Only will it, one or many of them whispered. Once more something struck me as odd in the multitoned encouragement. I grasped for the something, and it darted just out of reach, a bright flicker like candlelight racing beyond the mare.
Only will it, I agreed. I wondered how I’d forgotten the ease and intimacy of speaking mind to mind.
Yours is a hard road to travel. The touch of Cernunnos’s mind was comforting. For time unending it has been, little shaman. Very soon, though, that will change, and your task will be no more than the rest of us bear. The pleasure in his sending was a flare of warmth, and I responded without meaning to.
I’ll be glad to carry a lighter load, my lord master of the Hunt, I replied. For an instant, I felt a tug through my belly, like a claw hooking my spine and dragging it forward. Images of a misty world ran through the claw and directly into my senses: a gray sky and trees of muted greens, glimpsed through swirling fog. It smelled rich and peaty, like good earth just tilled, and the wind that shook the leaves was cool and crisp with the scent of salt water. There was laughter, crystalline musical sound that cut through the fog. Everything inside me screamed home!
The mare’s breakneck pace slowed a little.
Not jet. All the vast power of the god came to bear upon me, inside a breath. The misty, shadowy image that cried home shattered under his will. New pain, as deep as the old, erupted inside me.
Give it back! I screamed, but Cernunnos’s power locked me away from it, solid as iron chains.
Bring us to your Babylon, he ordered, and I flung myself straight in the saddle, throwing my hands high.
“We are here!”
The stars stopped around me with earth-shaking suddenness. I closed my hands, drawing down the star scape like it was a curtain. From behind it emerged a city, growing up around me as if it had always been there.
Structured of stone, it sprawled out with a decadent elegance, broad streets spreading in all directions from where we stood in the center of a square. Towering, twisting spires rose high into the sky, like Joshua Trees reaching a thousand feet tall, gnarled and intricate and as old as time. They stood out, bright white against a blue-gray sky, with branches knotted together to form looping walkways in the air.
Hanging jungles grew from those walkways, thick vines and wild flowers so potent I could smell their rich scent from hundreds of feet below. They writhed with more than the wind, as if they rather bordered on sentience. Leaves and branches wove in and out of one another, creating hammocks and nests as if the trees themselves enjoyed the intimacy of touch. I watched a child fling himself off the walkway with a piercing shriek of joy. The gardens caught him and built a ladder so he could climb back to the pathway above.
Men and women of all ethnicities and colors walked the pathways with no hurry at all, stopping to speak with one another. Their voices rose in a babble, over the sound of wind. If I listened with my ears I heard every tongue imaginable, but when I listened with my mind, I understood every word that was spoken.
Not one of them took notice of the Hunt’s arrival like it was anything untoward, though a number of passersby nodded and smiled or called their greetings. I watched curiously as a man and woman met and walked together to the base of one of the Joshua Tree spires, where the man lowered his head to kiss the woman’s throat.
Nor was theirs the only such display. Littered here and there, sometimes half-hidden in shadows, but as often not, couples tangled together without the slightest regard for who might be watching.
“What is this place?” Cernunnos asked, fascinated. “What is this Babylon of yours, little shaman?” He dismounted, and with a flick of his fingers sent the host down a dozen different streetways, then offered me a hand as I dismounted as well.
“A land of excess,” I said slowly. Remembering was hard; there was a fog in my mind, and it wanted me to remember the passion of the Hunt, not ancient legends from the world I’d once called home. “Where all men could speak to one another, where gluttony and lust held sway over intellect and reason. They say God was angered by the excess and destroyed the city, so that men could no longer speak to each other and instead were made to fight over misunderstandings. They say that to return to Babylon is to embrace corruption.” I looked around, listening to the rise and fall of voices and laughter. “It feels to me like…peace.”
Cernunnos placed two fingers over my breastbone, where his sword had punched through me a few days earlier. The sudden memory made me blink and shiver before it faded again. “And tell me, little shaman,” he said, “are you at peace now?”
A warning note twinged inside me. There was something I was forgetting, a reason not to be at peace. But Cernunnos smiled, shockingly green eyes inviting, and I forgot it again. “I am, my lord master of the Hunt.”
“I am so very glad.” He curled his fingers under my chin. His hands were cool, even through the leather gloves he wore. I shivered a little. “Don’t be afraid,” he murmured, and kissed me.
Fleetingly, the thought went through my mind: This is not right, and was followed hard by, when was the last time someone kissed me? Cernunnos’s power closed around me then, no longer a safe blanket of comfort, but tendrils of penetration, enticing passion from deep within me. I made an uncertain sound, closing my eyes against the pleasure in Cernunnos’s gaze. Green fire filtered through me, swirling up through my groin and into my breasts, sweet and hungry. His kiss was a taste of freedom, unlike anything I remembered since childhood. It was sanctuary.
“What a child we will make together, little shaman,” Cernunnos whispered. “What power, what passion he shall have.”
My eyes flew open, reality crashing back into my bones with a gut-wrenching jolt. “No!” I shoved him away as hard as I could. The god stumbled back, his green eyes alight with outraged astonishment. “No,” I panted again. “No, and no, and no, Cernunnos, I am not yours, and I will not make that mistake again.”
Passion ignited into rage in his eyes. “Think on your choices, shaman,” he snarled. “Choose me and I’ll grant you eternity, riding at my side. You will guide me as I guide the Hunt. Choose otherwise, and you and this place end now.” He threw his head back and let out a bellow like a wounded hind, a deep throbbing sound that sent tremors through the Joshua Tree spires. Around us the host faded back into being, unconstrained by observing niceties like traveling through physical space or linear time.
I stared at Cernunnos, far too aware of the heat still in my blood and the taste of his power, almost visible as he stood before me. At least the fog in my brain seemed to have burned away. “You need a thirteenth.” I’d figured that much out. Damn, I’d been right. Go team go. But I’d thought he needed Marie specifically. “You need someone to ride in the child’s place so you can ride. It can be anybody? You’re offering that to me?”
“Not anyone,” Cernunnos said through gritted teeth. “Someone with power. Someone who can bear the weight of my touch without shuddering. Someone who can bear a child to replace the one that is lost.”
Tears burned hot in my eyes, an unexpected pang of shared loss lighting the air between the ancient god and myself. For a few seconds I could hardly breathe, my throat tight with memory and loss. The fire in Cernunnos’s eyes burned dark with frustrated rage and sorrow. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself, holding myself still to prevent myself from going to him and trying to ease his pain.
“Choose,” Cernunnos demanded. He closed his fist around the stallion’s reins and mounted the animal in a single graceful motion. He looked terribly tall, fury stretching the elegant features gaunt, his power lending breadth to the slender form. He didn’t move, but I thought that if he turned his head I would see faint mists of green fire drift away, trails left by the anger in his eyes.