Here we will leave them, and let these Chronicles end.  For whoever would tell more of Castle Rodriguez must wield one of those ponderous pens that hangs on the study wall in the house of historians.  Great days in the story of Spain shone on those iron-barred windows, and things were said in its banqueting chamber and planned in its inner rooms that sometimes turned that story this way or that, as rocks turn a young river.  And as a traveller meets a mighty river at one of its bends, and passes on his path, while the river sweeps on to its estuary and the sea, so I leave the triumphs and troubles of that story which I touched for one moment by the door of Castle Rodriguez.

My concern is but with Rodriguez and Serafina and to tell that they lived here in happiness; and to tell that the humble Morano found his happiness too.  For he became the magnificent steward of Castle Rodriguez, the majordomo, and upon august occasions he wore as much red plush as he had ever seen in his dreams, when he saw this very event, sleeping by dying camp-fires.  And he slept not upon straw but upon good heaps of wolf-skins.  But pining a little in the second year of his somewhat lonely splendour, he married one of the maidens of the forest, the child of a bowman that hunted boars with their king.  And all the green bowmen came and built him a house by the gates of the park, whence he walked solemnly on proper occasions to wait upon his master.  Morano, good, faithful man, come forward for but a moment out of the Golden Age and bow across all those centuries to the reader:  say one farewell to him in your Spanish tongue, though the sound of it be no louder than the sound of shadows moving, and so back to the dim splendour of the past, for the Senor or Senora shall hear your name no more.

For years Rodriguez lived a chieftain of the forest, owning the overlordship of the King of Shadow Valley, whom he and Serafina would entertain with all the magnificence of which their castle was capable on such occasions as he appeared before the iron gates.  They seldom saw him.  Sometimes they heard his horn as he went by.  They heard his bowmen follow.  And all would pass and perhaps they would see none.  But upon occasions he came.  He came to the christening of the eldest son of Rodriguez and Serafina, for whom he was godfather.  He came again to see the boy shoot for the first time with a bow.  And later he came to give little presents, small treasures of the forest, to Rodriguez’ daughters; who treated him always, not as sole lord of that forest that travellers dreaded, but as a friend of their very own that they had found for themselves.  He had his favourites among them and none quite knew which they were.

And one day he came in his old age to give Rodriguez a message.  And he spoke long and tenderly of the forest as though all its glades were sacred.

And soon after that day he died, and was buried with the mourning of all his men in the deeps of Shadow Valley, where only Rodriguez and the bowmen knew.  And Rodriguez became, as the old king had commanded, the ruler of Shadow Valley and all its faithful men.  With them he hunted and defended the forest, holding all its ways to be sacred, as the old king had taught.  It is told how Rodriguez ruled the forest well.