come up for a young man like me?”
“One with indoor plumbing,” she said, following it up with a sleepy shove into the woods. “Now go. And go far. I don’t want to stand here listening.”
Kevin laughed nervously and crashed off farther into the woods.
Glenn found a tree and leaned into it, drifting, sleep tugging at her.
Glenn was pretty sure she was about to fall asleep standing up, when she heard the crunching of leaves, like from someone walking, but it wasn’t coming from the direction Kevin had gone. Glenn became alert instantly, fear focusing her mind to a pinprick.
The footsteps started again, louder this time, coming from far out in the woods to her left, on the other side of the path they had taken that day. They sounded small and close together. An animal, maybe? Glenn couldn’t be sure. The dry leaves crunched and then stopped. The next sound was that of heavy steps on flat ground. Whatever it was had stepped onto the path. It was less than twenty feet from her now, but she still couldn’t see anything through the thickness of the trees.
“Hey, so that was awesome,” Kevin said as he returned. “You ready to go back? I just — ”
Glenn held up her hand and listened. Something new now. A
voice. High and wispy, like wind blowing through reeds. Finally, Kevin caught it too and turned his head, trying to see where it was coming from. The sound undulated through the dark, growing louder, rising and falling and slowly taking shape.
“What is it?”
“Singing,” she said.
The lone voice grew louder. Whether it was a man’s or a
woman’s, Glenn couldn’t tell. The voice was high and glassy but strong at the same time. The words were foreign, but the tune sounded familiar, a looping melody. Beautiful.
Glenn knew she should go back to the camp and Aamon.
Whatever was out there was none of her concern, but still … there was something about that sound, the sweet, strange lilt of it, that wrapped itself around Glenn like two hands and drew her forward, away from the tree and out into the dark.
“Uh … wait, so we’re gonna … do you think we should
maybe …” Kevin sputtered before following behind her.
Glenn moved quickly, squinting in the dark, picking out her path through the woods as silently as she could, following the voice as it grew louder. When Glenn and Kevin neared the path’s edge, she motioned for him to get down. They knelt in the brush and crawled the last few feet until they could see through gaps in the foliage.
Standing only a few feet away in the center of the path was the singer, a tall, thin man with black hair. He was wearing a long tunic that was so white it seemed to glow in the moonlight. Underneath that, showing along his arms and legs before disappearing into leather gloves and high boots, was a layer of silver armor made up of thousands of tiny rings all linked together. He had a sword at his waist and carried a white shield on one arm. On the shield was the image of a swan, laid out in gold.
All at once the singing stopped, leaving a hole of silence all around them. The man stepped forward and looked up into the sky.
Everything — the trees, the wind, the sky — seemed to lean forward in anticipation.
There was a white blur and a rush of wings as an enormous swan swept down out of the sky and onto the path. Its long neck stood graceful and erect, its ivory wings tucked neatly at its side. Glenn’s heart went still as the knight crossed the space between them, laid his shield on the ground, and knelt before it, lowering his head as if in prayer.
Slowly, the swan began to grow before them. As it did, its
feathers pulsed with a white light that intensified until the glare overtook its form and forced Glenn and Kevin to shield their eyes at the brightness. The light peaked and faded, and when it was gone, the swan had disappeared.
In its place stood a young woman.
She was lithe and naked, with long white-blond hair. A
constellation of tiny stars danced around her head like a crown, filling the pathway and the trees around it with a warm, clear light. The woman lowered her hand, small and delicate, and touched the knight’s head. He took it as his cue to stand again, and as he did, he swept his arm back, ushering the woman farther down the path.
There, sitting just behind him, was a white carriage that Glenn would have sworn had not been there just seconds ago. It was large and ornate, with gold and silver trimming, and drawn by four white horses.
Standing at each corner of the carriage were four more men dressed exactly like the knight. One of them stepped forward with a long white robe in his hands and held it out to the naked woman, who dipped her head in thanks and allowed him to help her into it. As soon as she was dressed, the first knight opened one of the doors to the carriage, and she stepped inside. The knight shut the door and took his place at the front of the carriage. After a single word from him, the horses pulled the carriage soundlessly away and they all drifted down the path and vanished around the next bend.
There was a hanging moment of stillness while the light faded when Glenn could hear nothing but her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. Kevin said something, but she could barely hear him. She scrambled out of the brush. Her feet hit the dirt road and she ran, stumbling, down the dark path toward the bend in the road. An engine was revving inside her, pushing her forward. When she got to the next turn, there was nothing but darkness and the rustling of leaves all around her. Kevin caught up, panting.
“Where’d it go? Did you see?!”
Glenn listened to the low wind in the forest. There was nothing else. Something in Glenn sank, but in the next moment she heard it again — that crystal-like singing, a sliver of it, cutting through the night.
The engine in Glenn revved and she took off again, running flat out down the uneven path. Her lungs burned with the cold. Kevin could barely keep up but his panting was mixed with laughter. The same light giddiness rose in Glenn as they raced through the dark. Her feet skated over the ground. The path turned again, and when Glenn rounded the corner, it dipped suddenly down into a wide prairie of rolling hills with a great lake set in the center of it like a jewel.
Glenn and Kevin stopped in their tracks, trying to catch their breath, frozen in amazement.
Around the lake were hundreds of gloriously shining bodies, some alabaster, some ebony, some the deep green of moss or lapis blue, all of them joined hand in hand. The lake glittered and the hills glowed with the light from their skin. Even as Glenn watched, more carriages arrived from paths all around the lake. Some were drawn by horses and some by packs of wolves that rose to nearly the height of a man, with pelts the purest snowy white. One carriage swept down out of the sky, drawn by thousands of sparrows whose bodies alternated between shining red, green, and gold. And then there was the singing, hundreds of voices lifted together in the knight’s song. Soon the prairie was full of radiant bodies painting the lengths of the hills and the trees with the lights.
The party converged on the lake, everyone arranging themselves in several concentric circles and rotating around the shore. Kevin moved up alongside Glenn and grasped her hand. She spared a moment to look at him. She couldn’t help but laugh. His mouth was hanging open and his eyes were wide. She imagined she looked nearly the same.
Glenn squeezed his hand back, anchoring herself to that small bit of reality.
When she turned, the surface of the lake began to stir. The waters were turning in the direction of the light’s revolutions, forming a whitecapped whirlpool that soon grew to take over the entire lake. By now the revelers were all massed around the churning water. Glenn and Kevin stepped off the path and onto the grass, approaching slowly, unable to resist the pull of the beauty below them. The roar of the turning water grew and
