Guy Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

"We should not have come," her mother said, softly. "We make them weaker."

Not what she wanted to hear. "He'd have taken the fight himself if you hadn't been here."

"They'd have stopped him," Enid said.

"They'd have tried. You're the only one who could. You know it."

Her mother looked at her, seemed about to say something, but did not. They watched the men below. It was eerily clear and bright just now.

The men below. What, Rhiannon mer Brynn thought savagely, was a woman? What was her life? Even here in the Cyngael lands, celebrated—or notorious—for their womenfolk, what, really, could they ever hope to be or do at a time like this? A time that mattered.

Easy enough, she thought bitterly, as swords clashed. They could watch, and wring their delicate hands, her mother and herself, but only if they first disobeyed clear and specific instructions to stay away and hide. Hide, hide! Or they could be targets for an attack, be violated, killed, or taken and sold as slaves, then mourned and exalted in song. Song, Rhiannon thought savagely. She could kill a singer, too.

Women were children till they first bled, then married to make children, and—if Jad was kind—their children would be boys who could farm and defend their land or go off to fight one day. There was a ten-year-old boy here with a small scythe. A ten-year-old.

She stood by her mother, aware that Enid was still trembling (uncharacteristically) because she'd been so sure Brynn would fight and die here. There might be some pattern or purpose at work, that her mother had saved a red-bearded Erling's life in the farmyard that night, claiming him, and now that man had taken Brynn's fight upon himself.

There might be a pattern. Rhiannon didn't care. Not right now. She wanted them all dead, these Erlings, here simply because they could come, in their longships with their swords and axes, because they exulted in killing and blood and death in battle so their gods would grant them yellow-haired maidens for eternity.

Rhiannon wished she had the powers of the Cyngael goddesses of old, the ones they were forbidden even to name since they'd embraced Jad here in the west. She wished she could invoke stone and oak, kill the raiders herself, leave bodies hacked in pieces on this grass. Let those yellow-haired maidens put them back together. If they wanted to.

She'd blood-eagle them. See if the so-fierce raiders of the sea came back here after that. Her mood of the long summer was entirely gone, swept like fog before wind: that wistful, aching, sleepless sense that things had gone awry. They had, they had. But there was a lesson to be learned: love and longing were not what life in the northlands was about. She knew it now. She was seeing it. The world was too hard. You needed to become harder yourself.

She stood beside her mother, her face expressionless, showing no least hint of what was raging within her. You could look at Rhiannon, limned in that brilliant light, and see her as a dark-haired maiden of sorrows. She would kill you, if she could, for thinking that.

Another young woman, in Esferth far to the east, would have entirely understood these thoughts, sharing many, though with a different fire in her, and one she'd lived with all her life, no sudden discovery.

The bitterness of a woman's lot, the helplessness with which you watched brothers and other men ride out to glory with iron at their sides, was nothing new for her. Judit, daughter of Aeldred, wanted battle and lordship and hardship as much as any Erling raider cresting waves in a dragon-ship, coming ashore in surf.

Instead, she was readying herself for her wedding this winter to a boy in Rheden. She was working, this day, with her mother and her ladies, embroidering. There were skills a highborn lady was expected to bring to her marriage house.

By contrast to both of these, King Aeldred's younger daughter saw the world in a very different way, although this, too, had been suffering change, moment by moment, through these last, late days of summer.

Right now, with a pulsing pain behind her eyes and images impinging, erratic and uncontrollable like sparks from a fire, Kendra knew only that she needed to find the Cyngael cleric again, to tell him something important.

He wasn't at the royal chapel or the smaller one where he'd been before. She was in real distress. The sunlight, late in the day, forced her to screen her eyes. It occurred to her to wonder if this was what happened to her father when his fever took him, but she wasn't warm or faint. Only hurting, and with a terrifying, impossible awareness of fighting in the west, and a sword in her mind, flashing and going, and coming again, over and over.

It was her brother who found Ceinion for her. Gareth, summoned by a messenger, had taken one frightened look at Kendra sitting on a bench in the small chapel (unable to go back into the light, just yet) and had gone running, shouting for others to join him in the search. He came back (she wasn't sure how much time had passed) and led her by the elbow through the streets to the bright (too bright), airy room her father had had made for the clerics who were transcribing manuscripts for him. She'd kept her eyes closed, let Gareth guide her.

The king was there, among the working scribes, and Ceinion was with him, blessedly. Kendra walked in, one hand held by her brother, the other to her eyes, and she stopped, desperately unsure of how to proceed with her father here.

"Father. My lord high cleric." She managed that much, then stopped.

Ceinion looked at her, stood quickly. Could be seen to make a decision of his own. "Prince Gareth, of a kindness will you have a servant bring the brown leather purse from my rooms? Your sister needs a remedy I can offer her."

"I'll get it myself," said Gareth, and hurried out the door. Ceinion spoke a quiet word. The three scribes stood up at their desks, bowed to the king, and went out past Kendra.

Her father was still here.

"My lady," said Ceinion, "is this more of that matter of which we spoke before?"

She hesitated, in pain, in something more than pain. They burned witches, for heresy. She looked at her father. And heard Ceinion of Llywerth say, gravely, changing the way of things one more time, "There is no transgression here. Your royal father also knows the world of which you speak."

Kendra's mouth fell open. Aeldred had also stood, looking from one to the other of them. He was pale, but thoughtful, calm. Kendra felt as if she were going to fall down.

"Child," said her father, "it is all right. Tell me what you are seeing from the half-world now."

She didn't fall. She was spared that shame. They helped her to a high stool where a cleric had been working. The manuscript in front of her on the tilted surface of the desk had a gloriously coloured initial capital, half a page in height: the letter «G» with a griffin arched along its curve. The word it began, Kendra saw, was Glory.

She said, as clearly, as carefully as she could, "They are through the spirit wood. Or the Cyngael prince, Alun ab Owyn, is. He's the one I can… see. There are blades drawn, there is fighting."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

"Athelbert?"

She shook her head. The movement hurt. "I don't… see him, but I never did. Only the Cyngael, and I don't know why."

"Why should we understand?" her father said after a moment, gentle as rain. He looked at Ceinion, and then back at her. "Child, forgive me. This comes to you from me, I believe. You have the gift or curse I carry, to see that which most of us are spared. Kendra, there is no sin or failing in you."

"Nor in you, then, my lord," said Ceinion firmly, "if that is true, and I believe it is. Nor need you punish yourself for it. There are purposes we do not understand, as you say. Good, and the will of the god, are served in different guises."