Eilonwy awoke with a start, full of a sense of anxiety that she did not understand. But her first breath explained it; above the palpable distress of her companions and the cold, damp weight of the air, the smell gave warning: rain. Not yet, but close, and coming closer.
It was pitch dark, moon and starlight swallowed by thick cloud cover. By the faint glow of the embers of their fire she could see that Taran and Fflewddur were up, tying gear onto Melyngar. Gurgi huddled beneath the horse's legs, looking forlorn.
Eilonwy scrambled up, brushing off her skirts and adjusting Dyrnwyn's straps with chilled, stiff fingers. She was so tired of carrying the dratted thing. It had been silent since their escape from the cauldron warriors, and she wasn't sure she preferred it so or not. While the prickly vibration of its almost-sentience had been unnerving, at least it had made her feel a certain kinship, a resolve and responsibility, however begrudging; now it was so much dead weight, useless in practice but too dangerous to discard.
Fflewddur had noticed her. "Ah, good. You're awake."
"Mmph. You spoke truth about the weather, anyway," she muttered. "What should we do?"
"Stay put," said the bard. "We're just packing the gear to protect it. Leaving this shelter in the dark would be madness."
Eilonwy lit her bauble and squinted at the sky, a jagged streak of black between the underlit rock walls. "It isn't much of a shelter."
"It's all we've got," Taran said shortly, gathering up Melyngar's reins to lead her closer to a concave place in one of the cliff faces. "We're in for it anyway, but at least the wind is a bit blocked."
Following Fflewddur's direction, they huddled against the rock beneath the small overhang, with the horse's broad bulk shielding them from the elements. Overhead, the air had begun to whistle ominously, and a fine mist rode in on wayward gusts that found their way down the crevice. The close quarters provided some warmth, though the comfort of it was somewhat mitigated by the smell. In spite of his bath, Gurgi reeked of wet wolfhound as much as ever. Thank goodness the rest of them had finally gotten the chance to wash a bit, back in Medwyn's valley, although the cold splash of stream water upon her face and arms was hardly the bath she was beginning to crave.
There were chunks of rock digging into her back. Eilonwy squirmed, seeking a better position. She felt Dyrnwyn collide with something and Taran flinched next to her.
"Ouch! You and that blasted sword," he growled. "I wish you'd put it on Melyngar with the rest."
His anxiety was radiating like heat from an oven, and she knew, somewhere deep, that it was this that made him prickly, but her own discomfort overrode any attempt to be patient. "You needn't keep scolding about it," she snapped. "You're worse than a squirrel that's lost its acorns."
Taran made a choked sound of outrage, and Fflewddur snorted and coughed in a way that sounded suspiciously like he was suppressing unexpected laughter. "Now, now," he admonished, composing himself, "no telling how long we'll be holed up here like mice. It won't do to snipe at each other. What we need is something to take our minds off the weather."
"Well, you're the bard," Taran retorted, a bit rudely. "What about a story?"
"Or a song," said Eilonwy. "Something you can teach us so we can all sing it."
"Ah, now, there's an idea," Fflewddur said. "Nothing like a song to pass the time and cheer you up. I can't bring out the harp in wet weather, of course, but man's first instrument was his voice, as Teirgwaedd said."
He cleared his throat, and hemmed his way through a line or two of tunes she'd never heard before making up his mind. "Here, then. This one has a chorus you can repeat after every line. Sing it after me." He sung a string of nonsense, rhythmic syllables in a tune that was sweet and vaguely melancholy. She tried it, got tongue-tied, and stopped with a frown.
"Try again," Taran ordered. "I know this one. Coll sings it when he's missing his wife." He began the line again and she joined in, this time reaching the end reasonably in tune.
A gust of wind suddenly clawed its way into their shelter, whipping cloth and hair into a frenzy and pressing them against the wall. Melyngar snorted and jerked her head; Gurgi wailed; but Fflewddur sang out above the storm.
There is my sweetheart, down in the orchard
Taran elbowed her by way of cue, and they sang the answering refrain of "raddle-diddle-dow"s, probably much more loudly, she thought, than anyone ever had before. It wasn't the sort of song you'd shout at the top of your voice, ordinarily, and the contrast made her want to laugh, but Fflewddur was moving on gallantly.
Oh, how I wish I were there myself
His singing was a rich warm sound, balanced well in pitch and tone, and she thought, as she repeated the refrain again, that eventually he might be a respectable sort of bard after all. Taran kept wavering and cracking on the higher notes she hit with ease, but he couldn't quite seem to stay in a lower register either. Nevertheless, his voice was also pleasant, or would be, once he grew into it.
They came to the end of the verse, and she thought it painted a pretty picture: barn and orchard and byre - it sounded, in fact, quite like Taran's descriptions of Caer Dallben. No wonder Coll liked it, though what was that Taran had said...missing his wife?
She understood before the end. The third verse was a melancholy sigh, the wistful plea of a lover alone and longing. She dutifully finished the last chorus, but frowned at Fflewddur when it was over. "It was lovely-sounding, but I thought the point was to cheer us up."
He laughed. "The point was to distract us. I'd say it worked well enough for that purpose." He motioned out toward the darkness, where the wind was now a gale, shrieking overhead. "Well done, sounding out over that din. But perhaps something more rousing, to fight it effectively."
He struck up another tune, this one a battle-chant unknown to them, but appropriately bracing and easy to follow. Taran, catching the beat, slapped out a rhythm with his hands against Melyngar's leather stirrup-strap. It worked its way into her spirit and she would have stomped her feet if she'd had more room; as it was she marked out a counter-rhythm, smacking her palms against her own legs and snapping her fingers.
It was magic, she thought, a different sort of magic altogether, music. They were, all three of them, doing something different, yet it was as though there was one mind behind them, running through them and becoming something new on the other side. It was exciting; enchanting; her heart quickened and she felt the smile spread across her face like a banner. The wind howled; Fflewddur whooped in defiance and she and Taran followed suit, hooting war cries into the night. Gurgi, who was bouncing on his hairy feet, yelped over them all. Melyngar only seemed unaffected; her ears were laid back slightly at all this foolishness, but she stood docile and quiet, and Eilonwy, probing, felt only a sense of baffled tolerance from the horse.
One song followed another into the darkness and the gale, Fflewddur an apparently inexhaustible supply; whatever details of bardic lore he'd had trouble memorizing, clearly songs had not been among them. The wind shrieked and tore at the mountainside, and they knew moments of fear when its long fingers raked into the cleft, but always they rallied, until there came a moment when the sky looked slightly less black. The golden light of her bauble seemed to pale somewhat and she let it dim, and they blinked at one another in surprise to find that they could still see each other's faces without it.
The wind still shrieked, and as if it had waited only for daylight, the rain came - all at once, like a sea falling from the sky, it came in a drenching torrent that their meager shelter did nothing to deflect.
With exclamations of dismay, they all huddled into their cloaks, the merriment and music forgotten. Even the thick garments could not hold up to the downpour, however; within moments, the smell of wet wool was seeping from their sodden hoods. Gurgi hunched, a ball of misery, underneath Melyngar, but it didn't seem to help him much.
The light was growing enough for them to move by. It was Taran who first pushed out from behind Melyngar and made his way over the slick rock to the edge of their shelter. He peered out for a few minutes before returning to them, water streaming from the ends of his hair into his eyes.
"I think we should keep moving," he announced, though not with much enthusiasm. "We're losing time, and there's no way to know how long this will last. We can't afford to wait it out."
Fflewddur whistled. "I don't like it. These mountain paths are treacherous enough without traipsing over them in the middle of a storm. We could get blown right off a cliff."
Eilonwy was beginning to shiver. "Shan't we have to risk it? I'd rather be wet, miserable and moving than wet and miserable waiting here. We'd stay warmer, anyway."
"Yes, yes!" Gurgi added. "Gurgi is wet with drippings and soppings either way. He would rather be running down the mountain! Perhaps, lower down, there will be less fierce blowings and bitings from the wind."
"I see I'm outnumbered." The bard shook his head. "A Fflam is willing! Let us be off then."
It did not take long to regret the decision. Outside the cleft, the wind battered them to and fro against the mountainside, and within a league or two the path disappeared, leaving them stranded to make their own way over stony ground, treacherously slick.
They pressed on doggedly, having no other choice, and finally the rain eased and stopped. Eilonwy yanked her hood off, pulling the sodden mass of her hair out from beneath her cloak. She hated having wet hair, hated the cold cling of it against her neck and down her back; it was such a tangled mess after all their traveling that she couldn't even tie it up properly - not that it would do any good in this downpour. By the time they got to Caer Dathyl she'd be lucky if she didn't have to chop off the lot.
The labor of movement did indeed warm her, except for her freezing hands and feet. Every step squished icy rainwater inside her sandals and between her toes. Had Medwyn called her fire and water? She didn't want to be water, not now, not this; she never wanted to see water again. If she truly had any power over it she'd make it all disappear. Why in all her years of training had Achren never seen fit to teach her anything useful?
They moved on, too downhearted to speak, picking their way across ridges that ringed a valley, where a dark lake reflected the moody sky. Finally Taran halted and pointed to the hills at the other side. "According to what Medwyn told us we should make for that notch, way over there. But I see no purpose in following the mountains when we could cut almost straight across. The lake shore is flat, at least, while here it's getting impossible to climb."
Fflewddur gazed across the valley and rubbed his nose. "Even counting the time it would take to go down and come up again, I think we should save several hours. Yes, I definitely believe it's worth trying."
Eilonwy looked doubtfully at the lake. There was something prickling at the edge of her mind, like a whisper in a dark room. The valley felt wrong; lopsided, somehow; when she gazed too long at the water its edges blurred and bled before her eyes. "Medwyn didn't say anything about crossing valleys."
Taran looked annoyed. "He didn't say anything about cliffs like these, either. I'm sure they seem nothing to him. But to us it's something else again."
The wrongness of it, and her inability to explain it, made her anxious and cross. She frowned at him. "If you don't listen to what somebody tells you, it's like sticking your fingers in your ears and jumping down a well. For an Assistant Pig-Keeper who's done very little traveling, you suddenly know all about it."
His face settled into the hard, sullen lines she remembered from days previous. "Who found the way out of the barrow? It's decided. We cross the valley."
Outrage at his convenient lapse of memory about who'd gotten them as far as the barrow in the first place made her so speechless she could not retort...or at least, not until he had already turned and led Melyngar several yards down the hillside, by which time it was too late. Eilonwy scrambled down after him, fuming. She glared at the back of his head, wishing she could bore holes in it with her eyes.
She'd hoped, after all that had happened; she'd thought...
Well, never mind what she'd thought. Pig-Keepers! Pig-Headed, more like. Assistant Pig-Headed Nobodies who thought a few weeks in the woods made them experts at everything. Let him go where he wanted; right into that horrid black lake with its flat, shivery water. She wouldn't stop him; he wouldn't listen anyway, just call her a silly little girl and plough right ahead. Probably it was full of morgens that would pull him under and drown him. Good riddance.
By the time they reached the water's edge she was in a fine temper, and the realization that the steepness of the hills meant they'd have to wade into the lake itself did nothing to calm her. She glared at the water; it was dark and strangely viscous, an alien substance with which she felt no affinity whatsoever. Her distaste for the rain an hour ago was as nothing compared to the revulsion that washed over her now, but her companions were already splashing through the shallows, and in a moment she'd be left behind. She thought about calling to them, wondered what she'd say that would make any sense to them, but Taran was already nearly out of earshot and Fflewddur would be soon. Wavering between two evils, she gave it up, and plunged into the ankle-deep water.
And knew, instantly, that it was the worst thing they could have done.