Bran

Finn and Dickie found themselves alone at supper that night, which so discommoded Dickie that he left to seek the sanctuary of the library and his constant tutor, the Wyrm. But it pleased Finn’s sense of self-importance to have an entire table set with succulent dishes just for his benefit, to have three servants awaiting his pleasure and his alone. Feeling grandiose, he ordered every candle in the room lit and picked like a jaded aristocrat at each dish, finishing the meal with a call for pears flambé and a glass of brandy. The latter was ignored, but the server complied with the flambé, setting the fruit afire with a flourish, though he would probably have preferred to try his technique on Finn’s head. Finn supped on in blissful ignorance, propping up his feet and imagining that he’d have an establishment like this one day, albeit with electricity and something a little sportier by way of transportation.

He was in a good mood. His efforts to uncover fairies had hitherto met with little success (other than an occasional pelting with elf-shot or shrill mocking laughter from just out of sight), but he’d consulted with Dickie, who revealed, it seemed somewhat reluctantly, that he’d discovered the formula for a seeing ointment. Finn had initially been reluctant to try any draughts or philters, for he was fastidious as well as timid about things that smacked too strongly of medicines and doctors. To make an iffy ointment of possibly toxic plants was a last resort. But all other methods had failed, wholly or in part, and as June neared, he was determined finally to one-up the Morgans.

As well as he could ascertain, the Morgans had had no further truck with fairies of any sort, though of course his spying could not pierce Gul Ghillie’s disguise. Finn remained oblivious of the training that was happening practically under his nose, and he still thought to impress the Morgans with the discoveries he might make.

Now, with the help of his friend the Wyrm, Dickie had concocted a formula that made the invisible visible, and had gone so far as to try it on himself. He didn’t report seeing anything (which wasn’t quite true, for with the ointment Dickie saw not only the Wyrm, who slept, invisible, on a thick volume called Things That Don’t Exist, but also a map painted in invisible ink on the curtains, and the passing shade of Harold Halberd, one of Phyllida’s ancestors who fought in the Crusades, who nodded politely to him), but, more important to Finn, Dickie’s eye didn’t burn or sting or fall out. He snatched up the ointment and determined to try it himself in the woods the following day. He considered trying it that very night, but quite sensibly decided that things that choose to be invisible in the dark are probably worse than things that choose to be invisible in broad daylight.

Phyllida left the Morgans around sunset, having accomplished nothing. She and Lysander conversed well into the night, and eventually reached the conclusion it had taken Meg much longer to reach—that no force of their will could sway Rowan. Their only task now was to encourage him, and strengthen him in what ways they could.

More grievous to Phyllida was the knowledge of Bran’s role. She was still incredulous, but Bran’s apparent flight did nothing to exonerate him. She thought she knew too well the pain he had suffered after his restoration. Since the moment of his rescue from the fairy lands, he had longed to return there as a drowning man longs for one last breath of sweet air. But she’d never thought he’d pit himself against one of her own heirs. He was, you must remember, her father, and though she seemed the elder, she relied on him, now as in her childhood. Her first responsibility, as summer caregiver, must be to the boy under her guard, the innocent who had come to this grief (she told herself) through her own carelessness. But she had known Rowan a scant four weeks, and when she wept into the night, after Lysander had finally fallen asleep at her side, she was in truth weeping for Bran, her father, who seemed lost to her again.

In the morning, though, when the roosters, crows, and larks all sang in cacophonous chorus, she emerged from her room dry-eyed and clear-headed, and coolly gathered up the Morgans, directing them to bring their Seelie weapons to the practice grounds. She leaned against a tree, arms folded, and put Rowan through his paces with much the same critical eye as Gul Ghillie.

“When I was seven, I stood at my mother’s side to witness my first Midsummer War,” Phyllida said when at last he stopped, hardly winded, and sheathed Hagr. “The human Guardian of the Green Hill is always called to be an observer, and my mother took Chlorinda and me to stand by her side. That year, the Seelie champion was a fine young man from the village, the baker’s son. He’d long been a favorite of the Seelie Court, and they had groomed him to the task since he was a boy. His opponent had once been a boxer in London, but when he passed his prime, he moved into his father’s cottage, outside of Gladysmere, and turned to drink. He was still a tough one, however, and cruel…and many’s the time cruelty has outweighed high-handed skill. He fought with the long pike, and the baker’s boy with Hen and Brychan. A mismatched fight if ever I saw one, finesse against brute force. All around the Green Hill they fought, through the night, until the morning star peeked over the horizon, until one fell.” She was silent for a moment, seeing the carnage through seven-year-old eyes again.

“And every seven years since then, I have stood at the foot of the Green Hill and watched a battle rage above me. I’ve seen great fighters fall, and feeble men rise to victory. I have seen base treachery and nobility beyond imagining. And every seven years I have seen some mother’s son die at the hands of another. But never, my boy, have I seen a man hold his weapons with such skill as you. A month only you have been training? I would not believe it possible. And yet the fairies are fully capable of bestowing great gifts on those they favor—skill at arms, luck in love, gilded fingers, and honeyed tongues. If you stood against any save my father, I would give you victory this minute. But Bran has a soldier’s heart, and his years with the fairies have given him skills beyond those of mortal men. The fairies, Seelie and Host alike, are all great swordsmen, for they, too, will all fight in the Midsummer War.

“Know this, Rowan, my child: Bran will kill you if he can. I do not know what force compelled him to fight for the Host, but now that he is committed, he will come at you like a dragon spitting fire. I had thought him too strong, too good, to buy his happiness at such a price. Now that he has turned, he who should have been your greatest protector has become a deadly foe.”

How it pained the poor woman to speak those words! How old she suddenly felt as she said them, how crushingly heavy was the burden of her eighty-four years. That I should live to see this day, she moaned within. That such a thing should ever come to pass.

“You may yet prevail, child, though it is by no means certain. You have three weeks, three weeks only, to save your own life. Never cease in your training, and never forget how daunting is your…enemy.” She could hardly say the word.

She took a deep shuddering breath and went on. “To better fight your adversary, you must know what lies in his inmost heart. Come, children, sit around me here, among the worms and the roots. I find this tale too heavy to tell standing.” Meg noticed that Phyllida’s joints creaked as she lowered herself to the ground, and for the first time, she seemed thin and fragile.

“My mother was the most beautiful, brilliant, kind, loving person in the world. Everybody’s mother is, of course, but she was like one of the old Guardians incarnate. She would walk through the woods, almost a fairy herself, singing in their secret tongue. She tried to teach it to me—I only know a few of the words now. It has a way of slipping out of most people’s minds, so only a few can ever learn it properly. Fairy music is like that, too. Try as you may to remember the melody, you can never quite catch it again. When she sang, the woods would come alive. And some evenings, the trooping fairies would come at her call and ride past us on broad-chested horses, with packs of milk-white, red-eared hounds baying beside them.

“My father…Bran…I’ve always felt sorry for the men who marry into our tribe. How like outsiders they must seem, and yet how privileged, to be drawn into not only the happiness of love but an enchanted world. Lysander had an easier time than most—he grew up in the village. But Bran loved my mother first, and learned the consequences of his love later.

“I think perhaps Bran’s downfall lay in taking to it all too well. From the moment he set foot in the Rookery, I’m told, the Seelie Court swarmed around to greet him. That day is still remembered in legend, the day the fairies marched visible for all to see. From that moment on, Bran was swept up in his new life—the mystery of it all, the beauty, the danger. He plunged right in, learning everything my mother could teach him, and discovering on his own even the things she refused to reveal—things reserved for her own daughter only.

“He was a remarkable man—as you see him now. So handsome that all eyes turned to follow him when he rode about the countryside. My mother loved him as she loved this land, making him a part of her. And I loved him. He was like a mountain to me, an unmovable strength, a reassuring colossus. He used to take me on his shoulders when I was a little girl, and I swear that I could see over the treetops to the Green Hill itself. He’d walk in the woods with Lysander and me, teaching us all the plant lore he’d only just learned himself, and when I got tired, in the evening, he’d carry me home, with a fairy light leading us through the gloaming.”

Meg didn’t know which was harder—picturing Bran as a loving father, or Phyllida as a young girl.

“There came a day when he no longer took me for walks in the forest. Oh, he’d still go himself, but when I tried to follow he’d grow cross and tell me I had better help my mother. I was almost nine then, and it had begun to be apparent that Chlorinda wasn’t suited to be the next Guardian. So it was true that my own lessons became more urgent. Still, I was hurt that he seemed to have no time for me. I cried in my mother’s arms the first time he forbade me to follow him. She told me not to worry, that he was only concerned for my studies and just doing what a good father had to do. I saw something strange in her eyes as she said it. Have you seen it, when your parents lie to you in order to protect you? From that moment, I knew something was wrong, though I couldn’t say what.

“My father was home less and less. Business, my mother told me. He came home before dawn and fell into bed without seeing any of us, without speaking a word, and slept the day away. Then he’d rise after dusk and set out again, and be away through the night.

“What does a child ever know of the things that drive adults? To them the world is simple, and secrets are only petty things we keep from our parents, not they from us. I knew that things were changing—that my mother was unhappy and my father ever more distant. At that age I only saw how it affected me. My father didn’t play with me anymore, my mother looked always with her far-seeing eyes into the forest, toward the Green Hill, and hardly seemed to see the child who stood before her. And Chlorinda, well, by that time she was always half angry, half frightened, and I did my best to stay out of her way.

“One day, my father set out on his nightly journey a bit earlier than usual. Dusk was just settling around the Rookery, and I was at play in the garden when I saw him striding toward the wood. I called out to him, but if he heard me he didn’t turn around. I wanted to go with him, though I knew he’d send me back if he saw me, and I couldn’t bear that. So, though I knew my mother would soon be ringing the supper bell, I followed him into the deepening darkness. I had never been alone in the forest after sunset before, and even with my father only a few paces before me, oh, how alone I felt! I think in truth I lost him that night, and not the next, which was when he vanished from this world for seventy years.

“I was a little thing, and used to the woods, so it was easy for me to hide. By then he wouldn’t have paid any attention to me even if he’d caught me. His thoughts were already with the fairies, and I no longer existed to him. He came to a glade near the Green Hill, a bluebell meadow that opened to the starlight. There he met a lady of the Seelie Court. She laughed and took his hand, and he followed her like a man bewitched…which I must tell myself over and over again he was. ‘Come to the feast with me, and sup upon honey and sweet nectar,’ she said to him. But even under the enchantment of his glamour, he’d been too well schooled to partake of fairy food. It is the first thing every village child learns at his mother’s knee—that a single taste can make you a captive and slave forever. She laughed at him again. ‘So many nights have I tried…. Soon you will yield. Very well, if you will not feast, at least you must dance.’ And she drew him to her and whirled him about.

“Soon they were joined by others, stately couples of the high court, and dervish dancers, who seemed mad. The glade was filled with bodies, twirling and swaying, pressed close together in the crowd. The sound they made! Sometimes it was like the most beautiful music, with pipes and choruses. Then it would change, and sound like the wailing of tortured souls. Sometimes my father laughed, sometimes he seemed to scream, but while I watched, he never stopped dancing.”

The children listened, spellbound. “I ran home and…I never told my mother. I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps you do. I composed myself and went in to dinner late and never said a word to show I knew where my father was going every night. He came home the following morning, but when he went out the next night, he never returned.

“I don’t know how my mother got through the next few weeks. She blamed herself, you see, not my father. The temptation of the fairy court had been too much for him. I don’t know if the man lives who can resist their call, once they’ve set their cap at him. She could have, no matter how hard they tried to lure her. Women can always pierce the fairy glamour far more easily than men, and are not nearly so subject to their tricks and wiles.”

That’s why they picked Rowan, Meg thought. If the queen had picked me, I’d have had sense enough to say no.

“When a person has been imprisoned by the fairies, there’s always a way to get him back. The trick is finding it. Sometimes there’s just one day each year when the captive’s freedom can be won. Or you have to play a certain melody on a fiddle at midnight, or beat the fairies in a game of skittles, or trick the prisoner into wearing some piece of clothing inside out. The method is never the same. Mother did everything she could, racking her brain for lost memories from her ancestors, scouring our library for some text that might hold a clue. She followed the fairy rade when it trooped at Beltane, and though she saw my father riding among them, he didn’t know her. Many times over the next seventy years, I saw him with the Seelie Court, dressed like them, proud and laughing, in jewels, amid the fairy ladies. But he did not hear me when I called out to him, and if I tried to touch him the whole court vanished.

“While my mother lived, she did all she could. She climbed to the top of the Green Hill and set it on fire. She threatened to renounce her Guardianship, sell the Rookery and the land on which the Green Hill stood, and let developers tear the whole forest down. It was only bluff, and the fairies knew that. However much she loved my father, however she yearned to have him near her again, she couldn’t betray the obligation she’d inherited. She was the Guardian, mother of the next Guardian, and that was her first duty. It could not be set aside even for the sake of love.

“Chlorinda ran away when it seemed certain our father would never be saved. Mother hardly seemed to care…. Chlorinda had her own destiny. We heard from her a time or two, but she never returned to England. My mother—she died when I was twenty, made old before her time by loss and grief. I became the Guardian, with Lysander to aid me. And never, as seasons waxed and waned, as fields grew ripe and quick and barren winter followed harvest, never did I cease searching for a way to bring my father back.”

Phyllida looked at her hands where they lay in her lap. She was thrust back so far in the past, her own old body was a shock to her. Why, a moment ago, she’d been a girl, then a new bride. Now she stared at hands that could not possibly be hers, dry skin and gnarled knuckles, marked with spots and scars. How had they grown so old, when she could slip so easily back into the mind of her youth?

“How did the fairies capture him, in the end?” Meg asked, mercifully shattering Phyllida’s reverie.

“Ah, that I never knew until five years ago, when he was returned to us. He said it was a trick, though I’m not so sure he could be tricked against his will. When he visited them that final night, the Seelie lady asked him once again to feast with her, and again he refused—for a man may pursue his pleasure without wishing to give up his freedom, his life. This time she did not draw him into the wild dance. She led him to a cave, a moldering, wet place with a carpet of moss and mushrooms growing out of the walls. ‘If you will not eat,’ she said to him, ‘at least you can help prepare the feast.’ She set him before a huge, deep cauldron that bubbled over a fire. ‘You must stir this, never ceasing, until I return,’ she said, handing him a wooden spoon. ‘Then we will dance and make sport?’ he asked. ‘When I return,’ she replied, and left him.

“So he crouched before the cauldron and stirred the brew. He was sorely tempted to taste it, for it smelled at times like rich lamb stew, then like May wine with sweet woodruff and honey. But he didn’t dare put the spoon to his lips. Yet, for the lady’s sake, he stirred for what felt like forever, and the cauldron bubbled on. The pot was deep, the spoon short, and as he stirred he scalded his fingers in the boiling brew. Without thinking, he sucked on his fingers to cool them…and he was caught. It might have been an accident, though who can tell if a moment of carelessness is not in fact surrender to one’s deepest desire? My father was gone, my mother’s love was gone, and he lived with the fairies for seventy years. The rest of us grew old, but he existed in unchanging limbo in a land where the sun never rises, the moon never sets. The Green Hill was his home, the fairies were his companions, and we no longer mattered to him.”

“But you got him back,” Silly said cheerfully. To her it was just an exciting story. She couldn’t fathom any pain that had happened decades before she was born.

“Aye, we got him back in the end, Lysander and I, thinking it wise. Seventy years to ferret out the secret, to discover the night and time when he would be vulnerable, when we could bring him back to his home. I learned the way from a creature who lives in a pond in these parts, a horrid, foul thing called Jenny Greenteeth. She lives alone in her murk, waiting for prey to come too near her shore. But though she is a lonely, wretched, bitter thing, she knows all the secrets of the wood. The water whispers them to her. She wanted me to bring her a child—she dearly loves to eat a child, but they all know by now not to go too near her pool. That I wouldn’t do, even for my father’s sake. In the end, she agreed to tell me if I brought her a lamb, a kid, and a calf, no more than a day old.”

Phyllida closed her eyes, remembering their screams as they were pulled into the water and devoured. “But she was true to her word—the fairies have to be.

“On the appointed night, Lysander and I waited at the crossroads for the fairy rade to pass. There were three fairy knights on horseback, each looking exactly alike, each with the face of my father. But Jenny Greenteeth had warned us about that. ‘First let pass the black,’ she said, ‘and then let pass the brown. The man you seek will ride the milk-white steed.’

“We had only an instant as his horse went through the crossroads. We pulled him from his mount, and the two of us, old as we were, hardly had the strength to hold him down. He fought like a madman, calling out to the queen and her court to aid him, as though we were strangers to him. Perhaps we were strangers—how could he see the children he had known, through the cloak of years that had fallen on us? He wept and pleaded with us to let him go, then cursed and threatened us. He changed shape—for as the fairies’ companion he had their powers. He changed into a serpent, and still we held strong, for we knew he couldn’t harm us. Then into a bear he turned, grim and savage, and next to a snarling lion. He became a red-hot iron poker that seemed to burn us, but still we held, until, with sorrow in their faces, the fairies rode away, looking over their shoulders at the one they had loved.

“My father changed one last time. Gone were his fine clothes and jewels, and in their place moss and dried, crumbling leaves. For the fairy glamour had evaporated, and the illusion would not hold. That is the secret of the fairies, children—nothing that you see is as it appears. Nothing is real. For seventy years he had supped on toadstools and acorns, and thought them ambrosia. His silk and brocade garments were no more than tatters, his jewels bits of coal. And yet he had been happier there than as a mortal man. My father had been happy in that twilight world.

“With the glamour gone, he was a malnourished, ravaged carcass of a man, his hair tangled and his beard to his waist. I’d half expected him to crumble into dust, or have his years catch up with him all in a moment, like Oisin when he touched the ground after leaving Tir Na n-Og. But, no, my father stayed young, to all appearances the same man who had left his wife and children so many years ago.”

“His wife was gone,” Meg said, feeling Bran’s pain with a pang that caught at her heart. “His little girl had grown old. How did he bear it?”

“When the fairy glamour had left him,” Phyllida said, “he fell into a stupor, and we carried him home to nurse him. It was ages before he spoke. At first he would take no food, and even the taste of our purest springwater made him retch. But he had been a strong man once, and even if he had no wish to live, his body took over and saved him although his mind preferred to drift away into nothingness. For weeks he lived as if this reality was no more than a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, and one day he would find himself again in the world of the fairies. Then there came a day when he was lucid, and knew me for his own child. And then he wept, and tore at his hair, and called out for his wife, who was so long dead. ‘Seventy years!’ he lamented to the deaf heavens. ‘It cannot be. Just a few hours…I was only there a few hours….’ Such is it always to the captives, that their bliss, however long, seems no more than an instant.

“When he was able to walk, and take a little nourishment, he went to my mother’s grave and knelt there for an hour. Chlorinda was dead by then, too, though buried in America, and he had a horde of great-great-grandchildren—you four. He recovered fast enough, it seemed, and threw himself into work around the Rookery. Soon he looked just like he did when I was a child, handsome and robust. But he was a man out of his time. Though the Rookery was largely unchanged, all around him the world was a different place, with fast cars and computers and space flight. He’s done his best to shut it out, but sometimes young Jack plays modern music on his radio, or a jet plane passes, and Bran will actually cringe, as though he was just waking from his seventy-year trance.

“He was so full of remorse for what he did to me and to my mother. For a time I tried to get him to talk about his years under the Green Hill. He’s told me a little bit, though it pains him too much to talk about it. At first I believed this was because it was so terrible to him, that he should have been enjoying himself, all oblivious, while those who loved him suffered through his absence. I suppose that was part of it. But those few times he did speak of his captivity…his eyes glazed over, and his entire body would tremble with the memory of it. You cannot imagine the pleasures the fairies can bestow on those they favor! To go from that blissful world to this real one must be almost more shock than the mind can bear. Though to my face he curses the day he was carried away from his family, there are times when he will fall into a reverie, and I see that he would do almost anything to return to the fairies.”

Meg understood a little better that tearing bitterness of loss she’d seen in Bran in the cow barn. What’s more, she realized what a dangerous opponent he truly was. He was fighting for something dearer to him than anything on this earth.

“Did he try to go back?” Meg asked.

“I thought he would, and I almost regretted bringing him home in the first place. After so many years, is it not more a punishment than a reward to fetch him back to a strange world—home, and yet not home; family, and yet not the family he remembers? Would it not be better, at this late stage, to let him languish in his sunless world, where, however false is his happiness, at least he is happy? Maybe I was selfish. All my life I longed to have my father restored to me. When I finally got the chance, I did not think I would be doing him a grave harm.

“He never returned to the fairies, and I think now that he couldn’t. At least, not to the Seelie Court, where he made his home. Perhaps they viewed his return to me as a kind of betrayal, and this is his punishment, to be trapped in this world against his will, as I thought he was in the fairy world. Over the five years, the desire to go back under the Green Hill has become stronger. Oh, he won’t confess it, yet I’ve seen him go to the woods, searching, no doubt, for a fragment of what he’s lost. Since Lemman came, it’s been even harder. When I asked him, he always swore he’d not go back even if he could. But now that the opportunity has been granted him, now that the bliss, or something like it, is again within his reach, it seems the temptation was too much. It is within the Black Prince’s power to take Bran into his court. Whether he will or no, I cannot say. His offer must have been sweet enough to Bran’s ears that he’d shed his kinsman’s blood to win it.”

She sighed deeply and took Rowan’s hand in her own. “That, Rowan, is why you must be on your guard with him. He fights for a treasure no man has ever tasted, to regain that which must be dearer to him than life—his own or another’s. You fight for honor, and to live, but in your heart you have no wish to kill him. He will not be fighting under such a handicap. The lure of the fairies made him forget his loved ones once before, and now it has happened again. Be wary, Rowan, and be strong. If you would live, you must show him no mercy. He will have none for you.”