The Ways of Winter

Chapter 4-1

CHAPTER 4

“Alun?” George called as he opened the front door to the huntsman’s house, along the lane nearest the kennels in the extensive grounds behind the manor. His dogs padded in behind him. There was no reply. Alun wouldn’t have expected him back today and must be out on his own business.

I have just this evening to myself, he thought, before this batch goes off to Rhys and me with them. Unless it snows again.

He hung his outer coat near the back door and considered. If it snows, I’ll get that Christmas tree I’ve been promising myself. That’ll be a short jaunt into the woods nearby and I know just the little balsam fir to take, big enough for the central hall in this house, by the staircase.

He’d taken some ribbing when he first raised the topic. Most of his family and friends here had never heard of Christmas trees, and he had had to explain the custom as part of the winter solstice traditions of his human family—they could understand that. His recent marriage had made him think about how to pass along traditions to his own children, should there be any, and this was one he intended to keep. There were few Christians in the otherworld, just a handful of the humans. He didn’t know where he stood on the subject of religion himself, but he was sure about the importance of family traditions and he meant to celebrate the season in his own way.

He lit a lamp to help dispel the winter afternoon gloom and took it with him as he walked up the stairs. A glint on glass caught his eye and he was cheered to see that Alun had started to hang some of his family photos along the hall, here upstairs where the phenomenon of photography would be less startling to his fae visitors. He lit the hanging wall lamps so that he could stand back and look at them.

On that first visit home a month ago, after his decision to stay, he’d had to decide what to bring with him from his human life, thirty-three years of accumulation. He’d settled on some clothes, a few keepsakes, the boxes holding his parents’ materials (now piled in the library downstairs awaiting a free moment), and these photographs, many of which were recently blown up and framed for the purpose.

His grandfather had done something extraordinary. George was his only descendant, the son of his daughter, and he must have been seized with sentiment at his marriage and the possibility of great-grandchildren, for he’d taken the lead in arranging the selection and framing of the photos and, most surprisingly, had passed along the painting of the Talbot family arms, done for his own grandfather more than a hundred years before. That gleaming vision, the golden lion standing rampant on the red ground, had presided over George’s meals in his grandparents’ house for his entire childhood, and he still couldn’t believe his grandfather had decided to part with it.

Here, now, in this fae otherworld, that heraldic lion came to stand for the most prominent human thread in his makeup, and he gave it a position of honor at the top of the landing where it presided over the hall.

The center of his family display was not, however, the photos, but a painting just hung that Angharad had made after her visit, of his grandparents, now in their late seventies. There were few elderly fae—George had yet to meet one—and she had dwelt perceptively and sympathetically on the changes of age balanced by the accumulation of experience. You could see Gwyn’s features in his daughter’s face, humanized and softened. This painting was very dear to him and he lingered over it now. After his parents’ deaths when he was nine, his grandparents were the only human family he had. He smiled faintly, remembering—Rhian had never seen aged humans before and was frankly shocked when she met them, politely though she tried to hide it. He imagined this painting might disturb others here, too. Let them see what mortality brings, they’ll experience it too if they live long enough.

He touched the framed photos of his mother. He was older now than she was when he lost her, and her young face from childhood on smiled from every frame. There were no pictures of his father; he hoped to learn more when he went through their papers.

He’d also brought back books and intended to bring more, but that was a topic which gave him difficulty. It was one thing to leave natural history references lying around, but what about books on technology that was out of place here? Or fiction that painted a story of a world alien to the fae, especially the twentieth century?

He’d made Alun a gift of Kipling’s Jungle Books so that he could have a copy of his own and return Ceridwen’s to her, but he was reluctant to contaminate this world with too much of his old one, despite Ceridwen’s fondness for old-fashioned country house murder mysteries. On the other hand, who was he to decide what they should or shouldn’t know? Nothing prevented the ones who were interested from traveling into the human world via a way, if they could find one. He intended to have a long discussion with Ceridwen about it, soon.

He went on to his bedroom to pull out one of his old sweaters suitable for tomorrow’s excursion into the woods for a tree and to put on fresh clothing for dinner this evening.

He stepped back into the hall when he heard the sound of footsteps, and found Alun climbing the stairs. “I saw the dogs,” he said. “You’re back already?”

“I had to help Thomas Kethin with a big group of travelers, too many to house at the inn. Now I’ve been drafted to help get them to Rhys and look into the ways there, again.”

“You should go somewhere they can’t find you,” Alun said sympathetically.

“That gets my vote,” George said, ruefully. “Oh, we might be housing guests overnight. Two of the travelers are on their own, a musician and a lutine from Iona’s place. If Ifor can’t house them, I volunteered. I don’t know yet what will be arranged, but wanted to warn you.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I was just hanging these.” Alun gestured at the wall. “Very strange, these photographs are.”

“It looks fine, so far. A wall of pictures like this is very common, where I come from. Be sure to leave room for more from Angharad, as the spirit moves her.”

“I suppose it’s comforting, having a taste of home around you.”

“I’m finding it so, though it’s not my home any longer. This is. No regrets.” He smiled, thinking of his wife and wishing she were here.

“Have you finished your work to cover your absence in the human world?”

George thought about his arrangements with Mariah Catlett, the human agent Gwyn used to coordinate his human holdings, such as the Bellemore property in Rowanton. As a whipper-in for the Rowanton Hunt, he’d known her only as a quiet middle-aged woman, always in the first field. After he took over as huntsman for Gwyn and decided to stay, he discovered that she’d been an agent for Gwyn for thirty years. She’d inherited the position from her father, who’d stumbled upon Gwyn’s other life, back when he was impersonating a human in order to raise his daughter, George’s grandmother, and see her married.

She knew what Gwyn was, and took George’s revelations in stride, content with this unusual way of making a living. Gwyn paid her well, and the only condition placed upon her, other than discretion, was that she had to live in the caretaker’s house Gwyn had built for her father, at the spot where the Guests’ Way’s hidden branch emerged on the Bellemore property.

She was widowed with one son, and George wondered if he would be initiated into the family arrangement, or if Gwyn and he would be seeking someone else eventually, but for now it was a stable situation.

“Mariah and my grandfather have arranged my bank accounts and set up the necessary paperwork to rent my farm and sell the things I won’t be keeping, and to keep my human identity alive. They’re telling my friends that I’ve sold my position in my company and am taking the opportunity to travel, a complete change of life.” That’s not so far wrong, he thought.

“Has it been hard, giving up the business that you built?”

“Surprisingly not. I feel like I’ve squeezed that life dry, and suddenly software and computers and email, they’re not so important.” He smiled at Alun’s blank look. “I’ll still buy a few things through her, I imagine.” Giving up the Internet was one thing, he thought, but deodorant was another.

“This will all get more complicated when my grandparents pass on, but I hope that will be many years from now. If I have the long life, I suppose I’ll eventually be a solitary on the human side, like Gwyn.” It was a sobering thought, that he might have centuries yet to see how the human world advanced.

“Oh, well, “ he summarized, “no gain without some loss. And speaking of concentrating on the here-and-now, if we can’t travel tomorrow, I’m going after that Christmas tree. I’ll need a pick, and ax, and a spade. I want to bring it back as a live tree, not a cut one, so I’ll also need something to bundle around the root ball and not make a mess in the hall. The bottom half of a small barrel, maybe?”

“How will you get it here?” Alun asked.

“Good question. I wonder if anyone around here knows what a toboggan is?”

The great hall was almost full, all of the tables set up for the unexpected visitors, amid a general air of jollity as everyone enjoyed a break in routine.

Ifor caught George as he walked in and asked if he were still willing to house Cydifor and Maëlys for the night. “It’s been that difficult to get them all sorted out. Those two didn’t say anything, but I could see they weren’t comfortable just tagging along with the others.”

“No problem at all,” George said. “Alun’s making the two rooms available, and I’ve planned to have a few friends over. Can you tell them to come to me at the end of dinner, and I’ll bring them along?” Ifor nodded, and George went on to find Brynach, seated with his great-uncle Eurig in the position of an honored vassal at the front of the main hall.

“You’re in the wrong place, young married man,” Eurig teased, his walrus mustache waggling for emphasis.

“And don’t I know it,” George said. “Speaking of which, how is Tegwen managing in your absence, old married man?”

Eurig roared with laughter at the hit. “I’ll find out soon enough when I go back home.” Eurig’s estate was just up the road a bit beyond the Daear Llosg, north of the manor.

George continued smoothly, “In lieu of married life, I’ve come to invite my whipper-in here to an informal gathering this evening at my house after dinner.”

Brynach, with every inch of his seventeen-year-old dignity, rose and bowed. “I would be honored, huntsman.”

George smiled and walked up the steps to the dais to take his usual place at the high table, next to his young cousin Rhian. “Come on over tonight, if you want,” he told her. “I’ve invited the hunt staff, and we’ll make some of these guests feel welcome. Benitoe said he’d come and we might even see Ives.” That last was said with feeling. He’d dropped in on Ives at the kennels before dinner and had been sorry to find him still so disconsolate over the death of his daughter Isolda.

Rhian said quietly, “I think I remind him of her. I’ve been trying to keep out of his way.”

George gripped her hand on top of the table for a moment. “It takes time, my dear, there’s no hurrying it. Might be six months or a year before it stops stabbing at you with every recollection.”

“So, tell me about the hound walking, now that the snow is so deep,” he said, to change the subject. He helped himself to the beef, sliced on the platter, while he talked.

“We’re following the new routine you suggested. We’ve got the run of the yards in front of the manor first thing in the morning. After we’re done, the horses are turned out there for exercise. Between us, we keep the snow pounded down.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it down to a system already,” George said, and she nodded.

“We’ll be fit to resume hunting if there’s a thaw,” she said. “We’ll need you back, then, ready or not.”