Their march the next morning led them out of the rocky highlands, down into tree-clad hills rolling one after another like the backs of surfacing whales. At the edge of a clearing, Taran paused and glanced back at the mountains. Eilonwy followed his gaze.
Eagle Mountain rose, a jagged black ruin of some giant's tower, against the sky. The magnificence of it made her heart swell. "Oh, isn't it splendid. To think we came right over that. Or...well, under it."
Taran chuckled. "I'm glad we didn't have to go over it. We'd still be hanging off a rock somewhere up there. Perhaps my short cut didn't lead us so wrong after all." He glanced at her sidelong, flashing his wry, lopsided grin.
Eilonwy sniffed, unwilling to concede the point despite her involuntary impulse to grin in response. "Hmph. Sheer luck. And a narrow escape from a worse fate, I might add. Still," she admitted, "we're better off, and at least we have a guide...such as he is."
Taran took one last, wistful look at the peak, his face glowing. "I'd like to come back and climb it someday."
"Climb that?" She raised an eyebrow. "Why?"
"Just to do it," he said, glancing at her with a puzzled expression as though surprised at her reticence. "Can't you imagine what it would be like? To breathe the air up there and see the whole world spread out around you? You could almost touch the sky."
"Right before you plummeted to your death," Eilonwy said, shuddering. "you might as well throw yourself from a cliff right off and have done with it."
Taran snorted and shook his head, stepping into the trees. "I thought you liked the mountains. You were the one going on about wishing you were a bird and flying off into the heights."
"That was before a gale tried to blow me off them," she retorted, but she turned, too, for a final glimpse of the Eagle. You could almost touch the sky. A little thrill of curious excitement prickled over her scalp and tingled down her back. What, indeed, would the world look like from up there? Perhaps the idea wasn't so mad after all.
But she wasn't going to say that to him.
They kept a brisk pace until the sun was high, stopping in a shady glen for a brief rest. Eilonwy found a tuft of green moss, sat, and unlaced her sandals to shake the dirt and pebbles out. "It's lovely country here," she remarked, looking around. Leaf-shadows dappled the ground, the sunlight shimmering green between them. Beneath the canopy, birch trunks glowed like columns of pearl and coral. The air was warm, but fresh and breezy; the papery leaves rustled around them, whispering of summer. "It's too bad we can't enjoy it." She looked balefully at Doli and the dwarf snorted.
"This isn't a sightseeing stroll," he growled. "If you want to reach Caer Dathyl in time to do anything remotely useful - assuming any of you are capable of usefulness, which I doubt - you don't have time to admire the view."
Taran coughed warily, with an expression in her direction that said don't bait him. "It is beautiful, indeed," he said, "I'd like to return, myself, some time on a less urgent mission. I know now why Gwydion spoke so longingly of his home."
He turned to Fflewddur. "I've been thinking of Gwydion, in fact. There was some other reason he was seeking Hen Wen - some knowledge she could give him. I wonder..." He hesitated. "There may be someone in Caer Dathyl who can understand her. But if we could only get her to prophesy now, she might tell us something important."
Fflewddur shrugged. "A reasonable assumption. But how does it work? I don't suppose she roots out a message in the dirt for you."
"I'm not sure," Taran admitted. "I've never seen it done. Dallben uses letter sticks - ashwood rods with runes on them - but I don't know how he does it, and we don't have any, anyhow."
Eilonwy looked at Hen Wen, who was nosing happily in the leaf mould, grunting and snuffling. A less mysterious creature was difficult to imagine, and she was still dubious about the pig's reported abilities. But Taran looked so earnest that she pitied him. Magic wasn't a solid thing subject to rules or natural law; it was fluid, changing, amorphous. Perhaps, just maybe...
"I could...I could try another spell," she faltered. "Achren taught me some others, but I don't know if they'd be any use. They haven't anything to do with oracular pigs. I do know a wonderful one for summoning toads." Taran made a face and she shrugged an apology. "Well, it's the only one I know that deals with animals - though I grant you there's a lot of difference between a toad and a pig." She squinted at Hen Wen, thinking. "I wonder if it's a sort of...puzzle you have to figure out. Or a secret sign or...or a lock without a key. Achren was about to teach me the spell for opening locks, but I don't suppose I'll ever learn it now. Even so, locks haven't much to do with pigs, either."
They were all looking at her with uneasy expectation. Eilonwy realized she was babbling nonsense out of embarrassment, and snapped her mouth shut. Feeling foolish, she knelt next to the pig. She'd read something of oracles, and knew they were not to be trifled with, but surely there could be no harm in trying to communicate.
Laying a hand on the warm, bristly skin, she closed her eyes and felt for the mind behind it; there it was: a warm, comfortable, contented presence, simple, placid, and currently possessed of no thought beyond buried birch nuts. Whispering words intended to slide gently into the spaces between human thought and animal will, Eilonwy felt Hen Wen still under their influence. The pig cocked her head as if listening.
Behind the stillness and simplicity, something stirred; a glimmering spark of awareness, of intelligence. It was visible in her mind's eye but always at the very edge of sight, a shifting will-o-the-wisp that flickered at her and then danced capriciously out of reach. Neither beast nor human, it was an indefinable color and a shape she'd never seen, fascinating and alien. Its movement left an ephemeral trail and she followed it cautiously, reached out to touch it...
"Hwoinch!" Hen Wen shook herself, breaking Eilonwy's concentration, and the girl blinked in surprise as the pig trotted happily over to Taran and rubbed herself against his knees.
Eilonwy gazed at the animal with new interest. So...there really was something special going on inside that humble exterior. In which case Hen Wen herself might have just saved her from grasping something that ought not to be touched by mortal minds at all. A chill washed over her and she gulped, and deliberately pushed away the thought of potential consequences. It was over, anyway. Taran had given up the idea.
"It's no use," he sighed. "And there's no sense in losing time. I hope they have letter sticks in Caer Dathyl, though I doubt it. Whatever Dallben has, it seems to be the only one of its kind in all Prydain." He patted the pig and glanced up at Eilonwy. "Thanks for trying, though."
That crooked grin again. She blushed and, embarrassed, turned away from him self-consciously. Why did that keep happening? When they rose to resume their march she hung back, taking up the rear of their party, the better to mull it over without distraction.
It made no sense. It didn't happen with anyone else. Fflewddur's smile, merry and infectious, was impossible not to return in kind, and she did so wholeheartedly, with a warm, cheerful sense of companionship but no inclination to blush. Medwyn's smile had been serious, as serene as summer; evoking calm and peace to the point of near-sleepiness. Even Eiddileg's smile - brief as they'd seen it - had filled her with nothing but amusement.
Of course she'd known other less pleasant reactions too. Achren's smiles had either angered or frightened her; but then Achren's smiles had portended nothing good, ever.
But Taran, that confounded, confusing boy...his smile had struck her with a strange, heady thrill of breathless pleasure since the moment she'd first seen it, in those dazed, tense minutes after Spiral Castle had come crashing down around them. After days and days of traveling and talking and bickering, liking and hating him by turns, one would think such a thing might lose its power. But no.
There was nothing bad about it, of course. Quite the contrary. In fact, its very pleasantness was what worried her. She had no name for it, and she disliked mysteries. Besides, pleasant things got taken away, or twisted around and used against you. Hadn't he managed to hurt her feelings every time she'd let her guard down?
Pleasure is a trap. It comes in many forms, but always, it is a lure to dull the minds of mortals, to make them vulnerable. Achren's voice again, whispering over her shoulder. In the name of discipline, Achren had denied her any amusement or pleasure she wanted too much, and Eilonwy had learned to feign disdain for things she enjoyed to prevent them from being forbidden. It was how she had managed to hold on to all her favorite books.
But...but a smile wasn't a book, and anyway Achren was a liar; a dead liar at that, so why on earth couldn't she just enjoy that smile for what it was and leave it be? Why must it provoke her into biting back impulses to giggle like an idiot or burst forth in a torrent of equally idiotic, pointless words? Just thinking of it made her blush again, and she glared resentfully at Taran's back on the trail ahead. It's your fault, Taran of Caer Dallben. You and your Eagle Mountain and your great quests and your magic pig and your nightmare-stories and your childhood memories... Oh, blast him.
Until looking up, she'd been gazing thoughtfully at the ground, and it had slowed her pace. She suddenly realized her companions were nearly out of sight ahead, and leaped forward, in a reluctant canter to make up the ground. If getting to Caer Dathyl in time accomplished nothing else, at least it meant ending this confounded journey.
How was a person supposed to think when she couldn't even catch her breath?