He drew a breath and left the path right there, not hesitating, plunging into the woods.
It was impossible, almost immediately. Swearing, he pulled the horse to a stop and listened in blackness. Heard—blessed be Jad—a sound through leaves, not far ahead. It could be an animal. He didn't think it was. He twitched the reins, moved the horse forward, carefully now, picking his way, sword out. A semblance of a trail, no more than that. His eyes were adjusting but there was no light at all. An arrow would kill him, easily.
He dismounted on that thought. Looped the reins around a tree trunk. His hair was slick with sweat. He heard sounds again—something ahead of him. It wasn't an animal. Someone unused to being silent in a forest, an unknown wood, far from the sea, amid the terror of pursuit, a raid having gone entirely wrong. Alun gripped his sword and followed.
He came upon the four Erlings too quickly, before he was ready for them, stumbling through beech trees into a sudden, small space, seeing them there, shadows—two kneeling to catch their breath, one slumped against a tree, the fourth directly in front of him, facing the other way.
Alun killed that one from behind, kept moving, slashed away the sword of the one leaning by the tree, gripped him and turned him with an arm twisted behind his back, snarled, "Drop blades, both of you!" to the kneeling pair.
A triad, he thought suddenly, remembering Rhiannon held, then Brynn. Third time tonight. The thought was urgent, sword-swift.
He remembered what had happened to the other two men who had held their captives this way, and even as the thought came he broke the pattern. He killed the man he was using as a shield, pushing him hard away to fall on the earth, and he stood alone to face two Erlings in a clearing in a wood.
He had never actually killed before. Two now, in moments.
"Come on!" he screamed at the pair before him. Both bigger than him, hardened sea-raiders. He saw the nearer one's head jerk suddenly, looking past Alun, and without any actual thought Alun dove to his right. The arrow from behind flew past him and hit the Erling in the sword arm.
"Ivarr, no!" the man screamed.
Alun rolled, scrambled up, turned his back on the two of them, sprinting immediately east into the thicket where the bowman would be. He heard him running through to the other side, then mounting up. The horse was there!
He wheeled back, running hard, swearing savagely. The fourth of those he'd surprised here was running the other way, towards the path. The wounded man was on his knees, clutching the arrow in his arm, making small, queer sounds. He was as good as dead, they both knew it: poison on the arrowhead, the shaft. Alun ignored him, pushed through to his horse, clawed free the reins, mounted, forced his way back through the trees and then the clearing again to the other side. He could still hear the archer's horse ahead of them, that rider swearing too, fighting to find a path through in thick, treed blackness. He felt a surging in his blood, fury and hardness and pain. His sword was red, his own doing this time. It didn't help. It didn't help.
He broke through, the horse thrashing into open space, saw water, a pool in the wood, the other rider going around it to the south. Alun roared wordlessly; galloped the Erling horse into the shallow water, splashing through at an angle to shorten the way, cut off the other man.
He was almost thrown over the animal's head as it halted, stiff-legged.
It reared straight back up, neighing, clawing at the air in terror, and then it came down and did not move at all, as if anchored so firmly it might never stir again.
The entirely unexpected will elicit very different responses in people, and the sudden intrusion of the numinous—the vision utterly outside one's range of experience—will exaggerate this, of course. One person will be terrified into denial, another will shiver in delight at a making manifest of dreams held close for a lifetime. A third might assume himself intoxicated or bewitched. Those who ground their lives in a firm set of beliefs about the nature of the world are particularly vulnerable to such moments, though not without exception.
Someone who—like Owyn's younger son that night—had already had his life broken into shards, who was exposed and raw as a wound, might be said to have been ready for confirmation that he'd never properly understood the world. We are not constant, in our lives, or our responses to our lives. There are moments when this becomes clear.
Alun's foot came out of one stirrup when the horse reared. He clutched at the animal's neck, fought to stay in the saddle, barely did so as the hooves splashed down hard. His sword fell into the shallow water. He swore again, tried to make the horse move, could not. He heard music. Turned his head.
Saw a growing, inexplicable presence of light, pale as moon-rise, but there were no moons tonight. Then, as the music grew louder, approaching, Alun ab Owyn saw what was passing by him, walking and riding on the surface of that water, in bright procession, the light a shimmering, around them and in them. And everything about the night and the world changed then, was silvered, because they were faeries and he could see them.
He closed his eyes, opened them again. They were still there. His heart was pounding, as if trying to break free of his breast. He was trammelled, entangled as in nets, between the desperate need to flee from the unholy Jad-cursed demons these must beby all the teachings of his faith—and the impulse to dismount and kneel in the water of this starlit pool before the very tall, slender figure he saw on an open litter, borne in the midst of the dancing of them all, with her pale garments and nearly white skin and her hair that kept changing its colour in the silvered light that grew brighter as they passed, the music louder now, wild as his heart's beating. There was a constriction in his chest, he had to remind himself to breathe.
If these were evil spirits, iron would keep them at bay, so the old tales promised. He'd dropped his sword in the water. It occurred to him that he ought to make the sign of the sun disk, and with that thought he realized that he couldn't.
He couldn't move. His hands on the horse's reins, the horse rooted in the shallows of the pool, the two of them breathing statues watching what was passing by. And in that growing, spirit-shaped brightness in the depths of a moonless wood at night, Alun saw— for the first time—that the saddle cloth of the Erling horse he rode bore the pagan hammer symbol of Ingavin.
And then, looking at that queen again—for who else could this possibly be, borne across still waters, shining, beautiful as hope or memory? — Alun saw someone next to her, riding a small, high-stepping mare with bells and bright ribbons in its mane, and there came a harder pounding, like a killing hammer against his wounded heart.
He opened his mouth—he could do that—and he began to shout against the music, struggling more and more wildly to move arms or legs, to dismount, to go there. He was unable to do anything at all, couldn't stir from where he and the horse were rooted, as his brother rode past him, changed utterly and not changed at all, dead in the farmyard below them, and riding across night waters here, not seeing Alun, or hearing him, one hand extended, and claimed, laced in the long white fingers of the faerie queen.
Siawn and his men knew exactly where they were going, heading up the slope. They also had torches. Ceinion, though he preferred to walk, had been riding all his life. They came to the place where the trail from the ridge met the path, stopped there, the horses stamping. The cleric, though much the oldest, was the first to hear sounds. Pointed into the woods, Siawn led them there, cutting a little north of where Alun had tried to force his way through. There were nine of them. The other young Cadyri, Gryffeth ap Ludh, had joined them, fighting sorrow. They found the two dead Erlings and a dying one almost immediately.