George looked over his group on Friday morning before they entered the Guests’ Way outside the main palisade gates of Greenway Court. He was glad Benitoe had asked to come along after the hound exercise in the morning. He’d volunteered to drive the empty wagon, so he could “tell his auntie all about it,” and that saved George from looking for some one else to drive. Neither he nor Angharad were comfortable handling the long reins so they rode instead, with Maelgwn on his black pony Brenin Du.
Just outside the entrance to the way, he plucked two way tokens out of his vest pocket and handed them over to his foster-son. “I don’t want you using these, now, without telling me first.”
Maelgwn recognized the symbol for the Guests’ Way on one of them and George hid his smile as he puzzled over what the other one was for.
“Go on, now,” he said. “Take us in.” Rhodri had said he was ready for this.
Maelgwn straightened in surprise and pride. He moved to the front of the tiny cavalcade and led them in.
“Stop before the transition,” George said. “It’s a good distance in for this passage. Then look for something else.”
The boy dutifully came to a halt after a few yards and used his growing way-finding senses. “Is that another way, in here?”
“Well done. That’s what the second token is for. This is the hidden branch of the Guests’ Way, and the primary local access to the human world.”
“Is that how you came here?”
“No, Cernunnos made a way of his own for that, and we call it the Huntsman’s Way now. I’ll get you a token for it and show it to you, soon. Feel for it when you’re on the other side, it’s not far away.”
He waved his hand in the dim light of the passage where they were stopped. “Alright, bring us through the second way.”
They emerged some distance behind Mariah Catlett’s house. When George was whipper-in for his grandfather’s Rowanton Hunt, he’d known Mariah Catlett as a middle-aged woman, always in the first field of riders, close behind the hounds. He’d known little about her, except that she was widowed with a grown son in the Marines.
Now he knew her as Gwyn’s human agent. For thirty years she’d been earning her living this way, first for Gwyn, and now for him, too. Her father had stumbled upon Gwyn’s secret life when Gwyn had lingered behind in the human world to raise his daughter after her human mother died. That daughter was George’s grandmother, Georgia.
George had his own desk in her house now. It had been so strange to be in front of a computer again, several days ago, when he ordered the goods the rock-wights wanted, using accounts she’d set up for him.
He’d taken on the task of providing them with their first installment of geology textbooks, as agreed. Seething Magma had been fascinated with what he’d told her a month ago about plate tectonics and magnetism from the rotating iron core of the planet, and now all of them wanted to know more.
The elementals lived for tens of thousands of years, and their accumulated cultural knowledge was formidable, but they lacked the human penchant for science and were eager to make up that deficit as quickly as possible, especially for their core interests.
George had made himself a shopping list, but it kept growing as he thought about the problem. They needed not just books on the earth sciences, but also chemistry, paleontology, even dictionaries to translate both English terms and source words from Latin and Greek. And they had to start with high school texts and build up to more advanced material.
And then there were the musical instruments and related books that Cavern Wind had requested. That had kept him busy, too, thinking of what might be possible for rock-wights to use. He hoped he’d made good choices.
As they approached the house, Mariah came outside to welcome her guests, bringing George’s grandparents with her.
“Leave the wagon over by the garage,” she called. “All the packages are inside there. Come with me and we’ll put your horses in the stable while you visit.”
George dismounted to perform the introductions.
“This is Maelgwn, my foster-son,” he said. “Son, these are my grandparents, Gilbert and Georgia Talbot, and our hostess, Mariah Catlett.” Gilbert walked over to Maelgwn, who was still on his pony, and shook his hand. The two were of a height, Gilbert standing and Maelgwn mounted, and each stood or sat tall. George caught his grandmother smiling to see the comparison.
Benitoe stood by the wagon horse to greet them, and bowed. George thought the honors were about equal here. The humans had never seen a lutin, but then Benitoe had never seen elderly humans before, either. All had been warned, but George could see the reality was still a surprise on both sides.
Angharad dismounted easily, and he steadied her, holding his horse negligently by a long rein.
Georgia embraced her lightly. “Should you be riding, dear?”
Angharad smiled. “It’s very early days yet. You can be sure I’ll take no chances.”
Benitoe began unharnessing the horse once the wagon was stopped at the garage. They could load it there and bring the horse back to meet it, when they were done.
George’s grandfather came over to give him a hand. Benitoe eyed his gait. Walks like a horseman, he thought approvingly. They worked their way down the harness buckles together on either side, each of them spare of movement.
“I’m afraid I invited myself along to the family party because I was curious,” Benitoe said. “George is the only human I’ve ever met, and I knew my auntie would want to hear about what it’s like here, and about his family.”
“Happy to have you, son,” Gilbert said. “You’re the first of your kind we’ve met, too.”
They stared at each other frankly and Gilbert broke the ice first. “How old are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Twenty-eight, sir,” Benitoe said. “And you?”
“Seventy-seven and still going strong,” he boasted.
Benitoe was stricken and worked hard to keep it off his face. He knew humans were short-lived, but this man would clearly not see a hundred years. He’d never seen the marks of age like this on a fae. Such a one would be older than Beli Mawr, he suspected.
He glanced at George. Such a short life for him, too?
While they waited for Benitoe, George pointed out the main house and stables of Bellemore, just visible through the bare winter trees.
Georgia said, “Sometime you should all come have a look inside. I can show you around. You can’t tell from here, but that stable is shaped like a ‘U’ and holds twenty-four horses. My father always had an eye for a good horse.”
“Did you grow up here, great-grandmother?” Maelgwn asked.
Her face worked for a moment at the unexpected title. “Yes, dear, with my father.”
George thought, it was the right thing to do, to bring both parts of my family together. They’re all trying, for my sake. He blinked, and tried to mask the welling up of affection, but Angharad smiled at him and laid a hand on his arm in sympathy.
He looked up as his grandfather approached with Benitoe and the wagon horse and thought he saw a nod of approval from him.
He knew from Mariah that her stable had only six stalls, but she’d turned her horses out into a paddock for the day and made up four stalls for the visitors. She hauled the hanging door sideways along its track, and led them inside.
As she walked past the light switch she casually flicked it on. Both Maelgwn and Benitoe jumped as the lights came on, high and bright, as if by magic. Even Angharad was visibly startled. George couldn’t help teasing them about it.
“Welcome to electricity,” he said.
Maelgwn walked over to the switch, leading his pony, and moved it slowly up and down. Then Benitoe elbowed him aside and did the same.
“Not magic?” Benitoe said, trying to get close to an unlit light bulb to see how it worked.
“No, not at all,” George said. “Don’t stare at a lit bulb, you can hurt your eyes.”
“Why can’t we do this, then?” Benitoe said, intently, his mind visibly working.
George tried to explain. “It’s like turning on the water in the faucets in the huntsman’s house. It looks easy, but all that plumbing had to be laid and the balineum built to collect the water from the spring to ensure an even flow on demand.” He checked—Benitoe was following him. “It’s a similar kind of thing, electricity. You make it at one place and then distribute it. You’ll see tall poles holding wires that do it. It’s not hard to do, but to make it commonplace requires a lot of work. We’ve done that work, but you would have to start from scratch.”
Benitoe was thoughtful. “Auntie will never believe this.”
George had a vision of his aunt Maëlys's Golden Cockerel inn awash with electric lights.
Gilbert Talbot was feeling a bit light-headed. His wife’s father had always seemed somewhat uncanny to him, and he believed George’s tales of what had happened to him, how could he not, but somehow nothing had quite driven it home to him until now. He wasn’t sure if it was their obvious unfamiliarity with electricity and their wonder at it, or maybe just the lutin.
Gwyn and Angharad were polished creatures, more like foreign dignitaries than different beings altogether. You could forget that they weren’t human. But Benitoe was like nothing on earth. From a distance he had seemed first like a boy and then a small man or midget. But up close he was somehow just… other, a different nature. Like an alien, in some ways, in that he didn’t have an exact human counterpart, though appropriately dressed he would be inconspicuous. And yet his surprise over the lights was comical, and his intent inquisitiveness afterward very human indeed.
This was his grandson’s family now, and one of his friends. What a very strange turn life had taken for him.
He turned to George thoughtfully after they finished putting the horses up. “How about a ride in a car? I brought the old Suburban, you’d all fit. Do you have time for that?”
That stopped him in his tracks, to Gilbert’s amusement.
“No,” George said. “Too much, too quickly. I wonder if they’d like that some other time, though. Let’s spend the day visiting instead.”
What’s a car, Maelgwn wondered, overhearing his foster-father’s conversation. He’d positioned himself to keep an eye on him, after the surprise of the stable lights. Benitoe’s questions about “how” didn’t interest him. He wanted to know “what” instead—what could you use it for, what could it do? Was it a threat? Clearly it wasn’t dangerous here, by the way all the humans behaved.
Benitoe had told him Gilbert’s age while they settled their horses, and Maelgwn understood why he seemed shaken by it. The man was so young in years, younger even than Dyfnallt, who was just an ordinary grownup. So this is what it means, when Rhodri told me they don’t live very long.
But he looks like an elder, and he feels like one, too. Best to treat him that way and forget about the years.
He surveyed George and his grandfather standing together with an eye used to classifying animals and their behaviors in the wild. He could see where his foster-father got the breadth that made him stand out among the leaner fae, what he called his Norman blood. Was this a Norman, then? He stood tall, despite the white hairs, with the quiet manner of a horseman, something Maelgwn was beginning to recognize.
And this white-haired woman was the Prince of Annwn’s daughter. He had to keep reminding himself of it. He could see a resemblance in her face, but her manner was nothing like Gwyn’s—open, friendly, warm. He’d bet that was her mother in her. Maybe that’s where his foster-father got his too-trusting nature. Gwyn wasn’t like this.
I need to learn more from Gwyn when I see him, mealtimes. Learn more about the bearing of a prince.
And I need to explore this place, with or without permissions, he thought. A shiver of premonition ran down his spine. What about that other way his foster-father mentioned, the one he came through in the beginning?
He stood there quietly while the others discussed the proposed car ride and cast his way senses out. It wasn’t hard to find the other way, it didn’t seem to be hidden. He should remind his foster-father to change that.
