“So it may,” she said, “for it was torn. And that healing is beyond me—What is your name, Man?”
Dread touched his eyes. “Ciaran,” he said then quietly, as a guest ought. “Ciaran’s second son of Caer Donn.”
“Caer Donn. Caer Righ, we called it, the King’s domain.”
He feared, but he looked her in the face. “And what is your name?” he asked.
“I shall tell you my true one, that I do not give to mortals; for you are my guest. It is Arafel.”
“Then I must thank you with all my heart,” he said earnestly, “and then beg you set me on the road from here.”
In so many words he healed her heart and wounded it . . . and a regret came into his eyes as if he had seen the wounding. He held up before her his right hand, on which he bore a golden ring, worked with a seal.
“I have a duty,” be said. “On my honor, I have to go and do it, if there is still time.”
“Where is this duty?”
He lifted a hand as if he would give a direction, and nothing was the same. “There are armies,” he said in his confusion, pointing where he might mean the Brown Hills. “There is war on the plain; and my King has won.But the enemy has drawn off this way, which is a valley where they might hold long in a siege if they could take it. And lord Evald of Caer Wiell is riding with the King. Do you understand, lady Arafel? War is coming up the dale. Caer Wiell must not be deceived. They must hold firm, whatever the false reports and fair offers from the enemy, must hold only a little time, until the King’s army comes this way. Lord Evald’s hold—must hear the message I bear.”
“Wars,” she said faintly. “They will not be wise, who set foot in Ealdwood.”
“And I must go, lady Arafel. I must I beg you,” Already he began to fade, discovering the power of will within himself.
“Ciaran,” she said, a summoning, and held him by his name, still within the light of her sun. “You are determined. But you do not count the cost. The Huntsman will seek you out again. Once in the mortal world, you are a prey to him; he has never lost a hunt, do you see? And it is not finished.”
“That may be,” he said, pale-faced. “But I have sworn.”
“Pride,” she said. “It is empty pride. What arms have you, what means to pass through all of Eald against such enemies?”
He looked down at himself, armorless and empty-handed. But he wavered toward a parting, all the same.
“Wait,” she said, and went to the old oak, took from its branches one of the jewels which hung among the others, pale green like the one which hung at her own throat, though dimmed, for its master was ages gone. It sang to her, the dreams of an elf named Liosliath, a part of his soul, such souls as her kind had. “Take it. You borrowed his sword in your need, but this will serve you better. Wear it always about your neck.”
“What are these things?” he asked without taking, and looked about at all the trees which held such treasures, jewels and swords glimmering silver and light among the leaves. “What place is this?”
“You might liken it to a tomb; this you robbed . . . my brothers and my sisters, my fathers and mothers. It is elvish memory.”
“Forgive me,” he whispered, stricken.
“We do not die. We go . . . away; and when we are gone, what use are these things to us? Yet they hold memories. That is their use now. The sword, you could not fully use. But take this stone. Liosliath would not grudge it to a friend of mine. He was my cousin: he was young as our kind go, and so it may be safest for you. The shadows feared him.”
He took it in his hand, and his eyes widened and his lips parted. Fear . . . perhaps he felt fear. But he held it fast, and it sang to him, of elvish dreams and memories.
“It too is power,” she said. “And danger. It does not make you a match for Death; but ’twill fight the chill . . . if you have the heart to use it.”
He gathered the silver chain and hung it about his neck. His fair clear eyes clouded in the power of the dreams. But he was not lost in them. She touched her own dreamstone, and called forth the faintest of songs, a sweet, bright harping. “Do not trust in iron,” she warned him. “That and this . . . do not love one another. And come, since you must. Come, I shall walk with you on your way. Eald will take you there more safely than you might walk in the world of Men.”
“This is given for a baneful place,” he said.
“Walk it with me, and see.”
She offered her hand. He took it, and his was warm and strong in hers, human-broad but comfortable. He walked with her, and for all his apprehension a wonder came into his eyes when he saw the land, the trees of elven summer, the glamored meadows abloom with glistening flowers, the timid, wide-eyed deer which stared at them as they passed.
Stone sang to stone, his heart to hers, and the wind grew warm beneath that other sun. She felt something which had long frozen about her heart melt away, and she knew companionship for the first time in human ages, a fellowship lost since Liosliath himself had faded, last of all elves save herself.
(“Forgive me,” Liosliath had said, this Man’s unwitting words and her cousin’s last, which had tugged at her heart “I have tried to stay.” But he had had that look in his gray eyes which was the calling, and once it had begun in his heart, the fading began, and all her wishing could not hold him—nor could she go with him, for her heart was here.)
“It is beautiful,” Ciaran said.
“Not so wide as once,” she said. And, remembering: “We held Caer Donn once.”
“The grandfathers say—there are your sort still there.”
She tossed her head, stung. “Faery folk. Silly nixes. And sad. They have few wits. They shapeshift so often they forget themselves and cannot get back again—That is not to say they are not dangerous when crossed.”
“That is not your kind.”
“No,” she said, laughing, in better humor. “Not mine. We were the greater folk. Elves. The Daoine Sidhe. The faery-folk live in our ruin. They never loved us.”
“And others of your kind?”
“Gone,” she said. “But myself.”
He let go her hand to look at her, and in letting go he drifted, cried out in fear, for they were on Caerbourne’s edge, a bright stream, willow-bordered, and here its name was Airgiod, the Silver. She took his hand again and steadied him.
“Beware such lapses. You might fall. Caerbourne has eroded deep in human years, and his banks are steep. And worse, far worse, there is no knowing how deep he has sunk in the shadows. Lord Death’s geography is a darker mirror of this, but mirror nonetheless, and I should not care for hisriver. Remember your wound when you walk in Eald.”
He shivered; she felt the dread keenly, a chill in the stone upon her breast. She touched it and warmed it, and him.
“Use the stone,” she bade him. “He shall not have the rest of you if you but know how to walk in Eald. Your heart’s wish can bring you here, only so you do not stray too far; your heart’s wish can take you away.”
“It is a great gift,” he admitted at last “But they say all gifts in this world have cost.”
“Not among kinsmen.”
He looked up at her as deer look at hounds, wary and distraught
“There’s elvish blood in you,” she said. “Do you not know? You could not have come, else. We once ruled, I say, in Caer Donn.”
“So they say.” She felt the beating of his heart, like something trapped in the stone within her hand.
“Is it so terrible,” she asked, “to discover such a kinship?”
“I am my father’s own son, no changeling.”
“Then by father or mother, you carry blood of mine. You are no changeling, no. There is nothing of the little folk about you. Is it sire or mother stands taller than most?”