Very great it was, dark almost to black, its trunk knotted and gnarled, wide as a house. It stood alone in the clearing, in the place of sacrifice, and clutched the earth with roots old as the world, a challenge to the stars that shone down, and there was power in that place beyond the telling. Standing there, he felt it calling for his blood, for his life, and knowing he could not live three nights on that tree, he stepped forward, so as not to turn again, and the music stopped.
They stripped him of his garments then and bound him naked to the Summer Tree at the waning of the moon. When they had gone, it was silent in the glade save for the ceaseless sighing of the leaves. Alone upon the Tree, he felt within his flesh the incalculable vastness of its power, and had there been anything left to fear, he would have been afraid.
And this was the first night of Pwyll the Stranger on the Summer Tree.
Chapter 8
In another wood east of Paras Derval, the lios alfar were still singing as Jennifer drifted towards sleep. Under the stars and the crescent of the risen moon their voices wove about her a melody of sorrow so old and deep it was almost a luxury.
She roused herself and turned on the pallet they had made for her.
“Brendel?”
He came over to her and knelt. His eyes were blue now. They had been green like her own the last time she looked, and gold on the hillside that afternoon.
“Are you immortal?” she asked, sleepily.
He smiled. “No, Lady. Only the gods are so, and there are those who say that even they will die at the end. We live very long, and age will not kill us, but we do die, Lady, by sword or fire, or grief of heart. And weariness will lead us to sail to our song, though that is a different thing.”
“Sail?”
“Westward lies a place not found on any map. A world shaped by the Weaver for the lios alfar alone, and there we go when we leave Fionavar, unless Fionavar has killed us first.”
“How old are you, Brendel?”
“I was born four hundred years after the Bael Rangat. A little more than six hundred years ago.”
She absorbed it in silence. There was nothing, really, to say. On her other side Laesha and Drance were asleep. The singing was very beautiful. She let it carry her into simplicity, and then sleep.
He watched her a long time, the eyes still blue, calm, and deeply appreciative of beauty in all its incarnations. And in this one there was something more. She looked like someone. He knew this, or he sensed it to be so, but although he was quite right, he had absolutely no way of knowing whom, and so could not warn anyone.
At length he rose and rejoined the others for the last song, which was, as it always was, Ra-Termaine’s lament for the lost. They sang for those who had just died by Pendaran, and for all the others long ago, who would never now hear this song or their own. As the lios sang, the stars seemed to grow brighter above the trees, but that may have been just the deepening of night. When the song ended, the fire was banked and they slept.
They were ancient and wise and beautiful, their spirit in their eyes as a many-colored flame, their art an homage to the Weaver whose most shining children they were. A celebation of life was woven into their very essence, and they were named in the oldest tongue after the Light that stands against the Dark.
But they were not immortal.
The two guards died of poison arrows, and four others had their throats ripped apart by the black onrush of the wolves before they were fully awake. One cried out and killed his wolf with a dagger as he died.
They fought bravely then, even brilliantly, with bright swords and arrows, for their grace could be most deadly when they had need.
Brendel and Drance with two others formed a wall about the two women, and against the charge of the giant wolves they held firm once, and again, and yet again, their swords rising and falling in desperate silence. It was dark, though, and the wolves were black, and the svarts moved like twisted wraiths about the glade.
Even so, the shining courage of the lios alfar, with Drance of Brennin fighting in their midst as a man posessed, might have prevailed, had it not been for the one thing more: the cold, controlling will that guided the assault. There was a power in the glade that night that no one could have foretold, and doom was written on the wind that rose before the dawn.
For Jennifer it was a hallucination of terror in the dark. She heard snarls and cries, saw things in blurred, distorted flashes—blood-dark swords, the shadow of a wolf, an arrow flying past. Violence exploding all around her, she who had spent her days avoiding such a thing.
But this was night. Too terrified to even scream, Jennifer saw Drance fall at last, a wolf dying beneath him, another rising wet-mouthed from his corpse to leap past her to where Laesha stood. Then before she could react, even as she heard Laesha cry out, she felt herself seized brutally as the hideous svarts surged forward into the gap and she was dragged away by them over the body of Diarmuid’s man.
Looking desperately back, she saw Brendel grappling with three foes at once, blood dark on his face in the thin moonlight, then she was among the trees, surrounded by wolves and svart alfar, and there was no light to see by or to hope for anywhere.
They moved through the forest for what seemed an endless time, travelling north and east, away from Paras Derval and everyone she knew in this world. Twice she stumbled and fell in the dark, and each time she was dragged, sobbing, to her feet and the terrible progress continued.
They were still in the woods when the sky began to shade towards grey, and in the growing light she gradually became aware that amid the shifting movements of her captors, one figure never left her side: and among the horrors of that headlong night, this was the worst.
Coal-black, with a splash of silver-grey on his brow, he was the largest wolf by far. It wasn’t the size, though, or the wet blood on his dark mouth; it was the malevolence of the power that hovered about the wolf like an aura. His eyes were on her face, and they were red; in them, for the moment she could sustain the glance, she saw a degree of intelligence that should not have been there, and was more alien than anything else she had come upon in Fionavar. There was no hatred in the look, only a cold, merciless will. Hate, she could have understood; what she saw was worse.
It was morning when they reached their destination. Jennifer saw a small woodcutter’s cabin set in a cleared-out space by the forest’s edge. A moment later she saw what was left of the woodcutter as well.
They threw her inside. She fell, from the force of it, and then crawled on her knees to a corner where she was violently, rackingly sick. Afterwards, shivering uncontrollably, she made her way to the cot at the back of the room and lay down.
We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair. And so Jennifer Lowell, whose father had taught her, even as a child, to confront the world with pride, eventually rose up, cleaning herself as best she could, and began to wait in the brightening cottage. Daylight was coming outside, but it was not only that: courage casts its own light.
The sun was high in a blank sky when she heard the voices. One was low, with a note of amusement she could discern even through the door. Then the other man spoke, and Jennifer froze in disbelief, for this voice she had heard before.
“Not hard,” the first man said, and laughed. “Against the lios it is easy to keep them to it.”
“I hope you were not followed. I absolutely must not be seen, Galadan.”
“You won’t be. Almost all of them were dead, and I left behind ten wolves against the stragglers. They won’t follow in any case. Enough of them have died; they wouldn’t risk more for a human. She is ours, more easily than we might have hoped. It is rare indeed that we receive aid from Daniloth.” And he laughed again, maliciously amused.