Derval before you left.” This was exactly what drove Dave crazy about Gereint.
Diarmuid didn’t seem bothered. “With Loren, probably,” he murmured, smiling as if at a jest. Dave didn’t get the joke. “Will you come then?” the Prince continued, addressing the shaman.
“Not to Paras Derval,” Gereint replied placidly. “It is too far for my old bones.”
“Well, surely—” Diarmuid began.
“I will meet you,” Gereint went on, ignoring him, “in Gwen Ystrat. I will leave tomorrow for the Temple in Morvran. You will all be coming there.”
This time even Diarmuid looked discomfited. “Why?” he asked.
“Which way did the wolves fly?” the shaman asked, turning unnervingly to where Tore sat.
“South,” the dark man said, and they were silent. There was a burst of laughter from the largest fire. Dave glanced over involuntarily and saw, with a sudden chill, that Liane was sitting next to Kevin, and the two of them were whispering in each other’s ears. His vision blurred. Goddamn that flashy skirt-chaser! Why did the slick, carefree Kevin Laines always have to be around to spoil things? Inwardly seething, Dave forced himself to turn back to the conclave.
“You will all be there,” Gereint was repeating. “And Gwen Ystrat is the best place for what we will have to do.”
Diarmuid stared at the blind shaman for a long moment. Then: “All right,” he said. “I will tell my brother. Is there anything else?”
“One thing.” It was Levon. “Dave, you have your horn.”
The horn from Pendaran. With the note that was the sound of Light itself. “I do,” Dave said. It was looped across his body.
“Good,” said Levon. “Then if the Seer is in Paras Derval I would like to ride back with you. There is something I’d like to try before we go to Gwen Ystrat.”
Ivor stirred at that, and turned to his elder son. “It is rash,” he said slowly. “You know it is.”
“I don’t know,” Levon replied. “I know we have been given Owein’s Horn. Why else if not to use?” This was reasonable enough on its own terms to silence his father. It happened, however, to be quite wrong.
“What exactly are we talking about?” the Prince asked.
“Owein,” Levon said tensely. There was a brightness in his face. “I want to wake the Sleepers and set free the Wild Hunt!”
It held them, if only for a moment.
“What fun!” said Diarmuid, but Dave could see a gleam in his eye, answering Levon’s.
Only Gereint laughed, a low, unsettling sound. “What fun,” the shaman repeated, chuckling to himself as he rocked back and forth.
It was just afterward that they noticed that Tabor had fainted.
He’d revived by morning and come out, pale but cheerful, to bid them good-bye. Dave would have stayed with the Dalrei if he could, but they needed him for the horn, it seemed, and Levon and Tore were coming with them, so it was all right. And they’d be meeting again soon in Gwen Ystrat. Morvran was the place Gereint had named.
He was thinking about Gereint’s laughter as they set off south again to meet the road to Paras Derval where it began to the west of Lake Leinan. In any normal weather, Levon said, they would have cut across the grazing lands of north Brennin, but not with the ice and snow of this unnatural season.
Kevin was riding, uncharacteristically subdued, with a couple of Diarmuid’s men, including the one he’d so asininely jumped the night before. That was fine by Dave; he wanted nothing to do with the other man. If people wanted to call it jealousy, let them. He didn’t care enough to explain. He wasn’t about to confide in anyone that he’d renounced the girl himself—to Green Ceinwen in the wood. Nor was he about to recount what the goddess had replied.
She’s Tore’s, he’d said.
Has she no other choice? Ceinwen had answered, and laughed before she disappeared.
That part was Dave’s own business.
For now, though, he had catching up to do with the men he called his brothers, ever since a ritual in Pendaran Wood. Eventually the catching up took them to the moment in the muddy fields around Stonehenge where Kevin had been explaining to the guards in French and mangled English what he and Jennifer were doing necking in forbidden territory. It had been a remarkably effective performance, and it had lasted precisely until the moment when the four of them had felt the sudden shock of power gathering them together and hurling them into the cold, dark crossing between worlds.
Chapter 6
It was, Jennifer realized, as the