Into the Green

by Charles de Lint

  "I'm not..." Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness.

  "Druswid," she said. "He had me look at it and now I can't get the memory of it out of me."

  The woman nodded. She wore a tired smile— the kind a mother wears for her errant child.

  "He can be an old fool at times," she said, "but he was right in doing so. You needed a taste of the heart of its darkness to understand it fully."

  "That pattern..." Angharad said.

  Again words failed her.

  "Is foul," the woman agreed.

  Angharad shivered, remembering. She drew a breath, realizing that she was accepting a grave responsibility as soon as she spoke her next words.

  "What can be done about it?" she asked.

  "Find it. Wake it. Banish it."

  "How?"

  "The finding I can tell you," the woman said. "It was brought to South Gwendellan on a merchant ship. The waking is simple as well— though dangerous to one with our blood. It needs the Summerblood to be kindled, you see, but it feeds on our green."

  "Then why wake it?" Angharad asked.

  "Because only then may it be banished."

  "Can you help me?"

  The woman shook her head. The sorrow in her eyes made Angharad want to weep.

  "Not I— I am bound to my place in the green. As Druswid is to his oak. As his apprentice is to the yoke of his past. We are bound to our places as surely as housey-folk are bound to their hearths."

  "I... I don't think I can do it alone."

  "There are Summerborn in Gwendellan," the woman said. "Few, it's true, and weak in witchery, but you can find them if you look."

  "And they will help?"

  The woman sighed. "I don't know."

  "It isn't an easy task you're setting me," Angharad said.

  "It isn't set for you, daughter. You take it up or not by your own choice."

  "And if I don't?"

  "The puzzle-box will find its way into the hands of a Summerborn who, all unwittingly, will solve its riddle. The patterning on its six sides merely wakens the shadows we all carry within ourselves. When the box is opened, it will loose its true power."

  Angharad nodded.

  Glascrow.

  The green death.

  And wonder would finally die from the world— not because it was forgotten, but because of some ancient evil that no one truly understood.

  "I'll do it," Angharad said softly.

  The woman smiled her sad smile. "I thought you might."

  "And you can't tell me how to banish it?"

  "The glascrow predates my time in this world, daughter. I know only that we of the green may not handle it. Imagine one of the green given over to the darkness, abusing his or her wonders..."

  Angharad gave a shudder. A kowrie with dark magics...

  "Only one who carries both human blood and that of the Summerborn has a chance to escape the shadows."

  "Why?"

  "Because their humanity tempers their Summerblood— like the many folds of steel in a tinker blade. Resistant and supple, but nigh unbreakable."

  "So I must wake it..."

  "And face it. And banish it. Daughter, if I knew more,

  I would tell you. If I could, I would do the task myself— or at least accompany you."

  But she couldn't, Angharad thought. She looked back over the moors to where Ballan's Broom was now backlit by the dawn sky. Mysteries, she realized, had their own laws. No matter how marvelous they appeared to common folk, they still followed their own natural order. As a hound couldn't fly nor an apple tree blossom with roses, so those of the green had their own strictures that they must observe.

  "I understand," she said, turning back to look at the woman.

  No one stood there between the trees. There was only her own long shadow on the grass, cast by the rising sun behind her back.

  "I understand," she repeated softly.

  Luck, she thought she heard a voice whisper on the wind as she continued on to the Druswid Oak, but it might have been only her own need calling the word up from the places of the hidden green inside her.

  It wasn't until she was at the foot of the oak that she realized who it must have been that had spoken with her.

  Tarasen.

  Hafarl's daughter.

  —

  She borrowed a horse from a tinker company she met in the hills. The horse brought her to Codswill, where she took ship across the Channel Sea, then up along the coast of Southern Gwendellan to where Cathal harbors on the Grey Sea. Standing on Cathal's docks, swaying until she regained her land-legs, she stared at the bustling streets of the town.

  Somewhere on its cobbled streets, in the buildings that crowded elbow to elbow against each other, or in the stately mansions on High Hill, the puzzle-box was waiting for her. Shadows chittered in her green and she shivered with a chill, though the sun was high, the afternoon warm.

  She adjusted the strap of her journeysack on one shoulder, her cloak rolled and tied to it like a bedroll, the strap of her harp on the other. She pulled her shawl tighter about her red hair. Then, staff in hand, she went looking for help.

  For one with Hafarl's gift.

  One who was Summerborn.

  11

  The fear she saw in his eyes was all too familiar. It mirrored the fear she herself had felt when she'd looked into Woodfrost's eyes that first time and saw that he bore the Summerlord's gift of witch-sight.

  "My name's Angharad," she told him. "I mean you no harm."

  "I'm not like you."

  "I know. But you could be."

  She hunched down near him, her journeysack slapping one thigh, her small harp the other. She leaned on her rowan staff, letting the witch-wood take the greater part of her weight as she leaned closer to look at him.

  He crouched in the alleyway, half-hidden in a nest of refuse— close enough for her to touch, though he might as well have been as far from the bustling streets of Cathal behind her as northern Ardmeyn was from the Mull Isles, some three hundred leagues to its south. Goodwives and merchants filled Cathal's streets, haggling over the market wares; laughter and sharp words, and all the sounds in between that men and women make when they bargain, rose from the crowded stalls where they went about their business. But he hid from the light and sound and movement, hid in the rubbish and debris with the look of a half-starved dog about him.

  It was hard to tell his age, but guessing roughly, she put it at twice her own twenty-three summers. His brown hair was matted and dirty, his cheeks and chin bristly with several days' growth of beard. He wore rags and tatters, the clothing hanging loose on his gaunt frame. His eyes were hollowed and haunted— one a startling blue, the other a milky white— and his skin was grimed with dirt. He reeked of ale.

  But it was still there inside him— the Summerblood.

  And looking closer, Angharad could see that the dirt and rags and unkempt hair hid more than a lame leg and a blind eye. They hid what remained of a soldier. Wounded, no doubt, in the war that Gwendellan and Thurin had fought against the Saramand, across the Grey Sea. Wounded and left to fend for himself, now that Gwendellan's kings had withdrawn their armies from the strife.

  He was a beggar, here in Cathal, but once he had marched in the regiments, as proud as any young soldier.

  "What... what do you want from me?" he asked.

  "I mean you no harm," Angharad repeated.

  "No harm? Look at you! They've taken everything from me— are you here to take my soul as well?"

  She understood his dismay. In her pleated skirt and white blouse, a grey shawl hiding the bright red of her hair, with the harp on her shoulder and staff of witchwood that she leaned on, it was plain to see what she was: tinker, harper and— if you knew how to spy the Summerblood— witch. Not a one of them was overloved, though it was the witchblood that could hurt her the
most, were it discovered.

  Housey-folk abided tinkers for their metalwork and mending gifts, and a harper could be counted on to provide music more exotic than a worn old fiddle or squeezebox, so they were given a grudging welcome as well. But witcheries.... Housey-folk had little patience with witches and their gifts.

  If they only knew...

  But knowing took the sight, to see beyond the world that is, to see into the green— Hafarl's realm, the Middle Kingdom where the kowrie dwell except for those nights when the moon, or music, or both, call them forth to dance in the old stoneworks that riddle the Green Isles. Without the sight, housey-folk had only a harper's poetry to describe those fading wonders, and practical as housey-folk were, they believed only what they could hold and weigh, not what they were told.

  So she understood his fear, no matter the ignorance it was based upon, no matter that he had the gift of the sight, locked away behind the anxiety that made him tremble to look at her. She had worn that fear herself— worn it like armor against the magics of those with the blue-gold witchlight in their eyes.

  She tried to disarm him with a smile.

  "I haven't come to steal your soul," she said. "I've come to give it back to you."

  Grimy fingers clutched at the rags covering his chest. "I... I never... lost it."

  "Are you happy?" she asked him. "Are you content? Do you wear respect for yourself, even if others don't?"

  The blue eye grew shiny with unshed tears. "Don't... just don't..."

  Say any more, Angharad finished for him. Don't remind me of who I once was. Let me hide the memories in the same ale-fog that hides my pain.

  Her heart went out to him.

  "I don't mean to hurt you," she said. "But if you could see..."

  "See what? That a dog, foraging on the streets, is looked upon more fondly than one such as I?"

  "You—"

  "No, you listen."

  The alcoholic haze lifted momentarily from his gaze; the dampness in his eye was shiny now with anger.

  "They look at me and I remind them of the war we didn't win. I remind them of all those who didn't come back. They want nothing to do with me. And who can blame them? What have I to offer them? I've no learning. I've no strength to work the docks or farms. Tom Naghatty went overseas a boy, looking to become a man, but he came back only a half-blind, lamed beggar, worth nothing. An old sack filled with bad memories for whomever looks upon him and remembers."

  Angharad slowly shook her head.

  "That's not true," she said. "You could show them the green."

  "The green," he said. "That's for children to see."

  "It doesn't go away from you— you leave it behind."

  Tom gave her an unhappy smile. "Easy for you to say, with your harp and your eyes. You reek of witcheries."

  Angharad glanced nervously over her shoulder to the busy street behind her.

  "I do?"

  "Not to them— but to me. To any of us born with the curse."

  "So you do remember."

  "Much good it does me."

  "But it doesn't have to be a curse," Angharad said. "I remember the first time I—"

  "I don't want to hear any more. Go away. Leave me alone. You don't want me, you don't need me, and you won't have me."

  Angharad nodded, as though agreeing with him, but she made no move. She remained hunched there in front of him, her weight still on her staff, her mild gaze steady on him. A strand of red hair had come loose from her shawl and she blew it away from her cheek.

  "Woman," Tom said finally. "Why aren't you gone?"

  "My name's Angharad," she said.

  "I don't care if it's Tarasen, you'll still not have me. For what, I don't know, but better the troubles I know, than the worse ones the witchblood will lay on me."

  "It's odd you should mention her," Angharad said.

  "Who?" Tom asked. "Tarasen?"

  The weariness was back in his voice. The alcoholic haze returning to his one good eye, dulling the blue like a smear of fog rising up from the sea in late afternoon.

  Angharad nodded. "Hafarl's daughter. It's because of her that I'm here."

  And then she spoke of the events that had brought her to Cathal.

  —

  "What do you want from me?" Tom asked her when she was done telling her tale.

  If her words were seeds, Angharad realized, they had fallen on stony ground. Though he'd once been a soldier, he was one no more. The green that lay within him carried a blight at its core as surely, and as dark, as one born in the glascrow's shadows, but this one was born of the horror of the battlefield. Now he was done with struggles— except for the struggle to eke out a drunkard's existence on the streets and back alleys of Cathal.

  Perhaps he had earned the right to let others do the fighting now. Perhaps it was unfair of her to even ask.

  "Woman," Tom began again.

  "Angharad," she said absently.

  "Angharad, then."

  The blue eye was clear once more, the ale-fog held at bay. She heard an honest regret in his voice, but there was still no acquiescence in it.

  "I can't help you," he said. "Neither the merchants nor those wealthy enough to live on the Hill take the time to gossip with an old drunkard lying in an alleyway. I can't begin to guess where you should look for this puzzle-box of yours. And I am tired. So very, very tired."

  Angharad nodded. She reached over and grasped his grimy hand with her own.

  It's true that you're weary, she thought at the startled look that crossed his features when she touched him. Your youth worn away and wonder fled, but you aren't yet so divorced from the world that you can't still be surprised.

  "I understand," she told him. "It was unfair of me to ask."

  This close to him, the reek of his body odor and alcohol was almost overpowering. She concentrated on what remained of the green within him— the Summerblood that had called her into the alleyway to find him nesting here in the refuse.

  "You've already done your part in preserving the beauty of the world," she added.

  He pulled his hand free of hers. "Don't mock me."

  "I meant no mockery. You gave the strength and health of your youth and half your sight for your country. Had the Saramand ravaged our shores once more, much of the Isles' beauty would have disappeared. I honor you for that."

  "I don't need your pity either."

  "Nor my friendship?"

  "Just go away."

  Angharad rose to her feet with a sigh. "May I ask you one more question?"

  His fingers tore at a scrap of discarded paper stained with grease, shredding it. His shoulders were as sloped as the rounded hills of Cermyn— not from age, as those old hills were, but rather from a hundred small defeats. He would not look up.

  "What?" he said.

  "Where can I find other Summerborn?"

  The gaze of his one blue eye rose to meet hers. His face was turned so that she could not see the other, his profile that of a hawk or a falcon.

  Once, she thought, he had been handsome. War and the street had stolen that from him as well.

  "They're lost," he said. "Or drunk. Or hiding."

  "Hiding? From what?"

  "The witch-finders— what else? Do they love the Summerborn in your homeland?"

  "All the Isles are my homeland."

  "Well, this part of your homeland has fallen prey to witch-finders."

  He seemed about to say more, hesitated, then finally looked down at the small heap of shredded paper by his feet. Angharad waited to see if he would say more.

  "What do you mean?" she finally asked.

  She knew there were those without the sight who feared the Summerborn and fought that fear by bringing harm to its source. And there were always men who would satisfy that need by bringing them the fingerbones of the Summerborn. One of the sailors on the ship on which she'd arrived in Cathal had been wearing a necklace of such bones.

  "There is a man," Tom said, "who made his fortune
following the lines of battle. He had goods that were needed that he would provide if you could meet his price. His men haunted the battlefields, robbing the dead. It was whispered that he even traded with the enemy when the fighting was at its worst. Now he lives on the Hill, his past forgotten by those who would rather not remember."

  "What has he to do with these witch-finders?"

  "It seems he has a use for those Summerborn."

  "What use?"

  Tom shrugged wearily.

  "This man... what is his name?"

  "Aron Corser."

  A premonition stirred in Angharad, a shadow crossing her heart as chilly as those brought to her by the puzzle-box's pattern. She stored the name in her memory, for all that she wished she'd never heard it.

  "Thank you, Tom," she said. "Go gentle."

  Again, he looked up. "Go gentle," he repeated softly. "There was a story my mam used to tell me that always ended with those words."

  "I know it," Angharad said. " 'Cony the Tinker.' It's a travelers' tale."

  Tom nodded. "When the soldiers shot him down— the beekeeper's daughter spoke those words over his grave. I always remembered that story."

  "I did, too. Because of its sadness." And later, she thought, for how it was twin to her own life— her own love lost, as senselessly slain as Cony was, though it was a plague that took her harp's namesake, not the work of men.

  "Why is it that we always remember the sadness more?" she said, her voice soft.

  "I didn't remember it for its sadness," Tom said. "I remembered it for the strength of their love."

  The war had stolen more from him than his youth and health, Angharad realized. He'd left a girl behind and when he returned.... Had she rejected his broken body? Or had she already forgotten him before ever he returned?

  It was the plot of a hundred ballads, but no less painful if the story was your own. Yet somehow he had remembered the good of what they'd had, rather than the loss.

  The green silence inside him was less withered than he let on.

  "I wish I could," she said.

  "What?"

  "Remember the love more than the sadness."

  A bittersweet smile touched his grimy lips. "It's all I have," he said.

  Angharad nodded. "Go gentle," she said again and turned away.