One night, he dreamed of puppies. Newborn hound puppies. Great piles of them, twenty or thirty, with their eyes shut, mewling for their mothers’ milk.
He woke up and cast his mind out to listen again, in the night. It had been days since he’d last had his morning drink and it was easier to think, though his mind was as empty as ever of any history.
He’d frowned once at the woman, and she’d asked if he felt alright. Then he remembered the girl’s warning about not letting anyone know he was avoiding the drink. From then on he was careful to maintain the same smooth demeanor as before.
It was harder now because he found so much to interest him in his surroundings. Not her. All her conversation was about how sorry she was for him, how she wanted to help him get better. He could trust her, she said, but he wondered. The girl had made him suspicious, and there was no going back.
The woman had put her hands on him, at one point, but he was indifferent to caresses. He knew now, from listening to the animals, what it was she wanted, but it was like his lack of speech—there was nothing there for her.
In fact, there was nothing for her in any way. He knew she wanted something, but he had no idea what it was nor how to give it to her, so he didn’t worry about it.
It was the animals that provided all the new interest. They were simple to him, clear in their desires. He felt the joy of their coupling, of finding food and warmth. Their terror at a predator. For the birds, how they gloried in the air. For the rodents, the comfort of a snug burrow. The disputes over territory, the nursing of the young.
There was no confusion with the beasts. They didn’t care about his problems, they didn’t care about him at all. They lived their lives, and he began to pattern his judgment on their sense of normal.
As the days passed, he never found his door unlocked again. He left his balcony door open all the time and dressed warmly to accommodate the chill. Whenever the woman closed it, he opened it again after she left.
Several times birds had flown into his room and perched in the rafters, lingering for an hour or two. He thought they were sent by the girl, he could feel her presence in their minds.
He always knew when they were there, but he didn’t think the woman ever noticed. They were quiet and she didn’t look up. He wondered why the girl did that. Was she watching him through their eyes?
He’d discovered he could do that himself, if he tried.
Rhian found it very difficult to wait like this, the hardest thing she had ever done, dissimulating to Gwythyr each morning.
She set her mind on Brynach as she smiled shyly at her captor, and read all the books she could get from him to avoid thinking about her plight.
Every so often she sent a bird to George’s rooms or used a mouse in the rafters to keep an eye on him. She couldn’t hold them there very long—they needed the time for their own lives, to eat and sleep.
George saw the birds, she knew he did, and when there was no one else around it seemed to her that he was sharper now. She thought he was assuming his old confused demeanor deliberately whenever the woman came into his rooms, as if he understood he had to deceive her. This gave her hope that something of her warnings had penetrated.
But he showed no signs of a returning memory, and eventually they would tire of the lack of progress. She feared him being killed out of hand when that happened.
She had to get them both out before it got that far, but she had no idea how to do it. Her own pack was ready to go, and she replaced the food with fresher supplies every few days, but she wouldn’t abandon him as long as there was any chance to take him with her.
She didn’t know what to make of the woman who kept him company much of each day. She looked like Angharad, more or less, through the birds’ eyes, but Rhian was sure that was impossible. It had to be a glamour, and she assumed Creiddylad was behind it. Did George even remember Angharad at all? She shuddered at the foulness of the deception and vowed to step up her surveillance with the birds.
He liked to stand on the balcony and listen to all the animals he could reach, the squirrels and shrews and moles in the garden, and the animals that occasionally approached within range outside the walls. It was a keen pleasure to listen to the hunters, the polecats and foxes, as well as the hunted.
The birds were the best. He traveled with the little kestrels when he could, dizzied and thrilled by the stoop from on high on a sparrow or vole. He tried an owl one night, a great eagle-owl, gliding on silent feathers down on an unsuspecting rabbit.
So clean, their world. So easy to understand. Scents and appetites, so simple. They had abbreviated memories, too, like his.
He didn’t forget the mice in his chamber walls, whose acquaintance he had made first. They had gotten so used to his presence, both in person and in their minds, that they had lost their caution about hiding from him.
The woman had walked in yesterday morning while he was studying them. When he recognized her fear and disgust, he sent them behind the walls out of her reach. She didn’t seem to understand that he had made them vanish. Instead, she insisted that something be done to reduce the infestation, as she called it.
This morning one of the guards had introduced a cat into his room and he was enraptured. He shared his own breakfast with her, to the amusement of the woman.
All afternoon he sat cross-legged on the bed with the cat poured into his lap. He stroked the calico body while she purred with pleasure.
This was an interesting mind, he thought. It sought little creatures that moved in a certain twitchy way and dispatched them with precision and delight. He could see older hunts in her mind. The joy of the carnivore didn’t disturb him, it was her nature. The blood and pain was a byproduct, not her goal. He sank deep into her mind, enjoying her pleasure from his kneading hands in a cycle of mutual comfort.
The door opened and the woman came in, closing it behind her. She didn’t usually come at this hour, and he could see that she was angry. He didn’t like it when she was angry.
“You’re out of time, you know that, don’t you?” she told him. “Today or not at all, he says. Why won’t you just cooperate?”
She hissed in frustration.
He avoided her eyes and returned to the cat’s mind.
“Don’t look at the damn cat,” she screamed. “Look at me!”
So he did.
He took the same deep perception he was using with the cat and applied it to her mind. Dark, red, chaos. Desires and needs, guilts and evasions. This wasn’t her real face, this wasn’t her real body. Everything she said was a lie.
The cat fled and he found himself standing next to the bed, shaking in shock and outrage. This was nothing like the clean predator he’d been petting. It was revolting.
She stepped back from him in fear, and he felt the echo of it in his mind. She feared vengeance. Why? He made himself look and saw she’d done this to him, blocked his memory. She’d done this deliberately, planned it out.
Without thought he advanced on her in a rage. She retreated to the door and through it, and he heard the lock engage, but she hadn’t gone far at all. She was still there in the corridor and he couldn’t escape that disgusting mind, the horrible flavor of it. He wanted it to go away. Right now.
He picked up his chair and beat it against the closed door until it shattered in his hands, and he felt her withdraw a few steps. More, he thought, more. She needs to be gone.
With a surge of strength he lifted the heavy bedstead and upended it against the door with a crash, and still she lingered. In frustration he tore through the room in a fury, smashing the furnishings until nothing was left and he stood in the center of the room, panting with exertion. Her continuing presence just outside maddened him.
A sparrow circled around his head and caught his attention. He tasted it—it came from the girl. He walked out onto the balcony still shaking and trying to catch his breath.
There she was, on the bench. She gestured at herself, at her eyes. “Look at me,” she was saying.
Gladly he pulled out of the monster’s head and looked at her, with his mind.
Her message was articulate, clear, and simple. “Cernunnos,” she thought. “Call Cernunnos.” She pictured a deer-headed man which raised an echo of recognition in him.
He tried to do as she asked and it didn’t work. He shook his head and roared in frustration. He tried again and felt his body change, bursting out of his clothes, and he was lost to rational thought.
Rhian was in her room when she felt the sudden eruption of George’s fury through the little beasts she was using to monitor him. This was it, she thought with elation. No more waiting.
She grabbed her latest bag of food from the cache over the window and casually strolled past the guards into the garden as she had done many times before. She took her usual spot on the bench and hoped that whatever this was would attract little notice before she could get them away.
She watched through her sparrow in the rafters as George lifted the bedstead and blocked the door with it. She cheered him on, silently, as he destroyed the room but sobered as she realized he was trapped in Creiddylad’s mind and desperately needed a way to escape.
Let’s get out of here, she thought, and made the bird flutter to catch his attention. As she’d hoped, he came to the balcony to look for her.
She was scared when she got a look at him. He was shaking with rage, and she wasn’t sure he could concentrate on her. She tried to tell him to invoke Cernunnos, and she thought he understood her, but it didn’t work and he roared and shook his head. Then the roar turned into a bugle and he transformed, not into the deer-headed form of Cernunnos, but into a full-sized enormous red deer, trapped on that tiny balcony in the rags of shredded clothing.
She worried that the noise would call all the guards. Come down, she thought at him, and the deer shook its head with its heavy antlers, scrambled up on the parapet and leapt diagonally to another balcony on the floor below, and from there to the ground. Its legs scrabbled for traction as it landed, but it seemed to have survived the drop.
She yanked her pack from its hiding place and stuffed the food sack inside. Holding it behind her with one hand, she approached the postern gate and its two guards. Her longer knife filled her other hand, hidden by her skirt.
She widened her eyes and gasped, “It’s terrible. It’s gone wild and it’s destroying everything.” She pointed with her head at the deer, more than twice the weight of either guard. She counted on their confusion to dismiss her as a threat, and it worked. They drew their swords and advanced on the stag that came to her.
It bugled again and struck out at the leading guard with its flailing front feet. She dropped her pack and turned on the other guard and stabbed him in the throat while he was distracted. It was horrible, but she knew it had to be done. When she could drag her eyes away, she saw the deer trampling the corpse of the guard he’d attacked.
“Enough, lord Cernunnos,” she said. “It’s not his fault. We must leave.”
She steeled herself and stripped her guard of his swordbelt and took his sword, and she opened the postern gate. Behind them she could hear the uproar rising in the castle.
The deer bolted through the opening and she ran as fast as she could in its wake.
The deer waited for Rhian at the crest of a low hill east of the castle. There was a good view of the walls and some of the taller buildings. They weren’t high enough to see all the way down into it, but Rhian could hear shouted commands in the distance and knew that they must surely be organizing a pursuit.
She planned to repel any horses and hounds sent after them, but she wasn’t sure she could outrace them on foot and she wanted to keep the heavy sword. She needed a horse. She reached out with her beast-sense and found the nearest one, and summoned it. There was resistance, which she interpreted as a rider, so she had the horse rear, and the resistance ended. In just a few minutes, a bay horse trotted up the hill to join them. It bore an empty saddle, and she rejoiced to find saddlebags attached behind. When they paused, she would check to see what they contained.
Keeping a wary eye on the deer lest it take off without her, she quickly stripped off her dainty dress and donned the clothing she’d prepared, frowning at the delicate boots that were the best she’d been able to provide. She cut her long shift off to a proper shirt’s length and stowed the remnant in her pack. She wrapped the guard’s swordbelt around her waist, tying a knot to make it short enough to hold temporarily.
With a mirthless grin, she kicked her fine clothes off to the side for Gwythyr to find. Too bad she couldn’t linger to watch his reaction.
She mounted up and adjusted the stirrups to fit her. “We should go,” she told the deer. She couldn’t bespeak it well, like an ordinary animal, and she felt odd talking to it like a person, but what else was she to do to reach Cernunnos or George, whichever was uppermost?
She couldn’t tell if it understood her. She thought it had to be more animal in this manifestation than in the hybrid forms, and she wondered if that impaired its comprehension, or maybe a part of whatever enchantment Creiddylad had laid confused it.
It hadn’t left her, so something must be getting through. She saw the guard’s sword must have caught it along the right front leg, but the wound seemed shallow and the bleeding had stopped.
The deer turned its head to look at her and stamped its foot. Clearly it wasn’t ready to go yet. She resolved to wait until pursuit on foot was uncomfortably close, if necessary.
Something caught her eye and she suddenly realized that the ground beneath her was alive with movement. She held her horse motionless while mice, rats, and other small creatures swarmed from the east behind them toward the castle. From where she stood she could make out a shimmer on the castle walls. She reached out, and the walls shone to her with small life, creatures climbing up and over, the leading edge of what she felt beneath her horse’s feet.
The deer snorted in concentration as it worked and Rhian shuddered. He was filling the castle with vermin. No wonder the pursuit was delayed. She wouldn’t want to be on the other side of those walls tonight.
