It had been a wearying day, followed by a more wearying night. Although the boy did his best to keep his eyes open in the deepening evening, it was a struggle, and a struggle he eventually lost. He slept in a curled up ball, fitfully and uncomfortable, twisted inside his clothes and lying on the old broken stones, the leaves and the moss. It was simply where he’d collapsed, too tired to move an inch farther. His dreams that night grew to be strange and full of phantoms: but not the phantoms of the shadow-demon. These were inborn dreams it seemed–though still unpleasant and uncanny in their own way. He kept hearing voices, much like the voice of the shadow-thing that had come out of the tree: except there was a chorus of them, joined together in some semblance of song. It was all too clear, too crisp and too close seeming. Behind those shadow-singers, he heard the fainter and more far-off cries and songs of the white women, with their ghostly banshee voices. It used to be that the worst of his dream were about his father, or getting a beating from the older boys in the village, or being lost in the woods at night with the wild beasts. But those nightmares seemed pale and flimsy in contrast to his dreams on this night. They were different to his old nightmares. They had a tint of realness to them that even in his sleeping state, the boy was aware of and frightened by.
When he awoke, it was abrupt, and right out of the midst of a nightmare. He blinked at the new morning sun, momentarily blinded as his eyes adjusted to the swaying shadows under the purple leaves of the great tree. He wondered what had roused him out of sleep so violently. He rubbed at the grit in his eyes. He yawned. No one else seemed to be moving about the camp. Fleat was fast asleep, half-curled up and owlish-looking in his brown and grey clothing. Dapplegrim was nowhere to be seen. Presumably he was patrolling, or off looking for signs of boggarts, or the soldiers of the Sorthe princes. But then, with a cold, gut wrench of a feeling, the boy realised that Caewen wasn’t where she had been either. He sat bolt upright. The wool blankets where she had been sleeping were tousled and rucked up in a heap. Where was she?
It was still early in the morning. She ought still have been resting, surely?
Then, as he looked about and listened, he heard a clanging noise: it was harsh, loud and angry sounding as if someone were smashing a piece of metal into unforgiving stone. The boy breathed quietly and listened more intently–there–again he heard it–another faint smash and the shivering ring of metal.
He got to his feet, overbalancing slightly due to the carryover of sleepiness. Correcting his balance, he looked around a bit more. “Fleat! Fleat!” he whisper-hissed. “Wake up!”
“Hm? What?”
Another clash of metal somewhere not very far away.
“That sounds like fighting?” said Fleat.
The boy didn’t wait. “Come on!” He tore off, over the mulched leaves, and towards the noise. Could it be fighting? Could the boggarts or soldiers have found them, and snuck up on them? The humanfolk soldiers maybe, but not the big hunting-boggarts… surely not. Every child knew that the bigger, meaner sorts of boggarts are blinded by daylight. They always slip away to their caves and dining-lairs before dawn.
The boy slowed and edged his way forward, under the spreading branches of the great tree, so that it’s thick shadow fell across him as he walked. He then passed through the under-shadows of a half-dozen other trees, past more of the ruins and then out of it into the streaming light of a new dawn. He heard Fleat following him, though just barely. If it weren’t for the boy’s newfound keenness of hearing, he’d never be able to pick up the subtle noises of Fleat’s soft feet. “Wha–?” said Fleat, as he drew alongside, but the boy waved a hand at him to be quiet.
The noise was very close now, but neither Caewen nor Dapplegrim were visible. The clanging and smashing of metal was becoming more insistent. The two children made their way over a low grassy rise, and then the boy saw it: Caewen was standing in a patch of shadow cast by a long wall of low ruins that stood crumbling in the sun. She was wearing only the thin clothes that she wore to sleep, and she was sweat-soaked. There was a feverish look to her skin. She had her bronze sword in both her hands and was apparently trying her best to shatter it against a huge carven rock that looked as if it might once have been an altar, or a tumbled piece of some gigantic throne. Dapplegrim was nowhere to be seen.
She smashed the sword into the rock again and again, and then abruptly it bent and fractured. The pieces fell and scattered like fragments of a smashed red-yellow mirror. As soon as the sword broke she took a long breath, threw her head back and dropped to her knees.
“Caewen?” said the boy, approaching cautiously. “Caewen? What are you doing?” She looked up at him, her eyes fever-glinting.
“I did it. I did it. I have seen dreams in my dreams, visions in my visions. And now I see secrets in the world. I see patterns in the flight of birds. I see ancient secrets in the ripple of water on a pond surface. I see strange whisperings in the leaves as they fall from the trees. That sword was a sword of mortal flesh with all its magic stripped out by the shackle’s blood. Bronze and copper and leather, sweat, blood, lather and skin. It was of my old flesh and belonged to my old flesh. I had to divest myself of it. The sword had to be sacrificed against the altarstone.” She pointed. “Don’t you see?”
He shook his head.
She was insistent. “It had to be returned to the Clay-o-the-Green.”
“But what will you use to fight with?” said the boy. It was a pragmatic question, and he wondered if she had not quite thought that far ahead. There were boggarts hunting them still, after all.
Now another voice spoke, hissing from the darkness nearest her ankle. The shadow-thing was there, but had been so still and so silent that the boy had not even noticed it. “There are other weapons,” it said, “weapons more fitting for my master. Weapons not wrought by clumsy hands of mortalkind, but of another wholly more charmed sort. Weapons that are nearby. Tssh. Tsch. Tscc. One only has to know how to reach them. A trove, yes. I can hear them singing softly in the night under the ruins, down, down deep, beneath the tree.”
“We will obtain one,” said Caewen, her voice a little strained sounding. “But first, my old sword had to be sundered, and surrendered to the earth. Back to that from whence its metals came. Now it is done.” She shut her eyes, wavered a little where she knelt and threatened to topple over entirely.
Fleat and the boy both lunged. They managed to get her under the arms, and were able to help her stay upright. Together, both of them steadied her on her feet, then led her slowly back to her bedroll and blanket. The shadow-thing slinked after them, hissing softly to itself, and never straying from Caewen’s etiolated dawnlight shadow.