The Golden Swan

by Nancy Springer

  Dair shook his head violently. No. I heard them, but never so close, so calling, and I was younger—

  “He has no business with them,” I snapped. “Dair, don’t you know you are meant for something more than running with a pack?”

  He didn’t answer me. Even as I spoke his wolf form came on him all in a rush like loveheat, of its own accord. He stretched his muzzle skyward and howled; the sound shivered through the air. The chorus of the wild wolves abruptly ceased, and Frain’s cry of shock sounded painfully loud in the dusky silence.

  “Dair! Wait!”

  Dair ran to him and laid his long head in his lap with a whine, a wordless appeal. Frain held tightly to the taut, quivering body.

  “He has to go,” I said, my tone peevish to hide bothersome emotion. “He has to—find out.…”

  Fate can be a heartless thing.

  “He says he will come back to you.”

  Frain swallowed and loosened his grasp. “Go,” he said, and Dair bounded off into the dark forest.

  We listened awhile. The wolfsong had begun again. It moved farther away.

  “No harm is likely to come to him, is it, Maeve?” Frain asked me when he finally spoke. I hastened to reassure him.

  “Harm, to Dair? What harm could come to him from wolves? He is a wolf himself.”

  “He will be back,” Frain muttered, to himself rather than to me. “He said he would.”

  Why, then, if all was well, were we both sitting anxiously in the night?

  Neither of us slept, although I sometimes pretended to. At the first light of dawn Frain was up and pacing. From time to time faint howls sounded far to the east. Dair did not return.

  “Something has happened,” Frain declared with fanatical certainty a scant hour after sunrise. “I must go find him.”

  “You cannot find him,” I said.

  “The pack last howled eastward.” He pointed.

  “He will not be with the pack. Stay here. You will lose your way in the forest if you go off, and then he will have to find you.”

  Frain glared at me, insulted, but worry won out over injured pride. “Dair needs my help. I am sure of it,” he said, and started away. I caught hold of him.

  “Stay,” I said angrily. “It is bad enough that one of you two infants is out on his own.”

  He shook off my hand.

  “Stay and give Dair a chance to keep his word,” I said in a different tone, reaching through anger to truth. Frain stared at me, then nodded.

  He kept to camp, but restively. Neither of us ate. We stood erect and alert all that long morning, as if any moment something might pounce on us with teeth and claws and send us reeling into disaster.

  Dair told us later what had happened.

  The wolves, the wild pack, his brothers. They had struck a fine stag that led them a long, swift chase. Dair followed the sound and scent through the night, feeling the surge of his own power and grace. He heard the brief triumph howl at the kill, but it was daybreak before he found them where they lay feasting.

  Seven of them in the sunlight—

  He spoke in wonder of the colors of their pelages. Two were tawny fawn, one cinnamon, one nearly red, one brown, one gray and one, the largest and the leader, pure black. That one was as large as he. But he did not get to look at them for long; they scented him almost as soon as he sighted them. Man! they barked, and with that warning they streaked away, leaving their kill.

  I must have lost my mind, Dair said wryly. I ran after them.

  And he caught up with them in a few moments, for he was swift and long of limb. He sped into their midst, and of course they were terrified by his strangeness, appearance and essence that did not match. Their terror made them savage. They attacked him fiercely.

  His thick fur gave him some protection. But he could not stand against them all, and within the minute he was forced to flee, limping and bleeding from a dozen slashes. They pursued him. He could no longer outrun them, wounded as he was, and they harried him. He ran at first back toward our camp, but as they continued to follow, biting and snarling and worrying at him, he thought hazily that he might be bringing danger down upon us and he changed direction, setting a twisting course through the ilex trees. After a while, sluggish from full bellies, the pack circled away and left him. Dair struggled on, no longer sure of his bearings, feeling lost and desperate to find us. He would not stop to rest or lick his wounds until he had rejoined us.

  Maybe the wolf god knows the effort it cost him—he endured. He came back to us. About noon of the next day he staggered back to the campsite where Frain and I stood frantically disputing. One of his eyes was swollen shut from a cut just above it, and the ear on that side was torn, and his gray fur was all dappled and clotted with brownish red—he had one glimpse of Frain’s shocked and anguished face and he was himself again in human form. His injuries looked even worse on his furless human skin.

  “Oh, no!” Frain cried out, choking. “Dair—”

  He stood swaying a moment, and then he fell against Frain, who caught him with his one good arm and laid him down. But Dair came to himself again in a moment. He had needed that human embrace, I think.

  I am sorry, he muttered thickly.

  “Hush,” said Frain fiercely, almost as if he could understand him. “Maeve, water. Eala, if only I could help him—”

  We used all our water on him. There was not enough to properly cleanse the wounds. We concentrated on the ones around his face and head, binding them as neatly as we were able, hoping they would not scar too badly.

  “We ought to sear the rest for safety,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. Searing is an ugly business. Frain had Dair’s head on his lap at the time, and he clutched at him protectively.

  “He won’t sicken! He’s as strong as a bear.”

  Do it, Dair said. I don’t care. There were tears in his voice, and not because of physical pain, either. I felt sure of it. Frain and I both stared at him.

  “Don’t try to be noble, Dair,” I snapped. But I took him at his word and prepared for the searing, made the fire and placed a blade in it to heat. I found myself being very stern. Only toughness would see me through this. When the knife was ready I took it and advanced on Dair, my face hard.

  “Must this be done?” Frain appealed.

  “Yes. Burns are horrible, Frain, but contagion is worse. I’ve seen—” I did not say what I had seen. A shudder of foreboding passed through me, taking my breath for a moment. I closed my eyes, but I could not trace it.

  “Go find us water,” I said to Frain.

  “I am not entirely a weakling, Maeve,” he retorted coldly. Pride. And I had only been trying to spare him.… He stayed where he was and took Dair’s hands in his one.

  “All right,” I said, knelt and applied the blade.

  Dair bore it as an animal might, shaking and wincing but not crying out. Silent tears ran down his face. The leg wounds were the worst, but we cauterized all of them over the course of the next hour except the cuts on his face. They were not very large, and we hoped they would not fester or scar. Dair clung to Frain throughout it all. I could see how he needed the comfort of his presence, so it was I who went for water finally, a long walk, and by the time I got back dusk was coming on and Dair had lapsed into an exhausted sleep. Frain and I eased him into the softest bed we could make him. Then we sat and tried to eat, but neither of us could eat much.

  “You said he would not be hurt,” Frain muttered, staring at me fixedly, as if I had betrayed him.

  “I was wrong,” I said. Truth. I had thought Dair would be forced to make a choice. Instead, it had been made for him, and quite harshly.

  “He had to go, nevertheless,” I added. “He had to face his fate sometime.”

  Frain only looked away from me, shrugging. He would not admit his own anger at me, and for once I was not willing to press him. I felt worn out.

  We watched over Dair by turns that night, but he did not need us. I was expecting fever, but
none came. The next day he was in pain, but he made light of it. He ate some meat, and on toward evening he told us his story.

  “And I thought you had more sense,” I grumbled at him, still being stern.

  I am ashamed, he murmured, making me sorry for my words.

  “Why?” I scoffed. “We are all fools one time or another.”

  For—leaving Frain.…

  Of course his shame did not extend to me—mere mothers do not usually merit such concern. Sighing, I turned to Frain and told him what Dair had said, not really expecting much help from him. I had not yet learned to know him well, to realize that he had a habit of exceeding expectations.

  “But I know that call that sings in the wind,” he said promptly to Dair. His smile was warm, not forgiving but better yet—there was no need for forgiveness, that smile said. I gaped at Frain in astonishment. I had not known such understanding was in him.

  “I heard it when I stood on my first mountaintop,” he said, his face and the look in his eyes vital, alive with the memory. “I remember the marvelous sense of release that came over me, a wild singing sense of—of dissolution, all bonds gone, as if freedom were really possible. As if I could sprout wings and fly forever.” He smiled again, that same wonderful smile. “So that insane poetry is in you as well, Dair! Who would have thought it.” The smile faded. “But I cannot fly.”

  I cannot run with the pack, either, said Dair.

  There was the real wound probed. Wolfwit ran strong in him, stronger than we could well imagine, but the great weaver was demanding his first loyalty; he was fated to be merely and dearly himself.

  I want never to leave you again, he said to Frain, and I was hard put to keep my voice steady as I relayed the message. For it was not to be so, and perhaps he knew that even then. But it was the hope of his heart.

  By the next day Dair was up and about a bit, scorning pain. We rubbed oil on his scabs to keep the skin from tightening. All the wounds were healing cleanly. The wolves sang at dusk again that night, and we watched Dair uneasily, but he ignored them.

  Within several days we were walking along again, and Dair was nearly as supple as ever. That was to his own credit, for he made his limbs stretch and move in spite of pain, and after a while the pain left him. Scars remained. He reminded me more than ever of Trevyn, with his scars.

  We went on through evergreen, oak and scrub pine and into tamarisk, and Frain seemed much the same troublesome youth as ever, and Dair none the worse for his escapade. But looking at him I sometimes felt a shadowy presentiment of further pain to come. Suffering for the son of a king.

  Chapter Three

  “I still do not understand about changing shapes,” said Frain some few weeks later as we sat after food in the evening.

  So that was why he had been so silent. I had thought he was tired, though of course he had not said so; he never complained of physical woes, and he had walked doggedly even when he had been weak from sickness.… I knew I was tired. It had been a tiring day, a hot and dusty one full of the sizzling sound of locusts in the acacia trees. But his question made me set weariness aside.

  “It is a matter of taking not a false form but another true form,” I started importantly. “If you were to change to—do you ever dream of being something?”

  “A bird,” he said. “A flying thing.”

  “Yes. Well, you would be.…” I lost my voice and my nerve. Already I was sorry we had gotten into this.

  “A crippled bird,” he said.

  “Yes.” I plunged on. “Well, when Dair became a horse, that was not a falsehood or a deception. It was Dair, the horse form of Dair. It was male, as he is. It was young, as he is. I would make an old gray mare.”

  “But how did he do it?” Frain pursued.

  It was very difficult to explain anything to him. He thought in such stark terms, and I in far softer ones. There is a way of seeing a faint star by looking just to the side of it—but he had a mind like a sword, always darting swiftly to the point. I sighed.

  “To be a creature—let us say a horse—”

  Oh, and in this plodding language of his, too. It was awful, it made everything sound like blacksmithing.

  “Well, to be a horse you must feel true desire to be a horse, and you must be in sympathy with the horse—a sort of liking, but more than liking—and then you must be able to let go of your human form.”

  “But—you mean completely become the other thing, body, self, everything?” I think he had envisioned the process as something akin to climbing into a dead skin. I nodded.

  “Your human form is your own. In the same way, any other form you take will be your own. When you change forms, your essence goes with you, just as when you die it flies and becomes spirit.”

  “But—” He floundered. “But it is monstrous!” he burst out. “Changing shapes, I mean. It is—it is unnatural!”

  How bound within walls he was, walls of his own making. “It is completely natural,” I said. “The goddess is a shape changer. Aene can come to us in any form.”

  “But the goddess—”

  He stopped, thinking. When he spoke again it was coolly and very carefully.

  “Shamarra is a goddess,” he said, “and she has been changed to a night bird by Adalis. If she were to learn this shape changing, might she be able to revert to her human form? But I suppose you are going to tell me that it is a skill that can be neither learned nor taught.”

  “Maybe so, Frain,” I told him. “Maybe so.”

  I was oddly fond of him. Not in any lustful way, either, and that was unusual for me. But he was virgin, I could sense it, and I had known from the first that he was not for me; he was not strong enough. So I had taken to mothering him, I who had given up the only child of my own. And I hated to discourage any of his dreams, however absurd.

  “It may be,” I added, “that at the Source many things are possible.”

  “Maeve,” he said wearily, “I was seven years in search of one legendary land and never found it, not really, and now am I to be seven years in search of another one? How can you be so sure about this Source of yours? I am a fool for letting you lead me off like this.”

  It was the first time he had admitted his doubt to me. I was honored that he trusted me enough to speak so honestly.

  “What can you do but follow me?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” He smiled ruefully. “I need you and Dair to help me help Shamarra. I can see that now.”

  “Tell me more about this Shamarra,” I said.

  So he rehearsed the tale for me again. He told it more easily every time, and more dispassionately, in a ritual way, as priests sometimes recount sacred history, as if it were a legendary account and not at all a story of living, suffering flesh, least of all his own. Shamarra had been beautiful, passionate, and she had been violated, sorely wronged by the same person who had wronged Frain, his brother whom he loved, and he seemed to assume that love of Tirell constrained Shamarra as it did him, trapped her in a river of tears perhaps, ensnared her in a net of opposed emotions as it did him, but I knew better. He was more victim than she, I suspected. Once a healer, with no longer any health to spare, tangled in a puppyish attachment, unable to see clearly or hear the word of the goddess, bound in an eternal life of callow youthfulness, crippled by anger he could not vent or resolve—he thought of himself as Shamarra’s rescuer, but I felt sure he would be able to help no one until he had helped himself. And his calm words, dropped like so many lifeless stones—

  Only when he spoke of Fabron, his father, did he reveal some emotion.

  “He healed the beast—well, he healed Tirell, in effect, and then the power left him and he was unable to heal me. He told me I was his son—and by the time he told me I had to leave him. I think it broke his heart.” Frain’s face quivered a little and he turned away from the firelight. Dair whined in sympathy and I looked on, I am afraid, with the keenest interest. Here I saw guilt as well as anger.

  “You had to leave?” I prodd
ed.

  “Shamarra had left.”

  “But why could you not stay with Fabron?”

  I knew why well enough, but I wanted him to know. He winced away from the question.

  “I had to follow Shamarra.”

  It worked both for him and against him, that steadfastness of his—stubbornness, if you will. “Frain,” I said with some degree of exasperation, “Shamarra is the least of it.”

  “She may be to you,” he retorted, “but not to me.”

  “Listen.” I edged closer to him, closer to the fire, trying to make him hear me by virtue of sheer proximity; how had he gotten me so intent on teaching him? “Listen, Frain. It is real and true, all you say of Shamarra, but she is like one petal on a flower, one face to a standing stone, there is more to what has happened than her.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as spleen! Can you not see you were furious at Tirell for what he did? And at Fabron for leading you such a dance?”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged it off. He could not deny his anger, but he would not feel it, either. “For whatever reason,” he went on dryly, “I went back to Acheron. Back to the lake where it had all begun.”

  “And you saw the face in the water,” I said.

  “Yes.” He shuddered violently. “Let us not speak of that, Maeve, or I’ll have no sleep tonight.”

  Confound him, it was the thing above all others that needed to be spoken of! But I could not do it for him. I smothered a sigh of vexation and went on.

  “And Shamarra had been turned into a night bird.”

  “Yes.”

  “What, exactly,” I asked, “is a night bird?”

  “A little, drab bird, creature of Vieyra, the hag, the death goddess. Many of them live in the Lorc Tutosel, the mountains of the night bird to the south of Vale.” The words triggered a memory; I saw the haze of it in his eyes. “Wait,” he said. “Listen.” He leaned back and recited a sort of song.

  “The night bird sings

  Of asphodel;

  The day bird wakes

  And flaps his wings

  And cannot fly

  And lifts the cry