The Last Light of the Sun. Guy Gavriel Kay

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СКАЧАТЬ kept changing colour as he looked, dizzyingly. The wonder of that, even under stars. He could only see clearly by the light she cast. That, as much as anything, telling him how far he’d come, walking up from the farmyard. The half-world, they named it in the tales. Where he was now. Men were lost here, in the stories. Never came back, or returned a hundred years after they’d walked or ridden away, everyone they knew long dead. He could see her small breasts through the thinness of what she wore. Did they feel the cold, faeries?

      There was an ache in his throat.

      “How … how am I seeing you?” He had no idea if she could even speak, use words. His words.

      Her hair went pale, nearly white, came back towards gold but not all the way. She said, “You were in the pool. I … saved you there.” Her voice, simply speaking words, made him realize he had never, really, made music with his harp, or sung a song the way it should be sung. He felt that he would weep if he were not careful.

      “How? Why?” He sounded harsh to his own ears, after her. A bruising of the starlit air.

      “I stopped your horse, in the shallows. They would have killed you, had you come nearer the queen.”

      She’d answered one question, not the other. “My brother was there.” It was difficult to speak.

      “Your brother is dead. His soul is with the Ride.”

      “Why?”

      Reddened hair now, crimson in summer dark. Her shining let him see. “I took it for the queen. First dead of the battle tonight.”

      Dai. No weapon, when he had gone out. First dead. Whatever that meant. But she was telling him. Alun knelt on the damp, cool grass. His legs were weak. “I should hate you,” he whispered.

      “I do not know what that means,” she said. Music.

      He thought about that, and then of the girl, Brynn’s daughter, in that room by the chapel, where his brother’s body lay. He wondered if he would ever play the harp again.

      “What … why does the queen …?”

      Saw her smile, first time, a flashing of small, white teeth. “She loves them. They excite her. Those who have been mortals. From your world.”

      “Forever?”

      The hair to violet. The slim, small body so white beneath the pale green garment. “What could be forever?”

      That hollow, in his heart. “But after? What happens … to him?”

      Grave as a cleric, as a wise child, as something so much older than he was. “They go from the Ride when she tires of them.”

      “Go where?”

      So sweet a music in this voice. “I am not wise. I do not know. I have never asked.”

      “He’ll be a ghost,” Alun said then, with certainty, on his knees under stars. “A spirit, wandering alone, a soul lost.”

      “I do not know. Would not your sun god take him?”

      He placed his hands on the night grass beside him. The coolness, the needed ordinariness of it. Jad was beneath the world now, they were taught; doing battle with demons for his children’s sake. He echoed her, without her music. “I do not know. Tonight, I don’t know anything. Why did you … save me in the pool?” The question she hadn’t answered.

      She moved her hands apart, a rippling, like water. “Why should you die?”

      “But I am going to die.”

      “Would you rush to the dark?” she asked.

      He said nothing. After a moment, she took a step nearer to him. He remained motionless, kneeling, saw her hand reach out. He closed his eyes just before she touched his face. He felt, almost overwhelmingly, the presence of desire. A need: to be taken from himself, from the world. To never come back? She had the scent of flowers all about her, in the night.

      Eyes still closed, Alun said, “They tell us … they tell us there will be Light.”

      “Then there will be, for your brother,” she said. “If that is so.”

      Her fingers moved, touched his hair. He could feel them trembling, and understood, only then, that she was as afraid, and as aroused as he was. Worlds that moved beside each other, never touched.

      Almost never. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak again he felt a shockingly swift movement, an absence. Never said what he would have said, never knew what he would have said. He looked up quickly. She was already ten paces away. In no time at all. Standing against a sapling again, half turned, to fly farther. Her hair was dark, raven black.

      He looked back over his shoulder. Someone was coming up the slope. He didn’t feel surprise at all. It was as if the capacity to feel that had been drained from him, like blood.

      He was still very young that night, Alun ab Owyn. The thought that actually came to him as he recognized who was climbing—and was gazing past him at the faerie—was that nothing would ever surprise him again.

      Brynn ap Hywll crested the ridge and crouched, grunting with the effort, beside Alun on the grass. The big man plucked some blades of grass, keeping silent, looking at the shimmering figure by the tree not far away.

      “How do you see her?” Alun asked, softly.

      Brynn rubbed the grass between his huge palms. “I was in that pool, most of a lifetime ago, lad. A night when a girl refused me and I went walking my sorrow into the wood. Did an unwise thing. Girls can make you do that, actually.”

      “How did you know I …?”

      “One of the men Siawn sent to report. Said you killed two Erlings, and were mazed in the pond till Ceinion took you out.”

      “Does he … did Siawn …?”

      “No. My man just told me that much. Didn’t understand any of it.”

      “But you did?”

      “I did.”

      “You’ve … seen them all these years?”

      “I’ve been able to. Hasn’t happened often. They avoid us. This one … is different, is often here. I think it’s the same one. I see her up here sometimes, when we’re at Brynnfell.”

      “Never came up?”

      Brynn looked over at him for the first time. “Afraid to,” he said, simply.

      “I don’t think she’ll hurt us.”

      The faerie was silent, still by the slender tree, still poised between lingering and flight, listening to them.

      “She can hurt you by drawing you here,” Brynn said. “It gets hard to come back. You know the tales as well as I do. I had … tasks in the world, lad. So do you, now.”

      Ceinion, down below, before: You СКАЧАТЬ