There was no reason, really, to wait for morning, fair as it might prove to be.
He walked on, alone on the road, leaving the lights of the inn behind, and after no very great distance more came to a small, flat bridge across the northern roadside ditch and knew the place and crossed there as he had years ago and years ago, and went through the wet dark autumn grass of that field, and when he came to the black edgings of the wood he did not pause but entered into the weighted, waiting darkness of those ancient trees, with seven souls and his own.
Behind him, in the world, the sun went down.
Darkness lasted in the Aldwood, night a deepening of it not a bringing forth. Morning was a distant, intuited thing, not an altering of space or light. The moons were usually known by pull, not by shining, though sometimes they might be glimpsed, and sometimes a star would appear between black branches, moving leaves, above a lifting of mist.
In the glade where blood was shed each autumn by masked priests of a rite so old no one knew how it had begun, these truths were altered- a very little. The trees here gave way enough for light to fall when the tendrils of fog were not hovering. The noontide sun might make the leaves show green in spring or summer, red-gold as they were claimed by autumn frosts. The white moon could make a cold, spare beauty of the black branches in midwinter, the blue one draw them back into strangeness, the half-world. Things could be seen.
Such as the crushed grass and fallen leaves and the sod where a hoofed tread that ought to have been too massive for the earth had fallen, just now, and had gone back among the trees. Such as seven birds lying on the hard ground, Grafted birds, artifices. Such as the man near them. What was left, more truly, of what had been a man. His face was untouched. The expression, by the moonlight which was blue just then, serene, accepting, a quiet laid upon it.
He had returned of his own will: some weight had been given to that, allowance made, dispensation. The body below was ripped apart, bloodily, from groin to breastbone. Blood and matter lay exposed, trailed along the grass away, where the hoofprints went.
An old, worn traveller’s pack lay on the ground a little distance away. It had a wide leather strap, Esperanan, worn soft.
It was silent in the glade. Time ran. The blue moon slipped through empty spaces overhead and passed away from what it saw below. No wind, no sound in the bare branches, no stirring of fallen leaves. No owl called in the Aldwood, or nightingale, no rumbling tread of beast, or god returning. Not now. That had been and had passed. Would be again, and again, but not tonight.
Then, into such stillness in the cold night, came speech. The birds on the grass, and yet not them. Voices of women were heard in the air, in the darkness, soft as leaves, women who had died here, long ago.
Do you hate him?
Now? Look what has been done to him.
Not only now. Ever. Before. I never did.
A quiet again, for a time. Time meant little here, was hard to compass, unless by the stars slipping from sight as they moved, when they could be seen.
Nor I.
Nor I. Should we have?
How so?
Truly. How so?
And only look, said Linon then, her first words, who had been first of them to be claimed and to return, look how he has paid.
He wasn’t afraid, though, was he? Tiresa.
Yes, he was, said Linon. A breath in the stillness. He isn’t, any more.
Where is he? Mirelle.
No one answered that.
Where are we to go? asked Mirelle.
Ah. That I do know. We are there already. We are gone. Only say goodbye and we are gone, said Linon.
Goodbye, then, said Tiresa. Falcon.
Goodbye, whispered Mirelle.
One by one they bade farewell to each other, rustling words in the dark air as the souls took leave. At the end, Linon was alone, who had been first of all, and in the quiet of the grove she said the last words to the man lying beside her in the grass, though he could not hear her now, and then she spoke something more in the dark, more tender than a farewell, and then at last her bound soul accepted its release, so long denied.