“And I knew you would be here, taking comfort in the steeds. You have always been besotted by animals.… Arlen, have you yet found yourself a modicum of sense?”
I shivered with surprise. It was the winterking himself, he who was destined to wed me and die! Forthwith I moved, feeling that I must see him. Risking noise—the wailing of the wind masked most noise, anyway—I sat up, inched forward, and found a crack in the boards, looked through it.…
Great Mother of us all! No one had told me that he was young and tall and beautiful; how was I to know? I had thought Lonn fair, but Arlen’s extravagant beauty stunned me. Some wanton energy filled him so that his every move sang to me; he seemed godlike, almost shining, his very hair crisp and alive, as if he wore a crown of flame—it was red, that marvelous many-tinged red of a chestnut horse in sunlight. And the features of his face, surpassingly lovely, their symmetry, the fawn-hued sheen of his skin, and his eyes—his eyes were as green as green springtime grass. And I gasped in glad pain at the pathos of his sad, smiling mouth.
Arlen of the Sacred Isle. With an eerie insight I knew, even then, that I would love him till I died.
TWO
“A modicum of sense?” Arlen said, and he shook his glorious head, his hair shining like a red hawk’s feathers in firelight. “What has sense to do with what is happening?”
Little enough, I thought, gasping again with the pain of my thawing feet. Little enough sense. They had not heard me; my noise was lost in the sound of wind outside. Arlen smiled and sat on a barley bin, and Lonn sat beside him, looking commonplace next to his splendor.
“Even so, I must ask you yet once more to think,” said Lonn in that warm, steady way of his, and Arlen glanced at him in annoyance.
“Don’t badger me, my good friend, please. Not this last night that is given us to share.”
“I must! Arlen, I cannot bear it. They will tie you up to that bloody tree, tie you with willow thongs and beat you until you faint—”
“I know,” said Arlen.
“—and then they will put out your eyes.”
Those incredible eyes. I shuddered and closed my own. I had not known it was to be so cruel.
“I know,” Arlen said sharply. “Lonn, stop it.”
“I cannot,” said Lonn. “Then they will castrate you. And after the death blow you will be flayed—”
“Say no more, I tell you!” Arlen made a small, furious sound in his throat and sprang up, turning his back on Lonn, and patted several horses at random. I watched, seeing the anguish on his face, furious at Lonn in my turn.
“And then they will sever your joints,” said Lonn, very softly, “and gut you, and hack you apart, catching your blood in a silver basin, and they will sprinkle us—” He choked, unable to go on. Pitiful pain in his voice—it was impossible any longer to be angry at him.
“Why?” Arlen spoke without turning around. “Why are you doing this to me? They have told us these things since we were striplings.”
“They have told us so that we would not hear, not really know, not understand—how horrible—”
Silence.
“Arlen, go, flee,” Lonn said softly at last. “Live.”
Arlen turned back toward him, his face hard and fair, like a carving. “I would rather be dead than dishonored,” he said. “A coward—”
“There is no dishonor in putting an end to madness.”
“The sacred rites of the goddess, madness?” For a moment Arlen’s green eyes blazed, but then he merely looked weary. “Lonn, I have no desire to quarrel with you. Please.”
“All right,” said Lonn stubbornly, meaning that it was not right at all. “If honor is of such concern to you, then think of the girl, her honor. She will be bound to know no man but you, one hour’s wedlove in all her life and then celibacy. Suppose she has promised herself to a sweetheart? She is not here of her own will, any more than we are. Likely she will be foresworn.”
I could have laughed or cried. Me, a sweetheart, in sterile Stanehold, with father standing guard? Arlen must have thought something of the same sort, for he laughed out loud, mocking laughter yet not unmelodious.
“A daughter of that precious Rahv? She’ll be black as a crow and hard as flint, not likely to care for any lover or honor either. Save your concern, Lonn.”
“But I think she is not of corvine sort, Arl,” Lonn remarked with meaning in his glance.
“You’ve seen her? How in the many kingdoms did you manage—”
“I blundered in.”
Arlen sat down again, sighing and shaking his fiery head, and Lonn spoke on.
“She is a gentle thing; I swear it from just my glimpse of her. No crow, Arl, for all that her hair shines black as the Naga. She seemed more like—like a dusky flower, a fragile blossom.”
I snorted. Perhaps they heard me and thought I was a horse.
“Not that she lacked spirit,” Lonn added hastily, as if I had reproached him. “She looked ready to bolt. You have seen the panicky glance of a tethered yearling …? But no flinty shell, Arlen. This—this horror, how is she to withstand it? What is to become of her?”
He spoke with an ardor that made me stare, forgetting any resentment, that made Arlen stare as well, made him furrow his fair brow.
“What do you want of me?” he asked Lonn quietly.
“Go away. Live. Let her return to her home.”
“No one knows what would happen if the winterking did not come to the ceremony,” Arlen replied, not in argument this time but in genuine keen-edged thought. “Likely they would slay someone else in my stead, and that one would not thank me. As for the lady Cerilla, they might be inclined to punish her in order to avert the wrath of the goddess.” His voice was very low, with a stillness in it. “Indeed, they would be as likely to slay her quite slowly as to free her.”
“Surely Rahv would not allow harm to come to her,” Lonn said fiercely.
“I am not so sure,” Arlen replied, and I knew that truth spoke in him, that he interceded for my life as Lonn interceded for his, and I shivered where I sat in the darkened stall.
They must have been friends, those two, ever since they were small boys. They sat gazing at each other, all the futility of the thing in their eyes, and reached a wordless agreement.
“I think we must settle for honor,” Arlen said finally. “A winterking’s death for me, and for her the life of a white-robe. She will make peace with it somehow. They all do.” He shifted his gaze. The matter was closed, and new matter was needed. “What ails my gentle Bayard,” Arlen murmured idly, “that he stands so oddly in his stall?”
He stood up and started toward me. I did not care to be found cowering in the soiled straw. With all the dignity I could muster I pulled my blanket tighter, rose, and stepped forward to meet him. We came face to face in the dim corridor between stalls, and I trembled in the lantern light like a dazzled deer.
“By the great goddess, a lass!” Arlen exclaimed. “Barefoot in the freezing cold and snow.”
I lowered my gaze; I could not bear to meet the soft look of those marvelous green eyes.
“Who are you? How have you come here? Has someone mistreated you? Perchance we can set it to rights.” He waited for my answer, and when none came he muttered, “By the holy oak, you are half naked.” He took off his cloak and put it around my shoulders. “We will find you some clothing. Are you hungry?” Again he waited patiently for a reply. “Lass, will you not tell me who you are?”
I glanced up at him, biting my lip, not knowing what to say to him who was doomed to die. He met my look with a puzzled stare that melted after a moment into something warmer, a nearly trancelike gaze, and I answered it in like wise. Neither of us moved when Lonn came over to stand beside us, and he had to touch Arlen’s arm to rouse him.
“Arlen of the Sacred Isle,” he said in a carefully level voice, “may I present Cerilla, daughter of Rahv of the Seven Holds and Lady of Tower Stane.”
Arlen seemed stunned. “Lonn was right
,” he murmured. Then he stepped back from me with a tight, hurt look. “Lonn was right,” he said more calmly. “You have a lover; you were running away.”
“No, my lord, it is not that at all!” Distressed, I spoke more than was my wont. “It is only—lord, please understand. My father cares nothing for my happiness. He gave my sister Rina to that toad Eachan, who killed her in his ill humor—” I stopped, gulping with emotion. “Lord,” I appealed, “how was I to know that you are comely and kind?”
For some reason he winced, yet he stood silent.
“Surely I have no desire to see you slain, eat your flesh—”
The most horrible of the many horrors. He shuddered, but I felt suddenly calm, even bold.
“But I would gladly lie with you,” I told him, with a proud lift of my chin so that I faced him more squarely.
“You do me great honor, lady,” he said softly. “But—the one thing goes with the other.”
“I know.”
“It would be only the once, a single hour in the afternoon, and then—the bond is for life; the goddess sees to that.”
“I know.”
“I will find you boots, clothing, gold,” he said. “Go, flee, save yourself.”
“Leave you to face it alone?” I cried, with a passion that startled me. “But they will punish you!”
He threw back his marvelous head and laughed, a wild, ringing sound. “What can they do to me that they have not already planned?” he cried gaily.
“Both of you go,” said Lonn, his tone vehement, and Arlen quieted.
“I have said that I will not be dishonored.” He spoke softly, and his gaze was on me, softly. “No one will call me coward. But it is hard.…”
“At once. Go.” Lonn stepped into the stall, took the blood-red Bayard by its tether, and brought it around. For the first time I looked at the steed rather than at the winterking, and a tingling shock went through me; the animal was alive with loveliness in the same odd way that Arlen was, every hair of its mane tossing on its crest, its eyes deep and feral and gold-flecked, fiery dapplings shimmering on its flanks. I wondered if magic had somehow touched me as well, if in a polished shield I could have seen it.
Arlen looked at me, at the horse. He shook his head, his hair leaping like sunflame. “I must stay,” he said, and though the pitch of his voice was low I knew there would be no disputing with him. Lonn must have known it as well, for he turned to me.
“Lady Cerilla,” he urged, “mount the steed. It will carry you across the water. After that, ride where you will.”
I looked only at Arlen then, not at the horse. He answered my look without speaking.
“Lady,” Lonn begged.
“I will stay,” I said.
He fell to his knees before me.
“If you are his friend,” I flared, “do not beseech me to go from him. I will stay to offer him what comfort I can. Before he dies.”
Lonn stared up at me, and I glared back at him, and hope died in his eyes. “I have been his friend since we were babes,” he muttered at last, and he got up and led the horse away.
“Your feet,” Arlen said to me. “They are as blue as river pearls.”
He gathered me up in his arms to spare me from walking any farther in the snow. Out into the dark and cold and snow and wind we went, his cloak and my blanket flapping about me, Lonn following us across the wide weed-grown courtyard with the lantern, his head bowed against the wind. But Arlen strode through the storm as if he had been born to it. Hold of the goddess bulked dimly before us, half ruinous, parapets showing jaggedly, like broken teeth, against the sky. We found a narrow entry. A dark passage led steeply downward from it, as if into the fundament of the fortress. Lonn unshielded his lantern, and after a moment we came out into a warm and cavernous room.
It was the kitchen, the great womb of the castle, deserted at this time of night. Arlen carried me across it and set me down on the immense hearth. Embers still glowed in the blackness of the gaping fireplace, and the brick of the hearth had retained the heat of the day’s flames; I felt myself smiling because of the warmth. Arlen settled himself by me and rubbed my feet with his hands, his touch as warm as the hearth. Lonn stood his lantern on the table and found three earthenware cups, filled them with perry aand spices, and set the poker in the embers to heat for mulling them. Then silently he sat down on the floor by Arlen and me.
We talked of inconsequential things: the perry, and had it been a favorable season for fruits and liquors? The snow, and would it turn into a veritable winter storm? The talk, however trivial, seemed honey sweet. Lonn did not speak much, but I think he understood how precious this time was; he sat and did not hurry the preparation of our midnight cups. The poker still lay heating in the embers when, soundlessly, a white shadow stirred and one of the Gwyneda came into the kitchen.
Both Arlen and Lonn startled violently and blanched in terror. Then both slumped where they sat in relief. As for the white-robe, she stopped, then walked over to speak with us, her tread soft, as if she herself were afraid of being heard.
“All powers be thanked that it is only you, Erta,” Arlen told her.
She answered him with a glance half amused, half rueful. Hers was a plain, comfortable face, square, pale of brows, with the freckles and blotches of age; there was no trace of the pinched and peevish expression I had seen on the other Gwyneda I had met.
“It is a harsh life for the white-robes,” Arlen said to me. “They are never allowed enough to eat, they sleep on stone, they rise early to tend to the dawn observances of the goddess—” He stopped, seeming to remember that within a day I would be a white-robe myself. “They bear it differently,” he went on more softly after a moment. “Some keep to their chambers as much as they can, others work like demons in the gardens, others do stitchery, or divert themselves with friends and enemies, or tend the children, or torment them. Most of them are bitter in one way or another, and happy to cause pain.”
“And Erta is one of the few who are not,” Lonn said.
“She is our mother,” Arlen added, and both he and Lonn laughed so that I saw it was a jest. Erta did not laugh, but she smiled a little. Her eyes did not smile. She looked worried.
“Give the little one my greeting,” she said to Arlen, “for I cannot speak to her.”
She meant me, I understood. “There is a rule of silence with seculars,” Arlen explained to me.
Still in awe of his beauty, I only gazed back at him. He must have taken my glance as query.
“They are not allowed to speak to anyone not of the Sacred Isle, not even their relations who come to the ceremonials,” he told me. “Nor am I, for that matter,” he added with a sort of wonder, and he laughed. “But there is nothing they will be able to do to me after the morrow.”
“There are some who are very angry with you, Lonn,” Erta said to him.
For speaking to me in my chamber, I understood. Lonn got up, and poured a fourth tumbler of perry for Erta, spiced it, and fetched the poker to heat it and the others, all without speaking. He gave us our drinks, and we accepted them as silently as he offered them. I felt quite warm by then, and almost contented.
“It does not matter,” Lonn said finally, and though he tried to keep despair out of his voice it rang through hollowly.
“I would like for you to stay whole a few months yet,” Erta told him mildly.
He shrugged and would not or could not speak.
“You have strong magic,” she said. “Let it help you in some way.”
“What are you doing here at this time of night, Erta?” Arlen asked her. It was a foolish question, intended only as a diversion for Lonn’s sake, and she knew it. She made a small noise that might have been a cough or stifled laughter, as if she were about to ask him the same. But she did not.
“I could not sleep,” she said, and I never suspected the story that lay behind those words.
“We ought to see Lady Cerilla back to her room,” said Lonn rather harshly.
<
br /> Erta went with us, walking ahead of us, our defense and scout, but we met no one. It was a small hold, as I had thought, and we found my chamber quickly. Arlen and I looked at each other, but there was nothing to say, not in front of the others, and with a glance and a small smile we parted. I closed my door, flung my blanket on my bed, and crawled under it. Sleep did not come quickly—I heard the tolling of the bell for the morning ritual and saw the dawn of my wedding day show silver-gold through the window slot. The sun rose, sending out beams the color of orichalc, the glowing bronze of the mountains, strongest of metals. Chains of orichalc bound the glycon, the great serpent of the deep.…
My thoughts strayed, and after a while I dozed.
THREE
I dreamed a strange and vivid dream.
I was hunted, running for my life; I was the swift and tawny deer that leaps between the spires of the Mountains of the Mysteries, and the hunter was an enigma, all flux and fear, first a horror, the flayed man, then a faceless being on a faceless horse, than a great serpent like the glycon. I ran amid oak trees and willow and rowan and golden apple, through mist and across rivers where women in white robes turned into swans and melted into seawater. I ran—and looked back over my shoulder to see that the rider was drawing nearer. It was a glorious youth on a steed of blood bay; it was Arlen. At the sight of the sweetness of his mouth I fell in love with him, and I stopped, turned toward him. But then I saw a rush of shadow, a monstrous, dark, swift-moving thing, unclear. And I realized that it was not he who had hunted me, that some horror pursued him in his turn—
I awoke with a start and could not sleep again. Within the hour the Gwyneda came to prepare me for the day.
All the forenoon was spent in lustrations and attentions that I bore with the best dignity I could command, though the Gwyneda were none too gentle. On first entering my chamber, they seized me and upended me to examine me. Only when they were determined to their satisfaction that I was what had been promised—that is, a virgin, and not bleeding at the time—did they release me. Then a bath of milk was prepared, and I was led to it and made to stand in it while pitchers of it were poured over me; it was cold. Only then, in the rhythm of the pouring, did the Gwyneda break silence, and they spoke not to me but to their goddess, in incantation.
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