Guy Gavriel Kay – The Last Light of the Sun (страница 13)

He did hesitate a moment, for all the old reasons, but then he stood up and came forward to where she sat and kissed her full upon the lips as she lifted her head, and despite his genuine fatigue he was aware of the beating of his heart and the swift presence of desire. He stepped back. Read her mischievous expression an instant before she moved a hand and touched his sex through the robe.

He gasped, heard her laugh as she withdrew her touch.

“Only exploring, Ceinion. Fear me not. No matter what you say to be kind, there will come a night when I can’t excite you any longer. One of these visits …”

“The night I die,” he said, and meant it.

She stopped laughing, made the sign of the sun disk, averting evil.

Or trying to. They heard a cry from outdoors. Through the window, as he quickly turned, Ceinion saw the arc of a thrown and burning brand.

Then he saw horsemen in the farmyard and screaming began.

ALUN THOUGHT HE’D SEEN his brother this way before, if not quite like this. Dai was restless, irritable, and afraid. Gryffeth, staking out the left side of the just-wide-enough bed, made the mistake of complaining about Dai’s pacing in the dark and received a blister-inducing torrent of profanity in return.

“That wasn’t called for,” Alun said.

Dai wheeled on him, and Alun, in the middle of the bed (having drawn the short straw), stared back at his brother’s straining, rigid outline through the darkness. “Come to bed, get some sleep. She’ll still be here in the morning.”

“What are you talking about?” Dai demanded.

Gryffeth, unwisely, snorted with laughter. Dai took a step towards him. Alun actually thought his brother might strike their cousin. This anger was the part that wasn’t quite as it had been before, whenever Dai had been preoccupied with a girl. That, and the fear.

“Doesn’t matter,” Alun said quickly. “Listen, if you can’t sleep, there’s sure to be dicing in the hall. Just don’t take all the money and don’t drink too much.”

“Why are you telling me what to do?”

“So we can get some rest,” Alun said mildly. “Go with Jad. Win something.”

Dai hesitated, a taut form across the room. Then, with another flung, distracted curse, he jerked the door open and went out.

“Wait,” Alun said quietly to Gryffeth. They waited, side by side in the bed.

The door swung open again.

Dai strode back in, crossed to his pack, grabbed his purse, and went back out.

“Now,” said Alun, “you can call him an idiot.”

“He’s an idiot,” Gryffeth said, with feeling, and turned over in bed.

Alun turned the other way, determined to try to sleep. It didn’t happen. The tapping at their door—and the woman’s voice from the corridor—came only moments later.

IT WAS OBVIOUS from Helda’s expression, and her darting glances at Rhiannon, that she was concerned. Their young cousin had thrown herself on her bed as soon as the four of them had returned from the hall to her chambers. She lay there, still in the green, belted gown, an extravagance of light blazing in the two rooms (with Meredd away, forever now, among the Daughters of Jad, Rhiannon had claimed the adjoining chamber for the other three women). She looked, if truth were told, genuinely unwell: feverish, bright-eyed.

Without a word spoken the three had resolved to humour her, and so nothing had been said in opposition to her immediately voiced demand for all the lights to be lit, or the next request, either.

Rania had the purest voice, in chapel and banquet hall, and Eirin the best memory. They’d gone off to the other room together, murmuring, and now returned through the connecting doorway, Eirin smiling, Rania biting her lip, as she always did before singing.

“I won’t do very well,” she said. “We only heard it once.”

“I know,” Rhiannon said, unusually mild, her voice at odds with her look. “But try.”

They had no harp here with them. Rania sang unaccompanied. It was well done, in truth, a different tone given by a woman’s voice in a quiet (too-bright) room, late at night, as compared to the same song heard in the hall as the sun was going down, when the younger son of Owyn ap Glynn had given it to them:

The halls of Arberth are dark tonight, No moons ride above. I will sing a while and be done.

The night is a hidden stranger, An enemy with a sword, Beasts in field and wood.

The stars look down on owl and wolf, All manner of living creature, While men sleep safe behind their walls.

The halls of Arberth are dark tonight, No moons ride above. I will sing a while and be done.

The first star is a longed-for promise, The deep night a waking dream, Darkness is a net for the heart’s desire.

The stars look down on lover and loved, All manner of delight, For some do not sleep in the night.

The riddle of the darkest hours Has ever and always been thus, And so it is we can say:

Needful as night’s end, Needful as night, By the holy blessed god, they are both true.

The halls of Arberth are dark tonight, No moons ride above. I have sung a while and I am done.

Rania looked down shyly when she finished. Eirin clapped her hands, beaming. Helda, older than the other three, sat quietly, a faraway look on her face. Rhiannon said, after a moment, “By the holy blessed god.”

It was unclear whether she was echoing the song, or speaking from the heart … or whether both of these were true.

They looked at her.

“What is happening to me?” Rhiannon said, in a small voice.

The others turned to Helda, who had been married and widowed. She said, gently, “You want a man, and it is consuming you. It passes, my dear. It really does.”

“Do you think?” said Rhiannon.

And none of them would ever have matched this voice to the tones of the one who normally controlled them all—the three of them, her sisters, all the young women of household and kin—the way her father commanded his warband.

It might have been amusing, it should have been, but the change cut too deeply, and she looked disturbingly unwell.

“I’m going to get you wine.” Eirin rose.

Rhiannon shook her head. Her green cap slipped off. “I don’t need wine.”

“Yes, you do,” said Helda. “Go, Eirin.”

“No,” said the girl on the bed, again. “That isn’t what I need.”

“You can’t have what you need,” Helda said, walking over to the bed, amusement in her voice, after all. “Eirin, a better thought. Go to the kitchen and have them make an infusion, the one for when we can’t sleep. We’ll all have some.” She smiled at the other three, ten years younger than she was. “Too many men in the house tonight.”

“Is it too late? Could we have him come here?”

“What? The singer?” Helda lifted her eyebrows.

Rhiannon nodded, her eyes beseeching. It was astonishing. She was pleading, not giving a command.

Helda considered it. She wasn’t sleepy at all, herself. “Not alone,” she said finally. “With his brother and the other Cadyri.”

“But I don’t need the other two,” Rhiannon said, a hint of herself again.

“You can’t have what you need,” Helda said again.

Rania took a candle and went for the infusion; Eirin, bolder, was sent to bring the three men. Rhiannon sat up in the bed, felt her own cheeks with the backs of her hands, then rose and went to the window and opened it—against all the best counsel—to let the breeze cool her, if only a little.

“Do I look all right?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Helda, maddeningly.

“I feel faint.”

“I know.”

“I never feel this way.”

“I know,” said Helda. “It passes.”

“Will they be here soon?”

ALUN DRESSED AT SPEED and went to find Dai in the banquet hall, leaving Gryffeth in the corridor with the girl and the candle. Neither of them seemed to mind. They could have gone to the women’s rooms around the corner and waited there, but they didn’t seem inclined to do that.