Come with me, the voice had said, and see how the years pass, so soon withered like the violets; but there is no fading where I go. Take my hand, come with me, never hear them calling.
"Branwyn."
She turned where she sat, startled by her husband's voice, so softly he had come up the stairs; but that was his way, this quiet. He offered his arms to her; she held out her own and he came and knelt down by her, holding her, patting her shoulders, making her look at him.
"Were you crying?" he asked, with the evidence of it on her lashes. "O Branwyn, love, my love, my heart, there's no need for crying now. They're safe, full of bread and honey, no worse than scratches and skinned knees—"
"What was it they found?"
"Something— She called it a silly nix, a thing—Oh, don't speak of it It's nothing; it's gone, not to trouble us more."
"They will not go back to the river."
"They will not. They understand." He smoothed her hair, held her with great tenderness.
"It comes of this gadding about the fields, this—"
"You cannot grow flowers in the shade: they want the sun and wind, Branwyn."
She shivered, sat back from him, he kneeling and holding her clenched fists in his. For a long moment she fought for self-posses sion. "They cannot," she said, "grow like weeds. They cannot be deceiving Muirne and running off."
"No, they cannot. But they have the luck on them, they do, and that was on them today, and more than luck. —She will come to night, Branwyn. Here."
She needed a moment to understand.
"No," she said.
"How can it be no?" He was utterly dismayed. His face was stricken. "Branwyn—"
It was in the open then, his distress, her distrust; and then because she had never fought open war with her enemy: "Forgive me, I am distraught. I only want my house in peace, in peace—"
He gathered up her hand and carried it to his lips. She hardly felt the warmth. "Branwyn. You fear too much."
"What does she want?"
He had no ready answer. Some worry sat within his eyes, confirm ing her own dread. "Perhaps to warn us. Or to explain. Nothing more than that. Perhaps to be courteous. She is that. The Daoine Sidhe are much on courtesy. Branwyn, she is our friend. She has always been. Look you, what land since the war is blessed like ours, what fields as green as ours—"
"Or children," she said harshly, "so many and so fair? —I waited. I waited fifteen long years with every house in the land more blessed than ours. I held the serving maid's daughters and I ached after daughters of my own—and watched children I had held become brides before I held my own daughter and my son. O, if this was blessing, Ciaran, it was slow to come to us, and forgive me, forgive me if I am too fond—"
"And are they only yours?" he asked.
She had no answer. His look robbed her, so that she shivered.
"They were long years," he said, "but we cannot lay them on Meadhbh's and Ceallach's shoulders and crush the spirit from them. And they were good years, Branwyn."
"They were good years," she admitted, "but o, Ciaran, if we were so blessed—if there was luck on us—why not that simple luck that farmwives had and I did not? So I hold them close. And today— today I feared perhaps—"
"She is our friend. Branwyn, they are safe thanks to her."
She thought about that a time, and her heart grew a little broader, and her memory a little clearer, that once there had come a light into Caer Wiell, and in that light a shape, and a voice. Almost she saw her, a ragged figure in faded clothes, but she could not see the face.
"I would like to make her welcome," Ciaran said. "For so many debts. For friendship. Branwyn, this hall was theirs once and long ago. Its name was Caer Glas, and I do not know if there is another place in all the world like this, where she might be here and still in Eald. I would be dead; and so might we all—but for Arafel."
There is Bonn, the thought leapt into her mind unbidden, where you were born. That also was theirs once. But she brushed that thought aside, as she did every unpleasant thing, keeping her own nest pure for those she loved. "We will set a table," she said, finding comfort in the proprieties of things, to tame the wild with bonds of courtesies, as if this were a charm to assure its civility. If she could once set it within her hall, she thought, and once fix it in her mind, if she could believe and once remember it, then she would feel safer; then she could get sureties of it, and learn to call its name.
Arafel she was, and Feochadan, which was Thistle; and other names besides. But the sound was not enough. She had to learn it with the heart, as Ciaran had, and she meant to do so, for the best of reasons, that Caer Wiell was her home, and she was born to it, of southron blood and of the line of kings and of an enemy Arafel had slain. The stones were hers, her home, the magic that she knew; and what entered here trod her ground. Here she might learn a thing, and remember this time, not letting it fade as it faded for others.
She still had power. It was herself her husband chose, to age in ordinary years, beside her; it was herself who held his children; and these were the things she dwelt on in her mind, that in Caer Wiell she was secure.
"There's my love," her husband said, and rising, touched his lips to her brow. "You'll see." He turned wistful and very grave. "At moonrise," he said.
It was long before Beorc rode in, for the searchers he had ridden farthest and deepest into the woods, and because of things he had seen or thought that he might have seen he would have no easy sleep for nights to come.
"Safe," he echoed when his lord himself had come down to the gate to meet him. "Gods be thanked." And then he turned his face again toward seeing to his horse, for shame that he went so weak and his eyes stung, perhaps with sweat, but perhaps not. He drew his bow and quiver from the saddle and slung both over his shoulder before delivering his good bay gelding to the grooms who waited.
"Get him a cup of ale," Ciaran said. "Come to hall when you have had your ease. I want to speak with you."
"Aye," Beorc muttered, turning about again, nodding a courtesy to his departing lord. Others had come down—Domhnull one, his cousin on his mother's side; and Rhys ap Dryw, a lord's son himself, but youngest of seven sons; and others who had been among the searchers. A boy took Beorc's bow and quiver, another his muddy cloak. "Who found them?" he asked concerning the children. "Where found?"
There was strange silence among the men. "The lord himself," one said, but seemed to hold something back.
"Come," said Domhnull, taking his arm. "Come upstairs."
Beorc followed up the stairs to the wardroom, and there sank down on a bench, working himself free of his buckles, his armor and his sweat-drenched clothes. Domhnull and Rhys stayed with him, and a flurry of pages ran in and out with a succession of basins and towels and the promised stoup of ale.
"Oh, that's good," Beorc murmured, his hair and beard plastered with cooling water and his lips wet with the frothy ale. He drew a quieter breath and looked up at his comrades who leaned nearby, Rhys with one foot on the bench and his arms on his knee, Domhnull braced against the wall, hands tucked in his belt. They were not of a kind, those two—his young cousin's an uncommon fairness, hair brighter than new straw, eyes blue and clear as a babe's; and Rhys must have looked sullen from his cradle, a dark, lean man with a brooding stare: his mountains bred grim folk as they bred kites and hawks. "No harm to them?" Beorc asked again, for something in the answers he had gotten and not gotten nagged at him with the sense of something amiss. "Where were they, asleep under some hedgerow?"
"No one knows," said Rhys.