The Knight

Your mind plays strange tricks on you—that is what I told myself. I could read Aelf writing, though I had just about forgotten I could write it. Now that I knew I could, I could see that it must have been one of the things I learned in Aelfrice before I came out in Parka’s cave. The Aelf had wiped a lot of things out of my memory—who knows why? All my memories of that time had been erased. But they had not wiped out what I was supposed to say to somebody about their troubles and the injustices they had suffered. I could not remember any of the details, but they had to be there just like the shapes of the Aelf letters. “They sent you with the tale of their wrongs and their worship,” Parka had told me. When they had left their message, they must have left what I had learned about their writing, too. Maybe they had to.

By the time I had thought all that, I was back at the well. I knew I would have to reach bottom this time if I wanted my mail back. I would have to give it everything I had—every last ounce. A good dive to start with, jumping as high as I could and breaking the water like an arrow to get as deep as possible.

I made a good dive and swam down until my ears ached, but there was nothing but water ahead when I had to come up.

After sight-seeing around the grotto a while to warm up and catch my breath, I picked out a nice smooth stone almost too heavy to carry and jumped into the well holding it. Down and down it carried me until the light vanished. Here there was (it seemed to me) a new quality to the water—it was still cold, and still very different from even the coldest, wettest air. But it was not suffocating anymore. It was water that had stopped trying to drown me.

I was so surprised, and so scared, that I let go of the stone, drifting up at first, then swimming upward with all my might when the tiny circle of blue light that was the top of the well showed again.

This time I shot out of the water, chilly and tired but not exactly breathless. That was Aelfrice down there, I told myself. The water in Aelfrice knows who I am.

The pool I had dived into on the Isle of Glas had its bottom in Aelfrice, I remembered. So had the sea, or that was how it seemed when the Kelpies had dived into it with me. So had the pool into which the winged man had sunk, for that matter. There was no reason this well should not take me to Aelfrice too, although I suspected it would not take everyone there.

“But I’m not everyone, after all.” This time I chose two smaller stones, nicely rounded.

Something moved in the chill, blind depths. I could not feel it, but I felt the little currents it made. And then, with the outstretched hands that held my ballast stones, I felt something new. Rough and hard. Flexible. Letting go of one stone, I grabbed it, then dropped the other.

My return to the surface hurt like the devil. Again and again I just about let go of the slimy, shapeless thing that held me back. From its weight and feel, I was sure it was the hauberk of double mail I had taken from Nytir, although there seemed to be something else caught in it—something long, awkward, stiff and bumpy.

At the surface at last, and grasping the well’s edge with one hand, I heaved the whole mess up and out onto the rough floor of the grotto, foundering in the process but bobbing up once my arm was free. About ready to drop, I climbed out of the well, carried up by a sudden surge of rising water, an uprush that seemed to have become a lot stronger since the last time I paid attention to it.

When I climbed out of that well and shook myself as dry as I could, combing water from my hair with my fingers, the ringing in my ears made me deaf to the music echoing faintly through the grotto. I shivered and gaped and spat, shaking my head.

Then I heard it.

Eerie and splotched with sour chords, sinking and rising again, foreign and familiar all at once, it snapped like a flame, then sang the way a swan sings when a hunter’s arrow takes her life. It scared me half to death—but it made me homesick for someplace I could not remember.

I ran around the altar to the passage where I had left my clothes. Lights no bigger than lightning bugs danced a long, long way down.

As quickly as I could, I dressed myself again, forcing my feet into my wet boots, although it felt as if I might break every bone in them.

The hauberk I had brought up from the bottom of the well was tangled with water-weeds and filthy with mud. I rinsed it in the cold, clear water that would become the Griffin. A sword belt of fine metal mesh was linked to it; and a gem-encrusted scabbard hung from the belt. I drew the blade halfway to look at it. It was black, but mottled with silver in a way that made me think of a knife I saw in Forcetti.

I turned it over. Was it really mottled? Or marked? Or just darkened by years underwater? Sometimes I seemed to see writing there, other times, none. The hilt might have been gold or bronze, a little green now with corrosion.

A thousand clear voices had joined the music—a chant like the chants in church. As quickly as I could, I pulled on the hauberk, finding it lighter than I remembered.

I had left my own sword belt behind. I was ru

When I looked up again, the dragon’s head was above water. Its scales seemed black in the dim light; its eyes were of a blackness to turn all ordinary black to gray, the kind of black that drinks up every spark of light.

Coil by coil it rose, and I believe it would have spread its wings if it could; but wide and lofty as the grotto was, it was not big enough for that. Half open, the wings filled it, so that it seemed for a minute or more to have been hung with curtains of thin black leather—curtains hanging from cruel, curved claws as black as ebony.

Sea-green, many-colored, and fiery were the marching, singing Aelf who poured from the passage to hail Grengarm; but black was the robe of the bound woman they laid on his altar: long and curling black hair that did not quite veil her nakedness. Under it, her skin was as white as milk.

I stared, dazzled by her beauty but by no means sure she was human.

One of the Aelf, robed and bearded, indicated her by a gesture, made some speech to Grengarm that was lost in the music and the singing, and fell to his knees, bowing his head to the rocky floor.

Grengarm’s mouth gaped, and a voice like a hundred deep drums filled the whole grotto. “You come with spears. With swords.” The curved fangs his open mouth showed plainly were longer than those swords, and as sharp as any spear. “What if Grengarm finds your sacrifice unworthy?”

The singers fell silent. The harps and horns and flutes no longer played. From far away came the thud of mridangas, the chiming of gold thumb cymbals, and the jingle of sistra. My heart pounded, and I knew then that I had danced once like the dancers that were coming.

These were Aelfmaidens, twenty or more, naked as the woman on the altar but crowned with floating hair, leaping and turning, dancing each to her own music, or perhaps all dancing to a music beyond music, to a rhythm of sistrum, cymbal, and mridanga too complex for me to understand. They twirled and dipped, stepped and capered as they played; and I saw Uri among them.

Folding his wings, Grengarm moved the way a big snake moves, advancing toward the altar. The dancers scattered, and I, almost unconsciously, drew the sword I had just found.

A phantom knight stood before Grengarm as soon as my blade cleared the scabbard, a knight holding his sword above his head and shouting, “Cease! Cease, worm! Or perish.”