"Retherly, in the valley. Where our infants are buried. She's been endowing the Daughters of Jad there for years."
"A well-known house."
"Will be better known, with a queen, I imagine."
Ceinion listened for, but did not hear, bitterness. He was thinking about the prince on his other side, didn't look that way, giving Gareth time.
"After the wedding?" he said.
"So she intends."
Carefully, Ceinion said, "We are not supposed to grieve, if someone finds her way, or his, to the god."
"I know that."
Gareth suddenly cleared his throat. "Do… the others know of this?" His voice was rough.
His father, who had chosen his moment, said, "Athelbert? No. Your sisters might. I'm not certain. You may tell them, if you like."
Ceinion looked from one to the other. Aeldred, it occurred to him, would not necessarily be an easy man to have for a father. Not for a son, at any rate.
He'd had a good deal of wine, but his thinking was still clear, and the name had now been spoken. A doorway of his own. Perhaps. They were as much alone as they were likely to be, and the younger son, listening, had a thoughtful nature. He drew breath and spoke. "I have," he said, "another wedding thought, if you might entertain it."
"You want a wife again?" The king's smile was gentle.
So was the cleric's, responding. "Not this woman. I am too old, and unworthy." He paused again, then said it: "I have in mind someone for Prince Athelbert."
Aeldred grew still. The smile faded. "This is the heir of the Anglcyn, friend."
"I know it, my lord, believe me. You want peace west of the Wall, and I want my people drawn into the world, from their feuds and solitude."
"It can't be done." Aeldred shook his greying head decisively. "If I choose a princess from any of your provinces, I declare war on the other two, destroy the purpose of a union."
The other man smiled. "You have been thinking about this." "Of course I have! It is what I do. But what answer is there, then?"
And so Ceinion of Llywerth said softly, with the voice-music the Cyngael carried with them through the world, "There is this one answer, lord. Brynn ap Hywll, who slew the Volgan by the sea and might have been our king had he wanted it, has a daughter of an age to be wed. Her name is Rhiannon, and she is the jewel of all women I know. Unless that be her mother. The father is known to you, I dare say."
Aeldred stared at him without speaking for a long time. The Ferrieres cleric snored, cheek to the wooden board. They heard laughter again and a muffled curse from down the room. A sleepy servant prodded the nearer fire with an iron rod.
A door opened before the king spoke.
Doors opened and closed all the time, without consequence or weight. This one was behind them, not the double doors at the far end of the hall. A small door, an exit for the king and his family, should they wish one. A tall man had to stoop to go through. A passage to inner quarters, privacy, the sleep one would have assumed to be coming soon tonight.
Not so, in the event, for it is not given to men and women to know with any surety what is to come.
The doorways of our lives take many shapes, and the arrivals that change us are not always announced by thunderous pounding or horns at the gates. We may be walking a known laneway, at prayer in a familiar chapel, entering a new one and simply looking up, or we may be deep in quiet talk late of a summer's night, and a door will open behind us.
Ceinion turned. Saw Osbert, son of Cuthwulf, Aeldred's life-long companion, and his chamberlain. Cuthwulf, as it happened, had been a name cursed in the Cyngael lands, a cattle-raider and worse than that, in more violent days. Another reason (if more were needed) the Anglcyn were hated and feared west of the Wall.
The Erlings had killed Cuthwulf by Raedhill, with his king.
The son, Osbert, was a man Ceinion had come to admire without stint or reservation after two sojourns here. Fidelity and courage, judicious counsel, quiet faith and manifest love: these held their message for those who could see.
Osbert moved forward with the limp he had carried away from a battlefield twenty years ago. He came into the lamplight. Ceinion saw his face. And even by that muted illumination he knew that something had come upon them through that door. He set down his wine, carefully.
Peace, ease, leisure to build and teach, to plant and harvest, time to read ancient texts and consider them… these were not the coinage of the north. In other lands they might be, to the south, east in Sarantium, or perhaps in the god's other worlds. Not here.
"What is it?" Aeldred said. His voice had altered. He stood, his chair scraping back. "Osbert, tell me."
Ceinion would remember that voice, and the fact that the king had been on his feet before he'd heard anything. Knowing already.
And so Osbert told them: of signal flares lit on hills towards the south by the sea, running in their chain of telling fire along the ridges with a message. Not a new tale, Ceinion thought, hearing it. Nothing new here at all, only the old dark legacy of these northlands, which was blood.
NINE
"Will my own world be there when I leave you?" "I don't know what you mean. This is the world we have."
She was beside him, very near. The glade would have been dark were it not for the light she cast. Her hair was all around him, copper-coloured now, thick and warm; he could touch it, had been doing so, in a wood on a summer night. They lay in deep grass, edge of a clearing. Sounds of the forest around them, murmurous. These woods had been shunned for generations by his people and the Anglcyn, both. His fear was beside him, however, not among the trees.
"We have stories. Those who went with faeries, and came home… a hundred years later." Spirit wood, they named this forest. One of the names. Was this what it meant?
Her voice was lazy, a slow music. She said, "I might enjoy lying here that long."
He laughed softly, startled. Felt himself suspended, precariously, between too many feelings, almost afraid to move, as if that might break something.
She turned onto an elbow in the grass, looked at him a moment. "You fear us even more than we fear you."
He thought about that. "I think we fear what you might mean."
"What can I… mean? I am just here."
He shook his head. Reached for clarity. "But here for so much longer than we are."
Her turn to be silent. He stared at her, drinking slender grace with his eyes, the otherness of her. Her breasts were small, perfect. She had arched her body back above him, before, in the light she made. He wondered, suddenly, how he would pray from now on, what words he could use. Did he ask forgiveness of his god for this? For something the clerics taught did not even exist?
She said, finally, "I think the… speed of things for you makes the world more dear."
"More painful?"
Her hair had slipped, by invisible degrees, towards silver again. "More dear. You… love more, because you lose so quickly. We don't know… that feeling." She gestured, one hand, as if reaching. "You live in… in the singleness of things. Because they go from you."
"Well, they do, don't they?"
"But you come into the world knowing that. It cannot be… unexpected. We die, as well. It just takes…"
"Longer."
"Longer," she agreed. "Unless there is iron."
His belt and dagger were in the chapel in Esferth. He felt a renewed grief: one of the suspended feelings here. What she had just said. Loving more, because losing.
He said, "Is my brother still with the queen?"
She raised an eyebrow. "Of course."
"But he won't be, always."
"Nothing is always."
Born into the world, knowing that.