Four
In the King's castle in Pelucir, Talis, trying to Extinguish a Candle Flame by Will, shattered every mirror around him.
It was barely dawn. Awakening early, out of habit, he had forgotten for a moment where he was. He saw, from the window of his chambers, not the bare, harsh peaks of Chaumenard, but the misty green wood on the hill, the sky colored pearl around it. The habits of sorcery stirred restively in him, pulled him out of bed; he remembered, with relief, the book he had taken from the school. He opened it, began a spell at random. The only sounds, until the moment he spoke the final word of the spell, came from the kitchens and the kennels: wood chopped, hounds barking to be fed. Then the round, heavy mirror hanging above his clothes chest splintered as neatly as if he had thrown a stone into it, and spilled its pieces out of the carved oak frame all over the floor. He stared at the shards, puzzled. Then he heard the pounding on his door, and other doors opening, and the cries, astonished, fearful and furious, of sorcery.
He opened his door quickly, and found a dozen guards and the King, naked under a mantle, his hair awry, his mistress, Genia, behind him, blinking sleepily, her pale brows lifted in wonder.
"I'm sorry," Talis said quickly, assuming responsibility for having gotten them out of bed, but hazy yet, about exactly what had happened. "What did I do?"
"I woke up picking pieces of Genia's mirror out of my beard," his brother Burne said incredulously. "Did you do that?"
"I was trying to extinguish a candle."
Burne stared at him. He was a burly, energetic man with golden hair and a greying beard; a fleck of mirror glinted in it, Talis saw with horror. When Burne was younger than Talis, he had ridden onto Hunter's Field and watched their father die; he had buried both their parents and raised Talis like the son he would never have. Talis, familiar with the mingling of loathing and fascination which sorcery inspired in Pelucir, heard his brother's voice tighten. "You broke mirrors all over the house trying to blow out a candle? What did they spend two years teaching you in that place?"
"I think," Talis said, perplexed, "it must be the spellbook."
"Then find another book," Burne said irritably. "Or go out in the woods to practice. You're supposed to learn to defend the castle, not demolish it. Our great-uncle is probably armed and mounted and out the gate by now, trying to fight ravens with a broadsword." He turned, left a bloody footprint behind him, and cursed pithily.
"I'm sorry," Talis said again, to his back. He wandered into his chambers again, where servants were sweeping up the glass. He stood at the window, musing at the wood, watching the sun rise behind the trees, spilling gold and shadow across Hunter's Field.
A corner of the massive keep, thrusting a dark angle of stone into his vision, caught his attention. Its roof sagged open in places; one beam was charred from a flaming arrow that had eaten through the roof slats before the warriors within had put the fire out. The keep was said to be haunted by all the maimed, hungry, bitter ghosts of warriors who had died during the siege. It was possessed, household legend ran, of a dark magic woven of the blood and fire, anger and fear, that had filled it during the siege. No one went into it.
"You want to what?" Burne asked, during breakfast in the hall. Talis, ruthlessly breaking mirrors so early, had deprived himself of the sight of younger, fairer guests, as if, he thought ruefully, they had vanished along with their reflections.
"I want to use the keep. I won't disturb anyone there, except the ghosts."
"It's not a laughing matter," Burne said testily.
"I'm not laughing," Talis said gently. "But I'm not afraid of ghosts. I grew up with them. They have haunted this house all my life."
Burne was silent. He chose a salmon bone from his plate, and leaned back, sighing. "I know. And they have haunted you. No. It's grim in there. I won't have you lost among that keep's memories."
I already am, Talis thought, putting the currant eyes out of bread shaped like a swan. He broke its neck and said patiently, "The book I brought back with me is unusual. Words don't seem to mean themselves." Burne, picking his teeth with the salmon bone, was looking askance at him. "They don't mean what they should. Mean. What we expect them to."
"What-"
"That's why I caused trouble this morning. The spells seem very simple, elementary. Extinguishing a flame, like this-" He concentrated, letting the flame of a single candle from the branch in front of them burn in the dark of his mind, then fade as he drew the darkness over it. The candle went out. Burne blinked. "-is not difficult. That's all I was trying to do this morning."
"Then why did you break all those mirrors?"
"Because the spell in the book dealt with mirrors, not candles. But it said candles. And fire. So I was confused."
"So am I."
"I suspect all the spells are like that. They are in some unknown mage's private language. I must understand the language to work the spells."
Burne grunted. "I suppose you can't just forget about the book."
"No."
"All this sounds far more dangerous than it's worth."
"You sent me to Chaumenard," Talis reminded him. "How much is sorcery worth to Pelucir?"
"Not your life."
Talis shook his head quickly. "There's no question of that." He touched his lenses, evading Burne's skeptical gaze. "Mages don't kill each other with books. I'll be careful."
"No."
"Burne, I won't stop trying to use this book. It's too tantalizing. I'll go back to Chaumenard if you want-"
"No." Burne shifted, and changed tactics. "Anyway, the keep must be a rotten husk by now. You'll break your neck in there. It's probably full of bats and rats along with ghosts and bitter memories."
"That's another curious thing. If the keep did generate its own strange magic during the siege, I want to explore it. It may be a source of power that could be used to defend the castle. Sorcery not connected to any mage, but to the heart and life-blood of Pelucir."
Burne's brows knit. "I don't understand."
"I will. If you let me try."
The King was silent, frowning at the salmon bone. He made a decision; disapproving of it, he became abrupt. "You will at all times be guarded." Talis, surprised, did not argue. "If you come to harm, between that benighted book and the bewitched keep, I'll never forgive you. But at least, if you're guarded, I'll know what became of you."
"Nothing will happen to me," Talis promised.
He took two guards and the spellbook to the keep after breakfast. The guards, too young to be veterans of Hunter's Field, followed him grimly, tense and pale, as if they expected to find both the sorcerer and the sorcery from the legendary battlefield at the top of the keep. The thick door, closed but unlatched, opened easily; children, Talis guessed, looking for ghosts. Not being so adept at making fire as putting it out, he carried a torch. Light pushed at the filmy darkness within, but did not fully penetrate it. The narrow windows, even those facing the sun, were oddly opaque.
Something pale glided silently along the edge of the light. "Ghosts," he heard a guard whisper. The chipped flagstones were stained with blood. "The warriors came here," the other said softly, staring at the floor, "to get away from It." Their swords were drawn. Talis looked up, saw in a gentle Crosshatch of faint, dusty light, high above, more white ghosts stirring along the rafters and rotted planks of the ruined middle floor. They questioned him distantly: Who? "Owls," he said to the guards, who looked at him doubtfully; they did not believe in owls. Ghosts, Talis thought, would have smelled less rank. He pushed into the darkness, found steps finally, worn stone shadowed with the footprints of wounded warriors fleeing Hunter's Field. The steps seemed to build themselves, one after another, under his descending foot; they angled endlessly upward along the walls. Even passing through the dim light in the middle floor, Talis could not see what lay beyond it. The steps darkened again; he heard a muttered word behind him. Finally he saw an end: a rectangle of black floating within four streaks of pale light. The door leaped suddenly quite close, in another step or two; his torch fire nearly singed it. He dropped the torch into a sconce on the wall and found a face in the door opening its eyes to gaze at him.
It was little more than knotholes, cracks and bubbles of pitch that the door had assembled into a rather dour sentinel, but one guard nearly lost his balance and tumbled back down the steps. "Sorcery," he spat like a curse, and the face looked mildly affronted.
"It's only wood," Talis said absently. Behind the door, he sensed, lay the dark heart of the keep's sorcery: its memories and its power. He touched the latch. "Stay here."
"My lord Talis, the King-"
"It's worse inside," Talis said, touching his lenses. They swam with sudden fire. He smiled. The guards sat down heavily on the stairs. "If you need me," he added, "I'll hear you."
He closed the door quickly behind him, seeing moving shadows on the walls. The room looked larger than it should have been. The stone walls were sealed against the weather by straw and clay and whitewash dimmed by smoke. Light from the torn roof and the single large window drew the shadows clear: He watched, transfixed, as an armed man drew back an arrow, then dropped both arrow and crossbow as a sword falling out of nowhere cut off his hand. The air seemed suddenly heavy to breathe, as if it had filled with smoke and too much heat from the thick, cold hearth. Another shadow roamed restlessly across the walls, stopped to look out the window, and ducked back; Talis saw a bolt of fire hurtling toward the window out of the placid empty field. The window moved.
He blinked. So had the window, dodging the ghostly fire. It looked over the herb gardens now, in the back of the kitchen. He turned, trembling slightly; the silence within the room seemed strained, as if at any moment the scream of the man who had lost his hand would break through the boundaries of memory and become real. He felt the sweat on his face; he took off his lenses, rubbed his eyes with his wrist. He looked for some place to set the book. Table, he thought, uprighting an overturned stool. A bucket to catch rain. A mirror, unbroken. Candles. He stopped thinking then, overwhelmed by the sudden, terrible despair and fury that seemed to flow into him from the stones under his feet, the walls around him. Look, the keep said to him. See. This happened.
"Yes," he whispered, "yes," and sorrow shook him, an ache such as he had never felt in his life for the death of a king he never knew. He stumbled to the door, leaned against it until his breathing calmed and nothing in his expression would alarm the guards.
He had various implements, pieces of furniture, and whatever might be useful brought up as far as the door. He would permit no one to enter the room. The window shifted randomly during the day, as if it fled a bombardment of stones, or glimpsed a stealthy, moonlit movement. Perhaps sensing his own calm among its memories, the keep seemed to grow more peaceful. Fewer shadows wandered across the walls; the tension of silent cries within the air lessened.
He tried no more spells that day, fearing Burne's wrath if something else went awry. But he stayed so long reading the book, trying to find a link between mirror and fire, what words might mean what, that twilight stole into the wood the window framed, and the guards, hearing the evening fanfares, thumped nervously on the door.
"My lord Talis, the King commands your presence in the hall."
Burne got his presence, but Talis was so absent-minded, scarcely seeing the faces around him, that the King said explosively, "If it's that disturbing, that bat-ridden tomb, I'll have it sealed shut. You look like a ghost."
Talis drew his thoughts out of the keep hastily, and applied himself to being as sociable as possible, causing, before the evening's end, at least three different rumors of impending marriage. Burne seemed pleased. But his mistress, a kindly and discerning woman, saw Talis' effort and said gently to him as they retired to their chambers, "Don't let the King worry you. Love takes time; it will recognize itself. Burne knows that. He is trying to put the past behind him, but he can't do that using your future. Be patient."
Talis returned to the keep before sunrise. The face in the door opened an eye as he opened the door, then went back to sleep. Most of the castle still slept. Only the kennels and stables were rousing, and the kitchen, for guests would be gathering that morning to hunt with the King. Talis, far more interested in the mysteries in the spellbook than in running down animals and slaying them, hoped his brother would not notice his absence. The window gave him a view of the field and the distant wood, a mist of green and shadow, where night still lingered beneath the golden oak and the birch whiter than bone. The sun and the hunters would waken it, sending great flocks of startled birds wheeling out of the trees. Now the wood dreamed. So did the castle. Talis opened the book.
The sun rose without catching his eye, for the window had shifted to overlook the formal gardens and fountains. Talis had risen also, tantalized by a spell. It seemed effortless: To Open a Latched Door Across a Room. Talis eyed the door and then the book. The spell, he knew, would have nothing to do with a door. More likely, it had to do with boots or wind. But, he reasoned, if he found what the spell in reality did, he could match the reality with the words, and prove that in this particular mage's teasing code door meant wind.
Implements, the book said. One gold cup. A large bowl of water. A candle lit in a holder made of gold.
He had brought them all into the keep: They were familiar requirements. He poured water from a bucket into a porcelain washbasin, and lit the candle. Beeswax scented the air; he had a sudden, wistful memory of spring in the high meadows on the mountains. He cleared his mind, concentrated.
Hold the cup upside-down above the water, the book instructed, so that gold reflects water and water reflects gold, reflection reflecting reflection. Stand the candle in water between them, so that fire, gold, water, lie within the hollow of the cup.
Repeat these words thrice. Backward.
Talis, holding the cup steady above fire, gold, water, hit a blank: The spell ended there. What words? he wondered, and was illuminated.
"Drawkcab," he said without much hope. "Ecirht. Sdrow. Eseht. Taeper."
He felt a stirring in the air around him, as if the keep, alarmed at the strange sorcery, watched him. "Drawkcab," he repeated, and thought he heard an echo, an unfamiliar voice, urgent, intense. "Ecirht. Sdrow. Eseht. Taeper. Drawkcab," he began a third time. "Ecirht. Sdrow. Eseht." He heard a scream then, faint and distant, a memory tearing into time, and his face tightened. "Taeper," he finished grimly, and light exploded out of the water.
The cup spun out of his hands, flew across the room and flattened itself against the far wall. The light, humming dangerously, left a white streak across Talis' vision, hit the ceiling at an angle, then arced out the window, which had moved again, attracted perhaps by the trumpets calling the hunt to order below.
Talis heard a tortured squeal from the trumpet, and the thunk of metal against stone. The noise of the dogs drowned human voices, but he could make out, in the second before he located his bones and could move, an isolated shout here and there among the frenzied howling. "Burne," he breathed, horrified, and flung himself at the window, clinging to it before it could move again. He leaned precariously over the edge, catching his lenses and then his balance as he looked down.
Burne was staring at a bolt of white fire burrowing mole-like into the ground in front of his horse. The horse, a favorite hunter, trembled in every muscle, but did not throw its rider. The trumpeter, sitting dazed among the hounds, had not fared so well. Servants bearing trays of spiced wine and hot brandy had flung them into the air, splashing themselves; goblets rolled among the hounds. The hounds whimpered and bayed at the light, horses fought to bolt; everyone else seemed frozen- hunters, musicians, kennel-masters, servants, dog-boys and the King-all staring at the light as, with a kind of mindless frenzy, it buried the last of itself underground.
The faces lifted then, to stare at Talis.
He saw only one: his brother's. It was a furious, glowing thing, a little, Talis thought, like the light he had created. He could not hear Burne well, above the racket the hounds made, but he caught the drift: What had he learned in two years at Chaumenard, and why had Burne bothered to send him there, and why had Burne even bothered to survive the winter siege, only to live to be killed by his own brother? Then he added something that caused Talis to hang even more perilously out the window, trying to hear. The hounds, having frightened away the light, began to quiet; the King's voice came clear.
"-out of that keep. It's a nightmare of foul memories and I want you down among people instead of ghosts, before you get as crazed as it is-"
"It's not the keep," Talis shouted back. "Burne, it's just the book-"
"Then throw it down! I want the book burned and the keep walled shut-"
"Burne, listen to me-"
"You nearly killed me!"
"It was an accident!"
"You accidently missed me?"
"No!"
"Then what were you trying to do?"
"Open a door!"
"With a lightning bolt?"
"Burne, please listen! Wait-I'm coming with you-"
The King refused to discuss the matter. Talis, mounted, and armed to kill anything that moved, caught up with Burne halfway to the wood. Everyone else seemed eager to ask him about the incident, to tease, to tell him what they were doing and saying the moment lightning leaped out of the keep and nearly hit the King. But lightning wasn't the word for it-it was more like something living, a strange being made of light with an urge to bury itself alive. And the odd noise it made. The hum. Like some vast, vibrating string. Thrum.
"Burne," Talis pleaded, but the King only showed him a tight-jawed profile.
"No."
The hounds, loosed, streaked toward the wood. The King urged his hunter into a canter. Talis, hesitating, looked back at the keep. Riders fanned around him; trumpets and horns called a warning to deer and hare, boar and bird. The single eye at the top of the keep looked back at Talis, opaque with memory or light. He had a sudden, crazed image of himself barring the doors from within and letting Burne lay siege against him. But Burne would never forgive him, and there was nothing he could do in the keep that couldn't be done elsewhere. Yet it drew at him, massive and ancient, dark with the ash of siege fires, as full of memories as the heads of warriors who had survived the night. It was a mystery, like the spellbook, which, Talis reminded himself, he should go back and rescue. He glanced at the riders disappearing into the trees and decided to try once more to persuade Burne.
He galloped after the hunt.
He heard the trumpets cry of a deer in two different places, it seemed. He followed one, saw the flicker of gold and scarlet and royal purple among the leaves; the riders were farther away than seemed possible. The trumpets sounded again, and then the gentle, silvery horns called of hare. Hounds belled everywhere, from every direction, though he saw none of them. He rode quickly, recklessly, to catch up, listening for the trumpets, for Burne would pursue the hart before the hare. A lacework of birch leaves brushed across his eyes; he ducked down, riding low beneath the outstretched boughs of oak, and far too quickly. But as fast as he rode, the hunt seemed to recede even more quickly away from him.
He heard the horn again, distant, teasing, and then suddenly close, and from another direction. The hunters had apparently scattered throughout the wood. He turned first toward one fanfare, then the other; he could see nothing but trees, the moving shadows of windblown leaves. He galloped through the shadows, bewildered and careless, and then across a shallow stream, its water slow and heavy with moss-capped stones. He felt his horse stumble, catch itself, and he straightened a little, pulling on the reins. The long limb of an oak stretched across the far bank caught him in the chest, lifted him out of the saddle, and threw him into the stream.
The world went black. Then he dragged his eyes open, unable to breathe, not knowing if he lay in air or water. He found air finally, pulled it in, trying to blink away the strange mist of green that had enveloped him. Leaves, he realized slowly: He had lost his lenses, and the world had blurred. Little explosions of pain flared in his knee, his ribs, one shoulder, the back of his head. He lay on his back in water and frog-spawn and long, slimy ribbons of moss. He groaned, and groped for his lenses, raising himself piecemeal among the stones, finding everything battered, but nothing unworkable. He fished his lenses out of the moss and put them on. One lens was shattered. He cleaned the other, and found his boar spear, a few broken arrows and the sheath at his belt full of nothing but water. He groped again, found his hunting knife. He pushed himself to his feet with the spear and hobbled out of the water. His horse had vanished, which surprised him, since it was of stolid temperament and disinclined to startle. He stood on the bank, balanced against the Spear to take the weight off his knee, and listened for the hunt.
The wood was soundless.
He heard no trumpets, no barking hounds, no hooves, no voices, not even disturbed birds complaining above the trees. Not even the leaves moved; they might have been carved of stone in the still air, though on the ground, his bemused eyes told him, their shadows moved.
A horn sounded, a single, sweet note.
Three deer as white as snow with eyes of gold and shadows of gold ran through the trees in front of him.
He heard himself make a sound; the hair pricked on the back of his neck. He tried to move; he could only grip the spear more tightly to keep from falling. The deer flickered noiselessly away into the trees, shadows flowing like sunlight across everything they touched.
Three hounds as white as bone, with eyes and shadows as red as blood, ran soundlessly through the trees in pursuit of the deer.
He tried to turn himself invisible; the only thing he managed, in that upside-down world, was to erase his shadow. His hands slick on the boar-spear, he turned desperately to stumble away, hide himself from what would come. But he could not move quickly, in or out of the vision, and what came next came fast.
Three white horses with eyes of bone and shadows of hoarfrost galloped after the hounds. Behind them rode three roan, and behind them three black, and behind them a great gathering of hunters that seemed to have fashioned themselves out of roots, tree bark and leaves, as if the wood itself were hunting. Through the empty frame of his lenses Talis saw a moving blur of green, trees riding a hard wind. Through the unbroken lens he saw the faces of leaf and tree-bole, the slender woven branches of willow, of pale, papery birch bark. Only the riders turning their white mounts toward him had no faces.
He swayed, caught his balance against the spear, watching the one with slender, jewelled hands ride forward, a bright white swirl of long skirt and mantle, flowing ribbons of silk and pearl, and crowned with gold and bone above long hair streaked with autumn fire and a dark oval that was no face. Frozen, Talis watched her notch the arrow in her hand, lift her bow. Just before she shot, he whispered, "At least, before you kill me, let me see your face. And then tell me why."
He saw her face.
He swayed again, trembling, wordless. Her eyes were gold and dark, troubled, in a face at once imperious and vulnerable and so beautiful there seemed no word, in human language, for what he saw.
She lowered her bow. She said, her voice like the horn he had heard, pure, regal, haunting, "I am the mother of sorrow."
"Oh," he breathed, his voice gone, the world gone, except for what existed in the circle of his unbroken lens. "How can I help you?"
"You can see me. You have crossed into my world. You are not dreaming."
"No."
"Tell me your name."
He drew a long, shaking breath to give her that and his bones and anything else she might want of him. "My name is-"
Someone shouted it behind him and the world within the lens shattered.
He turned, bewildered, stunned by the frenzied barking of hounds, not remembering where he had been, what world he had walked out of to see her. Hunters rode out of the trees, shouting; trumpets sounded; dogs swarmed into the stream, belling and harrying a boar that in its maddened panic was charging straight across the water at Talis.
He did not remember moving. He remembered blood on the boar's tusk after it tore open a hound with the toss of its head, and its rank smell as it came close, and then its small, furious and terrified eye. And then the spear shuddered in his hands, tried to wrench itself free. Something splashed across his eyes. He saw the world through a bloody haze.
Talis, he heard then, from another world, a secret within the wood.
And then he heard the King's voice. 'Talis!"
He knelt on the ground holding a spear with a dead boar impaled on it that had pushed itself in its dying frenzy all the way up to the cross-guard. That much he could see through his broken lens. The hounds were swarming around him, barking with wild excitement in his face, trying to tell him what he had done. He opened his hands finally, let the spear fall. He stumbled, rising. Burne caught him, dragged him away from the hounds.
The King pounded him, saying something, his face still patchy with fear. Talis winced, aching suddenly in every bone. He pulled his lenses off, cleaned the blood from the unbroken glass, his hands trembling. His hearing seemed to return with his sight; as he put the lenses back on, his brother's voice penetrated.
"I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead, when it came at your back and you just stood there not listening, not turning, with enough racket behind you to make the trees jump. And then you turned, and brought the spear down and the boar ran up it as cleanly as if it were spitting itself for supper. One stroke, straight through the heart." He pounded Talis between the shoulder blades again, then took a closer look at him. "You're all wet. You have slime in your hair."
"I fell in the stream," Talis said dazedly. "Riding too fast after you. I broke a lens and maybe a rib. I was using the spear as a crutch. That's why I had it in my hands at all."
Burne eyed him wordlessly a moment, his face taut again. "Why didn't you use some magic or something? You could have been killed!"
"I don't know. I wasn't thinking clearly."
"You must have stunned yourself. That's why you didn't hear us."
"Yes." He touched his lenses and saw a face within the light and windblown leaves. "I was stunned. Burne, I'm sorry I nearly killed you this morning."
"Never mind." Burne sighed. "It's been tried before."
"About the keep-"
"Never mind about the keep. Keep it. You'd only find another place to have your accidents in, anyway."
"It's not-" Talis stopped himself. "Thank you."
"Well. Anyway, it makes a good story. Almost as good as you falling off your horse, breaking a lens, and killing a charging boar while you hobbled around using your boar-spear as a crutch." He slapped Talis' back again, loosing a grunt of amazed laughter. "You can tell it when we feast on your kill."
It seemed to Talis, as he stood dripping water and blood, seeing blurred green wood through one eye, and dogs scrapping over offal through the other, a peculiar exchange for magic.
He found his horse, which had gone nowhere but had simply declined to follow him into a dream, and rode home accompanied by various fanfares, with the gutted boar hanging upside-down on the spear behind him. The physician bandaged his ribs and his knee, forbade him to climb the keep stairs and gave him a tonic which, he thought, could have melted drawbridge chain, and which stunned him until evening the next day. It seemed mildly hallucinatory: As he sat through the long boar feast trying to keep his fraying thoughts together, he kept glimpsing the face of the woodland Queen among the guests. It was, he decided, a trick of his broken lenses, making him see double. Now a young girl wore the Queen's expression of power and vulnerability; now a fall of hair the color of autumn leaves made him catch his breath. Now he saw her face, just before it turned away from him to speak. It was a face full of opposites, he decided: delicate and regal, young and ageless, wild and controlled, fierce and sweet…
Trumpets greeted the boar as it entered on a tray of silver and gold. Talis saw himself on the tray suddenly, blind and still. If he had not turned, if the spear had broken in his fall, if he had lost it in the water… He swallowed dryly, adjusted his lenses, and the odd vision vanished, along with his appetite. Later, the horns bade farewell to the bones and the picked meat and the tusks that lay like quarter moons on the bloody tray. Talis, wandering badly, forced himself to listen to his great-uncle relate a complex incident that had happened last autumn, or the one ten years before, or some autumn before Talis was born. There was One Great Hunt, he decided, that went on perpetually in some never-ending autumn. That was the Hunt out of which all stories came. Even his boar would come charging out of spring into autumn one day, during some drunken feast, when he would remember the leaves being all the colors of her hair… The story involved a broken stirrup, a hedge with a gypsy's laundry drying on it, and a pig. Talis' eyes strayed. There she was again, at the far end of the table, holding a hazelnut in her long white fingers, each finger ringed with gold. She laughed suddenly at the hunting story; her face changed, became human. The King said softly to Talis:
"You're not eating. Are you in pain?"
Talis shook his head. "I doubt that I'd feel pain if you dropped a table on my head. I just keep wandering out of the world."
Burne grunted. "Go to bed before you fall in your plate." Servants brought in wet linens scented with rosewater, and tiny, icy bowls of minced fruit. Talis wiped his hands and rose unsteadily; Burne added, "And stay out of the keep. You're dangerous enough up there when your head is clear."
"I will," Talis said absently. Shadows followed him, spun out of the flickering torchlight. Voices, laughter, music, seemed to follow him also, even through the dark night, as if he walked through some invisible hall where the gathering within celebrated yet another hunt. He climbed the keep steps slowly. There seemed far more of them than usual. He had reached the top and opened the door before he remembered, with some surprise, that he had been on his way to bed.
The room was lighted, he realized slowly, though he had found his way up in the dark. The light seemed not fire but sun, ancient, golden, still, like the wood on a soundless summer afternoon. He made a sound, seeing two worlds again: the bleak, shadow-ridden keep, the light trembling in it as if, in the otherworld, midnight did not exist.
In that light, not even past existed. All the tormented shadows had vanished on the walls. He saw only one shadow: tall, slender, crowned with what looked like a circle of flame or deer horn. He watched it for a long time, until his heart seemed made of that sweet light, and he felt that at any moment she might step out of the faceless shadow on the wall into his world.
He heard her voice, distant, silvery, pure, like her hunting horn. Talis.
"Yes," he whispered, and again, "Yes."
She said nothing more. He watched until her shadow reached out everywhere, pulled him into night.