Charles De Lint - A Pattern of Silver Strings

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 35.63KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A Pattern of Silver Strings

by Charles de Lint

For Mary Ann

Nagakaramu Kokoro mo shirazu

Kurokami no

Midarete kesa wa

Mono wo koso omoe

Lady Horikawa

[Will he always love me?

I cannot read his heart.

This morning my thoughts

Are as disordered

As my hair.]

Meran Gwynder was the daughter of an oak king and the wife of a harper, though neither her royal green

blood nor her marriage seemed very real to her just now. Loss filled her heart and she could find no way

to deal with it. The sadness of what seemed a broken trust shared an uneasy rule with her unending

questions. If she could know why…

"He left without a word," she said.

Bethowen the hillwife clicked her teeth in reply, though whether the sound was meant to be sympathetic

or was only a habit, re-mained debatable. They sat on a hilltop, under the guardianship of an old

longstone, with the stars glimmering pale in the night skies above and the fire between them throwing

strange shadows that seemed to echo the whisper of the wind as it braided the hill's grasses. Stirring the

fire with a short stick, Bethowen looked through the glitter of sparks at her guest.

Meran had nut-brown skin and brown-green hair. She was slim, but strong-limbed. Her eyes were the

liquid brown of an otter's. The hillwife could see none of this in the poor light. Those images she drew up

from her memory. What she saw was a troubled woman, her features strained and wan in the firelight. At

the oak-maid's knee the striped head of Old Badger looked up to meet the hillwife's eyes.

"Men will do that," Bethowen said at last. "It's not a new thing, my dear."

"Not him."

"What makes me wonder," the hillwife continued as though she'd never been interrupted, "is what brings

one of the treefolk so far from her tree." Ogwen Wood was a good two hours south and west across the

dark hills, a long distance for an oakmaid.

"My tree fell in a storm years ago—you never heard? I should— would have died but for him. As the

green blood spilled, he drew me back. With his harpmagic. With his love."

"And you have no more need of your tree?"

"He made me charms. Three talismans."

Meran could see his quick sure hands working the oakwood as surely as though he were beside her

now. First he made a pendant, shaped like an oak leaf, and that she wore under her tunic, close to her

heart. Then a comb, fine-toothed and decorated with acorn shapes, and that she wore in her hair to keep

the unruly locks under control. Lastly a flute that she kept in a sheath hanging from her shoulder. Oak

was not the best of woods for such an instrument, but his harpmagic had instilled in it a tone and timbre

that the natural wood lacked.

"He built us a new home of sod and stone and thatch and there we lived as we had before. Until this

morning…"

"When you awoke and found him gone," Bethowen finished for her. "But he journeys often, doesn't he,

this husband of yours?

Roadfaring and worldwalking from time to time. I have heard tales…"

"And well you might. But you don't understand. He left without a word. I woke and he was gone. Gone."

She tugged at the edge of her cloak with unhappy fingers and looked up to meet the hill-wife's bright

eyes. "He left Telynros behind."

"Telynros?"

"His harp. The roseharp."

Telynros was a Tuathan gift, an enchanted instrument that plainly bore the touch of the old gods'

workmanship. Silver-stringed and strangely carved, it had, growing from the wood where forepillar met

the curving neck, a living blossom. A grey rose.

"Please," Meran said, "tell me where he has gone."

Bethowen nodded. "I can try, my dear. I can only try."

From the unrolled cloth that lay at her knee, she chose a pinch of flaked alder bark and tossed it into the

flames with a soft-spoken word. The fire's hue changed from red-gold to blue. Muttering under her

breath, she added a second pinch and the blue dissolved into violet.

"Look into the flames," she said. "Look and tell me what you see."

"Only flames. No, I see…"

An oak tree strained at its roots, green-leafed boughs reaching for… something. There was a sense of

loss about that tree, an incompleteness that reflected in the pattern of its boughs. Under the spread of its

leafed canopy, half covered in autumn leaves, stood a harp.

"My tree," Meran whispered. "But it's…" She shook her head. "My tree standing in my father's wood as

ever it did. And that is Telynros, his harp. Bethowen?"

"It is the present you see," the hillwife replied. "But a view of it that we already know, not what you

seek."

Sighing, Bethowen closed her eyes. Deep inside, where the herenow curled around her thoughts, she

drew on the heart of her strength. Her taw, the inner silence that is the basis for all magic, rose sure and

firm like a well-remembered tune. When she spoke a word, the air crackled about her and a pale green

rune hovered in the air above the fire. Sinking, it slowly became a part of the flames.

Meran leaned closer to the fire. The scent of wildflowers was strong in the air. The vision in the flames

remained. Only its perspective changed. First the harp grew large and larger still, until all she could see

was the silvery glisten of its strings, then between them, amidst eddying rivers of mist that hid more than

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Charles De Lint - A Pattern of Silver Strings.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Charles De Lint - A Pattern of Silver Strings

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: