The Last Light of the Sun

by Guy Gavriel Kay

the world of men could be divided into three groups: those living, those dead, and those at sea.

but marrying the exile’s wife and claiming land for himself smacked too much of reaping in pleasure what he’d sowed as a judge.

It was hard to be devious when you had no idea what you were doing.

began rocking upon him, breathing harder. Crying a name then (not his),

Daaaaaamn

He heard the horse before he saw it. Wolves might eat the moons, heralding the end of days and the death of gods, but they hadn’t found Halldr’s grey horse yet.

if they met again it would probably be in the afterworld of souls.

Twelve had been a marginal number for a raiding party, but the brothers were confident in their abilities, not without some cause. Besides, in Cadyr it was said that any one of their own was worth two of the Arberthi, and at least three from Llywerth. They might do the arithmetic differently in the other two provinces, but that was just vanity and bluster.

Alun could see his brother’s face as this green-gold woman-girl turned to Dai, whose phrase she had just echoed and challenged. And because he knew his brother better than he knew anyone on the god’s earth, Alun saw the world change for Dai in that crossing of glances. A moment with a name to it, as the bards said. He had an instant to feel sorrow, the awareness of something ending as something else began, and then they asked him for a song, that the night might begin with music, which was the way of the Cyngael.

This happened more and more as he grew older. Past and present colliding, simultaneous visions, the present seen with the past. This same man, a quarter-century ago, on a battlefield by the sea, the Volgan himself and the Erling force they’d met by their boats. There had been three princes among the Cyngael that day but Brynn had led the centre. A full head of dark hair on him then, far less bulk, less of this easy humour. The same man, though. You changed, and you did not change.

“I don’t know,” he said, which had the virtue of being honest.

Ceinion knew it was his duty to chastise the other man for this. He didn’t even consider it; had known ap Hywll and his wife for too long. One of the things about living in and of the world: you learned how complex it could be.

There was something about Enid that always made him want to smile.

“Only exploring, Ceinion. Fear me not. No matter what you say to be kind, there will come a night when I can’t excite you any longer. One of these visits . . .” “The night I die,” he said, and meant it.

Then something else comes to her. And on the thought—quick and bright as a firefly over water—between her shoulders, where they all had wings

They stayed like that, a moment as long as the one before Jad made the world. Then a hammer was thrown.

Terror went away like smoke on a wind as soon as he was out through the doors and saw what there was to see. Its passing left behind a kind of hollowness: a space not yet filled by anything. He had been quite certain, in fact, from the moment he’d heard Dai’s first cry, but there was knowing, and knowing.

“I know what happened here,” said the boy—he was still something of that, though his father’s heir as of tonight.

“I need to kill him, my lord.” There were things you were supposed to say to that, in the teachings, and he knew what they were, he had even written some of them. What Ceinion of Llywerth, high cleric of the Cyngael, anchor and emblem of his people’s faith in Jad, murmured amid the orange flickering of torches and the black smoke was: “Not yet, my dear. You can’t kill him yet. Soon, I hope.”

She turned back to her husband. “And you, my lord, will apologize tonight and tomorrow and the next day to Kara, here. You likely gave her the fright of a young life, more than any Erling would have, when she came to fetch ale for those still dicing and found you sleeping in the brewhouse. If you want a night’s sleep outside the doors, my lord, choose another place next time, if we have guests?” Ceinion loved her even more, then, than he had before.

remembered the wind of that hammer flying past her face. Realized—already—that she would likely do so all her life, carrying the memory like the two scars on her throat.

She carried on, following her mother. Enid knew what to do here, as in so many things.

And a third one (a failing of the Cyngael, threes all the time?)

“A lie! You wanted to make every man love you, to play at it. A game.” Her heart was pounding now. “You are . . . unjust, my lord.” Repeating herself. “Unjust? You tested that power every time you entered a room.” “How do you know any such thing?” How did he know?

Enid was with the living, in the other room.

She didn’t look at him. She was staring, instead, at the open doorway. The emptiness of it, where someone had gone out. Had walked into the night, hating her—the way he’d said his brother had left him. A pattern? Set and sealed with iron and blood?

“How did this happen?” she asked, of the cleric, of the world. Holy men usually spoke of the mysterious ways of the god. “I do not know,” Ceinion of Llywerth murmured, instead.

Three things not well or wisely done, the triad went. Approaching a forest pool by night. Making wrathful a woman of spirit. Drinking unwatered wine alone. They did things by threes in this land, Alun thought savagely. Obviously it was time for him to claim one of the wine jars and carry it off, drain it by himself until oblivion came down.

The world was unassuageably awry. His heart had a hollow inside it where Dai had been. It was not going to fill; there was nothing to fill it with.

A faerie, standing before him in the world he’d thought he’d known.

Her voice, simply speaking words, made him realize he had never, really, made music with his harp, or sung a song the way it should be sung. He felt that he would weep if he were not careful.

He thought about that, and then of the girl, Brynn’s daughter, in that room by the chapel, where his brother’s body lay. He wondered if he would ever play the harp again.

He didn’t feel surprise at all. It was as if the capacity to feel that had been drained from him, like blood.

You got to the meadhalls of Ingavin by dying with a weapon to hand. Time then for easiness, among ripe, sweet, willing maidens, and the gods. On this earth, you fought.

When you had no obvious choices, you acted as if what you needed to do could be done.

He watched the other man topple into white, foaming surf. Dead already. Another angry ghost.

Two men were walking out through the gates. One lifted a hand in greeting. Bern felt the anger still within him, making a home, not ready to leave.

At the margins of any tale there are lives that come into it only for a moment. Or, put another way, there are those who run quickly through a story and then out, along their paths. For these figures, living their own sagas, the tale they intersect is the peripheral thing. A moment in the drama of their own living and dying.

And he didn’t think three generations would be allowed them. Not in these northern lands, this boneyard of war.

Something peculiar seemed to be happening to her now, however. A feeling, a sensation within . . . a presence. She didn’t understand it, felt edgy, angry, threatened. A darkness in the sunlight here, beside it.

You could say he’d missed the sea, man-killer, fortune-maker. A part-truth, but only that.

Heimthra, longing for home, could kill a man from within. He’d seen it happen.

No doubt, no hesitation, even here, so far away from home, from childhood. Small sons could be like that, memorizing each and every thing about the father, a figure larger than anything in the world, filling the house, then emptying it when he left, on the dragon-ships again.

He took her fingers in his hand, and brought them to his mouth and kissed them, then turned her palm to his lips. Felt her trembling, as leaves did in wind. Heard her say, very faintly, music, “Will you do me harm?” Alun opened his eyes. She was a silver shining in the wood, beyond imagining. He saw the trees around them and the summer grass. “Not for all the light in all the worlds,” he said, and took her in his arms.

We Cyngael live where the farthest light of Jad falls. The last light of the sun. It needs attending to, my lord, lest it fail.”

Ceinion would remember that voice, and the fact that the king had been on his feet before he’d heard anything. Knowing already. And so Osbert told them: of signal flares lit on hills towards the south by the sea, running in their chain of telling fire along the ridges with a message. Not a new tale, Ceinion thought, hearing it. Nothing new here at all, only the old dark legacy of these northlands, which was blood.

He hesitated, and then a thought came that could not have come a night before, when he was younger.

Brogan had never been near the king’s court (only twice up to Esferth town, which was twice more than enough) but he knew what he thought of it. You didn’t need to eat dung to know you wouldn’t like the taste.

We like to believe we can know the moments we’ll remember of our own days and nights, but it isn’t really so. The future is an uncertain shape (in the dark) and men and women know that. What is less surely understood is that this is true of the past as well. What lingers, or comes back unsummoned, is not always what we would expect, or desire to keep with us.

It was late in a long life, and three husbands had been laid in the earth, before Cwene realized—and acknowledged to herself—that what she had wanted to do, more than anything before or since, was ride away from her home and everyone she knew in the world with that Erling on his grey horse that night long ago. The clever girl had become a wise woman through the turning years; she forgave herself for that longing before she died.

A desperate, glorious folly. The way of the Cyngael.