It hurled him. The black limbs spun, the earth came up at him and he struck it, brown wet earth, slick leaves, clinging to his hands.
He heard dogs. He leapt up, in the sunlight, in the dappling of the leaves of Caerbourne Ford; he heard horses and movement and the cleaving of the air, the shivering passage of iron from the bowmen beyond the trees.
Arrows struck him in quick succession. His heart burst in dazing pain. He fell a second time, shattering the shafts and numb after the first hurt—rising then because his limbs still moved: he saw the An Beag bandits, saw bows bent again to add more arrows to those that pierced him.
He ran. He turned and plunged into mist, where the pain began in earnest, robbing him of breath.
M "Ciaran," Liosliath cried, fair and far and desperate. "Cling to the stone—o run, run, run!"
The wind came then, tearing at the mist, and he heard thunder, the howling of the gale that yet smelled of sea and wrack. A glim mering shone like a star amid the murk, and grew, steadily oncom ing, while the thunder swelled.
"Aodhan!" he cried, remembering. He had called three times. The elf horse had come, from the ends of the earth it might be: Aodhan had come.
Thunder came down on him, and wind battered him as Aodhan came near, a shining pallor in the dark, a shoulder offered to his need. He caught the mane amid which lightnings flickered, harmless to him; strength burned from the stone toward his hands, needing nothing of his heart, and he flung himself astride, or somehow he had gotten to Aodhan's back. The elf horse began to run above the ground, carrying him with shockless steps and racing not through distances but faster and deeper into Eald.
"O Aodhan," he whispered, "take me to her, take me there now."
The elf horse snorted, shifted in his stride, almost losing him from his back, and whinnied in dismay, shifting this way and that. They ran; a wall of bright mist loomed before them, poured about them. Ciaran cried aloud, so fierce the pain of iron that split his heart, cried a second time in dismay to find them in retreat.
"Again," he cried, "Aodhan, take me through!"
The elf horse turned and tried the chill mist again, laboring. The cold pain shot through him, but he clung to the mane and held, feeling the horse fighting and veering beneath him. Trial after trial the elf horse made, shying back to lunge forward again, and now small things chittered and leapt at them in growing shadow; he cried aloud, and Aodhan whinnied and veered aside.
There was a darkness then, and Aodhan was running to the baying of hounds, away from the barrier, for the pain had ebbed. Thunder muttered. There were other hooves, and leaping shapes of dogs, and swift-flying shadows.
A rider drew even with them, moving with them, on a horse like night, in which there was the pale glimmering of bone where Aodhan's lightning flickered; the rider was Lord Death.
"No," Ciaran whispered. "Let me go on trying. Let me try, Lord Death."
"Turn then," the answer came; and he called out to Aodhan, to no avail. The elf horse ran on, a swift striding that lost not a pace. He sank on Aodhan's neck in defeat, unable to do more, clinging as the sunny road stretched suddenly beneath them.
Death stayed with him, a shadow in the day. They had left Eald and ran now on the river road, that which led home. The elf horse had failed as he had, ran now with a stretching and gathering of sinew, a flutter of mane, a blur of sunlit dust.
THIRTEEN
The Bain Sidhe
Domhnull made the steps, leaning on his stick, for his legs would still betray him, and went out along the wall, seeking somewhat of refuge, some little solitude where no one else could come at him with questions—Ask my lady this, it was, and ask my lady that, and pray, sir, what of the grainstores? —and the riders be home, sir Domhnull, nothing found, no hope, no luck and less of substance.
He leaned his arms upon the wall, his stick resting by him and bowed his head, for it ached; but he thought again how that would seem and lifted it, looking outward on a sight that today seemed worse than yesterday—for sun shone on Caer Wiell's lands, on green pasture and growing fields and the gentle swells of it west and north and even on the trees about the river. But beyond that circle of sunlight the sky was darkened with walls of cloud, towering for tresses of cloud that had begun as wisps and mare's-tails.
It did not advance as storms did, on wind and claps of thunder. It built new outposts, a mare's-tail first, a gray, dull wisp, and then an outwelling of the stormcloud near it, all silent, proceeding no more swiftly than any growth of clouds on a summer's day. A man had to watch, not look, and then he would see it, this wall-building all about them. They had hardly noticed it beginning, first as a line of cloud in the far northwest, and then in the west, spreading over the forest to the south as the clouds built; and then one night it reached out an arm toward the north again, darkening the dawn with strands of murk that became another wall.
Daily, folk had begun to remark on it, and to cast anxious glances from the fields and the crests of the walls. Night and day it grew, until the first strands of it appeared in the north, completing the ring about them, and the cloud over the forest advanced until the line of sunlight could be seen plain on the treetops at noon, so that now shadow lay visibly along the tops of the trees that overhung the Caerbourne and off across the hills; and overhead now, above the gray walls of the keep a cloudy rampart towered, up and up into bright sun and blue sky, its gray surface knobbed and gnarled and changing and somehow not moving, as if it had pressed against some barrier that made this well of sunlight. Domhnull did not look at it, no more than a glance, but there was no escaping the sight of it outward, where its arm swept round across the hills, and the march ing line of shadow had now come all the way over the hills, so that that horizon too was dull and dark.
The circle had narrowed again in the night, from the north. No one talked about it. Only there was a traffic to the walls or out the gates, each looking for himself, from lady Branwyn to Cook in her apron, floured from morning baking—to himself, latest, not wanting to look at all, but drawn here. It was the sunlight he looked at, the impossibly brilliant sunlight shining off the fairness of the land, bar ricade against the shadow, which had now assumed a perfect round ness on its nearer edge, marking the size of the circle that yet would be.
Gods help us, Domhnull thought, but it was not gods he thought of, but rather Arafel. He still hoped. The sunlight was reason for hope even if it was narrowing, even if their lord was the seventh day missing.
"He has gone away," lady Branwyn had said, with such a look in her blue eyes that he dare not question it. Gone. Domhnull knew where lord Ciaran had gone, and watched the cloudwall veil that forest day by day.
But the circle remained about them, and the folk of Caer Wiell went about their business, knowing quite as well as he, he reckoned, that their lord had not ridden to this place where he had gone—since his horse was still in stable and no men had been called to go with him. Gossip would happen, but there was a strange calm about this gossip, a matter of factness like the confidence with which his own mother had set out bowls of milk for visitors in the night. This cloud was a sign, it was clearly a sign, and not a good one; but a steady hammering went up from Smith's forge, and smoke and sparks: and riders went to and fro on the road keeping up contact with the borders, while wagons groaned their way in from the steadings, and the storehouse filled day by day, preparing for siege.