatter of bright foliage, and the brightness about him faded, leaving him alone with the dark and the swift loping shadows, with the dark rider, who burst upon him in a flickering of lightnings and yet absorbed no light himself, like a hole in the world through which he might fall forever, if the hounds did not have him first. He held the illusory blade trembling before him, and shuddered as its light drew detail from the dark, of jaws and eyes of hounds. He was drawn to look up, to lift his face unwilling, to face the rider—he saw something, which his dazed mind would not recall even in the instant of beholding it.
The rider came closer, and a chill came on his flesh, on all but the hand which held the blade. He lost the brightness, could not hold even his vision of this grim place. The black began to come over him, but he slashed at it and the hounds yelped aside from him, bristling and trembling.
“Come,” a voice whispered to him, very softly.
He must, for he could not hold his arm up any longer. The blade wavered, and sank, and yet a warmth broke like a breath of spring at his back. “Stand firm,” someone said.
“He is mine,” said the shadow, a voice like shards of winter ice.
“Be off,” said the other, soft and without doubt
“He has stolen from you. Do you encourage thefts?” And for a moment the world was bright, and the shadow was a blight upon it, a robed darkness which stood in an attitude of amazement. “Ah,” the cold voice breathed, wonder-struck. “Ah. Thisyou have kept from me.”
Light blazed. Ciaran staggered in it, and his knees hit the ground, a shock which wrung a sob of pain from him, and he could no longer tell earth from sky or day from night. Wet leaves lay against his cheek or cheek against the leaves, and the rain beat down into bis face, chilling his torn soul.
But the shadow was gone, and the thunder stilled. It seemed the moon shone down. A face confused itself with it, and with the sun in a strange, fair sky.
He still clutched the sword. Slim cool fingers pried his hand from it, eased his limbs, covered him with a downy peace in which the only pain was to his heart, an ache and a memory of loss.
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.”