Nancy Springer
CHAINS OF GOLD
I first met Arlen of the Sacred Isle on the eve of our nuptials: Lonn, the comrade, and then Arlen, the sacred king. Being not entirely without sense or spirit, I had no intention of wedding this winterking or a summerking or a sacred king of any sort; I wanted no part of anything so fearsome. But my father, Rahv of the Seven Holds, sensed the mystic power of that kingship—power, even though the newmade kings did nothing but breed and the—and he wanted a snatch at it, through me, perhaps for the sake of the flattery of rival lords. Or perhaps he truly hoped to obtain the favor of the goddess. Whatever his reason, he brought me a long journey across the Secular Lands, past the yellow eskers that divided the demesnes, past tilled land and pastureland, past many stone keeps atop their mounds and many tower holds. Closer to the river lay only oakwood wilderness, for no one lived there, near the holy water. Rahv brought me to the river shore on the eve of the winter solstice, and in that chill dusk I was sent over to the Sacred Isle.
Naga, the river was called, meaning serpentine, or Sacred Catena, the chain. It ran at the edge of the Secular Lands, the edge of the world folk knew; on the far side, it was said, only heroes trod. Down from Adder’s Head far to the north Naga flowed, lake after lake and island after river island, for every lake a name and between every lake the river and the islands, and for every island a name and a tree hallowed to it. The tree of the Sacred Isle was the willow, for sorrow.
I had never seen the Naga, for I had been kept very much castlebound, and I stared at the water, expecting to see snakes swimming in it, perhaps, or a sheen as of scales on the river itself. It looked black in the dusk, rippling and glinting restlessly, as if it were indeed alive, as bards said it would become in the end time, when it would rise and slither away to join the glycon in the deep. For the time, it lay darkly, and great white flakes of snow dropped into it.
Near my ear, someone guffawed.
“Belly of the goddess, but the wench’s look is as dark as yon water! See her scowl. Beware, Rahv; they are likely to send her back to you when they see the black brows over her eyes.”
It was Eachan, the wretch who had wed my sister and then killed her, daring to gibe at my black hair and dark-skinned face. I glared at him, and he laughed; other lords standing nearby laughed with him. My father cuffed me on the side of my head, though not hard enough to bruise, not when my body would soon be on display for the Gwyneda’s approval.
“She will do for breeding,” he said. “Naught else is needed. Go on!” he ordered, sending me forward with a shove.
I stumbled into the boat that awaited me and sank to the seat, gathering my sable mantle around me. Before me rose the high head of a swan. I sat in a swan boat as white as the falling snow, and though my hands touched carved wood it was alive—already it skimmed of its own accord away from shore. Not even a steersman sailed with me. I shivered, and the others watched silently, all the lords and nobles of the Secular Lands with their bright pennons and pavilions and their warm campfires, their ladies lining the shore and staring at me. The swan boat swam quickly, and soon snow veiled them from me, or me from them.
Alone. It was a chance. Of course I had long since made up my mind to escape, but there had been no escaping from Stanehold, where my father had housed me; even in daytime I was not permitted outside the walls. And there had been no lack of guard on the journey either. I had only lowered my eyes when my father had given me news of my impending nuptials, but Rahv was no fool. Ever since, all the long way hither, I had never been left alone, not even in the horse litter, not even to sleep. Only in the swan boat, rushing across the black water, alone—but my stock of courage was small, after all the years of bullying. I contemplated the Naga a moment too long, and it was too late. Already turrets were appearing before me, looming through the twilight, and a gray haze of winter willow, all looping boughs and long branches writhing into the water.
The island grew thick with magic, I sensed that at once, a magic as wild and chill and thick as the great thickets of ivy and bramble that tore at the keep, a knotted and twining magic. Perhaps the whole Sacred Isle was entirely magic and essence of magic. Fearsome. The thought made me clutch at the wood of my seat. So still, so silent did the watchers stand, those who awaited me at the island, that I did not at first see them—the Gwyneda, the white-clad blessed ones. Soon I would be one of them.
White robes that hid their bodies, hard faces under white hoods that hid their hair. Without a word they seized me and hurried me into the keep. Entering, I saw only a vast dusk, like a dark maw. I stumbled, trying to look about me, and they tightened their grip on my arms, hurrying me forward. Up a spiral stairway, along walls of cold gray stone, finally through a doorway—
A bedchamber. The door closed behind me, and unceremoniously they rid me of the sable mantle, the ermine robe—black for mourning, white for a bride. Then the long bodice of blood-red velvet edged in miniver, so that I stood blinking in a silken gown, feeling denuded even in that finery, wondering if these white-robed strangers were, indeed, women. I had thought they were, but their faces stared so flat and still that I could not tell. They tugged the jeweled clips and gilt combs from my hair, tearing out long strands of it, and as I drew breath to protest the door opened and a youth stood there.
“Lady Cerilla,” he said quietly, “welcome.”
His voice was warm, his dark eyes candid and warm and searching as he faced me. I trusted him at once, he, the only warm thing within the cold stone walls, and I thought him very fair, with his gentle rugged features and those frank eyes, and I wished I could somehow confide in him and beg him to help me escape. Not with all the watchers. The Gwyneda looked furious—yes, they were women, for their faces had sharpened into the look of women’s fury, their noses turning as frosty white as their robes. But still they did not speak.
“Are you hungry?” the youth asked. “Shall I get you something to eat?”
I stirred from my trance of hope and misery to violently shake my head. I had never felt less hungry.
“A cup of mulled wine?”
“No,” I whispered. “Thank you.” Help, my eyes signaled, and he nodded gravely.
“Call on me for whatever you desire,” he told me, “no matter what the hour. My name is Lonn.” He bowed and left, closing the door behind him.
The white-robed ones finished undressing me without a word, not leaving me even my shift. I held my chin high against their unspoken hostility. Perhaps they were mute, I thought. Only later did I learn of the rule of silence that kept them from speaking to seculars, the rule Lonn had broken.
The room where they stripped me was as cold as their silence, as bare as my body, with gray stone walls lacking any hangings, an unshuttered window slot set too high to see from, a hearth fire burning sullen and low. No furnishings except a great grim bed. The white-robes guided me to it, placed me naked between the chill sheets. That done, they left me, taking my clothing with them.
“Wait!” I told them. I wanted to ask them questions, make them answer me. But I was not Rahv; my voice quavered. They closed the door behind them.
Alone again, I lay and looked at the door.
It bore neither bar nor lock, for sacred brides, like sacred kings, were supposed to come willingly to the ceremonials. I would not be killed or even so much as flogged: I was expected merely to bed a stranger, bear a son, and be cloistered the rest of my life. What matter that I had petitioned the goddess for a true love? It was an honor to be the winterking’s bride. A bar on the door, or a lock, would have been admission of the wrongness of my being there.
I smiled sourly. Like my father, the Gwyneda were no fools, and they had taken my clothing as their surety. Also, perhaps there was a guard outside the door, or a white-robed figure skulking near the first turning.
I waited, watching the gray twilight fade from the window slot, the dying firelight fade from the room, until all was sable black. Sometimes footsteps sounded in the corridor, sometimes voices. I waited, listening, until all night noises seemed to be stilled.
I moved, waited, moved again. I got up, shivering, wrapped a blanket around me as best I could, and felt my way to the door.
In no way could I guess what punishment might be mine if a guard stood beyond the door. Punishments were erratic, in my experience, and severe. But a strong anger stirred in me, longtime anger urging me on. So my father thought he could barter me away like a whelp, give me where he saw fit, as if I were no more than a slave! I had heard a minstrel’s song, once, about a faraway father who loved his daughter, and it had stayed in me like a knife tip broken off in a wound.
Softly I pushed open the door.
No guard. The corridor was dimly lit by rushlights held in sconces and smoking as they burned, giving forth more stinking gloom than light. No one stood near, as far as I could see through the smoke. Barefoot, I padded back the way I had been brought in, edged my head around the corner. A glimpse of white robe, sound of footsteps; I jumped back and ran on tiptoe in the opposite direction, under a shadowy archway, past—a serpent’s head thrust in my face, the body spiraling up a pillar! I nearly screamed. But in a moment I saw that it was a carving, stone or wood, and shakily I went on.
For what seemed like a parlous long time I pattered about, choosing my direction at random, shying at corners, descending stairways when I found them, often forced to flee from shadows or footfalls. The carved snakes lurked everywhere, as was fitting in a place sacred to the goddess. I saw them on walls, on doorjambs and lintels, even coiled on the floor. Always I watched them narrowly as I passed, thinking uneasily that if a carved wooden swan had come to life, so might one of these—or perhaps there were real serpents about as well. Soon I felt other reason for unease. The hold of the goddess seemed huge, labyrinthine, far larger than it should have been, could have been, on that river isle. Sorcery, I grew certain. No wonder the Gwyneda had felt no need to guard me, had left me in bed like a child put out of mind for the night.
Silently I vowed that I would find my way out, even though I was likely to the in the freezing cold—already I was freezing within the walls, my feet completely numb. And there would be the icy water to brave, for I had no way to cross the river. None of it mattered. I had to get out.
Call on him, that youth had said, that Lonn. What nonsense. How was I to call on him?
Remembering his warm glance, his candid gaze, I felt re solve suddenly melt into despair—the mere thought of help had undone me. My eyes blinked shut against tears. “Lonn,” I murmured to myself, “Lonn,” and I continued to walk, blindly, very tired, not much caring any more what happened to me, whether I blundered into white-robes or fell down a stone spiral stairway or met with a genuine serpent. I no longer so much as listened for danger. “Lonn,” I whispered.
Wind and snow on my face.
Astonished, I opened my eyes, saw a white blur of a night. I was out, unbeknownst. Snow hissed and seethed in the wind, curling against my ankles; I stood in snow and had not even felt it with my frozen feet. Nor could I remember passing any gate or entry. But I felt the wind plainly enough, and the stinging cold, biting through my blanket as if it were spider-web. I jerked myself out of astonishment and ran.
“Lonn,” I whispered between panting breaths, “guide me again.”
I could see somewhat, for even on the darkest night there is always a dim glow outdoors—ghostlight, folk called it. Faint spirit fire lit the white smother of snow, and ahead of me a dark building loomed—a boathouse, I hoped. I had run half the length of the isle, and water had to lie near, though I could not hear the rush of it above the wind. But would a swan boat obey me? Perhaps if I yet again invoked the name of Lonn…
Whispering to Lonn, I found the door and slipped within, then stood hearkening in utter blackness as the wind howled and shrieked outside. This place was warm, blessedly so, and I sensed stirrings, and I smelled—horses? A stable?
But what could be the use of horses to me? To anyone, on this isle?
There was no bridge to the shore, I knew. But in a more unreasoning way I knew that I had been led to these horses. It would have been shameful to scorn such a gift, even though I had never sat on a horse in my life—riding was not permitted, lest I harm my maidenhead. But I had seen men riding away often enough, and suddenly I felt a fierce desire to do the same. I stepped forward, feeling at the darkness, searching for a bridle or halter, finding only the rough wooden partition of a stall—
A footfall sounded somewhere nearby. Panicked, I flung myself into the stall, banging against the hocks of an unseen horse. The creature gave a startled jump but moved to one side without kicking me, and I lay in the straw trying to quiet my breathing, trying to listen above the clamor of my heart.
“Lonn?” a voice said softly, a masculine voice full of beauty and ardor, as if a song echoed in it. An unaccountable thrill and yearning took hold of me at the mere sound of that voice.
He walked past me and stood at the door, whoever he was, seeming to find his way quite surely even in the dense darkness. Who might he be, there in the deep of night? He stood for a while as if waiting, and then he sighed, and I wondered the more. Idly he moved off, patting horses and whispering to them.
A light floated past the window, lantern glow, and the door opened.
“Lonn.” The same melodious voice spoke, gladness and relief in it.
“Who else?” Lonn retorted lightly. He closed the door behind him, hung his lantern on a hook, and unshielded it. I flattened myself in terror of the light.
“I knew you would come.” The other strode over to stand beside him.
“And I knew you would be here, taking comfort in the steeds. You have always been besotted by animals… Arlen, have you yet found yourself a modicum of sense?”
I shivered with surprise. It was the winterking himself, he who was destined to wed me and the! Forthwith I moved, feeling that I must see him. Risking noise—the wailing of the wind masked most noise, anyway—I sat up, inched forward, and found a crack in the boards, looked through it…
Great Mother of us all! No one had told me that he was young and tall and beautiful; how was I to know? I had thought Lonn fair, but Aden’s extravagant beauty stunned me. Some wanton energy filled him so that his every move sang to me; he seemed godlike, almost shining, his very hair crisp and alive, as if he wore a crown of flame—it was red, that marvelous many-tinged red of a chestnut horse in sunlight. And the features of his face, surpassingly lovely, their symmetry, the fawn-hued sheen of his skin, and his eyes—his eyes were as green as green springtime grass. And I gasped in glad pain at the pathos of his sad, smiling mouth.
Arlen of the Sacred Isle. With an eerie insight I knew, even then, that I would love him till I died.
“A modicum of sense?” Arlen said, and he shook his glorious head, his hair shining like a red hawk’s feathers in firelight. “What has sense to do with what is happening?”
Little enough, I thought, gasping again with the pain of my thawing feet. Little enough sense. They had not heard me; my noise was lost in the sound of wind outside. Arlen smiled and sat on a barley bin, and Lonn sat beside him, looking commonplace next to his splendor.
“Even so, I must ask you yet once more to think,” said Lonn in that warm, steady way of his, and Arlen glanced at him in annoyance.
“Don’t badger me, my good friend, please. Not this last night that is given us to share.”
“I must! Arlen, I cannot bear it. They will tie you up to that bloody tree, tie you with willow thongs and beat you until you faint—”
“I know,” said Arlen.
“—and then they will put out your eyes.”
Those incredible eyes. I shuddered and closed my own. I had not known it was to be so cruel.
“I know,” Arlen said sharply. “Lonn, stop it.”
“I cannot,” said Lonn. “Then they will castrate you. And after the death blow you will be flayed—”
“Say no more, I tell you!” Arlen made a small, furious sound in his throat sprang up, turning his back on Lonn, and patted several horses at random. I watched, seeing the anguish on his face, furious at Lonn in my turn.
“And then they will sever your joints,” said Lonn, very softly, “and gut you, and hack you apart, catching your blood in a silver basin, and they will sprinkle us—” He choked, unable to go on. Pitiful pain in his voice—it was impossible any longer to be angry at him.
“Why?” Arlen spoke without turning around. “Why are you doing this to me? They have told us these things since we were striplings.”
“They have told us so that we would not hear, not really know, not understand—how horrible—”
Silence.
“Arlen, go, flee,” Lonn said softly at last. “Live.”
Arlen turned back toward him, his face hard and fair, like a carving. “I would rather be dead than dishonored,” he said. “A coward—”
“There is no dishonor in putting an end to madness.”
“The sacred rites of the goddess, madness?” For a moment Arlen’s green eyes blazed, but then he merely looked weary. “Lonn, I have no desire to quarrel with you. Please.”
“All right,” said Lonn stubbornly, meaning that it was not right at all. “If honor is of such concern to you, then think of the girl, her honor. She will be bound to know no man but you, one hour’s wedlove in all her life and then celibacy. Suppose she has promised herself to a sweetheart? She is not here of her own will, any more than we are. Likely she will be foresworn.”
I could have laughed or cried. Me, a sweetheart, in sterile Stanehold, with father standing guard? Arlen must have thought something of the same sort, for he laughed out loud, mocking laughter yet not unmelodious.
“A daughter of that precious Rahv? She’ll be black as a crow and hard as flint, not likely to care for any lover or honor either. Save your concern, Lonn.”
“But I think she is not of corvine sort, Arl,” Lonn remarked with meaning in his glance.
“You’ve seen her? How in the many kingdoms did you manage-”
“I blundered in.”
Arlen sat down again, sighing and shaking his fiery head, and Lonn spoke on.
“She is a gentle thing; I swear it from just my glimpse of her. No crow, Arl, for all that her hair shines black as the Naga. She seemed more like—like a dusky flower, a fragile blossom.”
I snorted. Perhaps they heard me and thought I was a horse.
“Not that she lacked spirit,” Lonn added hastily, as if I had reproached him. “She looked ready to bolt. You have seen the panicky glance of a tethered yearling…? But no flinty shell, Arlen. This—this horror, how is she to withstand it? What is to become of her?”
He spoke with an ardor that made me stare, forgetting any resentment, that made Arlen stare as well, made him furrow his fair brow.
“What do you want of me?” he asked Lonn quietly.
“Go away. Live. Let her return to her home.”
“No one knows what would happen if the winterking did not come to the ceremony,” Arlen replied, not in argument this time but in genuine keen-edged thought. “Likely they would slay someone else in my stead, and that one would not thank me. As for the lady Cerilla, they might be inclined to punish her in order to avert the wrath of the goddess.” His voice was very low, with a stillness in it. “Indeed, they would be as likely to slay her quite slowly as to free her.”
“Surely Rahv would not allow harm to come to her,” Lonn said fiercely.
“I am not so sure,” Arlen replied, and I knew that truth spoke in him, that he interceded for my life as Lonn interceded for his, and I shivered where I sat in the darkened stall.
They must have been friends, those two, ever since they were small boys. They sat gazing at each other, all the futility of the thing in their eyes, and reached a wordless agreement.
“I think we must settle for honor,” Arlen said finally. “A winterking’s death for me, and for her the life of a white-robe. She will make peace with it somehow. They all do.” He shifted his gaze. The matter was closed, and new matter was needed. “What ails my gentle Bayard,” Arlen murmured idly, “that he stands so oddly in his stall?”
He stood up and started toward me. I did not care to be found cowering in the soiled straw. With all the dignity I could muster I pulled my blanket tighter, rose, and stepped forward to meet him. We came face to face in the dim corridor between stalls, and I trembled in the lantern light like a dazzled deer.
“By the great goddess, a lass!” Arlen exclaimed. “Barefoot in the freezing cold and snow.”
I lowered my gaze; I could not bear to meet the soft look of those marvelous green eyes.
“Who are you? How have you come here? Has someone mistreated you? Perchance we can set it to rights.” He waited for my answer, and when none came he muttered, “By the holy oak, you are half naked.” He took off his cloak and put it around my shoulders. “We will find you some clothing. Are you hungry?” Again he waited patiently for a reply. “Lass, will you not tell me who you are?”
I glanced up at him, biting my lip, not knowing what to say to him who was doomed to the. He met my look with a puzzled stare that melted after a moment into something warmer, a nearly trancelike gaze, and I answered it in like wise. Neither of us moved when Lonn came over to stand beside us, and he had to touch Arlen’s arm to rouse him.
“Arlen of the Sacred Isle,” he said in a carefully level voice, “may I present Cerilla, daughter of Rahv of the Seven Holds and Lady of Tower Stane.”
Arlen seemed stunned. “Lonn was right,” he murmured. Then he stepped back from me with a tight, hurt look. “Lonn was right,” he said more calmly. “You have a lover; you were running away.”
“No, my lord, it is not that at all!” Distressed, I spoke more than was my wont. “It is only—lord, please understand. My father cares nothing for my happiness. He gave my sister Rina to that toad Eachan, who killed her in his ill humor—” I stopped, gulping with emotion. “Lord,” I appealed, “how was I to know that you are comely and kind?”
For some reason he winced, yet he stood silent.
“Surely I have no desire to see you slain, eat your flesh—”
The most horrible of the many horrors. He shuddered, but I felt suddenly calm, even bold.
“But I would gladly lie with you,” I told him, with a proud lift of my chin so that I faced him more squarely.
“You do me great honor, lady,” he said softly. “But—the one thing goes with the other.”
“I know.”
“It would be only the once, a single hour in the afternoon, and then—the bond is for life; the goddess sees to that.”
“I will find you boots, clothing, gold,” he said. “Go, flee, save yourself.”
“Leave you to face it alone?” I cried, with a passion that startled me. “But they will punish you!”
He threw back his marvelous head and laughed, a wild, ringing sound. “What can they do to me that they have not already planned?” he cried gaily.
“Both of you go,” said Lonn, his tone vehement, and Arlen quieted.
“I have said that I will not be dishonored.” He spoke softly, and his gaze was on me, softly. “No one will call me coward. But it is hard…”
“At once. Go.” Lonn stepped into the stall, took the blood-red Bayard by its tether, and brought it around. For the first time I looked at the steed rather than at the winterking, and a tingling shock went through me; the animal was alive with loveliness in the same odd way that Arlen was, every hair of its mane tossing on its crest, its eyes deep and feral and gold-flecked, fiery dapplings shimmering on its flanks. I wondered if magic had somehow touched me as well, if in a polished shield I could have seen it.
Arlen looked at me, at the horse. He shook his head, his hair leaping like sunflame. “I must stay,” he said, and though the pitch of his voice was low I knew there would be no disputing with him. Lonn must have known it as well, for he turned to me.
“Lady Cerilla,” he urged, “mount the steed. It will carry you across the water. After that, ride where you will.”
I looked only at Arlen then, not at the horse. He answered my look without speaking.
“Lady,” Lonn begged.
“I will stay,” I said.
He fell to his knees before me.
“If you are his friend,” I flared, “do not beseech me to go from him. I will stay to offer him what comfort I can. Before he dies.”
Lonn stared up at me, and I glared back at him, and hope died in his eyes. “I have been his friend since we were babes,” he muttered at last, and he got up and led the horse away.
“Your feet,” Arlen said to me. “They are as blue as river pearls.”
He gathered me up in his arms to spare me from walking any farther in the snow. Out into the dark and cold and snow and wind we went, his cloak and my blanket flapping about me, Lonn following us across the wide weed-grown courtyard with the lantern, his head bowed against the wind. But Arlen strode through the storm as if he had been born to it. Hold of the goddess bulked dimly before us, half ruinous, parapets showing jaggedly, like broken teeth, against the sky. We found a narrow entry. A dark passage led steeply downward from it, as if into the fundament of the fortress. Lonn unshielded his lantern, and after a moment we came out into a warm and cavernous room.
It was the kitchen, the great womb of the castle, deserted at this time of night. Arlen carried me across it and set me down on the immense hearth. Embers still glowed in the blackness of the gaping fireplace, and the brick of the hearth had retained the heat of the day’s flames; I felt myself smiling because of the warmth. Arlen settled himself by me and rubbed my feet with his hands, his touch as warm as the hearth. Lonn stood his lantern on the table and found three earthenware cups, filled them with perry and spices, and set the poker in the embers to heat for mulling them. Then silently he sat down on the floor by Arlen and me.
We talked of inconsequential things: the perry, and had it been a favorable season for fruits and liquors? The snow, and would it turn into a veritable winter storm? The talk, however trivial, seemed honey sweet. Lonn did not speak much, but I think he understood how precious this time was; he sat and did not hurry the preparation of our midnight cups. The poker still lay heating in the embers when, soundlessly, a white shadow stirred and one of the Gwyneda came into the kitchen.
Both Arlen and Lonn startled violently and blanched in terror. Then both slumped where they sat in relief. As for the white-robe, she stopped, then walked over to speak with us, her tread soft, as if she herself were afraid of being heard.
“All powers be thanked that it is only you, Erta,” Arlen told her.
She answered him with a glance half amused, half rueful. Hers was a plain, comfortable face, square, pale of brows, with the freckles and blotches of age; there was no trace of the pinched and peevish expression I had seen on the other Gwyneda I had met.
“It is a harsh life for the white-robes,” Arlen said to me. “They are never allowed enough to eat, they sleep on stone, they rise early to tend to the dawn observances of the goddess—” He stopped, seeming to remember that within a day I would be a white-robe myself. “They bear it differently,” he went on more softly after a moment. “Some keep to their chambers as much as they can, others work like demons in the gardens, others do stitchery, or divert themselves with friends and enemies, or tend the children, or torment them. Most of them are bitter in one way or another, and happy to cause pain.”
“And Erta is one of the few who are not,” Lonn said.
“She is our mother,” Arlen added, and both he and Lonn laughed so that I saw it was a jest. Erta did not laugh, but she smiled a little. Her eyes did not smile. She looked worried.
“Give the little one my greeting,” she said to Arlen, “for I cannot speak to her.”
She meant me, I understood. “There is a rule of silence with seculars,” Arlen explained to me.
Still in awe of his beauty, I only gazed back at him. He must have taken my glance as query.
“They are not allowed to speak to anyone not of the Sacred Isle, not even their relations who come to the ceremonials,” he told me. “Nor am I, for that matter,” he added with a sort of wonder, and he laughed. “But there is nothing they will be able to do to me after the morrow.”
“There are some who are very angry with you, Lonn,” Erta said to him.
For speaking to me in my chamber, I understood. Lonn got up, and poured a fourth tumbler of perry for Erta, spiced it, and fetched the poker to heat it and the others, all without speaking. He gave us our drinks, and we accepted them as silently as he offered them. I felt quite warm by then, and almost contented.
“It does not matter,” Lonn said finally, and though he tried to keep despair out of his voice it rang through hollowly.
“I would like for you to stay whole a few months yet,” Erta told him mildly.
He shrugged and would not or could not speak.
“You have strong magic,” she said. “Let it help you in some way.”
“What are you doing here at this time of night, Em?” Arlen asked her. It was a foolish question, intended only as a diversion for Lonn’s sake, and she knew it. She made a small noise that might have been a cough or stifled laughter, as if she were about to ask him the same. But she did not.
“I could not sleep,” she said, and I never suspected the story that lay behind those words.
“We ought to see Lady Cerilla back to her room,” said Lonn rather harshly.
Erta went with us, walking ahead of us, our defense and scout, but we met no one. It was a small hold, as I had thought, and we found my chamber quickly. Arlen and I looked at each other, but there was nothing to say, not in front of the others, and with a glance and a small smile we parted. I closed my door, flung my blanket on my bed, and crawled under it. Sleep did not come quickly—I heard the tolling of the bell for the morning ritual and saw the dawn of my wedding day show silver-gold through the window slot. The sun rose, sending out beams the color of orichalc, the glowing bronze of the mountains, strongest of metals. Chains of orichalc bound the glycon, the great serpent of the deep…
My thoughts strayed, and after a while I dozed.
I dreamed a strange and vivid dream.
I was hunted, running for my life; I was the swift and tawny deer that leaps between the spires of the Mountains of the Mysteries, and the hunter was an enigma, all flux and fear, first a horror, the flayed man, then a faceless being on a faceless horse, than a great serpent like the glycon. I ran amid oak trees and willow and rowan and golden apple, through mist and across rivers where women in white robes turned into swans and melted into seawater. I ran—and looked back over my shoulder to see that the rider was drawing nearer. It was a glorious youth on a steed of blood bay; it was Arlen. At the sight of the sweetness of his mouth I fell in love with him, and I stopped, turned toward him. But then I saw a rush of shadow, a monstrous, dark, swift-moving thing, unclear. And I realized that it was not he who had hunted me, that some horror pursued him in his turn—
I awoke with a start and could not sleep again. Within the hour the Gwyneda came to prepare me for the day.
All the forenoon was spent in lustrations and attentions that I bore with the best dignity I could command, though the Gwyneda were none too gentle. On first entering my chamber, they seized me and upended me to examine me. Only when they were determined to their satisfaction that I was what had been promised—that is, a virgin, and not bleeding at the time—did they release me. Then a bath of milk was prepared, and I was led to it and made to stand in it while pitchers of it were poured over me; it was cold. Only then, in the rhythm of the pouring, did the Gwyneda break silence, and they spoke not to me but to their goddess, in incantation.
“White goddess of winter,” they chanted, and then their words followed the cycle of deathlife and the seasons.
“White goddess of spring, the seed in thy bosom, White goddess of summer, thy sower the sacred king, Goddess of life, red reaper of death, Great goddess of winter, white goddess, dark winnower, Great goddess, hear us.”
They went on in that way for a while as I stood amidst sheetings of milk. Then they progressed to petitions, begging the goddess for fertility of fields and heifers and women, for a mild winter without pestilence, for easy birthings among women of virtue, ...
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