The Hedge of Mist

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  I was treading warily now, for the ritual questions were as thick on this ground as the pine needles, and needed careful answering.

  "I have not yet been told it. But the Prince Avallac’h, he who dwelled until lately at Inisguidrin, bade me seek it and take it when I found it. If there is a use for it, be sure I will fill it as I am so given to do."

  "No doubt." The corrigaun was silent for a moment, his eyes on me; then his glance shifted twice, first to the hound, then to the briarbrae behind him. "That which you seek is within. Go and fetch it out, and it is yours. Not yours, but yours. Do you take my meaning?"

  "Aye," I said shortly, too annoyed to be ritualistically diplomatic—if we once began to bandy hidden meanings about, we should be here until the snows flew—and any road, he was laughing again, no doubt at me.

  He saw this, and shook his head. "Nay, take no offense! You have done more than well to have found your way here at all. To pass the Siennega of ill repute; to speak with the Keeper, who shall not be named here again; to come by Shadow Valley and the false corvaen; to have withstood the temptation of Joyful Valley and to have countered the dark power who goes before you into the east, and all haps of the questing—

  But I was a bit behind him. "The dark power? You mean Marguessan? Came she here?"

  The corrigaun nodded, eyes now like black flints. "Came, aye, but came away empty-handed. Now, seek what you—and she—did come for." He gestured into the depths of the brae with a royal courtesy, as if he ushered me into a hall of the presence. "In there. I will wait upon your return."

  He seemed as he spoke to fade from my view, though with my sidesight I could still see him, standing motionless off to one side of the clearing. Then I turned my full attention to the thicket before me.

  I could see no way in. It was more than a thicket: a mass of briars, woody vines crossed and woven together like our famous Keltic knotwork, and every crossing was bossed with a thorn the length of my thumb, dull bronze in color and sharp as a brooch-point.

  I drew a deep calming breath in the way I had been taught, resigning myself to death by shredding, when again I felt the cold touch of a hound’s nose in my palm. I looked down—so tall was the beast that I met her grave golden gaze somewhere around my waist—and then flinched uncontrollably, as she bared her gleaming fangs. But this time she only mouthed my hand in the great jaws, as delicately as if she were carrying a puppy by its scruff, and tugged so that I must move forward with her into the brae.

  And where the hound led me, the briars gave way for us to pass by unshredded. Not so much as one thorn-hook snagged on my tunic or scratched the deerhound’s wiry black coat; as for the vines themselves, they had become of a sudden as pliant as ivy tendrils in spring.

  I do not know how deep in we went, the magic hound and I; it had been dark beneath the trees, and was darker still amid the briarbrush. But all at once, in the thickest, thorniest heart of the tangle, something gleamed before me like a ruby, like a drop of blood in sunlight, and I saw that it was a flower.

  Why ‘laughing’?, I heard myself wondering far away, and not for the first time; for there was naught mirthful about this bloom. Very fair it was, a perfect wild rose, its petals opening out but its secret heart still tightly furled. I looked at it, then searched carefully around, lest there should be some other flower and I in my haste pluck the wrong one. But nay; there was only the one, and I reached out a hand for it…and was instantly nipped on the other hand yet again by the hound at my side. I opened my mouth to roar a protest—what in all the hells had I done to merit that?—but my jaw remained well agape as out of the close air words came to my ears.

  "Ask first, and thank it."

  I stared wildly in all possible directions, but saw no one who might have uttered so much as a syllable that I could have heard here deep inside the briars. Then, as the words were repeated, a little impatient snap to them now, I suddenly understood. It was the hound who had spoken.

  Well, my methryn did not raise a stupid Tal-bach; slow I might be at times, but on the whole it did not take a house to fall on me… And also I recognized at once the rightness of the command I had been so strangely given.

  So I bowed to the flower, and did not feel the least littlest bit embarrassed to do so; I begged its aid in my quest as gravely as if it had been some armed champion I besought to fight for me—and perhaps in its own way it was just that. I thanked it for allowing itself to be employed in such wise; and then gently, very gently, I broke its stem from the thorned branch where it had grown and waited who could tell how long. I dared not look at the hound.

  At once the darkness lifted, and sunlight streamed down upon me as I stood there stupid as an owl with the rose in my fingers. The briars grew on a sudden lush and thick with a flush of green, supple as willow-wands, and rose blooms were thick on all sides. Roses without thorns…

  A path stood open back to the clearing, and the hound was already loping down it. I followed after more decorously, for I was a bit dazed by now, as you might well expect, and in a few moments came again to where the corrigaun had stood. But he too was changed.

  The flaming sword was gone now, and he was no more dwarrow but a flame himself, white and gold and tall as a spear. For one glad moment I thought that it was Gwyn come to me, Gwyn son of Nudd whom I dare to call my friend; but when I lifted my dazzled eyes to his face I saw that he was not. Though surely of my friend’s folk… Tall he was, dark gold of hair and sea-gray of eye.

  "I am Allyn son of Midna," said the Sidhe lord then, and I could see through the silver light that mantled him that he was smiling. "Gwyn who shall be king did set me here to guard the Rose. He had a thought it would be you, Pen-bardd, who would win it, and wished to have a friend, even if one only by remove, here to greet you and see all was done properly."

  I bowed deeply and made some courteous speech of reply, but I was in truth no more than one enormous many-aspected question, and I felt that much was owed me (felt rightly or no, is not the point), and so I scrupled no whit in asking.

  "But why, lord? What shall I do with it? Where must I take it? Why is it named the laughing flower, to me it seems nothing to smile about? What purpose to it? And that stag I must hunt, and what of the others—"

  He raised a hand in protest, laughing now. "Peace, peace! All in very good time, I promise you. But I will say this: As to what you must now do, with the precious thing you bear, you must bring it with you to the Castle of the Cup, Caervanogue where it stands upon the Dragonsea, and there you shall give it into the Keeper’s own hands. Its nature shall there be made clear, and its name explained, and its purpose fulfilled—to your personal joy. And as to the White Hart of the Mountain, you already have your guide." He nodded at the black hound, who was sitting a few feet off looking very proud of herself.

  I still had goleor of questions to be asked, but Allyn son of Midna did not seem one to be pressed; and as I watched he drew himself into himself—it is a hard thing to explain—and I yearned toward him in protest.

  "Ah, nay, do not go, not yet! It is true, then, that the corrigauns are but the Sidhe-folk in other garb? Tell me that only, of your courtesy, before you leave!"

  The light that had cloaked him—Allyn son of Midna—was beginning to grow blinding bright from within itself, as a cloud will when the sun that has run behind it is about to break from the veiling mist.

  "For that you are friend to my folk, aye," said the brightness, and even now I could hear the smile. "The answer is aye and nay both. It might be so, but it might also be that we choose to put on dwarrow-shape, as you might choose between leinne according as to your whim on such and such a day. But whether that makes us one or the other—you must tell us."

  With that Allyn mhic Midna was gone. Typical! I reflected with no small bitterness; well was it said ‘Seek not the Sidhe for plain speaking’! Whoever had first said so—probably in as fierce a frustration then as I now—did not know the half of it… and, I conceded with even more rue, no more did I.


  But it seemed that Allyn had not yet gone altogether, for as I stood there thinking these hard thoughts I heard his voice ring clear, from the place where he had been.

  "Taliesin. Go now. Bring the flower east. He Who Frees the Waters shall have a need for it. Go."

  Then the light was gone for truth, and the wind with it, and the sun ran back behind the blue hills beyond the fir-wood. I stood a moment longer, then carefully folded the rose into a small soft leather pouch, tucked the pouch beneath my leinna, where the gold hawk’s feather held the true plume within, and went to find my horses.

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  Now begins the most difficult part to tell of, after, that was of all my questing; and the most glorious also.

  I was riding hard, following the black hound through wide rolling desolate upland valleys forested sparsely with oak and beech and birch. We were hunting the white hart of the Bhan-reann-ruadh, the ghostly stag; and, let me tell you, my mind was no whit easier on that than formerly, for all Allyn of the Sidhe’s words of heartening. True, now that I had those words, could add their weight to Red Star Woman’s geisa—and had I not already partly fulfilled those, by stealing of the hound that ran before me?—it seemed somehow more correct. And any road, it was not as if I did this thing unbidden, or out of mere whim: Allyn had companioned Gwyn and Birogue to Caerdroia, to bring the word of the Cup’s loss to Gwen and Artos, when I myself had failed to bring that word from Glenshee. Nay; Allyn Midna’s son was part of this coil as surely as was I or any other quester, and the road we went was a right one.

  Well, for the most part. I glanced back at Gwain’s bay mare following contentedly after; but the thought of her dead and vanished master was never far from my mind. I faced forward again with a sigh. With the Cup’s finding, maybe, that wrong too could be righted… But the remembering of Gwyn and Birogue comforted me a somewhatly; always those two of the Shining Folk seemed to turn up at my life’s most crucial moments. Oh aye, they came at good times too, of course: It was they had wedded me to my beloved Guenna, and when our Gerrans was born they had come to his saining, honoring him and us and the rite with their presence and blessings, bringing rich gifts from under the hill, to stand as faerie godsparents to our son.

  But that thought led also, inevitably, to thought of Merlynn Llwyd, and how I had last beheld him. If we hoped for any help beyond our own in this thing, save that of the Goddess Herself, surely it was Merlynn’s that we had all longed for in our hearts, though we knew in our cold clear brains, well enough, that we should never have it; at least, not just now. For that promised future, when my much-loved teacher should be among us again, was far distant, but our need was here, and hard upon us.

  I made camp that night on the edge of a nameless plain bordered with trees. The weather was turning colder as the year turned; even for those of us who rode on quest, the seasons could not be slowed altogether. Tonight there was a blue mist rising above the rowans and wychelms that formed a straggling line against the wind. The Moon Wolf was out on white Argialla, that ring of glittering ice round the moon that heralds hard weather, though Tara’s other satellite, red Bellendain, was not yet up; and from the trees behind me I could hear the high anxious call of the gabhairinreo, the little goat of the frost, as she gathered her new-fledged family to fly south before the snows.

  Nothing happened in the night, save that I bolted awake once under my sheepskins to hear what seemed a flight of spears passing overhead—sshhaa! isshhaa!—but when I looked up there was nothing and no one between me and the cold majesty of the autumn stars. There strode Caomai, the Armed King, over the western horizon, with the Ellwand, the six stars of his baldric, glowing their astonishing bitter blue; above my head trailed misty gold Llenaur, the Lady of Heaven’s Mantle. Over in their pickets, my horses dozed peacefully on their feet, both Feldore and Gwain’s bay mare, whom (not knowing her right name) I had taken to calling Rylan, after a horse Gweniver had loved in her girlhood. In the dim light from the shuttered quartz-hearth, I could see the black hound’s eyes gleam red.

  In the early morning I rose and made some shakla to take off chill, and while waiting for it to heat I looked out over the lands around. It was almost a desert place I saw before me: but a cold desert, a basalt plain that rolled for twenty miles or more to the foot of a gigantic mountain rising from the valley floor like a dark crenelated wall, a towering rampart flinging itself skyward, perhaps seven thousand feet straight up.

  But our way did not lead there, for no sooner was I in the saddle when the black hound, having accepted her share of breakfast fare as little more than her right and proper due, bounded ahead of me, ever to the east, across the sea of bare basalt.

  Toward noon we came to one of the few landmarks in all that featureless trackless waste: a small cairn of rough-hewn stones that marked a well, with a bent branch atop it for bucket-winch. And I gazed at it in wonder, for I knew it to be Saint Clears’s Well, a sacred spring called up out of the stone desert by a holy hermit of old. Most folk in Keltia thought it to be a faery-story only, holding that there never was such a place, or even such a saint. But as Druid I knew better on both counts: Not only had there been the holy Clears, but he had called two springs bubbling up in the Goddess’s name. Red and white they were: the white clean and cold and pure, for simple slaking of thirst; and the red, tinted to its startling ruddiness by (it was said) the saint’s own blood, for healing. Wondrous powers of the miraculous were attributed to the rust-colored water; but too many folk these days thought such a marvel could not be true—as if truth and miracle could not exist side by side in the same thing.

  As I say, I had been better taught, though even I had never thought to see the well of Saint Clears with my own eyes. For the double spring was believed to mark the farthest northeastward anyone had ever gone in the uncharted reaches of the Northwest Continent. Even Edeyrn and his Ravens had never come this way in their unclean pillagings; even Athyn on her Long Hunt, Raighne in her wanderings, Brendan in his explorations, none of these had been this way. And yet here a great scholar and saint had chosen to spend his days, none knew why; it was still a mystery.

  I drew of the white delicious water enough to drench my horses and myself, then filled up all the waterbags, then had another long drink of the cold spring. I knew by my very arrival here that my way lay easter still, still onward. And the others? I wondered. What of their road? Had they come this way? Or was this easting mine alone?

  But I could not pass so sanctified a place without a pause for prayer—a prayer for Arthur back at Caerdroia as much as for us who rode on quest—and to speak to the spirit of the well’s guardian, and to fill a small crystal bottle with the ruby water that was held to have such healing powers, aye, even in the teeth of death itself. Or so at least Saint Clears promised, to any who took from his fountain in the proper spirit… So I drank yet again, a libation from the Fionn-uisge, Phoenix, the White Spring; and took of the waters of Uisge-ruadh, Iscaroe, the Red Spring. Thinking all the while of Gwain my kinsman, and of how perhaps it was still not too late to restore him, could I only find his body, and how thereby I might yet have forgiveness for my sin of kinslaying.

  So I spoke there in the cold desert silence to the saint of the spring, and to the Powers he had so well served, giving thanks for the twin benisons of the waters, speaking his name to the Goddess; and rode on ever east.

  That night toward sunset I had for the first time a glimpse of the quarry we hunted. All the west was aflame behind me, and all the east a huge blue bowl before, when suddenly fled across the middle distance the great white stag, the hart with the collar of gold about his throat. He shone like a flame himself in the flying light, blue-white against the oncoming dusk, and moved like a footless ghost over the darkling plain. As he crossed before us, he slowed and halted, one strong slim foreleg slightly raised in an attitude of heraldic grace, and turned his head to us.

  Across the darkening distance the stag and I looked long
upon each other, and I saw for the first time that he bore a great clear jewel between his mighty spread of antlers, a jewel that caught the sunset light and broke it into a million sparkling flashes and flung them all back at me, so that I blinked helplessly; and when I opened my dazzled eyes again the hart was gone.

  The black deerhound gave a small eager whine from where she stood by Rylan’s forelegs; she was not looking after her declared quarry but up at me, and her golden eyes gleaming in the dusk so unmanned me in that instant that Feldore actually leaped sidewise his own length, as if in battle, so sudden and so hard was the jerk of my leg against his girth. Mighty Mother! That is no dog! I avowed fervently and silently, behind deep shields. What she was, I knew not—not yet, any road—but if she proved in the end to be a mere hound with rather oddly colored eyes, hear me Horned Lord, I would eat my own toes…

  We had sight of the stag again at dawn the next morning—he was poised on the edge of a small pinewood, precisely as if he well intended to be seen, ghostly and visible against the dark trunks of the trees—and then we lost his track all the long chilly day. I was nodding in the saddle, huddling inside my sheepskin cloak, a little dull with fatigue and the cold. It had turned blustery, though the sky stayed clear and bright, and the fallen leaves were seething along the ground like the seidean-sidhe, the faerie whirlwind that comes when the Sidhe do ride among mortal woods and fields.

  And then he was there, the white hart in his splendor, his gold collar shining in the first rays of the sunset, the jewel alight amid his giant rack. I cried aloud to see him, and he whisked himself about and ran before us, heading toward a thick oakwood that lay far down the narrow empty valley. Feldore needed no urging but surged into the hunting gallop, Rylan close behind, and already the black deerhound was streaking ahead of us, levelled out in a long dark arching blur parallel with the ground.

  We covered the distance to the oakwood in what seemed mere seconds, though surely it was many minutes. Before I had time to reflect on how strangely similar all this felt to that wood where I had found the magical flower (still carefully tucked away against my breast, in its leathern pouch), Feldore was standing stiff-legged in the center of a broad clearing and shaking in every limb, and Rylan with him. The stag was before us, and he was tremendous, much bigger than he had seemed heretofore; and the black hound was crouched low before the stag, ready to spring.