The Book of Three: Chapters 6–9

A few feet above him, pale yellow sunlight shone through a grating; the feeble beam ended abruptly on a wall of rough, damp stone. The shadows of bars lay across the tiny patch of light; instead of brightening the cell, the wan rays made it appear only more grim and closed in.

He supposed Gwydion had been cast in another dungeon; Taran fervently hoped so.

He staggered to his feet, lurched to the door, kicking it, battering himself against it with what little strength remained to him.

In despair, he sank to the damp ground, his head pressed against the unyielding oaken planks.

“Please,” said a girl’s voice, light and musical, “my name is Eilonwy and if you don’t mind, would you throw my bauble to me? I don’t want you to think I’m a baby, playing with a silly bauble, because I’m not; but sometimes there’s absolutely nothing else to do around here and it slipped out of my hands when I was tossing it.”

Nevertheless, he longed for the sound of another voice, even Eilonwy’s prattling.

He curled up and tried to sleep away his pain; the tight thongs pinched, but his swollen hands were mercifully numb.

Eilonwy, as the bewildered Taran saw her for the first time, had, in addition to blue eyes, long hair of reddish gold reaching to her waist. Her face, though smudged, was delicate, elfin, with high cheekbones.

“Achren is leagued with Arawn of Annuvin,” cried Taran. “She is an evil, loathsome creature!”

She’ll think you disappeared into thin air—and that will make it all the more vexing.

The narrow, stifling galleries turned endlessly; he could not be sure whether they were making real progress or whether the tunnel was merely doubling back on itself.

He collided with an outcropping of rock, rolled again, and dropped suddenly into the darkness.

“Don’t say that. I could tear up my robe and plait it into a cord—though I’ll tell you right away I wouldn’t enjoy crawling around tunnels without any clothes on. But I don’t think it would be long enough or strong enough."

As Eilonwy had said, the passageway was more comfortable, for they could walk side by side without crouching and scuttling like rabbits in a warren.

Eilonwy herself admitted she had never explored the passage; her blithe confidence did not convince him she had the slightest notion of where she was going.

“Well, by all means let’s find out what,” said Eilonwy, prodding Taran in the back.

The whispering became a high keening, a wail of torment. It was as though voices had been spun out like threads, twisted taut, ready to snap.

Closing his ears to the horrifying sounds and preferring to think of them as draughts of air rather than spectral voices, Taran quickened his pace.

Eilonwy paid scant attention to the warriors, having found something more interesting to her.

Weapons glistened amid stacks of helmets; woven baskets held brooches, collar-pieces, and chains.

He stepped past the warriors and drew near the figure on the slab. Rich raiment clothed the body; polished stones glowed in his broad belt.

The skull seemed to grimace in defiance, daring a stranger to despoil the royal treasures.

Suddenly the passageway convulsed, the hidden roots of trees sprang up, the ground split beneath Taran, heaving and crumbling.

A sudden gale nearly battered Taran to the ground. A tree of lightning crackled in the sky.

The wind was still; the air oppressive.

Taran’s sword leaped out. The man in the cloak hurriedly dropped Melyngar’s bridle and darted behind a tree.

“Truce! Truce!” called the stranger. “You can’t smite an unarmed man!”

“Humblest apologies for disappointing you,” he said.

“Lord Gwydion is dead?” Fflewddur Fflam asked. “Those are sorrowful tidings. He is a kinsman and I owe allegiance to the House of Don. But why do you blame his death on me? If Gwydion has bought my life, at least tell me how, and I shall mourn with you.”

“Those are hard words to apply to a winsome lass,” said the bard. “Especially one who isn’t here to defend herself.”

“So it seems that I’ve been rescued by mistake,” Fflewddur said, after Taran explained what had happened. “I should have known it would turn out to be something like that. I kept asking myself, crawling along those beastly tunnels, who could possibly be interested whether I was languishing in a dungeon or not?”

At the summit of the hill, the mighty blocks of stone lay as if crushed by a giant fist. Only the square arch of the gate remained upright, gaunt as a bone.

Melyngar followed docilely, her head bowed, as if she understood that she would not see her master again.

“We all need rest,” Taran said. “But I don’t trust Achren, alive or dead, and we still know nothing of the Cauldron-Born. If they escaped, they may be looking for us right now. No matter how tired we are, it would be foolhardy to stay this close.”

The bard wrapped himself in his own tattered garment and set his harp carefully on a gnarled root.