The Last Light of the Sun (61 page)

Needful as night
she had said in the hall at the end of spring, entirely aware of the effect it would have. She’d been younger then, Rhiannon thought. Here she was, after nightfall, and she couldn’t have said what it was she needed. An ending, she’d decided, to whatever had begun that other night.

She heard a noise. The two men came out from the trees and stood there, the grey dog beside Alun. She saw them both look down upon the farmhouse and the lights. Then her father turned to her.

“Jad be thanked,” Rhiannon said.

“Truly,” he replied.

He came over and brushed her forehead with his lips, as was his habit. He hesitated, looked over his shoulder. Alun ab Owyn had stayed where he was, just clear of the last trees. “I need to drink and drink,” Brynn said. “Both at once. I’ll see you below.” He went over and took both horses’ reins and led them down.

She was unexpectedly calm. The springtime seemed so long ago. The wind had died down, the smoke from her torch rose up nearly straight.

“Did you—?”

“I have so much—”

They both stopped. Rhiannon laughed a little. He did not. She waited. He cleared his throat. “I have so much need of your forgiveness,” he said.

“After what you did?” she said. “Coming here again?”

He shook his head. “What I said to you—”

This, she could address. “You said some things in grief and loss, on the night your brother died.”

He shook his head. “It was … more than that.”

She had stood by the gate, seen her father go up. The two of them had just come out of the wood. She knew something of this. She said, “Then it was more. And you are the more to be forgiven.”

“You are gracious too. I have no right … ”

“None of us has a right to grace,” Rhiannon said. “It comes sometimes. That night … I asked you to come to me. To sing.”

“I know. I remember. Of course.”

“Will you sing for me tonight?”

He hesitated. “I … I am not certain that I … ”

“For all of us,” she amended carefully. “In the hall. We are honouring those who came to help us.”

He rubbed at his chin. He was very tired, she saw. “That would be better,” he said quietly.

That would be better.
Some paths, some doorways, some people were not to be yours, though the slightest difference in the rippling of time might have made them so. A tossed pebble landing a little sooner, a little later. She looked at him, standing this near, the two of them alone in darkness, and she knew she would never entirely move beyond what had happened to her that night at the end of spring, but it was all right. It would have to be all right. You could live with this, with much worse.

“Will you come down, my lord?” she said.

“I will follow you, my lady, if I may. I am not … entirely ready. I will do better after some moments alone.”

“I can understand that,” Rhiannon said. She could. He’d been in the half-world, would have a long way back to travel. She turned away from him and started down.

Just outside the gate to the yard, a shadow moved away from the fence.

“My lady,” said the shadow. “Your mother said you would be up that slope and unlikely to welcome someone following. I thought I would risk coming this far.” Her torchlight fell upon Athelbert as he bowed.

He had come through the spirit wood to bring them a warning. They were not even allies of his people. He was the king’s heir of the Anglcyn. He had come out to wait for her.

Rhiannon had a vision then of her life to come, the burdens and the opportunities of it, and it was not unacceptable to her. There would be joys and sorrows, as there always were, the taste of the latter present in the wine of such happiness as mortals were allowed. She could do much for her people, she thought, and life was not without its duties.

“My mother,” she said, looking up at him by the light of his lifted torch, “is generally right, but not always so.”

“It is,” said Athelbert, smiling, “a terrible thing when a parent is always right. You’d have to meet my father to see what I mean.”

They walked into the yard together. Rhiannon closed and latched the gate behind her, the way they had all been taught to do, against what might be out there in the night.

HE WASN’T ALONE
. He had said that he needed to be, but it was a dissembling.

Sitting on the grass above Brynnfell, not far from where he’d first walked up to the faerie (he could see the
sapling to his left), Alun set about shaping and sending a thought, again and again in his mind.

It is over. It begins. It is over. It begins.

He had no idea what the boundary markers of this might be, if she could sense anything from him, the way he’d been so painfully open to the images she’d sent. But he stayed there, his dog beside him, and he shaped those words, wondering.

Then wonder ceased and a greater wonder began, for he felt her presence again, and caught (soundlessly, within) a note of laughter.
It is over. If you are very fortunate, and I am feeling generous, it begins.

Alun laughed aloud in the darkness. He would never be entirely alone again, he realized. It might not have been a blessing, but it was, because of what she was, and he knew it from the beginning, that same night, looking down upon the farm.

He stood up, and so did the dog. There were lights below, food and wine, companionship against the night, people waiting for him, with their needs. He could make music for them.

Come back to me,
he heard.

Joy. The other taste in sorrow’s cup.

N
ine nights after leaving Brynnfell, as they rowed into the wind back east, skirting close to Ferrieres to be as far from Aeldred’s ships as they could, Bern realized that his father
had
spoken a last word to him.

It was a bright night, both moons in the sky, a little more light than was entirely safe for them. He remained thinking for some time longer, hands to his oar in the night. He rocked his body back and forth, pulling through the sea, tasting salt spray and memories. Then he lifted his voice and called out to Brand.

They were treating him differently now. Brand came directly over. He listened as Thorkell Einarson’s son shared a thought which seemed to Leofson to come, under the two moons, as guidance from a spirit (burned with all proper rites on a strand in Llywerth) benevolently mindful of their fate.

At dawn they lashed the ships together on choppy seas and took counsel. They were Jormsvik mercenaries, feared through the north, and they’d had humiliations beyond endurance on this journey. Here was a chance to come home with honour, not trammelled in shame. There were reasons to roll these dice. It was past the end of raiding season; they’d be entirely unexpected. They could still land nearly a hundred men, and Carloman of Ferrieres had his hands full (Garr Hoddson pointed out) farther east with the Karchites, who were being pushed towards him by the horsemen of Waleska.

And most of them had heard—and each now believed he understood—the last cry of Thorkell Einarson, who’d lost a single combat deliberately, to save their lives. Brand One-eye had stopped even trying to proclaim it otherwise.

There was no dissent.

They put the ships ashore in a shallow cove west of the Brienne River mouth. They knew roughly where Champieres was, though not with certainty. Since the Volgan’s raid, no one had been back to that hidden valley where kings of Ferrieres were laid to rest, chanted over by holy men. In the early years, they’d known it would be guarded after what had happened. And later, it was as though Champieres had become sacred to the Erlings too, in Siggur’s memory.

Well, there were limits to that, weren’t there? A new generation had its needs.

They did, in the event, know enough to find it: beyond the river, an east-west valley, entered from the east. It wasn’t hugely difficult for trained, experienced men.

What followed, three nights later, was what tended to follow when the Erlings came. They sacked the royal sanctuary of the Sleepless Ones, set it afire, killed three dozen clerics and guards (not enough fighting men any more, Garr had been right about the Karchites). They lost only eight of their own. Carried—loading the horses, burdened like beasts themselves—sacks of silver and gold artifacts, coins, candlesticks, censers and sun disks, royal gems, jewel-hilted blades (none silver, not this time), ivory caskets, coffers of sandalwood and ebony, spices and manuscripts (men paid for those), and a score of slaves, whipped towards the ships, to serve them in Jormsvik or be sold in a market town.

A raid as gloriously triumphant as anyone could remember.

An echo, even, of what the Volgan had done. Enough looted to leave each one of them wealthy, even after the share given over to the treasury when they came home.

A hearth fire story, too. You could hear the skalds already! The dying hero’s last word, Volgan’s friend, understood only by his son one night at sea, sending them to Champieres, where the father had been twenty-five years and more ago. In the name of Ingavin, it made a saga by itself!

There were storm winds in their faces for two days and nights as they continued home. Lightning cracked the sky. Waves high as masts roared over the decks, drenching them, sweeping some of the horses screaming overboard. They were Erlings, though, lords of the sea roads, however wild they might become. This was their element. Ingavin and Thünir sent storms as a trial for men, a test of worthiness. They wiped streaming water from eyes and beards and fought through rain and gale, defying them, as no other men alive dared do.

They came into Jormsvik harbour on a bright, cold afternoon, singing at their oars. They’d lost one ship, Hoddson’s, and thirty-two men. To be lamented and honoured, each one of them, but the sea and the gods claim their due, and where was glory, after all, when the task was easily done?

It was a very good winter in Jormsvik.

IT WAS JUDGED
the same way in Esferth and Raedhill and elsewhere in the Anglcyn lands. King Aeldred and his wife and court travelled north to Rheden to celebrate the marriage of their daughter Judit to Prince Calum there. The red-haired princess was fiercely beautiful, even more fiercely strong-willed, and clearly terrified her younger husband. That, her siblings agreed privately, had been
predictable. Why should the prince be different from anyone else?

Not remotely overlooked in the ceremonies and entertainments of that fortnight was the moment in the Midwinter Rites when Withgar of Rheden knelt before King Aeldred, kissed his ring, and accepted a disk of Jad from him, while clerics chanted praise of the living sun.

You paid a price to join your line to a greater one, and Rheden was not unaware that Esferth was increasingly secure from the Erlings. It wasn’t difficult to guess in which direction Aeldred’s eyes might turn. Better to marry, turn risk to advantage. They were all one people in the end, weren’t they? Not like the dark, little, cattle-thieving Cyngael on the other side of the Wall.

As it happened, some time before leaving Esferth for the north, the Anglcyn king had put his mind (and his clerics) to work on the formal terms of another marriage, west, with those same Cyngael. Withgar of Rheden hadn’t been told about these plans, as yet, but there’d been no reason to inform him. Many a marriage negotiation had broken down.

This one, however, seemed unlikely to do so. His daughter Kendra, normally the gentle, compliant one of his four children (and best loved, as it happened), had spoken with her father and the Cyngael cleric in privacy shortly after certain events that had taken place at summer’s end by a farm called Brynnfell in Arberth. Events they knew altogether too much about because of her and the young prince of Cadyr, Owyn’s surviving son and heir, the man she intended to wed. She told her father as much.

Aeldred, notoriously said to anticipate almost all possible events and plan for them, was not remotely ready for this. Nor could he furnish any immediate reply to his daughter’s
firm indication that she would follow her mother straight to the sanctuary at Retherly if the union—so clearly a suitable one—were not approved.

“It is marginally acceptable, I grant you. But do you even know he wants this? Or that Prince Owyn will approve?” Aeldred asked.

“He wants this,” Kendra replied placidly. “And you’ve been thinking about a union west for a long time.”

This, of course, happened to be true. His children knew too much.

The king looked to Ceinion for help. The cleric’s manner had greatly changed over the course of a few days, with word of events at Brynnfell. He bore a genial, amused manner through the days and evenings. It was difficult to provoke an enjoyable argument on doctrine with him.

He smiled at Aeldred. “My delight, my lord, is extreme. You know I hoped for such a union. Owyn will be honoured, after I finish speaking with him, which I will do.”

So much for help from that quarter.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kendra said, with alarming complacency. “Alun will deal with it.”

Both men blinked, looking closely at her. This, Aeldred thought, was his shy, dutiful daughter.

She closed her eyes. They thought it was self-consciousness, under the doubled scrutiny.

She looked at them again. “I was right,” she said. “He’ll be coming here, with my brother. They’ll be taking the coastal road. They are on the way to Cadyr now, to speak with his father.” She smiled gently at the two of them. “We’ve agreed not to do this too much, before the wedding, so don’t worry. He says to tell Ceinion he’s making music again.”

There wasn’t a great deal one could do about this, though prayer was clearly indicated. Kendra was diligent
about attendance at chapel, morning and evening. The marriage
did
make sense. There had been some brief discussion, the king remembered, about Athelbert and Brynn ap Hywll’s daughter. Well, that wouldn’t need to be continued, now. You didn’t marry
two
children to achieve the same result.

Ceinion of Llywerth offered his own two wedding gifts to the king. The first was his long-sought promise to spend part of each year with Aeldred at his court. The second was quite different. It emerged after a conversation between the high cleric of the Cyngael and the extremely devout queen of the Anglcyn. In the wake of this frank and illuminating exchange, and after two all-night vigils in her chapel, Queen Elswith arrived at her husband’s bedchamber one night and was admitted.