priestesses sang under the dome, ending the lament on the last long, keening note. And after a moment she heard Shiel’s clear voice begin the antiphonal verses of the evening invocation. There was some peace there, Jaelle thought, some comfort to be found in the rituals, even now, even in time of darkness.
Her chamber door burst open. Leila stood in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” Jaelle exclaimed. “Leila, you should be in the dome with—”
She stopped. The girl’s eyes were wide, staring, focused on nothingness. Leila spoke, in a voice tranced and uninflected. “They have blown the horn,” she said. “In the battle. He is in the sky now, above the river. Finn. And the kings. I see Owein in the sky. He is drawing a sword. Finn is drawing a sword. They are—they are—” Her face was chalk white, her fingers splayed at her sides. She made a thin sound.
“They are killing,” she said. “They are killing the svarts and the urgach. Finn is covered in blood. So much blood. And now Owein is—he is—”
Jaelle saw the girl’s eyes flare even wider then, and go wild with terror, and her heart lurched;
Leila screamed. “Finn, no! Stop him! They are killing us!”
She screamed again, wordlessly, and stumbling forward, falling, buried her head in Jaelle’s lap, her arms clutching the Priestess, her body racked convulsively.
The chanting stopped under the dome. There were footsteps running along the corridors. Jaelle held the girl as tightly as she could; Leila was thrashing so hard, the High Priestess was genuinely afraid she would hurt herself.
“What is it? What has happened?”
She looked up and saw Sharra of Cathal in the doorway.
“The battle,” she gasped, fighting to hold Leila, her own body rocking with the force of the girl’s weeping. “The Hunt. Owein. She is tuned to—”
And then they heard the voice.
“Sky King, sheath your sword! I put my will upon you!”
It seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere in the room, clear, cold, utterly imperative.
Leila’s violent movements stopped. She lay still in Jaelle’s arms. They were all still: the three in the room and those gathered in the corridor. They waited. Jaelle found it difficult to breathe. Her hands were blindly, reflexively stroking Leila’s hair. The girl’s robe was soaked through with perspiration.
“What is it?” whispered Sharra of Cathal. It sounded loud in the silence. “Who said that?”
Jaelle felt Leila draw a shuddering breath. The girl—fifteen, Jaelle thought, only that—lifted her head again. Her face was splotchy, her hair tangled hopelessly. She said, “It was Ceinwen. It was Ceinwen, High Priestess.” There was wonder in her voice. A child’s wonder.
“Herself? Directly?” Sharra again. Jaelle looked at the Princess, who despite her own youth had been trained in power and so evidently knew the constraints laid by the Weaver on the gods.
Leila turned to Sharra. Her eyes were normal again, and very young. She nodded. “It was her own voice.”
Jaelle shook her head. There would be a price demanded for that, she knew, among the jealous pantheon of goddesses and gods. That, of course, was far beyond her. Something else, though, was not.
She said, “Leila, you are in danger from this. The Hunt is too wild, it is the wildest power of all. You must try to break this link with Finn, child. There is death in it.”
She had powers of her own, knew when her voice was more than merely hers. She was High Priestess and in the Temple of Dana.
Leila looked up at her, kneeling still on the floor. Automatically, Jaelle reached out to push a snarl of hair back from the girl’s white face.
“I can’t,” Leila said quietly. Only Sharra, nearest to them, heard. “I can’t break it. But it doesn’t matter anymore. They will never call them again, they dare not—there will be no way to bind them if they do. Ceinwen will not intercede twice. He is gone, High Priestess, out among the stars, on the Longest Road.”
Jaelle looked at her for a long time. Sharra came up and laid a hand on Leila’s shoulder. The tangle of hair fell down again, and once more the Priestess pushed it back.
Someone had returned to the dome. The bells were ringing.
Jaelle stood up. “Let us go,” she said. “The invocations are not finished. We will all do them. Come.”
She led them along the curving corridors to the place of the axe. All through the evening chants, though, she was hearing a different voice in her mind.