"We are three," the whisper came to him. "Mother, Maid—and me." He thrust himself for the bedside. A grip caught his arm, a band like ice, burning chill that would not yield. He reached for that grip and met a hand soft-fleshed as age itself, frail-seeming, and strong. A like grip closed on the other arm, and the cold went inward, numbing breath, numbing heart, which beat in painful flutterings.

" Man," the voice whispered, a breath of ice across his face, driving him backward and down. " Man. . . that you did not touch Willow in the marsh; well done; that you did not force my daughter; again well done; but that you forced a kiss of my daughter . . . nowI repay: what's for one . . . is for all, like and like, Mother, Maid, and me."

He was drowning . . . felt a touch on his lips, an embrace about his limbs, and it was ice stealing inward. "No," he said, despairing. The white face came back to him, that despair, that flung itself from the rocks, cursing him. "No," he said again, colder still—Willow's face, and the starving children, the hollow-eyed, hollow-hearted children the war had made. A third time: " No." It was the lady crying out, her outrage at a world that took no regard of her, where force alone availed; and himself, his, that comrades met and killed each other, and no force could mend what was and what had been. He had no strength now, none, only the anger and the grief, alone. His shoulders struck the wooden floor; he sprawled, his senses beginning to leave him as his sight had done, and tears were freezing on his lashes, the moisture freezing on his lips so that he could open neither, sightless, speechless in the dark, void of all protest. Sense went last. He was not aware for what might have been a long time; and then he felt again, wood beneath his naked back, perceived a light through his lids, but still he could not open his eyes. A shadow bent above him, breath stirred across his face; soft lips kissed one eyelid and then the other, and lastly his mouth.

He looked on Willow, who crouched by him in her shift, holding a lighted candle, her arm about her knees.

"It's day," said Willow. "There's just no window here." He dared no words. He rolled over and got up, ashamed in his nakedness, drew his clothing on under Willow's silent, dark-eyed stare. She had stood up. He walked for the door, turned the remembered way in haste down the creaking hall, through the low doorway and down the windings of the stairs in the dark—down into the main room of the keep, where wood moldered silver gray and cobwebs hung, the nests of spiders, fine spinnings in the daylight which sifted in through broken beams. His armor lay in the dust. He put it on, hands trembling, worked into the mail and did the buckles.

A step creaked on the stairs. He looked about. It was Wllow coming down. He seized up the sword and belted it about him, and looked again, where the Lady stood in Willow's place. The outside door gaped; the wood was gone. He ran for it, for the sunlight, around to the pen behind, where his horse cropped the green grass alone in a ramshackle enclosure, and his saddle and gear lay on the dewy ground. He saddled the horse in haste, climbed into the saddle and rode carefully past the keep, hearing the lowing of a cow at his back. That ceased. He blinked and Willow sat on a stone of the ruined wall, swinging her bare feet and waving at him. He spurred the horse past, reined back again with the feeling of something at his back. He looked to the doorway. The Lady stood there. She had a lily in her hair and her feet were bare. "Good journey," she wished him. "Farewell, sir knight."

He snapped the reins and rode quickly onto the road. A black, bent figure stood among the trees and brush on the far side of it, robed and hooded. The horse shied, trembling. Dubhan could see nothing but the robes, hoped for all the life that was in him that it would not look up, would not fling back the hood.

"Not yet," the voice came like the sighings of leaves. "You have years yet, sir knight." He cracked the reins and rode. The sunlight warmed him finally, and the birds sang, until the chill melted from his gut where it had lain. He looked back, and there was only the forest. When he had ridden a day, there was a village. He watered his horse there, and the townsfolk came shyly round him and asked the news. He told them about the war; and the king dead, and the duke; but they had never heard of either, and blinked and wondered among themselves. They gave him bread and ale, and grain for his horse, and he thanked them and rode away. On that day he hung the sword from his saddle and carried it no more.

On the next he took off the armor and stowed it away, let the breeze to his skin, and rode through lands widely farmed, where villages lay across the road, open and unfearing. They saw the weapons, the children of these villages, and asked him tales. He made up dragons and unicorns. The children smiled.

In time, so did he.

1985

OF LAW AND MAGIC

Between the Avenue of the Moon and the Avenue of Snow is a way named Fog; and the houses in this district are old and eclectic. The houses span centuries; they come slowly to respectability with the weathering of their brick and beams and their new paint into the brown conservatism and eccentricity of this district. Here is a house a mere three hundred years into its age, with the graceful towers that were the style of its day; here is another with the timbered construction of four hundred years ago; and a house of porches which were fashionable a mere one hundred years ago, pierced-wood lace which has weathered to a comfortable silver-brown; here is yet another of stone and brick, festooned with vines which try yearly to reach out to the wooden lace: but the owner has bought a spell to keep the peace, and the reaching tendrils continually turn back on themselves. The vines bloom in the spring with blue flowers and perfume the air, but a spell is on them, and the blue is silvered and muted and offends none of the neighbors with unseemly levity. The comfortable house next to the vines on the other side has a tiny yard and a little brick wall: children play there and climb the bricks and play mischievous games, tossing stolen flowers at passersby (and wickedly imagining they are poisoned blooms and that they cast spells instead of flowers. The children on this street are few and fey and very, very sly, choosing only strangers for their pranks: to trouble adult neighbors would not be wise.). There is a house of muted red brick; a house of river stone; a house of porches and a house of towers; but there is one house the eye tends to miss.

And near it and across the street by the brick wall the young woman in the cloak fends off a shower of silver-blue blossoms and glances up at the grinning wolf-faced children. Her hand is callused. Her dress is nondescript and plain, and her cloak is brown and shows years of wear. She clutches it together tightly about her skirts and shows the fey children a pinched, pale countenance, tangled brown curls within the hood, a long thin face like theirs, but they are freerunning wolves and she is a town-bred cur with the habit of being kicked. They are wolves and mercy never occurs to them, only prudence, and they plan wickedness and sport; one of them meditates trying a wee small spell.

But: "The lawyer's house," she says, looking up at them on their wall, all a-row like ornaments, their laps full of stolen vine branches. And their wolfish pupils dilate and contract in perfect time, and one of them bucks his bare knees up and another does, and the third, and the fourth points with a thin, muscled arm.

The house sits withdrawn from the street, a house of brick age-dulled and dark; a narrow house, a house of windows so old and clouded they drink the light in and cast none back; a house so plain and huge and ugly it might be some warehouse. Little sun gets to it in its slight retreat from the street; the alley beside it is bare dirt and dry dust on the few tilted paving stones. The porch is a mere retreat under the slanting eave of a black slate roof hardly blacker than the aged red brick; the front door is set between two age-hazed windows. This is a house without period, without age, without place among such aged finery, but it is large and (perhaps) very old, but its style is not after all (only perhaps; one could mistake or not remember)—the oldest: though it does suggest that the oldest may be, in comparison to it, far older of their kinds than one has thought. It is in all things vague. And it is a large house and a powerful house, so that in a sudden settling of things into true perspective, one has to realize that the lace-house and the vine-house and the house of the wall and the fey wolfish children are light and this is darkness, this is age, this is the reclusive house of the neighborhood, the silence and the mystery which the witch-children fear, the one house in whose alley they venture only with trepidation. But casual passersby never notice its dreadfulness. Only the neighbors and the children know; and now the woman knows, and clutches her cloak the tighter and leaves the witch-children silent on their wall. The wolf-eyed girl who thought of the spell sits by her playmates and congratulates herself that she was cautious in her spelling. She is only seven. She knows that she is talented and hopes to live to become a threat. And this woman in her poverty disturbs her, because this must be a witch, and witches ought to be greater and more formidable. The boy beside her is Sighted and feels a dimming of the day; hugs his arms about himself without feeling that he does it; while his brother edges closer to him. And the boy from the towered-house spits at the street below to break the luck when the woman has gone. None of them go back to their game. They sit in their row on their fence and watch, and draw suspicious stares from passing locals who wonder what mayhem the witch-children are contemplating today, legs a-dangle as they sit on the wall, not looking at each other but decidedly looking at something.