But she settled in the sinking moonlight, and watched beside him, choosing instead to stay. He leaned against the side of an aged tree, gazed at her and watched her watching him, eyes darting to the least movement in the leaves, and back again to her, who was the focus of all ancientness in the wood, of dangers to more than life. And at last for all his caution his eyes began to dim, and the whispers had power over him, the sibilance of leaves and the warmth of dreaming Eald.
FIVE
The Hunter
Fionn slept, and waked at last by sunrise, blinking and looking about him in plain fear that trees might have grown and died of old age while he slept. His eyes fixed on Arafel last of all and she laughed in elvish humor, which was gentle if sometimes cruel. She knew her own look by daylight, which was indeed as rough as the weed she had named herself. She seemed tanned and thin and hard-handed, her gray-and-green all cobweb patchwork, and only the sword stayed true. She sat plaiting her hair to a single silver braid and smiling sidelong at the harper, who gave her back a sidelong and anxious glance.
All the earth had grown warm in that morning. The sun did come here, unclouded on this day. Fionn rubbed the sleep from his eyes and opening his wallet, began looking for his breakfast.
There seemed very little in it: he shook out a bit of jerky, looked at it ruefully, then split off a bit of it with his knife and offered half his breakfast to her—so small a morsel that, halved, was not enough for a Man, and a haggard and hungry one at that.
“No,” she said. She had been offended at once by the smell of it, having no appetite for man-taint, or the flesh of any poor forest creature. But the offering of it, the desperate courtesy, had thawed her heart. She brought out food of her own store, a gift of trees and bees and whatsoever things felt no hurt at sharing. She gave him a share, and he took it with a desperate dread and hunger.
“It’s good,” he pronounced quickly and laughed a little, and finished it all. He licked the very last from his fingers, and now there was relief in his eyes, of hunger, of fear, of so many burdens. He gave a great sigh and she smiled a warmer smile than she was wont, remembrance of a brighter world.
“Play for me,” she wished him.
He played for her then, idly and softly, heart-healing songs, and slept again, for bright day in Ealdwood counseled sleep, when the sun burned its warmth through the tangled branches and brambles and the air hung still, nothing breathing, least of all the wind. Arafel drowsed too, at peace in mortal Eald for the first time since many a tree had grown. The touch of the mortal sun did that kindness for her, a benison she had all but forgotten.
But as she slept she dreamed, and there were halls in that vision, of cold gray stone.
In that dark dream she had a Man’s body, heavy and reeking of wine and ugly memories, such a dark fierceness she would gladly have fled it running if she might. She felt the hate, she felt the weight of human frame, the reeling unsteadiness of strong drink.
He had had an unwilling wife, had Evald of Caer Wiell—Meara of Dun na h-Eoin was her name; he had a small son who huddled afraid and away from him in the upstairs of this great stone keep, the while Evald drank with his sullen kinsmen and cursed the day. Evald brooded and he hated, and looked oftentimes at the empty pegs on his wall where the harp had hung. The song gnawed at him, and the shame gnawed at him, bitter as the song—for that harp came from Dun na h-Eoin, as Meara came.
Treason, it had sung once, and the murder of kings and bards. Keeping it was his victory.
So Evald sat and drank his ale and heard the echoes of that harping. And in her dream Arafel’s hand sought the moonstone on its chain and found it at his throat
She had laid a virtue on it in giving it, that he could neither lose it nor destroy it. Now she offered him better dreams and more kindly as he nodded, for it had that power. She would have given him peace and mended all that was awry in him, drawing him back and back to Eald. But he made bitter mock of any kindness, hating all that he did not comprehend.
“No,” whispered Arafel, grieving, dreaming still before that fire in Caer Wiell. She would have made the hand put the stone off that foul neck; but she had no power against the virtue she herself had given it, so far, so wrapped in humankind, while he would not. And Evald possessed what he owned, so fiercely and with such jealousy it cramped the muscles and stifled the breath.
Most of all he hated what he did not have and could not have; and the heart of it was the harper and the respect of those about him and his lust for Dun na h-Eoin.
So she had erred, and knew it. She tried to reason within this strange, closed mind. It was impossible. The heart was almost without love, and what little it had ever been given it folded in upon itself lest what it possessed escape.
He had betrayed his King, murdered his kinsmen, and sat in a stolen hall with a wife who despised him. These were the truths which gnawed at him in his darkness, in the stone mass which was Caer Wiell.
Of these he dreamed, and clenched the stone tightly in his fist, and would never let it go: this was all he understood of power—to hold, and not let go.
“Why?” asked Arafel of Fionn that night, when the moon shed light on the Ealdwood and the land was quiet, no ill thing near them, no cloud above them. “Why does he seek you?” Her dreams had told her Evald’s truth, but she sensed another in the harper.
Fionn shrugged, his young eyes for a moment aged; and he gathered his harp against him. “This,” he said.
“You said it was yours. He called you thief. What then did you steal?”
“It is mine.” He settled it in his arms, touched the strings and brought forth melody. “It hung in his hall so long he thought it was his, and the strings were cut and dead.”
“And how did it come to him?”
Fionn rippled out a somber note and his face grew darker. “It was my father’s and his father’s before him, and they harped in Dun na h-Eoin before the Kings. It is old, this harp.”
“Ah,” she said, “yes, it is old, and one made it who knew his craft. A harp for kings. But how did it come to Evald’s keeping?”
The fair head bowed over the harp and his hands coaxed sound from it, answerless.
“I’ve given a price,” she said, “to keep him from it and from you. Will you not give back an answer?”
The sound burst into softness. “It was my father’s. Evald hanged him in Dun na h-Eoin, in the court when it burned. Because of songs my father made, for truth he sang, how men the King trusted were not what they seemed. Evald was the least of that company, not great; petty even in that great a wrong. When the King died, when Dun na h-Eoin was burning, my father harped them one last song. But he fell into their hands and so to Evald’s—dead or living, I never knew. Evald hanged him from the tree in the court and took the harp of Dun na h-Eoin for his own. He hung it on his own wall in Caer Wiell for mock of my father and the King. So it was never his.”
“A king’s own harper.”
Fionn never looked at her and never ceased to play. “Ah, worse things he has done. But that was seven years ago. And so I came, when I was grown—wandering the roads and harping in all the halls. Last of all to Caer Wiell. Last of all to him. All this winter I gave Evald songs he liked. But at winter’s end I came down to the hall at night and mended the old harp. So I fled over the walls. From the hill I gave it voice and a song he remembered. For that he hunts me. And beyond that there is no more to tell.”