Patricia C. Wrede - Stronger Than Time

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STRONGER THAN

TIME

Patricia C. Wrede

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 grey. 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

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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 grey 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 grey blur in

the deepening shadows. "It's a cursed place."

"I know." The words were almost too faint to catch, even in the

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