“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.