A horn began to sound from the walls, waking echoes across the hills. The lost was found, and now the searchers through the forest must come safely home. Following these echoes other horns began to sound through the forest and along the river as searchers heard and passed the signal on.
Women came running before ever they reached the gates, and quickest was Branwyn, who had been watching from the walls and seeking too with what small portion of Eald she held in her heart. She came running, her braids whipping loose, her skirts aflurry, her slippered feet hardly touching the stones. She caught her errant chil dren in her arms and looked at their faces and up at Ciaran's and wept.
"They were with her," Branwyn said hotly. "I knew, I knew—"
"No. They were not with her," Ciaran said. "But she found them."
Branwyn's face went pale beneath its flush, all her knowings in disorder. She held Meadhbh's face and then Ceallach's between her hands and looked them in the eyes, kneeling there on the muddy stones beneath the gate—looked last and most desperately at Ciaran, hearing silences. Muirne came, wiping her nose and her eyes and begging everyone's forgiveness. "You must beg Muirne's pardon," Ciaran said sternly to his children. "You left her, as I hear it."
Meadhbh made a grave curtsy, difficult to manage within her mother's arm; and: "I beg pardon, Muirne," Ceallach said faintly.
Ciaran looked at all those round about, and still there was a hush on all the crowd except the children. "Our thanks," he said. "Noth ing is amiss. The lost is found." He set a hand on his son's shoulder as Branwyn took Meadhbh in hand, and they passed through the gates of the hold he had held as lord the last ten years.
TWO
Caer Wiell
Branwyn wept, in the upper hall of Caer Wiell, her hands against her eyes as she sat huddled in her chair before the hearth. To her credit she wept alone, her children in their tower room with Muirne, her husband with his men down by the gate; for they were tears compounded of rage, of helplessness, of years and years of dread.
She hated Eald. It was a hate not born of anger, and yet having anger in it, for she had been betrayed. She had loved it once desper ately, when she had been a child, and so she feared it for her chil dren, with more than instinct. It and she were enemies, but quietly, gently—for all that she loved was tangled in Eald: her husband, her home, her children latest of all. She saw a vision of green leaves and dancing light, touching all she had, and this light was without sub stance: she could not strike it or hold it in the hand, but no shutters or gates could stop it. It slipped through chinks and the wind that came from the woods breathed enchantments more potent than her mortality.
Something had touched her children, something of Eald had held them today, and so she clenched her fists and remembered herself as if she hovered in the air above the girl on a fat Caerdale pony, and that child was herself and that which hovered was herself grown and trying to warn the girl—-go back, go back, never trust them.
The vision always ended there, before the pony shied. It was more dreadful so, with every merry jogging step become horridly sinister, every stirring of the leaves a menace the child could not yet feel.
Go back, go back, go back.
It was strange, that she could never recall Arafel. In her mind she knew that there had been such a person, that this was the power that sat at the heart of the wood. She had spoken with her face to face, oh, many a time. But the face and the voice had left her mind, leaving only the memory of a memory, of something which had shaken her life and left a great gap about itself, making her doubt that it was ever true. She never admitted this to her husband, never spoke of it, but she knew that this was not so with him, that Eald was graven too deeply in his heart for him ever to forget. She hated Eald and embraced it, perceiving even in him, in Ciaran, in the father of her children, a green silence she could never breach, and thoughts she could never share, and a longing against which she worked all her mortal witchery—Stay, o stay, never think of her, never listen to the wind, never remember—whatever it is I cannot hold in my mind.
If she could shape this thing, she thought sometimes, she might gain power over it. Once she had walked into the heart of Eald, Ciaran's hand locked with hers, so that for a time she saw; but that memory too had fled like water through the sieve of her reason, and while she remembered that they had spoken with someone, that someone was lost to her. There had been a horse Ciaran had ridden; but she had not been able. In truth, she could not tell even looking at it whether it was a horse at all, whether something of surpassing beauty or surpassing horror, except that it was power, and it had carried her husband once to war, a thing of light and terror, and sometimes the memory of soft horselike breaths and sometimes the striking of a hoof, not horselike, but like the muttering of thunder in the distance.
She shivered, and gazed into the tiny fire they kept to warm this room in springtime. The memories faded, as faery things would, which was their camouflage in the world; faded from her, though once she had seen these things and touched the elvish horse and met Arafel face to face.
Stay away, she cried in her heart, never come back, never trouble us —for she knew that all the gifts she had and all her happiness came from that most untrustworthy source.
And faery gifts faded, like faery itself in the minds of its beholders, except for those of elvish blood.
She knew the rumors of her husband, that he was Sidhe and fey. He had never said so, but knew she had heard and did not gainsay. So the rumors were true, and that was indeed his heritage. She knew —knew things that troubled his deepest dreams, where Death pur sued him and gained a part of him, only biding for the rest. And whether this had truly happened, somewhere in Eald, or whether it was only a portending dream, she was not sure, in that way that all her memories shifted like quicksand. But it was real enough that a night of storm could send Ciaran into dark despair, when they were private, after he had put aside the cheerfulness he wore for others.
On such nights he scarcely slept, and started awake at cracks of thunder, relieved only when the dawn brought back the day. And then he would smile and laugh as if there had never been a cloud; but she had learned to dread these times, and something in her grew taut and miserable when such nights began.
Away, she mourned. Away, away.
But that was not the bargain she had struck; and now and again in a far and shifting fashion like the recollection of a dream she remem bered a face she could not hold longer than a breath, and a bright ness that held something of green and something of the sun and moon at once. Children might stray after such baubles, after such bright promises. She had no children, did Arafel, none that Branwyn knew; and it was in Branwyn's heart that the elf might feel an envy and desire of children.
They told such tales of the Sidhe, that they could be so cruel, so thoughtlessly cruel.
Had not Arafel been so cruel with her, promising a small girl faery-sights, and luring her into the forest to the loss of her pony and almost of her life?
Come away, a voice still whispered in her dreams. Let go and see things as they are.
But it was only memory, a voice without distinction, like the face.
The things she cherished now were warm and solid like Caer Wiell, her husband's arms, her children's laughter. She had traded all of faery promises for these.