She must have really slept, eventually. It could not have been more than an hour before she was tearing herself, shaking and sweating, from the talons of a nightmare. Her eyes flew open to cloud-mottled moonlight, wind-tossed upon a velvety black sea of moss and brush, and she sat up, gasping for breath, straining against the strangling fabric of her cloak. The rush of moving air through the treetops roared in her ears like a million bodiless voices; her own whimpering wandered lost and wordless among them. She could remember nothing of the dream save being suspended over darkness, lost within a cavernous empty space with shadowy, writhing walls, and hearing Achren's voice speaking unintelligible words; every nuance and tone pulsed with malice.
It seemed a heart-pounding eternity before another voice intruded, rough and homely but alive and real: Taran's voice, saying her name; his hands on her shoulders, shaking her out of the clinging remnants of the dream.
She stopped struggling and stared at his wide-eyed face, materialized out of the darkness. A surge of relief and exhaustion swept over her; she burst into tears, burying her face in her cloak-swathed arms.
Taran froze for a moment, but presently she was aware of a warm arm about her shoulders and a voice muttering low, soothing words. "There now...it's all right. Just a bad dream. No one's after you. You're with friends and we're safe now. Don't cry...it makes your nose run, remember?"
This made her sob crack like an egg over an unexpected laugh, and she hiccuped and raised her face, scrubbing tears away. She tried to speak, but her voice wavered and slid, stumbling over the unstable terrain of her breath. "I...it was just...I couldn't..."
"Shh," he said again, patting her back. "It's all right. Dreams are dreams. Dallben says sometimes they mean something important, but Coll says it's usually that you shouldn't have eaten beans for dinner."
Another hysterical gasp of laughter; she muffled it in her cloak, and stayed there, sniffling, in case he had any more of those lines. "I've never eaten beans for dinner. But I have nightmares often."
"Well." She felt him shrug. "Small wonder, where you come from. Maybe they'll go away now that you're out of Spiral Castle, once you've been gone long enough to remember that in your sleep. Here," he added, shifting his arm and tugging at her cloak. "You're all tangled up. That'll give anyone nightmares. I wake up at home, sometimes, all twisted up in my blankets, dreaming I'm being swaddled to death by a giant."
"Did you just make that up?" She loosened her arms, allowing him to pull the folds of material free.
Taran shook out the cloak and settled it back around her shoulders. "No, it's true. Once I dreamed I was being chased by morgens through a pond, and couldn't run because, you know, you move so slowly in the water. And when I woke up frightened, and tried to get up, my legs were so tangled in my blanket I fell out of bed."
Eilonwy giggled, tension draining from her shoulders, and gazed out over the meadow. Taran was sitting next to her, an arm still over her shoulders in a way that somehow did not feel awkward or stiff, and she wondered how she could have ever been as angry with him as she'd been just a few hours ago. If only he could always be as agreeable as this.
"Taran," she ventured presently, ending a long silence, "what is Caer Dallben like?"
"It's quiet," he answered, after a thoughtful pause. "Before the last few days, I would have said it was too quiet. But now..." He gestured with his free hand out toward the meadow. "Now I'd like it back. I suppose I thought an adventure would be...I don't know, grander. Not sleeping on sticks and going hungry and being chased through the woods for days. I'd rather have been hoeing the turnips. But I won't tell Coll that, if I ever make it back," he added, and she knew, by the sound of his voice, the rueful grin that accompanied it.
"Is it a farm, then?" Eilonwy asked, trying to imagine it. She had never seen one. Only pictures of them in tapestries.
"It is," he said, with a note of surprise. "Haven't I told you? I suppose I haven't. Yes, it's a farm. Not very big, as it's just Coll and I to tend it. But there's vegetable plots, and an apple orchard, and spaces for the goats and oxen to graze. And chickens - usually. And Hen Wen, of course."
"Your pig," she recalled, and frowned, puzzled. "It's not Dallben's farm, then? Why is it called Caer Dallben?"
Taran scratched his head. "It's...well, it just is. Dallben is master there, but he's too old for farming. Though I don't think he did that even when he was young - if he ever was. He's an enchanter, you see...the most powerful in Prydain, Coll says."
This piqued her interest. "I wonder why Achren never mentioned him," she mused. "I thought she knew all the sorcerers and enchanters about - especially if they were a threat to her."
"I don't know about Achren," Taran snorted. "But Dallben never tells me anything, unless he's teaching me something on purpose. He never mentioned Achren, but I'm sure he knows about her."
"What sort of magic does he do?"
"None at all that I've seen. He sleeps most of the time and calls it meditating." Taran laughed again, voice cracking on the last breath. "When Hen ran away he was just about to consult her with her letter sticks - ashwood rods with runes all over them. It would have been the first bit of magic I've seen from either of them." He paused, and tossed a pebble into the bracken. "It's a pretty dull life, to be honest. Just working in the fields or around the animals all day, repairing walls and pulling weeds. In the evenings we sit mending things or carving. Coll whittles these intricate spoons he trades with the Rover camps when they come by. And Dallben reads to us, and expects me to remember every blasted word. Most days we go to bed with the sun and rise with it the next morning. Every day's the same."
She sighed. "I think it sounds marvelous." He made a sound of dubious surprise, and she shook her head. "No, really. I wonder if you know how lucky you are. Perhaps it isn't very exciting, but at least you're with people who care for you."
Silence, but not rejection. The wind whispered through the leaves restlessly. "What happened to your parents?" she asked. "You don't ever mention them."
"I don't know who they are, or what happened to them," Taran said, stretching out his long legs and digging his heels into the turf. His arm slid from her shoulders as he leaned back, and she missed its comforting presence instantly. "Coll says he doesn't know, and if Dallben does, he hasn't told me." There was bitterness in his voice, and longing; it was a note she knew the shape of, an empty space in the heart.
"I'm sorry," she said simply. "I wish I'd known mine, too."
"Do you know anything about them?" His voice was soft.
"Only my mother's name and ancestry," she sighed. "It's something, I suppose."
"I'd give a lot to know that much," he said. "But don't you still have kin left? The ones who sent you to Achren?"
Eilonwy stiffened, frowning. "I don't know. It's what she always said, but I'm less and less sure of anything she ever told me." She hugged her knees, scrunching down so the woolen folds of cloak bunched under her ears. "It must be nice, living with people you can trust. Dallben may not tell you everything, but at least you know what he does tell you is true."
Taran grunted noncommittally, but she knew, somehow, that he wouldn't argue. Some unspoken truce had fallen between them. She listened to the wind slicing through the trees, and felt a vague sense that the two of them were surrounded by whirling wilderness, safe in a sheltering circle at its center...something fragile and fleeting; but if she held out her arms, she could almost touch its edges, dabble her fingers against it as in the fluid surface of a running stream.
"I should be watching," Taran murmured presently, and she sighed, feeling the break in the circle, a release as unobtrusive and irrevocable as a bubble popping. He patted her back one last time. "Can you sleep now, do you think?"
"I think so." She scooted to a different patch of turf, feeling that the present one was sullied by the nightmare, and lay down, careful not to wrap herself too tightly in the cloak. Taran rose and returned to his position beneath a tree, fading into the shadows. Looking into the dark patch she knew him to inhabit, she took a breath.
"Taran?" Silence. Waiting. "Thank you."
There was a baffled pause, and then an embarrassed "mmph" of acknowledgement. She grinned, realizing it was the best she would get from him, shut her eyes, and drifted off trying to imagine green fields and grazing goats.
If Fflewddur, who had snored through the entire exchange, noticed the ease of tension between the two younger members of their party the next morning, he said nothing. Taran did not refer to her nightmare or its aftermath, to Eilonwy's relief. She didn't want to discuss the dream, and the following moments she wanted to hold like a treasure in a secret box, and share with no one. But the boy returned the smile she offered when she saw him in the first light, a real smile without mockery or regret, and she felt her spirit lift like a gull.
It was late when they set out, after an hour or so of foraging that netted a few more mushrooms, wild raspberries, and a large haul of watercress, the sort of meager sustenance Achren had been wont to call "peasant food". Eilonwy wondered if peasants were always as achingly hungry as they all were by this time. It made almost anything taste good, or at least unobjectionable.
She perched herself on a stone next to the small, spring-fed pond where they'd found the cress, half-listening to Fflewddur as he planned a new route and scratched maps into the dirt. Their flight from the cauldron-born had pushed them off course, but the bard was confident that they could still reach Caer Dathyl before the enemy war bands overtook them.
Eilonwy wasn't so sure. Gurgi was worse; he refused the food they offered him and slumped at the foot of a tree. His eyes were half-shut, but the slivers of amber iris that showed beneath his heavy lids were unnaturally, feverishly bright. He would have to ride Melyngar again, and the horse could not carry two and be expected to maintain speed or endurance.
She helped the bard and Taran hoist Gurgi to the saddle, but when Taran motioned to her to get up, she shook her head. "It's all right. I'll walk." He raised his eyebrows and she added, without defensiveness, "We're not running anymore. And I've had a decent rest. It'll be better for Melyngar."
Taran shrugged. "Suit yourself." He gathered up the reins to tie them to the saddle, and she noticed him wince when he stretched his wounded arm upwards. A dark line of blood trickled from beneath its bandage.
"Your arm." She reached for it, and he pulled away, glancing down scornfully at the offending limb.
"It's all right. The bandage is just loose from all the running."
"But it's bleeding again," she persisted. "It ought to be cleaned and re-bound at least."
"We don't have time," he protested. "We must keep moving."
She resisted an urge to scowl, remembering his gentleness the night before, but could not keep the tartness from her voice. "What we don't have time for is for you to fall ill. You're the leader on this mission, remember?"
Fflewddur, busy arranging their gear on Melyngar, glanced up. "She's right, my lad," he said, indicating Taran's arm with a nod. "A few moments won't hurt, and we don't need another invalid. You see yourself what can happen with an open wound." He looked meaningfully at Gurgi. "There's linen in the saddlebags, probably for just that purpose. I could do it for you, know all about the properties of herbs and roots -"
A snap from the harp at his back cut him off and he bit off the rest of his boast with a grimace. "On second thought, better let her do it. I've seen my share of battle but to be honest, the sight of blood makes me a bit green."
Taran's lips tightened in annoyance. "Very well. If you can be quick about it."
You're welcome, Eilonwy thought, with an inward frown, but took the linen scraps Fflewddur offered without comment, and motioned Taran over to the spring. He sat on a stone at its edge and held out his arm with the air of one much put-upon, flinching away just a trifle when she pulled the dagger from her belt to slice the knot from the old bandage.
In silence she unwrapped the grimy cloth, soaking it with the spring water where blood had crusted the layers together and peeling them apart carefully. It was a nasty business and she knew it must pain him, but he looked steadily at the running water and said nothing.
His wound was not noticeably better than the first time she'd seen it, but at least now it could be properly washed. "Here," she said, handing him a rag, wetted and wrung from the spring. "You clean it. I don't want to hurt you." He sniffed at the implication that it hurt at all, but obediently dabbed at his arm while she arranged the new bindings in her lap. At the touch of the water he paled, but made no complaint; if anything he scrubbed harder, and she saw the hollow at his cheek where he sucked at his teeth to brace himself. Sympathy and admiration mingled into a warm tangle in the pit of her stomach; she examined it curiously, and, for the first time, without suspicion.
"That'll do," he decided, and then pointed behind her at the bank of the spring. "Here, pick that." She followed his point to a group of broad-leafed plants with clusters of tiny yellow flowers, and leaned over to pluck one.
"What for?"
"Poultice," he murmured, taking it from her and crushing the flowers in his fingers. "Ninehooks is good for cuts and scrapes. Smells awful, though. Wish I had some blackroot. Or lavender." He spread the crushed herb over his wound, tapping it against the damp skin to make it stick.
Eilonwy sat back on her heels in astonishment. "How do you know all that?"
Taran looked up at her in surprise. "It's just herb-lore. Coll uses ninehooks all the time." He held out his arm for her to bandage once more, watching her flushed face curiously. "You mean you didn't?"
Eilonwy bit her lip as she wrapped his arm. "I can tell you which plants will poison you. Or eaten to summon...things...you might not really want summoned. Or what to burn in the dark of the moon to make your enemies go blind, or get boils, or see things that aren't there..." she stopped, seeing that his expression had turned wary and distasteful; he was actually pulling away from her almost imperceptibly. "It's all the herb-lore Achren had any use for," she explained hastily, "but...at least I know what to avoid."
"Hmm," Taran said, relaxing again. "Well, perhaps Coll can teach you the useful kinds too, one day. I mean," he added, reddening, "if you ever meet him."
Eilonwy, realizing she had paused with a strip of the bandage in midair, cleared her throat. "Of...of course," she stammered, and swiftly tied it off, distracted. Had he just invited her to Caer Dallben? A scant twelve hours ago she'd have scoffed at the very notion, but now...
Taran was examining his re-bandaged arm, stretching it out and then in experimentally. "That is better," he admitted. "Thank you." Another flash of that crooked, self-conscious smile...she gave up trying to find a name for the sensation it induced.
Fflewddur, coming up with Melyngar, clucked at them both. "Now, that's something more like it." His tone, Eilonwy thought, suggested he meant more than just Taran's arm, but his expression was as mild as usual. "Ready, then? Lead on, lad, and let's be off. I've a song trying to form in my head, and I compose best while I'm covering ground."