Midsummer's Country
by Ashura
archive: Arcadia (http://arcadia.envy.nu)
pairing: eventual Bran/Will, but not for a while
warnings: drama, and everything that goes with it. sex, violence, mythology. ;)
disclaimer: Bran, Will, various other characters and excerpts from Silver on the Tree all belong to Susan Cooper. Characters and scenes from the Mabinogion and various Arthurian legends are free for anyone's using, and the order of the words of the story are mine.
soundtrack: Derek Bell "The Magic Harp," Enya "The Celts"
Chapter one: LunedIn the evenings, they told stories. They were old stories, and everyone already knew them, but it seemed they never tired of reliving them. Even the jokes were the same—Owein would begin, and Kei would interrupt him, and they would bicker like children, egging each other on until Arthur told them to get on with it. Gwenwhyvar and Laudine would look at each other and roll their eyes, and sit in the warm, comfortable chairs by the fire pretending that they were thoroughly entranced with hearing the same tales of their knights-errant for the tenth night in a row, and Olwen would laugh and toss her hair and play a small harp beneath it all.
These were the nights when Bran would excuse himself early and visit the mirror. Sometimes he said he was tired, or feeling ill, most of the time he laughed and told them straight out that he was bored. And because he was still a boy, they told him by all means to run off and explore or play or do whatever it was that he wanted to do.
He had been a boy for a long time now, and it was starting to worry him.
He hadn't noticed at first the way time didn't pass in the castle behind the North Wind, because one does not notice things that do not exist. It was only after he found the mirror that he realised it. There were a great many artifacts and magic things, in the castle and scattered around the castle grounds, and not even the High King knew of them all. In the early days Bran really had gone exploring, and he had discovered a fair number of them. One night he had left the great hall and wandered into the dim, low corridors behind the kitchens. He wasn't sure anyone knew they were there at all. The dust was miserable, and the air was thick and it smelled stagnant and old, but it was the most interesting place he had been, so he kept on. And in one of the rooms he opened—though it was dark and stuffy and opening the door had displaced several unhappy spiders—was the mirror.
It was not impressive to look at, simple and covered in grime, little more than a dirty shard of metal with runes scratched into the back of it. Bran stuck it in his pocket more because he wanted to see what it looked like clean than because he had any intention of learning what it did. He left the room and kept on following the passage. It got smaller and smaller, and after a very long time it finally began to lead upward. It ended in a small stone trapdoor, in the ceiling above him, with no handle or lock.
"Well this is good," he said. "How do I get you to open, then? Don't suppose it'll help if I just ask nicely?"
It did not, for the door did not respond. But when he lay his hand against it, it swung open at his touch, calmly and silently. He shot it a dubious look and lifted himself through.
He was in the centre of a circle of oak trees, atop a carpet of soft dark grass. In the centre of the clearing stood a squat grey stone, just tall enough and flat enough to sit on. The moon was full that night, and it filtered down through the trees, making them glow silver. Small white flowers turned their faces up toward it, their delicate petals open despite the darkness, growing in a clear circle around the perimetre, under the trees. The air was thick and heavy and smelled of wildflowers.
"Now here's a thing," he said aloud, mostly to break the eerie silence with the sound of his own voice. It came out low and muffled. The trapdoor had closed behind him as soon as he was through, and it blended invisible into the grass. Entranced, curious, and a little afraid, he approached the standing stone. He ran his hand along the rough surface, half expecting it to be warmer or colder or smoother than the night should have allowed. It was not—just a stone, and nothing more, or so it seemed. He climbed onto it, perching cross-legged atop its flat surface, glaring around the clearing as if daring it to challenge him.
It did not, and soon he tired of waiting for something untoward to happen. He turned his attention to the fragment of mirror again, and cleaned off some of the thick layers of dried dirt that covered it. He spit on it, and rubbed it with the hem of his tunic, which came off smeared with black.
By the time he'd used up most the available bits of fabric on his clothing, the mirror was finally usable. It was not in any particular shape, and he did not know the runes carved into its back, so if it had a special use he couldn't make it out. He gazed into it, and it showed only his reflection, a reflection he generally avoided looking at. His smooth pale face stared back at him, tawny cat-eyes the only mark of colour, and those obscured by fine, equally pale hair. His features were delicate and round, at twelve years old still more child than man, but the faint beginnings of laugh lines—or were they worry lines?—were already forming at the corners of his eyes. His mouth was small, lips full but nearly invisible for being as white as the rest of him. The neck of his tunic brushed his chin, it was stark midnight-blue; he had never given up his preference for striking colours that stood out against his skin. He dressed the way the rest of Arthur's court did now, but he still felt as though he were dressing up for a costume party every day of his life. In some ways, living in the castle with the family of his birth was like having a long-lost piece of him suddenly and completely returned to its place; he felt at home and /wanted/, and though he and his parents had needed time to adjust to one another, he loved them fiercely. But there were other times when he was sure he was dreaming, and he fully expected to wake up back in the cottage on David Evans' farm, with his da shaking him and telling him to get up and not be late for school.
It was when he saw his mother that he always knew he wasn't dreaming. Gwenwhyvar was everything he had ever been told she was, beautiful and entrancing and bright. When she had first seen him alight from Pridwen's deck, her blue eyes had gone wide and dewy, and she had caught him up in her arms before he had realised she was there, holding him tight and murmuring his name into his hair. He had returned her hug awkwardly, blinking back tears of his own and feeling complete and relieved. He had worried that when he saw her, he might be angry. He was not. That first night she had come to his room, and asked after Owen Davies, and all about his life. She told him she was proud of him, and that she loved him. He had never been so content as he was when he fell asleep that night.
The surface of the mirror was clouding, and he rubbed his hand across it to erase the effects of his warm breath against it. It did not clear. Curious, he rubbed at it again. It seemed the haze was on the inside, and he blew on it and rubbed it again.
When the reflection cleared, it was no longer himself he saw. He was looking into a room—an attic, it looked like, because the ceiling was slanted, with wood-paneled walls and a mismatched collection of colourful rugs scattered across the floor. A bed with a blue quilt, a bookcase, full, with an odd little statue of a dragon atop it, a music stand nearby, and on one wall the most garish, ugly carnival head Bran had ever seen in his life. As he watched, trying to figure out just what he was looking at, a boy walked into the room, a schoolbag slung over one shoulder, and tossed himself onto the bed. He had straight brown hair that fell in his eyes, and he was wearing very faded bluejeans and a grey t-shirt. He scuffed battered trainers off his feet and fumbled around in his bag, and Bran's stomach clenched, because he knew exactly what he was seeing, now, and why he hadn't recognised him immediately.
The boy was Will Stanton, only he was older than when Bran had last seen him.
Watching Will dig Brave New World out of his pack and stretch out on the bed to read, Bran decided he was at least fifteen. He had gotten longer, angled out a bit, but the intense expression on his face when he focused all his attention on his book was achingly familiar. An unpleasant suspicion took hold of Bran's mind, morphing slowly into a vague panic. He wasn't getting any older. It made sense, of course, now that he had given it words, but he had never considered it before. He had not given too much thought to adulthood, but rather simply assumed it would eventually occur. To realise otherwise was disconcerting.
He put the mirror in his pocket and left the stone. It took some searching, but he discovered the catch that opened the secret door, and once he was back in the castle he went immediately to Merriman. He offered the mirror, but it was dull and flat again and showed only their faces, and the interior of the room around them, stone walls and dull tapestries and darkness. But Merriman believed him, when he explained it.
"It will work only under moonlight, I think," he said. "A full moon, or close to. You saw Will, you say?"
"Yes," said Bran. "Only he's older."
"Ah," said Merriman.
"I'm not," Bran explained pointedly. "Any older, I mean." A pause. "I'm going to be twelve forever here, aren't I?"
The wizard nodded. "Yes, I think that is the way of it. No-one ages here. The others do not notice, because they are in the prime of their years already. But I think it is different for a child."
"I'm not a child exactly," said Bran. Merriman arched his eyebrows, and chuckled.
"Take the mirror back to the stone," he said finally. "I do not think it will do you any harm to use it, and that is the place where it will work best."
So Bran had. He cleaned it thoroughly first, then returned to the little clearing and laid it atop the stone. He watched Will for a while, but watching someone else read has a very limited appeal, and before long his mind was drifting to the nature of his unfortunately discovery. If he had Will's age right, then he'd been living in the castle for going on three years. It certainly didn't feel as though it had been that long—a month or two, it seemed, at most. That at least was something to be thankful for. Eternity was stretching out before him, and now that he was considering its implications, it seemed like a very long time indeed.
And every full moon after, he had returned to the ring of oak trees and the standing stone, and looked in the mirror. He used it to check up on Owen Davies, back at Clywyd Farm; he saw him sitting and drinking tea with John Rowlands, and they looked tired and nostalgic but not too sad, though he couldn't hear their words. He looked in on Jane Drew once, but she had just stepped into a bath, and the initial, immediate embarrassment was enough that he never tried to find her again. She was older, too. Most of the time, though, he watched Will. The last watchman of the Light spent an inordinate amount of time reading in his room. He finished Brave New World and moved on to Heart of Darkness and Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, he devoured On the Road and Canterbury Tales and A Picture of Dorian Gray. Watching him pore through Le Morte D'Arthur had been entertaining; Bran had never read it, but Will seemed to find it incredibly amusing. He rolled his eyes a lot and made faces at the book. He got taller and older, let his hair grow long and tied it back in a tail, cut it off again. Once Bran caught him on his birthday, surrounded by his circus of a family, and quietly sang 'Happy Birthday' along with them when he saw everyone's lips moving. There were seventeen candles on the cake, and Bran distracted himself from the gnawing unhappiness in his belly by watching Will open his gifts. Five years had passed in Time while he had been outside it.
The next time was even worse. Will was on a date. The girl was small and pretty, with brown hair pulled back in a bouncy ponytail. She had green eyes and glasses and an intense look very similar to Will's. They were holding hands while they walked. She said something that must have been funny, because he laughed and bent over to kiss her cheek. Bran gripped the edges of the mirror so tight it left dark, angry red welts on his palms. He felt like throwing up. It was driven home in a rush, all at once, in a way it hadn't yet, all the things he was missing out on, all the things he'd taken for granted would eventually occur that were never going to. He had never expected to have too much of a social life, living in the back end of a sheep town and knowing his odd appearance made people nervous, but he had always imagined he'd find somebody /someday/. He'd harboured a hopeless crush on Will for most of the year between the time they'd met and when they said goodbye. (He wasn't sure if that had something to do with the animosity he was feeling toward the nameless green-eyed girl or not, but he wouldn't have minded terribly if lightning had struck her while he was watching.)
He was never going to make it out of puberty. He knew it, he'd known it for some time, it was just never driven home quite so sharply as when he watched Will Stanton kiss a girl on the cheek, and then go on walking, holding her hand.
The girl turned up several more times as the months passed. Her name, Bran finally determined, was Chloe, and she and Will read a lot of the same books. She would sit cross-legged on his bed, flipping through pages til she found something worthy of reading aloud to him. She read parts of Howl and Paradise Lost and something by e.e. cummings that made Will blush before he kissed her. She laughed a lot. After the initial jealousy had worn off Bran would have liked her, if watching them hadn't made him feel so empty. Once he watched them make out on Will's bed, and he felt a bit ashamed of himself, but didn't think he could have closed his eyes even if he'd wanted to. Eventually she stopped appearing at all, and for a while after, Will looked sad and seldom left his room. He kept her books of poetry in a separate stack behind the music stand, and didn't touch them. Bran talked to the mirror in those days, though he knew Will couldn't hear him—"It's all right," he said, over and over again, "I'm here, see, and everything's going to be fine, you'll get over it. It'll be all right." After a time the poetry books disappeared. Will went on a few more dates, but he never kissed any of them, at least not while Bran was watching. None of the girls ever appeared twice. Bran felt as though he had Will to himself again. Once, out of morbid curiousity, he used the mirror to look in on Chloe. It took a while, since he didn't know very much about her, but he found her finally, drinking coffee in the back corner of a dim, smoky pub and scribbling furiously into a notebook. She wore a soft grey sweater and a silver ring on her forefinger, and when she couldn't think of what to write, she chewed on the cap of her pen. He didn't try to find her again.
During the days Bran joined his father and the knights in hunts and wargames. He had learned to ride, though he always felt as though he remained astride only by the good graces of his horse, a good-natured but energetic mare named Teg that his mother had gifted him. It had put him in mind, at first, of his race across the Lost Land with Will. In time, he found newer memories to share with the older ones. He still found new places to explore, as if the castle and its grounds were constantly growing and expanding—and perhaps that was indeed the case. He never asked if it were so, he simply chose to believe it. There were feasts and balls and quiet nights and warm, lazy afternoons, and Bran was content far more often than he was not, despite the quiet yearning that had taken up permanent residence in his heart. But always the full moon would find him sitting on the stone in the centre of the faery ring, gazing into the mirror, vicariously living through Will the life he would never be able to share. It was summer in the mortal world now, and the entire Stanton family had convened for a reunion. Bran didn't know the names of all his older brothers and sisters, let alone their various spouses and children, he only knew that there were a lot of people blocking his view at any given moment even though he had the mirror trained on Will. The Old One himself was talking to one of his brothers, a tall man in his mid-thirties with a warm, dancing smile. A little girl, blonde pigtails swinging, approached them and tugged on Will's hand. His face lit up and he knelt to talk to her. Bran's stomach twisted again. It was just another reminder—no one aged here, no one died, but no one was born, either. He pressed his fingers against the glass, holding his breath, willing it to let him through, hoping with every heartbeat that Will would look up and see him, staring through the glass.
"What are you looking at?" It was a girl's voice, smooth and light and melodic, and Bran looked up, startled. A young woman stood nonchalant and easy at the edge of the clearing, watching him. Flaxen curls tumbled to her shoulders, her eyes were bright, and she held a cloak of gold brocade wrapped around her.
"I—just—" Bran realised he had no short answer to give a stranger, and dropped the mirror into his lap. "Nothing."
"Really?" She cocked her head, watching him appraisingly. "You look rather lost, for one who is doing nothing." And then, as if in barely courteous afterthought, she added, "my lord."
Bran felt his cheeks colour. The words were something he'd long since gotten used to, there was just something enigmatic about the way she said them. "You startled me, lady, that is all." He held the mirror out toward her. "I've been watching an old friend."
Reading his extended hand as invitation, she came toward him, and looked down into the smooth glass. "Is the prince of Britain finding eternity in paradise a little harder to deal with than expected?" she asked, and her voice, though still lightly mocking, was sympathetic. She closed his fingers around the mirror and pushed it back toward him.
"A little. That's not quite it." He stared down into the mirror, watching Will play with the girl—a niece?—as he sought the words to explain what he had so far kept to himself. "Do you know how many years have passed there, since Pridwen brought us here?" he asked finally.
To his surprise, the girl nodded. "Seven. Seven years tonight, on this full moon. Is that what saddens you?"
He looked at her wryly. "I haven't grown up at all."
She laughed, not mockingly at all now, but sparkling like a brook in springtime. "Neither have I, milord, so I think I understand a little." She peered through his hands toward the mirror. "Which one are you watching? This old friend?"
He had the mirror track down Will again amid the milling Stantons and pointed him out to her. Her leaf-green eyes widened in surprise. "That is Merlion's boy! The Old One."
"Yes," said Bran.
"Not so much a boy, now, though," she remarked appreciatively. He glared at her, but she was looking down and didn't notice.
"It must be difficult," she said softly, "to have accomplished so much, so young, and have nothing left to achieve. In a land where once I traveled, such a one would go on a quest to find his destiny."
"I've already been on quests," Bran said bitterly. "That was how we all got here, remember?"
She met his eyes and held them. "I did not say," she replied slowly, "that a quest must be to save the world. In times past there were many adventures to be had, and most achieved nothing of any lasting significance, unless it be the confidence and growth of the one who makes the journey."
"What exactly," Bran asked, "are you suggesting?"
She cupped his chin in a slender hand, her fingers brushing his cheek. "I am merely suggesting, my prince, that I have been watching you come to this spot and look on the mortal world for quite a long time now, and I am tired of seeing you sad. I know something of being suspended in time, as I think your lord father does as well. You have your own destiny, Bran Davies ap Pendragon, one that is not tied up in matters of the Light, because every man has such. No one will begrudge you the chance to go in search of it—not even the High Magic, I think, if it is what you wish." She let her hand fall to her side again and smile brilliantly. "I would accompany you, of course. You are not the only one who finds this life less than satisfying."
Bran felt the thrill of adventures still unknown warm his blood. It was a feeling like waking from a long and fitful sleep. He spared another long look for the mirror he held in his lap, where Will was making an exasperated face at his mother. Time was passing, and Bran was not part of it.
"Yes," he said, slowly, measuring his words carefully. "I think I will take your advice, lady." He turned his face up toward her and smiled, and in that moment he looked very young indeed. "What shall I do?"
She returned his smile, and dropped a low curtsey in the moonlight. "My name is Luned, my lord," she said formally, "and we will depart on the next full moon."
tbc.
