The Summer Tree

Chapter 10

He landed badly, but the reflexes of an athlete took him rolling through the fall, and at the end of it he was on his feet, unhurt. Very angry, though.

He had opted out, damn it! What the hell right did Kim Ford have to grab his arm and haul him to another world? What the…

He stopped; the fury draining as realization came down hard. She had, she really had taken him to another world.

A moment ago he had been in a room in the Park Plaza Hotel, now he found himself outdoors in darkness with a cool wind blowing, and a forest nearby; looking the other way, he saw wide rolling grasslands stretching away as far as he could see in the moonlight.

He looked around for the others, and then as the fact of isolation slowly came home, Dave Martyniuk’s anger gave way to fear. They weren’t friends of his, that was for sure, but this was no time or place to have ended up alone.

They couldn’t be far, he thought, managing to keep control. Kim Ford had had his arm; surely that meant she couldn’t be far away, her and the others, and that Lorenzo Marcus guy who’d got him into this in the first place. And was going to get him out, or deal with severe bodily pain, Martyniuk vowed. Notwithstanding the provisions of the Criminal Code.

Which reminded him: looking down, he saw that he was still clutching Kevin Laine’s Evidence notes.

The absurdity, the utter incongruousness in this night place of wind and grass acted, somehow, to loosen him. He took a deep breath, like before the opening jump in a game. It was time to get his bearings. Boy Scout time.

Paras Derval where Ailell reigns, the old man had said. Any cities on the horizon? As the moon slipped from behind a drift of cloud, Dave turned north into the wind and saw Rangat clear.

He was not, as it happened, anywhere near the others. All Kim had been able to do with her desperate grab for his arm was keep him in the same plane as them, the same world. He was in Fionavar, but a long way north, and the Mountain loomed forty-five thousand feet up into the moonlight, white and dazzling.

“Holy Mother!” Dave exclaimed involuntarily.

It saved his life.

Of the nine tribes of the Dalrei, all but one had moved east and south that season, though the best grazing for the eltor was still in the northwest, as it always was in summer. The messages the auberei brought back from Celidon were clear, though: svart alfar and wolves in the edgings of Pendaran were enough for most Chieftains to take their people away. There had been rumors of urgach among the svarts as well. It was enough. South of Adein and Rienna they went, to the leaner, smaller herds, and the safety of the country around Cynmere and the Latham.

Ivor dan Banor, Chieftain of the third tribe, was, as often, the exception. Not that he did not care for the safety of his tribe, his children. No man who knew him could think that. It was just that there were other things to consider, Ivor thought, awake late at night in the Chieftain’s house.

For one, the Plain and the eltor herds belonged to the Dalrei, and not just symbolically. Colan had given them to Revor after the Bael Rangat, to hold, he and his people, for so long as the High Kingdom stood.

It had been earned, by the mad ride in terror through Pendaran and the Shadowland and a loop in the thread of time to explode singing into battle on a sunset field that else had been lost. Ivor stirred, just thinking on it: for the Horsemen, the Children of Peace, to have done this thing… There had been giants in the old days.

Giants who had earned the Plain. To have and to hold, Ivor thought. Not to scurry to sheltered pockets of land at the merest rumor of danger. It stuck in Ivor’s craw to run from svart alfar.

So the third tribe stayed. Not on the edge of Pendaran—that would have been foolhardy and unnecessary. There was a good camp five leagues from the forest, and they had the dense herds of the eltor to themselves. It was, the hunters agreed, a luxury. He noticed that they still made the sign against evil, though, when the chase took them within sight of the Great Wood. There were some, Ivor knew, who would rather have been elsewhere.

He had other reasons, though, for staying. It was bad in the south, the auberei reported from Celidon; Brennin was locked in a drought, and cryptic word had come from his friend Tulger of the eighth tribe that there was trouble in the High Kingdom. What, Ivor thought, did they need to go into that for? After a harsh winter, what the tribe needed was a mild, sweet summer in the north. They needed the cool breeze and the fat herds for feasting and warm coats against the coming of fall.

There was another reason, too. More than the usual number of boys would be coming up to their fasts this year. Spring and summer were the time for the totem fasts among the Dalrei, and the third tribe had always been luckiest in a certain copse of trees here in the northwest. It was a tradition. Here Ivor had seen his own hawk gazing with bright eyes back at him from the top of an elm on his second night. It was a good place, Faelinn Grove, and the young ones deserved to lie there if they could. Tabor, too. His younger son was fourteen. Past time. It might be this summer. Ivor had been twelve when he found his hawk; Levon, his older son—his heir, Chieftain after him—had seen his totem at thirteen.

It was whispered, among the girls who were always competing for him, that Levon had seen a King Horse on his fast. This, Ivor knew, was not true, but there was something of the stallion about Levon, in the brown eyes, the unbridled carriage, the open, guileless nature, even his long, thick yellow hair, which he wore unbound.

Tabor, though, Tabor was different. Although that was unfair, Ivor told himself—his intense younger son was only a boy yet, he hadn’t had his fasting. This summer, perhaps, and he wanted Tabor to have the lucky wood.

And above and beyond all of these, Ivor had another reason still. A vague presence at the back of his mind, as yet undefined. He left it there. Such things, he knew from experience, would be made clear to him in their time. He was a patient man.

So they stayed.

Even now there were two boys in Faelinn Grove. Gereint had spoken their names two days ago, and the shaman’s word began the passage from boy to man among the Dalrei.

There were two in the wood then, fasting; but though Faelinn was lucky, it was also close to Pendaran, and Ivor, father to all his tribe, had taken quiet steps to guard them. They would be shamed, and their fathers, if they knew, so it had been only with a look in his eye that he had alerted Tore to ride out with them unseen.

Tore was often away from the camps at night. It was his way. The younger ones joked that his animal had been a wolf. They laughed too hard at that, a little afraid. Tore: he did look like a wolf, with his lean body, his long, straight, black hair, and the dark, unrevealing eyes. He never wore a shirt, or moccasins; only his eltor skin leggings, dyed black to be unseen at night.

The Outcast. No fault of his own, Ivor knew, and resolved for the hundredth time to do something about that name. It hadn’t been any fault of Tore’s father, Sorcha, either. Just sheerest bad luck. But Sorcha had slain an eltor doe that was carrying young. An accident, the hunters agreed at the gathering: the buck he’d slashed had fallen freakishly into the path of the doe beside it. The doe had stumbled over him and broken her neck. When the hunters came up, they had seen that she was bearing.

An accident, which let Ivor make it exile and not death. He could not do more. No Chieftain could rise above the Laws and hold his people. Exile, then, for Sorcha; a lonely, dark fate, to be driven from the Plain. The next morning they had found Meisse, his wife, dead by her own hand. Tore, at eleven, only child, had been left doubly scarred by tragedy.

He had been named by Gereint that summer, the same summer as Levon. Barely twelve, he had found his animal and had remained ever after a loner on the fringes of the tribe. As good a hunter as any of Ivor’s people, as good even, honesty made Ivor concede, as Levon. Or perhaps not quite, not quite as good.

The Chieftan smiled to himself in the dark. That, he thought, was self-indulgent. Tore was his son as well, the whole tribe were his children. He liked the dark man, too, though Tore could be difficult; he also trusted him. Tore was discreet and competent with tasks like the one tonight.

Awake beside Leith, his people all about him in the camp, the horses shut in for the night, Ivor felt better knowing Tore was out there in the dark with the boys. He turned on his side to try to sleep.

After a moment, the Chieftain recognized a muffled sound, and realized that someone else was awake in the house. He could hear Tabor’s stifled sobbing from the room he shared with Levon. It was hard for the boy, he knew; fourteen was late not to be named, especially for the Chieftain’s son, for Levon’s brother.

He would have comforted his younger son, but knew it was wiser to leave the boy alone. It was not a bad thing to learn what hurt meant, and mastering it alone helped engender self-respect. Tabor would be all right.

In a little while the crying stopped. Eventually Ivor, too, fell asleep, though first he did something he’d not done for a long time.

He left the warmth of his bed, of Leith sound asleep beside him, and went to look in on his children. First the boys; fair, uncomplicated Levon, nut-brown, wiry Tabor; and then he walked into Liane’s room.

Cordeliane, his daughter. With a bemused pride he gazed at her dark brown hair, at the long lashes of her closed eyes, the upturned nose, laughing mouth… even in sleep she smiled.

How had he, stocky, square, plain Ivor, come to have such handsome sons, a daughter so fair?

All of the third tribe were his children, but these, these.

Tore had been having a bad night. First the two idiots who had come to fast had managed to end up, totally oblivious, within twenty feet of each other on precisely opposite sides of a clump of bushes in the wood. It was ridiculous. What sort of babies were they sending out these days?

He had managed, with a series of snuffling grunts that really were rather unnerving, to scare one of them into moving a quarter of a mile away. It was an interference with the ritual, he supposed, but the fast had barely begun, and in any case, the babies needed all the help they could get: the man smell in those bushes had been so strong they’d have likely ended up finding only each other for totem animals.

That, he thought, was funny. Tore didn’t find many things funny, but the image of two fasting thirteen-year-olds becoming each other’s sacred beasts made him smile in the dark.

He stopped smiling when his sweep of the grove turned up a spoor he didn’t recognize. After a moment, though, he realized that it had to be an urgach, which was worse than bad. Svart alfar would not have disturbed him unless there were a great many. He had seen small numbers of them on his solitary forays westward towards Pendaran. He’d also found the trail of a very large band, with wolves among them. It had been a week before, and they were moving south fairly quickly. It had not been a pleasant thing to find, and he’d reported it to Ivor, and to Levon as leader of the hunt, but it was, for the time being, no direct concern of theirs.

This was. He’d never seen one of the urgach, no one in the tribe had, but there were legends enough and night stories to make him very cautious indeed. He remembered the tales very well, from before the bad time, when he’d been only a child in the third tribe, a child like all the others, shivering with pleasurable fear by the fire, dreading his mother’s summons to bed, while the old ones told their stories.

Kneeling over the spoor, Tore’s lean face was grim. This was not Pendaran Wood, where creatures of Darkness were known to walk. An urgach, or more than one in Faelinn Grove, the lucky wood of the third tribe, was serious. It was more than serious: there were two babies fasting tonight.

Moving silently, Tore followed the heavy, almost overpowering spoor and, dismayed, he saw that it led eastward out of the grove. Urgach on the Plain! Dark things were abroad. For the first time, he wondered about the Chieftain’s decision to stay in the northwest this summer. They were alone. Far from Celidon, far from any other tribe that might have joined numbers with them against what evils might be moving here. The Children of Peace, the Dalrei were named, but sometimes peace had been hard won.

Tore had no problems with being alone, he had been so all his adult life. Outcast, the young ones called him, in mockery. The Wolf. Stupid babies: wolves ran in packs. When had he ever? The solitude had made for some bitterness, for he was young yet, and the memory of other times was fresh enough to be a wound. It had also given him a certain dour reflectiveness born of long nights in the dark, and an outsider’s view of what humans did. Another kind of animal. If he lacked tolerance, it was not a surprising flaw.

He had very quick reflexes.

The knife was in his hand, and he was low to the gully and crawling from the trees as soon as he glimpsed the bulky shadow in a brief unsheathing of moonlight. There were clouds, or else he would have seen it earlier. It was very big.

He was downwind, which was good. Moving with honed speed and silence, Tore traversed the open ground towards the figure he’d seen. His bow and sword were on his horse; a stupidity. Can you kill an urgach with a knife, a part of him wondered.

The rest of him was concentrating. He had moved to within ten feet. The creature hadn’t noticed him, but it was obviously angry and it was very large—almost a foot taller than he was, bulking hugely in the shadows of the night.

He decided to wait for moonlight and throw for the head. One didn’t stop to talk with creatures from one’s nightmares. The size of it made his heart race—tearing fangs on a creature that big?

The moon slanted out; he was ready. He drew back his arm to throw: the dark head was clearly outlined against the silvered plain, looking the other way, north.

“Holy Mother!” the urgach said.

Tore’s arm had already begun its descent. With a brutal effort he retained control of the dagger, cutting himself in the process.

Creatures of evil did not invoke the Goddess, not in that voice. Looking again in the bright moonlight, Tore saw that the creature before him was a man; strangely garbed, and very big, but he seemed to be unarmed. Drawing breath, Tore called out in a voice as courteous as the circumstances seemed to permit, “Move slowly and declare yourself.”

At the snarled command, Dave’s heart hit his throat and jack-knifed back into his rib-cage. Who the hell? Rather than pursue this inquiry, however, he elected to move slowly and declare himself.

Turning toward the voice with his hands outspread and bearing only Evidence notes, he said, as levelly as he could, “My name is Martyniuk. Dave Martyniuk. I don’t know where I am, and I’m looking for someone named Loren. He brought me here.”

A moment passed. He felt the wind from the north ruffling his hair. He was, he realized, very frightened.

Then a shadow rose from a hollow he hadn’t even seen, and moved towards him.

“Silvercloak?” the shadow asked, materializing in the moonlight as a young man, shirtless despite the wind, barefoot, and clad in leggings of black. He carried a long, quite lethal-looking blade in his hand.

Oh, God, Dave thought. What have they done to me? Carefully, his eyes on the knife, he replied, “Yes, Loren Silvercloak. That’s his name.” He took a breath, trying to calm down. “Please don’t misunderstand anything. I’m here in peace. I don’t even want to be here. I got separated… we’re supposed to be in a place called Paras Derval. Do you know it?”

The other man seemed to relax a little. “I know it. How is it that you don’t?”

“Because I’m not from here,” Dave exclaimed, frustration hitting his voice. “We crossed from my world. Earth?” he said hopefully, then realized how stupid that was.

“Where is Silvercloak, then?”

“Aren’t you listening?” Martyniuk exploded. “I told you, I got separated. I need him to go home. All

I want to do is get home as fast as I can. Can’t you understand that?”

There was another silence.

“Why,” the other man asked, “shouldn’t I just kill you?”

Dave’s breath escaped in a hiss. He hadn’t handled this too well, it seemed. God, he wasn’t a diplomat. Why hadn’t Kevin Laine been separated from the others? Dave considered jumping the other man, but something told him this lean person knew how to use that blade extremely well.

He had a sudden inspiration. “Because,” he gambled, “Loren wouldn’t like it. I’m his friend; he’ll be looking for me.” You are too quick to renounce friendship, the mage had said, the night before. Not always, Dave thought, not tonight, boy.

It seemed to work, too. Martyniuk lowered his hands slowly. “I’m unarmed,” he said. “I’m lost. Will you help me, please?”

The other man sheathed his blade at last. “I’ll take you to Ivor,” he said, “and Gereint. They both know Silvercloak. We’ll go to the camp in the morning.”

“Why not now?”

“Because,” the other said, “I have a job to do, and I suppose you’ll have to do it with me now.”

“How? What?”

“There are two babies in that wood fasting for their animals. We’ve got to watch over them, make sure they don’t cut themselves or something.” He held up a bleeding hand. “Like I did, not killing you. You are among the Dalrei. Ivor’s tribe, the third. And lucky for you he is a stubborn man, or the only thing you would find here would be eltor and svart alfar, and the one would flee you and the other kill. My name,” he said, “is Tore. Now come.”

The babies, as Tore insisted on calling the two thirteen-year-olds, seemed to be all right. If they were lucky, Tore explained, they would each see an animal before dawn. If not, the fast would continue, and he would have to watch another night. They were sitting with their backs against a tree in a small clearing midway between the two boys. Tore’s horse, a small dark gray stallion, grazed nearby.

“What are we watching for?” Dave asked, a little nervously. Night forests were not his usual habitat.

“I told you: there are svart alfar around here. Word of them has driven all the other tribes south.”

“There was a svart alfar in our world,” Dave volunteered. “It followed Loren. Matt Sören killed it. Loren said they weren’t dangerous, and there weren’t many of them.”

Tore raised his eyebrows. “There are more than there used to be,” he said, “and though they may not be dangerous to a mage, they were bred to kill and they do it very well.”

Dave had an uncomfortable, prickly feeling suddenly. Tore spoke of killing with disquieting frequency.

“The svarts would be enough to worry about,” Tore went on, “but just before I saw you, I found the spoor of an urgach—I took you for it, back there. I was going to kill first and investigate after. Such creatures have not been seen for hundreds of years. It is very bad that they are back; I don’t know what it means.”

“What are they?”

Tore made a strange gesture and shook his head. “Not at night,” he said. “We shouldn’t be talking of them out here.” He repeated the gesture.

Dave settled back against the tree. It was late, he supposed he should try to sleep, but he was far too keyed up. Tore no longer seemed to be in a talking mood; that was okay by him.

On the whole, it looked all right. Could have been a lot worse. He appeared to have landed among people who knew the mage. The others couldn’t be too far away; it would probably work out, if he didn’t get eaten by something in these woods. On the other hand, Tore obviously knew what he was doing. Roll with it, he thought.

After about three-quarters of an hour, Tore rose to check on his babies. He looped east, and came back ten minutes later, nodding his head.

“Barth is all right, and well hidden now, too. Not as stupid as most of them.” He continued west to look hi on the other one. A few minutes later, he reappeared again.

“Well—” Tore began, approaching the tree.

Only an athlete could have done it. With purest reflex, Dave launched himself at the apparition that had emerged from the trees beside Tore. He hit the hairy, ape-like creature with the hardest cross-body block he could throw, and the sword swinging to decapitate Tore was deflected away.

Sprawled flat with the breath knocked out of him, Dave saw the huge creature’s other hand coming down. He managed to parry with his left forearm, and felt a numbing sensation from the contact. God, he thought, staring into the enraged red eyes of what had to be the urgach, this sucker is strong! He didn’t even have time to be afraid: rolling clumsily away from the urgach’s short-range sword thrust, he saw a body hurtle past him.

Tore, knife in hand, had hurled himself straight at the creature’s head. The urgach dropped its awkward sword, and with a terrifying snarl, easily blocked Tore’s arm. Shifting its grip, it threw the Rider bodily away, to smash into a tree, senseless for a moment.

One on one, Dave thought. Tore’s dive had given him time to get to his feet, but everything was moving so fast. Whirling, he fled to where Tore’s tethered horse was neighing in terror, and he grabbed the sword resting by the saddle-cloth. A sword? he thought. What the hell do I do with a sword?

Parry, like crazy. The urgach, weapon reclaimed, was right on top of him, and it levelled a great two-handed sweep of its own giant blade. Dave was a strong man, but the jarring impact of blocking that blow made his right arm go almost as numb as his left; he staggered backwards.

“Tore!” he cried desperately. “I can’t—”

He stopped, because there was suddenly no need to say anything more. The urgach was swaying like a toppling rock, and a moment later it fell forward with a crash, Tore’s dagger embedded to the hilt in the back of its skull.

The two men gazed at each other across the dead body of the monstrous creature.

“Well,” said Tore finally, still breathing hard, “now I know why I didn’t kill you.”

What Dave felt then was so rare and unexpected, it took him a moment to recognize it.

Ivor, up with the sun and watching by the southwest gate, saw Barth and Navon come walking back together. He could tell—it was not hard—from the way they moved that they had both found something in the wood. Found, or been found by, as Gereint said. They had gone out as boys and were coming back to him, his children still, but Riders now, Riders of the Dalrei. So he lifted his voice in greeting, that they should be welcomed by their Chieftain back from the dreamworld to the tribe.

“Hola!” cried Ivor, that all should hear. “See who comes! Let there be rejoicing, for see the Weaver sends two new Riders to us!”

They all rushed out then, having waited with suppressed excitement, so that the Chieftain should be first to announce the return. It was a tradition of the third tribe since the days of Lahor, his grandfather.

Barth and Navon were welcomed home with honor and jubilation. Their eyes were wide yet with wonder, not yet fully returned from the other world, from the visions that fasting and night and Gereint’s secret drink had given them. They seemed untouched, fresh, which was as it should be.

Ivor led them, one on either side, letting them walk beside him now, as was fit for men, to the quarters set apart for Gereint. He went inside with them and watched as they knelt before the shaman, that he might confirm and consecrate their animals. Never had one of Ivor’s children tried to dissemble about his fast, to claim a totem when there had been none, or pretend in his mind that an eltor had been an eagle or a boar. It was still the task of the shaman to find in them the truth of their vigil, so that in the tribe Gereint knew the totems of every Rider. It was thus in all the tribes. So it was written at Celidon. So was the Law.

At length Gereint lifted his head from where he sat cross-legged on his mat. He turned unerringly to where Ivor stood, the light from outside silhouetting him.

“Their hour knows their name,” the shaman said.

It was done. The words that defined a Rider had been spoken: the hour that none could avoid, and the sanctity of their secret name. Ivor was assailed suddenly by a sense of the sweep, the vastness of time. For twelve hundred years the Dalrei had ridden on the Plain. For twelve hundred years each new Rider had been so proclaimed.

“Should we feast?” he asked Gereint formally.

“Indeed we should,” came the placid reply. “We should have the Feast of the New Hunters.”

“It shall be so,” Ivor said. So many times he and Gereint had done this, summer after summer. Was he getting old?

He took the two newest Riders and led them into the sunlight, to where all the tribe was gathered before the door of the shaman’s house.

“Their hour knows,” he said, and smiled to hear the roar that went up.

He gave Navon and Barth back to their families at last. “Sleep,” he urged them both, knowing what the morrow would be like, knowing he would not be heeded. Who slept on this day?

Levon had, he remembered; but he had been three nights in the grove and had come out, at the last, hollowed and other-worldly. A difficult, far-voyaging fast it had been, as was fitting for one who would one day lead the tribe.

Thinking so, he watched his people stream away, then ducked back into the darkness of Gereint’s house. There was never any light in that house, no matter which camp they occupied.

The shaman had not moved.

“It is well,” Ivor said, hunkering down beside the old one.

Gereint nodded. “It is well, I think. They should both do, and Barth may be something more.” It was the closest he ever came to giving the Chieftain a hint of what he had seen in the new ones. Always Ivor marvelled at the shaman’s gift, at his power.

He still remembered the night they had blinded Gereint. A child, Ivor had been, four summers from his hawk, but as Banor’s only son, he had been taken out with the men to see it done. Power for him all his life would be symbolized by deep-voiced chanting and torches weaving on the night plain under the stars of midsummer.

For some moments the two men sat quietly, each wrapped in his own thoughts, then Ivor rose. “I should speak to Levon about tomorrow’s hunt,” he said. “Sixteen, I think.”

“At least,” the shaman said in an aggrieved tone. “I could eat a whole one myself. We haven’t feasted in a long time, Ivor.”

Ivor snorted. “A very long time, you greedy old man. Twelve whole days since Walen was named. Why aren’t you fat?”

“Because,” the wisest one explained patiently, “you never have enough food at the feasts.”

“Seventeen, then!” Ivor laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning before they go. It’s up to Levon, but I’m going to suggest east.”

“East,” Gereint agreed gravely. “But you’ll see me later today.”

This, too, Ivor had grown accustomed to. The Sight comes when the light goes, the Dalrei said. It was not Law, but had the same force, it seemed to Ivor at times. They found their totems in the dark, and all their shamans came to their power in blindness with that ceremony on midsummer night, the bright torches and the stars suddenly going black.

He found Levon with the horses, of course, tending to a mare with a bad fetlock. Levon rose at his father’s footstep and came over, pushing the yellow hair back from his eyes. It was long, and he never tied it back. Seeing Levon lifted Ivor’s heart; it always did.

He remembered, probably because he’d been thinking of it earlier, the morning Levon had returned from his three-day fast. All day he had slept, bone-weary, the fair skin almost translucent with exhaustion. Late at night he had arisen and sought his father.

Ivor and his thirteen-year-old son had walked out alone into the sleeping camp.

“I saw a cerne, father,” Levon had said suddenly. A gift to him, the deepest, rarest gift. His animal, his secret name. A cerne was very good, Ivor thought with pride. Strong and brave, proudly horned like the god for which it was named, legendary for how it would defend its young. A cerne was as good as could be.

He nodded. There had been a difficulty in his throat. Leith was always teasing him about how quick he was to cry. He wanted to put an arm about the boy, but Levon was a Rider now, a man, and had given him a man’s gift.

“Mine was a hawk,” Ivor had said, and had stood beside his son, their shoulders touching as they looked together at the summer sky above their sleeping people.

“Eastward, right?” Levon said now, coming up. There was laughter in his brown eyes.

“I think,” Ivor replied. “Let’s not be foolhardy. It’s up to you, though,” he added quickly.

“I know. East is fine. I’ll have the two new ones, anyhow. It’s easier country to hunt. How many?”

“I thought sixteen, but Gereint wants an eltor to himself.”

Levon threw back his head and laughed. “And he complained about not enough feasting, didn’t he?”

“Always,” his father chuckled. “How many hunters, then, for seventeen?”

“Twenty,” Levon said immediately.

It was five fewer than he would have taken. It put great pressure on the hunters, especially with the two new ones in the band, but Ivor held his peace. The hunting was Levon’s now, and his son knew the horses and hunters, and the eltor like no one else did. He believed in putting pressure on them, too, Ivor knew. It kept them sharp. Revor was said to have done the same thing.

So “Good” was all he said. “Choose well. I’ll see you at home later.” Levon raised a hand; he was already turning back to the mare.

Ivor hadn’t eaten yet, or talked to Leith, and the sun was already high. He went home. They were waiting for him in the front room. Because of Gereint’s parting words, he wasn’t totally surprised.

“This,” said Tore, without ceremony, “is Davor. He crossed from another world with Loren Silvercloak last night, but was separated from him. We killed an urgach together in Faelinn last night.”

Yes, Ivor thought, I knew there was something more. He looked at the two young men. The stranger, a very big man, bristled with a certain aggressiveness, but was not truly so, Ivor judged. Tore’s terse words had both frightened and pleased the Chieftain. An urgach was unheard-of news, but the Outcast’s saying “we” made Ivor smile inwardly. The two of them had shared something in that killing, he thought.

“Welcome,” he said to the stranger. And then, formally, “Your coming is a bright thread in what is woven for us. You will have to tell me as much as you care to of your story. Killing an urgach—that was bravely done. We shall eat first, though,” he added hastily, knowing Leith’s rules with guests. “Liane?” he called.

His daughter materialized instantaneously. She had, of course, been listening behind the door. Ivor suppressed a smile. “We have guests for the morning meal,” he said. “Will you find Tabor and have him request Gereint to come? Levon, too.”

“Gereint won’t want to,” she said impertinently. “It’s too far, he’ll say.” Ivor observed that she was keeping her back to Tore. It was shameful that a child of his should treat a tribesman so. He would have to speak to her of it. This business of the Outcast must be ended.

For the moment he said merely, “Have Tabor say that he was right this morning.”

“About what?” Liane demanded.

“Go, child,” Ivor said. There were limits.

With a predictable toss of her hair, Liane spun and left the room. The stranger, Ivor saw, had an amused look on his face, and no longer clutched the sheaf of papers he carried quite so defensively. It was well, for the moment.

Loren Silvercloak, though, and an urgach in Faelinn Grove? Not for five hundred years had such a creature been reported to Celidon. I knew, Ivor thought, there was another reason why we stayed.

This, it seemed, was it.

Chapter 11

They had found a horse for him, not an easy task. The Dalrei tended to be smallish people, quick and wiry, and their mounts were much the same. In winter, though, they traded with the men of Brennin in the land where the High Kingdom ran into the Plain near the Latham, and there were always one or two larger mounts in every tribe, used usually for carrying goods from camp to camp. Riding the placid-tempered grey they had given him, and with Ivor’s younger son, Tabor, as a guide, Dave had come out at dawn with Levon and the hunters to watch an eltor chase.

His arms were in pretty rough shape, but Tore had to be just as bad, or worse, and he was hunting; so Dave figured he could manage to ride a horse and watch.

Tabor, skinny and tanned dark brown, rode a chestnut pony beside him. He wore his hair tied back like Tore and most of the Riders, but it wasn’t really long enough for that, and the tied part stuck up on the back of his head like a tree stump. Dave remembered himself at fourteen and found an uncharacteristic empathy for the kid beside him. Tabor talked a lot—in fact, he hadn’t shut up since they’d ridden out—but Dave was interested and didn’t mind, for once.

“We used to carry our houses with us when we moved,” Tabor was saying as they jogged along. Up front, Levon was setting an easy pace eastward into the rising sun. Tore was beside him and there seemed to be about twenty other riders. It was a glorious, mild summer morning.

“They weren’t houses like we have now, of course,” Tabor went on. “We made them of eltor skin and poles, so they were easy to carry.”

“We have things like that in my world, too,” Dave said. “Why did you change?”

“Revor did it,” Tabor explained.

“Who’s he?”

The boy looked pained, as if appalled to discover that the fame of this Revor hadn’t reached Toronto yet. Fourteen was a funny age, Dave thought, suppressing a grin. He was surprised at how cheerful he felt.

“Revor is our brightest hero,” Tabor explained reverently. “He saved the High King in battle during the Bael Rangat, by riding through Daniloth, and was rewarded with the land of the Plain for the Dalrei forever. After that,” Tabor went on, earnestly, “Revor called a great gathering of all the Dalrei at Celidon, the mid-Plain, and said that if this was now our land, we should have some mark of ourselves upon it. So the camps were built in those days, that our tribes might have true homes to come to as they followed the eltor about the Plain.”

“How far back?” Dave asked.

“Oh, forever and ever,” Tabor replied, waving a hand.

“Forever and Revor?” said Dave, surprising himself. Tabor looked blank for a second, then giggled. He was a good kid, Dave decided. The ponytail was hilarious, though.

“The camps have been rebuilt many times since then,” Tabor resumed his lecture. He was taking his guide duties seriously. “We always cut wood when we are near a forest—except Pendaran, of course—and we carry it to the next camp when we move. Sometimes the camps have been completely destroyed. There are fires when the Plain is dry.”

Dave nodded; it made sense. “And I guess you have to clear out the damage the weather and animals do in between times, anyway.”

“Weather, yes,” Tabor said. “But never the animals. The shamans were given a spell as a gift from Gwen Ystrat. Nothing wild ever enters the camps.”

That, Dave still had problems with. He remembered the old, blind shaman, Gereint, being led into the Chieftain’s house the morning before. Gereint had trained his sightless eye sockets right on him. Dave had met the look as best he could—a staring duel with a blind man—but when Gereint had turned away, expressionless, he’d felt like crying out, “What did you see, damn you?”

The whole thing unnerved him. It had been the only bad moment, though. Ivor, the Chieftain, a small, leathery guy with crinkly eyes and a considered way of speaking, had been all right.

“If Silvercloak was going to Paras Derval,” he’d said, “then that is where he’ll be. I will send word of you with the auberei to Celidon, and a party of us will guide you south to Brennin. It will be a good thing for some of our younger men to make that journey, and I have tidings for Ailell, the High King.”

“The urgach?” a voice had said then from by the door, and Dave had turned to see Liane again, Ivor’s brown-haired daughter.

Levon had laughed. “Father,” he’d said, “we may as well make her part of the tribal council. She’s going to listen anyhow.”

Ivor had looked displeased and proud, both. It was at that point that Dave had decided he liked the Chieftain.

“Liane,” Ivor had said, “doesn’t your mother need you?”

“She said I was in her way.”

“How can you be in her way? We have guests, there must be things for you to do,” Ivor had said.bemusedly.

“I break dishes,” Liane had explained. “Is it the urgach?”

Dave had laughed aloud, then flushed at the look she’d given him.

“Yes,” Ivor had said. But then he added, looking levelly at Liane, “My daughter, you are being indulged because I dislike chastising my children before guests, but you go too far. It ill becomes you to listen at doors. It is the action of a spoiled child, not a woman.”

Liane’s flippant manner had disappeared completely. She paled, and her lip trembled. “I’m sorry,” she had gasped, and spinning on her heel, had fled the home.

“She hates missing things,” Levon had said, stating the obvious.

“There they are.”

Tabor was pointing southeast, and Dave, squinting into the sun, saw the eltor moving northward across their path. He had been expecting buffalo, he now realized, for what he saw made him catch his breath, in sudden understanding of why the Dalrei spoke not of a herd, but of a swift of eltor.

They were like antelope: graceful, many-horned, sleek, and very, very fast. Most were colored in shadings of brown, but one or two were purest white. The speed of their sweep across the plain was dazzling. There had to be five hundred of them, moving like wind over the grass, their heads carried high, arrogant and beautiful, the hair of their manes lifting back in the wind of their running.

“A small swift,” Tabor said. The kid was trying to be cool, but Dave could hear the excitement in his voice, even as he felt his own heartbeat accelerate. God, they were beautiful. The Riders around him, in response to Levon’s concise command, picked up speed and changed approach slightly to intersect the swift at an angle.

“Come!” Tabor said, as their slower mounts fell behind. “I know where he will have them do it.” He cut away sharply northward, and Dave followed. In a moment they crested a small knoll in the otherwise level sweep of the prairie; turning back, Dave saw the eltor swift and the hunters converge, and he watched the Dalrei hunt, as Tabor told him of the Law.

An eltor could be killed by knife blade only. Nothing else. Any other killing meant death or exile to the man who did so. Such, for twelve hundred years, had been the Law inscribed on the parchments at Celidon.

More: one eltor to one man, and one chance only for the hunter. A doe could be killed, but at risk, for a bearing doe’s death meant execution or exile again.

This, Dave learned, was what had happened to Tore’s father. Ivor had exiled him, having no other mercy to grant, for in the preservation of the great eltor swifts lay the preservation of the Dalrei themselves. Dave nodded to hear it; somehow, out here on the Plain under that high sky, harsh, clear laws seemed to fit. It was not a world shaped for nuance or subtlety.

Then Tabor drew silent, for one by one, in response to Levon’s gesture, the hunters of the third tribe set out after their prey. Dave saw the first of them, low and melded to his flying horse, intersect the edge of the racing swift. The man picked his target, slid into place beside it; then Dave, his jaw dropping, saw the hunter leap from horse to eltor, dagger flashing, and, with a succinct slash, sever the beast’s jugular. The eltor fell, the weight of the Dalrei pulling it away from the body of the swift. The hunter disengaged from the falling beast, hit the ground himself at frightening speed, rolled, and was up, his dagger raised in red triumph.

Levon raised his own blade in response, but most of the other men were already flying alongside the swift. Dave saw the next man kill with a short, deadly throw. His eltor fell, almost in its tracks. Another hunter, riding with unbelievable skill, held to his mount with his legs only, leaning far out over the back of a madly racing eltor, to stab from horseback and bring down his beast.

“Uh-oh,” Tabor said sharply. “Navon’s trying to be fancy.” Shifting his glance, Dave saw that one of the boys he’d guarded the night before was showing off on his first hunt. Riding his horse while standing up, Navon smoothly cut in close to one of the eltor. Taking careful aim, he threw from his standing position—and missed. The flung blade whipped just over the neck of the prey and fell harmlessly.

“Idiot!” Tabor exclaimed, as Navon slumped down on his mount. Even at a distance Dave could see the young Rider’s dejection. “It was a good try,” he offered. “No,” Tabor snapped, his eyes never leaving the hunters. “He shouldn’t be doing that on his first hunt, especially when Levon has trusted him by taking only twenty for seventeen. Now if anyone else is unlucky…”

Turning back to the hunt, Dave picked out the other new Rider. Barth, on a brown stallion, went in with cool efficiency, picked out his eltor and, wasting no time, pulled alongside, leaped from his horse, and stabbing, as the first hunter had done, brought his beast down.

“Good,” Tabor muttered, a little grudgingly. “He did well. See, he even pulled it down to the outside, away from the others. The leap is the surest way, though you can get hurt doing it.”

And sure enough, though Barth rose holding a dagger aloft, it was in his left hand, and his right hung down at his side. Levon saluted him back. Dave turned to Tabor to ask a question, but was stopped cold by the stricken expression on his companion’s face.

“Please,” Tabor whispered, almost a prayer. “Let it be soon. Oh, Davor, if Gereint doesn’t name me this summer, I will die of shame!” Dave couldn’t think of a single thing to say. So, after a moment, he just asked his question. “Does Levon go in, too, or will he just watch?”

Tabor collected himself. “He only kills if the others have failed, then he must make up the numbers himself. It is a shameful thing, though, if the leader must kill, which is why most tribes take many more hunters than they need.” There was pride in Tabor’s voice again. “It is a thing of great honor to take only a few extra Riders, or none, though no one does that. The third tribe is known now over all the Plain for how bold we are on the hunt. I wish, though, that Levon had been more careful with two new ones today. My father would have—oh, no!”

Dave saw it, too. The eltor picked out by the fifteenth Rider stumbled, just as the hunter threw, and the blade hit an antler only and glanced away. The eltor recovered and raced off, head high, its mane blown gracefully back.

Tabor was suddenly very still, and after a quick calculation Dave realized why: no one else could miss. Levon had cut it very fine.

The sixteenth hunter, an older man, had already peeled off from the small group remaining. Dave saw that the Riders who had already killed were racing along on the far side of the swift. They had turned the eltor so the beasts were now running back south along the other side of the knoll. All the kills, he realized, would be close together. It was an efficient process, well judged. If no one else missed.

The sixteenth hunter played no games. In fast, his blade high, he picked a slower animal, leaped, and stabbed, pulling it clear. He rose, dagger lifted.

“A fat one,” Tabor said, trying to mask his tension. “Gereint’ll want that one tonight.”

The seventeenth man killed, too, throwing from almost directly over top of his eltor. He made it look easy.

“Tore won’t miss,” Dave heard Tabor say, and saw the now familiar shiftless figure whip past their knoll.

Tore singled out an eltor, raced south with it for several strides, then threw with arrogant assurance. The eltor dropped, almost at their feet. Tore saluted briefly, then sped off to join the other Riders on the far side of the swift. Seeing that throw, Dave remembered the urgach falling two nights before. He felt like cheering for Tore, but there was one more to go, and he could feel Tabor’s anxiety.

“Cechtar’s very good,” the boy breathed. Dave saw a big man on a chestnut horse leave Levon’s side—the leader was alone now, just below them. Cechtar galloped confidently towards the racing swift that the others were steering past the knoll. His knife was drawn already, and the man’s carriage on his horse was solid and reassuring.

Then the horse hit a tummock of grass and stumbled. Cechtar kept his seat, but the damage was done—the knife, prematurely upraised, had flown from his hand to fall harmlessly short of the nearest animal.

Hardly breathing, Dave turned to see what Levon would do. Beside him, Tabor was moaning in an agony of distress. “Oh no, oh no,” he repeated. “We are shamed. It’s a disgrace for all three Riders, and Levon especially for misjudging. There’s nothing he can do. I feel sick!”

“He has to kill now?”

“Yes, and he will. But it doesn’t make any difference, there’s nothing he can—oh!”

Tabor stopped, for Levon, moving his horse forward very deliberately, had shouted a command to Tore and the others. Watching, Dave saw the hunters race to turn the eltor yet again, so that after a wide arc had been described, the swift, a quarter of a mile away now, were flying back north, five hundred strong on the east side of the knoll.

“What’s he doing?” Dave asked softly.

“I don’t know, I don’t understand. Unless…” Levon began to ride slowly eastward, but after a few strides he turned his horse to stand motionless, square in the path of the swift.

“What the hell?” Dave breathed.

“Oh, Levon, no!” Tabor screamed suddenly. The boy clutched Dave’s arm, his face white with terrified understanding. “He’s trying Revor’s Kill. He’s going to kill himself!”

Dave felt his own rush of fear hit, as he grasped what Levon was trying to do. It was impossible, though; it was insanity. Was the hunt leader committing suicide out of shame?

In frozen silence they watched from the knoll as the massed swift, slightly wedge-shaped behind a huge lead animal, raced over the grass towards the still figure of Tabor’s yellow-haired brother. The other hunters, too, Dave was dimly aware, had stopped riding. The only sound was the rapidly growing thunder of the onrushing eltor.

Unable to take his eyes away from the hunt leader, Dave saw Levon, moving without haste, dismount to stand in front of his horse. The eltor were very close now, flying; the sound of the drumming hooves filled the air.

The horse was utterly still. That, too, Dave registered, then he saw Levon unhurriedly draw his blade.

The lead eltor was fifty yards away.

Then twenty.

Levon raised his arm and, without pausing, the whole thing one seamless motion, threw.

The blade hit the giant animal directly between the eyes; it broke stride, staggered, then fell at Levon’s feet. Right at Levon’s feet.

His fists clenched tightly with raw emotion, Dave saw the other animals instantly scythe out away from the fallen leader and form two smaller swifts, one angling east, one west, dividing in a cloud of dust precisely at the point where the fallen eltor lay.

Where Levon, his yellow hair blowing free, stood quietly stroking his horse’s muzzle, having stolen in that moment, with an act of incandescent gallantry, great honor for his people from the teeth of shame. As a leader should.

Dave became aware that he was shouting wildly, that Tabor, tears in his eyes, was hugging him fiercely and pounding his sore shoulders, and that he had an arm around the boy and was hugging him back. It was not, it never had been the sort of thing he did, but it was all right now, it was more than all right.

Ivor was astonished at the fury he felt. A rage such as this he could not remember. Levon had almost died, he told himself, that was why. A foolhardy piece of bravado, it had been. Ivor should have insisted on twenty-five Riders. He, Ivor, was still Chieftain of the third tribe.

And that vehement thought gave him pause. Was it only fear for Levon that sparked his anger? After all, it was over now; Levon was fine, he was better than fine. The whole tribe was afire with what he had done. Revor’s Kill. Levon’s reputation was made; his deed would dominate the midwinter gathering of the nine tribes at Celidon. His name would soon be ringing the length of the Plain.

I feel old, Ivor realized. I’m jealous. I’ve got a son who can do Revor’s Kill. What did that make him? Was he just Levon’s father now, the last part of his name?

Which led to another thought: did all fathers feel this way when their sons became men? Men of achievement, of names that eclipsed the father’s? Was there always the sting of envy to temper the burst of pride? Had Banor felt that way when twenty-year-old Ivor had made his first speech at Celidon and earned the praise of all the elders for the wisdom of his words?

Probably, he thought, remembering his father with love. Probably he had, and, Ivor realized, it didn’t matter. It really didn’t. It was part of the way of things, part of the procession all men made towards the knowing hour.

If he had a virtue, Ivor reflected, something of his nature he wanted his sons to have, it was tolerance. He smiled wryly. It would be ironic if that tolerance could not be extended to himself.

Which reminded him. His sons; and his daughter. He had to have a talk with Liane. Feelingly decidedly better, Ivor went looking for his middle child.

Revor’s Kill. Oh, by Ceinwen’s bow, he was proud!

The Feast of the New Hunters started formally at sundown, the tribe gathering in the huge central area of the camp, from where the smell of slowly roasting game had been wafting all afternoon. Truly, this would be a celebration: two new Riders and Levon’s deed that morning. A feat that had obliterated the failures before. No one, not even Gereint, could remember the last time it had been done. “Not since Revor himself!” one of the hunters had shouted, a little drunkenly.

All the hunters from the morning were a little drunk; they had started early, Dave among them, on the clear, harsh liquor the Dalrei brewed. The mood of mingled relief and euphoria on the ride home had been completely infectious and Dave had let himself go with it. There didn’t seem to be any reason to hold back.

Through it all, drinking round for round with them, Levon seemed almost unaffected by what he had done. Looking for it, Dave could find no arrogance, no hidden sense of superiority in Ivor’s older son. It had to be there, he thought, suspicious, as he always was. But looking one more time at Levon as he walked between him and Ivor to the feast—he was guest of honor, it seemed—Dave found himself reluctantly changing his mind. Is a horse arrogant or superior? He didn’t think so. Proud, yes; there was great pride in the bay stallion that had stood so still with Levon that morning, but it wasn’t a pride that diminished anything or anyone else. It was simply part of what the stallion was.

Levon was like that, Dave decided.

It was one of his last really coherent thoughts, for with the sunset the feast began. The eltor meat was superlative; broiled slowly over open fires, seasoned with spices he didn’t recognize, it was better than anything he’d ever tasted in his life. When the sizzling slices of meat started to go around, the drinking among the tribesmen got quite serious as well.

Dave was seldom drunk; he didn’t like surrendering the edge of control, but he was in a strange space that evening, a whole other country. A whole other world, even. He didn’t hold back.

Sitting by Ivor’s side, he suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen Tore since the hunt. Looking around the firelit pandemonium, he finally spotted the dark man standing by himself, off on the edge of the circle of light cast by the fires.

Dave rose, not too steadily. Ivor raised an inquiring eyebrow. “It’s Tore,” Dave mumbled. “Why’s he on his own? Shouldn’t be. He should be here. Hell, we… we killed an urgach together, me and him.” Ivor nodded, as if the stumbling discourse had been lucid explanation.

“Truly,” the Chieftain said quietly. Turning to his daughter, who was serving him just then, he added, “Liane, will you go and bring Tore to sit by me?”

“Can’t,” Liane said. “Sorry. Have to go get ready for the dancing.” And she was gone, quick, mercurial, into the confused shadows. Ivor, Dave saw, did not look happy.

He strode off to fetch Tore himself. Stupid girl, he thought, with some anger, she’s avoiding him because his father was exiled and she’s chief’s daughter.

He came up to Tore in the half-dark, just beyond the cast glow of the many fires. The other man, chewing on an eltor haunch, merely grunted a hello. That was okay. Didn’t need to talk; talkers bugged Dave anyhow.

They stood awhile in silence. It was cooler beyond the fires; the wind felt easy, refreshing. It sobered him a little.

“How do you feel?” he asked finally.

“Better,” Tore said. And after a moment, “Your shoulder?”

“Better,” Dave replied. When you didn’t say a lot, he thought, you said the important things. In the shadows with Tore, he felt no real desire to go back to the center of the clearing. It was better here, feeling the wind. You could see the stars, too. You couldn’t in the firelight; or in Toronto, either, he thought.

On impulse he turned around. There it was. Tore turned to look with him. Together they gazed at the white magnificence of Rangat.

“There’s someone under there?” Dave asked softly.

“Yes,” said Tore briefly. “Bound.”

“Loren told us.”

“He cannot die.”

Which was not comforting. “Who is he?” Dave asked with some diffidence.

For a moment Tore was silent, then: “We do not name him by his name. In Brennin they do, I am told, and in Cathal, but it is the Dalrei who dwell under the shadow of Rangat. When we speak of him, it is as Maugrim, the Unraveller.”

Dave shivered, though it wasn’t cold. The Mountain was shining in the moonlight, its peak so high he had to tilt his head back to take it in. He wrestled then with a difficult thought.

“It’s so great,” he said. “So tremendous. Why’d they put him under something so beautiful? Now every time you look at it, you have to think about…” He trailed off. Words were too tough, sometimes. Most of the time.

Tore was looking at him with sharp understanding, though. “That,” he said softly, “is why they did it.” And he turned back to the lights.

Turning with him, Dave saw that some of the fires were being put out, leaving a ring of flame, around which the Dalrei were gathering. He looked at Tore.

“Dancing,” his companion said. “The women and boys.”

And a moment later Dave saw a number of young girls enter the ring of fire and begin an intricate, weaving dance to a tune laid down by two old men with curiously shaped stringed instruments. It was pretty, he supposed, but dancing wasn’t really his thing. His eyes wandered away, and he spotted the old shaman, Gereint. Gereint was holding a piece of meat in each hand, one light, one dark. He was taking turns biting from each. Dave snorted and nudged Tore to look.

Tore laughed, too, softly. “He should be fat,” he said. “I don’t know why he isn’t.” Dave grinned. Just then Navon, still looking sheepish about his failure that morning, came by with a flask. Dave and Tore each drank, then watched the new Rider walk off. Still a boy, Dave thought, but he’s a hunter now.

“He’ll be all right,” Tore murmured. “I think he learned his lesson this morning.”

“He wouldn’t be around to have learned it if you didn’t use a knife as well as you do. That,” Dave said for the first time, “was some throw the other night.”

“I wouldn’t have been around to throw it if you hadn’t saved my life,” Tore said. Then after a moment he grinned, his teeth white in the darkness. “We did all right back there.”

“Damn right,” said Dave, grinning back.

The young girls had gone, to cheerful applause. A larger operation began now, with the older boys joining a number of the women. Dave saw Tabor move to the center of the circle, and after a moment he realized that they were dancing the morning’s hunt. The music was louder now, more compelling. Another man had joined the two musicians.

They danced it all, with stylized, ritual gestures. The women, their hair loose and flowing, were the eltor, and the boys mimed the Riders they would one day be. It was beautifully done, even to the individual quirks and traits of the hunters. Dave recognized the characteristic head tilt of the second Rider in the boy who imitated him. There was enthusiastic applause for that, then there was laughter as another boy danced Navon’s flashy failure. It was indulgent laughter, though, and even the other two misses were greeted with only brief regret, because everyone knew what was coming.

Tabor had untied his hair for this. He looked older, more assured—or was it just the role, Dave wondered, as he saw Ivor’s younger son dance, with palpable pride and surprisingly graceful restraint, his older brother’s kill.

Seeing it again in the dance, Dave cheered as loudly as everyone else when the young woman dancing the lead eltor fell at Tabor’s feet, and all the other women streamed around him, turning at the edge of the circle defined by the fires to form a whirling kaleidoscope of movement about the still figure of Tabor dan Ivor. It was well done, Dave thought, really well done. A head taller than everyone there, he could see it all. When Tabor glanced at him across the massed people in between, Dave gave him a high, clenched-fist gesture of approval. He saw Tabor, despite his role, flush with pleasure. Good kid. Solid.

When it ended, the crowd grew restive again; the dancing seemed to be over. Dave looked at Tore and mimed a drinking motion. Tore shook his head and pointed.

Looking back, Dave saw that Liane had entered the circle of fire.

She was dressed in red and had done something to her face; her color was high and striking. She wore golden jewelry on each arm and about her throat; it glinted and flashed in the firelight as she moved, and it seemed to Dave as if she had suddenly become a creature of flame herself.

The crowd grew quiet as she waited. Then Liane, instead of dancing, spoke. “We have cause to celebrate,” she sang out. “The kill of Levon dan Ivor will be told at Celidon this winter, and for many winters after.” There was a roar of approval; Liane let it die down. “That kill,” she said, “may not be the brightest deed we have reason to honor tonight.” The crowd hushed in perplexity. “There was another act of courage done,” Liane continued, “a darker one, in the night wood, and it should be known and celebrated by all of the third tribe.”

What? Dave thought. Uh-oh.

It was all he had time for. “Bring forth Tore dan Sorcha,” cried Liane, “and with him Davor, our guest, that we may honor them!”

“Here they are!” a high voice cried from behind Dave, and suddenly goddamn Tabor was pushing him forward, and Levon, smiling broadly, had Tore by the arm, and the two sons of Ivor led them through the parting crowd to stand beside the Chieftain.

With excruciating self-consciousness, Dave stood exposed in the light of the fires, and heard Liane continue in the rapt silence.

“You do not know,” she cried to the tribe, “of what I speak, so I will dance it for you.” Oh, God, Dave thought. He was, he knew, beet-red. “Let us do them honor,” Liane said, more softly, “and let Tore dan Sorcha no more be named Outcast in this tribe, for know you that these two killed an urgach in Faelinn Grove two nights ago.”

They hadn’t known, Dave realized, wishing he could find a place to disappear, knowing Tore felt the same. From the electric response of the tribe, it was clear that they hadn’t had a clue.

Then the music began, and gradually his color receded, for no one was looking at him anymore: Liane was dancing between the fires.

She was doing it all, he marveled, spellbound, doing it all herself. The two sleeping boys in the wood, Tore, himself, the very texture, the mood of Faelinn Grove at night—and then somehow, unbelievably, whether it was alcohol or firelight or some alchemy of art, he saw the urgach again, huge, terrifying, swinging its giant sword.

But there was only a girl in the ring of fire, only a girl and her shadow, dancing, miming, becoming the scene she shaped, offering it to all of them. He saw his own instinctive leap, then Tore’s, the urgach’s brutal blow that had sent Tore smashing into a tree…

She had it dead-on, he realized, astonished. Then he smiled, even through his wonder and stirring pride: of course, she’d listened in while they told Ivor. He felt like laughing suddenly, like crying, like some kind, any kind of articulation of emotion as he watched Liane dance his own desperate parry of the urgach’s sword, and then, finally, Tore’s hurled dagger—she was Tore, she was the blade, and then the toppling, like a mighty tree, of the beast. She was all of it, entire, and she wasn’t a stupid girl after all.

Ivor saw the urgach sway and fall, and then the dancer was herself again, Liane, and she was whirling between the fires, her bare feet flying, jewelry flashing on her arms, moving so fast her hair, short as it was, lifted behind her as she exploded in a wild celebration of dance, of the deed in the night wood, of this night, and the next, and the days, all of them, of everything there was before the hour came that knew your name.

With a lump in his throat he saw her slow, the motion winding down until she stopped, her hands across her breasts, her head lowered, motionless, the still point between the fires; between the stars, it seemed to him.

A moment the third tribe was still with her, then there came an explosion of cheering that must have rocketed beyond the camp, Ivor thought, beyond the lights of men, far out into the wide dark of the night plain.

He looked for Leith in that moment, and saw her standing among the women on the other side of the fires. No tears for her; she was not that sort of woman. But he knew her well enough after so many years to read the expression on her face. Let the tribe think the Chieftain’s wife cool, efficient, unruffled; he knew better. He grinned at her, and laughed when she flushed and looked away, as if unmasked.

The tribe was still buzzing with the catharsis of the dance and the killing that had led to it. Even in this, Liane had been wilful, for he was not at all sure this was how he would have chosen to tell them of the urgach, and it was his place to decide. It couldn’t be kept hidden, for the auberei would have to take word on their ride to Celidon tomorrow, but once more, it seemed, his middle child had gone her own way.

How could he be angry, though, after this? It was always so hard, Ivor found, to stay angry with Liane. Leith was better at it. Mothers and daughters; there was less indulgence there.

She had judged it rightly, though, he thought, watching her walk over to Tore and the stranger and kiss them both. Seeing Tore redden, Ivor decided that not the least cause for joy this night might be the reclaiming of the outcast by this tribe. And then Gereint rose.

It was remarkable how tuned the tribe was to him. As soon as the blind shaman moved forward into the space between the fires, some collective thread of instinct alerted even the most intoxicated hunter. Gereint never had to gesture or wait for silence.

He’d looked silly before, Ivor reflected, watching the shaman move unassisted between the flames. Not anymore. However he might look with eltor juice dripping from his chin, when Gereint rose in the night to address the tribe, his voice was the voice of power.

He spoke for Ceinwen and Cernan, for the night wind and the dawn wind, all the unseen world. The hollowed sockets of his eyes gave testimony. He had paid the price.

“Cernan came to me with the greyness of dawn,” Gereint said quietly. Cernan, thought Ivor, god of the wild things, of wood and plain, Lord of the eltor, brother and twin to Ceinwen of the Bow.

“I saw him clear,” Gereint went on. “The horns upon his head, seven-tined for a King, the dark flash of his eyes, the majesty of him.” A sound like wind in tall grass swept through the tribe.

“He spoke a name to me,” Gereint said. “A thing that has never happened in all my days. Cernan named to me this morning Tabor dan Ivor, and called him to his fast.”

Tabor. And not just named by the shaman after a dream. Summoned by the god himself. A thrill of awe touched Ivor like a ghostly finger in the dark. For a moment he felt as if he were alone on the Plain. There was a shadow with him, only a shadow, but it was the god. Cernan knew his name; Tabor dan Ivor, he had called.

The Chieftain was brought unceremoniously back to the reality of the camp by the high scream of a woman. Liane, of course. He knew without looking. Flying across the ring, almost knocking over the shaman in her haste, she sped to Tabor’s side, no longer a red spirit of dance and flame, only a quicksilver, coltish girl fiercely hugging her brother. Levon was there, too, Ivor saw; more quietly, but as fast, his open face flashing a broad smile of delight. The three of them together. Fair and brown and brown. His.

So Tabor was in Faelinn tomorrow. At that thought, he looked over and saw Tore gazing at him. He received a smile and a reassuring nod from the dark man, and then, with surprise and pleasure, another from giant Davor, who had been so lucky for them. Tabor would be guarded in the wood.

He looked for Leith again across the ring of fire. And with a twist in his heart, Ivor saw how beautiful she was, how very beautiful still, and then he saw the tears in her eyes. Youngest child, he thought, a mother and her youngest. He had a sudden overwhelming sense of the wonder, the strangeness, the deep, deep richness of things. It filled him, it expanded within his breast. He couldn’t hold it in, it was so much, so very much.

Moving within the ring to a music of his own, Ivor, the Chieftain, not so old after all, not so very, danced his joy for his children, all of them.

Chapter 12

Tabor, at least, was no baby. Ivor’s son, Levon’s brother, he knew where to lie in the wood at night. He was sheltered and hidden and could move easily at need. Tore approved.

He and Davor were in Faelinn Grove again. Their guest had, surprisingly, elected to delay his journey south in order to watch over the boy with him. Tabor, Tore thought, had made a strong impression. It wasn’t unusual: he liked the boy himself. Characteristically, Tore gave no thought to the possibility that he himself might be another reason for Dave’s reluctance to leave.

Tore had other things to think about. In fact, he had been of two minds about being accompanied that night. He had been looking forward to solitude and dark since the festival. Too much had happened there, and too quickly. Too many people had come over to embrace him after Liane’s dance. And in the night, long after the fires had burned down, Kerrin dal Ragin had slipped into the room Levon had insisted he take in the camp. Levon had been smiling when they talked, and when Kerrin appeared in the doorway, Tore had belatedly understood why. Kerrin was very pretty, and much talked about among the hunters; her giggling, scented arrival was not the sort of thing an outcast grew accustomed to.

It had been very nice, more than that, in fact. But what had followed her arrival in his bed did not admit of leisure or tranquillity to let him reflect on all that had occurred.

He’d needed to be alone, but Davor’s company was the next best thing. The big man was inclined to silence himself, and Tore could sense that the stranger had things of his own to think about. In any case, they were there to guard Tabor, and he’d not have wanted to meet another urgach alone. The Chieftain had given Davor an axe—the best weapon for one of his size, without training in the sword.

So, weapons to hand this time, the two of them had settled down against a pair of trees close to where Tabor lay. It was a mild easy night. Tore, outcast no longer, it seemed, let his mind go back, past Kerrin’s fair, silken hair, past the naming of Tabor by the god, the tumult of the tribe’s response to what he and Davor had done, to the still point, the heart of everything, the moment for which he needed the dark and solitude.

Liane had kissed him when her dance was done.

Fingering the haft of his axe, enjoying the balanced, solid feel of it, Dave realized that he even liked the name they had given him.

Davor. It sounded far more formidable than Dave. Davor of the Axe. Axewielder. Davor dan Ivor—

Which stopped him. From that thought he could feel himself backing away; it was too exposed to even let it surface inside.

Beside him, Tore sat quietly, his dark eyes hidden; he seemed lost in reverie. Well, Dave thought, I guess he won’t be an outcast anymore, not after last night.

Which took him back. His, too, had been a tiring night. Three girls, no less, had made their way through Ivor’s doorway to the room where Dave slept. Or didn’t, after all, sleep.

God, he remembered thinking at one point, I’ll bet there’s a lot of kids born nine months after one of these feasts. A good life, he decided, being a Rider of the Dalrei, of the third tribe, of the children of Ivor—He sat up abruptly. Tore glanced at him, but made no comment. You have a father, Dave told himself sternly. And a mother and brother. You’re a law student in Toronto, and a basketball player, for God’s sake.

“In that order?” he remembered Kim Ford teasing, the first time they’d met; or had Kevin Laine put it the other way around? He couldn’t remember. Already the time before the crossing seemed astonishingly remote. The Dalrei were real, Martyniuk thought. This axe, the wood, Tore—his kind of person. And there was more.

His mind looped back again to the night before, and this time it zeroed in on the thing that mattered much more than it should, more, he knew, than he could allow it to. Still, it did. He leaned back against the tree again, going with the memory.

Liane had kissed him when her dance was done.

They heard it at the same time: something crashing loudly through the trees. Tore, child of night and woods, knew immediately—only someone who wanted to be heard would make so much noise. He didn’t bother moving.

Dave, however, felt his heart lurch with apprehension. “What the hell is that?” he whispered fiercely, grabbing for his axe.

“Her brother, I think,” Tore said, inadvisedly, and felt himself go crimson in the dark.

Even Dave, far from a perceptive man, could hardly miss that one. When Levon finally emerged through the trees, he found the two of them sitting in an awkward silence.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he offered apologetically. “I thought I might watch with you. Not that you need me, but…”

There was truly no guile, no hauteur in Levon. The man who had just done Revor’s Kill, who would one day lead the tribe, was sheepishly requesting their indulgence.

“Sure,” Dave said. “He’s your brother. Come sit down.”

Tore managed a short nod. His heartbeat was slowing, though, and after a time he decided he didn’t really mind if Davor knew. I’ve never had a friend, he thought suddenly. This is the sort of thing you talk to friends about.

It was all right that Levon had come; Levon was unlike anyone else. And he had done something the morning before that Tore was not sure he would have dared to try. The realization was a hard one for a proud man, and a different person might have hated Levon for it. Tore, however, measured out his respect in terms of such things. Two friends, he thought, I have two friends here.

Though he could only speak of her to one of them.

That one was having problems. Tore’s slip had registered, and Dave felt a need to walk the implications out. He rose. “I’m going to check on him,” he said. “Right back.”

He didn’t do much thinking, though. This wasn’t the sort of situation Dave Martyniuk could handle, so he ducked it. He carried the axe, careful not to make a noise with it; he tried to move as quietly as Tore did in the wood. It’s not even a situation, he told himself abruptly. I’m leaving tomorrow.

He had spoken aloud. A night bird whirred suddenly from a branch overhead, startling him.

He came to the place where Tabor was hidden—and well hidden, too. It had taken Tore almost an hour to find him. Even looking straight at the spot, Dave could barely make out the shape of the boy in the hollow he’d chosen. Tabor would be asleep, Tore had explained earlier. The shaman had made a drink that would ensure this, and open the mind to receive what might come to wake him.

Good kid, Dave thought. He’d never had a younger brother, wondered how he would have behaved toward one. A lot better than Vince did, the bitter thought came. A hell of a lot better than Vincent.

A moment longer he watched Tabor’s hollow, then, assured there was no danger to be seen, he turned away. Not quite ready to rejoin the other two, Dave took an angled route back through the grove.

He hadn’t seen the glade before. He almost stumbled into it, checked himself barely in time. Then he crouched down, as silently as he could.

There was a small pool, glittering silver in the moonlight. The grass, too, was tinted silver, it seemed dewy and fragrant, new somehow. And there was a stag, a full-grown buck, drinking from the pool.

Dave found he was holding his breath, keeping his body utterly still. The moonlit scene was so beautiful, so serene, it seemed to be a gift, a bestowing. He was leaving tomorrow, riding south to Paras Derval, the first stage of the road home. He would never be here again, see anything like this.

Should I not weep? he thought, aware that even such a question was a world away from the normal workings of his mind. But he was, he was a world away.

And then, as the hairs rose up on the back of his neck, Dave became aware that there was someone else beside the glade.

He knew before he even looked, which is what caused the awe: her presence had been made manifest in ways he scarcely comprehended. The very air, the moonlight, now reflected it.

Turning, in silence and dread, Dave saw a woman with a bow standing partway around the glade from where he crouched in darkness. She was clad in green, all in green, and her hair was the same silver as the moonlight. Very tall she was, queenly, and he could not have said if she was young or old, or the color of her eyes, because there was a light in her face that made him avert his face, abashed and afraid.

It happened very quickly. A second bird flew suddenly, flapping its wings loudly, from a tree. The stag raised its head in momentary alarm, a magnificent creature, a king of the wood. Out of the corner of his eye—for he dared not look directly—Dave saw the woman string an arrow to her bow. A moment, a bare pulsation of time, slipped past as the frieze held: the stag with its head high, poised to flee, the moonlight on the glade, on the water, the huntress with her bow.

Then the arrow was loosed and it found the long, exposed throat of the stag.

Dave hurt for the beast, for blood on that silvered grass, for the crumpled fall of a thing so noble.

What happened next tore a gasp of wonder from the core of his being. Where the dead stag lay, a shimmer appeared in the glade, a sheen of moonlight it seemed at first; then it darkened, took shape and then substance, and finally Dave saw another stag, identical, stand unafraid, unwounded, majestic, beside the body of the slain one. A moment it stood thus, then the great horns were lowered in homage to the huntress, and it was gone from the glade.

It was a thing of too much moonlit power, too much transcendency; there was an ache within him, an appalled awareness of his own—

“Stand! For I would see you before you die.”

Of his own mortality.

With trembling limbs, Dave Martyniuk rose to stand before the goddess with her bow. He saw, without surprise, the arrow leveled on his heart, knew with certainty that he would not rise to bow to her once that shaft was in his breast.

“Come forward.”

A curious, other-worldly calm descended upon Dave as he moved into the moonlight. He dropped the axe before his feet; it glittered on the grass.

“Look at me.”

Drawing a deep breath, Dave raised his eyes and looked, as best he could, upon the shining of her face. She was beautiful, he saw, more beautiful than hope.

“No man of Fionavar,” the goddess said, “may see Ceinwen hunt.”

It gave him an out, but it was cheap, shallow, demeaning. He didn’t want it.

“Goddess,” he heard himself say, wondering at his own calm, “it was not intentional, but if there is a price to be paid, I will pay it.”

A wind stirred the grass. “There is another answer you could have made, Dave Martyniuk,” Ceinwen said.

Dave was silent.

An owl suddenly burst from the tree behind him, cutting like a shadow across the crescent of the moon and away. The third one, a corner of his mind said.

Then he heard the bowstring sing. I am dead, he had time, amazingly, to think, before the arrow thudded into the tree inches above his head.

His heart was sore. There was so much. He could feel the quivering of the long shaft; the feathers touched his hair.

“Not all need die,” Green Ceinwen said. “Courage will be needed. You have sworn to pay a price to me, though, and one day I will claim it. Remember.”

Dave sank to his knees; his legs would not bear him up before her any longer. There was such a glory in her face, in the shining of her hair.

“One thing more,” he heard her say. He dared not look up. “She is not for you.”

So his very heart lay open, and how should it be otherwise? But this, this he had decided for himself; he wanted her to know. He reached for the power of speech, a long way.

“No,” he said. “I know. She’s Tore’s.”

And the goddess laughed. “Has she no other choice?” Ceinwen said mockingly, and disappeared.

Dave, on his knees, lowered his head into his hands. His whole body began to shake violently. He was still like that when Tore and Levon came looking for him.

When Tabor woke, he was ready. There was no disorientation. He was in Faelinn, and fasting, and he was awake because it was time. He looked about, opening himself, prepared to receive what had come, his secret name, the ambit of his soul.

At which point, disorientation did set in. He was still in Faelinn, still in his hollow, even, but the wood had changed. Surely there had been no cleared space before him; he would never have chosen such a place, there was no such place near this hollow.

Then he saw that the night sky had a strange color to it, and with a tremor of fear he understood that he was still asleep, he was dreaming, and would find his animal in the strange country of this dream. It was not usual, he knew; usually you woke to see your totem. Mastering fear as best he could, Tabor waited. It came from the sky.

Not a bird. No hawk or eagle—he had hoped, they all did—nor even an owl. No, his heart working strangely, Tabor realized then that the clearing was needed for the creature to land.

She did, so lightly the grass seemed scarcely to be supporting her. Lying very still, Tabor confronted his animal. With an effort, then, a very great effort, he stretched himself out, mind and soul, to the impossible creature that had come for him. It did not exist, this exquisite thing that stood gazing calmly back at him in the strangely hued night. It did not exist, but it would, he knew, as he felt her enter him, become a part of him as he of her, and he learned her name even as he learned what it was the god had summoned him to find and be found by.

For a last moment, the very last, the youngest child of Ivor heard, as if someone else were speaking, a part of himself whisper, “An eagle would have been enough.”

It was true. It would have been more than enough, but it was not so. Standing very still before him, the creature appeared to understand his thought. He felt her then, gently, in his mind. Do not reject me, he heard as from within, while her great, astonishing eyes never left his own. We will have only each other at the last.

He understood. It was in his mind, and then in his heart also. It was very deep; he hadn’t known he went so deep. In response he stretched forth a hand. The creature lowered her head, and Tabor touched the offered horn.

“Imraith-Nimphais,” he said, remembered saying, before the universe went dark.

“Hola!” cried Ivor joyously. “See who comes! Let there be rejoicing, for see, the Weaver sends a new Rider to us.”

But as Tabor drew nearer, Ivor could see that it had been a difficult fast. He had found his animal—such was written in every movement he made—but he had clearly gone a long way. It was not unusual, it was good, even. A sign of a deeper merger with the totem.

It was only when Tabor walked up close to him that Ivor felt the first touch of apprehension.

No boy came back from a true fast looking quite the same; they were boys no longer, it had to show in their faces. But what he saw in his son’s eyes chilled Ivor to the core, even in the morning sunshine of the camp.

No one else seemed to notice; the tumult of welcome resounded as it always did, louder even, for the son of the Chieftain who had been called by the god.

Called to what, Ivor was thinking, as he walked beside his youngest child towards Gereint’s house. Called to what?

He smiled, though, to mask his concern, and saw that Tabor did so as well; with his mouth only, not the eyes, and Ivor could feel a muscle jumping spasmodically where he gripped his son’s arm.

Arriving at Gereint’s door he knocked, and the two of them entered. It was dark inside, as always, and the noise from without faded to a distant murmur of anticipation.

Steadily, but with some care, Tabor walked forward and knelt before the shaman. Gereint touched him affectionately on the shoulder. Then Tabor lifted his head.

Even in the darkness Ivor saw Gereint’s harshly checked motion of shock. He and Tabor faced each other, for what seemed a very long time.

At length Gereint spoke, but not the words of ritual. “This does not exist,” the shaman said. Ivor clenched his fists.

Tabor said, “Not yet.”

“It is a true finding,” Gereint went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “But there is no such animal. You have encompassed it?”

“I think so,” Tabor said, and in his voice now was utter weariness. “I tried. I think I did.”

“I think so, too,” Gereint said, and there was wonder in his voice. “It is a very great thing Tabor dan Ivor.”

Tabor made a gesture of deprecation; it seemed to drain what reserves of endurance he had left. “It just came,” he said, and toppled sideways to his father’s feet.

As he knelt to cradle his unconscious son, Ivor heard the shaman say in his voice of ritual, “His hour knows his name.” And then, differently, “May all the powers of the Plain defend him.”

“From what?” Ivor asked, knowing he should not.

Gereint swung to face him. “This one I would tell you if I could, old friend, but truly I do not know. He went so far the sky was changed.”

Ivor swallowed. “Is it good?” he asked the shaman, who was supposed to know such things. “Is it good, Gereint?”

After too long a silence Gereint only repeated, “It is a very great thing,” which was not what he needed to hear. Ivor looked down at Tabor, almost weightless in his arms. He saw the tanned skin, straight nose, unlined brow of youth, the unruly shock of brown hair, not long enough to tie properly, too long to wear loose—it always seemed to be that way with Tabor, he thought.

“Oh, my son,” Ivor murmured, and then again, rocking him back and forth as he always used to, not so many years ago.

Chapter 13

Towards sundown they pulled the horses to a halt in a small gully, only a depression, really, defined by a series of low tummocks on the plain.

Dave was a little unnerved by all the openness. Only the dark stretch of Pendaran brooding to the west broke the long monotony of the prairie, and Pendaran wasn’t a reassuring sight.

The Dalrei were undisturbed, though; for them, clearly, this exposed spot on the darkening earth was home. The Plain was their home, all of it. For twelve hundred years, Dave remembered.

Levon would allow no fires; supper was cold eltor meat and hard cheese, with river water in flasks to wash it down. It was good, though, partly because Dave was ravenous after the day’s ride. He was brutally tired as well, he realized, unfolding his sleeping roll beside Tore’s.

Overtired, he soon amended, for once inside the blanket he found that sleep eluded him. Instead he lay awake under the wide sky, his mind circling restlessly back over the day.

Tabor had still been unconscious when they left in the morning. “He went far,” was all the Chieftain would say, but his eyes could not mask concern, even in the dark of Gereint’s house.

But then the question of Tabor was put aside for a moment, as Dave told his own story of the night glade and the Huntress, except for the very last, which was his alone. There was a silence when he was done.

Cross-legged on his mat, Gereint asked, “ ‘Courage will be needed’—she said exactly that?”

Dave nodded, then remembered it was the shaman, and grunted a yes. Gereint rocked back and forth after that, humming tunelessly to himself for a long time. So long that it startled Dave when he finally spoke.

“You must go south quickly, then, and quietly, I think. Something grows, and if Silvercloak brought you, then you should be with him.”

“It was only for the King’s festival,” Dave said. Nervousness made it sound sharper than he meant.

“Perhaps,” Gereint said, “but there are other threads appearing now.”

Which wasn’t all that wonderful.

Turning on his side, Dave could see the raised silhouette of Levon against the night sky. It was deeply comforting to have that calm figure standing guard. Levon hadn’t wanted to come at first, he remembered. Concern for his brother had left him visibly torn.

It was the Chieftain, asserting himself with absolute firmness, who had settled the issue. Levon would be useless at home. Tabor was being cared for. It was not, in any case, unusual for a faster to sleep a long time on his return. Levon, Ivor reminded his older son, had done the same. Cechtar could lead the hunt for ten days or two weeks—it would be good for him in any case, after the loss of face caused by his failure two days ago.

No, Ivor had said decisively, given Gereint’s injunction as to speed and secrecy, it was important to get Dave—Davor, he said, as they all did—south to Paras Derval safely. Levon would lead, with Tore beside him in a band of twenty. It was decided.

Logical and controlling, Dave had thought, and coolly efficient. But then he remembered his own last conversation with Ivor.

The horses had been readied. He had bidden formal, slightly stiff farewells to Leith and then Liane—he was very bad at goodbyes. He’d been embarrassed, too, by the knot of girls standing nearby. Ivor’s daughter had been elusive and remote.

After, he’d looked in on Tabor. The boy was feverish, and restless with it. Dave wasn’t good with this, either. He’d made a confused gesture to Leith, who’d come in with him. He hoped she’d understand, not that he could have said exactly what he’d wanted to convey.

It was after this that Ivor had taken him for that last stroll around the perimeter of the camp.

“The axe is yours,” the Chieftain had begun. “From what you have described, I doubt you will have great use for it in your own world, but perhaps it will serve to remind you of the Dalrei.” Ivor had frowned then. “A warlike remembrance, alas, of the Children of Peace. Is there anything else you would…?”

“No,” Dave had said, flustered. “No, it’s fine. It’s great. I’ll ah, treasure it.” Words. They had walked a few paces in silence, before Dave thought of a thing he did want to say.

“Say goodbye to Tabor for me, eh? I think… he’s a good kid. He’ll be all right, won’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Ivor had replied with disturbing frankness. They had turned at the edge of the camp to walk north, facing the Mountain. By daylight Rangat was just as dazzling, the white slopes reflecting the sunlight so brightly it hurt the eye to see.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Dave had said lamely, aware of how asinine that sounded. To cover it, he pushed on. “You’ve been, you know, really good to me here. I’ve… learned a lot.” As he said it, he realized it was true.

For the first time Ivor smiled. “That pleases me,” he said. “I like to believe we have things to teach.”

“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Dave said earnestly. “Of course you do. If I could stay longer…”

“If you could stay,” Ivor had said, stopping and looking directly at Dave, “I think you would make a Rider.”

Dave swallowed hard, and flushed with intense, self-conscious pleasure. He was speechless; Ivor had noticed. “If,” the Chieftain had added, with a grin, “we could ever find a proper horse for you!”

Sharing the laugh, they resumed their walk. God, Dave was thinking, / really, really like this man. It would have been nice to be able to say it.

But then Ivor had thrown him the curve. “I don’t know what your encounter last night means,” he had said softly, “but it means a good deal, I think. I am sending Levon south with you, Davor. It is the right thing, though I hate to see him go. He is young yet, and I love him very much. Will you take care of him forme?”

Mean, unbalancing curve ball. “What?” Dave had exclaimed, bridling reflexively at the implications. “What are you talking about? He’s the one who knows where he’s going! You want me to guard him? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

Ivor’s expression was sad. “Ah, my son,” he had said gently, “you have far to go in some ways. You, too, are young. Of course I told him to guard you as well, and with everything he has. I tell you both. Don’t you see, Davor?”

He did see. Too late, of course. And clearly, he’d been an idiot, again. Again. And with no time to make it up, for they had looped full circle by then, and Levon, Tore, and seventeen other Riders were already mounted, with what seemed to be the whole third tribe turning out to see them off.

So there had been no last private word. He’d hugged Ivor hard, though, hoping the Chieftain would somehow know that it meant a lot for him to do that. Hoping, but not knowing if.

Then he had left, south for Brennin and the way home, the axe at his saddle side, sleeping roll behind, a few other things behind as well, too far behind for anything to be done.

On the starlit dark of the Plain, Dave opened his eyes again. Levon was still there, watching over them, over him. Kevin Laine would have known how to handle that last talk, he thought, surprisingly, and slept.

On the second day they started just before sunrise. Levon set a brisk but not a killing pace; the horses would have to last, and the Dalrei knew how to judge these things. They rode in a tight cluster, with three men, rotating every second hour, sent ahead a half-mile. Quickly and quietly, Gereint had advised, and they all knew Tore had seen svart alfar heading south two weeks before. Levon might take calculated risks on the hunt, but he was not a rash man; Ivor’s son could hardly be so. He kept them moving in a state of watchful speed, and the trees at the outreaches of Pendaran rolled steadily by on their right as the sun climbed in the sky.

Gazing at the woods, less than a mile away, Dave was bothered by something. Kicking his horse forward, he caught up with Levon at the head of the main party.

“Why,” he asked, without preamble, “are we riding so close to the forest?”

Levon smiled. “You are the seventh man to ask me that,” he said cheerfully. “It isn’t very complex. I’m taking the fastest route. If we swing farther east we’ll have to ford two rivers and deal with hilly land between them. This line takes us to Adein west of the fork where Rienna joins it. Only one river, and as you see, the riding is easy.”

“But the forest? It’s supposed to be…”

“Pendaran is deadly to those who enter it. No one does. But the Wood is angry, not evil, and unless we trespass, the powers within it will not be stirred by our riding here. There are superstitions otherwise, but I have been taught by Gereint that this is so.”

“What about an ambush, like from those svart alfar?”

Levon was no longer smiling. “A svart would sooner die than enter Pendaran,” he said. “The Wood forgives none of us.”

“For what?” Dave asked.

“Lisen,” Levon said. “Shall I tell the story?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Dave.

“I have to explain magic to you first, I think. You were brought here by Silvercloak. You would have seen Matt Sören?”

“The Dwarf? Sure.”

“Do you know how they are bound to each other?”

“Haven’t a clue. Are they?”

“Assuredly,” said Levon, and as they rode south over the prairie, Dave learned, as Paul Schafer had four nights before, about the binding of mage and source, and how magic was made of that union.

Then as Levon began his tale, Tore came up quietly on his other side. The three of them rode together, bound by the rhythm and cadence of Lisen’s tragedy.

“It is a long story,” Levon began, “and much of import comes into it, and has grown out of it.I do not know nearly the whole, but it begins in the days before the Bael Rangat.

“In those days, the days before magic was as I have told you it now is, Amairgen, a counselor to Conary, the High King in Paras Derval, rode forth alone from Brennin.

“Magic in that time was governed by the earthroot, the avarlith, and so it was within the domain of the Priestesses of the Mother in Gwen Ystrat, and jealously they guarded their control. Amairgen was a proud and brilliant man, and he chafed at this. So he went forth one morning in the spring of the year, to see if it need always be so.

“In time he came, after many adventures that are all part of the full tale—though most of them I do not know—to the sacred grove in Pendaran. The Wood was not angry then, but it was a place of power, and never one that welcomed the presence of men, especially in the grove. Amairgen was brave, though, and he had been journeying long without answer to his quest, so he dared greatly, and passed a night alone in that place.

“There are songs about that night: about the three visitations he had, and his mind battle with the earth demon that came up through the grass; it was a long and terrible night, and it is sung that no man else would have lived or been whole of mind to see the dawn.

“Be that as it may, just before morning there came a fourth visitation to Amairgen, and this one was from the God, from Mörnir, and it was beneficent, for it taught to Amairgen the runes of the skylore that freed the mages ever after from the Mother.

“There was war among the gods after that, it is told, for the Goddess was wrathful at what Mörnir had done, and it was long before she would let herself be placated. Some say, though I would not know if it is true, that it was the discord and the chaos of this conflict that gave Maugrim, the Unraveller, the chance to slip from the watch of the younger gods. He came from the places where they have their home and took root in the north lands of Fionavar. So some songs and stories have it. Others say he was always here, or that he slipped into Fionavar when the Weaver’s eye was dimmed with love at the first emergence of the lios alfar—the Children of the Light. Still others tell that it was as the Weaver wept, when first man slew his brother. I know not; there are many stories. He is here and he cannot be killed. The gods grant he be always bound.

“Be all of that as it may, in the morning when Amairgen rose up, the runes in his heart and great power waiting there, he was in mortal danger yet; for the Wood, having its own guardians, was greatly angered at his having dared the grove at night, and Lisen was sent forth to break his heart and kill him.

“Of that meeting there is one song only. It was made not long after, by Ra-Termaine, greatest of all singers, Lord then of the lios alfar, and he crafted it in homage and remembrance of Amairgen. It is the most beautiful lay ever fashioned, and no poet since has ever touched the theme.

“There were very mighty peoples on the earth in those days, and among them all, Lisen of the Wood was as a Queen. A wood spirit she was, a deiena, of which there are many, but Lisen was more. It is said that on the night she was born in Pendaran, the evening star shone as brightly as the moon, and all the goddesses from Ceinwen to Nemain gave grant of their beauty to that child in the grove, and the flowers bloomed at night in the shining that arose when they all came together in that place. No one has ever been or will be more fair than was Lisen, and though the deiena live very long, Dana and Mörnir that night, as their joint gift, made her immortal that this beauty might never be lost.

“These gifts she was given at her birth, but not even the gods may shape exactly what they will, and some say that this truth is at the heart of the whole long tale. Be that so, or not, in the morning after his battles she came to Amairgen to break him with her beauty and slay him for his presumption of the night. But, as Ra-Termaine’s song tells, Amairgen was as one exalted that morning, clothed in power and lore, and the presence of Mörnir was in his eyes. So did the design of the God act to undo the design of the God, for coming to him then, wrapped in her own beauty like a star, Lisen fell in love and he with her, and so their doom was woven that morning in the grove.

“She became his source. Before the sun had set that day, he had taught her the runes. They were made mage and source by the ritual, and the first sky magic was wrought in the grove that day. That night they lay down together, and as the one song tells, Amairgen slept at length a second night in the sacred grove, but this time within the mantle of her hair. They went forth together in the morning from that place, bound as no living creatures to that day had been. Yet because Amairgen’s place was at the right hand of Conary, and there were other men to whom he had to teach the skylore, he returned to Paras Derval and founded the Council of the Mages, and Lisen went with him and so left the shelter of the Wood.”

Levon was silent. They rode thus for a long time. Then, “The tale is truly very complex now, and it picks up many other tales from the Great Years. It was in those days that the one we call the Unraveler raised his fortress of Starkadh in the Ice and came down on all the lands with war. There are so many deeds to tell of from that time. The one the Dalrei sing is of Revor’s Ride, and it is very far from the least of the great things that were done. But Amairgen Whitebranch, as he came to be called, for the staff Lisen found for him in Pendaran, was ever at the center of the war, and Lisen was at his side, source of his power and his soul.

“There are so many tales, Davor, but at length it came to pass that Amairgen learned by his art that Maugrim had taken for his own a place of great power, hidden far out at sea, and was drawing upon it mightily for his strength.

“He determined then that this island must be found and wrested away from the Dark. So Amairgen gathered to him a company of one hundred lios alfar and men, with three mages among them, and they set sail west from Taerlindel to find Cader Sedat, and Lisen was left behind.”

“What? Why?” Dave rasped, stunned.

It was Tore who answered. “She was a deiena,” he said, his own voice sounding difficult. “A deiena dies at sea. Her immortality was subject to the nature of her kind.”

“It is so,” Levon resumed quietly. “They built in that time for her the Anor Lisen at the westernmost part of Pendaran. Even in the midst of war, men and lios alfar and the powers of the Wood came together to do this for her out of love. Then she placed upon her brow the Circlet of Lisen, Amairgen’s parting gift. The Light against the Dark, it was called, for it shone of its own self, and with that light upon her brow—so great a beauty never else having been in any world—Lisen turned her back on the war and the Wood and, climbing to the summit of the tower, she set her face westward to the sea, that the Light she bore might show Amairgen the way home.

“No man knows what happened to him or those who sailed in that ship. Only that one night Lisen saw, and those who stood guard beside the Anor saw as well, a dark ship sailing slowly along the coast in the moonlight. And it is told that the moon setting west in that hour shone through its tattered sails with a ghostly light, and it could be seen that the ship was Amairgen’s, and it was empty. Then, when the moon sank into the sea, that ship disappeared forever.

“Lisen took the Circlet from her brow and laid it down; then she unbound her hair that it might be as it was when first they had come together in the grove. Having done these things, she leaped into the darkness of the sea and so died.”

The sun was high in the sky, Dave noticed. It seemed wrong, somehow, that this should be so, that the day should be so bright. “I think,” Levon whispered, “that I will go ride up front for a time.” He kicked his horse to a gallop. Dave and Tore looked at each other. Neither spoke a word. The Plain was east, the Wood west, the Sun was high in the sky.

Levon took a double shift up front. Late in the day Dave went forward himself to relieve him. Towards sunset they saw a black swan flying north almost directly overhead, very high. The sight filled them all with a vague, inexplicable sense of disquiet. Without a word being spoken, they picked up speed.

As they continued south, Pendaran gradually began to fell away westward. Dave knew it was there, but by the time darkness fell, the Wood could no longer be seen. When they stopped for the night, there was only grassland stretching away in every direction under the profligate dazzle of the summer stars, scarcely dimmed by the last thin crescent of the moon.

Later that night a dog and a wolf would battle in Mörnirwood, and Colan’s dagger, later still, would be unsheathed with a sound like a harpstring in a stone chamber underground beside Eilathen’s lake.

At dawn the sun rose red, and a dry, prickly heat came with it. From first mounting, the company was going faster than before. Levon increased the point men to four and pulled them back a little closer, so both parties could see each other all the time.

Late in the morning the Mountain exploded behind them.

With the deepest terror of his life, Dave turned with the Dalrei to see the tongue of flame rising to master the sky. They saw it divide to shape the taloned hand, and then they heard the laughter of Maugrim.

“The gods grant he be always bound,” Levon had said, only yesterday.

No dice, it seemed.

There was nothing within Dave that could surmount the brutal sound of that laughter on the wind. They were small, exposed, they were open to him and he was free. In a kind of trance, Dave saw the point men galloping frantically back to join them.

“Levon! Levon! We must go home!” one of them was shouting as he came nearer. Dave turned to Ivor’s son and, looking at him, his heart slowed towards normality, and he marveled again. There was no expression on Levon’s face, his profile seemed chiseled from stone as he gazed at the towering fire above Rangat.

But in that very calm, that impassive acceptance, Dave found a steadfastness of his own. Without moving a muscle, Levon seemed to be growing, to be willing himself to grow large enough to match, to overmatch the terror in the sky and on the wind. And somehow in that moment Dave had a flashing image of Ivor doing the selfsame thing, two days’ ride back north, under the very shadow of that grasping hand. He looked for Tore and found the dark man gazing back at him, and in Tore’s eyes Dave saw not the stern resistance of Levon, but a fierce, bright, passionate defiance, a bitter hatred of what that hand meant, but not fear.

Your hour knows your name, Dave Martyniuk thought, and then, in that moment of apocalypse, had another thought: I love these people. The realization hit him, for Dave was what he was, almost as hard as the Mountain had. Struggling to regain his inner balance, he realized that Levon was speaking, quelling the babble of voices around him.

“We do not go back. My father will be caring for the tribe. They will go to Celidon, all the tribes will. And so will we, after Davor is with Silvercloak. Two days ago Gereint said that something was coming. This is it. We go south as fast as we can to Brennin, and there,” said Levon, “I will take counsel with the High King.”

Even as he spoke, Ailell dan Art was dying in Paras Derval. When Levon finished, not another word was said. The Dalrei regrouped and began riding, very fast now and all together. They rode henceforth with a hard, unyielding intensity, turning their backs on their tribe without a demur to follow Levon, though every one of them knew, even as they galloped, that if there was war with Maugrim, it would be fought on the Plain.

It was that alert tension that gave them warning, though in the end it would not be enough to save them.

Tore it was who, late in the afternoon, sped a distance ahead; bending sideways in his saddle, he rode low to the ground for a time before wheeling back to Levon’s side. The Wood was close again, on their right. “We are coming to trouble,” Tore said shortly. “There is a party of svart alfar not far ahead of us.”

“How many?” Levon asked calmly, signaling a halt.

“Forty. Sixty.”

Levon nodded. “We can beat them, but there will be losses. They know we are here, of course.”

“If they have eyes,” Tore agreed. “We are very exposed.”

“Very well. We are close to Adein, but I do not want a fight now. It will waste us some time, but we are going to flank around them and cross both rivers farther east.”

“I don’t think we can, Levon,” Tore murmured.

“Why?” Levon had gone very still.

“Look.”

Dave turned east with Levon to where Tore was pointing, and after a moment he, too, saw the dark mass moving over the grass, low, about a mile away, and coming nearer.

“What are they?” he asked, his voice tight.

“Wolves,” Levon snapped. “Very many.” He drew his sword. “We can’t go around—they will slow us by the rivers for the svarts. We must fight through south before they reach us.” He raised his voice. “We fight on the gallop, my friends. Kill and ride, no lingering. When you reach Adein, you cross. We can outrun them on the other side.” He paused, then: “I said before there would be war. It seems that we are to fight the first battle of our people. Let the servants of Maugrim now learn to fear the Dalrei again, as they did when Revor rode!”

With an answering shout, the Riders, Dave among them, loosed their weapons and sprang into gallop. His heart thudding, Dave followed Levon over a low tummock. On the other side he could see the river glistening less than a mile away. But in their path stood the svart alfar, and as soon as the Dalrei crested the rise a shower of arrows was launched towards them. A moment later, Dave saw a Rider fall beside him, blood flowering from his breast.

A rage came over Dave then. Kicking his horse to greater speed, he crashed, with Tore and Levon on either side, into the line of svarts. Leaning in the saddle, he whistled the great axe down to cleave one of the ugly, dark green creatures where it stood. Lightheaded with fury, he pulled the axe clear and turned to swing it again.

“No!” Tore screamed. “Kill and ride! Come on!” The wolves, Dave saw in a flying glance, were less than half a mile away. Wheeling hard, he thundered with the others towards the Adein. They were through, it seemed. One man dead, two others nursing wounds, but the river was close now and once across they would be safe.

They would have been. They should have been. It was only sheerest, bitterest bad luck that the band of svarts that had ambushed Brendel and the lios alfar were there waiting.

They were, though, and there were almost a hundred of them left to rise from the shallows of Adein and block the path of the Dalrei. So with the wolves on their flank, and svarts before and behind, Levon was forced into a standing fight.

Under that red sun the Children of Peace fought their first battle in a thousand years. With courage fueled by rage they fought on their land, launching arrows of their own, angling their horses in jagged lethal movements, scything with swords soon red with blood.

“Revor!” Dave heard Levon scream, and the very name seemed to cow the massed forces of the Dark. Only for a moment, though, and there were so many. In the chaos of the melee, Dave saw face after face of the nightmare svarts appear before him with lifted swords and razor teeth bared, and in a frenzy of battle fury he raised and lowered the axe again and again. All he could do was fight, and so he did. He scarcely knew how many svarts had died under his iron, but then, pulling the axe free from a mashed skull, Dave saw that the wolves had come, and he suddenly understood that death was here, by the Adein River on the Plain. Death, at the hands of these loathsome creatures, death for Levon, for Tore…

“No!” Dave Martyniuk cried then, his voice a mighty bellow over the battle sounds, as inspiration blasted him. “To the Wood! Come on!”

And punching Levon’s shoulder, he reined his own horse so that it reared high above the encircling enemy. On the way down he swung the axe once on either side of the descending hooves, and on each side he killed. For a moment the svarts hesitated, and using the moment, Dave kicked his horse again and pounded into them, the axe sweeping red, once, and again, and again; then suddenly he was clear, as their ranks broke before him, and he cut sharply away west. West, where Pendaran lay, brooding and unforgiving, where none of them, man or svart alfar or even the giant, twisted wolves of Galadan, dared go.

Three of them did dare, though. Looking back, Dave saw Levon and Tore knife through the gap his rush had carved and follow him in a flat-out race west, with the wolves at their heels and arrows falling about them in the growing dark.

Three only, no more, though not for lack of courage. The rest were dead. Nor had there been a scanting of gallant bravery in any one of the Dalrei who died that day, seventeen of them, by Adein where it runs into Llewenmere by Pendaran Wood.

They were devoured by the svart alfar as the sun went down. The dead always were. It was not the same as if it were the lios they had killed, of course, but blood was blood, and the red joy of killing was thick within them all that night. After, the two groups them, so happily come together, made a pile of bones, clean-picked and otherwise, and started in, letting the wolves join them now, on their own dead. Blood was blood.

There was a lake on their left, dark waters glimpsed through a lattice of trees as they whipped by. Dave had a fleeting image of hurtful beauty, but the wolves were close behind and they could not linger. At full tilt they hurtled into the outreaches of the forest, leaping a fallen branch, dodging sudden trees, not slacking pace at all, until at last Dave became aware that the wolves were no longer chasing them.

The twisting half-trail they followed became rougher, forcing them to slow, and then it was merely an illusion, not really a path. The three of them stopped, breathing with harsh effort amid the lengthening shadows of trees.

No one spoke. Levon’s face, Dave saw, was like stone again, but not as before. This he recognized: not the steadfastness of resolution, but a rigid control locking the muscles, the heart, against the pain inside. You held it in, Dave thought, had always thought. It didn’t belong to anyone else. He couldn’t look at Levon’s face very long, though; it twisted him somehow, on top of everything else.

Turning to Tore, he saw something different. “You’re bleeding,” he said, looking at the blood welling from the dark man’s thigh. “Get down, let’s have a look.”

He, of course, hadn’t a clue what to do. It was Levon, glad of the need for action, who tore his sleeping roll into strips and made a tourniquet for the wound, which was messy but, after cleaning, could be seen to be shallow.

By the time Levon finished, it was dark, and they had all been deeply conscious for some moments of something pulsing in the woods around them. Nor was there anything remotely vague about it: what they sensed was anger, and it could be heard in the sound of the leaves, felt in the vibrations of the earth beneath their feet. They were in Pendaran, and men, and the Wood did not forgive.

“We can’t stay here!” Tore said abruptly. It sounded loud in the dark; for the first time, Dave heard strain in his voice.

“Can you walk?” Levon asked.

“I will,” said Tore grimly. “I would rather be on my feet and moving when we meet whatever is sent for us.” The leaves were louder now, and there seemed—or was that imagination? — to be a rhythm to their sound.

“We will leave the horses, then,” Levon said. “They will be all right. I agree with you—I don’t think we can lie down tonight. We will walk south, until we meet what—”

“Until we’re out!” Dave said strongly. “Come on, both of you. Levon, you said before, this place isn’t evil.”

“It doesn’t have to be, to kill us,” said Tore. “Listen.” It was not imagination; there was a pattern to the sound of the leaves.

“Would you prefer,” Dave snapped, “to go back and try to make nice to the wolves?”

“He’s right, Tore,” Levon said. In the dark, only his long yellow hair could be seen. Tore, in black, was almost invisible. “And Davor,” Levon went on, in a different voice, “you wove something very bright back there. I don’t think any man in the tribe could have forced that opening. Whatever happens after, you saved our lives then.”

“I just swung the thing,” Dave muttered. At which Tore, astonishingly, laughed aloud. For a moment the listening trees were stilled. No mortal had laughed in Pendaran for a millennium. “You are,” said Tore dan Sorcha, “as bad as me, as bad as him. Not one of us can deal with praise. Is your face red right now, my friend?”

Of course it was, for God’s sake. “What do you think?” he mumbled. Then, feeling the ridiculousness of it, hearing Levon’s snort of amusement, Dave felt something let go inside, tension, fear, grief, all of them, and he laughed with his friends in the Wood where no man went.

It lasted for some time; they were all young, had fought their first battle, seen comrades slaughtered beside them. There was a cutting edge of hysteria to the moment.

Levon took them past it. “Tore is right,” he said finally. “We are alike. In this, and in other ways. Before we leave this place, there is a thing I want to do. Friends of mine have died today. It would be good to have two new brothers. Will you mingle blood with me?”

“I have no brothers,” Tore said softly. “It would be good.”

Dave’s heart was racing. “For sure,” he said.

And so the ritual was enacted in the Wood. Tore made the incisions with his blade and they touched their wrists, each to each, in the dark. No one spoke. After, Levon made bandages, then they freed the horses, took their gear and weapons, and set forth together south through the forest, Tore leading, Levon last, Dave between his brothers.

As it happened, they had done more than they knew. They had been watched, and Pendaran understood these things, bindings wrought of blood. It did not assuage the anger or the hate, for she was forever lost who should never have died; but though these three had still to be slain, they could be spared madness before the end. So it was decided as they walked, oblivious to the meaning of the whispering around them, wrapped in it, though, as in a net of sound.

For Tore, nothing had ever been so difficult or shaken him so deeply as that progression. Over and above the horrors of the slaughter by Adein, the deep terror of being in Pendaran, there was another thing for him: he was a night mover, a woods person, this was his milieu, and all he had to do was lead his companions south.

Yet he could not.

Roots appeared, inexplicably, for him to stumble over, fallen branches blocked paths, other trails simply ended without apparent cause. Once, he almost fell.

South, that’s all! he snarled to himself, oblivious in his concentration to the aching of his leg. It was no good, though—every trail that seemed to hold promise soon turned, against all sense or reason, to the west. Are the trees moving? he asked himself once, and pulled sharply away from the implications of that. Or am I just being incredibly stupid?

For whichever cause, supernatural or psychological, after a little while it was clear to him that hard as he might try—cutting right through a thicket once—to keep them on the eastern edges of the Great Wood, they were being drawn, slowly, very patiently, but quite inescapably, westward into the heart of the forest.

It was not, of course, his fault at all. None of what happened was. Pendaran had had a thousand years to shape the paths and patterns of its response to intrusions such as theirs.

It is well, the trees whispered to the spirits of the Wood.

Very well, the deiena replied.

Leaves, leaves, Tore heard. Leaves and wind.

For Dave that night walk was very different. He was not of Fionavar, knew no legends of the Wood to appal, beyond the story Levon had told the day before, and that was more sorrowful than frightening. With Tore before and Levon behind, he felt quite certain that they were going as they should. He was blissfully unaware of Tore’s desperate maneuverings ahead of him, and after a time he grew accustomed to, even sedated by, the murmurings all around them.

So sedated, that he had been walking alone, due west, for about ten minutes before he realized it.

“Tore!” he cried, as sudden fear swept over him. “Levon!” There was, of course, no reply. He was utterly alone in Pendaran Wood at night.

Chapter 14

Had it been any other night, they would have died.

Not badly, for the forest would do this much honor to their exchange of blood, but their deaths had been quite certain from the moment they had ridden past haunted Llewenmere into the trees. One man alone had walked in Pendaran and come out alive since Maugrim, whom the powers called Sathain, had been bound. All others had died, badly, screaming before the end. Pity was not a thing the Wood could feel.

Any other night. But away south of them in another wood, this was Paul Schafer’s third night on the Summer Tree.

Even as the three intruders were being delicately separated from each other, the focus of Pendaran was torn utterly away from them by something impossible and humbling, even for the ancient, nameless powers of the Wood.

A red moon rose in the sky.

In the forest it was as if a fire had started. Every power and spirit of the wild magic, of tree and flower or beast, even the dark, oldest ones that seldom woke and that all the others feared, the powers of night and the dancing ones of dawn, those of music and those who moved in deadly silence, all of them began a mad rush away, away, to the sacred grove, for they had to be there before that moon was high enough to shed her light upon the glade.

Dave heard the whispering of the leaves stop. It frightened him, everything did now. But then there came a swift sense of release, as if he were no longer being watched. In the next instant he felt a great sweep, as of wind but not wind, as something rushed over him, through him, hurtling away to the north.

Understanding nothing, only that the Wood seemed to be simply a wood now, the trees merely trees, Dave turned to the east, and he saw the full moon resting, red and stupefying, atop the highest trees.

Such was the nature of the Mother’s power that even Dave Martyniuk, alone and lost, unspeakably far from home and a world he somewhat comprehended, could look upon that moon and take heart from it. Even Dave could see it for an answer to the challenge of the Mountain.

Not release, only an answer, for that red moon meant war as much as anything ever could. It meant blood and war, but not a hopeless conflict now, not with Dana’s intercession overhead, higher than even Rangat’s fires could be made to climb.

All this was inchoate, confused, struggling for some inner articulation in Dave that never quite came together; the sense was there, though, the intuitive awareness that the Lord of the Dark might be free, but he would not be unopposed. It was thus with most of those across Fionavar who saw that symbol in the heavens: the Mother works, has always worked, along the tracings of the blood so that we know things of her we do not realize we know. In very great awe, hope stirring in his heart, Dave looked into the eastern sky, and the thought that came to him with absolute incongruity was that his father would have liked to see this thing.

For three days Tabor had not opened his eyes. When the Mountain unleashed its terror, he only stirred on his bed and murmured words that his mother, watching, could not understand. She adjusted the cloth on his forehead and the blankets over him, unable to do more.

She had to leave him for a while after that, for Ivor had given orders, swift and controlled, to quell the panic caused by the laughter riding on the wind. They were starting east for Celidon at first light tomorrow. They were too alone here, too exposed, under the very palm, it seemed, of the hand that hung above Rangat.

Even through the loud tumult of preparation, with the camp a barely contained whirlwind of chaos, Tabor slept.

Nor did the rising of a red full moon on new moon night cause him to wake, though all the tribe stopped what they were doing, wonder shining in their eyes, to see it swing up above the Plain.

“This gives us time,” Gereint said, when Ivor snatched a minute to talk with him. The work continued at night, by the strange moonlight. “He will not move quickly now, I think.”

“Nor will we,” Ivor said. “It is going to take us time to get there. I want us out by dawn.”

“I’ll be ready,” the old shaman said. “Just put me on a horse and point it the right way.”

Ivor felt a surge of affection for Gereint. The shaman had been white-haired and wrinkled for so long he seemed to be timeless. He wasn’t, though, and the rapid journey of the coming days would be a hardship for him.

As so often, Gereint seemed to read his mind. “I never thought,” he said, very low, “I would live so long. Those who died before this day may be the fortunate ones.”

“Maybe so,” Ivor said soberly. “There will be war.”

“And have we any Revors or Colans, any Ra-Termaines or Seithrs among us? Have we Amairgen or Lisen?” Gereint asked painfully.

“We shall have to find them,” Ivor said simply. He laid a hand on the shaman’s shoulder. “I must go. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow. But see to Tabor.”

Ivor had planned to supervise the last stages of the wagon loading, but instead he detailed Cechtar to that and went to sit quietly by his son.

Two hours later Tabor woke, though not truly. He rose up from his bed, but Ivor checked his cry of joy, for he saw that his son was wrapped in a waking trance, and it was known to be dangerous to disturb such a thing.

Tabor dressed, quickly and in silence, and left the house. Outside the camp was finally still, asleep in troubled anticipation of grey dawn. The moon was very high, almost overhead.

It was, in fact, now high enough. West of them a dance of light was beginning in the clearing of the sacred grove, while the gathered powers of Pendaran watched.

Walking very quickly, Tabor went around to the stockade, found his horse, and mounted. Lifting the gate, he rode out and began to gallop west.

Ivor, running to his own horse, leaped astride, bareback, and followed. Alone on the Plain, father and son rode towards the Great Wood, and Ivor, watching the straight back and easy riding of his youngest child, felt his heart grow sore.

Tabor had gone far indeed. It seemed he had farther yet to go. The Weaver shelter him, Ivor prayed, looking north to the now quiescent glory of Rangat.

More than an hour they rode, ghosts on the night plain, before the massive presence of Pendaran loomed ahead of them, and then Ivor prayed again: Let him not go into it. Let it not be there, for I love him.

Does that count for anything, he wondered; striving to master the deep fear the Wood always aroused in him.

It seemed that it might, for Tabor stopped his horse fifty yards from the trees and sat quietly, watching the dark forest. Ivor halted some distance behind. He felt a longing to call his son’s name, to call him back from wherever he had gone, was going.

He did not. Instead, when Tabor, murmuring something his father could not hear, slipped from his mount and walked into the forest, Ivor did the bravest deed of all his days, and followed. No call of any god could make Ivor dan Banor let his son walk tranced into Pendaran Wood alone.

And thus did it come to pass that father and both sons entered into the Great Wood that night.

Tabor did not go far. The trees were thin yet at the edge of the forest, and the red moon lit their path with a strangely befitting light. None of this, Ivor thought, belonged to the daylight world. It was very quiet. Too quiet, he realized, for there was a breeze, he could feel it on his skin, and yet it made no sound among the leaves. The hair rose up on the back of Ivor’s neck. Fighting for calm in the enchanted silence, he saw Tabor suddenly stop ten paces ahead, holding himself very still. And a moment later Ivor saw a glory step from the trees to stand before his son.

Westward was the sea, she had known that, though but newly born. So east she had walked from the birthing place she shared with Lisen—though that she did not know—and as she passed among the gathered powers, seen and unseen, a murmur like the forest’s answer to the sea had risen up and fallen like a wave in the Wood.

Very lightly she went, knowing no other way to tread the earth, and on either side the creatures of the forest did her homage, for she was Dana’s, and a gift in time of war, and so was much more than beautiful.

And as she traveled, there came a face into the eye of her mind—how, she knew not, nor would ever—but from the time that was before she was, a face appeared to her, nut-brown, very young, with dark unruly hair, and eyes she needed to look into. Besides, and more than anything, this one knew her name. So here and there her path turned as she sought, all unknowing, delicate and cloaked in majesty, a certain place within the trees.

Then she was there and he was there before her, waiting, a welcome in those eyes, and a final acceptance of what she was, all of her, both edges of the gift.

She felt his mind in hers like a caress, and nudged him back as if with her horn. Only each other, at the last, she thought, her first such thought. Whence had it come?

I knew, his mind answered her. There will be war.

For this was I birthed, she replied, aware of a sudden of what lay sheathed within the light, light grace of her form. It frightened her.

He saw this and came nearer. She was the color of the risen moon, but the horn that brushed the grass when she lowered her head for his touch was silver.

My name? she asked.

Imraith-Nimphais, he told her, and she felt power burst within her like a star.

Joyously she asked, Would you fly?

She felt him hesitate.

I would not let you fall,she told him, a little hurt.

She felt his laughter then. Oh, I know, bright one, he said, but if we fly you may be seen and our time is not yet come.

She tossed her head impatiently, her mane rippling. The trees were thinner here, she could see the stars, the moon. She wanted them. There is no one to see but one man, she told him. The sky was calling her.

My father, he said. I love him.

Then so will I, she answered, but now I would fty. Come!

And within her then he said, I will,and moved to mount astride her back. He was no weight at all; she was very strong and would be stronger yet. She bore him past the other, older man, and because Tabor loved him, she lowered her horn to him as they went by.

Then they were clear of the trees, and there was open grass and oh, the sky, all the sky above. For the first time she released her wings and they rose in a rush of joy to greet the stars and the moon whose child she was. She could feel his mind within hers, the exulting of his heart, for they were bound forever, and she knew that they were glorious, wheeling across the wide night sky, Imraith-Nimphais and the Rider who knew her name.

When the chestnut unicorn his son rode lowered her head to him as they passed, Ivor could not keep the tears from his eyes. He always cried too easily, Leith used to scold, but this, surely this transcendency…?

And then, turning to follow them, he saw it become even more, for the unicorn took flight. Ivor lost all track of time then, seeing Tabor and the creature of his fast go soaring across the night. He could almost share the joy they felt in the discovery of flight, and he felt blessed in his heart. He had walked into Pendaran and come out alive to see this creature of the Goddess bear his son like a comet above the Plain.

He was too much a Chieftain and too wise to forget that there was a darkness coming. Even this creature, this gift, could not be an easy thing, not colored as she was like the moon, like blood. Nor would Tabor ever be the same, he knew. But these sorrows were for the daylight—tonight he could let his heart fly with the two of them, the two young ones at play in the wind between him and the stars. Ivor laughed, as he had not in years, like a child.

After an unknown time they came down gently, not far from where he stood. He saw his son lay his head against that of the unicorn, beside the silver shining of its horn. Then Tabor stepped back, and the creature turned, moving with terrible grace, and went back into the darkness of the Wood.

When Tabor turned to him, his eyes were his own again. Wordlessly, for there were no words, Ivor held out his arms and his youngest child ran into them.

“You saw?” Tabor asked finally, his head against his father’s chest.

“I did. You were glorious.”

Tabor straightened, his eyes reclaiming their dance, their youth. “She bowed to you! I didn’t ask. I just said you were my father and I loved you, so she said she would love you, too, and she bowed.”

Ivor’s heart was full of light. “Come,” he said gruffly, “it is time to go home. Your mother will be weeping with anxiety.”

“Mother?” Tabor asked in a tone so comical Ivor had to laugh. They mounted and rode back, slowly now, and together, over their Plain. On this eve of war a curious peace seemed to descend upon Ivor. Here was his land, the land of his people for so long that the years lost meaning. From Andarien to Brennin, from the mountains to Pendaran, all the grass was theirs. The Plain was the Dalrei, and they, it. He let that knowledge flow through him like a chord of music, sustaining and enduring.

It would have to endure in the days to come, he knew, the full power of the Dark coming down. And he also knew that it might not. Tomorrow, Ivor thought, I will worry tomorrow; and riding in peace over the prairie beside his son, he came back to the camp and saw Leith waiting for them by the western gate.

Seeing her, Tabor slipped from his horse and ran into her arms. Ivor willed his eyes to stay dry as he watched. Sentimental fool, he castigated himself; she was right. When Leith, still holding the boy, looked a question up at him he nodded as briskly as he could.

“To bed, young man,” she said firmly. “We’re riding in a few hours. You need sleep.”

“Oh, Mother,” Tabor complained, “I’ve done nothing but sleep for the—”

“Bed!” Leith said, in a voice all her children knew.

“Yes, Mother,” labor replied, with such pure happiness that even Leith smiled watching him go into the camp. Fourteen, Ivor thought, regardless of everything. Absolutely regardless.

He looked down at his wife. She met the look in silence. It was, he realized, their first moment alone since the Mountain. “It was all right?” she asked.

“It was. It is something very bright.”

“I don’t think I want to know, just yet.” He nodded, seeing once more, discovering it anew, how beautiful she was.

“Why did you marry me?” he asked impulsively. She shrugged. “You asked.” Laughing, he dismounted, and with each of them leading a horse, his and Tabor’s, they went back into the camp. They put the animals in the stockade and turned home.

At the doorway Ivor looked up for the last time at that moon, low now in the west, over where Pendaran was.

“I lied,” Leith said quietly. “I married you because no other man I know or can imagine could have made my heart leap so when he asked.”

He turned from the moon to her. “The sun rises in your eyes,” he said. The formal proposal. “It always, always has, my love.”

He kissed her. She was sweet and fragrant in his arms, and she could kindle his desire so…

“The sun rises in three hours,” she said, disengaging. “Come to bed.”

“Indeed,” said Ivor.

“To sleep,” she said, warningly.

“I am not,” Ivor said, “fourteen years old. Nor am I tired.”

She looked at him sternly a moment, then the smile lit her face as from within.

“Good,” said Leith, his wife. “Neither am I.” She took his hand and drew him inside.

Dave had no idea where he was, nor, beyond a vague notion of heading south, where to go. There weren’t likely to be signposts in Pendaran Wood indicating the mileage to Paras Derval.

On the other hand, he was absolutely certain that if Tore and Levon were alive, they’d be looking for him, so the best course seemed to be to stay put and call out at intervals. This raised the possibility of other things answering, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about that.

Remembering Tore’s comments on the “babies” in Faelinn Grove, he sat down against a tree on the upwind side of a clearing, where he could see anything coming across, with a chance of hearing or smelling something approaching from behind. He then proceeded to negate this bit of concealment by shouting Levon’s name several times at the top of his voice.

He looked around afterwards, but there was nothing stirring. Indeed, as the echoes of his cry faded, Dave became deeply aware of the silence of the forest. That wild rush, as of wind, seemed to have carried everything with it. He appeared to be very much alone.

But not quite. “You make it,” a deep voice sounded, from almost directly beneath him, “very hard for honest folk to sleep.”

Leaping violently to his feet, Dave raised his axe and watched apprehensively as a large fallen tree trunk was rolled aside to reveal a series of steps leading down, and a figure emerging to look up at him.

A long way up. The creature he’d awakened resembled a portly gnome more than anything else. A very long white beard offset a bald crown and rested comfortably on a formidable paunch. The figure wore some sort of loose, hooded robe, and the whole ensemble stood not much more than four feet high.

“Could you trouble yourself,” the bass voice continued, “to summon this Levon person from some other locality?”

Checking a bizarre impulse to apologize, and another to swing first and query later, Dave raised the axe to shoulder height and growled, “Who are you?”

Disconcertingly, the little man laughed. “Names already? Six days with the Dalrei should have taught you to go slower with a question like that. Call me Flidais, if you like, and put that down.”

The axe, a live thing suddenly, leaped from Dave’s hands and fell on the grass. Flidais hadn’t even moved. His mouth open, Dave stared at the little man. “I am testy when awakened,” Flidais said mildly. “And you should know better than to bring an axe in here. I’d leave it there if I were you.”

Dave found his voice. “Not unless you take it from me,” he rasped. “It was a gift from Ivor dan Banor of the Dalrei and I want it.”

“Ah,” said Flidais. “Ivor.” As if that explained a good deal. Dave had a sense, one that always irritated him, that he was being mocked. On the other hand, he didn’t seem in a position to do much about it.

Controlling his temper, he said, “If you know Ivor, you know Levon. He’s in here somewhere, too. We were ambushed by svart alfar and escaped into the forest. Can you help me?”

“I am pied for protection, dappled for deception,” Flidais replied with sublime inconsequentiality. “How do you know I’m not in league with those svarts?”

Once more Dave forced himself to be calm. “I don’t,” he said, “but I need help, and you’re the only thing around, whoever you are.”

“Now that, at least, is true,” Flidais nodded sagely. “All the others have gone north to the grove, or,” he amended judiciously, “south to the grove if they were north of it to start with.”

Cuckoo, Dave thought. I have found a certifiable loon. Wonderful, just wonderful.

“I have been the blade of a sword,” Flidais confided, confirming the hypothesis. “I have been a star at night, an eagle, a stag in another wood than this. I have been in your world and died, twice; I have been a harp and a harper both.”

In spite of himself Dave was drawn into it. In the red-tinted shadows of the forest, there was an eerie power to the chant.

“I know,” Flidais intoned, “how many worlds there are, and I know the skylore that Amairgen learned. I have seen the moon from undersea, and I heard the great dog howl last night. I know the answer to all the riddles there are, save one, and a dead man guards that gateway in your world, Davor of the Axe, Dave Martyniuk.”

Against his will, Dave asked, “What riddle is that?” He hated this sort of thing. God, did he hate it.

“Ah,” said Flidais, tilting his head. “Would you come to salmon knowledge so easily? Be careful or you will burn your tongue. I have told you a thing already, forget it not, though the white-haired one will know. Beware the boar, beware the swan, the salt sea bore her body on.”

Adrift in a sea of his own, Dave grabbed for a floating spar. “Lisen’s body?” he asked.

Flidais stopped and regarded him. There was a slight sound in the trees. “Good,” Flidais said at last. “Very good. For that you may keep the axe. Come down and I will give you food and drink.”

At the mention of food, Dave became overwhelmingly aware that he was ravenous. With a sense of having accomplished something, though by luck as much as anything else, he followed Flidais down the crumbling earthen stairs.

At the bottom there opened out a catacomb of chambers, shaped of earth and threaded through twisting tree roots. Twice he banged his head before following his small host into a comfortable room with a rough table and stools around it. There was a cheery light, though from no discernible source.

“I have been a tree,” Flidais said, almost as if answering a question. “I know the earthroot’s deepest name.”

“Avarlith?” Dave hazarded, greatly daring.

“Not that,” Flidais replied, “but good, good.” He seemed to be in a genial mood now as he puttered about domestically.

Feeling curiously heartened, Dave pushed a little. “I came here with Loren Silvercloak and four others. I got separated from them. Levon and lore were taking me to Paras Derval, then there was that explosion and we got ambushed.”

Flidais looked aggrieved. “I know all that,” he said, a little petulantly. “There shall be a shaking of the Mountain.”

“Well, there was,” Dave said, taking a pull at the drink Flidais offered. Having done which, he pitched forward on the table, quite unconscious.

Flidais regarded him a long time, a speculative look in his eye. He no longer seemed quite so genial, and certainly not mad. After a while, the air registered the presence he’d been awaiting.

“Gently,” he said. “This is one of my homes, and tonight you owe me.”

“Very well.” She muted a little the shining from within her. “Is it born?”

“Even now,” he replied. “They will return soon.”

“It is well,” she said, satisfied. “I am here now and was here at Lisen’s birth. Where were you?” Her smile was capricious, unsettling.

“Elsewhere,” he admitted, as if she had scored a point. “I was Taliesen. I have been a salmon.”

“I know,” she said. Her presence filled the room as if a star were underground. Despite his request, it was still hard to look upon her face. “The one riddle,” she said. “Would you know the answer?”

He was very old and extremely wise, and he was half a god himself, but this was the deepest longing of his soul. “Goddess,” he said, a helpless streaming of hope within him, “I would.”

“So would I,” she said cruelly. “If you find the summoning name, do not fail to tell me. And,” said Ceinwen, letting a blinding light well up from within her so that he closed his eyes in pain and dread, “speak not ever to me again of what I owe. I owe nothing, ever, but what has been promised, and if I promise, it is not a debt, but a gift. Never forget.”

He was on his knees. The brightness was overpowering. “I have known,” Flidais said, a trembling in his deep voice, “the shining of the Huntress in the Wood.”

It was an apology; she took it for such. “It is well,” she said for the second time, muting her presence once more, so that he might look upon her countenance. “I go now,” she said. “This one I will take. You did well to summon me, for I have laid claim to him.”

“Why, goddess?” Flidais asked softly, looking at the sprawled form of Dave Martyniuk.

Her smile was secret and immortal. “It pleases me,” she said. But just before she vanished with the man, Ceinwen spoke again, so low it was almost not a sound. “Hear me, forest one: if I learn what name calls the Warrior, I will tell it thee. A promise.”

Stricken silent, he knelt again on his earthen floor. It was, had always been, his heart’s desire. When he looked up he was alone.

They woke, all three of them, on soft grass in the morning light. The horses grazed nearby. They were on the very fringes of the forest; southward a road ran from east to west, and beyond it lay low hills. One farmhouse could be seen past the road, and overhead birds sang as if it were the newest morning of the world. Which it was.

In more ways than the obvious, after the cataclysms that the night had known. Such powers had moved across the face of Fionavar as had not been gathered since the worlds were spun and the Weaver named the gods. Iorweth Founder had not endured that blast of Rangat, seen that hand in the sky, nor had Conary known such thunder in Mörnirwood, or the white power of the mist that exploded up from the Summer Tree, through the body of the sacrifice. Neither Revor nor Amairgen had ever seen a moon like the one that had sailed that night, nor had the Baelrath blazed so in answer on any other hand in the long telling of its tale. And no man but Ivor dan Banor had ever seen Imraith-Nimphais bear her Rider across the glitter of the stars.

Given such a gathering, a concatenation of powers such that the worlds might never be the same, how small a miracle might it be said to be that Dave awoke with his friends in the freshness of that morning on the southern edge of Pendaran, with the high road from North Keep to Rhoden running past, and a horn lying by his side.

A small miracle, in the light of all that had shaken the day and night before, but that which grants life where death was seen as certain can never be inconsequential, or even less than wondrous, to those who are the objects of its intercession.

So the three of them rose up, in awe and great joy, and told their stories to each other while morning’s bird-song spun and warbled overhead.

For Tore, there had been a blinding flash, with a shape behind it, apprehended but not seen, then darkness until this place. Levon had heard music all around him, strong and summoning, a wild cry of invocation as of a hunt passing overhead, then it had changed, so gradually he could not tell how or when, but there came a moment when it was so very sad and restful he had to sleep—to wake with his new brothers on the grass, Brennin spread before them in a mild sunlight.

“Hey, you two!” cried Dave exuberantly. “Will you look at this?” He held up the carved horn, ivory-colored, with workmanship in gold and silver, and runes engraved along the curve of it. In a spirit of euphoria and delight, he set the horn to his lips and blew.

It was a rash, precipitate act, but one that could cause no harm, for Ceinwen had intended him to have this and to learn the thing they all learned as that shining note burst into the morning.

She had presumed, for this treasure was not truly hers to bestow. They were to blow the horn and learn the first property of it, then ride forth from the place where it had lain so long. That was how she had intended it to be, but it is a part of the design of the Tapestry that not even a goddess may shape exactly what she wills, and Ceinwen had reckoned without Levon dan Ivor.

The sound was Light. They knew it, all three of them, as soon as Dave blew the horn. It was bright and clean and carrying, and Dave understood, even as he took it from his lips to gaze in wonder at what he held, that no agent of the Dark could ever hear that sound. In his heart this came to him, and it was a true knowing, for such was the first property of that horn.

“Come on,” said Tore, as the golden echoes died away. “We’re still in the Wood. Let’s move.” Obediently Dave turned to mount his horse, still dazzled by the sound he had made.

“Hold!” said Levon.

There were perhaps five men in Fionavar who might have known the second power of that gift, and none in any other world. But one of the five was Gereint, the shaman of the third tribe of the Dalrei, who had knowledge of many lost things, and who had been the teacher of Levon dan Ivor.

She had not known or intended this, but not even a goddess can know all things. She had intended a small gift. What happened was otherwise, and not small. For a moment the Weaver’s hands were still at his Loom, then Levon said:

“There should be a forked tree here.”

And a thread came back with his words into the Tapestry of all the worlds, one that had been lost a very long time.

It was Tore who found it. An enormous ash had been split by lightning—they could have no glimmering how long ago—and its trunk lay forked now, at about the height of a man.

In silence, Levon walked over, Dave beside him, to where Tore was standing. Dave could see a muscle jumping in his face. Then Levon spoke again:

“And now the rock.”

Standing together the three of them looked through the wishbone fork of the ash. Dave had the angle. “There,” he said, pointing.

Levon looked, and a great wonder was in his eyes. There was indeed a rock set flush into a low mound at the edge of the Wood. “Do you know,” he said in a hushed whisper, “that we have found the Cave of the Sleepers.”

“I don’t understand,” said Tore.

“The Wild Hunt,” Levon replied. Dave felt a prickling at the back of his neck. “The wildest magic that ever was lies in that place asleep.” The strain in Levon’s usually unruffled voice was so great it cracked. “Owein’s Horn is what you just blew, Davor. If we could ever find the flame, they would ride again. Oh, by all the gods!”

“Tell me,” Dave pleaded; he, too, was whispering.

For a moment Levon was silent; then, as they stared at the rock through the gap in the ash, he began to chant:

The flame will wake from sleep

The Kings the horn will call,

But though they answer from the deep

You may never hold in thrall

Those who ride from Owein’s Keep

With a child before them all.

“The Wild Hunt,” Levon repeated as the sound of his chanting died away. “I have not words to tell how far beyond the three of us this is.” And he would say no more.

They rode then from that place, from the great stone and the torn tree with the horn slung at Dave’s side. They crossed the road, and by tacit agreement rode in such a way as to be seen by no men until they should come to Silvercloak and the High King.

All morning they rode, through hilly farmland, and at intervals a fine rain fell. It was badly needed, they could see, for the land was dry.

It was shortly after midday that they crested a series of ascending ridges running to the southeast, and saw, gleaming below them, a lake set like a jewel within the encircling hills. It was very beautiful, and they stopped a moment to take it in. There was a small farmhouse by the water, more a cottage really, with a yard and a barn behind it.

Riding slowly down, they would have passed by, as they had all the other farms, except that as they descended, an old, white-haired woman came out in back of the cottage to gaze at them.

Looking at her as they approached, Dave saw that she was not, in fact, so old after all. She made a gesture of her hand to her mouth that he seemed, inexplicably, to know.

Then she was running towards them over the grass, and with an explosion of joy in his heart, Dave leaped, shouting, from his horse, and ran and ran and ran until Kimberly was in his arms.