by Myers, Karen
“Thank you, great-grandson. Yes, we have been considering all of this,” Gwyn said, with his usual unflappable dignity.
George handed the pen and ink back to Ceridwen. “I’m glad I don’t have your problems,” he said with a smile. “The human world isn’t much of a guide. The demographics are so different, and the economics, too. We cared a great deal about river travel and mountain passes when we settled all this,” he waved his hand in the air to include the local countryside, “but with the rock-wights, that just may not be an issue for you, or not an important one.”
Gwyn shrugged. “We shall have to find our own path, then, as I thought. I foresee great changes ahead. The new ways the rock-wights are providing are already changing the trading networks, even though we’ve barely started. Some of our own people and many of the immigrants are taking advantage of them to settle near the new way-openings. Like the re-building of Edgewood, they each make individual choices for their own reasons, but the result is new blood and new energy precisely where we need it, as though we had assigned them there.”
“Like I told you,” George said. “Letting people decide what works best for them is more effective than trying to make them do what you want. Give them opportunities that make sense to them, and they’ll resettle elsewhere or come from abroad, especially the best and brightest of them, the ones you want most.”
He cleared his throat. “Seething Magma tells me that you’ve already gone beyond the original set of new ways from your alliance agreement. She wouldn’t tell me any more, told me to ask you about it.”
Ceridwen looked at Gwyn, and then replied. “We’ve moved past that. Have you been to Mariah Catlett’s place recently?”
George was puzzled. Mrs. Catlett was Gwyn’s human agent, and now his, too. She lived in the caretaker’s house on the Bellemore estate, Gwyn’s occasional dwelling in Rowanton, Virginia.
“No, I haven’t been there since we returned from Britain a couple of months ago. We’ve been too busy with the kennel rebuilding. I was planning to go soon.”
Ceridwen coughed into her fist. “I suggest you make a visit, at your earliest opportunity. We’ve found something the rock-wights want even more than the books on earth sciences you brought them.”
At his quizzical glance, she shook her head. “I’ll let you see for yourself.”
Alright, George said to himself. If she won’t tell me, then I guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon. He contented himself with glaring at her.
Gwyn chuckled at the byplay, but then he sobered and steepled his fingers, tapping his lip before saying, “Thank you for telling me yesterday what you’ve discovered about my grandchild, your mother.”
Gwyn paused, but he clearly had more to say, so George just nodded and waited.
“I’m concerned about Cernunnos’s reaction. Has there been any change?”
George frowned at the necessity of discussing it in public, but of course this was important to Gwyn. Cernunnos was not just the patron of the great hunt. This entire kingdom of Annwn was really his, granted to Gwyn’s rule. George’s predecessor as huntsman, Iolo ap Huw, had shared no special relationship with the god, but George did, and Gwyn’s worries about any alteration in that were reasonable.
And hard to answer. “Nothing’s changed,” George said. “I believe he’s still there, since I still have those skills I think of as his and I can call up the empty forms.”
“But?” Ceridwen prodded.
He continued reluctantly, “But there’s been no feel of him at all.” Silly to feel abandoned, he thought, since I knew nothing of Cernunnos nine months ago, and I’m sure he thinks little of me. But you do get used to someone who’s living in your head much of the time.
“You intend to continue looking into your father’s past?” Gwyn asked, his tone neutral.
George looked him square in the face. “I have to, sir. He was your grandchild’s husband and my father. He’s not your blood, but he is mine. I can’t leave it alone. Could you, if it were you?”
Gwyn pursed his lips and made no reply.
George made it for him—what of the great hunt? Would Cernunnos still be alienated at the end of October, at Nos Galan Gaeaf? Would the great hunt fail? And what might that do to Gwyn’s rule, based on Cernunnos’s endorsement?
“I’ll try to sort it out quickly, sir. I don’t want to damage my relationship with Cernunnos, either.” He couldn’t stop himself from adding, with a quirk of his mouth, “I miss the guy.”
“What do you advise?” Gwyn asked Ceridwen, once George had left. “This quarrel between Cernunnos and my huntsman is… disturbing.”
Ceridwen looked at him. “I don’t know that it’s possible for anyone to interfere in it. They come together, as a single body, at least when Cernunnos is present.”
“But could he abandon my great-grandson altogether?”
“I don’t see why not, if George lost his favor,” she said. “And who knows where he was while George was growing up in the human world? George will die some day, after all, and Cernunnos will need to seek another.”
She addressed what she assumed to be his primary concern. “Iolo had no direct knowledge of him, and he was a fine huntsman. And Cernunnos showed no displeasure with those hunts.”
Gwyn nodded and considered for a moment.
“I can’t understand such loyalty to a father he hardly knows,” he said at last, his voice puzzled.
Ceridwen smiled to herself. “Considering your own father, I’m not surprised.”
CHAPTER 6
By Monday late morning, George had carved out some free time for himself and intended to devote it to research in the human world, not to mention checking up on whatever Ceridwen had hinted at. He tested Mosby’s girth and made sure the pouch strapped behind his saddle was buckled shut. It held all the relevant paperwork about his parents, and he chuckled as he stuck his booted foot in the stirrup and threw a leg over. No briefcase for me, for going to the office, just a saddlebag. Very strange.
He paused to think about that for a moment. Out of habit he’d included his saber, mounted to the saddle underneath his left thigh. He sighed. He’d remembered to put on clothing simple enough to be unremarkable in the human world but had forgotten to do the same for his horse.
He waved over a groom from the doorway of the stable behind Greenway Court and began to unbuckle the straps holding the sheathed saber in place, moving his leg out of the way as he worked. “Could you put this back with the rest of my tack?” The lutin came forward and took the sword. He’d store it in the trunk marked with George’s sigil, a bare winter oak. The wooden token on the trunk marked all the gear within as belonging to him, to the right eyes. Without more of the fae blood George couldn’t see such things, but others could.
That taken care of, he turned the head of his tall horse, a smoky gray Percheron/Thoroughbred cross that he’d brought with him from the human world, and kicked him toward the gates in the curtain wall that connected the manor house to the outer palisade. They went on through at a walk down the front grounds of the manor, all the way to the main gates.
He waved at the two guards, men he had sparred with under weapons-master Hadyn, then he steeled himself for the faintly unpleasant stone passage that provided a break in the living palisade and a partial protection from the strong repulsion spell the palisade projected.
Outside the barrier, the road from Greenhollow came up from the south along the river, to his right, and continued north for many miles. It rose out of his sight, paralleling the base of the Blue Ridge. He walked Mosby directly across the road, graveled here for reinforcement, to a large open area, dusty and much worn by traffic. There, well known but invisible to most eyes, was the entrance to the Guests’ Way, one of the ways that led to Greenway Court, in this case from Eastern Shore, which George understood to be somewhere in the Delmarva peninsula.
Greenway Court had been sited here in large part because of the near conjunction of this way and the Trave
lers’ Way down in Greenhollow, the route to the old world. The ways were discovered by specialized way-finders, and treasured as rare and valuable. Their location and ownership dictated much of the economic development of the fae kingdoms. With the recent discovery of the rock-wights as creators of the ways and Gwyn’s alliance with them, everything would change.
Much of Annwn’s internal way traffic used the Guests’ Way, and a secondary overflow court had begun to develop at Eastern Shore, particularly for judicial and administrative matters. Another way there, near the exit of the Guests’ Way, led to Edgewood and carried much of that traffic for both trade and couriers. Even though Edgewood was only about 50 miles north of Greenway Court, it was faster and easier to get there via these two ways than to ride there directly over little used roads and paths. New ways had been added to ease the communication with Edgewood, and all of them were an improvement over non-assisted travel.
I thought the ways the rock-wights would provide were going to be used to supplement real roads, George mused, like highways and bridges. But it’s clear that if the fae can bargain for unlimited ways, ordinary roads will be much less important to them, at least for longer distances. I didn’t expect that. What else am I going to get wrong about how this world ends up developing?
George was a way-finder himself, after a fashion. His skill was from Cernunnos, not his fae blood, and he couldn’t manipulate the technology associated with the ways, the making of wooden way-tokens, the assignment of ownership to others, and all the rest of the magical tools used to control the access and use of the ways. His distant relative and friend Rhodri was Gwyn’s way-finder in the youngest generation, and he and George had experimented to see what he was capable of.
I wonder how Maelgwn is coming along, George thought. Rhodri said way-finders are slow to develop, and he’s only twelve, but he can see the ways, and he can guide already. His real mother was a way-finder, before Madog killed all the family except the boy, and Rhodri thinks he could apprentice to it in a few months, if he wants to. His heart seems to be in the outdoor life, though—he’s always off rangering somewhere with Thomas Kethin. Well, it’s his life, and he’ll have to live with his choices. Maybe there’s a way to do both. George visualized his sober young foster-son and thought, it’s not just for my coming daughter that I want answers about her family. It’s for my almost-son, too. Not blood of my blood, but dear to me just the same.
He reached into his pocket and took out the way-token Rhodri had given him. With that in hand, he approached the brief pavement of laid stones that marked the way entrance for those that couldn’t see it and entered at a slow walk. The first few yards were still connected to the land behind him but he could sense the transition coming up that would carry him to the other end. Before that, not perceivable to most, was a difference in the texture of the passage.
The Guests’ Way was one of the rare ways that had a Y-branch, and Gwyn had caused that branch to be hidden long ago. It led to the human world, to his occasional estate at Bellemore. Few knew of its existence, and George put his first token away and plucked out a second one, specific to this hidden branch. He walked Mosby through the internal opening and took the passage through the transition point and out onto the grounds of Bellemore, behind the caretaker’s house and near her stable.
This wasn’t the only way to the human world—George himself had used another not far from here when he first came to Annwn—but it was the one most used locally, and Gwyn’s Virginia estate had been sited to take advantage of it. Gwyn hadn’t lived here in sixty years, but when he sired a child on his human lover eighty years ago, he’d married her. When she died in childbirth, he’d stayed in residence long enough to raise their daughter, George’s grandmother, before staging a disappearance and presumed death, and vanishing from the scene soon after she married.
Gwyn had visited from time to time incognito and seen his daughter’s daughter grow up, riding to hounds with the Rowanton Hunt like her parents before her. Satisfied that all was well enough, he’d contented himself with mothballing Bellemore, under the putative ownership of a family trust administered by a well-paid Culpeper lawyer, as an estate for another day and a later generation of men when he could return with few questions from neighbors who would not recognize him.
The current caretaker, Mariah Catlett, was a godsend. Her father had caught on to part of Gwyn’s secret and pledged his loyalty, and Gwyn had employed him as an agent and rewarded him well. The arrangement had carried on to the next generation, the widowed Mariah running Gwyn’s human errands in exchange for a good income and a place to live. When George rode and whipped-in to the Rowanton Hunt he’d known her as an older hunt member, always in the first field, and was still adjusting to thinking of her as someone who knew about his new life in Annwn, the only human besides his grandparents in on the secret. It remained to be seen whether or not her son would be let into the family business and recruited. Gwyn had assured her there would be no penalty if he declined or chose to move elsewhere.
As George approached the stable he scanned the area for ways by habit and was startled to find a new way close by to his right, where none had been before. The drive from the house to the stables had been extended in that direction, curving around some sycamores. Through the full summer growth he could just barely detect the outlines of a building. His senses told him the new way was somewhere close behind it.
He turned Mosby up the new road and when he cleared the bend, he found a typical steel farm outbuilding, like a modern-day Quonset hut, but painted in camouflage green rather then left in the more usual bare metal. What was this all about?
He heard the door close on Mariah’s porch and trotted back in her direction to put his horse up at the stable.
“Good to see you, Mrs. Catlett.”
He dismounted and she joined him as he led Mosby in to a stall. “What’s been going on since I was last here?”
With that air of unflappability that some women in their fifties acquired, she smiled at him. “Didn’t they tell you?”
She laughed at his disgruntled expression. “You just go on over there. Your computer’s been moved to the new building. I’ll bring you some lunch.”
He rolled his eyes and finished untacking Mosby. His horse might as well be comfortable, since he expected to be there a few hours using the internet.
When he emerged from the stable, his eye was caught by a sensor on the porch roof at the back of the house. When he looked up, he saw another on the stable entrance. Motion detectors? Was that how she knew he’d arrived?
He slung the saddle bag with his notes over his shoulder and walked down the drive around the bend to the new building. It was quite large, like a big equipment shed, and the narrow end faced him, with an ordinary door to the left and a large vehicle bay door to the right. There were no windows in this end, and the building itself had been carefully inserted into the wooded grounds to preserve as much tree cover as possible.
More motion detectors were visible, and the main door unlocked electronically as he approached. There was no keyhole that he could see. Mariah, watching from the house, he wondered. What is all this?
He found the lights on when he walked in. To his right there were typical farm vehicles arranged in an orderly fashion—tractors and attachments, a mower—and behind them was a partition blocking off the rest of the building. He could smell gasoline and oil, but something else, too. Cool air, and a hum of electronics.
When he opened the door in the partition and walked through, he laughed out loud. Of course, he thought. He hadn’t been looking with the right senses.
Hello, Mag, he projected.
*Greetings. I’m glad they finally told you.*
No, they let it be a surprise, he thought to her, still laughing and felt her light up in response.
The remainder of the deep windowless building was a workspace for rock-wights. Three long tables had been set up, each with a desktop computer, and someone had installed shelves along o
ne long wall with office supplies, spare keyboards and other parts, and books. Lots of books.
“What is this, the Academy East?” he said.
Seething Magma and Ash Tremor occupied much of the space. Mag was the size of a pickup truck and her older sister was considerably larger. George could sense the new way entrance at the back of the building. How convenient, he thought, they don’t even have to go outside. Though I don’t think their mother Gravel could fit in here.
How’s Cloudie, he asked Mag silently. She had no trouble picking up his thoughts and didn’t bother to use her new skills at audible speech when it was just him, since he could hear her just fine in his head.
These creatures with their bodies like malleable stone slabs and their variable pseudopods had been legends to the fae, lost in the mists of time, until George and Seething Magma had met when she sought help to rescue her young kidnapped daughter, Granite Cloud. When the fae realized that the rock-wights were not only real, but were also the makers of the scarce and difficult-to-find ways, everything changed.
The offer to supply newly-created ways gave the rock-wights a strong bargaining position with the fae, and George had made a counter-offer of introducing them to human sciences like geology, a subject of great interest to creatures who lived for millenia and ate their way through rock. Together, the fae and the rock-wights had built an Academy on ground between Greenway Court and the interior of the Blue Ridge where many of them lived, and George had stocked it with an initial load of science books from the human world.
To please Cavern Wind, one of Mag’s grown daughters, George and Rhodri had also provided musical instruments and books, thus introducing a new art form into their culture. The most immediate fruits of that were their newly-developed skills in shaping internal voice boxes and diaphragms so that the rock-wights could now speak.
