The Last Light of the Sun. Guy Gavriel Kay

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СКАЧАТЬ swallowed. Had never lacked courage, even as a child. “Why so?” she said.

      “You dare ask?” Behind, Ceinion made a small sound and a gesture, then stood still.

      “I must ask,” Rhiannon said. “I know of nothing I might ever have done to Owyn’s house to cause this to be said. I grieve for our people, and for your sorrow.”

      He stared at her. It was difficult, in this light, to see his eyes, but she had seen them in the hall, before.

      “Do you?” he said finally, blunt as a hammer. She couldn’t stop thinking of hammers. “Do you even begin to grieve? My brother went outside alone and unarmed because of you. He died hating me because of you. I will live with that the rest of my days. Do you realize this? At all?”

      There was something hot, like a fever, coming off him now. She said, desperately, “I believe I understand what you are saying. It is unjust. I didn’t make him feel—”

      “A lie! You wanted to make every man love you, to play at it. A game.”

      Her heart was pounding now. “You are … unjust, my lord.” Repeating herself.

      “Unjust? You tested that power every time you entered a room.”

      “How do you know any such thing?” How did he know?

      “Will you deny it?”

      She was grieving, her heart twisting, because of who it was, saying these words to her. But she was also Brynn’s daughter, and Enid’s, and not raised to yield, or to cry.

      “And you?” she asked, lifting her head. Her bandage chafed. “You, my lord? Never tested yourself? Never went on … cattle raids, son of Owyn? Into Arberth, perhaps? Never had someone hurt, or die, when you did that? You and your brother?”

      She saw him check, breathing hard. She was aware that he was, amazingly, near to striking her. How had the world come to this? The cousin stepped forward, as if to stop him.

      “It is wrong!” was all Alun could manage to say, fighting for self-control.

      “No more than the things a boy does, becoming a man. I cannot steal cattle or swing a sword, ab Owyn!”

      “Then go east to Sarantium!” he rasped, his voice altered. “If you want to deal in power like that. Learn … learn how to poison like their empresses, you’ll kill so many more men.”

      She felt the colour leave her face. The others in the room had stopped moving, were looking at them. “Do you … hate me so much, my lord?”

      He didn’t reply. She had thought, truly, he would say yes, had no idea what she’d have done if he did so. She swallowed hard. Needed her mother, suddenly. Enid was with the living, in the other room.

      She said, “Would you wish the Erling hadn’t thrown his hammer to save my life?” Her voice was level, hands steady at her sides. Small blessings, he wouldn’t know how much this cost her. “Others died here, my lord prince. Nine of us now. Likely more, before sunrise. Men we knew and loved. Are you thinking only of your brother tonight? Like the Erling my father killed, who demanded one horse when he had men taken with him?”

      His head snapped back, as from a blow. He opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. Their eyes locked. Then turning, blundering past the cleric and his cousin, he rushed from the room. Ceinion called his name. Alun never broke stride.

      Rhiannon put a hand to her mouth. There was a need to weep, and a greater need not to do so. She saw the cousin, Gryffeth, take two steps towards the door, then stop and turn back. After a moment, he went and knelt beside the dead man. She saw him extend a hand and touch the place where the blade had gone in.

      “Child,” whispered the high cleric, her father’s friend, her mother’s.

      She didn’t look at him. She was staring, instead, at the open doorway. The emptiness of it, where someone had gone out. Had walked into the night, hating her—the way he’d said his brother had left him. A pattern? Set and sealed with iron and blood?

      You can’t have what you want, Helda had said, even before everything else.

      “How did this happen?” she asked, of the cleric, of the world.

      Holy men usually spoke of the mysterious ways of the god.

      “I do not know,” Ceinion of Llywerth murmured, instead.

      “You’re supposed to know,” she said, turning to look at him. Heard her voice break. Hated that. He stepped forward, drew her into his arms. She let him, lowered her head. Didn’t weep, at first, and then she did. Heard the cousin praying over the body on the floor beside them.

      Three things not well or wisely done, the triad went. Approaching a forest pool by night. Making wrathful a woman of spirit. Drinking unwatered wine alone.

      They did things by threes in this land, Alun thought savagely. Obviously it was time for him to claim one of the wine jars and carry it off, drain it by himself until oblivion came down.

      He wished in that moment, striding through the empty farmyard without the least idea where he meant to go, that the Erling arrow had killed him in the wood. The world was unassuageably awry. His heart had a hollow inside it where Dai had been. It was not going to fill; there was nothing to fill it with.

      He saw a glimmering of light on the treed slope beyond the yard.

      Not a torch. It was pale, motionless, no flickering.

      He found himself breathing shallowly, as if he were hiding from searchers. He squeezed shut his eyes. The glow was still there when he opened them. There was no one else in the farmyard now. A spring night, the breeze mild, dawn a long way off still. The stars brilliant overhead, in patterns that told their stories of ancient glory and pain, figures from before the faith of Jad came north. Mortals and animals, gods and demigods. The night seemed heavy and endless, like something into which one fell.

      A shining on the slope. Alun undid his belt, let fall his sword, walked through the gate of the yard and up the hill.

      SHE SEES HIM drop the iron. Knows what that means. He can see her now. He has been in the pool with them. For some of them, after that, the faeries can be seen. Her impulse, very strong, is to flee. It is one thing to hover near, to watch them, unseen. This is something else.

      She makes herself stay where she is, waiting. Has a sudden, fearful thought, scans with her mind’s eye: the spruaugh, who might tell of this, is curled asleep in the hollow of a tree.

      The man comes through the gate, closes it behind him, begins to climb the slope. He can see her. She almost does fly away then, though they can’t really fly, not any more. She is trembling. Her hair shivers through its colours, again and again.

      SHE WAS SMALLER than the queen, half a head smaller than he was. Alun stopped, just below where she stood. They were beside the thicket, on the mostly open slope. She’d been half hidden behind a sapling, came out when he stopped, but touching it. Utterly still, poised for flight. A faerie, standing before him in the world he’d thought he’d known.

      She СКАЧАТЬ