Hauberin dared take his attention from the signet ring enough to glance warily about. Unlike the gentle woodland through which they’d come on their way into the city, this was a rugged place, the land rising and falling sharply, full of rocks and twisting, ancient trees clinging fiercely to the broken ground. The air was cool and damp, rich with the scent of wet earth and vegetation; the steep hillsides glinted with moisture where they weren’t blanketed with ferns, and the horses’ hoofbeats were muffled by moss. Even though the sun was still almost fully overhead, the light was dim and green, diffused by leaves.
This, the prince realized with a silent laugh, could only be what the humans feared as Fée country. He could easily picture some fearful human traveler riding through this wildness at nightfall, reaching Touranne full of tales of lurking Things.
Matilde shuddered. ‘I wish it wasn’t growing so late. I hope we don’t have to stop in this forest for the night.”
“What, afraid?” Alliar teased.
“Of squelching,” she retorted. “This would be a dank place to camp.”
Hauberin silently agreed. But there might not be a choice; as the faint psychic thread led them through a narrow gully, dense forest on the left, an earthen ridge rising on the right, there was no doubt that the already dim light was fading rapidly. While darkness was hardly a problem, neither he nor Matilde nor, for that matter, the horses, were prepared to ride the day and night around, particularly over such broken ground.
And here I’d hoped to be done with this, one way or another, before I had to spend another night’s dreaming—
Hauberin came sharply alert as the horses whickered and sidled uneasily, feeling a faint, strangely distorted Power brush his own, interfering with his concentration on the signet ring, catching a quick glimpse of glowing green eyes peering out from behind a tree on his left.
“Stay between us,” he murmured to Matilde, and added with studied calm to Alliar, “Over there. On your side. Watching us.”
“I see him. Look to your right.”
Hauberin glanced up as though by chance to see a second slender form stone-still in shadow on the ridge; it would have been totally invisible to human sight. “Well now, it seems they aren’t just legends after all.”
“They?” Matilde whispered. “Are those Fées?”
Invisible to Powerless human sight, Hauberin amended. “Probably. They don’t quite feel like anyone out of Faerie, though . . . An interesting problem, eh, Alliar?”
Matilde glanced sharply from being to prince. “This is hardly the time for a discussion! You’re not just going to ignore them, are you?”
The prince completely relaxed his concentration on ring and conversation, sending his senses roving delicately out, testing, feeling those mysterious other presences, feeling that oddly distorted Power of theirs rousing in response to his own before he could count them. He smoothly withdrew back into himself before any of them could accidentally snare him. However many there were—not as many, he sensed, as the Fées would have liked, more, certainly, than he would have liked—they were too many to fight. Nor, judging from the coldness he’d felt, were they in any mood for a parlay.
“Until we’re sure how many of them there are,” Hauberin said belatedly, “and why they’re watching us, ignoring them is all we can do.”
He caught up the psychic trail he’d been following, and felt that other Power quiver. As they rode on, the shadowy figures moved with them, and Hauberin felt the space between his shoulder blades start to prickle. No magical being could handle iron, but that didn’t mean the Fées weren’t nicely armed with bronze or sharpened stone.
And here we are, neatly caught between forest and ridge.
But the Fées still did nothing more than watch.
“Watch away,” the prince told them. “I’m not going to be the first to yield.”
The night darkened. The horses had long ago accepted the alien scents of the watchers, plodding wearily on like equine sleepwalkers, heads down, ears bobbing limply. Alliar, of course, showed not the slightest sign of fatigue, but Hauberin heard Matilde stifle a yawn and had to fight down one himself.
“Can’t we stop . . . ?” the woman complained sleepily. “Don’t think I’ll ever be able to walk again . . .”
“Sorry,” Hauberin murmured. “We don’t dare stop. Not here, not now.”
No answer. The prince settled as comfortably as he could into the saddle, trying to ignore the complaints of his own tired muscles . . . The endless ridge continued without a gap on one side, the endless trees continued without a break on the other, featureless walls, hypnotic in their sameness, going on and on like a tunnel . . . a corridor . . . a dark, featureless corridor . . .
. . . down which he walked, aching with terror, knowing that this time there would be no escape, this time he was finally close enough to see—
“No! I won’t—No!”
His own shout brought the prince jarringly awake, nearly falling, not at all sure where he was, hearing startled noises from Alliar and Matilde.
“What’s wrong?” the being asked sharply.
Hauberin swallowed dryly, struggling to catch his breath. “Nothing,” he rasped out. “I . . . fell asleep in the saddle for a moment, that’s all.”
At least he hadn’t dropped the vital ring. The prince glanced down at it, then clenched his fist about it, cold and sick with the weight of hopelessness. It had all nearly ended here; he had come so painfully close to dying in his sleep. If the dream took him again, it would surely win.
Unless, of course, Hauberin thought grimly, he reached the Other first.
The night up ahead was growing too dark. Something was blocking their path, looming up mysteriously as they approached, making their horses shy and dance nervously—It was a hill, only a hill, sloping smoothly out of the surrounding forest, too perfectly round to be natural. Studying it, Hauberin straightened in sudden comprehension. Ah, so this was what humans meant by a Hollow Hill! It was an ancient site, so ancient folk had forgotten its purpose as some long-ago chieftain’s burial place: dramatic, but perfectly harmless.
Harmless? The psychic thread he followed led, without the slightest deviation, right into the hill.
Impossible. That’s a solid mound of earth.
A doorway opened in the hillside, a blacker mouth in the blackness, leading back into a long, narrow cave.
I stand corrected, Hauberin thought wryly.
Green-clad figures moved silently out of the mound to stop, straight-backed and proud, staring coldly at the prince. The prince stared right back in unabashed curiosity. Not much taller than he, these people were thin and lean as hungry hounds, their skin fair almost to unhealthy pallor. Both men and women wore their long, straight white hair in a series of intricate braids woven in multiples of three, six, nine, the magic numbers, a style so old Hauberin had seen it only in history texts; their green robes, though blatantly of human weave, were of an equally antique design. They looked so much alike—the same sharp, narrow, nearly gaunt faces, the same slanted, bitter, green eyes—he could barely tell one from another. And to all of them clung the feel of that weak, distorted Power.
And yet, and yet, for all their strangenesses, there could be no doubt: these were Fées, these were folk of Faerie.
Hauberin, amazed, moved one hand in an intricate ceremonial greeting common to most of the magic Peoples.
Not, it seemed, to these. They made not the slightest move in response, save for: “You trespass,” one woman said in the human language.
“Not intentionally.” In the Faerie tongue, Hauberin began the ritual phrase, “We come without harm, we mean you no harm, we pass on without harm.”
Green eyes blinked. “He speaks the ancient tongue,” someone murmured.
“Ancient!” the prince echoed in surprise. “It’s the language of our homeland!”
“Do not taunt us,” the woman replied in so archaic a Faerie dialect the prince had difficulty following her. “You bear the
signs of our people,” she continued, gesturing to Hauberin’s face and ears, “but none of the True Blood have such skin, such hair, such eyes. Be gone from here, half-blooded one.” The antiquated word she used, chaikulai, held subtle connotations of slavery and shame. “We give no greeting to humankind.”
Hauberin fought back a sharp retort, waving the indignantly sputtering Alliar to silence. “No? And yet you let a human pass into your domain.”
“No.” Her eyes were green ice. “No human has passed this way.”
That, Hauberin acknowledged uneasily, might not be quite a lie; what he’d seen in the cathedral might no longer have been truly Gilbert, truly human. Glad that Matilde couldn’t have understood the words or the implication behind them, the prince said, “Surely you can’t deny you granted someone passage.”
The narrow faces were unreadable as stone. “What we did, or did not, is not your concern, chaikulai. Now, begone!”
Power glinted in the air. The pale, lean figures were suddenly robed in splendor, tall, proud, terrible in their fury—
Hauberin laughed angrily. “Enough of this!” he cried, and cast his own illusion over himself: a true enough image of himself shining coldly in princely silver robes, the intricate silver crown of High Ceremony gleaming against his black hair. “Half-blood I may be,” Hauberin said in the human tongue—he would not call himself chaikulai—“but I am also a rightful Prince of Faerie, acknowledged by the High King and Queen themselves—and I will not be treated like a magickless fool.”
Their illusions faltered and fell. Hauberin kept his own a moment longer, enforcing the image. Then, seeing the bitter envy in the slanted green eyes, he let it fade, knowing better than to push too far, and slipped lightly from the saddle (regally schooled face showing no sign of stiff muscles’ protests). Following his lead, Matilde and Alliar also dismounted, Alliar deftly scooping up the three horses’ reins.
“I must pass through your domain,” Hauberin told the Fées. Hunting for the properly archaic turn of phrase, he added, “I hunt a blood-foe, a death-foe. Will you grant me leave?”
Almost reluctantly, the woman who’d first spoken dipped her head. “We grant you leave to enter,” she murmured, which wasn’t quite what Hauberin was seeking. “We grant you our hospitality. You shall speak with our Lady, and then . . .” She shrugged bonelessly. “It is for you and she to decide what follows. Come, lord, will you not follow me?” But then the woman turned with a hiss. “Not she! Not the human!”
Hauberin politely held out an arm to Matilde. She, as regal as any Faerie woman, rested her hand upon it. “Yes, she,” the prince said mildly, and stared into the Fée’s eyes until her gaze fell.
“So be it,” she muttered.
“Not me! I can’t!” Alliar’s silent words were tinged with panic. “Hauberin, forgive me, I—I can’t go into that closeness, I—”
“Hush,” the prince soothed. “You don’t have to enter.”
“But you can’t go in there alone, just you and she and the winds know how many of them!”
Hauberin wasn’t happy at the idea, either, particularly not when the Presence just might be lurking—no. No one of Faerie kind would tolerate That among them. “Odd though they are,” the prince said, wondering if he was comforting Alliar or himself, “these are still Faerie folk. And as such, since they’ve offered me hospitality, they cannot break that vow to do me any harm. I repeat, you don’t have to come with me.”
The being’s relief washed over him. “I’ll wait out here,” Alliar said lightly. “After all, somebody has to hold the horses. But I’ll be ready if you need me,” the being added silently. “And . . . laws of hospitality notwithstanding, walk warily, my friend.”
XXVII
NIGHTMARE
At first, Hauberin thought the Fées were being deliberately petty to the half-human and the human. Why else leave the passageway into the hill in darkness so thorough even Faerie sight was useless? But after a moment he heard the faintest rasp of palms lightly brushing one stony wall for guidance as though performing a familiar ritual, and realized with a shock of amazement that they either didn’t know any light-spells or simply didn’t have the Power to use them. For a moment the prince toyed with the idea of trying a spell of his own . . . No. He had accepted their hospitality, no matter how grudgingly it had been given; he was as bound by its rules as they. And pointing out a host’s failings was hardly hospitable.
Eh, well, darkness alone never hurt anyone. The floor was smooth under his feet, there didn’t seem to be any hidden snares or branching passages, and if they could use a wall for a guide, so could he, touching fingertips to stone as he walked.
An endless time passed in darkness, with no sound other than faint breathing and the now-familiar slip of palms against wall. The floor sloped ever so gently beneath his feet, and Hauberin wondered uneasily just how deep into the earth they were going. Matilde hadn’t said a word all this while, but her grip on his arm was becoming fierce enough to cut off the circulation.
“You’re going to leave bruises,” he said.
“Sorry.” She loosened her hold ever so slightly. “It’s just . . .”
“Don’t worry. I won’t lose you.”
“But how can they live like this? Crowded into darkness—Oh, Hauberin, when I think of the bright light of Faerie . . . How can they stand this?”
Fée hearing was as keen as any of the Faerie peoples. “Because we are not weak, fearful humans,” a woman’s voice snapped out of nowhere, and both Matilde and Hauberin started.
“I think you hit a sore point,” the prince murmured, right in Matilde’s ear, and heard her give the ghost of a chuckle.
How did they stand it? Or . . . did they? What if the Fées didn’t live here at all? What if, despite the ring’s insistence that this was the right way, Matilde and he were blithely walking right into a trap—
Impossible. The place had the feel of a lived-in fortress. And no Faerie folk ever lied. No matter how long they’d lived in the hated human Realm, the Fées still could be no exception.
“Look,” Hauberin soothed Matilde, “there’s a glimmer of light up ahead.”
“Amen.” It was the faintest, most heartfelt whisper.
But now the prince had to wonder, If they have a source of light, why don’t they use it throughout?
Then they stepped down into a vast chamber, a natural limestone cavern with several smooth passageways leading off into more darkness, and he had his answer: the light came from a few widely spaced glass globes set into the chamber walls and charmed to cast a pale white glow.
“Lilialli’al!”
“Of course,” a Fée said condescendingly.
The prince ignored him, staring at the lilialli’al in open amazement. He’d never seen one before; nobody in his land used the light-globes any more. The creation of a lilialli took tedious, strenuous magic, a foolish waste of time and strength since experiments over the ages had given Faerie simpler, more efficient light-spells.
Just how long have these folk been here?
Long enough for many or the nearly everlasting light-globes to have lost their potency. That meant the Fées must have inhabited this land for . . . Powers, for at least since the humans’ discovery of iron, probably much longer. The hall must have been a grand thing back then, all magic and splendor. Traces of that splendor remained: silver still glinted here and there from walls intricately carved in archaic designs that meant little to Hauberin, and a few small gems gleamed from the graceful stone throne that sat against the chamber’s far side.
“But if the lilialli’al are failing,” the prince mused aloud, “why don’t you simply use candles or torches?”
That earned him a bitter, scornful laugh. “Those are human things.”
Hauberin shrugged. “They’re Faerie things, too, in my land.”
The contempt in countless eyes spoke volumes. The prince deliberately turned his back before he said something he’d regret, making much of studying th
e throne.
Matilde might not have understood the language, but she certainly understood hostility. “If only they didn’t all look alike,” she whispered unhappily.
Hauberin glanced from the throne and the fading light-globes to the too-pale, too-gaunt, too-similar faces watching him from all sides and felt a sudden uneasy twinge, forcing himself to remember: These are your hosts, they cannot play you fake.
But he surprised himself with a touch of regret as well for these sad remnants of a once proud race. All too plainly, they had kept themselves aloof from humanity down through the years, scorning to breed the very half-bloods, the despised chaikulai’al, that might have given their stock its needed vitality; all too plainly they had mated only among their own small group till what Power this magic-weak Realm allowed them had worn thin and nearly useless. Oh, it would still be enough to frighten a passing human, perhaps even enough to win them such peacekeeping offerings as their green cloth. But he doubted a living child had been born in these caverns within a hundred cycles of the mortal moon. As for the rumor of human children stolen away . . . it was surely that, only rumor. No human child could live for long, shut away from sunlight, from all light . . .
Why do they stay here? Why didn’t they flee to Faerie ages past?
Before he could find a tactful way to ask, there was a stirring among the Fées, a nervous anticipation. The crowd parted, bowing like wheat in the wind to let their Lady pass.
She was old, this Lady, as Sharailan his court sage was old, with something of the same brittleness, but without any of Sharailan’s tempering gentleness; in her, the untold ages had worn away any trace of softness, and what was left was sharp as any blade. As she took her place upon the throne, green gown sweeping in stiff folds about her, Hauberin thought of an elegant white hunting hound, all lean, fierce, hungry beauty.
A Strange and Ancient Name Page 35
