The door flung itself open and swirls of snow-glittering wind pushed into the cosy room, groping and feeling at the surfaces. They looked as if they were hands of darkness and ice, but as they crept closer to where Caewen and Cag-Mag sat, the old witch said simply, “No. Not here. Not in my house.”
The hands lost their animate glitter, and little puffs of dead ice crystal fell to the floor. A man’s outline appeared in the doorway then. There was a voice: not evil, not creaking and bleak. It was a calm, plain voice, rounded in its tones and well-practised, melodious, but not overly honeyed. It was the voice of some wandering singer, road-wise, perhaps down on their luck–a person who had seen the world and lived to yearn for a home that was simpler. The voice sounded kind. It sounded sad. Weary. Wondering. And also, a touch frightened.
“What madman dares to call me like a feral spirit? Who summons me with sorcery? Show yourself.”
“He cannot see us,” said Cag-Mag. “And he cannot hear us. He will see only an empty cave. He cannot hurt us or cast magic upon our flesh or our spirits. His sword cannot touch us. So long as we resist him.”
Caewen was staring, wide of eye, at the darkened doorway. When the questions got no answers, he entered, and that was when Caewen recognised him.
She couldn’t help herself as she fought back a sudden shocked in-breath.
He looked around himself suspiciously as if he thought he had detected something, but was unsure of it.
“Who lurks here? You stoop to drawing illusions over my sight?” He narrowed his eyes, and his face gathered a stormy darkness about the eyes and mouth. It was the harper from the Wizard’s Moot. The man who had been lounging with a friend outside his tent. The one that Dapplegrim had kept calling, “Not human,” whenever Caewen looked at him. Now, like then, Caewen felt an immediate and powerful sense of being drawn to him. Before, she had mistaken the feeling for something merely sexual. It was more than that, she realised. It was the candle’s glorious light in the eyes of a moth. It was the glory of stars and moonlight upon a frozen and treacherous sea.
He was dressed much as he had been when Caewen last saw him, but now, somehow, his attire gave an impression of regality that had not been present before. The clothing had a shimmer to its weave and the edges were stitched with fine strands of silver.
His face was beautiful, and full of delicate angles. Deep hollows fell away beneath his cheeks. Lips that could only be described as sensuous had a blushed shade to them. Each eye was as dark and opaline as a blackened pearl, but lit at the centre by an iris of pure white. Long ice-blond hair flowed about his face, stirring as if there was a wind in the cave–which there was not. His crown was not of gold, steel or precious stones: but rather a crown made of glass forget-me-nots. The clothing he wore was a mass of drapery and folds: charcoal black and off-chalky white, decorated all along the edges with knot-work and ivy-leafs. Upon his chest was a device, picked out in silver on perfectly black leather cuirass: a winter-bare tree, branches twisting above, roots curling below. From the tree hung a chain, and from the chain, a harp. He had a harp hanging at his side too, ivory and silver and jet. And all about his person were fastened small objects that appear to have been carved from very old bone: rings and bracers, a torc, two earrings, a flower dangling at the end of a ribbon, tied to his sword. For he carried a sword: and where he was beauty and handsome grace, the sword was an unmistakably practical object: undecorated steel as dark as the spaces between stars. A single red ribbon fastened to the pommel, and from that ribbon dangled the floral carving.
Caewen felt a longing waft out of the bone cloak brooch, lying as it did on the little table. She felt it reach out and stretch itself to the man in the doorway. It wanted to rejoin its siblings–it wanted to make the skeleton whole.
He must have felt it too.
He narrowed his gaze still further and pursed his lips. “Who are you to dangle my own bone-and-body in front of me? This is an insult. I say again: how dare you?”
She felt something more too. It wasn’t just the bone token that felt desire. She did, just as surely, just as strongly. She remembered how at the wizard’s fair Dapplegrim had warned her away from this man. How her companion had seemingly sensed her draw to this man who was not a man. Had Dapple know the truth? Or suspected it? He had been very firm in placing himself between her and the harper at the fair. And now this. Everything about the man was distilled allure. Caewen had imagined that The Winter King lead armies through fear or force of arms, but now she saw a more treacherous power was in him. This was a being whose armies would love him, and would love him beyond the measure of their own life, and beyond the ultimate threshold of despair. Caewen felt that love growing in her. This was what Cag-Mag meant when she said that this was a test. Caewen had just to say–No–and yet, she could not bring herself to say a word. The struggle within was too great. The purity of the need was too powerful.