The soldier looked at it with awe, for it was an uncanny thing. The old woman said: “Take this as my gift to you, and consider your time spent telling me your story time spent well, for I can thus give you a gift to serve your purpose. This cloak is woven of the shadows that hide the hare from the fox, the mouse from the hawk, and the lovers from those who would forbid their love. Wear it and you are invisible: for the cloak is close-woven, finer than loose shadows, and no rents will betray you. See—” and the old woman whirled it around her own bowed shoulders, shaking the hood down over her bright eyes—and then the soldier saw nothing where she stood, or had stood, but the dappled, moving leaf-shade over the grass and wildflowers and the rough wooden bench. He blinked and felt suddenly cold, and then as suddenly hot: hot with the hope that blazed up in him and need not, this time, be quelled.
A whirling of air become shadow, become untouched entire blackness, and the old woman stood before him again, holding the cloak in her hands, and it poured over her feet. “—or not see,” she said, and smiled. “Take it.” She held it out to him. It was as weightless as the shadows it was made of, soft as night; he wound it gently round his hands, and it turned itself to a wisp like a lady’s scarf; and gently he tucked it under a shoulder strap of his knapsack. It whispered to itself there, and one silken corner waved against his cheek.
“I have words to send with you too,” said the old woman. “First: speak not of me, nor of this cloak,” and she looked at him shrewdly. “But you may guess that for yourself. You may guess this too: drink nothing the Princesses may offer you when you retire to your cot in the dark corner of the Long Gallery. It is a wonder and an amazement to me that the men before you have not thought of this simple trick; but it is said otherwise—and I, I have my ways of hearing the truth.”
“Perhaps it is the youth of those men,” said the soldier gravely; “for I have heard that all those who have sought this riddle and the prize have been young and fair to look upon. I have little of either youth or beauty to spend, and must make it up in caution.”
The old woman laughed oddly, and looked at him still more oddly, the leaf-shadow moving in her eyes like silver fish in a lake. “Perhaps it is as you say. Or perhaps it is something that stands with the Princess as she offers the drink; something that is loosened in that Long Gallery once the key in the door has turned and this world, our world, is locked away for the night’s length.” There was something in her face like pain or sorrow.
“For this too I wish to say to you: the Princesses you must beware, for the spell they lie under is deep, and spell it truly is, but neither of their making nor their fault, and very glad they would be to be free of it, though they may stir no hand to help themselves.” The old woman paused so long that the soldier thought she might not speak again, and he listened instead to the shadowy whispering at his ear, and let his eyes wander to the path that would take him to the city, and to his chosen adventure and his fate.
“The story is this, as I believe it,” said the old woman; “and as I have told you, I have ways of hearing the truth.
“The Queen had the blood of witches in her,” she went on slowly, “and while the taint is ancient and feeble, still it was there; while the King is mortal clear through, or if there is any other dilution, it is so old that even the witches themselves have forgotten, and so can do nothing.
“The Queen was a good woman, and she was mortal and human, and bore mortal daughters. The drop of witch blood was like a chink in the armor of a knight rather than a poison at the heart. The knight may be valiant in arms and honor as was the Queen in honor and love; but the spear of an enemy will find the chink at last.
“There is a sort of charm in witch blood for those who bear it; a charm to make the spears that may fly go awry. But the charm weakens faster than the blood taint itself if the bearer chooses mortal ways and never leaves them.
“In the Queen there was something yet left in that charm. In her daughters—nay. And so when the Queen died, a witch seized her chance: that her twelve demon sons, who bear a taint of mortal blood as faint as the witch blood of the Queen’s twelve daughters, those sons shall be tied to those daughters closely and more closely, till by their grasp they shall be drawn from the deeps where they properly live to the sweet earth’s surface; and there they shall marry the twelve Princesses, and beget upon them children in whom the dark blood shall run hot and strong for many generations, and who shall wreak much woe upon simple men.
“Eleven years will it take for the witch’s dark chain to be forged from Princes to Princesses, till the Princesses return one morning with the witch’s sons at their sides; eleven years’ dancing underground. And nine and a half years already have run of this course.”
The soldier grew pale beneath his sun-brown skin as he heard the old woman’s words. “Do any but you know of this? You—and now I?”
The old woman shrugged, but it was half a shiver, the soldier thought, and wondered; for a wise woman usually fears not what she knows. “The Princesses know, but they cannot tell. The King knows not, for the knowledge would break him to no purpose, for the quest and the venture are not his. For the rest, I myself know not; those fools the King consulted when the trouble first began may know a little; but they knew at least not to tell the King anything he could not bear. And you are the only one I have told.” The old woman again lifted her long-lashed eyes to the soldier, and the silver fish in her lakewater eyes had turned gold with the intensity of her telling.
“And the Princesses can do nothing,” repeated the soldier, “nothing but watch the sands of their own time running out.” The soldier thought of battles, and how it was the waiting that made men mad, and that to risk life and limb crossing bloody swords on the battlefield was joyful beside it.
“The eldest, it is said,” the old woman said even more slowly, “has more of wit than her sisters; and yet even she cannot put out a hand to save herself one night’s journey underground, nor even fail to give the man who would free her the drugged wine when he retires to his cot in the dark corner of the Gallery.” The old woman turned her eyes to the path the soldier would follow, that would lead him to the city, and the King’s pale castle, and the twelve dancing Princesses.
He was miles down that road, the corner of the cloak of shadows caressing his cheek, before he thought to wonder if he had bade the old woman farewell. He could not remember.