What had I thought I was doing, sitting on Apple’s back? Apple was dead, long ago in Caer Lind. Alone among the strange trees I knew myself far from home. These were not my familiar woods and this was not my land that remembered him. I was a stranger here, alone, uninvited, and unwelcome. I pulled myself to my feet to seek a way out and ran again, blindly, lurching, blundering into trees. After a while I stopped and threw my head back and howled.
What had I thought I was doing, trying to change the shape of the world when not even my family trusted me? Alone beneath the rustling branches I knew I had no real family. I hardly knew Darien, and now he was about to forgive Angas for killing Urdo. My father was dead. The brother I loved and the brother I despised were both dead, my sister had died after trying to poison me, my mother was old and had never really found me worthy of her. I howled and scrabbled at the fallen leaves and loam of the forest floor, stirring up a smell of damp rot that almost made me gag.
What had I thought I was doing, surviving the battle? Alone in the moonlight among the falling leaves I understood Emer, going forward to die. Almost I envied her for her illusions. I had long understood that a valiant death in battle is still only death and pain and blood and an end to life. Urdo was dead. I had outlived my lord and my purpose in life. I had failed in my duty to defend him. I had not been there in time. I wailed and wept and rocked to and fro. Again the spear got in my way, reminding me of its existence.
What had I thought I was doing, throwing away Urdo’s sword? Alone in the chilly glade I knew I had nothing left to remind me. I had been clutching the spear all this time, now I hugged it to me and sobbed over it. For a moment it was comforting, then it was hateful to me. It was a reminder of how I had failed in my responsibility. I longed to throw it away. I considered killing myself with it. I hated it. I hated myself. I hated the whole world. In that moment I even hated Urdo for failing me by dying. He was supposed to tell me what to do, and now I would never be sure again. I tore at my hair, tearing it out in great clumps. Somehow the pain steadied me. Pain, a part of my mind thought, is my ally. I saw a raven sitting on a bare branch in front of me, dark against the darkness.
What had I thought I was doing, being here at all? Alone beneath branches reaching like needy hands I knew I should have stayed at home and taken care of my responsibilities and my own people, who were my duty even if they hated me. I knew I would never find myself again, never find my way home to the people who had trusted me and who I had abandoned. I was worthless. I caught at the spear to hurl it away, and caught my thumb on the blade, a beginner’s mistake. I had not done that since I was twelve years old. What a stubborn fool I was, without even the skill to handle a spear properly. I sang the healing charm over my thumb, by reflex. I wasn’t at all surprised when it didn’t work, and the wound continued to sting and drip blood. It was what I deserved, after all, to be abandoned even by the gods.
As I put my cut thumb in my mouth I looked up through the pain and saw that it was not entirely true that they had all abandoned me. Gangrader was here, leaning against a tree in front of me and looking down quizzically. I realized that he had come to claim me at last. I was here to die of exposure in the wood, to complete the sacrifice Ulf had made of me.
What had I thought I was doing, living my life? Alone with Gangrader in the cold, wintry glade, I knew that my whole life since Ulf had dedicated me had been like a brand drawn back from the fire to be thrust into it on the next cold night. I had fought and ruled and laughed and thought myself alive, but really I had been dead all this time and not known it. I looked at him and hated him. He was standing in a patch of moonlight, leaning against a great ash tree. There was a grizzling of snow on the ground. He had his dark cloak clutched around him and a raven perched on his shoulder. One eye socket was shadowed and empty. He stared at me and did not speak. I stared back, despairing.
He continued to stand there looking at me until anger moved in me. Anger is another ally, came a thought somewhere at the back of my mind. I pulled anger around me like a warm blanket until fury filled me. “What did you think you were doing, claiming me against my will, Lord of the Slain?” I asked. My voice sounded dull and flat and hopeless in my ears. I did not ask how it would be worse to be claimed by Gangrader than to run mad in the wood. “Here you are in the wood, come to get me, yet I have never worshiped you or called on you, and so the sacrifice Ulf Gunnarsson made was worthless, being unwilling.”
Gangrader laughed harshly, making me furious. “The unwilling are no less welcome,” he said, in Jarnish.
I stared up at him, filled with indignation. “Of all the ridiculous, barbaric ideas I’ve heard from the Jarns over the years, that is the worst. How can it be? The whole purpose of a sacrifice is that it be made wholehearted. That’s revolting.”
“Long it would take to ask consent of those you left behind you for the battlecrows,” he said, in Tanagan now.
“That’s different. They would have killed me as quickly,” I said, rocking back on my heels and staring up at him. “That is not sacrifice.”
“What difference if my servant throw a spear to hurtle past the waiting swords and eyes, and dedicate the harvest reaped to me?”
“All the difference in the world!” I shouted, getting to my feet. “The gods have power but people have will. You may not claim me against mine.”
“Has Ulf no will?” he asked. Before I could answer that Ulf’s will did not bind me, he went on, “And would you count no worth the service you have done me all these years? They name you with my Choosers of the Slain.” The shadowed side of his face seemed to be smiling.
“I have never served you, and you have no right to claim me now,” I said.
“Do you call me when you desire aid?”
“I never have,” I said. I shifted the spear loosely in my hand. I had no idea whether this weapon could hurt a god. I was not used to fighting them. Nobody was. I wasn’t used to standing screaming at them for that matter. I began to wonder what I was doing and why I was doing it.
“Yet here I am when you have need of aid,” he said. “And what is there that you will offer me?”
“What aid?” I asked cautiously. I remembered Ulf telling me never to believe Gangrader’s twisted promises. I had told him proudly that Gangrader had promised me nothing.
He laughed, and the raven rose a few beats above his shoulder before settling again and fixing me with its dark eye. There was another on the leafless ash above his head, I realized, which had been staring at me all the time. I looked uneasily away from its bold gaze. “Are you come back so far beyond despair that you have reached the shore where caution lies? With time you would have found the way yourself. Shall we leave thorny points of who serves whom and now discuss how we go on from here?”
“You have not come to claim me?” I asked, still uncertain and confused. I was not quite all the way back from the despair Morthu had thrust me into.
“Who shall say what is mine?” he asked, in a very different voice, in Jarnish, smiling his crooked smile.
I wept then, with no warning, remembering not Gangrader saying that to Morwen but Urdo repeating those words in Caer Tanaga so long ago. On Foreth Ulf asked me if I had had no good of my dedication. Gangrader had come twice now to save me. Still he was no patron god of my choosing.
With those tears, which were from my heart and caused by no sorcery, I washed Morthu’s despair from my eyes. As I wiped the back of my hand across them to dash them away, I could see clearly again. I shivered, and for the first time saw what I was looking at; the bare branches, the sprinkling of snow. “It’s winter,” I said stupidly. I remembered the three days’ night on Foreth, and Darien spending a day following Turth when it had been five days for me in my waiting anxiety. “Has half a year passed as I ran mad? Is Urdo buried already? What has happened about Morthu? Does the curse still hold?”
“Time is rent from the worlds,” Gangrader said, still in Jarnish, making me wonder why he had been speaking Tanagan be
fore, and why he had changed. “Nor are you friendless outside time.”
I didn’t understand in the least. “Am I still in the time of the gods?”
“You stand in time here now as we feel time,” he said, back to Tanagan again. “Leaves and snow fall as worlds turn into time. This wood is not the world until we choose, not until someone looks and fixes time. Then there is going on but never back, for us as you, the pattern set in time. That black-heart would have thrust you out to wail and gained the time himself, without you there. He little thought that all of us would wait. No one has looked, and time is waiting yet; it hangs upon the moment when you came, that instant when the king bowed to the trees.”
“So this time isn’t real?” I asked, trying to puzzle my way through what he had said. I looked at the raven on the bare branch. They seemed as real as anything I had ever seen.
“It will be real in time,” he said.
“So, is there a way back?” I asked.
“Many ways,” he replied, smiling again.
“And is there a way back before that moment?” I asked, knowing it was hopeless, but needing to ask anyway. “Back to the morning of the battle?”
“There is no power can bend or break that law,” he said.
I drew breath, then stopped. This was where he supposed I should ask for help, so that he could bargain with me. He looked as if he were expecting it. What he said about unwilling sacrifices could have been meant to trick me. If I spoke, if I said anything at all now, it would be to ask for his help, and to make myself what he said I was. I took a firmer grip on the spear and said nothing, just looked at him evenly. Pain had been my ally, anger had been my ally. In the same way I had understood my allies even through the muddle of despair, I recognized that, although he would trick me if he could, Gangrader was my ally, too. I was myself again, and the heavy emptiness of despair had no more hold on me.
I kept waiting. I kept my breathing as even as I could, though I couldn’t control the speed of my heart. I was past being afraid, past hope and despair into true recklessness. I did not know what Gangrader wanted or whether it was the same as what I wanted. Being his Walkurja was better than despairing in Morthu’s power. I understood that now, but it was not my will, and my will had been forced too much this night already for me to give in now.
I stood there and looked at Gangrader’s unmoving face. I did not even know if there truly was a way back. If not then I might have lost seven months, or seven years, or worst of all seven times seven years, like people in stories who went under the hill and feasted for a night only to come back to find their friends dead and their children grown old. If so, then I would have to endure it. I faced the possibility then, and though I hated it I thought I could bear it if I had to.
As I stood there, leaning a little on the spear I had been given, I mourned. Urdo was dead, and Masarn, and ap Erbin, and so many friends. I mourned in silence for all who had fallen at Agned, running their names through my mind. I mourned even for Ayl, who I had killed, though not for Marchel or Arling. I mourned for Masarn’s wife Garwen and his daughter who had shared my name. I mourned for all the people Morthu had slain in Caer Tanaga to get the power to curse Segantia, and I mourned for all those who had died of the curse, naming all those I knew. Then I mourned for Duncan and Conal and all who had been killed in this war since Aurien poisoned me. I mourned for Aurien as she had been. I went back further and mourned again for Galba and those who fell at Foreth, and back through the war and mourned my father, Gwien, and beyond to Caer Lind, to Enid and Geiran and Bran and Osvran and Apple. Still I stood there and still I mourned for those who had fallen in skirmishes or in training, and at last I mourned for Rudwen and my brother Darien.
When I had held them all in memory I began to go forward through all my battles, each victory and defeat. When I reached Agned it was as painful as touching a fresh wound, but still I held it again in my mind. When I had done I was still staring at Gangrader, and he at me, as if we would never move.
I thought over my stewardship of Derwen, of my love for the land and my care of the people. I thought how Urdo had said I had done well, better than he would have thought. I remembered how Darien had said I was the best armiger. I thought how I had hated myself under Morthu’s despair and pushed that away as I had pushed away his darkness in the night. I remembered Veniva looking at me approvingly on the steps of the hall. I remembered little Gwien jumping up and down while he was waiting for me to rub down Beauty, because he was so glad to see me at Magor. Osvran used to say that we should never be arrogant, but we were right to be proud of what we were. I had repeated this to my own armigers for years, but never until now had I understood it for myself.
“Will you ask for help?” Gangrader said, in Jarnish. I was almost startled to hear the silence broken after so long.
I frowned at his smile, and then I laughed. Only now did I consider what he had said before. None of the gods had looked, so that I could go back into time when I had left it. I did not understand what it meant not to look into time, when the gods are part of the structure of the world, but it must mean that this was something they wanted. The laugh echoed strangely and some snow slid off a high branch. I drew a deep breath. “Oh yes, I will ask for help,” I said. I raised my arms, palms down and then palms up, as if to make an oath. There was no hymn for this, no words to help me find the way. “Albian,” I said, “Shining One. If ever I have served you, send me light to show me the way back to the sunlit world where I belong. Merthin, Lord Messenger. Aid me now, show me the right path out of this wood to my own time. Mother Coventina, who brought water on the hilltop at Foreth, help me find a way back to your world I left.”
Gangrader wasn’t there any longer. Where he had stood was a faint beginning of a path curving away around the ash. I looked up and saw the raven on the branch was still staring at me. I stuck my tongue out at it. The moon went behind a cloud, leaving the sky very dark.
I took a step on the path. Nothing happened. The trees were not very thick here. I went forward cautiously. My feet almost seemed to know the way, as they might at home in Derwen. I ran over what I had asked—might they have taken me back to Derwen instead of back to the night I left? I walked on, and found myself scuffing through strewn drifts of fallen leaves which crackled beneath my feet. The air smelled autumnal. The sky was beginning to lighten ahead of me. The path seemed to be tending downhill. I saw antlers through the trees, and dappled flanks moved past me in a rush as a herd of deer ran by, almost close enough to touch. Last came the great stag with the pair of brown eyes like pools and I knew I had seen Hithun again. I walked on, carefully, and now in the early dawn light I was walking on ferns and celandines and passing the last of the dead bluebells. I saw wild roses and brambles in full bloom, showing very white before color came back to the world.
I came at last to the place at the edge of the trees where I had stood with Darien. The sun was rising before me. My fingernails were broken and bloody, and my hands and arms were engrained with dirt and criss-crossed with scratches from brambles. The cut the spear had given me around the base of my thumb was a white healed scar, like something I had got years ago. The spear itself was also encrusted with dirt, but whole and safe. I could see the camp below me, as I had left it to walk with Darien. I gave heartfelt thanks to the gods.
Two people were walking up from the camp toward me. I didn’t feel as if there was any hurry to go toward them, so I stayed where I was. It occurred to me all at once that I was ferociously thirsty. I lifted my water bottle to my lips and drained it dry. By the time I lowered it they were close enough for me to see that they were Ulf and Garah. The expressions on their very different faces were identical.
— 22 —
I have been where were slain the warriors
of Tir Tanagiri, I have seen them fallen,
myself alive, they in their grave.
—“The List of Battles”
I sat down on a fallen elm, thickly grown with moss,
ivy, and great brown tree mushrooms. Garah and Ulf only took a few minutes to come up. They sat down on either side of me in the watery sunlight.
Garah began to give fervent thanks to the Mother for my safety as soon as she was sure I was really there, mostly unharmed, and in my right mind.
Ulf, characteristically, just grunted. “People have been catching glimpses of you for days,” he said. “But you were gone a moment later.”
“Days?” I asked, my heart sinking.
“This is the morning of the third day since the battle,” Garah said gently.
It could just as easily have been a hundred years. I should have been grateful, and I knew it, but all the same I was furious.
“The first morning half your ala were up here beating through the woods,” Ulf said.
“What has happened?” I asked, pushing my straggling hair back out of my eyes.
“Wouldn’t you rather go down and bathe?” Garah asked. “And aren’t you hungry?”
Bathing would have been wonderful, and my stomach rumbled at the thought of food, but I wasn’t ready for the amount of well-meant fuss there would be when I got back to the ala. Besides, I wanted to know what I’d missed. “Tell me now,” I said.
“Morthu and Cinon are in Caer Tanaga,” Garah said. “Elenn’s still there and I don’t know what anyone has told her. We’re a bit stuck as to what to do about them. We can’t easily get them out of there, but they can’t do much as long as they’re in there. We’re not really in a position to besiege them.”
“We could,” Ulf contradicted her. “It would mean having people on both sides of the Tamer and blockading the river, but we could do it.”