haggard features.
When he grew tired, Angharad fetched him a staff. She returned with a sturdy length of hawthorn; placing it in his hands, she indicated that Bran should go and relieve himself. He hobbled gingerly out into the little clearing; the snow fell on him, the fat, wet flakes stinging sweetly as they alighted on his exposed skin, stuck, and instantly melted.
Although it felt odd standing in the snow within sight of the old woman at the mouth the cave, Bran was glad to be able to stand like a man on his own two feet once more and not have to squat on a pot like a child. He returned to the cave, shaking and sweating and tottering like an invalid no longer able to lift his feet, but beaming as if he had journeyed to the very edge of the earth and lived to tell the tale.
The old woman did not rush out to help him but waited at the cave mouth for each stumbling step to bring him back. When he entered the cave, she took his face between her rough hands and blew her warm breath upon him. 'You can speak,' she told him, if you will,'
Up until that moment, Bran did not feel he had anything to say, but now all the pent-up words came bubbling up in a confused and tangled rush, only to stick in his throat. He stood swaying on the staff, his tongue tingling with half-formed thoughts and questions, struggling to frame the words until she laid a sooty finger on his lips and said, 'Time enough for all your questions anon, but sit down now and rest.'
She did not lead him back to his bed as he expected, but sat him on her three-legged stool beside the fire ring. While he warmed himself, she made a meal for them-a stew with meat this time, a nice fat hare, along with some leeks and wild turnips and dried mushrooms gathered through the autumn and dried in the sun. When she had cut up everything and tossed it into the cauldron, she took a few handfuls of ground wheat, some salt, water, honey, dried berries, and dried herbs and began making up little cakes with dough left over from the last batches.
Bran sat and watched her deft fingers prepare the food, and his thoughts slowed and clarified. 'What is your name?' he asked at last, and was surprised to hear a voice that sounded much like the one he knew as his own.
She smiled without glancing up and continued kneading the dough for a moment before answering. She shaped a small loaf and set it to warm and rise on a stone near the fire. Then, looking him full in the face, she replied, 'I am Angharad.'
'Are you a gwrach,' he asked, 11 a sorceress?'
She bent to her work once more, and Bran thought she would not answer. 'Please, I mean no disrespect,' he said. 'Only it seems to me that no one can do what you do without the aid of powerful magic.' He paused, watching her mix the flour, and then asked again, 'Truly, are you a sorceress?'
'I am as you see me,' she replied. She shaped another small loaf and put it beside the first. 'Different people see different things. What do you see?'
Embarrassed now to tell her what he really thought that he saw a repulsive crone with bits of leaf and seeds in her hair; that he saw a grotesque hag with smoke-darkened skin in a filthy, grease-stained rag of a dress; that he saw a hunchbacked, shambling wreck of a human being-Bran swallowed his blunt observations and instead replied, 'I see the woman who with great skill and wisdom has saved my life.'
'I ask you now,' she replied, rolling the dough between her calloused palms, 'was it a life worth the saving?'
'I do hope you think so,' he replied.
Angharad stopped her work. Her face grew still as she regarded him with an intensity like the lick of a naked flame over his skin. 'It is my most fervent hope,' she said, her voice solemn as a pledge. 'What is more, all of Elfael joins me in that hope.'
Bran, feeling suddenly very unworthy of such esteem, lowered his gaze to the fire and said no more that night.
Many more days passed, and Bran's strength slowly increased. Restless and frustrated by his inability to move about as he would like, he sat and moped by the fire, idly feeding twigs and bark and branches to the flames. He knew he was not well enough to leave yet, and even if he could have limped more than a few paces without exhausting himself, winter, with its blizzards and blasts, still raged. That did not hinder him from wishing he could go and making plans to leave.
Angharad, he knew, would not prevent him. She had said as much, and he had no reason to believe otherwise. Indeed, she seemed more than sympathetic to his plight, for she, too, nursed a low-smouldering hatred for the Ffreinc who had seized Elfael, killed the king, and wiped out the warband. Outlanders, she called them, whose presence was an offence under heaven, a stink in the nostrils of God.
While Bran shared this view, he could not see himself effecting any significant change in the situation. Even if he had been so inclined, as the matter stood, he was a man marked for death. If he was caught in Elfael again, Bran knew Count de Braose would not hesitate to finish what he had almost succeeded in accomplishing at the forest's edge.
The fear of that attack would come swarming out of the night to kindle in him an intense passion to escape, to flee to a safe haven in the north, to leave Elfael and never look back. Other times, he saw himself standing over the body of Count de Braose, his lance blade deep in his effete enemy's guts. Occasionally, Bran imagined there might be a way to unite those two conflicting ambitions. Perhaps he could fly away to safety, persuade his kinsmen in the north to join with him, and return to Elfael with a conquering warhost to drive the Ffreinc invaders from the land.
This last idea was late in coming. His impulse from the beginning had been escape, and it still claimed first place in his thoughts. The notion of staying to fight for his land and people had occurred to him in due course- seeded, no doubt, by the stories Angharad told, stories that filled his head with all kinds of new and unfamiliar thoughts.
One morning, Bran rose early to find his wizened guardian gone and himself alone. Feeling rested and able, he set himself the task of walking from the cave to the edge of the clearing. The day was clear and bright, the sun newly risen, the air crisp. He drew a deep breath and felt the tightness in his chest and side-as if inner cords still bound him. His shoulder ached with the cold, but he was used to it now, and it no longer bothered him. His legs felt strong enough, so he began to walk-slowly, with exaggerated care.
The ground sloped down from the mouth of the cave, and he saw the path trodden by Angharad on her errands and, judging by the other tracks in the well-trampled snow, a multitude of forest creatures as well. He hobbled across the open expanse and arrived in good order at the edge of the clearing.
Flushed with the exhilaration of this small achievement, he decided to press himself a little further. He entered the forest, walking with greater confidence along the well-packed snow track. It felt good to move and stretch. The downhill path was gentle, and soon he reached a small rill. The stream was covered by a thin layer of translucent ice; he could hear water running underneath.
The track turned and ran alongside the stream; without thinking, he followed. In a little while he came to a place where the ground dropped away steeply. The water entered a deep cutting carved into the slope and disappeared in a series of stony cascades. The path followed this ravine, but it was far too steep for Bran, so he turned and started back the way he had come. When he reached the place where the path joined the stream, he continued on, soon reaching another impasse. On his left hand, a rocky shelf jutted up, twice his height; on his right the stream flowed at the bottom of a rough defile, and dead ahead, the trunk of a fallen elm blocked the path like a gnarled, black, bark-covered wall.
He did not trust his ability to clamber over the fallen log-in his present condition, he did not dare risk it. He had no choice but to retrace his steps, so he turned around and started back to the cave. It was then he learned that he had walked farther than he intended, and also that he had seriously misjudged the slight uphill climb.
The rise was steep, and the snow slick underfoot. Twice he slipped and fell; he caught himself both times, but each fall was accompanied by a sharp tearing sensation-as if his wounds were being ripped open once more. The second time, he paused on his hands and knees in the snow and waited until the waves of pain subsided.
After that, he proceeded much more carefully, but the exertion soon taxed his rapidly tiring muscles; he was forced to stop to rest and catch his breath every few dozen paces. Despite the cold, he began to sweat. His tunic and mantle were soon soaked through, and his damp clothes grew clammy and froze, chilling him to the bone. By the time the cave came into sight, he was shaking with cold and gasping with pain.
Head down, wheezing like a wounded bear, Bran shuffled the last hundred paces to the cave, staggered in,
