“We will learn more soon,” Osbert said quietly. “I shouldn’t have asked. There’s little point in guessing like children at a riddle game.”
And that was true enough, as most things Osbert said were. But it was then, in precisely that moment, looking at her father’s crippled, beloved chamberlain, that Kendra realized that she knew what was happening.
She knew. As simple and appalling as that. And it was because of the Cyngael prince who had come to them, not her brother. Something had changed in her life the moment the Cyngael had crossed the stream the day before, towards where she and the others were lying on summer grass, idling a morning away.
Just as she had the night before, she knew where Alun ab Owyn had gone. And Athelbert was with him.
As simple as that. As impossible. Had she asked for this? Done something that had brought it upon her as a curse? Am I a witch? the thought came, intrusive. Her hand closed, a little desperately, on the sun disk about her neck. Witches sold love potions, ground up herbs for ailments, blighted crops and cattle for a fee, held converse with the dead. Could go safely into enchanted places.
She took her hand from the disk. Closed her eyes a moment.
It is in the nature of things that when we judge actions to be memorably courageous, they are invariably those that have an impact that resonates: saving other lives at great risk, winning a battle, losing one’s life in a valiant attempt to do one or the other. A death of that sort can lead to songs and memories at least as much—sometimes more—than a triumph. We celebrate our losses, knowing how they are woven into the gift of our being here.
Sometimes, however, an action that might be considered as gallant as any of these will take its shape and pass unknown. No singer to observe and mourn, or celebrate, no vivid, world-changing consequence to spur the harpist’s fingers.
Kendra rose quietly, as she always did, murmured her excuses, and left the hall.
She didn’t think anyone noticed. Men were coming and going, despite the hour. The beacon fire’s tidings were running through the city. Outside, in the torchlit corridor, she found herself walking a little more quickly than usual, as though she needed to keep moving or she would falter. The guard at the doors, someone she knew, smiled at her and opened to the street outside.
“An escort, my lady?”
“None needed. My thanks. I’m going only back to chapel and my lady mother.”
The chapel was to the left so she had to turn that way at the first meeting of lanes. She paused, out of sight, long enough for him to close the door again. Then she went back the other way, heading towards the wall and gates for the second time in as many nights.
Footsteps, a known voice.
“You lied to him. Where are you going?”
She turned. Felt a swift, unworthy flowering of relief, offered thanks to the god. She would be stopped now, would not have to do this after all. Gareth, his face taut with concern, came up to her. She had no idea what to say.
So offered truth. “Gareth. Listen. I can’t tell you how, and it frightens me, but I am quite certain Athelbert is in the spirit wood.”
He had taken a blow this evening with the tidings, harder than hers. He was still adjusting to it. She saw him step back a little. A witch! Unclean! she thought. Couldn’t help but think.
Unworthy, that thought. This was her brother. After a moment, he said, carefully, “You feel a … sense of him?”
He was close to truth. It wasn’t Athelbert, in fact, but that much she wasn’t ready to divulge. She swallowed hard, and nodded. “I think he … and some others are trying to get west.”
“Through that forest? No one … Kendra, that’s … folly.”
“That’s Athelbert,” she said, but it didn’t come out lightly. Not tonight. “I think they feel a need to go very fast, or even he wouldn’t do this.”
Gareth’s brow had knitted the way it did when he was thinking hard. “A warning? The Erlings going that way by sea?”
She nodded. “I think that must be it.”
“But why would Athelbert care?”
This became difficult. “He might be joining others, making one with them.”
“The Cyngael prince?”
He was clever, her little brother. He might also be the kingdom’s heir by now. She nodded her head again.
“But how … Kendra, how would you know?”
She shrugged. “You said it … a sense of him.” A lie, but not too far from truth.
He was visibly struggling with this. And how should he not? She was struggling, and it was inside her.
He took a breath. “Very well. What is it you want to do?”
There it was. She wasn’t going to be stopped unless she stopped herself. She swallowed. “Only one thing,” she said. “A small thing. Take me outside the walls. It will be easier if I’m with you.”
He loved her. His life was altered forever if Athelbert died. And in a different way, she supposed, if she died. Gareth looked at her a moment, then nodded his head. They went to the gate together in the blue moonlight.
A different man on watch, which was good; the last one would have been stricken with fear to see her, after what had happened the night before. There were still hundreds of men (and not a few women, she knew) outside by the tents. They’d have heard glorious tidings by now, a celebration would be beginning.
Gareth had no trouble persuading the guard that they were going out to join in that. Suggested that their sister, the princess Judit, would likely be not far behind, which happened to be—very probably—the case. If she wasn’t ahead of them, having gone out another way.
Outside, walking quickly west, not north towards the lights and the tents, Kendra had a tardy thought. She stopped again. “You … the message said you were to be kept safe.”
Gareth, uncharacteristically, swore. It would have been more impressive if he hadn’t sounded as though he were imitating Judit. She might have been amused at any other time. He glared at her. She lowered her gaze.
They moved on, came at length to the river. It all felt oddly like a dream now, a repeating of something done. She had been here last night.
She’d stopped on this side, then, waited for someone to come out of the trees.
Kendra hesitated now, looked up at her brother.
“You are going in, aren’t you,” he said. “The forest. To … spirits there.”
Not really a question.
She nodded her head. “Stay for me? Please?”
“I can come.”
She touched his hand. That was brave, very much Gareth, would bring her to tears if she wasn’t careful. “If you do, I will not go. You may curse all you like at instructions, but I will not lead you into the spirit wood. I won’t be long, or go far. Say you’ll stay here, or we both go back now.”
“That last sounds perfectly good to me.”
She didn’t smile, though she could see he wanted her to. She waited.
He said, finally, “You are sure of this?”
She nodded again. Another lie, of course, but at least not a spoken one this time.
He leaned forward, kissed her on the forehead. “You are so much better than all the rest of us,” he said. “Jad defend you. I’ll be here.”
Moonlight on the water, reflecting from the stream. Very little breeze, the night mild, late summer. She went quickly, wading in and across, before she could lose what felt like a too-small store of courage, or he could see that she was crying, after all.
The forest here began only a little way beyond the water. It slanted west farther south, and then there was the long knife of the valley half a day’s ride that way—and the holy house at Retherly where her mother was going to go after Judit was wed. She knew about that and Judit did. She didn’t think her brothers had been told yet.
Marriages and retreats. Kendra couldn’t say she’d spent any great amount of time thinking about either, or about boys and men. Perhaps she ought to have. Perhaps this had been a sister’s reaction to Jud
it, whose lifelong defiance of any imposed order or protocol had led her far from the norms of a proper young woman’s behaviour.
Kendra was, she supposed, the proper young woman of the family. (An alarming thought, at that particular moment.) It hadn’t ever felt as though she was, it was more a matter of not enough inclination to pursue such matters, and no one—in truth—alluring or engaging enough to change her mind on the vague but undeniably important subject of men. Her brothers and sisters made jokes about Hakon’s interest in her (they weren’t kind to him about it), but Kendra considered him a friend, and … a boy, really. There wasn’t much point thinking about it, in any case. Her father would decide where she wed, just as he had with Judit.
Her sister’s fiery recklessness hadn’t done much to alter the fact that she was marrying a thirteen-year-old Rheden prince this winter. As far as Kendra was concerned, defiance needed to get you somewhere, or it was just … being noisy.
She wasn’t sure whether what she was doing now was defiant, or mad, or—most alarmingly—if it was something dark and complex and having to do with a man, after all. There was nothing ordinary about it, she knew.
She also knew, very near the trees now, that if she even slowed, let alone broke stride here at the wood’s edge, fear would take hold of her entirely, so she kept walking—into the darkness of branches and leaves where Alun ab Owyn had gone the night before.
The strangeness, this terrible, unsettling inward strangeness, grew stronger. He was in these woods. She knew it. And she even seemed to know exactly where she needed to go now, where he had been last night. This is unholy, she thought, and bit her lip. I could burn for this.
It wasn’t far, which was a blessing of the god upon her life, and might mean she was not yet entirely cast out from Jad’s countenance and protection. She had no time to try to think that through.
Where she stopped was less a clearing than an easing of the press of trees around, where grass might grow. She thought about wolves, then snakes, made herself stop that. She stood very still, because this was the place. She waited.
And nothing happened. A sense of foolishness assailed her. That, too, she pushed away. She might not understand this awareness within, but it would be the worst sort of lie to the self to deny it was in her, and she would not do that. She cleared her throat, too loudly, almost made herself jump.
In the darkness of the spirit wood, Kendra said, very clearly, “If you are here, whatever it is you are, whatever was here last night, that he came to meet … you need to know that he’s in the woods again now, to the south, which is … very dangerous. And with him is my brother, Athelbert. Maybe others. If you mean him well, and I pray to … my god that you do, will you help them? Please?”
Silence. Her voice, words spoken, then nothing, as if the sounds had been simply swallowed, absorbed, sinking away into never-having-been. That feeling of foolishness again, hard to push back. They would name her mad or a witch, or both. That Ferrieres cleric visiting had spoken in the royal chapel four days ago of the heresies and pagan rites that still flourished in corners of the Jaddite world, and his voice had hardened when he’d told how such things needed to be burned away, that the light of the god might not be dimmed by them.
This was, she supposed, a corner of the world.
She saw a light, where none had been. Kendra cried out, then covered her mouth quickly. She had come here to be heard. Trembling, groping for courage she really wasn’t sure she possessed, she saw something green appear in front of her, beside a tree trunk. A little taller than she was. Slender, hairless; it was hard to discern features, or eyes, for the glow was strange, obscuring as much as it illuminated. So this, she thought, was what Alun ab Owyn had come to meet.
In the oddest, almost inexplicable way, seeing this vague, sexless, indeterminate shape, she suddenly felt better—couldn’t sort out why that might be. It didn’t seem malevolent. Nor should it be, she thought, if Alun had been here to meet it.
“Thank … thank you,” she managed. “For co … coming to me. Did you hear? They are south. Near the coast, I believe. They … they are trying to get through the wood. Do … do you understand anything I say?”
No response, no movement, no eyes to see or read. A green shape, a muted glow in the wood. It was real, however. The spirits were real. She was speaking to one. Fear, and wonder, and a sense of … very great urgency.
“Can you help them? Will you?”
Nothing at all. The creature was motionless, as if carved. Only a slight shimmer of the green aura suggested it was a living thing. But fire glowed and shimmered and was not alive. She might be wrong. She might not understand any of this properly.
And that last thought, in fact, was nearest to the truth.
Why should she have understood what was happening? How could she do so? The spruaugh stayed another moment and then withdrew, leaving darkness behind it again, deeper for the lost light.
Kendra sensed immediately that this was all she was going to see, all that would happen. The space among the trees felt … emptied out. Fear had gone, she realized, replaced by wonder, a kind of awe. The world, she thought, was never going to seem the same again. Going back, she wouldn’t be returning to the same stream or moonlight or the city she had left.
There were green shimmering creatures in the woods beside Esferth, whatever the clerics might say. And people had always known this was so. Why else the centuries-long fear of this forest? The stories told to frighten children, or around night fires? She stayed where she was another moment, a pause before returning, breathing in the darkness, alone, as she had been last night, but not quite the same.
And so a difficult truth about human courage was played out among those trees. A truth we resist for what it suggests about our lives. But sometimes the most gallant actions, those requiring a summoning of all our will, access to bravery beyond easy understanding or description … have no consequence that matters. They leave no ripples upon the surface of succeeding events, cause nothing, achieve nothing. Are trivial, marginal. This can be hard to accept.
Aeldred’s younger daughter did something almost unspeakably brave, going alone at night into the blackness of a wood believed to be haunted, intending to confront the spirit world—which was the most appalling heresy according to every tenet she had ever learned. And she did do that and spoke a message, the warning she’d come to give—and it signified nothing at all, in the wheel and turn of that night.
The faerie had gone already, long before.
She had, in fact, been tracking Aeldred’s fyrd all the previous night and through this day and into evening from within the wood. Almost all of the spruaugh in the forest were south as well by now, and this one, hearing (and, yes, understanding) Kendra’s words, set itself to quickly go that way also, but pursuing its own desires: such desires as those creatures still possessed, which had nothing to do with guarding three mortal men in a forest that had once been named a godwood, in the days when men dissembled less about such things.
A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done … something. That can ripple, might do so, though in a different way.
Mostly, walking as quickly now as she dared in the root-and-branch darkness, what Kendra felt was relief. A rush of it, like blood to the head when you stand up too quickly. She had no idea what that green spirit had been, but it had come to her. Spirit world, half-world. She had seen it, a glowing in the night. Everything altered with that.
She came to the edge of the trees, saw moonlight through the last screening leaves, then unmediated, with stars, as she came out. The stream, the summer grass, her brother on the far bank. And what she felt, emerging, was near to joy.
The world had changed, in ways she couldn’t sort through, but it was still, in the main, the place she’d always known. T
he water, as she waded through, was cool, pleasantly so on a summer night. She could hear music and laughter to her left, north of the city. She could see the walls in the distance, torches for the guards on the ramparts.
She could see her brother, solid and familiar and reassuring. She stopped in front of him. He seemed taller, Kendra thought: somewhere over the summer Gareth had grown. Or was that a sense that came from what she knew about Athelbert?
Gareth touched her shoulder.
“I’m me,” she said. “Not spirit-claimed. Shall I kick you to prove it?”
He shook his head. “I’d think Judit’s soul had claimed you. Do you want to go to the tents? Be with people?”
He hadn’t probed or pressed her at all. She shook her head. “My clothing and boots are wet. I want to change. Then I think I need to go to chapel, if that’s all right? You can go over to the—”
“I’ll stay with you.”
The guard said nothing (what was he going to say?) when they called to come back in so soon after going out. Kendra went to her rooms, woke her women, had two of them help her change (they raised eyebrows but said nothing either—and what were they going to say?). Then she went back out to where Gareth had waited (again) and they went to chapel together.
The streets were busy for so late an hour, but Esferth was crowded and jubilant. They could hear the noise from the taverns as they went. Walked past the one where she’d stood across the street last night when Alun ab Owyn had come out with his dog, and she’d called the Erling over to her.
Gareth broke their silence. “Is he all right?”
“Who?”
“Athelbert. Of course.”
She blinked. Had made an error there. She managed a shrug. “I think he’ll be all right. After all, Judit is nowhere near him.”
Gareth stopped for a second, then burst out laughing. He dropped an arm around her shoulder and they continued that way, turning right at the next junction of streets towards the chapel.
“Where is Judit, do you think?” she asked.