Jack had no answer for that. He took her hand and held it, instead of only the cloth that bound them together. They walked on, until they had forded bloody rivers three and stained themselves red up to the knee.
Beyond the rivers, the hills grew to tall moorland and mountain, and dark pines covered the slopes. It almost looked like the prospect of home, but where the castle would be there was a great grey hill, rearing bare and tall out from the rest, and as they came closer, Jack saw that the mountain was carved, and he saw the square indentations of battlements and walls at the edges of the empty space, and he knew them. The carven mountain could have been a mold to cast Lord Robert’s castle.
The yard in front of the castle was there too, under a roof of grey stone, and fairies on horseback rode about it and trampled the dust into a cloud. They came close, and Jack saw that the stone roof was hung with silver lamps like stars, and the dust kicked up by the horses caught the light and glittered like diamonds and pearls in the air. Against the emptiness that would have been the castle’s wall, there were tiered seats, and fairies sat and watched the melee.
At the center of the highest tier sat one under a canopy who could only be the king of the elves. His skin was dark as the grey stone of the hills, and his hair was bright silver, long and loose down to his shoulders. His crown was twisted antlers, and his raiment was green and hung all over with the flowers of purple heather.
“Who is the lord?” asked Mary-Anne.
Jack felt for the shape of stories in his memory to answer. It was difficult. This place did not want him to remember that anything but here and now was real and true, but the stories written on his heart kept him tied to home and made all he knew of the place more than mist and fancy.
“The grey king. He must be the one who took Rowland. He rules a great country here, and he takes mortal champions, and maybe he is a lord of the dead and people come to his country when they die.”
“How do you know so much about this place? Are you really a changeling or a brownie Lord Robert caught to be Rowland’s servant?”
“I listen to the stories, and I remember them.”
Jack heard a shout he knew, and there was Rowland in the melee among the fairy knights. Rowland wore armor of bright silver, and his sword was silver, and a heather bloom was purple on his shield. He turned and twisted and matched blows with riders bearing strange devices and stranger faces. One rider had an owl’s head helm, and great owl’s wings spread from its back. Another struck at Rowland with a living branch that burst with flowers wherever Rowland cut it. Some had ram’s horns, or spreading antlers, or hair like weed and sea-wrack, and every one was beautiful with a beauty as sharp and cold as a blade of fine steel.
Rowland overmatched them all. Among the jewels of dust, he was the jewel of all the knights, and none could stand against him. It was joy to watch and a lightness and a tightening in Jack’s heart to see his Rowland triumph, but Jack was troubled, even while he looked at Rowland. Elves in tales were strong and cunning and full of spells and tricks. Why would they let a boy, even so strong and beautiful, overthrow them with a few blows of the sword?
He got no answers from the fighting and saw no sign of magic or inhuman strength, only listened to the music of blunted swords on silver mail and oaken shields until Rowland had unhorsed the last elf-knight. All the watching fairies rose and cheered, and the grey king clapped his hands with a sound like great stones falling from a height. He smiled, and flecks of gold sparked in his grey eyes. Mary-Anne stared at him, and Jack could feel the force of her attention in the limpness of her limbs while she looked.
“The victory to Rowland,” the grey king cried, “the newest ornament of my court. Now all who can enter my hall are welcome at the feast.”
The king clapped his hands again, and all the fairies were gone with a blast of wind and distant horn-call, and doors of shadow barred the main gate of the hollow hill.
Jack plumbed his heart for stories to know what trick or riddle might open the doors, but Mary-Anne tugged him from thought. “Don’t get too caught in stories, Clever Boy.”
She took him by the way he should have thought of, to the butcher’s door that went to the larder and the kitchens and was never shut.
The hall was lit by red torches, brighter than the star-lights in the ceiling high above. A fairy no taller than a little child, with hare’s feet and fingers like twisted twigs, met them in the doorway and led them to a place far down one of the three long tables.
They could see Rowland easily, sitting at the king’s right hand on the dais. Jack watched the way that Rowland hung on the king’s words and kept his eyes on the king’s face and not the plate before him, and he thought that Rowland was bewitched. Jack had never known Rowland to look at anyone that way, be it his father or Mary-Anne, or Jack himself.
Mary-Anne kept her eyes on the dais as well, but Jack could not tell if she was watching Rowland or the king.
The grey king rang a silver bell, and a host of servants like the one who had led them to the table poured into the hall, bearing platters and loading the tables until they groaned. There was game and fowl, beef dripping fat, swine roasted whole with mouths stuffed with apples and garlanded with rosemary. There were fish long as Jack’s arm and longer, and every scale was gilded. There were summer berries and autumn apples, oranges and lemons all out of place and season, and stranger fruits Jack could not name. There was white bread and barley cakes and sweet loaves dripping honey. There were subtleties of sugar spun like jewels and spider’s webs; pale wine and wine as dark as blood.
Jack’s mouth watered, and he thought that he had not eaten since the morning before Rowland was taken, and he could not count the hours he had traveled the other country. Mary-Anne reached for a platter, but Jack remembered his mother’s warning, and he pulled Mary-Anne’s hand away. “We can’t eat fairy food, or drink their wine, or we’ll be bound here forever.”
Jack took the bread his mother had given him, and the witch’s bottle, and they shared bread and water between them, and he blessed his mother’s gifts, for the last time, and the old witch too, since he had only the tales she had written on his heart and his own wits left to win his Rowland back.
With mortal food in their bellies, the scent of the fairy feast faded to nothing, and Jack felt no hunger looking at the laden tables. They watched the fairies eating and the king talking with Rowland and the others at the high table: gossamer-gowned, flower-haired ladies, lords of stone like to the king, and clever-eyed courtiers with fox tails slipping from under their doublets.
The fairies ate, but the tables never grew empty, and there was never a shortage of bones for the red-eared dogs lying by the hearth to fight over. Time passed, in the unmeasurable way of the other country, and then the feast was ending, and the grey king stood and spoke.
“Now our feast is passed, and we must ride once more to the war east of the world, and my new champion shall go first of all on the white horse and bring us victory against the bright sun that rises ever again.”
Jack felt the warmth of knowing in his breast. The mortal who would fight for the grey king under the hills against the sun was one of the tales written there, but Rowland should have had a choice and walked open-eyed into the contest, not gone bewitched and stolen, and the white horse was for a sacrifice, not for a champion in war. The grey king was sending Rowland to die against a foe that would rise up whole each time it was struck down.
It was as if two of the tales Agnes had written for him were braided together here, but the second tale, of the stolen knight riding with the fairy host on white horse, had a way to win Rowland free, and that was what they needed.
Jack turned to Mary-Anne. She must be the one to save Rowland. The true love was meant to pull the rider from the white horse, not the bosom friend.
“We have a chance to save Rowland, and win him free, but you will have to do it.”
“Tell me what to do.”
She looked grim, still resigned to
death in the other country, maybe, or maybe she did not think of going home with Rowland at her side as a cause for joy.
“When the company rides out, you must pull him from the white horse and hold him tight. The king will change Rowland’s shape in your arms, but you must not let him go.”
Mary-Anne set her face sternly and looked resolved, but Jack marked how her eyes lingered on the grey king as they went out, and he did not know what to think of it, but they looked the way his own eyes felt watching Rowland on the practice grounds when he trained for his knighthood.
The high table and the hall were emptying. Jack and Mary-Anne ran through the crowd, through the hollow castle and out to where the stable yawned as a dark tunnel in the grey hill. Jack clasped Mary-Anne’s hand, and she held it tight.
A rumble rolled out of the dark, and there was Rowland first of all on the white horse, and all the fairy host behind. Jack let Mary-Anne’s hand go, and she ran to Rowland’s stirrup, and she pulled him down. The fairy riders wheeled and turned their steeds with a sound like thunder and stones breaking, and they drew round Mary-Anne and Rowland in a ring, and Jack was hemmed in with them.
Rowland changed in Mary-Anne’s arms into lion, muscles rippling under a golden coat, his roar resounding from the hills, and still she held him tight. Rowland changed in Mary-Anne’s arms to great serpent, hissing like a boiling kettle, and the spittle that dripped from its fangs hissed on the ground, and still she held him tight. Rowland changed in Mary-Anne’s arms to a crying babe, and Jack could see, by its black hair and the line of its mouth so like to Rowland’s, it was the child the two of them would have one day. Mary-Anne let go and sprang away.
Jack leapt for Rowland and barely caught the babe as it struck the ground. He gathered it up and wrapped it in his arms before it cried, before the fairies moved. Maybe the story would still finish right if he kept hold. Maybe the spell was not yet broken. Damn Mary-Anne for letting go. If all was lost and Rowland bound, then Jack would make them take him. He would not let go of Rowland until he was slain or changed to some unfeeling thing by fairy magic.
Rowland changed in Jack’s arms to a boiling cauldron, and Jack felt his hands burn and blister, and he held on. Rowland changed in Jack’s arms to a sword, bright steel stained with blood and the hilt in Jack’s hands, and he kept hold, and tried to keep from retching or from weeping all unmanly. Rowland changed in Jack’s arms to a fairy maid, pulling him close for kiss of her red, red lips, and Jack felt his flesh crawl and fear make him tremble away, but still he kept hold.
Then Rowland was there, naked, flushed red and soaked in sweat as if he had lain long with fever, but he was himself again, and Jack knew he had won. He unlaced his shirt with clumsy fingers to give Rowland a covering.
The grey king stood down from his horse and looked over them with his hands on his hips, just like Lord Robert when he had caught them at some mischief.
“Well this is a pretty puzzle, young man with stories in your heart and iron in your boots. By the old rules you’ve won your love and should be free to take him home with you.”
Jack looked at Rowland, and Rowland looked back. His love? Rowland smiled a little back at him.
“But,” said the grey king, “the challenge was also failed, and so I am still due one mortal to stay and ornament my court. That must be the ruling then. Two of you may go back safe to your own country, but one must stay here under hill with me.”
Jack nodded slowly. That was right, and who could it be to stay but him? What tale was there of a bold young man coming back from fairyland with his common friend and not his lady love?
He was just rising to bid Rowland a last goodbye when Mary-Anne stood between him and the king.
“Take me, of course,” she said.
Was she run mad, thought Jack, or caught by some fairy spell that he had shaken off?
“You can’t find the way back alone,” said Jack. “You know that, don’t you? I don’t know a tale to tell you what it will be like to stay with him.”
“I know what I’ll get going back with Rowland, and so do you. I’ll take a chance on this instead.”
She looked at the king again, with hungry dreaming eyes, and Jack could see how she would think him fair, lordly and ageless, nothing like Rowland’s bright laughter and his land nothing like the trap of her marriage to boy too young for her.
The grey king said “this will do,” and he set Mary-Anne before him on his tall grey horse and put Jack and Rowland on the road back to their own country.
The road was short returning, and they came back to the lawn beside the grey stone chapel before the sun set on the day Rowland had been taken. They had not spoken, not beyond hesitation and a little fear, on their road home, but their hands never parted, and they stopped often to hug tightly.
© Copyright 2020 R.K. Duncan
R K Duncan Page 2
