Eilonwy stared blankly at the cottage wall. The overwhelming sensations of its interior had been cut off the moment the door had shut, and the comparative silence of the marsh made her feel for a moment that she had been stricken deaf. It was, in its way, almost a relief, but her temper, already stretched thin, frayed to breaking at their unceremonious dismissal. "Well, I like that!" she burst out. "After all their talk of dear little Dallben and sweet little Dallben, they've turned us out!"

Fflewddur was backing away from the little dwelling, clucking to their horses, obviously intent on making a getaway before the women changed their minds. "Better turned out than into, if you take my meaning," he said. "A Fflam is always kind to animals, but somehow I can't bring myself to feel I should like to actually become one!"

Gurgi had followed his lead and was already clambering into Lluagor's saddle. "No, oh, no!" he exclaimed. "Gurgi, too, wants to stay as he is—bold and clever!"

Taran, however, sprang back to the cottage door and began pounding on it angrily. "They must listen to us! They didn't even take time to think it over!" He ran to the shuttered window and banged again, shouting, much to the bard's obvious discomfort.

"I'm afraid that's your answer," Fflewddur said nervously, when it became clear that no one would answer Taran's cries. "They've said all they intend to say—and perhaps it's for the best. And I, uh…have the uneasy feeling that all that knocking and thumping about might—well, you don't know but what those, ah, ladies might get upset at loud noises."

Eilonwy snorted. "Ladies, indeed. I don't think they hear a thing from in there. It's so stiff with enchantment it might not even be here. I mean," she added, at a perplexed look from the bard, "not in the same way the rocks and grass are here. More like…a door where you go through it and…and then you're somewhere else entirely. Couldn't you feel it?" She turned to Taran. "Didn't that brooch tell you anything about it?"

He shook his head in frustration. "I don't know. They were so confusing I could hardly think. But we can't just go away! Not with the cauldron in their hands! Friends of Dallben or not, there's no telling what they'll do with it. I don't trust them at all. You heard how Orgoch was talking — I can well imagine what she'd have done to Dallben!"

They all grimaced, and Taran paced the ground before the doorstep. "This is what Gwydion warned against," he said. "Whoever has the cauldron can be a mortal threat to Prydain if they choose to be."

"At least Ellidyr hasn't found it," Eilonwy pointed out. "That's something to be grateful for."

"If you want the advice of someone who is, after all, the oldest of us here," Fflewddur offered, still edging away from the cottage, "I think we should do well to hurry back and let Dallben and Gwydion attend to the matter. After all, Dallben should know how to deal with those three."

Taran shook his head resolutely. "No. That I will not do. We should lose precious days in travel. The Huntsmen failed to get the cauldron back this time, but who knows what Arawn will attempt next? No, we dare not leave the thing here."

Eilonwy frowned. Ordinarily she would have sided with Fflewddur's practicality over Taran's overzealous sense of duty — which had, after all, already cost them dearly. But she could not shake off her sense of deep unease. Somehow the thought of leaving without the cauldron felt like turning one's back on an open door that anything might come out of. "For once, I agree," she said aloud. Taran looked at her in surprise and she nodded at him. "We've come this far and we shall have to go on to the end. I don't trust those enchantresses either. They wouldn't sleep if they thought we had the cauldron? I shall certainly have nightmares if I think of them with it! Not to mention Arawn." She shuddered. "No one, human or otherwise, should have that much power. Ugh, there go the ants down my back again."

Fflewddur threw up his hands in defeat. "Yes, well, it's true, but the fact remains—they have the wretched pot and we don't. They're there and we're here, and it looks very much as though it will stay that way."

Taran set his chin stubbornly. "When Arawn wouldn't give the cauldron back to them, they went and took it. Now, since they won't let us have it, I see only one way: we shall have to take it."

"Steal it?" Fflewddur yelped, and at both their agonized expressions he fell into a hasty crouch, flinching at his own excitement, and whispered, "I mean, steal it? Now there's a thought." His hazel eyes brightened with the storyteller's gleam. "Never occurred to me, but yes! Yes, that's the way; that has some style and flair to it!"

Oh, Belin, Eilonwy thought; he was already composing songs in his mind, his gesturing hands building castles in the air. Could he never attend to the business of the moment? If they survived, there would be time enough later for flights of creative fancy. "One difficulty," she interjected sharply into his reverie. "We don't know where they've hidden the cauldron, and they evidently aren't going to let us in to find out."

Fflewddur's hands dropped, dejected, and he cast her a sheepish look. Taran muttered, "I wish Doli were here. He'd have no trouble at all. I don't know—there must be some way." He looked about them fretfully. "They told us we could stay the night, so that gives us from now until dawn. Come, let's not stand in front of their cottage or they'll know we're up to something. Orddu mentioned a shed."

"Gurgi sees it!" Gurgi scrambled from Lluagor's back and loped ahead; they followed him around the side of the hill, where a low, thatched structure straggled up from its shoulder like something that had been haphazardly tossed there. Its earthen walls surrounded a bare clay floor. Feeble light filtered in through the chinks in the wall, along with the frigid wind off the Marsh. There was barely room for them all.

Fflewddur, who had to duck under the door, stamped his feet and hugged himself. "Chilly spot to plan anything," he declared. "Those ladies may have a lovely view of the Marshes, but it's a cold one."

Eilonwy pulled her bauble out and set it alight; the glow was warm to the sight if not to the touch, but it illuminated nothing cheerful. "I wish we had some straw, or anything to stay warm," she said. "It's getting colder by the minute. We'll freeze before we have a chance to think of anything at all."

"If we can get the horses bedded down, we can curl up next to them," Fflewddur suggested, tugging at Lluagor's girth strap. "They need a rubdown and rest as much as we do."

"Gurgi will find straw!" Gurgi leapt up, anxious to be helpful, and scurried away in the direction of the chicken coop.

In anxious silence they divested the horses of their tack and did what they could for them. Eilonwy buried her cold hands beneath Lluagor's mane; the mare nickered softly and turned her head to nudge her, blowing warm upon her cheek. Gurgi returned, triumphant, bearing an armful of straw, tossed it down and then hurried out for more as they spread the meagre pile across the dirt.

Taran paced back and forth, scuffing the straw about with his boots. "We'll have to get into the cottage as soon as they're asleep," he muttered, clutching the brooch at his throat. "But how? The clasp has given me no idea. The dreams I had of the cauldron are without meaning to me. If only I could understand them!"

Gurgi returned with more straw and Fflewddur pointed at the resulting pile. "Suppose you lie down there and dozed off right now," he said, "and slept as fast as you could? As hard as you could, I mean. You might find the answer."

Eilonwy flopped into the straw herself, tempted toward a hysterical laugh at this suggestion, apparently made in all earnestness. Taran looked bemused. "I'm…not sure," he said. "It doesn't quite work that way."

"You mean it doesn't enable you to sleep on command?" Eilonwy snorted. "What on earth good is it, then?"

Fflewddur shrugged a bit sulkily, even his easy temper obviously on edge. "It should be a lot easier than boring a hole through the hill, which was my next suggestion."

They brooded for a moment, listening to the wind whistling lonely through the chinks in the wall. Eilonwy halfheartedly stuffed a clump of straw into one crack nearest her. With enough straw, and clay from the floor, they could stuff them all and be out of the wind…not that that would solve their primary problem. But suppose…"We could block up their chimney and smoke them out," she suggested. "Then one of us could sneak in." Of course whoever did that would have to navigate a cottage full of smoke themselves, and somehow be able to

find a hidden cauldron within it. Besides, any enchantresses worth their powers wouldn't be fazed by smoke. "No, on second thought, I'm afraid anything we might put down their chimney—well—they could very likely put something worse up."

"They don't have a chimney," Taran pointed out, and she considered this in surprise, recalling a hearth within the tiny chamber. A hearth and fire but no chimney. Well, it made as much sense as anything else inside the place, which was none at all.

"Well, that's it, then," she sighed. "We shall have to forget that idea."

Gurgi threw down another pile of straw and Taran scuffed at it. "I suppose I could try to dream," he mumbled. "I certainly haven't a better suggestion."

"Go on, then," Fflewddur prompted, as the boy slumped to his knees with a sigh. "We can bed you down very nicely, and while you're dreaming, the rest of us will be thinking, too. That way we can all be working after our own fashion." He yawned. "I don't mind telling you I wish I had that brooch, and a good reason to sleep. I wouldn't need to be asked twice. I'm weary to my bones."

Eilonwy helped him pile excess straw around Taran, trying not to feel resentful that he expected the rest of them to stay awake. Weren't they all exhausted? A rest might do as much good as any thinking they could do in their current states. But Taran was obviously as unhappy with the circumstances as she was, and there was no sense in complaining and making things more difficult. She had no ideas either.

An unusual noise made them all start and look up; Gurgi had returned once again, tumbling chaotically into the shed as though he'd been thrown, skidding across the straw into their midst. Instead of an armload of straw, he bore an expression of terror. His eyes were wide, his head low, his legs crouched and spine hunched like those of a kicked dog. He trembled and whimpered and pawed at Taran.

The boy sprang back up, and all exclaimed over Gurgi in concern, but he was too frightened to speak. His head and eyes rolled to the door of the shed and he gestured in the direction from which he had come, though whether he wanted them to go toward it or flee further away was by no means clear. Taran finally broke away and strode back out, his hand on his sword.

They followed, and Gurgi, whimpering, clinging to Taran's sleeve, pulled him toward the chicken coop and through its low doorway before falling back with a gibbering whine. Eilonwy, ducking beneath the lintel herself, dodged him and followed his pointing finger with her gaze.

An icy, sick sense of dread crawled from her toes to her scalp instantly, before her eyes even had fully adjusted to the dim interior to truly comprehend what she saw. But it was all too visible in moments.

A massive cauldron squatted in the far corner, a malignant presence that seemed to assault the existence of everything good. An ugly heap of black iron, its bulging curves looked somehow obscene, the shape of them an unutterable profanity. It was hung with heavy rings, encrusted with old gore. It stank of blood and death. The chill wind slid around its gaping mouth, moaning softly at what it found there.

Eilonwy recoiled as if physically struck by the fog of terror and despair that seeped out from the thing. She clapped her hand to her mouth as her body rebelled, rejected the very air around it, in revulsion tried to return the food she'd recently consumed. With her other hand she clutched at Taran's jacket, while at her side Fflewddur had shouldered protectively in front of her, though his face was deathly white, his brow beaded even in the cold.

"It is the Black Crochan," Taran whispered hoarsely, and she knew by his voice and the way he turned his head and averted his eyes that he felt what she did. She wanted to look away as well, but could not. The cauldron looked too much like something alive, like a predatory thing that might pounce…no, that wasn't it, was it? It had nothing of the smooth, deadly beauty of a predator; if it were alive it would be a great bloated, disgusting thing, an enormous beast too grossly overfed to lift itself, content to wait because it knew more food would be brought before long.

"I suppose it is, indeed," Fflewddur said finally, with a gulp. "On the other hand perhaps it is not. They did say they had a number of other kettles and cauldrons lying about. I mean," he added, with clear desperation, "we shouldn't want to make a mistake."

Taran shook his head and clutched at the brooch. "No. It is the Crochan. I have dreamed of it. And even if I hadn't, I would know it still. I can sense the evil in it."

"So can I." Eilonwy whispered, her voice hollow. "It is full of death and suffering. I understand why Gwydion wants to destroy it." Taran turned his face toward her and she squeezed his arm, once again in sympathetic solidarity with his new perception. "You were right in seeking it without delay. I take back everything I said. It must be destroyed as soon as possible."

Fflewddur sighed. "Yes, I'm afraid this is the Crochan itself. Why couldn't it have been a nice little kettle instead of this ugly, hulking brute?"

"You can't fit grown men's bodies into—". Eilonwy began.

"Well, here we are!" the bard sputtered, "Let's snatch it! A Fflam never hesitates!" He made a jerky move toward the thing.

Taran grabbed his arm. "No!" he exclaimed. "We dare not take it in broad daylight! And we mustn't stay here or they'll know we've found it." He looked again and shuddered. "Besides, I don't think we'll be able to move it far on our own. It's too enormous. We'll come back after nightfall with the horses and drag it out — for now we'd better keep to the shed and act as if nothing's happened."

This they did, though it made Eilonwy's scalp crinkle to turn her back on the cauldron. Its brooding presence seemed to follow them, the gloom lifting only a tiny bit as they settled into the straw within the shed. Gurgi, who had remained silent and huddled against the back wall as they discussed the cauldron, perked up enough to find his voice. "Craft Gurgi found it!" he said, though it sounded more like begging for reassurance than boasting. "Oh, yes, he always finds what is lost! He has found piggies, and now he finds a great cauldron full of wicked doings and brewings! Kind master will honor humble Gurgi!"

He wormed his way beneath Taran's arm, and the boy seemed to relax a little, affectionately patting the loyal creature on the shoulder. "Yes, old friend. You've helped us more than once. But I never imagined they'd hide the thing under dirty straw in a chicken roost. I'd think they'd want to guard it better." He glanced at Eilonwy anxiously. "Does it seem odd to you?"

She shrugged. "Maybe. But then everything about them seems odd to me. Anyway, look how difficult it is even to get here! They obviously don't expect most even to make it this far, so perhaps they don't trouble themselves much about it."

"That's just it," Fflewddur put in hopefully. "They were very clever-putting it in one of the first places anybody would look, knowing quite well it was so easy nobody would ever think of looking there."

"Perhaps," Taran mumbled doubtfully. "Or perhaps they meant us to find it."

They all were silent at this, too disturbed to discuss the possibility. Lluagor shook herself out of a doze, took a few thudding steps toward one of the walls, and lay down ponderously in the straw. Eilonwy scrambled to her side and curled up against her belly. The warm, dusty smell of horsehide was comforting, and she patted the round ribs gratefully. "How are we to move the thing in any case?" she asked. "The horses aren't going to pick up those rings with their teeth."

"No." Taran crawled over to their saddles and searched among them. "We have rope here. Not much, but it'll have to be enough." He pulled out a coil and looked it over thoughtfully. "We can sling it between the horses and have them pull the cauldron. We'll have to walk them out, though. It'll be too much burden to carry us and that, too."

"A good thought," Fflewddur said, "and the best we're likely to have. For my part, I believe we should all try to get some sleep now —seeing as we won't get any tonight." He stripped off his harp, flopped backwards into the straw with an exhausted groan, and shut his eyes. "My mam used to tell me to count up all the things I was thankful for as I lay down to sleep. It never occurred to me to be thankful I wasn't a toad, but I shall have to add it to the list now."

Eilonwy, despite her anxiety and exhaustion, felt a stirring of curiosity. "It's a lovely idea," she said thoughtfully. "What was your mother like, Fflewddur?" Why had it never occurred to her to wonder about Fflewddur's parents? Of course he had them. Everyone had them, and some folks, remarkably, actually knew theirs.

Fflewddur blew out a long breath. "Oh, lovely she was, indeed. You'd have liked her. A practical woman, much like you. How she and Tad produced a scatterbrain like me was a puzzle to all of us." He chuckled softly. "She worried a great deal about how fanciful I was. Even before I was crowned king, which was never supposed to happen. I was the youngest of four, you see."

"Four?" Taran exclaimed, in a tone betraying that he had never thought about Fflewddur's family, either. "Brothers or sisters?"

"All boys," the bard sighed. "All lost in battle along with our father. Fifteen years ago now? …no, maybe sixteen. Belin, how the time rolls on. Slain by Huntsmen. They said…" he paused for a moment, and then finished quietly, "…they said it took four of them to bring my father down."

Eilonwy and Taran exchanged stricken expressions. Four Huntsmen! And here they'd been running from them all this time, and the bard had made no mention of such a history. "Oh, Fflewddur," Eilonwy murmured, tears welling behind her eyes. "How dreadful for you."

He was quiet again for a while, and then cleared his throat a little thickly. "Yes. Yes, it was. And for my mother, too. She had to step in as regent until I came of age to rule. And even after that, I leaned on her. It was she who encouraged me to take up the harp, in fact. I daresay against the advice of our stewards." He coughed out a strange, mournful laugh, and then sighed again, settling further into the straw. "I lost her a few years after that. A fever came through one winter and that was…"

He trailed off, and silence fell again but for the whistling wind, and a sleepy grunt from Gurgi, curled dreaming at Taran's feet.

"It's a dreadful thing, you know," Fflewddur said finally, "that cauldron. My father and two of my brothers were laid in a barrow not so far from Annuvin —the very sort Arawn raided for bodies. I've always rather dreaded that one day, I might come face…"

"Oh, don't," Eilonwy blurted out in horror, and sprang across the straw, sprawling next to him and snatching at his hand. He opened his eyes in surprise, then, looking touched and a little sheepish, squeezed her hands back gently.

"There, there," he said hoarsely. "I'd be no worse off than legions of others who've lost their kin and companions. And a Fflam is hopeful! Perhaps they've never been found." He patted her arm, and lay his head back down. "Still though…it's a worthy quest, what we're doing. No matter the hardship and loss…worth it all, in the end, if we can put a stop to that curse."

He gave her hand a last pat and shut his eyes with a sigh. Eilonwy crept back to Lluagor's side, pillowing her head on the horse's shoulder. Taran, clutching white-knuckled at the coil of rope, leaned against Lluagor's chestnut flank. They sat, in mute empathy, until soft snoring proclaimed their friend asleep.

Only then did the tears dammed behind her eyes spill out, as though they had waited so as not to embarrass Fflewddur's gallant pride with her pity. Wearily Eilonwy scrubbed them away on her sleeves, tired of crying, tired of going from grief to grief, on and on, from morning until night. Blast Arawn and his damned cauldron…what made any one individual so unrelentingly wicked that he would gladly ruin everything for everyone? And make it so that even the dead could not be free of him?

Taran made a jerky gesture next to her, as though he had let out a breath he'd been holding for a long time. "We've got to destroy it," he whispered hoarsely. "No matter what it takes. We've got to."

She nodded, and mumbled through a hand pressed over her mouth, "Taran, I don't know where my parents died, or where they were buried. What if…"

"Now don't you go and do what you told him not to," Taran interrupted. He pulled a saddlebag over, rummaged in it fiercely, and yanked out a linen scrap intended for bandages. Leaning over, he pulled her hands from her face and dabbed her streaming eyes with the cloth. "It's the same for me, you know. But it's not as though we would know them if we saw them, so there's no use worrying about it. You must choose to believe they're still at rest, wherever they are."

She took the cloth from him, a little embarrassed at his noting the need for it, and covered her face, breathing deep, trying to get control. "Why does he do this?" she whispered shakily. "Arawn, I mean. What makes some people so evil?"

He said nothing, but she could feel his brooding —a dark wave of grief, and pain, and confusion, all the things she felt, missing only the compulsion to shape them into words.

"Ellidyr is horrid because of how he's grown up, Dallben said," she pressed, "always in his brothers' shadow. And Achren was wicked because it got her what she wanted, faster and easier than being good, I think. But Arawn is evil just because, and I don't understand it."

Taran sighed, and rubbed his own eyes with tense fingertips. "Neither do I, Eilonwy. I don't know if he's even…even a person, in the way you are, or I am, or even Achren. I think there must be nothing left of him that could be called a man, if he ever was."

His voice had become distant and strange, and she turned to look at him. He was clutching at the brooch, with that fey light in his eyes that she had seen so much since he'd first clasped on that bit of iron. "I think," he said, his gaze troubled and faraway, "evil has eaten him alive, until there's not enough of him left even to die. And you can't ever fill that kind of emptiness. So he just goes on destroying and destroying, consuming and consuming, because it is all he knows how to do."

She stared at him, feeling both a compelling attraction and a bewildered discomfort at the strangeness of him, of what that magic turned him into, so much more of…what, exactly? Something that was unarguably marvelous, but… not him. She wondered if he had understood a word of what he had just said.

Taran shook himself a little, and his eyes went blank and then refocused on her face. He seemed suddenly to notice how near he had bent over her, and straightened up, his cheeks flushed. "You'd better try to sleep," he said, a little gruffly. "Fflewddur's right —we aren't likely to get any rest tonight."

Eilonwy sniffed, and wriggled closer to Lluagor's ribs, piling more straw about herself and huddling into her cloak. But sleep eluded her. Black thoughts closed in like looming shadows. Despite her resolve she could not help but imagine it: her own father, walking the world in living death, enslaved to darkness. Perhaps even her mother as well; did Arawn make cauldron-born only from men? She had never seen more than a dozen or so, and they had clearly all been men…or, well, once men… at Spiral Castle. But she could think of no particular reason Arawn mightn't toss a female corpse, or even a child's frail body, into the cauldron, if he had one to hand. A warrior was a warrior, after all.

Of course Taran was right: she wouldn't know her own parents even if she did see them, cauldron-born or not. But Fflewddur might know his kin. The simple folk who lived in the villages and farms near the raided barrows certainly would know their own friends and family. Imagine one's husband or father or son, buried and mourned for days or weeks, suddenly appearing at one's door with a sword and blank eyes, unresponsive to his loved one's cries, mercilessly murdering his own wife and children, father and mother.

Destroying and destroying, consuming and consuming, because it is all he knows how to do. She felt sick again, but also angry, and she turned her mind to the anger and let it spark and kindle until it warmed her from within. Its flames pushed her fear aside, consumed by hot, righteous fury. He must be stopped, she thought. He must be stopped. It must be destroyed.

Fflewddur was right: their task was a worthy one. And Taran too, however badly he'd gone about insisting on it, had been right to pursue the cauldron. It may have been more practical to return to Gwydion; indeed they might still, in the end, wish that they had. But the urgency of their quest could not be denied. And though they were few, and unimportant, perhaps, compared to such as Gwydion and Dallben, in the face of such evil they must do what they could, here and now, without delay.

Somehow, she thought, even if they failed, it was better to fail while fighting. Somehow, the fight seemed just as important as the outcome.


Finally got to do something I felt like was worth the time, here, after wrestling with how to handle the weird sisters. The horror of an undead army is one thing; the fact that it's made up of people you might have known and loved in life takes it up another notch and bring a personal motivation that spurs on this quest. My thanks to writer ZosiaDetroit, whose Fflewddur-centric fic Opening Chords served to give Fflewddur his history and led to such good material for this chapter. If you haven't read that one, you're missing a treat.