The Sable Moon

by Nancy Springer

  “Mothers, nay!” said Trevyn emphatically. “Take every man. Gwern and I will be fine by ourselves. I’ll ride after you in a few days.”

  “You should rest for at least a week.”

  “I’m stronger already. Look.” Trevyn slipped out of bed and stood, tottering. Alan eyed him doubtfully. But Gwern extended a hand to steady him, and unexpectedly spoke.

  “I’ll feed him well,” he volunteered, “and he’ll stay here till he’s healed. He’s never been able to get the best of me yet,” Gwern added darkly.

  “We’ll see, in the morning,” Alan hedged.

  But in the morning Trevyn walked to the table to eat, and Alan made ready to march with all his men, muttering. He had called his son Alberic, King That Shall Be. But it was hard to let go of the little boy that once was. For his own part, Trevyn seemed as protective of his father.

  “Be wary,” he warned. “Rheged is full of treachery. And Wael is probably with him.”

  “I thought you dispatched him!” Alan exclaimed.

  “Nay, I only slew his borrowed body, poor thing.… And I believe I did away with the transferring of living souls when I destroyed the parchment. But Wael still has plenty of tricks left.”

  “I don’t mind any magic, now that that shadow’s gone,” Alan grumbled. “Trev, lad, be gentle with yourself.…” They embraced, and Alan strode to the golden charger Rhyssiart, took saddle. Trevyn stood on the doorstep and raised a hand in farewell as his father jingled off at the head of his army. The men saluted him as they passed, and Trevyn bit his lip, feeling his knees forsake him; he couldn’t weaken now! Gwern slipped a casual hand under his elbow.

  “Thanks,” Trevyn hissed between clenched teeth.

  They stood until the last of the troops had passed. Then Trevyn staggered inside and collapsed on his bed, groaning. “I must be out of my mind,” he lamented. “Gwern, you are an execrable cook, and I know it.”

  “I’m no cook at all,” Gwern stated in his factual way.

  They ate cold food for three days, until Trevyn was well enough to make himself some soup. Then they spent another three days in almost constant baking and roasting, preparing supplies for their journey. They had no way of knowing what was happening in Nemeton, but Trevyn felt sure there must be fighting. Peasants wandered by their windows in bewilderment, some fleeing the rumored invasion, some returning to their homes since the threat of the wolves had passed. The proper owners of their cottage came back to it and peeked timidly in.

  “We’ll leave in the morning,” Trevyn assured them.

  He and Gwern spent the evening packing. Trevyn worked silently, frowning in thought. “Meg is wandering somewhere in all this confusion,” he said suddenly, when they were done. “How am I ever to find her, Gwem, since she won’t come to me? How did you find her to bring her here?”

  Gwern kept uneasy silence for a moment, moving his big hands, fumbling for words. “She is to the east, somewhere near Nemeton,” he said finally. “I can feel the focus of her being in much the same way as I am always drawn to you, but—it is through your love for her that I sense her. When I see her, it is through your eyes.”

  “And you love her,” Trevyn murmured.

  “Through your heart.”

  Trevyn stood staring at him, afraid to put into words something unfathomable he had felt. “But you must be yourself, Gwern,” he protested at last. “You always have been. Everyone is.”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  Chapter Three

  They left the cottage at dawn and rode toward Nemeton, with Trevyn on his strange, cat-eyed steed and Gwern on his colt. They rode all day, steadily but not hard, since Trevyn had still not regained his full strength. His own frailty troubled him, and starting the journey brought all his concerns to the fore.

  “Confound it, Gwern,” he grumbled by the campfire that evening, “do you know anything about the dragons of Lyrdion?”

  “Nay.”

  “Confound it!” Trevyn exclaimed again. “How am I ever going to defeat Wael? I can’t remember—I am nothing more than I was the last time I faced him and nearly died of it.”

  “But it was not Wael that hurt you the last time,” Gwern remarked reasonably.

  “It wasn’t?” Trevyn whispered. “Then—Menwy? Why, that black—” With difficulty he restrained himself from applying the epithet of female dog to the goddess.

  “She had to work through your hatred.” Gwern neither reproved nor explained. That toneless voice calmed Trevyn.

  “Well, if I can’t use her—Gwern, the problem remains the same. I am no match for Wael. And I must face him again, soon or late, whether he awaits me at Nemeton or not.”

  “Perhaps you will not have to face him alone,” Gwern said. Trevyn turned to him curiously, sensing—what?

  “What do you have in mind, Gwern?” he asked slowly. But Gwern shrugged and would not answer, sitting blank-faced by a hulking bundle of sword.

  The next morning they traveled on. To make for easier fording of the Black River, they headed slightly north. Three days later they crossed the main river and reached the point of land between its arms at the southern fringe of the Forest. Trevyn tried to stun rabbits for their supper as they rode, but his stones all missed. Muttering, he wished out loud that he had a hunting bird like the one he had lost, some time back, fighting with Gwern.

  “Look!” Gwern pointed. “An eagle.”

  The great golden raptor, shining like the sun, skimmed just over the treetops, its wings nearly five feet in span. “It must have come all the way from Veran’s Mountain!” Trevyn exclaimed. “Laifrita thae, little brother, you have seen far; what news?” He held up an arm for the bird, calling it to him. But the eagle swooped past his outstretched wrist and on toward Gwern, striking with a screech at the base of his neck where it met the shoulder. Curved talons drew blood, and Gwern, utterly startled, fell off his horse with a thud. The eagle flapped heavily away, and Trevyn jumped down from his own mount, hurried to Gwern. The youth was sitting up, looking browner than ever with leaf mold and rubbing his head in surprise.

  “I’m sorry!” Trevyn exclaimed. “I never in a thousand years would have expected that.… Are you all right?” He tried to examine Gwern’s cuts, but Gwern pushed his hand away, gently enough.

  “Scratches. I’m just stunned. Can Wael be setting the eagles against us now?”

  “I hope not!” Trevyn shuddered. Gwern looked up thoughtfully.

  “The eagles are the messengers of the goddess. But I can’t think how I might have offended her.”

  “Still, I didn’t smell any stench of Wael,” Trevyn mused.

  They rode on a little farther and camped in a Forest glade not too far from the river. They set a snare and had a rabbit for their supper. But in the morning Gwern groaned and struggled to rise from his bed. His face looked flushed under its habitual coat of grime. Trevyn pushed him back to his blanket, feeling the heat of his forehead with alarm. The cuts the eagle had given him looked swollen and raw.

  Trevyn cursed. “By blood, Gwern, that’s what you get for never washing!” he shouted in conclusion, and trudged to the river, grumbling. He returned with pans of water and bathed Gwern’s cuts and face. They did not ride that day. Trevyn spent the time cooking soup, but Gwern hardly ate any. He drank water from time to time. Trevyn made trip after trip to the river, bringing cool water, laying a cool cloth on the infected cuts. He didn’t sleep much that night, tending Gwern almost as frequently as he had during the day. But by the following morning Gwern no longer knew him. His wounds had swollen to double size, and he cried and moaned in delirious pain.

  Trevyn tried the only crude treatment he knew. Braving Gwern’s struggles and screams, he sliced the scabs open, squeezed out the pus, and seared the cuts with a hot blade. To do this, he had to sit on top of Gwern and pin down his flailing arms; later, he went off in the woods, and retched, and wept. Still later, in a sort of penance, he sat for hours by Gwern, patiently washing him, peeling away the
tattered clothing that seemed to have adhered to his skin. Beneath the rags he found scars. It took him a while to realize that the marks were identical, line for line, with his own scars from the slave whips and the wolves. When he could no longer deny it, he wept again. That night, every time he tried to sleep, he seemed to hear Gwern’s screams under his knife-wielding hand.

  The searing did not help. Contagion crept down Gwern’s arm and up his neck; Trevyn thought the skin would break with swelling, and half of Gwern’s face turned a vivid puce, like a bruise; he looked as if he had been beaten. Whenever he moved, he shrieked with pain. Trevyn scarcely dared to touch him, even with the wet cloth. He no longer attempted to sleep. Exhaustion would take him for a few moments from time to time, and then he would wake with a start and try to comfort Gwern, if only with clumsy words.

  By the time Trevyn lost count of days, Gwern no longer had strength to scream. He lay softly moaning, but Trevyn could tell that his pain had not abated. Then one day, near evening, Gwern suddenly quieted, lying limp and still. Filled with dread, Trevyn felt for his breath. But Gwern opened his eyes and fixed them on Trevyn’s haggard face.

  “The pain is gone,” he whispered wonderingly.

  Trevyn only swallowed, and Gwern looked thoughtful. “Not good,” he added after a pause.

  “Nay.” Trevyn had heard about the respite that sometimes came just before death.

  “Tell me,” Gwern said.

  “Your whole arm is purple with infection, and your shoulder down to your ribs, and your neck and face.…” For a moment, Trevyn closed his own burning eyes. “I can’t help you. I’ve tried to help, and I’ve only hurt you.”

  “But I can’t die,” Gwern murmured incredulously. “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what I keep saying,” Trevyn groaned. “I don’t understand. Sometimes I think I have been accursed since the day I was born. I had only just learned to—to love you, Gwern, and then this—”

  “But I can’t sicken! I am not mortal; I was never born,” Gwern explained laboriously. “Alys made me, somehow, to embody your deepest being, the Prince you liked the least. She ensouled me with her own breath. So I am Alys and I am you; how can I die while either of you lives? I have wept when you wept, loved when you loved, kept that feeling safe and helped it bring you back to Isle. I am wyrd; how can I just end? I don’t understand.…”

  “You are more than friend, even more than brother,” Trevyn whispered, shaking. “You are second self.…”

  “I am your inner fate. I am the child you have tried to leave behind; I am the white hart, the wild thing, and I am the wilderness within. I have loved you when you would not love yourself.”

  “Yet, you are also yourself, Gwern,” said Trevyn tightly, “to our sorrow.”

  “I am selfhead and godhead. So how have I become doomed to a mortal death.…” Weary, Gwern closed his eyes.

  Still trembling, unable to speak, Trevyn took his good left hand and held it between his own, stroking it, warming it when it began to grow cold. He did not dare a larger embrace; he would not risk jostling Gwern and causing him pain when he lay so peacefully. He could hardly tell when Gwerri ceased to breathe, but he saw the purple tinge creep all the way across his still face, felt the chill in his hand. Trevyn laid it down and edged away, sensing dark waters of hatred on all sides, welling up within him, drowning deep. He staggered to his feet, turned blindly and ran.

  Within a few strides he surged into rage that he thought would destroy him, destroy the world; he didn’t care. He careered against trees, punishing them and himself with all the strength in his body, smashing them with head and hands and knees, shrieking, but not with pain. He cursed with curses torn up from his reddest depths, cursed every person of the goddess, cursed Aene. Sometimes he stumbled and fell, ripping at earth with his bloodied hands. Sometimes he scrambled along, crashing through thickets like a hunted deer. He came up headlong against rocks, seized them and hurled them against the unresponsive earth, then plunged aimlessly onward. But he was too weak from fatigue and from his own recent illness to run mad for long. After a while he lay feebly thrashing, too exhausted to rise, too stubborn to weep. Later, eerily, he reached a calm even deeper than his hatred, and he knew quite surely that the goddess had not stirred for all his rage and all his grief. He felt her implacable love and understood that he would always be hers, always be alone. He bowed his head in acquiescence, laid his face in the dirt and slept.

  Something awakened him before dawn, some internal pang. He stared at the shadowy Forest, and remembered, and groaned. Then, unsteadily, he rose, wondering how far he had come from his campsite and how he would bury his—his companion; he could not bear to think of a more fitting title. He did not even know which direction would take him back to Gwern. But a faintly scornful snort sounded through the darkness and a white blur walked up to him: his wild-eyed horse. He crawled onto the beast, and it carried him off without a word of instruction through the gray dusk of dawn.

  He found Gwern, no more than a lump in the dim light, and beyond him a bundle that had been impatiently pushed out of the way. Trevyn needed the massive sword of Lyrdion now. He pulled the weapon from its wrappings, took it and felt his way to the top of a slight rise beyond the glade. There he began to hack a hole in the ground for his wyrd.

  He worked through bright dawn and sunrise. The hacking and scraping soothed him somehow. But even through the numbness of his grief he could feel the haunting tug of the sword. Culean had killed himself with that weapon, Trevyn grimly remembered, and with less cause than he had, he thought.… No matter. He dared say he put it to more fitting use. When he judged the grave was done, he went to get the body.

  He reached the edge of the glade, stopped and reached shakily for a tree. Gwern lay where he had left him. But he looked like a graceful young god, lying there, like a woman’s dream of her sleeping lover somehow caught in light and form. His rugged face and the bare rise of his chest caught the early sun and took on a golden glow; no trace of sickly purple remained. Trevyn walked over to him, knelt beside him and felt the movement of his ribs, felt the warm pulse of his neck, felt breath, scarcely daring to believe. Gwern stirred under his touch, blinked, then sat up and gaped at him.

  “What on earth—” he exclaimed, as agitated as Trevyn had ever seen him. “What—Trev, what has happened? You’re all blood and dirt; you’re a mess! You look—like me!”

  Trevyn felt for his voice; it came out a hoarse whisper. “And you look better than I can fathom.” He raised a hand, and with the bruised fingertips he delicately traced the smooth line of Gwern’s neck and shoulder. “Not so much as a scar on you,” he marveled.

  Gwern stiffened, stunned by memory. “I was dead!” he gulped. “Was—wasn’t I dead?”

  “Stark and cold.” Trevyn shivered with horror and growing joy.

  “I was dead, and now I am alive.… Sweet Mothers, Trev, what have you done? What—what ransom have you paid for me?”

  “I think I have sacrificed nothing but my pride. By my wounds, Gwern, I’m glad you couldn’t see me! I threw a fit.” Trevyn collapsed beside Gwern with a tremulous laugh. “I railed like a child—and after a while I knew—I understood—and now I don’t understand! Bah!” He sat up again. “Mother of mercy, is there to be no end of riddling?”

  Gwern made a small sound that Trevyn could not identify, not until he saw the tears running down the gentle brown slopes of his counterpart’s face. He had never seen Gwern weep, and at first he could not react or comprehend. “My Prince—” Gwern spoke huskily.

  “Gwern, what—” Trevyn awkwardly reached out toward him, touching only one cupped hand.

  “Trev, I love you; I owe you everything. Will you try not to leave me again? I want only to be at one with you for as long as the riddles shall last. Without end.”

  “Then come here,” Trevyn breathed, stirred to his soul’s depths. “Come here, my second self.” He embraced the son of earth, drew him in with both arms, felt Gwer
n’s answering embrace, warm head on his shoulder, hair by his cheek, bare, smooth chest against his heart, tears—all in an instant, and for the first time, he felt that, and then it vanished with an odd twinge. He held a bundle of blossoms and leafy sticks wrapped in vines and sealed with clay. Crying out, Trevyn leaped to his feet and flung it away, breaking the clay binding. “My curse on all your devices!” he wailed at the goddess, at the entire heedless world. Then he sank to the ground again and wept. “Oh, I have destroyed him!” he choked to no listener. “He loved me, and I have destroyed him!”

  He wept for hours, sometimes pacing in circles, sometimes quieting only to begin again. When the sun neared its zenith, he calmed somewhat at last and sat staring dully at white bean blossoms, ruddy tips of rowan and fragrant purple heather, all fresh and thriving. For no reason, his eyes glanced beyond the strewn sticks to where a wolf sat at the foot of a tall oak tree, gazing back at him. A wolf with lovely, violet eyes.…

  “Alys?” he whispered.

  “Nay, it is Maeve. I am only one small speck in Alys.” The wolf trotted up to sit gravely beside him, laid a paw on his knee in a gesture not so much doglike as human: for his comforting, he knew. He could barely speak.

  “Wael transformed you?” he faltered.

  “Nay, I came of my own accord. There was need of—of some balance. But the Lady has returned to the Forest now, and my task will soon be done.… Freca, why do you grieve? The earth-son is not gone. He is at one with you, just as he wished.”

  Trevyn had sensed this truth even before she spoke. He knew where the dragons of Lyrdion were: in honeycomb depths of earth, his to loose as he had loosed his rage, for he was at one with that earth now. He could feel the song of a rowan’s root. He knew Wael’s sooth-name: it was the obverse of his own, encompassing his own despair and death. Gwern had given him all knowledge in making him whole. He comprehended mysteries of all realms, whether sky, sea, Isle or twilit Elwestrand—all stations of the sun, all phases of the changing moon. And all pain; he stiffened stubbornly against that knowledge.