Guy Gavriel Kay - The Last Light of the Sun

No moons tonight. A gift she has been given, this mortal death in the dark, and so beautiful.

She looks around, sees no one near, goes out then from that farmyard, from iron and mortals, living and dead, springing over the fence, up the slope, stronger as she leaves blades and armour behind. She pauses at the crest of the ridge to look back down. She always looks when near to them. Drawn to this other, mortal half of the world. It happens among the Ride, she isn’t the only one. There are stories told.

The auras below are brighter than torches for her: anger, grief, fear. She finds all of these, takes them in, tries to distill them and comprehend. She looks down from the same beech tree as before, fingers upon it, as before. Two very big men in the midst of a ring; one holding iron to the other, who came bursting out of the small structure, roaring for a weapon. It frightened her, the red heat in that voice. But he was seen by the raider before his own men could reach him, and pinned by a sword to the wall. Not killed. She was not sure why, at first, but now she sees. Or thinks she does: other men arrive, freeze like carvings, then more come, gather, and are there now, like stone, torchlight around two men.

One of the two is afraid, but not the one she would have thought. She doesn’t understand mortals well at all. Another world, they live in.

It is quiet now, the battle over except for this, and one other thing they will not know, down below. She listens. Has always liked to listen, and watch. Trying to understand.

“Understand me,” the Erling said again, in his own tongue. “I kill him if anyone moves!”

“Then do it!” snapped Brynn ap Hywll. He was barefoot in the grass, only a grey undertunic covering his belly and heavy thighs. Another man would have looked ridiculous, Ceinion thought. Not Brynn, even with a sword to him and the Erling’s left hand bunching his tunic tightly from behind.

“I want a horse and an oath to your god that I will be allowed passage to our ships. Swear it or he dies!” The voice was high, almost shrill.

“One horse? Pah! A dozen men you led are standing here! You stain the earth with your breathing.” Brynn was quivering with rage.

“Twelve horses! I want twelve horses! Or he dies!”

Brynn roared again. “No one swear that oath! No one dare! ”

“I will kill him!” the Erling screamed. His hands were shaking, Ceinion saw. “I am the grandson of Siggur Volganson!”

“Then do it!” Brynn howled back. “You castrate coward! Do it!”

“No!” said Ceinion. He stepped forward into the ring of light. “No! My friend, be silent, in Jad’s name. You do not have permission to leave us!”

“Ceinion! Don’t swear that oath! Do not!”

“I will swear it. You are needed.”

“He won’t do it. He’s a coward. Kill me and die with me, Erling! Go to your gods. Your grandfather would have gutted me like a fish by now! He’d have ripped me open.” There was a white-hot, spitting fury in his voice, near to madness.

“You killed him!” the Erling snarled.

“I did! I did! I chopped off his arms and cut his chest open and ate his bloody heart and laughed! So carve me now and let them do the same to you!”

Ceinion closed his eyes. Opened them. “This must not be. Erling, hear me! I am high cleric of the Cyngael. Hear me! I swear by holiest Jad of the Sun—”

“No!” roared Brynn. “Ceinion, I forbid—”

“—that no harm will come to you when you release—”

“No!”

“—this man, and that you will be allowed—”

The small door to the outbuilding—it was the brewhouse—banged open, right behind the two men. The Erling startled like a nervous horse, looked frantically back over his shoulder, swore.

Died. Brynn ap Hywll, in the moment his captor half turned, hammered an elbow viciously backwards and up into the other man’s unprotected face beneath the nosepiece, smashing his mouth open. He twisted hard away from the sword thrust that followed. It raked blood from his side, no more than that. He stepped back quickly, turned …

“Here!”

Ceinion saw a sword arcing through the torchlight. Something beautiful in that flight, something terrible. Alun ab Owyn’s blade was caught by Brynn at the hilt. Ceinion saw his old friend smile then, a grey wolf in winter, at the Cadyri prince who had thrown it. I ate his heart .

He hadn’t. Might have done, though, the way he’d been that day. Ceinion remembered that fight—against this one’s grand father. A meeting of giants, crashing together on a blood-slick morning battlefield by the sea. In battle this fury happened to Brynn, the way it did to the Erlings of Ingavin’s bear cult: a madness of war, claiming a soul. If you became what you fought, what were you? Not the night for that thought. Not here, good men dead in the dark farmyard.

“He swore an oath!” the Erling bubbled, spitting teeth. Blood in the broken mouth.

“Jad curse you,” said Brynn. “My people died here. And my guests. Rot your ugly soul!” He moved, barefoot, half-naked. The Cadyri blade in his hand flicked right. The Erling moved to block it. The younger man wore armour, was big, rangy, in his prime.

Had been. The annihilating backhand blow swept down like a falling of rocks from a mountain height, crashing through his late parry, biting so deeply into his neck between helmet and breastplate that Brynn had to plant a foot on the fallen man, after, to lever and jerk it out.

He stood back, looked around slowly, flexing his neck and shoulder muscles, a bear in a circle of fire. No one moved, or said a word. Brynn shook his head, as if to clear it, to release fury, come back to himself. He turned to the door of the brewhouse. A girl stood there, in an unbelted tunic, flushing in the torchlight, her dark hair loose, for bed. For being bedded. Brynn looked at her.

“That was bravely done,” he said, quietly. “Let all men know it.”

She bit at her lower lip, was trembling. Ceinion was careful not to look to where Enid stood beside her daughter. Brynn turned around, took a step towards him, then another. Stopped squarely in front of the cleric, feet planted wide on his own soil.

“I’d never have forgiven you,” he said, after a moment.

Ceinion met that gaze. “You’d have been alive to not forgive me. I spoke truth: you do not have leave to go from us. You are needed still.”

Brynn was breathing hard, the coursing rage not yet gone from him, the big chest heaving, not from exertion but from the force of his anger. He looked at the young Cadyri behind Ceinion. Gestured with the blade.

“I thank you for this,” he said. “You were quicker than my own men.”

Owyn’s son said, “No thanks need be. At least my sword is blooded, though by another. I did nothing at all tonight but play a harp.”

Brynn looked down at him a moment from his great height. He was bleeding from the right side, Ceinion saw, the tunic ripped open there; he didn’t seem aware of it. Brynn glanced away into the shadows of the farmyard, west of them. The cattle were still lowing on the other side in their pen. “Your brother’s dead?”

Alun nodded his head, stiffly.

“Shame upon my life,” said Brynn ap Hywll. “This was a guest in my house.”

Alun made no reply. His own breathing was shallow, by contrast, constricted. Ceinion thought that he needed to be given wine, urgently. Oblivion for a night. Prayer could come after, in the morning with the god’s light.

Brynn bent down, wiped both sides of the blade on the black grass, handed it back to Alun. He turned towards the brewhouse. “I need clothing,” he said. “All of you, we will deal with …”