The Silver Sun (33 page)

Somehow Alfie seemed to have changed along with his master. Next to Arun or Asfala, he had always seemed an awkward, ramshackle beast. Now he looked as sleek and finely molded as a greyhound or a deer. He moved with a powerful grace born of rightful pride. His muscles rippled in his long limbs; his flanks shimmered in the sunlight; his eyes sparkled with a golden glow. Gazing into their amber depths, Rosemary thought she saw something of the mystery that was in Hal, for Hal was always uppermost in her thoughts.

How he had reached out to her, once he had come back to himself. He had whispered her name, pressed her hand to his thin face; later he slept with the warmth of her lips still lingering on his. Even in his weakness he thrilled her, his words and his touch at once tender and bold. No question, now, that he loved her! He no longer kept a courtly distance between, them, and every hour with him brought her new happiness.

One day, when Rosemary went to the walled garden to gather flowers for the sickroom, Alan stood there, waiting beneath the trees. She saw at once from the set of his jaw that something was afoot.

She had just come from Hal. “How is he?” Alan asked, and for a moment she forgot Alan's brooding face in her joy. “Much stronger,” she replied. “Today he sat and ate without help. I think he will soon be able to walk."

“Then the burden will soon be on him again,” Alan muttered. “As soon as he has taken a few steps, you will find him swinging a sword, preparing himself to take up his journey once again.” Striking his thigh with a fist, he turned to her. “I am no good here, ray lady. I am leaving."

“Leaving! But Alan, why?"

“As the best gift I can give to him and you. I give you both the precious days for your own. Let him have time for healing, and let him be yours alone, for the time. Let him not think of his task, or of leaving you, until I have returned."

She sensed the pain that underlay the gift, and her eyes brightened with unshed tears as she gave him the only comfort she could. “Oh, Alan,” she whispered, “it is no wonder that I love you like the brother I never had."

For a moment his face softened as he reached out to her in mute thanks. Then he turned away, and she watched the hard set of his back as he strode off to see Hal.

“There is nothing for me to do here,” Alan explained to Hal, a little later. “I will go to Laueroc, to see how time turns in the home of my fathers. I shall be back before the leaves fall."

“Will you take Cory with you?” asked Hal, after a long silence.

“Nay. He needs the rest.” That was not true, and Alan groped for a better reason. “I would rather have him here with Robin. I feel that I must go alone."

Hal looked searchingly at him, seeing love and foolishness and perhaps a touch of shame. He found no words to give to Alan. “Go with the One at your side,” he said at last, and held out his left hand. They passed their grip in silence; then Alan quickly left. Hal lay staring at a closed door.

There was a sort of timelessness in Celydon, Hal found, timelessness which Alan had given at some nameless sacrifice to himself, but it had its source in the lady. Rosemary sat at the bedside, sewing Hal shirts of soft linen, for hours, or days, he scarcely knew which; the time passed on tiptoe, unnoticed. As he grew stronger, they talked more, and sang to the plinset, old songs and new. Soon Hal was strong enough to spend part of each day in the garden. Rosemary could almost see the sun and air nourishing him, as if he were a blossoming plant. After a while they took walks, longer each day, until they were roaming far afield. When they rode the horses, they roamed farther yet. Hal was strong and healed by then, but he did not visit Ket in the Forest or go to the practice yard. Never had Rosemary seen the burden lie so lightly on him. For whole afternoons they would lie in the sun amidst the long meadow grasses, and he would make her flower garlands for her hair. They would talk of love, and kiss long kisses, deep and warm. Rosemary would gladly have given herself to him entirely, but he would not take her; not while the likelihood remained that he would be killed to leave her destitute and dishonored. Only in this way did he acknowledge his burden—except for one day.

It was three days after Alan left. Hal had asked Rosemary to fetch her father to his bedside, and when Pelys arrived Hal asked for her hand in marriage. But before Pelys gave his consent, he felt, he must reveal his birth to them both. Pelys would hear nothing of it.

“Tut, tut, lad, do you not think that I know you after all this time? You are wise, and brave, and well suited to be my daughter's husband. I do not need to know anything more."

“There is peril all around me. It may well reach out and touch her, and you."

“I always knew that you walked in peril! She knew it too. Do you not know that the gravest peril of her life is to be without you?"

“I must tell you!” Hal said desperately.

“Ay, ay, tell it then, if you must,” Pelys acceded. “But understand that she is yours, not by your words or my consent, but by the choice of her own heart."

“I am Hervoyel,” Hal burst out.

“I thought your other name was Mireldeyn,” Pelys remarked.

Haltingly Hal told them his story, searching for words that would help them understand the pitfalls of his destiny. Pelys whistled and looked somber, but Rosemary, with the insight of love, saw beyond the danger and the awful responsibility to the deepest wound in Hal's soul.

“Oh, poor Hal,” she whispered, almost in tears. When he told about his mother's death, and his torment in the Tower, she cried outright. He put his good arm around her. “It is not a pleasant tale,” he murmured. “I am sorry, love.” But her tears were balm on his wounds.

As the narrative continued, he explained why he had not taken her more into his confidence. “I knew that Nabon of Lee would make his move soon, likely within the year. Ket and his men watched him while I was gone, and also guarded you, my lady, as well as they could. But even so, if you had been captured—perhaps taken for extortion—then a hint that you knew something of the Welandais Prince would have spelled your death in some foul torture chamber. I know your courage, but you cannot keep your thoughts from showing in your face; your eyes are like mirrors for truth. So, for your own sake, I judged it best that you should know little of me or my doings. But the danger is over, for the time, and before Nabon has gathered his strength again we can expect to put an end to him, in an unseasonal feast of fires."

The tale flowed long into the afternoon, and Hal grew tired and weak before he was finished. There was much that Pelys and Rosemary did not yet understand. Most of Rosemary's questions, if she had asked them, would have been about Alan, and the hidden ache in his eyes, and the green stone which hung from his neck. But she did not ask them, for Hal slept, and when he awoke he was purged of care. Throughout the lazy, happy days which followed, Rosemary kept her perplexities to herself.

So she was now betrothed. She and Hal would wed within the year, if he lived. She shivered when she remembered how closely death followed on his heels, but as much as she was able, she turned her thoughts to the present and its joy. Still, she was often puzzled. So much more she knew about Hal now, and yet she hardly knew him at all. He spoke to the horses sometimes in words she could not understand, and did not tell her what language he spoke. There was a mystery in his eyes that went beyond facts of birth or life, a knowledge and vision which she could not begin to name or explain. She wondered when he would tell her what it meant, if he ever would, or could. Her musings made her sad, sometimes, and wistful. Looking at her, Hal thought his heart would break for love of her, though he could not understand her moods; this maiden, of all things, was a mystery to him.

When the leaves began to turn and a chill came into the air, Hal's cares came back with a vengeance. Time ceased its slow, stealthy passing and began to rush by, Hal started spending his days in the practice yard with Cory and Robin. His time with Rosemary no longer passed in long, dreamy wanderings, their thoughts and their talk roaming like their feet. Instead, they sat in silence, clinging to each other like desperate children, their kisses made urgent by the pressure of the passing days.

When the leaves had turned golden and scarlet, but still clung to the trees, Alan returned. Hal and Rosemary met him as he rode from the Forest. Alan's glance was hard, his face set in grim lines. Hal seemed not to notice, for his eyes were moist as he gripped Alan's hand and thumped his shoulders. Wordlessly returning the rough greeting, Alan ducked his head—aiding what, Rosemary wondered? But when he turned to greet her, she saw that something of gentleness had come back to the tired lines of his face.

For two days he rested at Celydon. He sparred with Hal in the practice yard, and could not help smiling with pleasure to find him as well as ever. But smiles did not come easily to Alan these days, not even when he was in the boyish company of Robin and Cory and ardent Rafe. Once he lounged an hour with Hal and Rosemary in the sunshine of the meadow, and he slowly relaxed, as if something inside him had let go for a while. But he would say little about where he had been, except for a brief talk with Hal.

“We see it everywhere,” he blurted then, as if the words rushed out of him almost against his will. “The petty cruelties and persecution, torture and crippling, broken men and broken spirits, the dead and the slowly dying. But when I saw it happening to those I knew and loved as a boy...” He paused, clenching his teeth. “You have heard me mention Tynan."

“Your father's old seneschal."

“Ay. He is still alive. Crippled with torture, and living only because he is too old to pose much threat. But he is fierce and loyal in spite of it all. I stayed at his cottage. The rest—either dead, or only half alive, surviving at the price of their souls."

“Do they have hope now?” Hal asked, but Alan looked away and answered only with a shrug. Hal was puzzled, for he felt that Alan had something more on his mind. But Alan stayed strangely silent. There was one visible sign of change: he no longer wore the ring he had got from his father's hand. When Hal asked him about it, he took the silver shining thing from a pouch slung under his tunic. But he offered no explanation, and he would not meet Hal's wondering eyes.

On the third day after Alan's return, they left Cetydon. Parting from Rosemary was a painful wrench for Hal, but they hoped that perhaps in a year they need not be parted again. Another hope eased Hal's going, a hope that maybe, once they were on their way, the comradeship of the road would return and Alan would be more himself.

And indeed he did become more easy as the days went by. Robin and Cory seemed to notice nothing wrong, but Hal still sensed a barrier between them, a distance, which hurt and fretted him. What had caused it, he could not understand. Was he somehow to blame, or had Alan found something in Laueroc which made him so aloof? If Alan had a secret ... Hal remembered years past, and sighed. He could not probe, when Alan had so patiently borne with his own unfolding mysteries. Sadly, reluctantly, Hal acknowledged that a door had shut between them when Alan went to Laueroc, and stood between them still.

Chapter Six

They spent the winter in danger, not so much from men as from freezing cold and ravenous beasts. So great was the pressure of their task that, in this season when all men kept within doors if they could, they sought no shelter, but moved across the empty surface of the land like ants braving a cottage floor. The horses grew thick coats of fur for protection, and spent their nights stamping and snorting, huddled nose to tail against the cold. The comrades wore layer upon layer of clothing, but in spite of it their fingers and faces were frozen and thawed and frozen again. They grew hardened to the weather, and found a fierce joy in their defiance of it. Only in the worst of storms, when blinding curtains of white would have frozen them entirely, did they take refuge in some cottager's hut or outlaw's cave. They watched the weather signs carefully, for to be caught by such a storm would have spelled certain death.

When they left Celydon they turned northward. They hastened across the Marches, wary of Arrok and avoiding Firth, for the King's army still besieged Roran's town. It would be to his advantage, Hal thought, that Iscovar's forces were divided, for the commander who had marched to Firth would almost surely have turned his army against the Prince.

Before winter struck, the company reached the harsh Northern Barrens, where Hal went to parley with the war lords, as Koran had arranged months before. These were mettlesome men, vain and quarrelsome as peacocks, chieftains of the barbaric tribes which roamed the far north in constant warfare. Tent dwellers even in bitterest winter, they were gaudy in their apparel, brawling in their ways. Robin and Cory found themselves fighting them from time to time, but Hal dominated them by force of his will and his flashing eyes. And Alan looked grim enough to give any man pause.

The warlords agreed to join forces against Arrok when the time came, and also to drive the besiegers from Firth. They hated Arrok and respected Roran, so these were tasks to their liking. Hal only hoped they could keep peace among themselves long enough to accomplish them. But winter would help enforce the truce he had ordered in preparation for the greatest war of all.

By the time the worst cold came, Hal and his comrades were on their way southward through the Westwood. There they spent several days with Blain the Lean, the outlaw whom Alan had met the summer past. Blain was a strange man for an outlaw, thin, dark and intense, not at all like the usually sturdy and stoical folk who are able to survive in the woods. He showed no skill in arms. Yet in his own way he seemed very clever, even worldly-wise. He discussed with authority the overthrow of power and the taking of power, describing in detail schemes of kings and nobles, sorcerers and priests, present as well as past. He even had some knowledge of military maneuvers. Hal wondered where he had got his education, since he was not of the nobility. From the sorcerers at Nemeton? It almost seemed that be must have been a novice, at least, in that coven of subtle and ambitious men. Yet Winterfest, that most sacred of Eastern yearly-days, came and went while they were with him, and no notice was taken.