The White Hart

by Nancy Springer

  “But where is Shamarra?” Frain cried out. There was no answer, and he turned away from the tree that stood unseen somewhere in the night, his one good hand clenched into a fist, trying to contain his fury.

  “The one question I have come all this way to ask her,” he panted, and then his anger choked him and he could not go on.

  “From what the goddess said, you would do well to stay far from Shamarra,” Trevyn remarked.

  “I will not believe she is my enemy,” said Frain. “Can not, will not.” Anger had left his tone to be replaced by a dead and settled desperation that I for one found far more fearsome. What ailed him, that he would not heed the word of the goddess? Trevyn put an arm around him, as if to warm the cold enchantment that was on him.

  “You will not be able to sleep until you have vented your rage,” he said. “Shout, weep, pound on me, something.”

  “I am seldom able to sleep in any event.” Frain shrugged off the embrace, gently but sulkily. “Can we be gone from here?” he asked.

  “In the pitch dark? Well, why not?” Trevyn liked challenges. “Dair, what is needed to roam the night?”

  A good nose.

  “You lead, then.”

  We blundered off with the horses trailing after us. But I could not find the way. It was Trevyn’s grove, and I was not he. Also, my mind was in an uproar. Maeve and I were to help Frain, Alys had said, Maeve my mother who lived across the sea. Frain and I would voyage on that sea, just as Trevyn had said—

  I will go with him, I said aloud, and I banged right into a massive tree.

  “What is it?” Frain called sharply, startled. He had heard only a thump and a growl in the night. But Trevyn had heard me well enough.

  “Let us stop here,” he said in a tight voice.

  “All right.” Frain sounded his gentle self again, and sheepish. “It is no use running away like a whipped child. My lord Trevyn, I am truly grateful to you for all you have done for me.”

  “Others have helped me when I needed it.” Trevyn sat on the ground, and we did the same. “Well, Frain, I will have a ship prepared for you.”

  “What is the use?” Frain lay back on the soft loam. “I still don’t know where I am going.”

  “East. To Tokar. To see Maeve. And may you fare better in that country than I did.”

  “Who is Maeve?”

  My mother, I said. She whom I remembered only as milk and warm fur—

  “Dair’s mother. A sorceress. Could you sleep now? You should be quite exhausted.”

  I believe Trevyn must have put some small spell on him, for as if he needed only the suggestion Frain rolled to one side and fell into the slumberer’s rhythm of gentle breathing. Trevyn put a cloak over him and turned to me.

  “So,” he whispered, “the pattern is plain to you.”

  I knew—I felt the bond. Even before the goddess spoke my name with his.

  “I know, I know it well enough. I had ordered myself not to interfere, but I can’t help telling you, Dair—I will miss you.”

  I found my way to him in the dark and touched his shoulder. It was hard, as if he held himself clenched against pain. He turned to me at the touch and embraced me fiercely.

  “I only hope he will learn to love you as I do,” he muttered, then hastily let go of me. “Sleep,” he told me.

  I lay down and pretended to sleep to please him. He sat with his head against a tall kerm-oak tree, drawing on the strength of the god, the grove. After a while he lay down as well, but I do not think he slept any more than I did. In the morning he silently found us our horses and led us back to the others, and then out of the Wyrdwood.

  Chapter Five

  Once we were back in Nemeton, Trevyn set about finding a ship for the crossing to Tokar. Frain was startled by the news that I was coming with him.

  “To see his mother?” he demanded.

  “I think there is more to it than that,” Trevyn told him.

  His honesty would not let him graciously accept me as his traveling companion, but there was no way he could graciously refuse, either—not when he was sailing on Trevyn’s ship and I was Trevyn’s son. I went to see him the next day, to try to come to an understanding with him.

  He was in his chamber, putting in order the piles of gifts and clothing people had given him. He was the castle favorite—he had such a gentle, honest way about him, he was the sort of youth that maidens smiled on without a second thought, that mothers trusted with their virgin daughters. He had a knack for making friends with everyone except me, it seemed. I knocked on his open door and he turned to see me standing there.

  “Dair!” he exclaimed. “Come—in.…” He sounded none too sure of the welcome. I came in anyway, went to him and knelt, placing my clasped hands in his in the ritual gesture of fealty. It was the only way I could think of to show him that I had given my loyalty to him. His face went white, and he trembled.

  “Dair,” he said between clenched teeth, “I am—I thank you, but—I am terrified of you.”

  I rose, stepped back and cupped my hands, a sign of peace. Why? I asked him. It was only an inquiring whine, but for once he understood me.

  “I wish I knew. I never thought I was such a coward. Dair, I know you mean me all good and no harm, and yet I shake at the sight of you, and I hate myself for it.”

  Would it help if I wore clothes? I asked, but it was only a senseless muttering to him.

  “I swear, I am going as mad as Tirell,” he said wildly to the air and the walls. “He was afraid of the beast and the brown man, but he found courage to embrace them—and I have none.” He edged away from me as if he were going to bolt, but then Trevyn happened in. Frain strode to his side in three steps, and Trevyn looked at him in mild surprise.

  “You don’t need my protection,” he said.

  “I know! It is ridiculous. What am I going to do with this fear?” Frain appealed to him.

  “See it through.”

  “It looks as if I am going to have to.” Frain stood still, trying to calm himself. Trevyn sat heavily on the bed.

  “I have your ship manned and provisioned. You can go with the tide.”

  Frain stared at him, sensing pain in the calm words. “Lord,” he said, “I have no desire to take him from you, believe me.”

  “I believe it,” said Trevyn wryly. He turned to me. “Dair, you had better get some clothes on. Salt spray is hard on the skin.”

  “I need no companion,” Frain protested. “For seven years I have walked alone—”

  “You need him worse than you know,” Trevyn said. I went out, and what they said after that I do not know.

  Trevyn walked us down to the harbor when the tide came in. He gave Frain good wishes and the handclasp of an equal. Then he gathered me into a long embrace. Both our faces were wet. Frain stood by, looking abashed.

  “I wish you were coming with us,” he said at last to Trevyn.

  “So do I. But I am a king now, wed, with a child, and as soon as you are gone I will be on my way back to Laueroc. My voyaging days are over.” He stood back as we boarded ship. “Farewell, you two!”

  Laifrita thae, Dounamir, I called to him. Sweet peace to thee, my father. The elfin greeting served for parting as well. I had never spoken to him so formally, but I knew I would not be coming back.

  “Farewell,” said Frain.

  With a creaking of spars and planks the ship took us down the harbor mouth with the tide. Trevyn stood watching us go. He looked very small, standing on the wharf by the gray water’s edge.

  Within a few hours after we left port I was dismally seasick. It was no wonder—my own human height still made me queasy sometimes, and the slight rolling of the ship on the calm sea undid me. I could scarcely bear to move. I kept to my bed in the dark hold, lay there and retched and groaned. Though I hardly thought so at the time, it was probably the best thing I could have done. Frain could not very well be afraid of me when I was lying so sick and helpless.

  At first he let me alon
e. But as he saw I was not going to get over my illness in a day or two he began bringing me gruels and things, at first out of duty and later, I think, with real concern. “Try to keep it down,” he would say, offering me a plate of some kind of awful mush. No matter what it was, it looked vile to me. I would try to eat it even so, to please him, and then I would give it back the wrong way. He would sigh, clean up the mess and depart. He tried me on wine and all sorts of things, and none of them did any good. This went on for several days, until I felt weak enough to die.

  I can’t bear this, I said, though I knew he would not understand me. Three more weeks yet—

  “It can’t last much longer,” he said, as if he had understood after all. “It will soon run its course.”

  He brought a basin of water and tried to bathe me. He had managed to warm it somehow, even. I had never been one for much bathing, as I suppose he could see, but I felt too wretched to protest. I lay and let him run the cloth over me, and every once in a while a soft sound would escape my lips. I scarcely noticed when he stopped his sloshings and lavings, muttering to himself fervidly. I scarcely noticed when he laid something on my chest and placed his hand on top of it. But when the slight weight stayed there for some time I made the painful effort to open my eyes.

  Frain was standing over me, looking desperate. The thing on my chest was the iron knife he always wore at his belt. I saw, wondering but without alarm, for with tight-lipped concentration he took away his hand and laid it on my forehead, pressing gently. I felt the tremor of effort in that hand. For a long moment he held it there. Then he jerked it away, cursing quietly. He turned toward the wall, his shoulders bent and askew, and I made an inquiring sound.

  “Dair?” He looked over to see me looking back at him. He smiled darkly and came to get his knife off my chest.

  “Old habits are hard to break,” he joked, his voice tight. “I was trying to heal you. I used to be a healer, long ago, before—before I got hurt.”

  Something in my silence helped him to go on.

  “There is a power in metal and in the sons of metal-smiths,” he explained. “I could take anything made of iron, a knife blade or whatever, and lay it on together with my hands, and the power would flow through me. I thought maybe—” He stopped with a shrug. “The power is gone,” he said after a moment. “I cannot heal anyone anymore, and least of all myself.”

  I gazed at him, my own woes forgotten. I signaled my interest with voice and gesture, urging him to say more. He sighed and sat on the stool by my bedside. A long silence followed.

  “It’s not just the hands,” he said finally. “It’s not just that—Tirell has crippled me. Everything went together, power, prowess, happiness—I’ve become crippled some other way, somehow. Something inside is hurt. My father lost his healer’s power to greed and shame, he told me. Well, I don’t know the name of the thing that has taken hold of mine, but it has an ugly face.”

  He got up abruptly and went out, and I went to sleep.

  I felt better. Perhaps the seasickness had run its course, but I think Frain had helped me. Not that there had been any mystic power of healing in his touch, but just that he had cared enough to try—I had seen what effort it had cost him to try. And he had trusted me enough to talk to me. I felt better.

  Fran brought me broth in the morning, and I kept it down. And I kept down the sops and slops he brought me thereafter. And a few days later I got up from my bed and wobbled out on deck. The sailors grinned at me and let me alone. Frain stood by me in awkward silence.

  “I am glad you are better,” he said finally, and I felt he could not have said it if it were not to some extent true.

  He was still distant with me, still put off. But he talked to me more easily and more often as the days went by. He was tense and unhappy, for he liked the sea no better than I did, and the sailors knew it and baited him about it. So he was lonely, and even a mute woodwouse of a companion served better than none. We passed the time with simple games, naughts and crosses, dice and the like. And he would talk about Tirell—how he had loved Tirell. Doglike devotion, folk call it. And he had loved his father Fabron as well, though more as an equal—and Vale itself, his homeland, he spoke of it with longing and love. One day when we had a bit of charcoal at hand he drew me a crude map of Vale on the ship’s deck.

  “Mountains all around. The river runs down from the northern ones, the dragon range, where there are snow-caps, and empties into a cavern under the king’s range to the south and east. No one knows where it goes after that. No one comes into Vale and hardly anyone goes out of it. Those few who do leave, like myself, are as good as dead to those within. I doubt if I will ever wander back.”

  I only half listened, staring at the rough oval he had drawn on the planking. In a moment I took the charcoal from him and put my own map beside his. It was very nearly the same shape. Clumsily, for I still found it awkward to use my hands, I showed the river running down from the north and west—dragons lived in those parts in the old days, legend said—and I put a dot at the river’s mouth—Nemeton. Glancing up at Frain, I saw that he did not understand. How to show him that this was an island, an oval surrounded by sea? I drew a sort of walnut shell with stick masts at Nemeton harbor—a ship.

  “Isle?” Frain asked, astonished.

  I nodded.

  “But—great goddess, what a coincidence! Are they both nearly the same size?”

  They were. We discussed it in our way, he figuring weeks of travel and I agreeing. It would take just about a year to make the rounds of either kingdom with any ease.

  “And Trevyn and Tirell, True Kings,” Frain muttered, more to the air than to me. “So alike, and yet so different. I believe the old woman is playing tricks on me again.” He strode off, and that was the end of our one-sided colloquy for that day.

  I grew stronger quickly, even on shipboard fare, and I grew more hopeful daily, for Frain was most surely more at ease with me, and maybe one day he might truly be my friend. He grew somewhat more candid with me. One day toward the end of the voyage he asked me a stark question.

  “Dair, were you really a wolf for a while?”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe we are what the goddess meant by wolf meeting dog. People used to call me Puppydog in Vale.… Because your mother was a wolf when you were born?”

  Nod.

  “Swans and serpents,” he breathed. “She must be a potent sorceress.”

  I shrugged in wary agreement. Frain stared at me and then past me, thinking hard.

  “Though why that should bother me, I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’ve seen enough strange things in my life, especially in a certain lake.” He shuddered slightly. “Dair,” he burst out, “if you would smile once in a while, it would help.”

  Trevyn had told me that my expression was fixed and unnerving. The muscles of my face did not work as they usually did in humans, it seemed. But certainly I was willing to try them, I wanted only to please. I flexed my lips. Frain gave me a startled look and glanced quickly away.

  “No good. You’re baring your teeth,” he said quite gently. “Never mind, it was a stupid idea.” He rested his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand. A large wave splashed over the ship’s railing and drenched him, and he jumped up, cursing.

  “Go ahead, douse me!” he shouted at it. “Who am I, anyway? A leaf on the tide, cloud feather, bird dropping or some such. First I search seven years in one direction, and then she sends me back in the other—” His anger turned to a sort of desperate amusement, and he lapsed into laughter, watching the water trickle away from him like tears. “Dair, I’m all wet.”

  I rose, offering to get him dry clothes, and he followed me below, still softly laughing. Then he stopped with a sigh. “I hate this endless water,” he said.

  All I could do was hand him dry clothes.

  “I never used to be so full of the mubblefubbles,” he told me wryly. “So fearful, so bitter—but the days when I was—when I was myself—seem s
o long ago that I can hardly remember them.”

  The voyage drifted on. Every morning we sailed blind, straight for the rising sun. Finally one day a rim of black showed below the sun, and the next day cliffs loomed up. We had come to the rocky coast of northern Tokar. It was all wilderness—no towns or homesteads were there.

  It was a shock to me, I admit it, that first landsight. I had always lived under the mantle of. Trevyn’s magic, and I had not known how drab the shadowed world would be. Rocks and twisted trees—without being anything less it was all somehow shrunken, there was no dream in this place. The greens were not the true dream green, the manycolors did not inhabit the tree trunks, the rocks would never sing or roses bloom in the snow or frost-flowers in the heat. It was a sere and unfriendly place even by mainland standards, I suppose, and to my eyes it seemed full of ill omen.

  “I hope we are not taken by slavers, as Trevyn was,” Frain said.

  We fetched our packs of gear and victuals as the ship turned broadside to the coast and sailed along it, searching for a landfall for us. The cliffs looked sheer, but after a while we sighted a jagged ravine where a stream ran down to the ocean. The smallboat was lowered to take us ashore.

  Half an hour later we stood on a spit of gravel beach and watched the ship sail away toward Isle, leaving us behind. For the first time I felt desolate.

  “Well, Dair,” Frain said, “now we’re on our own.” But he had been on his own for years, without even mute me for company. Was he sensing how I felt?

  I turned my back on the sea and looked toward the mainland.

  Trevyn had told me where Maeve’s home lay. It was somewhere in the jagged ridge country, at the end of the trail that led northward from Jabul. Its tall trees stood like an island in the scrub. We were coming at it from the west, but I felt confident I could find it. The house was encircled by a haunt, an invisible barrier of fear that kept it safe from the brigands and robbers who roamed these wilds. A haunt was a special place. We would be sure to hear talk of it—

  If the brigands did not do us in first. Neither of us bore any weapon to speak of. Frain had his iron knife, which we would need for cooking and the like, but he had steadfastly refused to take a sword. And as for me, I was human, but not so human as to have mastered the arts of combat.