"Ysabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER IX

After a blank, rigid moment, during which he could see her absorb what he’d just said, Kate put a hand to her mouth. She looked fearfully around her in the great and gathering dark—which had come down upon them hours too soon.

“Ned, what’s happening?”

As if he’d know. As if he had any hope of knowing.

Gazing past her, still trying to accept the reality of this, Ned saw torches. He tried to swallow; it felt like there was sandpaper in his throat. His heart thumped again, so hard it was painful.

Fires were burning in the meadow east of the entrance through which they’d just come. Torches in a long line—a procession moving towards the ruins.

Unable to form words, Ned just pointed. Kate turned to see.

“Oh, God. What have I done?” she whispered.

No good answer for that. No time for one. Ned looked desperately around for a hiding place, but except for the one column beside him everything in Entremont was flat, levelled. Catapults and time.

He stepped quickly back out of the sanctuary, grabbed Kate by the hand and, bending low, started running east along that wide main street between the upper and lower towns. They went straight out of the site and down the shallow slope. He pulled her to the ground behind a tree.

They lay there, breathing hard.

He thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t.

Ned lifted his head after a moment, cautiously, looking to his right, where the torches were. Twenty or thirty of them, he guessed. Some were inside the lower city now, others following. Coming in the way he and Kate had come themselves moments ago—in the sunlight of a springtime afternoon.

It was dark now. It was undeniably, impossibly, night.

He couldn’t clearly make out the figures carrying those flames. Beltaine, he thought. The Celts used to light sacred fires tonight. He was looking at fires.

Kate lay beside him in the grass, up close, hip and thigh against his. He had to give her credit, she wasn’t trembling or whimpering or anything like that. In the midst of everything, with the nearness, he was aware of her perfume again.

“This,” she whispered suddenly, turning her mouth to his ear, “is kind of cozy.”

Ned’s jaw actually dropped again. So much for whimpering, or tears. “Are you insane?” he hissed.

“Hope not. But really…I never in my life expected to see anything like this. Did you never have dreams about magic?”

And what did that have to do with anything?

“Kate, get it together! I met some of these guys two nights ago I think. We could get killed here.”

“Then stay close,” she murmured, “and let’s be real quiet.” She shifted a bit so one arm was right against him.

“Quiet won’t do it,” he whispered. “They can sense things. If I can do it, they sure can. We need to get away.”

He fished in his pocket for his phone. “Turn yours off,” he rasped. “Last thing we need is a ringtone right now.”

She moved to open her pack and do it. Ned flipped his phone open. Thank God, he thought: it was working here. He went to dial Greg and then stopped and swore savagely under his breath. Melanie’s stupid, stupid joke. Greg had that idiotic, multi-digit auto-dial, and Ned didn’t know his actual cell number. He punched “3” savagely. Heard two rings.

“Ned, what’s up?”

He kept his voice very low. “Melanie, listen, I’m in a bit of trouble. I’ll tell you later, but please get Greg to bring the van to the road below a place called Entremont. Quick as he can. I’ll meet him there. You know where it is? You can tell him how to get here?”

She was brisk, unruffled. Had to give her that. “I do know. Just north of town? Ned, you okay?”

“I will be when he gets here. It’s, ah, something like what happened at the mountain.”

“Poor baby. Okay. I’ll have him bring Advil. Hang in. He’ll be on his way.”

Ned flipped the phone shut and turned off his ringer. Put it back in his pocket. Lifeline to the real world, from wherever this one was.

He glanced at Kate, still right up next to him. “Is there another way back to the highway?”

She wasn’t totally out of her mind. She whispered, “They had a stairway up the cliff, at the other end, but it’s crumbled away mostly. It would go south down the valley, I guess.”

“We may have to try it. This isn’t close to safe.”

He lifted his head again. More torches, at least twenty of them. Some had been planted along the path now: from the entrance to the site, lining the road all the way to—of course, he thought grimly—the sanctuary space where the one tall column stood.

It was directly in front of them, to the left of the main street. He couldn’t make out the column from here, but he could see the flames clearly. The moon, he realized belatedly, was above them now. Full moon night.

“Well, I still have to say I like snuggling here,” Kate Wenger said. Ned heard—amazingly—a huskiness in her voice.

Even more amazingly, amid his terror, he was starting to find this aspect of things, her scent, how close she was in the dark grass, unnervingly distracting.

“You gonna kiss me, or what?” he heard her say.

Oh, God, he thought. It made no sense at all. None.

“Forget that now!” he whispered fiercely. “Let’s just go. We have to get down to the road. We’ll try that other stairway, and hope. I figure it’ll take Greg twenty minutes.”

“No. Stay where you are.”

Just behind them. A voice they knew.

Ned froze again, his neck hairs prickling. He felt Kate stiffen beside him.

“I have us shielded here,” they heard. “If you go from me they’ll sense you and they will kill you tonight. For violating this.”

Well, that would change Kate’s idiotic mood, Ned thought.

He heard a rustling sound. A figure crawled up beside him, to lie prone in the grass, as they were, by the tree.

“You followed us?” Ned whispered.

“I saw you arrive. I’ve been waiting for them.” The man from the cloister and caf#233; looked at him. Same leather jacket, same cold, intense expression. “I did tell you not to come here today.”

“I know,” Ned said.

“He didn’t want to,” whispered Kate from his other side. “I thought it would be cool. I like your jacket, by the way.” She smiled.

So much for changing Kate’s mood.

The man ignored her, his attention fixed on the torches. Some were planted, others were being carried. Ned still couldn’t clearly make out who was holding them.

“Why can’t I see anyone?”

“They aren’t entirely here yet,” the man said quietly.

The matter-of-factness made Ned swallow hard again.

“They will be when he comes,” he heard.

“When who comes?” Kate asked.

“Softly!” the man hissed.

“When who comes?” she repeated, more quietly. There was silence for a moment.

“The man I have to kill.”

Ned looked at him. There were too many questions. He said,

“I think…I may have seen him two nights ago.”

The figure on his left said nothing, waiting. Ned doggedly went on, “I was at this tower, above our place, and…Does he have stag horns? Sometimes?”

“He can. Golden hair? A big man?”

Ned nodded.

The wind blew. In the moonlight Ned saw smoke streaming south from the torches. The man beside him shook his head. He said, “Ned Marriner, I have no idea who you are, but you do seem to have yourself entangled here.”

“Not me?” Kate said, much too perkily.

“Perhaps,” the man said, gravely. “You did bring me here with what you said. I used your words as a sign, lacking any other. You named this place, among all the possibilities. I am grateful beyond words. I’d have likely been elsewhere when she arrived and, as the gods are always witnesses, she would have made me suffer for it.”

“She?” Kate said. “You said a man was coming.”

Another silence. “She will be here. We are where we are. The barriers are down.”

“Holy cow,” Kate breathed. “Is he…is this guy, like, a druid?”

A sudden, involuntary movement on Ned’s other side. “I hope not, or I am lost.”

Way too many questions.

Ned asked the first one he thought of. “Why is it night?”

He heard a sound, almost amusement. “Why would you imagine time should follow a known course tonight? Here? I told you not to come.”

“It shouldn’t be dark for hours. We were going to be gone before—”

“You’d have been dead when the spirits came if I weren’t here.”

Blunt, not a voice to argue with.

“What’s his name?” Kate asked. “This other guy…with the horns?”

An impatient voice from Ned’s other side. “I have no idea yet.”

“You aren’t being very nice,” Kate said, with a sniff. “Neither of you.”

Ned still didn’t get it: what was with her? But he saw the man on his left shift to look across him at Kate. He seemed about to say something, but he shook his head, as if rejecting a thought.

To Ned, he murmured, “I will go up when he comes. They will not be expecting me. He believes he has led me astray. All of them will be intent upon me. Go back along this field to where you came in, then run down the path. You will find your afternoon light again, beyond the gate.”

Ned looked at him. “What will you do?”

Another shake of the head. “Accept my gratitude and your lives. Leave quickly when I go up.”

In that stillness, wind blowing under moonlight, they heard a sound from the sanctuary ahead of them. Ned lifted his head. He gasped. The figures were visible now.

And more than that: the walls of the guard tower were back.

They were up, had risen again, as if they’d never been brought down, never known catapults.

The figures on the street in front of it had their backs to that tower. They were looking back along the path they’d just taken. Ned saw that they were dressed the way the man by the tower two nights ago had been, in variously coloured tunics, bright leggings, boots or sandals. Swords.

Swords?

These were Celts, Ned realized. And that meant they, and the risen tower, were over two thousand years old. Oh God, he thought again.

He wished he were home. All the way home.

And then he realized another strangeness, on top of all the others. He blinked, looked again. There was only moonlight, smoky torches, and yet…

He said softly, “Why can I see them so well? Even colours? Before, I couldn’t at all. Now it’s…too clear up there.”

The man on his left said nothing for a moment, then he murmured, “You are inside the night yourself. In your own way. Be very careful, Ned Marriner.”

“How do I do that?” Ned asked.

“By leaving. It matters. Beltaine can change you.”

Whatever that meant.

The man looked away from them. When he spoke again his voice had changed again. “But see. See now. Here is the bright companion of all my days.”

This, too, Ned Marriner would remember. The words, and how they were spoken.

He looked towards the entrance to the site.

Someone else was coming along the path.

No horns on his head this time, but Ned knew him instantly. Not a figure you forgot: tall, broad-shouldered, long-striding, the long, bright hair, same heavy golden torc about his neck. What seemed to be a sword at his side. He didn’t remember a blade before. The others by the sanctuary were watching him approach, their torches high, waiting.

The man beside Ned whispered, “See how fair he is, the tall one, how brilliant…” Ned could feel him tremble. “I will leave you,” the man said.

“You have no weapon,” Ned whispered.

“They will give me one,” he heard. “Remember, along this meadow, down the path, away.”

“You said you weren’t a good man,” Kate Wenger said, almost accusingly.

“Oh, believe me,” he whispered, staring straight ahead, not even looking at them now, “I told you truth.”

Ned glanced at him. And, just as in the cloister, something was inside his head abruptly: a thought, whole and complete, something he should have had no way of knowing.

He heard himself say, before he could stop, “Were you at the mountain? Way back then? Sainte-Victoire?”

The man in the grey leather jacket shifted, as if being pulled from where he wanted to be. He gazed at Ned in the darkness for a long moment.

“It really would interest me,” he said finally, “had we leisure enough, to learn who you are.”

“I’m right? Aren’t I? You were there?”

Ned could hear him breathing in the night. “We all were,” the man said. “She was mine that time.” He added something in a language Ned didn’t know. And then he said, “Go when I go up. What will follow, you should not see.”

He moved forward, low to the ground. Ned thought he was going to stand and walk up the slope right then, but he didn’t. He stopped behind another, nearer tree.

Ned had a sense the man was feeling something too fierce, too charged with intensity, to have stayed beside them, with their questions and chatter and guesses: Why is it dark? What’s his name?

He’d been patient. He was trying to save their lives. But now he needed to ready himself for what was coming.

Kate sighed suddenly beside Ned and slipped her left hand into his right, lacing fingers again.

They will kill you tonight. How did you react so much to the touch of a girl when you’d just heard that? Maybe, Ned thought, maybe such opposing feelings—fear, and the scent and feel of the girl beside him—could somehow go together, not be opposed after all. It was a difficult idea.

He looked up towards the site and the square, risen tower. The tall man had reached the sanctuary and those waiting there. He looked golden, godlike.

The others didn’t bow, but they made a space for him in the wide street. His hair was unbound, lying on his shoulders. It was an axe at his belt, Ned realized, not a sword. Jewellery glinted on his arms and around his throat. A smaller, older man stood beside him, dressed in white.

“Wow,” breathed Kate. “He’s gorgeous!”

She didn’t mean the little guy in white. A flicker of jealousy went through Ned, but her words were no less than truth, he thought.

There was a sense of waiting, of anticipation, on the plateau ahead of them, even now that this bright figure had come. They were all turned to the north, towards the torches planted on either side of the path. And because he was looking that way, as they were, across the low, long-levelled ruins, Ned saw when the white bull entered Entremont.

He felt, again, as if the world as he had always understood it was changing moment by moment, even as he lay hidden in the grass.

He saw that the animal was being led forward on a rope by three men through the moonlight of Beltaine eve. The bull was enormous, but it was also docile, moving quietly.

The torches were on stakes planted in pairs in the ground, and the bull—massive, otherworldly—passed between those fires. Ned somehow knew that there was a meaning to this going back so far he was afraid to think about it.

“Another bull,” whispered Kate.

Ned shook his head. “Not another. This is the one the others were about.”

The moon was shining and full and in that light the animal seemed to gleam and shimmer. Beside him, Kate was watching it in the same way Ned was, with awe and fear—and pity.

“They’re going to kill it,” she breathed.

“Yes,” he said.

He saw the golden figure unhook the axe from his belt. A sound came from the figures around him.

This was a sacrifice, Ned understood. What else could it be? Tonight was the beginning of summer’s season, hinge of the year in the days when these people and those who preceded and followed them—here and elsewhere—shaped their rites of goddess and god, fertility and death.

Here and elsewhere, Ned thought. Wales, too. His own people, his mother’s. His grandmother’s.

They would have to go quickly as soon as the man in front of them went up. Ned wasn’t sure why he believed he could do that—just walk up—but what could Ned properly understand about this, anyhow?

He knew some things, but he didn’t know how he knew them, and it didn’t seem to be helping with anything that mattered. Once they got out, if they got out, it would matter less. Wouldn’t it? It would be over.

“Hot-and-sour soup,” he muttered.

In reply, Kate Wenger giggled, amazingly. Then, after a pause, she moved their linked hands up to her mouth and bit his knuckle. Ned’s heart thumped, for different reasons than before.

“Behave, you,” she said softly.

“Me?” he murmured, genuinely startled—and aroused.

But in that same moment he did have a new thought, and felt a hard kick of fear. Something slid into place: he was pretty sure he finally knew what was going on with Kate.

He was about to say it, but stopped himself. What was the point? He couldn’t do anything about it. They just had to get out, for one more reason now, if he was right.

The three men leading the bull had now reached the one with the axe. They stopped in front of him. The white bull stopped. The smaller man in white stood to one side, holding something. There was silence.

Then Ned saw all the figures gathered there bow to the animal, as they had not bowed to the man.

The broad-shouldered figure spoke then, for the first time. Ned remembered that voice from two nights ago, rich and musical, deep as a drum. He said half a dozen words—Ned couldn’t understand them—and when he paused, those around him, fifty of them at least, gave a response.

The man spoke, and then they did. The wind blew. Smoke streamed from torches held and those embedded in the ground.

The bull, eerily white in the moonlight, stood placidly, as if entranced by the chanting voices. It might be that, Ned thought. Or else they’d given it some drug.

The voices stopped.

“I can’t watch,” Kate whispered suddenly, and she turned her face against Ned’s shoulder.

The man with the axe lifted it so that the weapon, too, glinted under that moon. And then, with a shout of joy, he brought it sweeping, scything, crashing down to strike the bull, overwhelmingly, between the great horns.

Ned felt Kate crying (only now, for the first time, for the animal). He forced himself to keep watching as the stricken, bludgeoned creature collapsed to its forelegs, and blood—strangely hued in the moon-silver night—burst forth, soaking all those close to it.

Barbaric, Ned wanted to say, think, feel, but something stopped him.

The man in the white robe stepped quickly forward holding a bowl to the spurting wound, filling it with blood. With both hands he extended it towards the one with the axe, the man Ned had last seen in the shape of an owl flying from a different ruined tower.

The big man let fall his bloodied axe. He claimed the bowl with two hands. Ned felt his pulse racing furiously, as if he were sprinting flat out towards some cliff he couldn’t see.

The man raised the bowl in front of him, the way he’d lifted the axe a moment before. As he spoke, words of incantation, the white bull toppled to one side at his feet like some great structure falling, blood still flowing, soaking into the dusty ground. No one answered the words this time.

Beside the tree in front of Ned and Kate, a lean, scarred man stood up. He said something under his breath. It might have been a prayer.

In front of the sanctuary, the raised bowl was lowered by the golden man. He drank the blood.

“Oh, my!” said Kate Wenger suddenly, too loudly.

She lifted her head.

“I can’t…I…What’s happening?”

Her voice was really strange. She jerked her hand from Ned’s, shifted away from him.

Ned stared at her. The man by the tree had heard. He looked back at them. Kate got to her knees, made as if to stand. Terrified, Ned pulled her back down.

“Kate!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”

She tried to pull away. “Don’t! I need…I have to…”

“No,” he heard the man just ahead of them breathe. “Not this one! She is too young. This should not be—”

Kate Wenger was writhing and twisting beside Ned, fighting to get away. She kicked him. Breathing in shallow gasps, she scratched his arm, then hit him in the chest with both fists.

And just then, in that same, precise moment, up on the plateau of Entremont under a full moon in a darkness that belonged only to this time between times when the walls were down, another voice was heard from the entrance to the site, beyond the paired torches burning beside the path.

“Ned? Ned? Are you here? Come on, I’ve brought the van!”

With his heart aching, and the first horrified glimmer of understanding coming to him, Ned saw Melanie—small and clever and fearless, with the green streak in her hair—take a hesitant step forward between the smoking torches, the way the bull had.

In that instant, Kate Wenger went limp beside him.

She collapsed as if released from a puppet-string, from a force that had been pulling, drawing, demanding her.

Several things happened at once.

The scarred man looked at the two of them a last time, then turned back to the ruins. As if he, too, was being pulled that way. And of course he was, Ned later realized: pulled by centuries.

And by love.

Ned saw him take a step himself and then another, up the small slope, and there he stopped, still unobserved, watching Melanie. Staring at her. He was completely exposed now, up on the plateau. He would have been spotted if any one of those gathered by the sanctuary had looked his way.

They didn’t. The big man with the fair hair handed the bowl back to the one in white without even glancing at him. He stood very still, head high, hands empty at his sides, facing Melanie where she stood on the north-south path. They were all watching her, Ned saw.

She began to come forward, slowly, between fires.

Ned shifted to his knees so he could see better. He kept one hand on Kate’s shoulder where she lay, face to the dark grass. But his eyes were on Melanie, along with everyone else’s.

So he saw when she began to stop being Melanie.

She came along the straight roadway, past the low, ruined walls of ancient houses, towards the sanctuary and the figures waiting there, walking between nine pairs of torches. Ned counted them as she went. Each time she disappeared and reappeared through the smoke, she had changed.

The first time, Ned actually rubbed his eyes, like a child. After that, he didn’t do it again, he just watched. With his unnaturally keen sight here, he saw when her hair began to change in that moonlight towards red, and then when it was red, and falling so much longer than before. And he thought, for the first time, how inadequate the words for colours could sometimes be.

Her clothing began to alter. Halfway down the row she was wearing sandals, not boots, and a calf-length, one-piece garment, with a heavy gold belt. He saw her come through another pair of flames with golden bracelets on her arms, and rings on several fingers. She was tall by then.

He watched her walk between the final torches.

The man who had summoned her—with the power of Beltaine and the white bull and the bull’s blood—knelt in the roadway. So did all the others, as if they had been waiting for his sign, as if Melanie were a queen, or a goddess.

Ned could see, even from where he was, that the big man’s face was alight with joy. And with need, or something beyond need, deeper. Whatever you thought of him, you couldn’t see that look and not respond to it.

Melanie, who was not Melanie any more, stopped in front of him.

She was in profile for Ned, lit by the moon and the carried torches. She was more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen, or ever imagined seeing.

He found it difficult to breathe. He saw her look up at the moon for a moment and then back down again, at the man kneeling before her.

He said something, in that language Ned couldn’t understand. Melanie reached down then, slowly. She touched his yellow hair with the fingers of one hand. It was very bright where they were, as if they were on a stage, acting out motions from long ago, but also here now, in front of him.

Wherever now was.

Then the woman spoke for the first time, and Ned heard her say, in exquisite French, formal, very clear, “Change your words. Returned in this new time, shall we not speak in the tongue they use? We will have to, will we not, as the dance begins?”

“As you wish, my lady.”

He was still kneeling. He lowered his head. It was difficult to see his face now, with the long hair falling.

“It is as I wish.”

Her voice was harder to read, but it sure wasn’t Melanie’s. She looked around slowly. Grave, unsmiling, taking in those nearby, the risen, moon-touched tower.

“Only one of you?” she said softly.

“Only one of us,” the kneeling figure said. “Alas.”

He lifted his face again. Ned saw that he was smiling. He didn’t sound distressed at all.

“Two of us,” the scarred man said, from the edge of the plateau.

No more than that, and quietly, but everything altered with the words. Entremont and the night turned. They took on, they accepted, a weight of centuries, their place in a long story.

Or so it was to seem to Ned, looking back.

There came a cry of rage from the kneeling man.

He rose, took a stride this way amid shouts from the others behind him. Ned saw spears lifted, levelled. A sword was drawn by one enormous, bare-chested, nearly naked warrior. The figure in white lifted his hands, still holding the bowl, as if to cast a spell or a curse.

Amid all this, the man in the grey leather jacket walked forward, entering among them as if he perceived no threat at all, as if he hadn’t even noticed any of this.

Perhaps he hadn’t, Ned thought. Perhaps he was seeing only the woman. As if nothing else signified or had meaning.

She had turned to watch him approach, and so Ned could see her face clearly now for the first time. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. His mouth was dry.

“They tested you?” she said mildly, as the man stopped in front of her. He didn’t kneel. She offered no other greeting.

He inclined his head in agreement. “They amuse themselves. As children do.” They were speaking French.

“You think? Not only children, surely. I enjoy being amused,” she said.

“I recall amusing you.”

She laughed. Ned closed his eyes again for a second. “Sometimes, yes, my stranger.” She tilted her head to one side, appraisingly. “You look older.”

“You said that the last time as well.”

“Did I?” She shrugged.

She turned away from him to the other one. The bigger man was rigid, tense, like some hunting animal. Ned had a sudden, sharp sense that violence was about to explode here.

Time to go, he thought.

“I remember that torc,” the woman said.

Ned saw the golden-haired man smile. “And I that lapis ring, among the others.”

She lifted one hand, looked at it briefly. “Did you give me this one?”

“You know I did. And when I did so.”

She lowered her hand. “You will tell me what I know?”

He bowed his head. She laughed.

Kate was quiet now beside Ned, lying on the grass. He was still on his knees. He felt paralyzed by fear and fascination, by the horror of what had happened. And he couldn’t take his eyes from this woman.

“We’ve got to get her back!” he whispered, feeling idiotic even as he said it. Who was he, to even think such a thing?

“Who went up? Who was it?” Kate murmured, finally lifting her head. She wiped at her wet cheeks.

“That’s Melanie. She came herself. I have no idea why Greg didn’t.”

“That was going to be me,” Kate said dully. “You know that?”

Ned nodded. He did know it. It was a difficult thing to get his head around. If Melanie hadn’t come…

He looked away from Kate, up the slope. The man—their man—in his grey jacket was surrounded. He was weaponless. They will give me one, he’d said.

We should be going right now, Ned thought.

He stayed where he was.

“How is it you are here, little stranger?” he heard the golden one demand.

“Yes, how?” the woman added. “They so dearly wish to know! Look at them! You have spoiled the game.” Music in her voice, capricious, amused.

“Children offer riddles they think are challenging,” he said mildly.

Ned could see her face whenever she turned this way.

“Is that truth? A riddle solved?” she asked.

He hesitated. “It is a truth, love. But a woman also gave a hint they might be here for the summoning and I heeded her.”

Love.

“Ah. A woman? And is she fair? Young, with a sweet voice? You have left me for another. Woe unto my riven heart.”

There was a little silence. Beside Ned, Kate Wenger had gone still.

“I will never leave you,” the man said quietly.

Ned Marriner shivered, on his knees in silver-green grass, hearing that.

“Never?”

Her manner had changed again.

The man’s back was to them, Ned couldn’t see his expression. They heard him say, “Have I not shown as much, by now? Surely?”

Her turn to be silent.

“I am a helpless woman,” she said at length. “I must believe you, I suppose.”

Helpless. Her tone and bearing made a lie of the word. “Tell me,” she said, her manner altering yet again, “is that carving you made of me still down below, in the world?”

“It is.”

“And do I look there as I do now?”

They could see him shake his head.

“You know you never did, in that stone. And time has worked its will.”

She took a step back from him, withdrawing. “Ah? Time? And must I accept that? You have not gone to undo that will? Is this love? Am I well served, or do you merely offer words?”

He lowered his head, as the other man had done.

“I have not been back in the world for long, my lady. Nor have we arrived in an age when I may enter that cloister to work.”

Her voice was scornful. “He offers an explanation! How gracious! Tell me, might a better man have done so?”

“That’s not fair!” Ned heard Kate hiss sharply, beside him.

The figure in the grey jacket said only, “Perhaps so, my lady. I know there are better men.”

Ned saw her smile at that. It was a cruel look, he thought.

The man added, softly, “But it had occurred to me then, as I worked, that no carving could come near to what you are. I shaped it to be only a hint, from the beginning, knowing it would become more so through the years, wearing away. One needs to have seen you—and perhaps more than that—to understand.”

More than that. Ned drew a shaky breath.

The smile changed, and was not cruel any more. She lifted a hand as if to touch his face, but she didn’t.

She turned to the other one instead. “And you? He says he will never leave me.”

This one’s voice was deeper, resonant. “My answer is as it was from the beginning, even before that night among the village fires. You left us when this began. You began this. It was always your right…but until the sky falls I will fight to have you back.”

Kate sat up beside Ned in the grass.

The tall woman, red and gold as a fairy queen, said, “Indeed? Will you fight for me?”

He said, “I would prove my love in the stranger’s blood tonight and always, with joy.”

“And prove your worth?”

His teeth flashed suddenly; he pushed back his yellow hair, which was being blown across his eyes. He was magnificent, like a horse. Or a stag, Ned thought suddenly, remembering the horns.

“Have I ever been unworthy, Ysabel?”

They heard her laughter ripple across the ruins.

Ysabel.

“Ah,” she said. “So that is my name this time?”

“The animal offered it, before it died. The druid said as much.”

“Then I accept, of course.”

Her amusement was gone. Another shift of mood, like a cloud across the moon.

She turned her head, looking down at the white bull lying in its own blood on the dusty, silvered street. She said something too softly for Ned to hear. Then she looked up again, from one man to the other.

“And now what happens? I name you both, is that it? And then a battle? That is why we are alive again?”

A challenge in her now, almost anger.

“That’s why he couldn’t answer before,” Kate whispered. “About his name.”

This time Ned reached out and took her hand. It lay quietly in his. They watched together. It was necessary to leave, he knew, and impossible.

The woman had turned this way again, towards the smaller man. The moonlight was on her face.

“What shall I call you?” she asked.

Her voice had lost that softer nuance again. She was controlling him, all of them. Wilful, teasing.

“Shall I name you Becan because you are small? Or Morven, one more time, since you came from the sea?”

“I had a different name when I did that,” he said mildly.

“I remember.”

“When I first came.”

“I remember.”

“And I…I have been…you have called me Anwyll.”

She lifted her head. “Beloved? Do you presume so much? That I must name you thus, because I foolishly did so once?”

Not truly angry, Ned thought, but he wasn’t sure.

“I only said that it was so, upon a time and more than once,” the man murmured. He didn’t lower his head. “You must not imagine I forget.”

Kate Wenger made a small sound beside Ned. No one moved on the plateau. The torches burned, smoke streaming on the wind.

“More than once,” the woman agreed finally. “Named so, or not. Before that scar and after. By the sea and from the waves.”

And Ned Marriner, hidden in the darkness of their downslope and hearing this, thought that if, before he grew old and died, a woman spoke to him words like these, in such a voice, he might say he’d lived a life worth living.

The woman named Ysabel was gazing upon the man. She shook her head, slowly.

“‘Anwyll’ must be earned again, surely, by one of you. Or neither, perhaps. But I will not name you Donal here: not a stranger again after so long. Little one, lean and alone, clad in grey, you shall be Phelan one more time. My wolf.”

“This is all Celtic,” Kate whispered.

“I know,” Ned murmured.

He was thinking wolf, how it suited.

The moon was high, so much sooner than it should have been. But what did should have been mean tonight? He watched the woman, who was not Melanie any more, turn to the other man.

“Gwri for your hair?” she said, that teasing tone again. “Allyn, or Keane, handsome one? Briant, for strength…Would you like one of those?”

It was as if she was testing, tasting names on her tongue. Playing with them. One long leg was thrust out to the side, a hand on her hip, head tilted, looking him up and down.

“You have cause to remember that last,” he replied, and threw back his head, laughing at his own jest. Ned thought she’d be angry again, but he was wrong. She laughed too. He didn’t understand her at all, he realized.

“Let me kill him here,” he said, gesturing with his hand in a wide sweep. “Grant us leave to fight. This is a sacred place tonight.”

Ned couldn’t see her face, but he heard the smile in her voice. “Ah. And so we are given your name,” she said. “Take it. Cadell you are and have always been, my warring one.”

Wolf and warrior. There was a silence where they stood, like figures in a tableau. Ned saw a shooting star, a fireball, streak slowly across the western darkness of the sky beyond and disappear. Like a child, in need, he made a wish upon it.

“Very well. That is done. Thank you, my lady. If we are to battle now, might someone be good enough to offer me a blade?”

It was the lean one speaking, brisk, matter-of-fact, the man they could now call Phelan. Ned swallowed, hearing that, the crisp courtesy of the words. But there was so much beneath them. The night could explode right now, a red, electric violence.

Go now! an inner voice was crying.

“A sword? Of course. With joy,” said the one called Cadell. “I cannot tell you how much joy.” He paused, then added, almost gravely, “You know that I will kill you.”

“I know that you will try.”

Someone—the small figure in the white robe, Ned saw—stepped forward holding an unsheathed sword across his palms like another offering. He’d handed the stone bowl to someone else. It was as if he’d been waiting for this, as if he’d known it would come. Perhaps he had. Phelan came forward to claim it and begin.

But in that moment a very long dance—the torment and the glory of it—was altered on that plateau. It would be a while before Ned Marriner realized that this was so, and longer still before he understood why, and by then it was almost too late.

“No,” said Ysabel.

Phelan stopped, a hand extended towards the hilt of the offered sword. He didn’t touch it. Both men looked at her.

She said, quietly, “Not a combat. Not this time. And not by armies gathered to you. It pleases me not.”

“I need to kill him, love,” said Cadell. There was urgency in the words. He pushed a hand through his hair again. “Now that you are among us it is on me as destiny, as a longing.”

“Then master it, if you are a man,” she said bluntly.

His head snapped back, as if the words had been a slap to the face.

“My lady, we are brought back to fight for you,” said Phelan softly. “We have always known this. It is what we are.”

She wheeled on him this time. Ned could see her again, the fury in her.

“You are brought back to be deserving of me—the one more than the other—in my eyes! Will you deny that? Will you challenge it?”

He shook his head. “You know I will not.”

Silence again. It was time to go, Ned knew. It was past time. He didn’t want to die here.

He heard her say, “I have another test, of love and worthiness. Of…longing.” She glanced towards the bigger man on the last word, and then back. “Tell, how do you long for me, my wolf?”

“I have told you,” he said.

“Hai! Listen to the Roman! I will say it as many times as you are willing to hear my voice,” the one called Cadell cried. “Our people—yours and mine! — do not squeeze words as coins from a miser’s hoard.”

The Roman. Yours and mine. Pieces of a puzzle, Ned thought. If he lived long enough to work it through.

Ysabel looked at Cadell and then back to the smaller man. She didn’t smile this time. It was as if, Ned thought, she was waiting, expecting something now, because of what had just been said.

It came. Phelan spoke, looking across her at the other man, ice suddenly in his voice. “Words, did you say? I know your words. I remember some of them. Do you? These, perhaps: Kill them all. God will know his own.”

He stopped, letting the sound fade, drift like the smoke. Then he added, softly, “A hoard, is it? What sort of piled-up treasure, tell us all? Dead women and babes? Charred flesh? Blackened bone? A hoard such as that, perhaps?”

“Oh, God,” Ned heard Kate whisper hoarsely.

Ned didn’t get it. No time to ask.

The bigger man was smiling, even in the face of this—golden, beautiful, unshaken by that rage. Ned could see a wolf in him, too, suddenly.

Both of them, he thought.

“Poor little man,” Cadell said mockingly. “My victory that time, wasn’t it? I do think it was. A difficult memory? Can’t escape? Trapped within walls? With those who so foolishly trusted you? And I never spoke those words. You know it.”

“You acted upon them. You killed because of them.”

The other man shook his head slowly, in elaborate mock-pity, then took a stride forward. “Will you chide me—will you do so—for deaths? Will you, Marius? For women and children? You will do that here? In sight of it?”

And with that name spoken, Ned understood.

Because of what Melanie had said before, beside the mountain. Telling of Pourri#232;res, below Sainte-Victoire, and the world-changing battle there. An ambush behind the Celts, the supply camp, their families, wives, children…

Two hundred thousand bodies rotting. A redness in the world.

I am not a good man.

Two wolves here. Ned felt sick again. It occurred to him that these two could make a conflagration of the world in their war. That they already had.

But even as he shaped the thought, in sudden fear, Ysabel said, “No blades, no armies. It shall not be so. Hear my will. Hear me carefully for I will say this once. I am going to leave this place. You will not fight each other here. Cadell, you will release the druid and his spirits to their rest again when the needfires die. I have been summoned. They are not a part of this any more. Say to me now that you will release them.”

She stared at him.

“I will release them,” he said, after a pause.

“You will not change shapes to seek me. Swear it.”

“I swear it. But what does ‘seek’ mean?”

Ned’s question, too.

She looked from Cadell to the other man. “When morning comes—with sunrise and not before—the two of you will begin to look for me.”

Phelan stared at her, said nothing.

She went on. “Call it a quest. Pretend you are gallant, honourable men, unstained by any sins. Who finds me first will prove his worth by doing so. I will be hiding and not easily found. Trust me in this. I do not choose to be easily found, or idly claimed.” She paused. “You have three days.”

“And if…we do not succeed?” Phelan’s voice was low.

“Then do whatever you wish to each other, it will matter not. You will have failed me, both of you. I will have been shown to be unimportant to you.”

She stopped, looked from one to the other, then added, in yet another tone, “I would prefer to be found.”

First uncertainty in her voice, Ned thought. There was a silence up where the torches were burning.

“This is…you offer a child’s game, my lady. I need to kill him.” Cadell’s voice was anguished.

“You like children’s games, I thought.” The hint of vulnerability gone, as soon as it had come. “And you are forbidden to kill now. It is my will. But there is this: who finds me first may sacrifice the one who fails. With my consent. And by my desire.”

Dear God, Ned thought. By my desire.

“Swear to this, to all of this, then I am gone.”

“You have only now come,” Phelan said, barely loud enough for them to hear. “Am I to lose you so soon?”

“Find me,” she said coldly, “and so keep me, if it matters so very much. Or wander off to make another carving. Stone instead of flesh, as you choose. But swear now, both of you. Three days. Find me. The loser is a sacrifice, for his failure.”

She turned back to Cadell. “Will you call it a game?”

She was so hard, Ned thought. She was tall, and crimson as a fire, and terrifyingly cold. He felt small, inadequate; a child, listening. And he was all those things, in almost all the ways that mattered.

He heard the two men swear to her, one and then the other.

“Ned, we have to go,” Kate whispered. “Before she leaves and they start looking around.”

It was true.

I will never see her again, he was thinking.

“I need to get her back,” was what he whispered, repeating himself, feeling stupid again even as he formed the words. I need to. What were his needs in this?

“Melanie? We’ll try. We’ll think how. But not here. Come on, Ned!”

Her hand was still in his; she tugged and he followed and they went from that place. From the woman whose name was in his head now, singing itself in that elusive, changing voice, never to leave. He knew it, even then, first night. That it would never leave.

It wasn’t very hard to get away, in the event, slipping back north through the meadow past the wall. Phelan had been right.

When they were outside the site, on the gravel path again, the sky began to grow lighter as they ran. By the time they reached the iron gate and passed through it was late-spring daylight again, bright and fair.

Windy, the sun in the west, ahead of them, as if it had been waiting. The van was in the lot, the only car there. Ned stared at it. It seemed an alien, unreasonable object.

He walked over. Melanie’s tote lay on the front passenger seat. It was difficult, confusing, seeing that. They had just been looking at swords and a sacrificial axe, a bull lying in the pool of its own blood after passing between sacred fires.

How did a Renault van come to exist in the world? How could Melanie not be here? He felt very shaky, thinking about that. And afraid.

Neither of them could drive and the van was locked; they’d have to walk. Ned heard traffic below, a strident car horn sounding. That, too, so impossibly strange. Kate tugged again and they started down.

It was difficult, his steps seemed to drag, even as she pulled him by the hand. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to go back into the lost moonlight behind them. Find me, she had said.

Ysabel.