Will you bid me go? it asked. The beautiful eyes were windows into the mist, the touch at his heart quite deft and sure. There was no resisting it.
No, he admitted. He did not want to admit this, but it was so, that he had no counselor but his ghost, whose advice had always been true. He knew the world; he had fought a bitter war; he had fought a different sort of war after, his house disgraced, his parents failing in health, his kinsmen all dead in the war or turning on one another. His counselor's advice had won the King, after all; gained him power while the lords of the land conspired and connived with a King who knew only plots and murderings.
Listen now, said the ghostly Sidhe, his Dark Man, the voice which had whispered through his thoughts for years so subtly he thought the thoughts his own. You must gather your forces, quickly, before your brother can prevent you. You must not stand siege here. Caer Donn was never made for it; and if you are pent within these hills he will reach to Dun na h-Eoin and cut you off from the King. Move now, this night, while you have the chance.
And do what?
Murder came to his mind, so soft and deadly a whisper it was not a word, but a vision, the King lying lifeless on his bier, the armies with their lances shining in the sun, advancing on the Dale.
Prevent him, said the voice. Prevent him.
ELEVEN
Retreat
They were still there, the skulkers in the brush, and sometimes arrows flew: men of Damh and perhaps the wild men of the Bradhaeth with them, lurking round the margins of the lake, in reeds and willows. And in every hiding place of the hills sat the country men of Caer Wiell, farmers skilled with bow and spear, and sword if it came to that, grandfathers and striplings not a few, for the word was out and the archers came, not alone here, but all along the marches, bands of kinsmen and not a few bow-skilled daughters ready for any outbreaking along the border.
"Go south," Ciaran had said then to the folk of Alhhard's stead ing, who had come first and feathered a good many of the lurkers about Lioslinn. "You and all your neighbors, go up and down the Bainbourne, and keep a watch, in case An Beag should grow rest less."
So Alhhard's sons went and Ciaran watched them go, not without misgivings. "An Beag will carry tales," Ciaran said glumly, "and the King will hear how I make war and stir up the whole countryside. If there is some attack of An Beag they will say it was I who moved on them."
"Go back to Caer Wiell," said Beorc. "There is no more need for you to be here. Less talk if you are back where you belong, and what passes up here is my doing."
Ciaran gave that no answer. He was weary of Beorc's asking, and walked away, sheltered by the hill. He wore armor of a sort, that country folk had gotten him, of laced leather; and there was talk. There could hardly be otherwise, how their lord was faery-touched and could not bear sword or iron, how he bore an elvish stone next his heart and flinched from Damh's iron-tipped arrows. He saw their looks as he passed them in his wandering along the lines, and felt the silence they paid him as if they had seen some direr sight than a tired, graying man in motley leather. By day he had stopped and joked with them as he had talked sometimes over fences in his riding through the land, but there were always whispers in his wake: he knew it. Now he passed along the ridge without a word except some times to greet a man familiar to him, like Cuinn of his household troops or Graeg of Graeg's steading. But mostly there were whispers. Likeliest, he thought, the folk of Caer Wiell had done a good deal of free talking to their cousins and brothers of the steadings; and there was no stopping the tale-bearing.
He wearied of it, beyond all bearing, felt solitude heaped upon his shoulders, and even Beorc resisting him, Beorc, who spoke less and less of Domhnull and took wilder and fiercer chances, flinging him self toward any point of hazard he suspected his lord might take instead. An anger burned in Beorc; he felt it in the stone, a dark thing that looped and twisted all round their long comradeship, through blame and guilt and a rage that smothered itself like banked fire.
You never should have sent him, lord. He went to keep you from it And you were blind. But Beorc would never say it.
He went back to that post he had kept in the evening before, a stony knoll that gave view of the lake and hills. Here they had held when the riders from Caer Wiell had reached them—reached them in the midst of battle, and taught their attackers somewhat of re spect. That had been one of the good moments of their holding here —but less good for Boda who would not be riding home to his wife; and for other lives they lost. The sky threatened; a feeling of ill had grown in the air since morning, and now the darkness that lay over the northwest was deeper and direr, shot with lightning, though it seemed only a cloud to mortal sight, a bit of weather to the west . . . "Get firewood under cover," he had heard his captains order. "That'll be on us by nightfall."
There was no sunset; the west was bound in murk too thick for sun to color it; and if that sight was grim, the surface of Lioslinn took on a leaden gleam that made it even less wholesome than be fore, a well of mire and dread, rimmed in shadowy reeds. Wrong, it cried to any with eyes to see it. Elvish sights should be fair, of green trees and silver; and this was not. This was corrupted. The hills rose like iron walls beside it, and trees were fallen, burned, laid waste.
"I do not like this," Beorc had said a day ago, when they waited attack. "This place weighs on me as nowhere I have ever been."
That from Beorc, who was not one to start at shadows. And the house troops, newly arrived, went about with haunted looks, glanc ing much toward the lake and toward the west, but that was no more than the countrymen had been doing before them.
"Lord," said Beorc now from behind him; but he had heard the tread in his wake all the while he had come this way, and known Beorc was following, his relentless shadow. Beorc reached him and crouched nearby on another stone, his guard, his warder, not to be shaken from his heels.
"It is worse," Ciaran said at last, for with his Sight he saw no difference now in day or night toward the west.
"I would you were away," said Beorc.
He had no more to say to that than before, and for a long time Beorc was silent.
"I feel it," Beorc said at last, "this storm. Others do. I'm sure of it."
"Was it not her gift," Ciaran murmured, "to see such things?" He thought of Domhnull, as he reckoned Beorc was thinking—the boy, loyal to him, going ahead in spite of all his Seeing.
Then it seemed to him that he heard hoof beats in the dark, and the stone began to burn against his breast.
Beorc had spoken. He could not get it clear. He rose. "Be still," he said. "O my friend, get your distance from me—"
It was coming from the pass, he thought. All the world seemed stretched and distorted, like iron under fire and hammer. He saw fires in the murk, and twisted trees and a darkness coiled and mon strous within the lake, stirring in its sleep.
The hoofbeats grew louder, and hounds bayed, voices mingled with the wind.
"Lord Death," he whispered, and struggling to see the Man beside him: "Beorc, Beorc, run, get away from here."
Iron shuddered in the air, the rasping of blade from sheath, and poisoned the wind. "Not I," said Beorc, there by him, if dimly through the pervading murk. "Lord, what is it?"
"The hounds, hear you?" The baying filled heaven and earth, and the brush and grass whispered about them like a gathering of many voices. There were clouds, and dark shapes coursing among them. His arm, once torn, turned cold and painful as the stone upon his breast. Fleeting things shredded on the wind, and voices shrieked in it like voices of lost children, of wounded animals, of dying men and the clangor of battle.