She saw he was distressed. "It takes a long time," she said, "before she tires. He is honoured, much loved."
"And he will be lost forever, after. That is always."
"Why lost? Why see it so?"
"Because we are taught that. That there is a harbour for our souls, and his was taken and will not find the god now. Maybe… that is what we fear. In you. That you can do this to us. Perhaps long ago we knew it, about the faeries."
"It was different, once," she agreed. And then shyly, after a moment, "We could fly, then."
"What? How?"
She turned, still shy, to show him her back. And so he saw the ridges clearly, hard, smaller than breasts, inside her shoulder blades, and he understood that these were all that now remained of what had been faerie wings.
He imagined it, creatures like her, flying under blue moon or silver, or at sunset. An ache in his throat, the envisaged beauty of it. In the world, once.
"I'm sorry," he said. He reached out, brushed one with a hand. She shivered, turned back to him.
"There it is again. The way you think. Sorrow. It is so much in you. I… we… do not live with that. It comes with the speed, doesn't it?"
He thought about this, didn't want to even guess how old she was. She spoke Cyngael the way his grandfather had.
He said it: "You speak my language so beautifully. What does your own sound like?"
She looked surprised a moment, then amused, the hair flashing it. "But this is my own tongue. How do you think your people learned it?"
He gaped, closed his mouth.
"Our home is in those woods and pools," she said. "West, towards where the sun lies along the sea at day's end. There was not always so much… distance between us."
He was thinking, as hard as he could. Men spoke of the music in the voices of the Cyngael. Now he knew. A knowing, like this night, that shifted the world. How was he going to pray? She was looking at him, still amused.
He said, "Is this, is tonight… forbidden to you?"
She took a moment to answer. Said, "The queen is pleased with me."
He understood, both answer and hesitation. She was protecting him. In her way, a kindness. They could be kind, it seemed. The queen was pleased because of Dai. The taken soul.
He said, looking at her, "But it is still… seen as wrong, isn't it? You have some licence because of what you did, but it is still…"
"There is to be distance, yes. Just as for you."
He laughed this time. "Distance? You don't exist! To say you are even here is heresy. Our clerics would punish me, some would cast me out from chapel and rites, if I even spoke of it."
"The one from the pool wouldn't," she said quietly.
He hadn't realized she'd seen the cleric that night. "Ceinion? He might," Alun said. "He likes me, because of my father, I think, but he wouldn't allow talk of faeries or the half-world."
She smiled again. "Half-world. I haven't heard that in so long." He didn't want to know how far back in the past some-thing would have to be for her to think that way. The slow uncoiling of time for them. She stretched, feral and sleek as a cat. "But you are wrong about that one. He knows. He came to the queen when his woman was dying."
"What?"
She laughed aloud, quicksilver sound, flutter and ripple in the glade. "Softly. I can hear you," she murmured. She touched him, idly, a hand on his leg. He felt desire, again, was very nearly defined by it. She said, "He came to the mound and asked if one of us might come with him, to help her live. She was coughing blood. He brought silver for the queen, and he wept among the trees outside. He couldn't see us, of course, but he came to ask. She pitied him."
Alun said nothing. Couldn't speak. He knew, everyone knew, about Ceinion's young wife and her death.
"So do not say to me," the faerie added, stretching again, "that that one, of all of you, would deny us."
"She didn't send anything, did she?" he asked, whispering.
Both eyebrows arched, she regarded him. "Why think that? She sent eldritch water from the pool and a charm. She is gracious, the queen, honours those who honour her."
"It didn't… help?"
She shook her head. "We are only what we are. Death comes. I did what I could."
He almost missed it. "She sent you?"
Her eyes on his, no distance between them, in one way. He needed only move a hand to touch her breast again.
"I have always been… most curious."
He sighed. So great a strangeness, the world altering moment by moment as the stars turned above them. Was it slow, or fast, that movement overhead? Did it depend on who was asking?
He said, "And tonight is… being curious?"
"And for you, is it not? What else is there for it to be?" A different note in her voice now, under the music.
He was gazing at her. Helpless to look away. Small, even teeth in the wide, thin mouth, pale skin, achingly smooth, the changing hair. Dark eyes. And vestiges of wings. Once, they could fly.
"I don't know," he said, swallowing. "I'm not wise enough. I feel as if I could weep."
"Sorrow, again," she said. "Why does it always come to that, for you?"
"Sometimes we can weep for joy. Do you… can you understand that?"
A longer silence. Then she shook her head slowly. "No. I would like to, but this is your cup, not ours."
The… otherness, again. This sense that he was both in and entirely outside the world he knew. He said, "Tell me Esferth and the others will be there when I go from here?"
She nodded, calmly. "Though some of them won't be."
He stared. A hard thumping of the heart. "What do you mean?" "They are starting to ride out. There is anger, men taking horse, bearing iron."
He sat up. "Holy Jad. How do you know?"
She shrugged. The question, he realized, was foolish. How could he understand how she knew things? How could she answer him? Even in the tongue they shared, the language her people had taught his.
He stood up. Began putting on his clothes. She watched him. He was aware, might always be aware now, of the haste of his doing this, seen through her eyes. The way he and the others lived. "I must go," he said. "If something has happened."
"Someone died," she said gravely. "There is sorrow. The aura of it."
The speed of their dying. He looked at her, holding his tunic in both hands. He cleared his throat. "Don't envy us that," he said.
"But I do," she said simply; small, sleek, shining otherness in the grass. "Will you come back into the wood?"
He hesitated, and then a thought came that could not have come a night before, when he was younger.
"Will you sorrow if I do not?"
Her eyebrows lifted again, but in surprise this time. She moved a hand, same gesture as before, as if reaching for something. Then, slowly, she smiled, looking up at him.
He pulled on his tunic. No belt, because of the iron. He turned to leave. He hadn't answered her question, either. He had no answer to give.
He looked back from the glade's dark edge. She was still sitting there on the grass, unclothed, in her element, sorrowless.
+
The voices in the darkness began moving away to the north. Bern remained where he was in the stream. He had a thought, broke off a reed; might need to submerge himself. He heard shouting, men running. Someone rasped a curse, an obscenity directed at Erlings everywhere, and the scabrous, pustulent whores who gave them birth.
Not a good time for this Erling to be discovered.
He'd been right, then. The signal fire had meant nothing good at all. It was still burning. More shouting now, farther away, towards Esferth, where the tents were: the tents outside an over-flowing city on the eve of a fair. A city they'd been told would be almost empty, one that they might even loot in a raid that would give rise to songs for generations to their glory, and Jormsvik's.