Текст книги "The Dreamstone "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

He reached it, entered it, sped in strange freedom of limb where trees were gnarled and straight at once, barren and flowered with stars, and aglitter with jewels like hanging fruit, with treasure of silver laid upon the white branches, swords and shining mail, cloth like morning haze, spiderweb among pale green leaves.

A sword hung before him, offered to his hand . . . he tore it from the leaves in a scatter of bright foliage, and the brightness about him faded, leaving him alone with the dark and the swift loping shadows, with the dark rider, who burst upon him in a flickering of lightnings and yet absorbed no light himself, like a hole in the world through which he might fall forever, if the hounds did not have him first. He held the illusory blade trembling before him, and shuddered as its light drew detail from the dark, of jaws and eyes of hounds. He was drawn to look up, to lift his face unwilling, to face the rider—he saw something, which his dazed mind would not recall even in the instant of beholding it.

The rider came closer, and a chill came on his flesh, on all but the hand which held the blade. He lost the brightness, could not hold even his vision of this grim place. The black began to come over him, but he slashed at it and the hounds yelped aside from him, bristling and trembling.

“Come,” a voice whispered to him, very softly.

He must, for he could not hold his arm up any longer. The blade wavered, and sank, and yet a warmth broke like a breath of spring at his back. “Stand firm,” someone said.

“He is mine,” said the shadow, a voice like shards of winter ice.

“Be off,” said the other, soft and without doubt

“He has stolen from you. Do you encourage thefts?” And for a moment the world was bright, and the shadow was a blight upon it, a robed darkness which stood in an attitude of amazement. “Ah,” the cold voice breathed, wonder-struck. “Ah. Thisyou have kept from me.”

Light blazed. Ciaran staggered in it, and his knees hit the ground, a shock which wrung a sob of pain from him, and he could no longer tell earth from sky or day from night. Wet leaves lay against his cheek or cheek against the leaves, and the rain beat down into bis face, chilling his torn soul.

But the shadow was gone, and the thunder stilled. It seemed the moon shone down. A face confused itself with it, and with the sun in a strange, fair sky.

He still clutched the sword. Slim cool fingers pried his hand from it, eased his limbs, covered him with a downy peace in which the only pain was to his heart, an ache and a memory of loss.

THIRTEEN

The Tree of Stones and Swords

She knelt with the rain still dripping off the leaves, a dew upon them both, and very still and pale the intruder lay beneath the mortal moon. Iron tainted him, and yet he had torn through into her forest—if only for a moment; had brought iron there, and Death. She was stirred to anger, and to fear, and to a longing which had not been in her heart since the child had broken it. To have entered her Eald, to have found that very heart of it and to have stolen an elvish sword . . . it was no common thief, this Man, and no common need could have forced him. Perhaps his mortal eyes had been affected by that terrible wound he bore, so that he fled with truer sight than most; but never in many a hunt had Lord Death failed.

Eald had stretched far once, before the coming of Men; and once, before her folk knew much of Men, there had been a few of halfling kind, for elvish loves and dalliances among these fatal strangers. Still, she thought, there might be elvish blood drawn very thin in some, halflings who had never felt the call across the dividing sea, who had never faded. In hope she tried to draw this stranger with her, but the iron weighted him and he could not stay.

She endured the anguish of handling it, undoing buckles, putting it off him, every bit and piece. So she uncovered a terrible wound in his side, and drew on her power to begin its mending, healed the little scratches with a single touch. And when she had rested a moment, it was not hard to bear him away with her, simply a holding of his head in her lap, and a thinking on elvish things. Then the trees became what they truly were, straight and beautiful, and the sun of her day shone down with kindly warmth in that grove.

He slept long, while the wound healed itself, while the lines of mortality faded from his face and left it beautiful, with that beauty which might be elven heritage. She did not leave him in all this time, waiting for his waking with all her heart.

And at last he did stir, and looked about him, and looked into her eyes, seeming much confused. He began at once to fade into the mortal world, into darkness, being in his own mind again, but she took his hand and drew him back before he could slip away. “Beware of going back,” she said. “Death has a part of you. Too, too easy for him to call you into his shadow as you are. You are much safer here.”

He tried to rise, still holding to her hand, maintaining that deleciate hold on here.She lent him strength, the green force which sustained the trees themselves, and after a moment he was able to stand and to look about him. Wind whispered through the leaves and the sun cast its own glamor, while deer stared at them both wise-eyed from the green shadow, in the grove of swords and jewels.

“I was dead,” he said.

“Never,” she assured him.

“My heart hurts.”

“So it may,” she said, “for it was torn. And that healing is beyond me—What is your name, Man?”

Dread touched his eyes. “Ciaran,” he said then quietly, as a guest ought. “Ciaran’s second son of Caer Donn.”

“Caer Donn. Caer Righ, we called it, the King’s domain.”

He feared, but he looked her in the face. “And what is your name?” he asked.

“I shall tell you my true one, that I do not give to mortals; for you are my guest. It is Arafel.”

“Then I must thank you with all my heart,” he said earnestly, “and then beg you set me on the road from here.”

In so many words he healed her heart and wounded it . . . and a regret came into his eyes as if he had seen the wounding. He held up before her his right hand, on which he bore a golden ring, worked with a seal.

“I have a duty,” be said. “On my honor, I have to go and do it, if there is still time.”

“Where is this duty?”

He lifted a hand as if he would give a direction, and nothing was the same. “There are armies,” he said in his confusion, pointing where he might mean the Brown Hills. “There is war on the plain; and my King has won.But the enemy has drawn off this way, which is a valley where they might hold long in a siege if they could take it. And lord Evald of Caer Wiell is riding with the King. Do you understand, lady Arafel? War is coming up the dale. Caer Wiell must not be deceived. They must hold firm, whatever the false reports and fair offers from the enemy, must hold only a little time, until the King’s army comes this way. Lord Evald’s hold—must hear the message I bear.”

“Wars,” she said faintly. “They will not be wise, who set foot in Ealdwood.”

“And I must go, lady Arafel. I must I beg you,” Already he began to fade, discovering the power of will within himself.

“Ciaran,” she said, a summoning, and held him by his name, still within the light of her sun. “You are determined. But you do not count the cost. The Huntsman will seek you out again. Once in the mortal world, you are a prey to him; he has never lost a hunt, do you see? And it is not finished.”

“That may be,” he said, pale-faced. “But I have sworn.”

“Pride,” she said. “It is empty pride. What arms have you, what means to pass through all of Eald against such enemies?”

He looked down at himself, armorless and empty-handed. But he wavered toward a parting, all the same.

“Wait,” she said, and went to the old oak, took from its branches one of the jewels which hung among the others, pale green like the one which hung at her own throat, though dimmed, for its master was ages gone. It sang to her, the dreams of an elf named Liosliath, a part of his soul, such souls as her kind had. “Take it. You borrowed his sword in your need, but this will serve you better. Wear it always about your neck.”

“What are these things?” he asked without taking, and looked about at all the trees which held such treasures, jewels and swords glimmering silver and light among the leaves. “What place is this?”

“You might liken it to a tomb; this you robbed . . . my brothers and my sisters, my fathers and mothers. It is elvish memory.”

“Forgive me,” he whispered, stricken.

“We do not die. We go . . . away; and when we are gone, what use are these things to us? Yet they hold memories. That is their use now. The sword, you could not fully use. But take this stone. Liosliath would not grudge it to a friend of mine. He was my cousin: he was young as our kind go, and so it may be safest for you. The shadows feared him.”

He took it in his hand, and his eyes widened and his lips parted. Fear . . . perhaps he felt fear. But he held it fast, and it sang to him, of elvish dreams and memories.

“It too is power,” she said. “And danger. It does not make you a match for Death; but ’twill fight the chill . . . if you have the heart to use it.”

He gathered the silver chain and hung it about his neck. His fair clear eyes clouded in the power of the dreams. But he was not lost in them. She touched her own dreamstone, and called forth the faintest of songs, a sweet, bright harping. “Do not trust in iron,” she warned him. “That and this . . . do not love one another. And come, since you must. Come, I shall walk with you on your way. Eald will take you there more safely than you might walk in the world of Men.”

“This is given for a baneful place,” he said.

“Walk it with me, and see.”

She offered her hand. He took it, and his was warm and strong in hers, human-broad but comfortable. He walked with her, and for all his apprehension a wonder came into his eyes when he saw the land, the trees of elven summer, the glamored meadows abloom with glistening flowers, the timid, wide-eyed deer which stared at them as they passed.

Stone sang to stone, his heart to hers, and the wind grew warm beneath that other sun. She felt something which had long frozen about her heart melt away, and she knew companionship for the first time in human ages, a fellowship lost since Liosliath himself had faded, last of all elves save herself.

(“Forgive me,” Liosliath had said, this Man’s unwitting words and her cousin’s last, which had tugged at her heart “I have tried to stay.” But he had had that look in his gray eyes which was the calling, and once it had begun in his heart, the fading began, and all her wishing could not hold him—nor could she go with him, for her heart was here.)

“It is beautiful,” Ciaran said.

“Not so wide as once,” she said. And, remembering: “We held Caer Donn once.”

“The grandfathers say—there are your sort still there.”

She tossed her head, stung. “Faery folk. Silly nixes. And sad. They have few wits. They shapeshift so often they forget themselves and cannot get back again—That is not to say they are not dangerous when crossed.”

“That is not your kind.”

“No,” she said, laughing, in better humor. “Not mine. We were the greater folk. Elves. The Daoine Sidhe. The faery-folk live in our ruin. They never loved us.”

“And others of your kind?”

“Gone,” she said. “But myself.”

He let go her hand to look at her, and in letting go he drifted, cried out in fear, for they were on Caerbourne’s edge, a bright stream, willow-bordered, and here its name was Airgiod, the Silver. She took his hand again and steadied him.

“Beware such lapses. You might fall. Caerbourne has eroded deep in human years, and his banks are steep. And worse, far worse, there is no knowing how deep he has sunk in the shadows. Lord Death’s geography is a darker mirror of this, but mirror nonetheless, and I should not care for hisriver. Remember your wound when you walk in Eald.”

He shivered; she felt the dread keenly, a chill in the stone upon her breast. She touched it and warmed it, and him.

“Use the stone,” she bade him. “He shall not have the rest of you if you but know how to walk in Eald. Your heart’s wish can bring you here, only so you do not stray too far; your heart’s wish can take you away.”

“It is a great gift,” he admitted at last “But they say all gifts in this world have cost.”

“Not among kinsmen.”

He looked up at her as deer look at hounds, wary and distraught

“There’s elvish blood in you,” she said. “Do you not know? You could not have come, else. We once ruled, I say, in Caer Donn.”

“So they say.” She felt the beating of his heart, like something trapped in the stone within her hand.

“Is it so terrible,” she asked, “to discover such a kinship?”

“I am my father’s own son, no changeling.”

“Then by father or mother, you carry blood of mine. You are no changeling, no. There is nothing of the little folk about you. Is it sire or mother stands taller than most?”

Fear filled him, a tumbling down of all truths he knew. Father, she thought, catching this from his mind. He said nothing. She felt a chill in him, self-aimed. She perceived memories of old stones near Caer Donn, recollections of childhood terrors, of ill legends and human hate, and shivered herself.

“I am sorry,” he said, sharing this. His mind was awash with fear, and with thoughts of his own duty, and of dying, and the black hounds. He touched the chain of the stone about his neck, making to draw it off, but she caught his hand and gently forbade that

“You will not die,” she promised him. “I will take you where you will go. Come, it is not far.”

The forest edge lay up the bright streamcourse, that place where sight stopped in mist, the edge of her world. She led him into that gray place, walking blind, but one hand she kept on the stone which remembered the world as it had been, and so she brought some substance out of nothingness, enough to find her way beyond the edge. She remembered Caer Wiell as it had once been, a fair green hill with a spring never failing; and so she came to it, and still held his hand fast. Half in the shadow-ways there was a dimming, a glare of fire, the shouts of war, ghosts of battle swirling about them.

Other things were there too. Death was one. “Pay him no mind,” she said to Ciaran, who turned and faced the shadow. “No. Hold to the stone and come with me.”

She set them more and more surely in mortal night, with the din of war about them, with Caer Wiell’s black walls above. She knew the gateway. It did not have wards against her. She set him through.

“Fare well,” she said. “And fare back again.”

So she stepped clear of Caer Wiell, back into the swirling shadow-din outside.

She felt a presence by her, a shadow which had drawn a moment out of the battle, a blackness sullen and cold.

“Hunt elsewhere,” she told him.

“You have had your will,” Lord Death said, making ironic homage.

“Hunt elsewhere.”

“You give this mortal uncommon gifts.”

“What if I do? Are they not mine to give?”

The shadow said nothing, and she walked away through the grayness, and into bright Eald, into her own. The phantom deer stared at her curiously in elven sunset; and she walked back to the grove of the circle, touched the stones which hung from the ancient oak, harked to precious memories which they sang as the wind blew among them. One voice was stilled now from the chorus, that which had been Liosliath’s.

“Forgive,” she whispered to him, who was far across the dividing sea, far from hearing her. “Forgive that it was you.”

But a strange companionship shivered through her still, after ages in solitude. She walked, and mingled with the eldritch harping which was the peculiar song of her stone of dreams, came the whisper of another heart, human-tainted, but true as earth. She was appalled somewhat at the nature of it, for he had known war; he had killed—but so had she, in the cruel, cold anger of elves. Human anger was different, all blood and blind rage, like wolves. He knew passions she felt strange; he knew strange fears; and self-doubts. It was all there, drowning Liosliath’s clear voice. He feared Liosliath; he denied, human-stubborn, the things his own eyes had seen in Eald.

But there was no hate in him.

She sank down at the base of the tree of memory, and drew her cloak about her, and dreamed his dream.

FOURTEEN

Caer Wiell

They brought him as a prisoner into the torchlit hall, with the sounds of battle dying. They had handled him ungently, but it was their lord’s own ring upon his finger, and they had changed their manner quickly enough when he insisted to show them that. “Sit,” they told him now, showing him a bench, and he was only too glad to do so, weary as he was.

Another came—Old wolf, Ciaran thought at that grim broad face, besweated and flushed with battle-heat He straightened himself at once when that man came in with more men-at-arms behind him. He set himself most carefully on his feet. “Scaga?” he ventured, for he was very like his son, a huge man and red-haired. “I come from the King; and from your lord.”

“Let me see this ring,” Scaga said; and Ciaran thrust out his hand, which the old warrior took roughly, turning the ring to the firelight. Scaga let it go again, his scarred face still scowling.

“I have a message,” Ciaran said, “for your lady’s ears.” And became he could guess the keep’s want of hope: “Good news,” be urged on Scaga, though he was charged to take it higher.

“Then it comes welcome, if true.” Scaga turned his face toward the open door, where sounds of battle had much faded, then looked back again, looked him up and down. “How came you here?”

“My message,” he said, “is for lord Evald’s lady.”

Scaga still frowned; it might be the nature of his face, or of his heart: this was, Ciaran thought, a fell man to cross. But Evald trusted him as steward, in a hold beset with enemies: he was then a man of great worth and faithfulness.

“With neither armor,” said Scaga, “nor weapon . . . How came you into the courtyard?”

“Your lord’s ring,” Ciaran insisted. “I speak only to your lady.” He felt the stone which lay hidden within his collar, a presence, a warmth which seemed greater than natural. It frightened him, with that against his heart and the like of Scaga staring into his eyes, full of suspicions.

“You shall go to her,” Scaga said, and motioned to the stairs. “Boy!” he called. “See my lady roused.”

A lad scampered up the steps at a run. Ciaran shivered in weariness and cold, for wind blew through the door. He wished desperately for a cup of ale, for a place to lie down and rest himself.

And there was none, for Scaga looked on him with narrowed eyes and offered nothing of hospitality—motioned men-at-arms to go before and behind him and led him up the steps to another hall within Caer Wiell’s thick walls, which at least was warmer, with a fire blazing in the hearth.

“Beware,” a voice seemed to whisper in his hearing, and it startled him. He wondered could all the rest hear it; but the others did not turn: it was for him alone. “Beware this hall. They do not love elven-kind. And do not show them the stone.”

A stone wolf’s-head was set above the fireplace. It seemed he had seen it before; that he had sat here, a man, and that a harp should hang so, upon the rightward wall—he looked, and was dismayed to find a harp hanging there, just where he had thought it should. He had then dreamed this place.

Or she had. There was a great scarred table once had sat a chair, before the fire. He blinked it clear, went to it, leaned there wearily against the table, while weary men guarded him.

And women came, so soon that he supposed they had not been asleep. Surely they had not been, with the enemy hurling fire against the hold. They came from the inner door which opened on this hall, one woman older and somewhat grayed. This was Meredydd, he surmised, Evald’s own lady; and Meredyddthe stone whispered in his heart, confirming it. The other of the twain was young, bright of hair—and that name came whispering through his heart as well: Branwyn.Branwyn. Branwyn. He stared without meaning to, for so much of anguish and of anger came whispering with that name. This Branwyn stopped and stared at him, blue eyes seemed bewildered and innocent of such pain.

“Your message,” Scaga’s harsh voice insisted.

Ciaran looked at Lady Meredydd instead, took a step toward her, but hands moved to weapons about him, and he did not go nearer. He tugged the ring from off his finger and gave it over to Scaga, who gave it to the lady. She took the ring as something precious, looked on it closely, lifted anxious eyes. “My husband,” she asked of him.

“Well, lady, he is well. I bring his love and my King’s word: Hold, defend, and do not be deceived by any lies of the enemy or accept any terms. The King has won a great battle at Dun na h-Eoin, and the enemy hopes for this valley as their last holding place. Only hold this tower, and the King and your lord will come as soon as possible against their backs. They know this. Now you do.”

“Now bless your news,” the lady wept, and even Scaga’s frown was eased. Meredydd came and offered her hands to him in welcome, but he felt Scaga’s heavy hand on his shoulder, pulling him away.

“There is more to hear,” said Scaga. “This man came over the walls somehow, with no armor, no arms—unmarked through the lines outside. There are questions should still be asked, my lady, however good and fair the counsel seems. I beg you, ask him how he came.”

For a moment doubt shadowed the lady’s eyes.

“My name is Ciaran,” he said, “Lord Ciaran of Caer Donn is my father. And as to how I came—lightly, as you see; by stealth. While your enemies struck at the gates—I came another way. I shall show you. But armed men could not take it.”

He was not used to lies. He felt fouled, wounded when the lady pressed his hands. “You will show us where,” Scaga said, and gave him in his turn a bearish embrace, gazed at him with emotion welling up—hope, it might be, where hope had been scant for them before. Branwyn too came and kissed his cheek; and weapons were done away as men came at last to clap him on the back and to hug one another for joy. A cheer lifted in the hall, and there was such desperate happiness—He felt a stirring through the jewel too, a presence, a distressing realization that he had said nothing on his own which ought to have convinced them and so relieved their hearts, but that some strangeness overlay him and his words, making them better than they were.

They gave him wine, and brought him upstairs to a princely room—her lord’s when he was young, the Lady Meredydd said; and true, everything there showed some woman’s love, the fine-pricked stitchery of coverlet and tapestries, the hangings of the bed. Branwyn herself brought a warm rug for the floor, and maids brought water for washing, while Lady Meredydd with her own hands brought him bread hot from the morning’s baking. He took it gratefully, while the lady and her daughter lingered to ply him with questions, how fared Evald and kinsmen, cousins, friends, men of the hold, a hundred questions during which maids eavesdropped and men-at-arms contrived to listen on pretext of errands. Some few men he knew; sometimes the news was sad and pained him; and most often he knew only a name, or less—but it gave him joy when he could report some loved one safe and well. Scaga’s son was one, for Scaga bent enough to ask. “He is well,” Ciaran said. “He led a good portion of Caer Wiell’s men at Dun na h-Eoin, first of those that broke the shields of the Bradhaeth while lord Evald cut off their retreat. He came out of the battle well enough; he was by lord Evald when we parted, in the King’s own tent.” The old warrior did not smile to hear it, but his eyes were bright.

“He must sleep,” Meredydd declared at last. “Surely he has travelled hard.”

“I fare well enough,” Ciaran said, for he ached after human company, for noise of voices, for all these sights and sounds of humankind.

“Before he sleeps,” said Scaga, “he must show us this weak place in our wall.”

The warmth drained from him. He nodded consent, not knowing what he was to do, but compelled to go. He swallowed a bit of bread gone dry in his throat, drank a last sip of the wine and set the cup down. “Aye,” he said. “Of course. That will not wait.”

Scaga rose, waiting at the door. Ciaran took his leave of the ladies, walked with the old warrior through the hall, his heart beating hard within his breast.

“I do not know if I can find it easily,” he said to prepare his excuse, and hating the lie. “From all the turnings of this place inside . . . I cannot be sure.”

Scaga said nothing, which seemed Scaga’s way. It gave him no comfort And when they had come up on the walls, Ciaran looked about him in deep distress, seeking something to confirm his lie.

“Look east,” the softest of whispers came to him, like the touch of a breeze. “Turn east and look down.”

He walked that way along the battlement, with Scaga treading heavily beside him. He paused at a place and looked down, where the stonework of the walls was oldest and roughest, where here and there brush had rooted itself in the gaps between the stones and man-made walls thrust crazily above the jagged stone of the underlying rocks. Of a sudden his eye picked out a way, weaving from one such foothold to another among brush rooted in the wall, a peril to the hold. “There,” he said. “We are a mountain hold, we of Caer Donn. And I climbed cliffs as a lad. There, do you see, Scaga? There and there and there.”

Scaga nodded. “Aye. That does want clearing, and watching. Our eyes must have been blind to it. A man sees things too often and so not at all: I had not marked how the brush had grown.”

“Rains, perhaps,” Ciaran said hoarsely, but in his heart he knew differently. He shivered, for his wool shirt was not enough against the wind, and felt Scaga’s friendly grip fall upon his shoulder.

“Come. Our thanks, young sir. Come in.”

He walked, glad of the wind-breaking shelter of walls on the one side of the battlements, gazed back as they walked, and suddenly down at an opening out of the walk. The courtyard was below, jammed with livestock and with village folk, a noise which welled up at him thinly, the wail of children and the listless bleating of goats. But it was a well-ordered place, Caer Wiell, and some of the men on the walls were country folk, light-armed, but goodly looking men, quick of eye and brisk about their business. Women were climbing up the inside scaffoldings which gave access to the battlements before the gates, bearing baskets of bread. There was then no hunger here, nor would there ever be thirst, because of the spring which named the hill, out of reach of the enemy. Ciaran felt much cheered by what he saw of the defense, even with the ominous smoke of enemy fires rising before the walls. He walked farther out than Scaga would have had him go, walked the wall to the area of the main gates and looked west.

Then he was less cheered, for the extent of the black ruin before the walls. The grass and fields were burned and trampled into mire. The enemy had carried away their dead and wounded; no corpse was left but the carcasses of slain horses, to draw the black birds; and beyond that trodden ground the hills were seared with fire, villages and farms burned, surely, from here to Caer Damh. The smoke rose in countless plumes from the hills, where a vast host camped, a crescent of smokes from the Caerbourne’s forested verge to the barren hills to the right, that spread itself on the winds and darkened the sky.

The attack could not have been this far advanced when he was on the road, riding from the King. He had passed one night—surely one night—in Eald.

How much of time? he asked that sometime whisper in the stone, feeling uncertainty all about him. How long did you hold me?He was betrayed. He knew it in his worst fears.

The fires would soon grow more and more, as Dryw and the King over the hills drove others into retreat. Or had it happened already? And what more had happened, and what men he just had named living might have died? And what stayed the King from coming?

Hold here.How old was the message, that Scaga was so grim, that lady Meredydd and her daughter caught so desperately at this hope he gave them? And how long had the King delayed to come?

“It seemed the fires had grown in number,” said Scaga out of his silence. “Now we know why.”

“Aye,” Ciaran said, wishing to say nothing at all.

He went back into the tower, and sat in the hall at the table by the fire, victim again of questions from those humbler folk who had not asked them before; and a few common folk who served there came only to look at him with their hopes unspoken in their eyes, and to steal quickly away. He sat there most of that long day, alone some of the hours, and sitting with Scaga in the afternoon, who brought some of his trusted men to question him at length—how great the strength of the enemy, what condition their arms, what number yet might come. He answered what questions he could as wisely as he could, hinting nothing, and was glad when they had gone away.

No more of lies, he wished of Arafel. You have tangled me in lies, more and more of them. They break my heart. What is truth? What should I say to them? Should I make them doubt the very hope I came to give them?

She had no answer for him, or did not hear.

But that evening after supper a young man came and took down the harp from off the wall, and played songs for him and for the ladies. Then he felt a warmth near his heart, a sweet, sad warmth. Then was peace, for the first time in the day. From the enemy there was no stirring, and the pure notes of the harp found another rapt listener: a joy flooded back from the stone, and filled Ciaran’s heart. He smiled.

And looked by chance into Branwyn’s eyes, who smiled too, in her hope. The smile faded to gravity. The eyes stayed upon his, flower-fair.

“No,” a whisper came to him from the depths of the stone.