Sunrise

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Stormclouds

Furious yells woke her. Eilonwy sat up, blinking, trying to make sense of the noise. A few feet away, Taran was sitting, looking as fuzzy-headed as she felt,  while Doli, his face as red as his hair, shook a mass of broken sticks in his face. 

"There you have it!" he roared. "I told you so! Don't say I didn't warn you. The treacherous creature's halfway to Annuvin by now, after listening to every word we said. If Arawn didn't know where we are, he'll know soon enough. You've done well; oh, very well." He threw the sticks to the ground in disgust, and Eilonwy realized, with a sickening twist of her gut, that it was the remains of the gwythaint's empty cage. "Spare me from fools and Assistant Pig-Keepers!" The dwarf stumped off toward a log and sank onto it in a despairing attitude, his head in his hands. 

Eilonwy sucked in her breath, realizing the truth. He was as uncertain as the rest of them. Of course. No wonder he was so angry all the time. She was intimately familiar with the anger borne of fear. I should have seen it before. No wonder he was always trying to be invisible. All at once she felt terribly sorry for him.

But she had little time to mull it over, turning her attention to Taran, who was picking up the broken saplings in dismay, examining the slashes and splinters as though he couldn't quite believe it. No one said a word. Fflewddur, ashen-faced, rubbed his forehead. Gurgi stared, the whites of his eyes showing all around the amber irises. A whimper escaped his throat, and the sound seemed to break Taran out of a trance.

Like Doli, he threw the broken cage to the ground, with a cry of anger. "So once again I've done the wrong thing. As usual." He kicked the ruin viciously, then sank to his knees, gripping his own head as though in pain. "Doli's right. There's no difference between a fool and an Assistant Pig-Keeper." 

Eilonwy swallowed hard. She wanted to run over and drag him up, throw her arms around him and tell him he was wrong, that Doli was wrong, that saving the gwythaint had been the right thing to do no matter what happened next. But her feet wouldn't move. Her heart pounded and her mouth went dry and great Belin what good was it having words you couldn't say? Like treasure locked away and buried where it was no use to anyone? 

She looked again at Doli, who was staring at the ground, and a little of her former irritation with him came back - not fury; she couldn't be furious with him anymore, but just enough comfortable, familiar annoyance to throw off whatever was holding her captive. She huffed a little.

"That may be true," she remarked. Taran looked up, miffed, but she preferred that to his melodrama. "But I can't stand people who say 'I told you so.' It's worse than somebody coming up and eating your supper before you have a chance to sit down." 

She scrambled to her feet and approached Taran where he knelt, hesitated a moment, then dropped next to him. "He's wrong," she whispered fiercely. "And you're not a fool. You needn't listen to him. He pretends to be disagreeable, but it's really that he's worried about us. He's prickly as a porcupine and just as ticklish once you turn him over. If he'd just --" 

"It doesn't matter," Taran retorted, cutting her off. "It's not him I'm angry with."

"It's you," she said flatly. "I know. But you did the best you knew. And it won't help to fret about it, now."

"True enough," Fflewddur added. He had stood up and was tightening all his gear with a grimly determined air. "We've lost enough time over that bird. Let's not lose more now that it's gone. At the very least it's less dead weight."

Taran stood up, his shoulders still slumped, and nodded.

They continued on, Doli in the lead once more, at a merciless pace that kept them all working too hard to think. The very world around them grew as grey and foreboding as their moods; the sky was blotted out by a dark shroud of thick cloud cover, and cold winds gusted in their faces as they turned westward and began to descend out of the hills. Hen Wen and Melyngar both turned skittish and recalcitrant, they resisted being led, and flinched at every snapped twig and tumbled pebble.