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

CHAPTER XI

Ned had forgotten about the van. They had to go back for it. Greg had a second set of keys, Aunt Kim had her car.

Ned said he’d go with them.

His father looked as if he wanted to veto that, but Ned was the one who knew where the van was, and it was getting dark. The approach of night made them decide to take off right away.

“Please come straight back. Would you like to sleep here tonight?” Edward Marriner asked his sister-in-law.

Kim nodded. “I think I should. Kate, do you want to stay with us? Or have you had enough of this?”

Kate hesitated, then shook her head. “I’ll stay. If there’s room for me? I can call and say I’m overnighting with a friend.” She gave Ned a look, and shrugged. “Marie-Chantal does it all the time.”

“She’ll be jealous,” he said, half-heartedly. He was thinking that it was Beltaine eve now.

“Only if I say it’s with a guy,” she said.

“It definitely isn’t with a guy,” Edward Marriner said firmly. “You and Kimberly can have Melanie’s room on the ground floor, if you don’t mind sharing?”

Aunt Kim smiled. “’Course not. It’ll make me feel young.”

“And maybe we’ll have her back tomorrow,” Ned’s father added.

Kimberly looked at him, seemed about to say something, but didn’t. Ned realized that she’d been doing that a lot.

“Let’s get your van,” she said.

SHE DROVE QUICKLY and well. Traffic had thinned out. It didn’t take long to get there. Ned found that unsettling.

You were sitting where you could grab a Coke from the fridge and listen to U2 on your headphones, and then you were in a place where a bull had just been sacrificed and a man had drunk its blood and summoned a woman to life, between fires. No transition space between those things.

He’d thought about distance and speed and the modern world a couple of days ago, on the way to the mountain. He’d even had a notion to write a school essay about it, saying clever things.

The memory felt absurd now, another existence entirely. He looked at Kim in the glow of the dashboard lights. He wondered if that had been the feeling that had driven her from home after whatever had happened to her. Could you be drawn so far into this other kind of world that your own—the one you’d known all your life—felt alien and impossible?

“Just ahead on the right,” he said, as the headlights picked out the brown sign for Entremont.

She saw it, and turned, a little too fast, the wheels skidding briefly.

“Sorry,” she said, downshifting as they climbed.

“That’s how I drive,” Greg said.

He’d been quiet, had taken the back seat so Ned could navigate. Ned was impressed with him, and grateful: Greg had been a lot easier than Steve about accepting their story. He wondered about that, too. What made some people inclined to believe you and others to react with anger or shock? He realized he didn’t know a whole lot about Greg or Steve. Or Melanie, for that matter.

The headlight beams, on bright, picked out the closed gates and the parking lot to the left of them. Kim swung into the lot. The van was alone there.

They all got out. Greg punched his remote and the doors of the van unlocked. Kim opened the passenger side.

“Her bag’s here.”

“Figured. Okay, let’s go,” Greg said, going around to the driver’s side. “I’ve got the creeps here, big time.”

Ned heard him, but he found himself walking the other way, towards the gates. They were locked, but could be climbed pretty easily. Kate had said the security guy came just to open them and lock up. Ned looked through, saw the wide path that led east to the entrance.

Trees mostly hid the northern wall of the site from here, but he knew it was there, and what was on the other side. The wind had pretty much died down now.

“Ned, come on!” Greg called.

He heard his aunt’s footsteps coming over.

“They’re probably still in there,” he said, not looking back. “She told them to give her all night. Not to start looking till morning.”

She sighed. “If I had any real power, dear, I’d go in with you, see what we could do. But I don’t, Ned. We won’t get her back by getting killed there on Beltaine.”

“Would they do that?”

She sighed again. He looked at her.

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “I wasn’t here. If they thought we were going to interfere, from what you’ve told us…”

“Yeah,” he said. “If they thought that, some of them might.”

“And we are,” Aunt Kim said. “We are going to try to interfere.”

“How?”

He saw her shake her head. “No idea.”

“Come on!” Greg shouted again. They heard him start the engine.

“He’s right. We don’t want to see them tonight. Or have them see us. You two head straight home,” Kimberly said. “I’ll meet you there. I’m just going to stop at the hotel for my things.”

Ned was still looking through the gates towards that other world beyond. Greg honked the horn. It sounded shockingly loud, intrusive. Ned turned and walked back and got in the van and they drove away.

He and Greg didn’t say much to each other. Aunt Kim was ahead of them on the way back to Aix and halfway around the ring road before she pulled into a hotel driveway. Greg stopped by the side of the road until a doorman opened the car door for her and she went into the lobby. Then—still not speaking—he pulled back into traffic and continued around the ring to the road east.

He took the now-familiar left after the bakery and grocery store and the small aqueduct, and then swung right onto their upward-slanting lane. Ned had his window down, for the cool air. Country road, a mild night, the risen moon ahead of them above the trees.

Greg swore violently and slammed on the brakes. The van skidded, throwing Ned against his shoulder belt. They stopped.

Ned saw the boar in the road, facing them.

We don’t want to see them tonight.

We don’t always have a choice, he thought.

“Melanie will kill me if I hit an animal,” Greg said. “Maybe it’ll scoot if I go slow, or honk.”

“It won’t,” Ned said quietly. “Hold on, Greg.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I’ve seen this one.”

“Ned, what the hell…?”

“Look at it.”

Scoot wasn’t a word you would ever really apply to what they were looking at. The boar was enormous, even more obviously so than before, seen this close. It was standing—waiting—with arrogant, unnatural confidence squarely in the middle of the roadway. There were a few high, widely spaced streetlights along the lane, half hidden by leaves, and the van’s headlights were on it. The rough, pale grey coat showed as nearly white, the tusks gleamed. It was looking straight at them.

They really weren’t supposed to have good eyesight.

Someone parted the bushes to the right and stepped into the road.

“Oh, Jesus!” Greg said. “Ned, do I gun it?”

“No,” said Ned.

He unlocked his door and got out.

He wasn’t sure why, but he did know he didn’t want to run, and he didn’t want to face this sitting down inside the van.

He’d also recognized who had come. He swung the door closed, heard the chunk sound. Loud, because there were no other noises, really. No birdsong after darkfall. Barely a rustle in the leaves, with the wind almost gone. He shoved his hands in his pockets and stood beside the van, waiting.

The druid, he saw, was still wearing white—as he had been among the ruins when he’d caught the bull’s blood in a stone bowl.

Ned knew it was a druid. He remembered Kate asking Phelan if his enemy—Cadell—was one, and Phelan’s horror at the very thought. Druids were the magic-wielders. This was the one, he was almost sure, who’d shaped the summons that had claimed Melanie, turned her into Ysabel. Cadell had been waiting for tonight, for this man to perform the rite. So had Phelan, for that matter.

It was necessary to remind himself that he was looking at a spirit, someone almost certainly dead a really long time, taking shape now only because it was Beltaine.

He was also pretty certain this particular spirit could kill him if it decided to. He wondered how far behind them his aunt was, if she’d taken the time to check out of the hotel or just grabbed her stuff and followed.

The druid was a small figure, not young, stooped a little, salt-and-pepper beard, seamed face, long grey hair, a woven belt around the ankle-length robe. He wore sandals, no jewellery. No obvious weapon. Ned thought they were supposed to carry a sickle or something and hunt for mistletoe…but he might have gotten that from an Asterix comic book, and he wasn’t too sure how much to rely on that source.

You could laugh at that, if you wanted to.

He said, in French, “Is the boar yours? Watching us?”

“Where has the woman gone?”

A thin, edgy voice, angry, controlling, accustomed to being obeyed.

Ned heard the other van door open and slam shut.

“That’s a real good question,” he heard Greg say. “Way I get this, you answer it for us. Where the hell is Melanie? Tell, then you can crawl back into your dumpster.”

“Easy, Greg,” he murmured, more afraid by the minute.

“There is no person of such a name any more,” the druid said.

“Not since she walked between needfires. I require you to say where Ysabel has gone. You will not be harmed if you do.”

Ned lifted a hand quickly, before Greg could speak again.

“Couple of things,” he said, working really hard to stay calm.

“One, I heard her say you were to stay up there tonight and that the two guys were to search alone. Any comments?”

The man looked almost comically startled. “You were there? During the rite?”

“Damn straight I was. So, like, I know the book on this.”

“You understand you can be killed for that?”

“Nope. I understand that the woman—Ysabel—laid down the rules. You hurt us here, we go missing, you think Phelan’s not gonna know about it, and tell her? You want to ruin this for Cadell? Think he’ll be happy?”

He heard the bravado in his own voice and wondered where it came from. But he was not going to show fear to this guy. He didn’t seem to be the same person, dealing with these people. Fifteen wasn’t a kid in their world. Maybe that was part of it. And it still seemed to him he was seeing too clearly in the darkness, as if everything was sharper tonight.

The druid was staring, saying nothing. Ned cleared his throat. “He’s your boss, isn’t he? Your chief? Whatever. So what are you doing here, screwing things up for him?”

“You are ignorant, whatever else you are,” the figure in front of him said. His eyes were deep-set under thick eyebrows.

“Maybe, but why do you care which one of them wins her? You’re dead again by morning, aren’t you?”

He didn’t know if that was so, actually. He hoped it was.

Another silence, and then: “She was one of us. The world began to change when she made her choice and left.” The druid lifted his voice. “She belongs among us. Changes can be undone. This is not just about the three of them.”

He looked briefly towards the trees, then back.

Ned had a thought, hearing that raised voice. On impulse, he tried the inward searching he’d used before to find Phelan twice, and his aunt by the tower.

Something registered, a glow within. Not the druid.

Ned smiled thinly. It was really weird, but though he was scared to the point that his hands were trembling, he also felt excited, alive, charged with something, by something, that he couldn’t explain.

The boar had gone now—off the road, back into the dark field or the woods beyond. It had been here to stop them; it had done that, and departed.

Ned said, “I had two questions, remember? Here’s the other one. You say you didn’t know I was up there before. What are you doing here then? Why did you think I’d have a clue about this? How did you know me at all, or how to find me?”

He knew the answers, but wanted to see what the other guy did.

He was aware that Greg was looking at him, a kind of awe in his face. The van’s headlights were illuminating the road and the white-robed figure. Insects darted through the light.

The druid lifted his head. “By what right do you question me?”

“Oh, fine,” Ned said. “That’s cool. I’ll just wait for your friend to climb out of the bushes and ask him.”

He saw the reaction to that. He turned to his right, towards the trees by the road. “There are mosquitoes up here, man, they must be worse in there. You getting bitten?”

He waited. There was a stirring in the trees.

Out of the darkness beyond the twin arcs of the headlight beams a red-gold figure emerged. Ned’s heart started pounding when he saw him.

Cadell had the stag horns growing from his head again. Ned heard Greg swear softly in disbelief.

“Who are you?” the big Celt said, stepping up onto the roadway.

Where the druid had been angry, Cadell sounded almost amused. His voice was as before: deep, carrying. You could follow that voice into battle, Ned thought.

He needed to be careful, though. It was true, the thought he’d had looking through the barred gates by the parking lot: if these guys thought he and Greg were a problem, they would do something about it.

If they could ignore his questions, he decided, he could do the same with theirs. He said, “Tell me, since this guy won’t, you really think Phelan won’t let her know you broke the rules? Like, broke them immediately? I heard you swear an oath.”

Cadell said, “It is Beltaine, she said to release them when the night ended.” The voice was still amused, diverted. It hadn’t been, Ned remembered, when Phelan walked up into the site, after Ysabel had come.

“True,” Ned admitted. Beside him, Greg was breathing hard.

“But I also heard her say you were to stay there, start searching in the morning.”

The big man smiled down at him. His easy manner didn’t feel faked to Ned. “But I’m not looking for her,” he said. “I was looking for you.”

“Cute. You willing to take a chance she’ll buy that? Risk everything on it? Is she the type to be cool with that kind of scam?”

Cadell’s expression did change then, which was kind of satisfying. There was a silence.

Ned nodded his head. “Thought so. And anyhow, why were you looking for me?”

“She called your name—the small woman—when she came up, before she went through the fires.”

Oh. Right, Ned thought.

And Cadell would have known his name, who he was, from by the tower with Aunt Kim. He’d made the connection. If Ned was understanding any of this—which wasn’t a dead certainty—the guy had been alive, on and off, for more than two thousand years. He’d had time to get clever. Learn how to grow stag horns, change into an owl, control wolves and dogs.

Piece a few clues together.

In the middle of the roadway, the druid was muttering to himself, angrily rocking back and forth like some wind-up toy ready to explode. Ned ignored him.

“You saw us come back for the van?” he guessed.

Cadell nodded. “I had someone watching it.”

“Smart of you,” Ned said. “One man against one man, but you get the ghosts?”

“He seems to have you,” Cadell said softly. “Doesn’t he?”

Ned hesitated.

“No one has us,” Greg snapped. He took a step forward. “We have nothing to do with this. We want Melanie back, then you can all go off and screw each other for all we care!”

“An unappealing notion,” Cadell said. He smiled. “What Brys told you is true, the woman you call Melanie doesn’t exist any more. You need to understand that. There is no reason for you not tell us where Ysabel might be, if you know.”

“You bastards!” Greg shouted. His hands were balled into fists.

“By what goddamned right do you—”

“Hold it, Greg,” Ned said. He moved over and put a hand on the other man’s arm. “Hold it.”

Ned took a breath. He was pretty upset himself, trying not to let it show. They couldn’t lose control here, though, they needed to know too much more.

He said, “Why should we have any idea where she is? Why would you even think that?”

The druid said something swiftly in that other language.

Cadell looked at him and shook his head. Replied curtly in the same tongue, then turned back to Ned.

“You can be told this much. But you must believe I am not your enemy, and Phelan is not your friend. Or anyone’s friend.” He paused, as if reaching for words. The druid was still muttering.

That one, Ned thought, wants to kill us.

Cadell said, “Ysabel changes. Each time we return. Each time, she is altered a little by the summoning. She carries something of the woman brought for her.”

“This has happened before, then? Someone else becomes…?”

“Always.”

Ned was getting a headache trying to concentrate, to remember all of this. He was going to have to tell Aunt Kim. Maybe she could make sense of it. If they got out of here. The villa was so close, but it felt years away. He had to keep Greg from exploding. He could feel the other man’s tension beside him.

He said, “She changes? You two don’t?”

Cadell shook his head, the antlers moving. “I am as I have always been, from the first days. And so is he, may the gods rot his heart.”

“So why? Why does she?”

Again the druid, Brys, snarled something at the bigger man, and again he was ignored.

Cadell wasn’t smiling now. “She alters so that her choice alters. You are not expected to understand. I am giving you these answers to show goodwill. I am not your enemy.”

“Goodwill?” Greg shouted. “After what you did to her? Are you insane?”

Ned grabbed for his arm again. He could feel Greg trembling, as if he wanted to charge forward, start swinging fists. He’d get cut to pieces if he did.

“I don’t understand,” Ned said. “You’re right. Maybe I don’t need to, but believe me—and this is the truth—we have no clue where she is.”

Cadell stared at him a long moment, then he sighed, as if surrendering something—a hope?

“It was always unlikely.” He shrugged. “Very well. Your road is clear now. Leave us to our search. Keep away from this. The woman by the tower, she swore that you would.”

That was Aunt Kim. “Uh-uh. No dice. She promised,” said Ned, “before you took one of us.” He pointed a finger, was pleased to see his hand was steady. “You changed things, not us.” He paused, took a chance. “Would you surrender someone who mattered to you, just like that?”

“It is not the same,” Cadell said. But he’d hesitated.

“Yes it is!”’ Greg snapped. “You want someone you lost, so do we!”

Ned looked at him. So did Cadell.

“Ysabel is never lost,” the big man said. “That is the nature of this. She is in the balance. And I have someone to kill.”

“Then play all that out without Melanie,” Ned said. He gambled again. “My aunt will be coming up this road any minute. She knows the one you’re mocking again with those horns. She’s seen him, remember? You want her in on this? Risk losing Ysabel because you chose the wrong woman to change and got tangled with us?”

Cadell was looking away now, up towards the trees and sky. So was the druid, Ned saw. He wondered if he’d made a mistake, mentioning Aunt Kim.

He knew what they were doing. He did the same thing himself, closed his eyes, reaching inward and then out for her. No presence, no sign of her pale, bright glow. She was screening herself, or too far away.

“I do not mock him,” Cadell said, looking at Ned again. “When I am in the woods, it…pleases me to honour him with the horns he wears.”

Ned shook his head, angry again, and scared. It was getting to be a bit much. He heard himself saying, “Oh, sure. Right. Do you honour a king by wearing his crown?”

And where had that come from? he thought.

The druid stopped rocking. Cadell blinked. Greg was staring at Ned again. Ned realized he still had a hand on the other man’s arm. He let it drop.

“Who are you?” Cadell said. He’d asked that already.

“A friend of the woman you took,” Ned said. “And nephew of the other one. The one who matters. So you need to just reverse whatever you did to Melanie, and you’ll get us all out of your hair.”

There was another silence. “That cannot be,” the druid said.

Cadell nodded his head. “Even if I wished it. You saw the bull die, and the fires.” He looked at Ned a moment. “And would it be honourable for you to reclaim your woman and have someone else be lost in her stead?”

No good reply to that, actually.

“She isn’t my woman,” Ned said lamely, feeling like a high school kid again, even as he spoke. That was what you said when guys teased you about a girl, for God’s sake.

Cadell smiled. A different sort of expression. It made you realize—again—that this man had lived a very long time.

“The roadway is clear,” he repeated, gently enough. “We will go back to the sanctuary and wait for dawn, as she commanded. As it happens, you are right…I don’t trust him not to tell her, and she may choose to let such things matter. I have learned, at cost, not to anticipate her. Go your way.” He paused, then added, again, “I am not your enemy.”

Ned looked at him. In the headlights, under moonlight, wearing those horns, the man looked like a god himself, with a voice to match.

A week ago, Ned had been worrying about his frog dissection in biology and a class party at Gail Ridpath’s house and the hockey playoffs.

He shivered, nodded his head. What did you say to any of this, anyhow?

“Screw you,” was what Gregory said, and added an extreme obscenity.

“I would be more careful,” Cadell said, calmly.

Greg repeated exactly what he’d just said, word for word, and strode forward—towards the druid. “We’re not going anywhere and neither are you,” he snarled at the one called Brys. “You handling this stuff? You handle it, man—change her back before I break your face!”

Sometimes a suspended moment boiled over into action just a little too fast.

“Stop!” cried Cadell.

Ned saw the druid raise both hands as Greg approached, moving fast. He thought the man was warding a blow. He was wrong.

Greg’s head snapped backwards. His whole upper body lifted, as his feet kept moving—almost comically—forward for an instant. Edward Marriner’s assistant, a solid, heavy-set man, went flying backwards through the air and landed hard in the road, flat on his back in the glare of the van’s headlights.

He didn’t move. His body looked awkward, crumpled, where it lay.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Ned said.

“I said stop,” Cadell snapped at the druid. And added something savagely in their other tongue.

Ned’s own anger came. A force such as he couldn’t remember feeling in his life. He wheeled towards the big Celt, heard himself scream, wordlessly, with fury and fear, and without knowing what he was doing, without a clue, his right hand swung up and across, scything through the night air, aimed towards Cadell, a good three metres away.

There was a sizzling sound, like steak first hitting a barbeque or electricity surging. Ned cried out again. Something leaped from his fingers like a laser—and sliced through the stag horns, severing them halfway up. The big man roared, in shock and pain.

Then there was silence.

Cadell, still twisted in the act of ducking, stared at Ned. A hand went to his horns. What was left of them. The sliced-off, branching part lay beside him in the road.

Ned turned to the druid. The white-robed man lifted his own hands quickly, but this time clearly in self-defence. Ned could see fear in his face.

“Who are you?” the druid said.

His turn, it seemed. People were asking that a whole lot, Ned thought. It could get old fast, or be really, really scary.

“Did you kill him?” he demanded. Greg still hadn’t moved.

“He’s alive,” Cadell said. “I blocked most of it. Brys, be gone now. You disobeyed me. You heard my command.”

The druid turned to him. Speaking slowly, a watchful eye on Ned, he said, “Command me not. I have a task here, for all of us. This is not only the three of you.”

“Yes it is,” said Cadell flatly. “It always is. Shall I unbind you, spirit from body, right here? Do you want to try journeying back to the other side right now? From this place? I will do it, you know I can. You are here only because of me.”

Another moment of stillness, a night road between trees and fields, the moon risen. Brys said something in that other tongue, words laden with a bitterness so deep even Ned could hear it. Then the druid gestured—towards himself this time—and disappeared.

Ned shook his head. And in just about the same moment, he felt a glow within. He hadn’t been searching for her…Aunt Kim was reaching for him, he realized, letting him know she was coming. He hadn’t known that could happen.

He hadn’t known much, in fact. His right hand was tingling, from the force, the fury, of what he’d just done.

He looked at Cadell again. The remnants of the broken-off horns were gone, he saw. The man stood, golden-haired, as he had at Entremont.

Ned felt an unexpected sorrow. A loss of something, of majesty. He swallowed. “I don’t know how I did that,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d saved Greg.”

“He’ll be all right. Didn’t deserve death so soon, though he’s a fool.”

“He isn’t,” Ned protested weakly. “We’re way over our heads. We’ve lost someone.”

Cadell looked at him, then lifted his head, as he had before, looking above the trees. Ned saw him register that Kim was coming. The big man shook his head.

“We all lose people. I told you truth. So did Brys, in this. She is gone. There is no such person in the world any more.”

“How are we supposed to accept that, or explain it?” Ned asked.

The Celt shrugged. Not my problem, the gesture seemed to say. But Ned was too worn out, too spent, to be angry again.

“Carry on with your lives,” Cadell said. Golden, magnificent, the resonant voice.

Ned remembered Phelan saying the same thing to them—him and Kate—just days ago. Cadell put a hand up and ran it through his long hair. “If you stray near to us you are going to be hurt or killed, or end up hopelessly between two worlds. You are close to that already, yourself, whoever you are.” His voice was unsettlingly gentle again.

I am not your enemy.

They heard a car below them, changing gears to climb.

“Farewell,” the big man said. He lifted one hand, straight over his head.

An owl was in the air where a man had been. It was flying away, north again, over hedge, field, towards the ridge beyond the houses set back from the road, then it was gone.

Ned looked at his hands. He felt like one of the X-Men, a comic-book freak. His fingers weren’t tingling any more, but he didn’t feel any kind of power, either.

Aunt Kim’s lights appeared. The red car came to a stop behind the van. Ned heard her door open and close, saw her approaching, moving quickly, almost running. Her white hair gleamed in the headlights.

He had never been so glad to see anyone in his life.

His aunt looked at him and stopped dead.

“Ned. What happened? Who was here?”

“Cadell, and a druid. There was a boar blocking the road, they sent it, and then they…” It was pretty hard to talk.

“Sent it? Why, Ned?”

“They thought we might know where she is.”

She looked around. “Where’s Gregory?”

“Present, ma’am.”

Ned turned quickly. Greg was sitting up, propped on one hand, rubbing at his chest with the other.

“Oh, God. What happened to you?”

“Got whomped by the druid guy. Good thing I’m way tough. Viking blood, all the way back.”

Ned shook his head. “Cadell blocked it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“Scared of our telling Phelan, Ysabel learning they were down here. Or maybe he’s…not so bad.”

“You mean I’m not way tough?”

Aunt Kim managed a smile. “I think you’re tough as horseshoe nails, Gregory. But let’s go up to the house. I don’t like it out here after dark. Not tonight.”

“Hold it,” Ned said.

His hearing seemed to be sharper, too. But a second later the others heard it. Then they all saw the bobbing flashlight beam above them on the roadway.

“Ned? Greg?” It was his father.

“We’re here!” Kimberly called. “It’s all right.”

The searchers appeared a few seconds later: his dad, Steve, Kate, hurrying down the slope. Ned saw that his father was carrying a hoe. Steve had a shovel. Kate held the flashlight…and a hammer.

“We saw the van’s lights, then they stopped,” his father said. “We got nervous.”

“And charged to the rescue? Like that?” Greg said, standing up carefully. He was still rubbing his chest. “Jeez, you look like extras storming the castle in Frankenstein. All you need’s a thunderstorm and accents.”

Ned’s father scowled. “Very funny, Gregory.”

Kate giggled, looking at her hammer. “I couldn’t find a stake,” she said.

Dracula wasn’t that far from the truth here, Ned thought, with risen spirits abroad.

This was all release of tension, and he knew it. They’d been scared, now they weren’t—for a while, anyhow.

“Ned, you okay?” his father asked.

Ned nodded.

It occurred to him that no one had seen what he’d done to Cadell. Greg had been flat on his back, out cold. Ned decided to keep that part to himself. He looked at his aunt.

“What was the name of that figure?” he asked. “The one you mentioned. With the horns. From when we met Cadell.”

Aunt Kim hesitated. “Cernan. Cernunnos. Their forest god.” Her expression changed. “He had them again?”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head. “So much for my powers of intimidation.”

“He left when we felt you coming.”

“As an owl?”

Ned nodded. “I think he was worried about you, or at least unsure.”

Aunt Kim made a wry face. “Probably scared of Peugeots. Famous for bad transmissions.”

They were trying to calm him down, Ned realized. He must look pretty freaked out. He managed a smile, but he didn’t seem to be fooling anyone. He kept remembering what he’d done, the feeling of it.

“Let’s go up,” Kimberly repeated. “You two can tell us what happened, but in the house.”

His father said, “Right. Greg, I’ll drive. You can ride shotgun with this.”

Greg eyed the hoe. “Thanks, boss. That’ll make me feel so protected.”

He had to be in considerable pain, Ned thought, remembering Greg flying backwards and that crumpled landing. He wasn’t letting on, though. People could surprise you.

Ned wanted to smile with the others, joke like them, but he couldn’t do it. He stared at his hands again. What he was feeling was hard to describe, but some of it was grief.

This time, when he came downstairs in the middle of the night his aunt was in the kitchen, sitting at the table in a blue robe. He hadn’t expected anyone—she startled him. The only light was the one over the stove-top.

“You get insomnia too?” she asked.

Ned shook his head. “Not usually.”

He went to the fridge and took out the orange juice, blinking in the sudden light. He poured himself a drink.

“Kate sleeping?”

She nodded.

He walked to the glass doors by the terrace.

“Did you go out? It looks beautiful, doesn’t it?” He saw the moon above the city.

“We’re better off inside, dear. It isn’t a night for wandering.”

“But I did go wandering,” Ned said, looking at the pool and trees. The cypresses were moving in the wind, which had picked up again.

“And because I did, Melanie’s gone. If we hadn’t gone up—”

“Hush. Listen to me. The two of you went because Kate was halfway inside the rites already. She said so. You said so, how different she became. She was starting for the fires when Melanie came.”

It was true. It wasn’t a truth that made you happy.

“I could have said no.”

“Not easy, Ned. Not in this kind of situation. You were in it too.”

He looked at her. “Did you ever say no?”

His aunt was silent for a time. “Once,” she said.

“And what…?”

“Long story, Ned.”

He looked away, towards the moon in the window again. He crossed back and sat at the table with her. He said, “Did you see that Veracook put rowan leaves on the window ledge?”

Aunt Kim nodded. “Probably outside all the doors, too, if we look. The past is close to the surface here, Ned.”

“Which part of the past?”

She smiled faintly. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Right now, from what you’ve said? I’d guess a lot of it, dear.”

He drank his juice. “We’re not going to get her back, are we?”

His aunt raised her eyebrows. “Oh, my! And which part of what family did that come from? Not ours, that’s for sure. Is your father like this?”

Ned shook his head.

“Then stop it right now. We haven’t even begun looking. You go get some rest. This is three in the morning talking in you. And remember, we have six good people here, and two more coming.”

Ned looked at her. “Well, yeah, but if my mom kills you we’re down to seven.”

His aunt sniffed. “I can handle my baby sister.”

He had to smile at that. “You think so?”

She made that wry face. “Maybe not. We’ll see. But really, go back to bed. We’re starting early.”

They’d made their plans. Both cars, two groups. Aunt Kim, with Kate in her best geek mode, had chosen the destinations. It had seemed hopeless, even ridiculous when they’d discussed it. It seemed more so now, in this dead-quiet of night.

He said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you, from before.”

She sat still, waiting.

“When the druid slammed Greg I thought he’d killed him. I got…I lost it, I guess. I’m really not sure how, but, like, I slashed sideways with my hand, from at least four, five metres away, and I…I cut Cadell’s horns off. Halfway up. Like, with a light-sabre, you know?”

She said nothing, absorbing this. Her expression was strange, though. She reached out, almost absently, and finished his orange juice.

“You aimed for the horns? Not him?”

He thought about it. “I guess. I don’t think I actually aimed at all. I had no idea I could even…” He stopped. It was pretty hard to talk about.

“Oh, child,” Aunt Kim said.

“What do I do about it?”

She squeezed his hand on the tabletop. “Nothing, Ned. It may never happen again. It was Beltaine. You’d seen the boar, a druid, the fires. You were pretty far along that road. And you have our family’s link to all of this. Maybe more than any of us. But you probably aren’t going to be able to control it, and maybe that’s just as well.”

“So I just forget what happened?”

She smiled again, sadly. “You’ll never forget it, Ned. But there’s a good chance it’ll never come back. Keep it, a reminder that the world has more to it than most people ever know.”

“My dad said something like that.”

“I like your father,” she said. “I hope he likes me.”

“You need my mom to like you a lot more.”

“Meghan? She loves me. Like a sister.”

Ned actually laughed.

“Go to bed,” his aunt said.

He did, and to his surprise, he slept.

Up in the wind at Entremont, middle of the night, he is remembering other times, watching the torches burn down. He is thinking about the forest, the first time he came here.

He’d been afraid of dying that day, so many lives ago, walking through black woods, following the guides, no idea where they were taking him, if he’d ever get back to the shore and sea, and light.

Even half lost in reverie, he is aware when the other man returns to the plateau, in his owl shape.

It isn’t as if Cadell is making a secret of anything.

Phelan is looking away south, doesn’t bother turning to see the other man change back. He keeps to himself at the end of the ridge overlooking the lights of Aix below. The sea is beyond, across the coastal range, unseen. He feels it always, a tide within, and the moon is full.

He is undisturbed by the other man’s disregard of the rules she has given them. It isn’t as if such behaviour is unexpected.

She is not going to make her choice because one of them has sought some advantage. They have fought each other or waged wars here for millennia. She is as likely to see Cadell’s flying as evidence of a greater desire for her. Or not.

It is never wise, he has learned, to believe you know what Ysabel will think, or do. And this newly devised challenge is unsettling.

Cadell will be feeling the same way, he knows. (They know each other very well by now.) The Celt might even—the thought comes—have returned here because he’s actually afraid she might let a transgression have consequence. She is capricious, almost above all else, unpredictable even after more than twenty-five hundred years. And she has altered their duel this time into something new.

Sometimes when he thinks the number, the length of time, twenty-five hundred, it can still catch him in the heart. The weight of it, impossibility. The long hammer of fate.

They never change, the two of them. She always does, in small, telling ways. She must be rediscovered, as a consequence, each and every time. Endlessly different, endlessly loved. It has to do with how she returns—through the summoning of someone else. The claiming of another soul.

His back to the other man and the spirits, looking out from the edge of the plateau, he is entirely unafraid. Cadell will not attack him here. That far he would never go.

He expects the Beltaine dead to be gone—as commanded—before sunrise, though the druid might not be. Brys is a wild card of sorts in this, always has been, but there is nothing to be done about that, really.

What he cannot alter he will ignore, for the next three days.

What he needs to do is find her. First.

He needs to concentrate on possibilities and there are too many. He reminds himself that she wants to be found. Tries to grasp what that means, in terms of where she might be.

It is possible that she’ll move around, not stay in a single chosen place. They have done this return so many times, the three of them. She will know how to change garments, hide her hair, find money if she needs it. She cannot fly, but there are trains, taxis. This world will not frighten her any more than it has unsettled either of the men, returning to changes. There are always changes.

She is not limited, except by the range, the ambit of their history here, and that is wide, east and west and north, and to the margin of the sea.

In the moonlight, the land below, unfurling south, is bright enough for shadows. He holds the sound of her voice inside him and gazes out towards the changed, invisible coastline, remembering.

He was so afraid, that first time here.

Arriving with three ships to establish a trading post on a shoreline known to be inhabited, and dangerous. You made your fortune in proportion to the danger. That was the way of it. If the goods on offer were difficult to obtain back home, the rewards were that much greater.

He was young, already known as a mariner. Unmarried as yet, willing to take risks, shape the rising trajectory of a life. Not an especially genial man, by reputation, but no obvious enemies, either. A habit of command. They had made him leader of the expedition.

They put ashore, he remembers, on the coast a little west of here. The shoreline has silted up, is greatly changed in two millennia: logging for timber, wood burned for fires, irrigation systems, flood barriers. The sea is farther away now than it was.

He remembers seeing the trees from the boat, the forest coming right down to where they made harbour. A windbreak cove, small, stony beach. Looking from the ship at those oak woods, wondering what lay beyond. Death or fortune…or nothing of significance.

After all, it didn’t have to be one or the other.

The Celts came to them two days later. Appearing silently out of the woods as they were putting up their first temporary structures.

Fear returning, the sheer size of them. They had always been bigger people. And the wildness: half naked, the heavy gold they wore, the long hair, bright leggings, weapons carried.

He knew how to fight, some of his seamen did. But they were traders, not truly soldiers. They had come in peace, in hope and greed, to begin a cycle: a rhythm of trade, seasonal, enduring.

To stay, if they could, eventually.

There was no language in common. Two of his men had been here before, farther east along the coast; they had twenty or thirty words between them in the barbaric tongue men spoke here. And it would have been laughable to imagine one of these giant savages speaking Greek. The tongue of the blessed Olympians.

Of civilized man.

They were far from civilization on that stony shoreline by the woods.

The Celts accepted gifts: cloth and wine, and cups for the wine, jewelled necklaces. They liked the wine.

And they made an overture, a promising one. From their gestures on the second encounter, two days after the first—motions of drinking, eating, pointing inland beyond the trees—he understood what they were conveying. He was being invited to a feast. No thought of not accepting.

You couldn’t allow fear to control you.

He left, with one companion, the next day when they came for him. They followed ten of the Celts into the trees, darkness dropping like a cloak, immediately, even on a sunny day, the sea disappearing behind them, then the sound of it gone.

He remembers, on this high, open, moonlit ground, how frightened he was as that day’s long walk went on. He had thought, for whatever reason, that this tribe lived by the water, but there was little reason for them to do so. These were not fisherfolk.

The woods seemed endless, enveloping, unchanging. A journey from his world into another one. A space out of time. Forests could be like that, in the stories, in life.

They heard animals as they went; never saw any. He was lost almost immediately as they twisted to follow a barely seen path, mostly heading north, he thought, but not invariably. He realized he was at their mercy; the two of them would never find their way back alone.

Your profits were in proportion to the risks you ran.

Towards sunset, end of a full day’s travelling, the trees began to grow thinner. The faint path widened. The sky could be seen. Then torches. They came out of the forest. He saw a village, lit with fires for a festival. He didn’t know, at that point, what the celebration was.

How could he have known?

They led him into that torchlight, across a defensive ditch, past bonfires, through an earthen wall, then a gauntlet of men—and women. Not hostile, more curious than anything.

They came into a circle, a wide space at the centre of small houses made of wood. A tall man, silver-haired, not young, stood up to greet them. They looked at each other and exchanged gestures.

He had liked the man from the first moment.

He was given a cup, one of their own. He lifted it in salute, drank. A harsh, burning liquor, unwatered. Fire down his throat. An effort (he remembers) not to shame himself, insult them, by coughing, or spitting it out. No civilized man would take liquor this way.

He was far from civilized men. He’d felt the drink affecting him almost immediately. A deep breath. A brief smile. He handed the cup back; a man of restraint, moderation. Chosen for these things as much as for courage and skill. A leader, responsible for his companion here and the others on the shore. The need to be diligent, careful.

He saw her then. First time.

The world changing, forever.

Really that, he thinks, on the plateau of Entremont, two thousand six hundred years after: as near to forever as a man might know.

For good or ill, joy or grief, love or hatred, death or life returning. All those things. As much as a man might know.

He hears a sound now, someone approaching, stopping. He turns this time. He knows the footfall as he knows his own, very nearly.

“Did you enjoy watching?” Cadell asks. “Hiding down below?” He smiles.

“The bull?” He shrugs. “I never enjoy it very much. You’ve improved. The kill was clean.”

The Celt continues to smile. “It always is. You know it.”

“Of course.”

They look steadily at each other. He wants to kill the other man. He needs to kill the other man.

The Beltaine spirits and the druid are a distance away, by the sanctuary and the still-burning torches. He and the other one might easily be alone here in the night. The wind had lessened earlier but has returned now. Clouds and stars overhead.

“I know where she is,” Cadell says.

“No you don’t,” he replies.