The child Hirgul seemed to get over the loss of his mother quickly. He dwelt placidly in the nursery of the Queen’s House and accepted Díamun as his playmate. In the course of time Dayamuna bore two more children, a son, Beinun, and another daughter, Dóna. All four children were happy together as they grew and learnt their lessons. The others called him Hergal, for that was a usual name in Dúmiel, while Hirgul sounded foreign to them. Hergal was a very quiet and solitary child, given to wandering alone, wrapped in his own thoughts.
The four children had a nurse, whose name was Yanelka. She used to tell them wonderful stories, for by descent she came of the Eskenári. That tribe dwelt in wains and kept horses; they once rode with the Thendâ, the ancient Guardians who were masters of all beasts and from them they learnt much lore.
Yanelka told them tales of long ago, of the Giants’ Wars, and the exploits of Slungandi, and the voyages of the Silúna, and the travels of the Thendâ, and the quarrels of the Kabdath, and the deeds of Vidnî and Arbros. She told them about animals and their ways, about monsters and dragons, about the great coldworm Firungwáfi and how Dreygan the Frostgiant captured him.
One of the children asked:
‘Are there hotworms as well as coldworms?’
‘No doubt, my dear. They say that far away in the South where the sun shines all the time, beyond Ravini Gwasdâl, there dwells a mighty and terrible wingworm, named Kervandwáfi. You wouldn’t want him to come flying over, breathing fire and all.’
She told them many tales about animals, especially about horses and beautiful moondeer (the laukarellna), the grisly skulldeer, and the great goatbeasts of the Giants. The horses and the moondeer, she said, have queens just as we have. Even the woods have queen trees!
‘For a wood, you know, is a magical place. The trees talk to each other through tiny threads joining their roots. And the Mother of the Wood is joined to all the other trees. And that’s how the magic spreads through the wood, and how the Queen Tree knows that people are coming into her woods. And if it’s a friendly wood, she lets you pass through, but if it’s an unfriendly one — well, the trees can do all manner of things…’
The children listened with wide eyes, for there were many woods near Tídris where they were accustomed to go to play. They wanted to know if the nearby woods were friendly or not.
‘Oh yes, my dears, there’s our Hrethet Atanya, the Queen’s Wood, a kind and welcoming place. And the Lóat Kabadri — they say the Kabdath once had a settlement there — a nice wood. We can even cut the trees there if we make the ûthéat rúri — that’s the tree rune, you know.’
Hirgul asked:
‘Where are the wicked woods, then, Yanelka?’
‘Well, now, I wouldn’t say they are wicked, but hostile to hyûvandri, to us humans — and to a lot of nastier beings, netári and suchlike. They have to be unfriendly you see, to keep them all from going through.’
‘But why should they stop them going through?’
‘It’s for our protection, my dears! You see, our land of Dúmiel, the Southland, has a great forest border all along its edge, from the Westward Sea to the Eastward one. It’s called the Greenmarch, and no wicked creatures — no kúmi netári — can pass through. The trees watch for them, and if they can’t deal with them, the Queen Tree of that part of the Greenmarch, she calls on the Fâdhéri to help, and they soon see them off!’
And this led Yanelka on to tell tales of the Fâdhéri, about how the King of the Entellári sent them to guard the Greenmarch during the Giants’ Wars, and how they refused to go back to Ailindâl or Féo Êlesti afterwards because they loved the woods so, and how sometimes humans accidentally meet them on the edges of the forests, and all the magic they can do, and how the King of the Fâdhéri lives in a castle beneath a great green mound called Lâfallon. And by then it was after bedtime and the tales were ended — until another night.
For some reason, all these tales sank deep into Hirgul’s mind. He wanted to see the unfriendly woods. He wondered what the Fâdhéri would do if you strayed into the Greenmarch — if you rode through on horseback. A picture came to him from far back in his life, himself moving rapidly among trees, a rhythmic movement, hoofs beating. He thought about woodcutters, whom he had seen at work in the Lóat Kabadri, with their great axes. And another old picture came into his mind — a great axe hanging on a wall, a hand reaching for it, his mother’s hand. Why?
As he grew older, and nursery days were over, these thoughts were all mixed up in his mind with thoughts of his mother. Everyone spoke to him quite openly about his mother: they let him have in his bedroom a portrait of her that was painted at the time of Dayamuna’s crowning; they spoke of her return from the north, her sad illness and death; they told him how she had had to flee from a cruel lord who tried to kill her. But of course they did not know the whole story. And they did conceal from him that before her ill-fated marriage, Rauwenna had tried to slay her sister in a jealous drunken fit.
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