Wrede, Patricia C - SSC (15 page)

"I hate being the center of
attention, and you can't have him!" Janet snarled.

The Lorelei's song changed key in a
mournful run of notes and grew louder and more threatening. Janet was foolish
to be so stubborn. She couldn't win, and in the end she would be blamed. Or
perhaps the Lorelei would take her instead of Dan. She would fall down that
dizzying slope and break to pieces on the rocks below, like the boats and the
boatmen.

Janet took her left hand off of
Dan's ear and clapped it against her own. The sick fear receded a little, but
not enough . . . and Dan twisted and pulled away. Her other hand slipped. Dan
twisted again and threw her off, then hoisted himself to his feet and started
for the edge of the slope again.

Janet scrambled after him. The
Lorelei's song rang in her ears, whispering that he would pull her over the
cliff's edge with him if she tried to stop him again. Janet gritted her teeth
and flung herself forward. She reached Dan just as he came to the guardrail,
and slapped her hands over his ears. He stopped, staring at her, while the
Lorelei sang fear and failure with renewed intensity.

She wasn't going to make it. She
knew she wasn't, even without the growing triumph she could hear in the
Lorelei's voice. In another minute, she would have to let go of Dan's ears to
cover her own, she could feel it. She bit her lip, trying to distract herself,
but it didn't help. And then Dan raised his hands and covered her ears.

The song diminished to a bearable
level at once. Janet sighed in relief. Just in time, she remembered not to take
her own hands away from Dan's ears. That really would be stupid. On the other
hand, how long could they stand here like this? If only Beth would come, or
Mrs. Craig, or somebody . . . But if they did, what would they think when they
found her standing with Dan in the moonlight, each holding on to the other's
ears? The image was too much, and she began to giggle. Dan looked down,
startled, and the giggle turned into a laugh at the expression on his face. In
another moment, Dan was laughing, too.

As they laughed, the remaining
pressure on Janet vanished, and when she stopped chuckling she realized that
the Lorelei's song had ceased. After a moment's hesitation, she slowly lowered
her hands. Dan shivered, then did the same.

"Thanks," he said to
Janet. He looked as if he would have liked to say more, but wasn't quite sure
what.

Janet nodded, accepting both the
spoken and the unspoken thought. "Thanks to you, too. She was starting to
get to me."

"I finally figured that
out," Dan said. "I don't know why it took me so long. I— Heads
up!"

Janet turned. The Lorelei was
standing a few feet farther down the cliff's edge, watching them, her face an
expressionless mask. Hastily, Janet reached for Dan's ears again, but the
Lorelei shook her head.

"That is unnecessary
now," the Lorelei said. "You have won." She gave Janet a long,
measuring look. "I have never been defeated by ones as young as you
before. You have great strength, girl."

Janet found herself unwilling to
say anything to the Lorelei, so she settled for a shrug.

The Lorelei's gaze moved to Dan,
and she smiled coldly. "You have learned something, I think. Do not forget
it." She held Dan's eyes briefly, then looked back at Janet. "Go,
then, the pair of you."

Dan started toward the footpath at
once, and Janet was not far behind him. As they crossed from the moon-made
silver of the bare rock to the packed dirt of the footpath, the world seemed to
tilt briefly and resettle itself in a different shape. They heard the sound of
running feet in front of them. "Hey, look out!" Janet said.

"I'm looking, I'm
looking." Beth panted as she came to a halt. "I see you found somebody."

"It's a good thing for me that
she did," Dan said.

"Well, you were right here,
weren't you?" Beth said indignantly. "I wasn't that far behind. Boy,
you can really run, Jan. I thought I'd lost you for a minute."

"You did," Janet said.
She snuck a quick look back over her shoulder. The Lorelei was gone.

"Oh?" Beth looked from
Janet to Dan, noting Dan's torn shirt and muddy jeans. "I smell a tall
tale. Come sit in the parking lot and tell me, and then we'll figure out what
to say to Mrs. Craig." She flicked her flashlight on, and the three of
them started back toward the
Gasthaus.

The keep rose high above the ring
of brush and briars choking the once-clear lawn around its base. Even when the
sun was high, the tower's shadow lay cold and dark on the twisted mass of
thorns, and at dusk it stretched like a gnarled black finger across the forest
and up the mountainside. Arven hated walking through that somber dimness,
though it was the shortest way home. Whenever he could, he swung wide around
the far side of the keep to stay clear of its shadow. Most people avoided the
keep altogether, but Arven found its sunlit face fascinating. The light colored
the stone according to the time of day and the shifting of the seasons, now
milk white and shining, now tinged with autumn gold or rosy with reflected
sunset, now a grim winter gray. The shadowed side was always black and ominous.

Once, when he was a young man and
foolish (he had thought himself brave then, of course), Arven had dressed in his
soft wool breeches and the fine linen shirt his mother had embroidered for him
and gone to the very edge of the briars. He had searched all along the sunlit
side of the keep for an opening, a path, a place where the briars grew less
thickly, but he had found nothing. Reluctantly, he had circled to the shadowed
side. Looking back toward the light he had just quitted, he had seen white
bones dangling inside the hedge, invisible from any other angle: human bones
entwined with briars. There were more bones among the shadows, bones that
shivered in the wind, and leaned toward him, frightening him until he ran away.
He had never told anyone about it, not even Una, but he still had nightmares in
which weather-bleached bones hung swaying in the wind. Ever since, he had
avoided the shadow of the keep if he could.

Sometimes, however, he
miscalculated the time it would take to fell and trim a tree, and then he had
to take the short way or else arrive home long after the sun was down. He felt
like a fool, hurrying through the shadows, glancing up now and again at the
keep looming above him, and when he reached his cottage he was always in a bad
temper. So he was not in the best of humors when, one autumn evening after such
a trip, he found a young man in a voluminous cloak and a wide-brimmed hat,
sitting on his doorstep in the gray dusk, waiting.

"Who are you?" Arven
growled, hefting his ax to show that his white hair was evidence of mere age
and not infirmity.

"A traveler," the man
said softly without moving. His voice was tired, bone tired, and Arven wondered
suddenly whether he was older than he appeared. Twilight could be more than
kind to a man or woman approaching middle age; Arven had known those who could
pass, at twilight, for ten or fifteen fewer years than what the midwife attested
to.

"Why are you here?" Arven
demanded. "The road to Prenshow is six miles to the east. There's nothing
to bring a traveler up on this mountain."

"Except the keep," said
the man in the same soft tone.

Arven took an involuntary step
backward, raising his ax as if to ward off a threat. "I have nothing to do
with the keep. Go back where you came from. Leave honest men to their work and
the keep to crumble."

The man climbed slowly to his feet.
"Please," he said, his voice full of desperation. "Please,
listen to me. Don't send me away. You're the only one left."

No, I was mistaken, Arven thought. He's
no more than twenty, whatever the shadows hint. Such intensity belongs only to
the young. "What do you mean?"

"No one else will talk about
the keep. I need— I need to know more about it. You live on the mountain; the
keep is less than half a mile away. Surely you can tell me something."

"I can only tell you to stay
away from it, lad." Arven set his ax against the wall and looked at the
youth, who was now a gray blur in the deepening shadows. "It's a cursed
place."

"I know." The words were
almost too faint to catch, even in the evening stillness. "I've . . .
studied the subject. Someone has to break the curse, or it will go on and on
and . . . Tell me about the keep. Please. You're the only one who might help
me."

Arven shook his head. "I won't
help you kill yourself. Didn't your studies teach you about the men who've died
up there? The briars are full of bones. Don't add yours to the collection."

The youth raised his chin.
"They all went alone, didn't they? Alone, and in daylight, and so the
thorns killed them. I know better than that."

"You want to go up to the keep
at
night?"
A chill ran down Arven's spine, and he stared into the
darkness, willing his eyes to penetrate it and show him the expression on the
other's face.

"At night, with you. It's the
only way left to break the curse."

"You're mad." But
something stirred within Arven, a longing for adventure he had thought buried
with Una and the worn-out rags of the embroidered linen shirt he had worn on
their wedding day. The image of the keep, shining golden in the autumn sun,
rose temptingly in his mind. He shook his head to drive away the memories and
pushed open the door of his cottage.

"Wait!" said the
stranger. "I shouldn't have said that, I know, but at least let me
explain."

Arven hesitated. There was no harm
in listening, and perhaps he could talk the young fool out of his suicidal
resolve. "Very well. Come in."

The young man held back. "I'd
rather talk here."

"Indoors, or not at all,"
Arven growled, regretting his momentary sympathy. "I'm an old man, and I
want my dinner and a fire and something warm to drink."

"An old man?" The other's
voice was startled, and not a little dismayed. "You can't be! It didn't
take that long—" He stepped forward and peered at Arven, and the outline
of his shoulders sagged. "I've been a fool. I won't trouble you further, sir."

"My name is Arven." Now
that the younger man was turning to go, he felt a perverse desire to keep him
there. "It's a long walk down the mountain. Come in and share my meal, and
tell me your story. I like a good tale."

"I wouldn't call it a good
one," the young man said, but he turned back and followed Arven into the
cottage.

Inside, he stood uneasily beside
the door while Arven lit the fire and got out the cider and some bread and
cheese. Una had always had something warm ready when Arven came in from the
mountain, a savory stew or thick soup when times were good, a vegetable pottage
when things were lean, but since her death he had grown accustomed to a small,
simple meal of an evening. The young man did not appear to notice or care until
Arven set a second mug of warm cider rather too emphatically on the table and
said, "Your story, scholar?"

The young man shivered like a
sleepwalker awakened abruptly from his dreams. "I'm not a scholar."

"Then what are you?"

The man looked away. "Nothing,
now. Once I was a prince."

That explained the world-weariness
in his voice, Arven thought. He'd been raised to rule and then lost all chance
of doing so before he'd even begun. Probably not long ago, either, or the boy
would have begun to forget his despair and plan for a new life, instead of making
foolish gestures like attempting the keep. Arven wondered whether it had been
war or revolution that had cost the young prince his kingdom. In these perilous
times, it could have been either; the result was the same.

"Sit down, then, Your
Highness, and tell me your tale," Arven said in a gentler tone.

"My tale isn't important. It's
the keep—"

"The keep's tale, then,"
Arven interrupted with a trace of impatience.

The prince only nodded, as if
Arven's irritability could not touch him. "It's not so much the story of
the keep as of the counts who lived there. They were stubborn men, all of them,
and none so stubborn as the last. Well, it takes a stubborn man to insult a witch-woman—even
if he was unaware, as some have claimed—and then refuse to apologize for the
offense."

Without conscious thought, Arven's
fingers curled into the sign against evil. "The count did that? No wonder
the keep is cursed!"

The prince flinched. "Not the
keep, but what is within it."

"What?" Arven frowned and
rubbed the back of his neck. Trust a nobleman to make hash of things instead of
telling a simple, straightforward tale. "Go on."

"You see, the count's meeting
with the witch-woman occurred at his daughter's christening, and the infant
suffered as much or more than the father from the witch-woman's spell of
revenge. Before the assembled guests, the witch declared that the girl would be
the last of the count's line, for he would get no more children and his
daughter would die of the pricking of a spindle before she turned sixteen. When
the guards ran up, the witch laughed at them and vanished before they could lay
hands on her.

"The count made fun of the
curse at first, until he found that half of it at least was true. His daughter
was the only child he would ever have. Then he raged like a wild man, but it
did him no good. So he became wary of the second half of the curse, more
because he did not wish his line to end than out of love for the girl.

"He was too stubborn to take
her away, where the witch's power might not have reached. For seven
generations, his father's fathers had lived in the keep, and he would not be
driven away from it, nor allow his daughter to be raised anywhere else. Instead,
he swore to defeat the curse on his own ground. He ordered every spindle in the
castle burnt and banished spinners and weavers from his lands. Then he forbade
his daughter to wander more than a bow shot from the outer wall. He thought
that he had beaten the witch, for how could his daughter die of the pricking of
a spindle in a keep where there were none?