Chapter Text
It was just after sunrise when Harry set out. He had the old mare, Bes, saddled and waiting an hour before that, but in the past several years her dark eyes had become marbled with pale blue, and her vision was poorest in complete darkness.
He saw smoke curling from the chimney and knew his mother was awake and, with her, the youngest children. His father and his middle brother would be walking the sheep up to the high meadow to graze. Harry felt a thrill at breaking away, chased by guilt that his share of the work would be divided among the others. But someone had to take mother’s letters to the village and bring back the calf his father had traded for now that it was weaned.
The village was a half day’s ride away, but a little less if he rode under the shadow of the cursed mountain.
It would horrify his parents to know it, but Harry always took the forbidden shortcut. He had heard the tales of what happened to fools who strayed where the Mountain King could walk. Harry always scoffed at the stories, but in truth the first time he had ridden off the rough trail when it detoured, continuing due west instead, he had been in pursuit of the sense of danger that made his heart pound, filling him with a heady energy.
But Harry didn’t believe the old tales. His parents should also know better. If there was a Mountain King, why hadn’t anyone alive ever seen him? Harry didn’t count his ancestors’ stories as reliable evidence.
Still, doing something forbidden had been a thrill, the first time. And perhaps, when Harry passed back into the sunlight past the mountain, he had felt the faintest sense of disappointment.
Today, he hardly gave it a passing thought when Bes, shuffling along half on feel, instinctively veered to follow the southwesterly bend in the trail, and Harry pressed her instead onto the straighter course, reaching down to place a reassuring hand on her neck.
For a moment, she hesitated, a stronger objection than the docile horse had ever made before. She lifted her head and stared directly at the mountain, as though her vision was clear and whatever she saw there startled her. Harry felt the tension in her through his thighs, and the hair on his arms stood on end.
Laughing quietly at his own silliness, Harry closed his legs on the horse and drove her on, and she shook out her mane and resettled, as though nothing had given her pause after all.
The sun climbed, and the mountain cast its wide shadow. Harry hummed an old song to himself, enjoying the solitude and the rhythm of Bes’s body under his. He was drawn inward so far that he didn’t notice the figure on horseback until Bes did. Her nostrils flared and she lifted her head, calling out a gruff whinny in greeting. Harry, startled, took in the still-distant sight of a golden palomino with a tall, dark-haired rider. As soon as he noticed them, the horse burst into a canter, and its gold-shod hooves sparked on the stony ground, removing any doubt as to who Harry was about to meet in the shadow of the cursed mountain.
The Mountain King was as cool and dark as his horse was warm and bright. He reined up adjacent to Harry, his saddle black and stitched in gold, a cloak settled around his body over the richly embroidered garments of nobility. He looked more human than Harry would have expected, yet beautiful.
That was Harry’s first thought: beautiful. The parted dark hair, which should have been as messy as Harry’s after a hard gallop in the morning air, fell neatly to frame a face sculpted from alabaster. His eyes were winter’s blue, the place in the solid ice that is not exactly black. Above them, his dark brows were raised in the manner of one who is not only surprised, but pleasantly so.
“Harry,” said the Mountain King. “Come with me.”
It did not occur to Harry to object. The legend was clear about the fate of the fool who rode in the shadow of the cursed mountain, and the punishment - a curse upon his family for eternity - if the fool should resist.
But it did occur to him to feel a terrible, shamed grief. That his hubris had led him to this moment; that his parents would think him dead; that his mother’s letters would never be delivered; that the family’s only horse…
“May I send Bes home?” he asked, then paled at his own audacity. But before he could withdraw the question, the Mountain King turned and smiled.
“Certainly,” he purred, and Harry was very conscious of his steady attention while he dismounted, removed Bes’s bridle, and chased her until she broke into an uncertain trot and began the journey back to the farm, her head low. Harry thought, too late, she might lose her way without a rider to compensate for her poor eyesight. But then the Mountain King made a sort of waving motion with his hand, and before Harry’s eyes Bes’s bony body became muscled and lithe; her halting gait became airy and buoyant. The distance was too great to be sure, but Harry thought he saw her eyes darken and clear. Her head rose and she galloped homeward with joy, ease, and confidence.
The sight shouldn’t have saddened Harry even more, but it did.
“Come,” said the Mountain King, extending a hand to Harry. Harry looked up in confusion, then he understood that the Mountain King meant Harry should swing into the saddle ahead of him. After the past few minutes, Harry was nearly immune to shock, so instead of freezing in place he raised his hand and let the Mountain King seize him firmly by the wrist, then he vaulted neatly onto the glossy horse. Before he knew it, his back was pressed into the smooth warmth of the Mountain King’s chest. The Mountain King put one arm around him to hold him close, a hand at Harry’s hip, and the golden horse turned north.
“Tell me,” the Mountain King murmured in Harry’s ear. “Why did you come to me?”
Harry tensed. “I didn’t come to you,” he snapped. “I had an errand.”
“What was your errand?”
What a meaningless question. “My mother’s letter, and…” there was more. But before Harry, flustered, could suss it out, the Mountain King was speaking again. His voice was deep and Harry felt the vibration of it against his back, the heat of the accompanying breath against his temple. He shivered.
“I have watched you. But the times before, it was too soon for us. I knew I must wait.” His hand, which had been still against Harry’s hip to hold him steady at first, now relaxed. His fingertips eased beneath Harry’s tunic, and Harry’s entire body went taught at the feeling of the Mountain King’s touch on his bare skin.
Harry grasped the Mountain King’s wrist. The Mountain King laughed quietly and withdrew, resettling his hand on Harry’s right thigh, which was at least covered by his rough leggings. Still, Harry was painfully aware of the weight and heat of the contact.
“You have always been bold,” said the Mountain King. Harry felt him shift so that he could press his nose into Harry’s hair and breathe in, deeply. “But why did you come to me?”
Harry’s brow furrowed. As the sun rose, the mountain’s shadow was pulled inward. The horse walked at the same pace as the moving light.
“I didn’t come to you,” Harry murmured. “I rode out from the farm. I had…”
But Harry no longer recalled the reason for the ride. He didn’t remember waking in the hay loft, and shoving the eldest of his younger brothers playfully until he woke too. Harry didn’t remember the soft clink of the first drops of milk hitting the bottom of the pail in the next stall over while he saddled a drowsy horse named Bes. He didn’t remember his brother’s name.
“I left the farm,” he said firmly, thinking of his parents’ faces, though they looked too young to be the faces of parents to a young man grown. He remembered the way the hills came together to feed the spring behind the house, and the house itself. The curl of smoke when the sky was pale and wintry. But it wasn’t winter, Harry thought, looking around at the vibrant grass. They were really very near the mountain now.
“You left the farm to come to me,” agreed the Mountain King. “But why did you come?” His hand was still on Harry’s thigh, but it was no longer idle. He stroked Harry gently above the knee, then gradually higher, until his touch arched inward. Harry gasped and his head fell back against the Mountain King’s shoulder. The Mountain King laughed. “My Harry,” he said, his mouth against Harry’s ear.
“I left,” Harry admitted. With his head at this angle, lolling against the solid, curved muscle of the Mountain King’s shoulder, he was faced with the looming shape of the cursed mountain. A bleak voice called out to him from the recesses of his own mind; it was very, very faint. Yet Harry felt suddenly, bitterly homesick, even if he no longer knew why. The Mountain King’s eager touch moved to Harry’s hair, soothing, as Harry wept.
It had been minutes, or maybe hours. The sun was high and the golden horse began the rocky climb toward the entrance to the Mountain King’s caverns. Torchlight filled the stony tunnel, a confusion of hot and cold. Harry had a strange urge to sing. As they left the daylight, he surrendered to it, and his song could be heard thereafter in the shadow of the mountain, though it was a hundred years before anyone was fool enough to go where they could hear it.