"So we wait till they…?"

"We don't know what this is," Alun said.

"You imagine they're bringing pillows for our weary heads?" Athelbert snapped.

"I have no idea what to imagine. I can only—"

A never-finished thought, that one. Speech can be rendered meaningless sometimes, the sought-after clarity of words. The fierce white light that burst from the pond, shattering darkness like glass, made all three of them throw hands before their eyes and cry aloud.

They were blinded, as unable to see as they had been in the blackness. Too much light, too little light: the same consequence. They were men in a place where they ought not to have been. The sounds in the glade were their own cries, fading in the charged air, the horses' neighing, thrashing of hooves. Nothing from the dog now, no noise at all from the green creatures that had encircled them, or from whatever had made that annihilating flare of light, which was also gone now. It was black again.

Alun, standing rigid and afraid, eyes clenched shut in pain, caught a scent, heard a rustling. A hand claimed his. Then a voice at his ear, music, scarcely a breath, "Drop your iron. Please. Come. I must get away from it. The spruaugh are gone."

Fumbling, he let fall his sword and belt, let her lead him, his senses dazzled, eyes useless, heart painful, too large for his chest.

"Wait! I… can't leave the others," he stammered, after they'd gone a little distance from the glade.

"Why?" she said, but she did stop.

He'd known she would say that. They were impossibly different, the two of them, beyond his power to even nearly comprehend. The scent of her was intoxicating. His knees felt weak, her touch conjured a kind of madness. She had come for him.

"I won't leave the others," he corrected. There were flashes and spirals of light in his field of vision. It was painful when he opened his eyes. He still couldn't see. "What… what were…?"

"Spruaugh." He could hear disgust in her voice, could imagine her hair changing colour as she spoke, but he still couldn't see. It occurred to him to be afraid again, to wonder if he would be forever blinded by that shattering flash, but even with the thought came the first hints of returning vision. She was a spilling light beside him.

"What are…?"

"We don't know. Or I don't. The queen might. They are mostly in this forest. A few come into our small one, linger near us, but not often. They are cold and ugly, soulless, without grace.

They try, sometimes, to make the queen attend to them, flying to her with tales when we do wrong. But mostly they stay away from where we are, in here."

"Are they dangerous?"

"For you? Everything is dangerous here. You should not have come."

"I know that. There was no choice." He could almost see her. Her hair was an amber glow.

"No choice?" She laughed, rippling.

He said, "Did you feel you had a choice when you rescued me?" It was as if they had to teach each other how the world was made, or seen.

A silence, as she considered. "Is that… what you meant?"

He nodded. She was still holding his hand. Her fingers were cool. He brought them to his lips. She traced the outline of his mouth. Amid everything, after everything, here was desire. And wonder. She had come.

"What was it? Before them. The thing that—"

Fingers flat against his mouth, pressing. "We do not name it, for fear it will answer to the name. There is a reason why your people do not come here, why we almost never do. That one, not the spruaugh. It is older than we are."

He was silent for a time. Her hand was moving again, tracing his face. "I don't know why we're alive," he said.

"Nor do I." Matter-of-factly, a simple truth. "One of you did make an offering."

"The Erling. Thorkell. His hammer, yes."

She said nothing, though he thought she was about to. Instead, she stepped nearer, rose upon her toes, and kissed him on the lips, tasting of moonlight, though it was dark where they stood, except for her. The blue moon outside, above, shining over his own lands, hers, over the seas. He brought his hands up, touched her hair. He could see the small, shining impossibility of her. A faerie in his arms.

He said, "Will we die here?"

"You think I can know what will come?"

"I know that I can't."

She smiled. "I can keep the spruaugh from you."

"Can you guide us? To Brynnfell?"

"That is where you are going?"

"The Erlings are, we think. Another raid."

She made a face, distaste more than anything else. Offended rather than fearful or dismayed. Iron and blood, near to their small wood and pool. And, truly, why should the deaths of mortal men cause a spirit such as this dismay, Alun thought.

Then he had another thought. Before he could back away from it he said, "You could go ahead? Warn them? Brynn has seen you. He might… come up the slope, if you were there again."

Brynn had been there with him after the battle. And in that pool in the wood when he was young. He might fight his visions of the spirit world, but surely, surely he would not deny her if she came to him.

She stepped back. Her hair amber again, soft light among tall trees. "I cannot do that and guard you."

"I know," Alun said.

"Or guide."

He nodded. "I know. We are hoping that Cafall can." "The dog? He might. It is many days for you."

"Five or six, we thought."

"Perhaps."

"And you can be there…"

"Sooner than that."

"Will you?"

She was so small, delicate as spray from a waterfall. He could see her chasing a thought, her hair altering as she did, dark, then bright again. She smiled. "I might grieve for you. The way mortals do. I may start to understand."

He swallowed, with sudden difficulty. "I… we will hope not to die here. But there are many people at risk. You saw what happened the last time they came."

She nodded, gravely. "This is what you wish?"

It was what he needed. Wishes were another thing. He said, "It will be a gift, if you do this."

So still a place, where they were. There ought to have been more noises in a wood at night, the pad of the animals that hunted now, scurry of those that moved along branches, between roots, fleeing. It was silent. Perhaps the light of her, he thought… steering the creatures of the forest away.

She said, serious as children could sometimes be, "You will have taught me sorrow."

"Will you call it a gift?" He remembered what she'd said the night before.

She bit her lip. "I do not know. But I will go home to the hill above Brynnfell and try to tell him there are men coming, from the sea. How do you… how do mortals say farewell?"

He cleared his throat. "Many different ways." He bent, with all the grace he could command, and kissed her on each cheek, and then upon the mouth. "I would not have thought my life would offer such a gift as you."

She looked, he thought, surprised. After a moment, she said, "Stay with the dog."

She turned, was moving away, carrying brightness and music. He said, in a panic, sudden and too loud, startling them both, "Wait. I don't know your name."

She smiled. "Neither do I," she said, and went.

Darkness rushed back in her wake. The glade and pond were not far away. Alun made his way there. Called out as he approached, so as not to startle them. Cafall met him at the clearing's edge.

Both men were standing.

"Do we know what that was?" Thorkell asked. "The light?"

"Another spirit," Alun said. "This one a friend. She drove them away with it. I don't think… we can't stay here. I believe we need to keep moving."

"Tsk. And here I was, imagining you'd gone to fetch those pillows for our heads," said Athelbert.

"Sorry. Dropped them on the way back," Alun replied.

"Dropped your sword and belt, too," said the Anglcyn prince. "Here they are." Alun took both, buckled the belt, adjusted the hang of his sword.