The Harp of The Grey Rose Read online

  THE HARP OF THE

  GREY ROSE

  “Charles de Lint is a folksinger as well as a writer and it is this voice we hear … both old and new, lyric, longing, touched by magic.”

  —Jane Yolen, author of Briar Rose

  “Mr. de Lint’s handling of ancient folklore to weave an entirely new pattern has never, to my knowledge, been equalled.”—Andre Norton, SFWA Grandmaster

  “One of the most original fantasy writers currently working.”

  —Booklist

  “Charles de Lint shows that fantasy can he the deep mythic literature of our time.”

  —Fantasy and Science Fiction

  Something stood there— someting— darker than the night.

  I knew in that instant that every word the maid d told me had been true. A flash of lightning ripped across the sky outside, and I saw the Waster clearly silhouetted against its sudden light.

  He was shaped like a man, but stood almost eight feet high, towering like a monolith above us. Coals of red fire smoldered in his eyes. He was too big to come through the door—but he had no need to enter. He picked me up with a hand that was as hard as iron and, as my fists struck futile blows against his massive chest, hurled me across the room. I landed with a jarring crash.

  Helplessly, I watched him take up the Grey Rose and turn from the threshold. Her eyes were wide with terror, her scream silent.

  Then a darkness came washing over me and I knew no more.

  FIREBIRD

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  THE HARP OF THE

  GREY ROSE

  The Legend of Cerin Songweaver

  Charles de Lint

  FIREBIRD

  AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

  FIREBIRD

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd. 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  A portion of this novel previously appeared in Swords Against Darkness IV, edited by Andrew J. Offutt (Zebra, 1979), under the title The Fane of the Grey Rose.

  First published in the United States of America by the Donning Company/ Publishers, 1985 Second publication by Avon Books, 1991 Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2004

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Charles de Lint, 1985 All rights reserved

  ISBN 0-14-240060-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  for my

  grandmother

  Oma Kamé

  and

  dedicated

  to the

  memory of my

  father

  Frederic Charles

  (1919-1967)

  Has it flown away

  The cuckoo that called

  Waking me at midnight?

  Yet its song seems

  Still by my pillow.

  —Fujiwara Shunzei (Toshinari)

  Contents:-

  THE GREY ROSE

  HICKATHRIFT TRUMMEL

  TELYNROS

  CALMAN STONESTREAM

  WISTLORE

  GWENYA

  DEEPDELVE

  THE RED HOUNDS

  THE DARK ROSE

  TWILIGHT’S SONGWEAVER

  GLOSSARY

  The fateful slumber floats and flows

  About the tangle of the rose;

  But lo! the fated hand and heart

  To rend the slumberous curse apart!

  —William Morris

  THE GREY ROSE

  Secret roads there are,

  entwined like a clutch of reeds

  made silver by the moon

  —the tinker’s road, the hunter’s road,

  the hidden way the Harpers go;

  but more secret still

  are the ways the elder folk once trod.

  Gentle and merry, haunted of old, they wind deeper still.

  —from the Songweaver’s Journeybook

  ONCE A YEAR AT MIDSUMMER, Tess’s brother Finan came to stay with us for a day or three. They were both Kelledys, tinkers from Lillowen originally. But while the road was still Finan’s home Tess had quit the travelling life before I was born. She’d settled into a small cottage on the edge of the West Downs in Eldwolde where she played the part of witch-wife to the folk of Wran Cheaping and, for the past fifteen years, foster mother to myself.

  She was a big-boned woman, old enough to be my grandmother and taller than me by a good three inches, though I

  stood just under six feet. Her hair was the grey of a sun-bleached stone, her features lean and her eyes a piercing blue—“A witch’s eyes, sure enough,” the villagers called them. I was never sure what part of her cures and far-seeing was simply good common sense and what was owed to that Wwee touch of the old blood” that she claimed ran in her mother’s side of the family, bypassing the sons in favour of the daughters.

  Knowing her as well as I did, I had to admit—when she was mixing up her herb simples or merely gazing far-eyed into the fire—that there was something fey about her. There was a certain look in her eyes that never touched her brother’s.

  She was ten years Finan’s senior—a fact she liked to play up when they argued.

  “You’d do well to listen to your elders,” she’d tell him, a long bony finger stabbing the air for emphasis. “Remember who it was that changed your swaddling when Da’ was on the road and Mum too busy to pay any mind to your wailing. Broom and heather! I knew a thing or two before ever you were howling out your lungs, and if I don’t know more now, you tell me—who does?”

  Finan would grin then and give me a wink.

  He was a tall, handsome man, black-haired but greying at the temples, smooth-shaven and dark-eyed, with a gold loop in each earlobe and his clothes a shock of colour you could see a mile off on the downs—all reds and yellows like an armload of pimpernels and dandelions gathered in a bunch and set
down on a rock. He gave me a shirt once— bell-heather pink with a collar ruffle—but I’d yet to wear it out of sight of the cottage. It was hard enough that the folk of Wran Cheaping thought of me as the witch’s foster son, without my parading about like a jack-a-dandy. There were whispers and wary smiles a-plenty behind my back. No need to add laughter to them.

  This summer Finan arrived a day early—in time for the week’s end market—and he and I rode into the village where he sold three of his tinkerblades for twice as many silver pieces and mended a pot or two for a handful of coppers. There were sausages from the market and fresh greens from the garden for dinner that night, washed down with a skin of wine that Finan produced from his seemingly bottomless pack. Afterward we let the fire die down and sat talking by the glow of a single fat candle that did its valiant best to light the whole of the small cottage from its spot on the mantel.

  The cottage was all one room, with a low bed, with a small chest at its foot in each of two corners, a large stone hearth from which hung an array of tinwork, cast-iron pots and pans, and wooden utensils; and a long, low table by the door where Tess cut and bundled her herb simples. A small shelf of books stood in a third corner—a rare treasure in a land where few could read and fewer still cared to. Throughout the cottage, wherever there was space on the rafters, hung dried bunches of herbs, flowers, and the like for teas, medicines, and simples. Stacked in the fourth corner were dried willow withies that we soaked in a large tub to make pliable before we did our basketwork.

  Two chairs completed the furnishings. Tess’s was a rocker, while mine was a sturdy oak affair with legs that I’d tried to carve into the semblance of a brecaln’s feet. They’d come out looking not so much like a hill cat’s paws as some strange cross between a furred bird’s feet and who knew what. Finan had my chair tonight while I sat on a pillow by the hearth.

  “Should’ve seen the lad,” he teased, and I saw what was coming. I’d already heard it on the ride back from the market. “Gawking about like he’d never been to the village before. He had his eyes on one lass—let me tell you. If I hadn’t caught them and popped them back into his head, I’m sure he’d still be there, scrabbling about in the dirt looking for them.”

  Tess shot me a considering look, and I knew what was brewing behind those bird-bright eyes of hers. She was ever pushing me to make friends in the village, but I found it hard. Few had time for the witch’s fosterling, and I had little in common with any of them. It wasn’t that I thought myself better; we viewed the world through different eyes, and it set me apart. They met me with a curious mixture of mockery and fear—the fear that Tess had taught me a spell or two.

  “Was she pretty?” Tess asked.

  Finan wagged his hand in the air and arched his brows.

  “Pretty enough,” he said, “in a peculiar sort of way.”

  Again, I had to wonder if he’d seen the same maid I had.

  She was a stranger to Wran Cheaping, as far as I knew. Since I lacked a name for her, in my own mind I called her the Grey Rose for the blossom she wore in her rust-brown hair. That rose was the colour of twilight, as grey as the mists upon the West Downs. I swore its petals were still damp with morning dew, for all that the day’s end was nearly upon us when I saw her.

  Farmer Howen’s sons were examining Finan’s tinker-blades when she swept by, her mantle rustling like windblown leaves. Their backs were to her, but I was looking beyond them, trying not to listen to their cautious jibes, so that I saw her when they did not.

  “Fair gives me a chill,” Jon, the elder, was saying, “standing so near one who deals with the fairy folk.”

  His brother Sewell smirked. They were cut from the same cloth, these two big, brawny farm lads with hair like straw and dung-brown eyes.

  “Best watch your tongue,” Sewell said, “or he’ll turn you into a toad, and you’ll eat nothing but flies.”

  Finan gave them both a hard look, but I paid neither of them any mind. I’d heard it all before. It made me sad as well as angry, as always. Nothing I could say would change their minds. Well, let them have their magic and legend and superstition. I knew better.

  I watched the maid I had named the Grey Rose move through the market. For all that no one else seemed to give her more than a glance, she’d bound me with a spell. Her mantle was oak-leaf green, and under it she wore a rust-coloured smock and a cream-white blouse. Stars appeared to glisten in her dusky eyes, so clear and bright, and there was an air about her like a breath of autumn—a sweet and heady scent. Though she wasn’t tall, something about her lent her the appearance of height, and she walked with a loose, easy stride. Here she bought a sack of grains, there a handful of fresh sprouts and greens, and carried it all in a wicker basket on her arm.

  I wondered where she was from and why no other gaze followed her as mine did. She set my heart a-singing, and I longed to speak with her, but I was too aware of my rough woolens and shabby cloak. I was always shy—and what had I to speak of with one like her? She seemed highborn … 1 suppose it was, although the only noble folk I had experience with were in the tales Tess had told me.

  As she reached the far side of the market, she stole a glance my way, and her gaze caught mine in such a way that we seemed to share a secret that only we two could understand. She smiled; I cast my gaze to the ground, my heart drumming. I could feel my neck redden under my collar. When I had looked up once more she had been gone; and all I had to look upon were the plain, broad faces of Howen’s sons.

  “She was beautiful,” I said, giving Finan a warning look.

  He shrugged as if helpless. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, but he said nothing.

  “What was her name, Cerin?” Tess asked.

  “I… I don’t know.”

  She made a tching sound with her tongue, and I could see the cogs in her mind whirling as she planned the matchmaking.

  “I never seen her before,” I offered.

  “There are ways to find folk,” she declared.

  A fey look came into her eyes. At times like that I was always uneasy. I liked the idea of magic better than being confronted with it.

  “Leave it be,” I said, shaking my head. “Please.”

  I might never see the maid again, but I didn’t want the memory of her tied up with either Tess’s herb charms or her brother’s jokes. I think Tess read that in my face, for she pursed her lips, sighed, then turned to Finan and asked him of his trip from Lillowen. I stayed to listen for a while, but I found it hard to concentrate. Since that moment in the market my thoughts had never strayed far from the maid of the Grey Rose and, reminded of her once again—even in such a way as Finan’s teasing—I was hard put to think of anything else.

  At length 1 fetched my harp from beside my bed and went out into the night to sit beside the well. There was a smoothed stone there that I’d found out on the downs two summers ago and spent a few days half rolling and half dragging to its present location. I liked to sit there at night sometimes, playing my harp.

  It was a rudely carved instrument, not the work of a skilled craftsman, for I’d laboriously fashioned it myself. The supports and soundbox were cut from weather-worn barn wood, and it was strung with bronze-wound strings that Finan had given me to replace the original cow-gut ones I’d begged from Ralen Tagh, who had a meat stall in the market. Yet for all its rustic looks, it had a pleasing enough tone; and I could coax tunes from it to fill the long hours I spent on my own. The case—I’d sewed it myself— was made of goatskin.

  I sat with it on my lap for a while, feeling the night’s stillness settle in me. There was a light wind blowing in from the downs, carrying with it the smell of heather, and the stars wheeled in their constellations above, both distant and close.

  I began to time the harp, but neither the night’s quiet nor the task at hand could ease the trouble in my heart. That one smile from the lips of the Grey Rose had awakened a longing in me that would not be stilled. Not so much for her, for I knew little enough of wo
men. Besides, what would one such as her want with the likes of me? No, it was a discontent she reawoke—one that was never far from me. It had nothing to do with Tess, for I loved her as if she was my own mother, but it was more her fault than the girl’s, for Tess had filled my head with tales of the world beyond these downs that I longed to see with my own eyes. Every year when Finan came, those feelings grew stronger, and yet… I was afraid to go, as well.

  When the harp was tuned, I let my fingers play what they would. They strayed across the strings while I let my thoughts ramble, until I found I was playing the opening bars to a cradle song Tess used to sing to me. When I thought of my parents—I was only two years old when the sickness took them and left me an orphan—it was her face that came into my mind’s eye. What I knew of them was only what Tess had told me.

  My mother had been Eithne Gwynn, a Harper of the old school, revered and respected until she was exiled from the Harperhall in Wistlore for wedding a gwandryas, one of the wandering nomads of the Grassfields of Kohr. It was from her that I got my knack for tunes and the like, while my father’s wild blood was responsible for a feyness that Tess said I had, though any such had yet to manifest itself—if it was present at all. Some might argue that it was my father’s blood that set me apart from my peers in Wran Cheaping, but I thought not. It was nothing so romantic. I was simply too aware that there was a world beyond, while they preferred to ignore it.