There was an enormous stone in front of it again, exactly as there had been before, and Dave knew who lay asleep in the darkness there.
He dismounted, and he took the horn into his hand and walked a little way into the Wood. The light was dappled here, the leaves rustled above his head. He wasn’t afraid though, not this time. Not as he had been the night he’d met Flidais. The Great Wood had slaked its anger now, the lios alfar had told them. It had to do with Lancelot and Darien, and with the final passing of Lisen, the blazing of her Circlet in Starkadh. Dave didn’t really understand such things, but one thing he did understand, and it had brought him with the horn back to this place.
He waited, with a patience that was another new thing in him. He watched the shadows flicker and shift on the forest floor and in the leaves overhead. He listened to the sounds of the forest. He tried to think, to understand himself and his own desires. It was hard to concentrate, though, because he was waiting for someone.
And then he heard a different sound behind him. His heart racing, despite all his inward preparation, he turned, kneeling as he did so, with his head lowered.
“You may rise,” said Ceinwen. “Of all men, you should know that you may rise.”
He looked up and saw her again: in green as she always was, with the bow in her hand. The bow with which she’d almost killed him by a pool in Faelinn Grove.
Not all need die, she had said that night. And so he’d lived, to be given a horn, to carry an axe in war, to summon the Wild Hunt. To return again to this place.
The goddess stood before him, radiant and glorious, though muting the shining of her face that he might look upon her without being stricken blind.
He rose, as she bade him. He took a deep breath, to slow the beating of his heart. He said, “Goddess, I have come to return a gift.” He held out the horn in a hand that, he was pleased to see, did not tremble. “It is a thing too powerful for me to hold. Too deeply powerful, I think, for any mortal man.”
Ceinwen smiled, beautiful and terrible. “I thought you would come,” she said. “I waited to see. Had you not, I would have come for you, before you went away. I gave you more than I meant to give with this horn.” And then, in a gentler tone, “What you say is not wrong, Davor of the Axe. It must be hidden again, to wait for a truer finding many years from now. Many, many years.”
“We would have died by Adein without it,” Dave said quietly. “Does that not make it a true finding?”
She smiled again, inscrutable, capricious. She said, “You have grown clever since last we met. I may be sorry to see you go.”
There was nothing he could say to that. He extended the horn a little toward her, and she took it from his hand. Her fingers touched his palm, and he did tremble then, with awe and memory. She laughed, deep in her throat. Dave could feel himself flushing. But there was something he had to ask, even if she laughed. After a moment, he said, “Would you be as sorry to see me stay? I have been trying for a long time now to decide. I think I’m ready to go home, but another part of me despairs at the thought of leaving.” He spoke as carefully as he could, with more dignity than he’d thought he possessed.
She did not laugh. The goddess looked upon him, and there was a strangeness in her eyes, half cold, half sorrowing. She shook her head. “Dave Martyniuk,” she said, “you have grown wiser since that night in Faelinn Grove. I had thought you knew the answer to that question without my telling it. You cannot stay, and you should have known you cannot.”
Something jogged in Dave’s mind: an image, another memory. Just before she spoke again, in the half second before she told him why, he understood.
“What did I say to you that night by the pool?” she asked, her voice cool and soft like woven silk.
He knew. It had been hidden somewhere in his mind all along, he supposed. No man of Fionavar may see Ceinwen hunt.