Guy Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

No one ever asked (no one was trusted so much), but the anger was there, each day, every night, listening for sounds that never came now from the empty pallet along the adjacent wall. And it was with her when she rose in darkness to dress and go past the bed where Elyn wasn't any more, to do the milking her sister used to do.

Her mother had wanted to take the pallet apart, make more space in the small hut. Meiri hadn't let her, though lately, as summer had turned towards harvest and autumn, a chill now some nights, she'd begun thinking she might do it herself one afternoon after work was done.

She'd choose a clear day, when flame and smoke could be seen a long way, and she'd burn the bedding on the sun-browned tor above the fields as a memorial. Not enough, no remotely adequate answer to loss and helpless fury, but what else was there?

Elyn hadn't been a noblewoman or a princess. There was no consecrated place in the vault of a sanctuary for her bones, no carved words above or image on stone, no harp songs. She wasn't Heledd or Arianrhod, lost and lamented. She'd been only a farmer's daughter in the wrong place one too-dark pre-dawn hour, raped and carved open by an Erling.

And what was there that a sister could make for her remembering? A song? Meiri didn't know music, or even how to write her own name. She was a girl, unmarried (no man to fight for her), living with her parents near the border between Llywerth and Arberth. What was she going to do? Take fierce and fell revenge? Intervene in some battle, strike a blow against Erlings?

In the event, she did do that. Sometimes, despite all the weight of likelihood, we can. It is a part of the mystery of the world and needs to be understood that way.

In an hour before sunrise at the end of that summer Meirion heard sounds, muffled in mist, to her right, as she made her way home along the worn, grassy path from the summer pasture.

The path ran parallel to the road from Llywerth, though to call it a road was somewhat to overstate. Roads weren't much a part of the Cyngael provinces. They cost a great deal in resources and labour, and if you made a road it was easier to be attacked along it. Better, times being what they were, to live with some difficulty of travel and not smooth the way for those who meant you ill.

The rough path south of her, running past their farm and the hamlet, was one of the main routes to and from the sea, however, cutting through a gap in the Dinfawr Hills to the west and continuing east below the woods along the north bank of the Aber.

That's why Elyn had died. People passed too near them all the time, going east and west. That's why Meirion stopped now and carefully, quietly, set down her neck yoke with the brimming pails on either side. She left it in the grass, stood a moment, listening.

Horse hooves, harness, creak of leather. Clink of iron. There was no good reason for armed horsemen to be on this path before sunrise. Her first thought was a cattle raid: Llywerth outlaws (or noblemen) crossing into Arberth. Her village tried to stay out of these affairs; they didn't have enough cattle (enough of anything) to be a target for raiders. Better to let them go by, both ways, know nothing or as little as possible if pursuit came after (either way) with questions asked.

She'd have gone quietly back along her own path, walking home with the morning milk, if she hadn't heard voices. She didn't understand the words—which was the point, of course. She would have, if these men had been from Llywerth. They weren't. They were speaking Erling, and Meiri's sister, fiercely loved, had been slain and defiled by one of them at the beginning of summer.

She didn't go home. Anger can channel fear sometimes, master it. Meiri knew this land as she knew the tangles of her own brown hair. She crouched down, leaving the milk behind in the path (a fox found it later in the day, drank its fill). In the greyness she moved towards the voices and the trail. After a bit she went on her belly among the grass and scrub and wriggled closer. She didn't know anything about how Erlings (or anyone else) arranged themselves on a march-and-ride, so it was good fortune more than anything else that no outriders were sweeping the scrub-land north of the trail. Much of what happens in a life turns on good fortune or bad, which unsettles as much as it does anything else.

What she saw, peering through brambles, was a company of Erlings, some horsed, more of them afoot, stopped to talk, barely visible in the darkness and not-yet-lifted fog. What she heard was "Brynnfell," twice, unmistakably, the name springing at her from snapped and snarled words that made no sense at all, over the hammering of her blood.

She knew what she needed to know. She started to wriggle backwards on knees and elbows. Heard something behind her. Froze where she was, not breathing. She didn't pray. Ought to have, of course, but was too bone-frightened.

The lone horseman continued moving, passing just behind where she lay. She heard him cut down beyond the bushes she'd been peering through and rejoin the company on the road. Any raiding party had outriders, especially in hostile country where you weren't sure of your way. A dog would have found her, but the Erlings had no dogs.

Meirion fought a desire to stay where she was, motionless, forever, or until they went away. She heard the riders dismount. The river was close here, just to the south. They might be stopping for water and food.

She wanted that.

Listening carefully, behind her as well now, she crawled backwards, regained her own path. Left the milk where it was and began to run. She knew where these raiders were going and what needed to be done. She wasn't certain if the men in the fields would listen to her. She was prepared to kill someone to make them do so.

She didn't have to. Sixteen farmers and farmhands, and ten-year-old Derwyn ap Hwyth, who never let himself be left behind, set off before the sun was fully up, running east to Brynnfell, taking the old track. That one stopped at their forest. It was a known and tamed wood, though, source of kindling and building logs, and there was a trail that would bring them out, eventually, near Brynn ap Hywll's farm.

Meirion's father, whose bad leg meant he couldn't keep up, took the one horse in the village and went north to Penavy. Found twelve men working by there. Said what needed to be said. They, too, went running, straight from the harvest fields, seizing whatever came to hand that was sharp and could be carried for a day and a night at speed.

Almost thirty men. Meirion's response. Not trained fighters, but hardy, knowing the land, and filled—each one of them—with anger bright and cold as a winter sun. This wasn't a vast invading fleet of dragon-prows from Erling lands. This was a raid, skulking through their land. They would fear the northmen, always, but they would not run from them.

It was crippled Ryce's daughter, his surviving daughter, who had come upon the raiders and carried—like a queen of legend—needful tidings back of where they were bound. A woman of the Cyngael, worthy of song. And they all knew, in the lands and villages around, what had been done to her sister.

They would reach Brynnfell half a day before the Erlings did.

The afternoon of the day she saw the raiders, Meirion—in a frenzy born of waiting—took Elyn's pallet apart. She began to carry the straw and bedding up the tor. Her mother and the other women saw what she was doing and set themselves to help, gathering wood, arranging it on the flat summit. All of them working, women walking up and down the hill. Late in the day, the sun westering and the last crescent of the blue moon rising (no moons at all tomorrow), they lit a bonfire there for Elyn. Only a girl. No one important at all, by any measure you might ever think to use.