"I agree. He's going to take the Olden Track to the grove."

"He's never done it before." She threw Shay a quizzical glance.

Shay shrugged. "Rhuddlan said he might. The way through the mountains will take him over the high pass of Wyche Elm. The thinner air will help clear his mind."

"Of what?" Llynya's look grew even more confused.

"The maid, sprite. The maid."

"Ah," she said with dawning understanding, then her brow furrowed. "Maybe we should head him off. I don't think Rhuddlan wants his mind clear of the maid." "No," Shay said. "We'll follow him, nothing more. Deri calls him, but it's up to Lavrans to find his own way."

"As it is for us to find our own way back through thepryf'smaze?"

He grinned. " 'Tis Beltaine, sprite. Mayhaps I'll find my way with you instead."

Her startled expression didn't bode well for the possibility. Neither did the speed with which she lofted herself off the bough to the ground. "You would have to catch me first!" Her words came back to him from where she'd disappeared in the trees, fast on Lavrans's trail.

From his place higher in the maple, Shay jumped with his arms spread wide, letting his cloak fill with air and slow his descent. One day soon Llynya would grow up.

Dain knelt by the river and slid his hand down into the cool running water. Dawn was rising, sending her golden tendrils of light skimming over the horizon and the land to shatter on the surface of the Llynfi. Just beyond his fingers, trout lay in wait for the morning hatching of insects, their tails swaying languidly between the eddies and the rocks.

Llynya was behind him, smelling of violets. Shay was off to his left, crouched in a low-lying limb of beech, both of them watching and waiting. To any other, they would have been invisible. On any other day, he would not have been aware of them himself.

On this day, though, nothing escaped his awareness. The earth was a living force reaching up through the soles of his feet and twining through the fibers of his body, making pathways for the rivers that were the waters of his body. He spread his fingers, letting the icy cold seep into the tender curves of his hand.

After the cold came the liquid element, lapping at his skin and passing through him. He was the river.

The sun broke free of the earth and flooded his senses with light; after the light came the warmth, carried on a gentle breath of air to caress and enfold him. A single sphere burned bright and deep in his chest, shining with a clarity beyond fire, with a luminosity he could scarce conceive. Rhuddlan had called a demon of earth and fire, but would receive a being of water and light.

'Twas Ceri who had done this to him. She had offered herself in love and had not left enough darkness in his soul to conjure up a good demon. She was thePetra Genitrix, the Stone Mother, unshakable, unconquerable, she who yields only to time. What need had Rhuddlan of a demon? she'd asked. The need of all men for demons, he should have told her, to illuminate the path to God. It was the simplest possible truth.

Instead, he had sucked the centaury smoke into his mouth and let it escape with his spoken words, using his voice to lure her into fear. Or so he had tried. Brave Ceri had done naught but retreat a single step.

What strange matrix comprised her heart and soul, he wondered, that she had no fear? Must be the purest he'd ever beheld.

Caradoc was no match for her.

He brought his hand to his mouth and drank the water cupped in his palm. The day would be long with no food, the hours filled with the singing of many sacred chants. He drank again, replenishing the water he would soon lose as sweat in the cavern to the west of the gorge. The Quicken-tree would have alreadybegun building a pyre next to the warm pool that bubbled up from the floor in the cavern, using for fuel the trees that had died in the past year: yew, oak, beech, hazel, elm, all but the dead rowans, for those would be burned in the Bel-tinne. Stones would be heated in a circle close to the flames and water from the pool poured on the stones. 'Twould be night before he emerged from the dark, steaming womb, purified as Ceraunnos.

The scent of sweet william wafted to him on the breeze. He turned his head and rose, drying his hand on the edge of his cloak. 'Twas time to lead the sprite and Shay into Deri. TheWycheElmPass started off to his right, little used and overgrown, with a scree slope on its south-ernmost flank. He himself had discovered the track only late the previous autumn and had not used it since. The seclusion and beauty of the water trail had always beckoned to him more, but the river-hollowed cave behind the waterfall did not appeal to him this morn. He would rather walk the mountains and fill himself with the smell of gorse and heather, with violets and sweet william and sunlight, and avoid all dark places that smelled too much of rich earth, until he was called by the Quicken-tree.

"Nuuuuma," Ceridwen crooned, leaning forward from where she sat on the floor. "Look, Numa. Look what Ceri has for you." She dangled the monkshood-laced meat in front of the albino's nose. 'Twas a risk, to be sure, but all her other attempts to circumvent the dogs had come to naught. The meat trick was proving no better. Numa Was ignoring her. Elixir had growled when she'd offered it to him, a low, deadly sound that had near scared the heart half out of her.

Damn dog. The black hound was Satan himself, aloof, needing no one. Not even Dain touched him, not so much as a scratch behind the ear.

But the bitch liked a good scratch.

"Numa." She smiled, reaching toward the dog's head. Numa's lip curled, and a growl issued from deep in her throat. The sound was not friendly, but neither did it have the menace of Elixir's warning.

Regardless, Ceridwen relented, bringing her hand down to her side. There was no sense in pushing the albino to violence. Dain had told her the dog would tear her limb from limb, and though she doubted that Numa would go so far, a bite was not out of the question. Her memory of Numa's teeth sinking into old Erlend's throat was quite clear.

She sighed and tossed the meat back into the bowl of physick. The day was nearly done, the sun setting far to the west, the forest sinking into night. She had seen no fires yet, but she knew they would be lit.

'Twas May Eve.

Elixir padded by her and stopped at the bowl to give it a sniff. The draught was of her own making.

She'd been careful with the monkshood, wanting the dogs only asleep, not dead, though neither was likely unless they ate her concoction. The hunting hound finished his inspection, and his black eyes flicked up and impaled her with what she was sure was a curse.

"Fie," she scolded him. She was already damned. The hound could not hurt her. "Fie," she repeated for good measure, then immediately wished she had not, because he grew so instantly still, 'twas as if he had suddenly, upon her utterance, been turned into stone. Nary a hair nor lash moved on him, nary a whisker twitched. His eyes, no longer malevolent, had hardened into glassy, sightless ice. He was frozen, with only his ears cocked in a manner to imply life. Had she conjured a spell with her "fie," she wondered, accidentally using a word with powers far and beyond those of the insipid "sezhamey"?

No, she had felt nothing. She would know if magic was working within her, and if "fie" was a charmed word, people would be frozen like statues over half the demesne.

But if not magic, what?

She looked to Numa. The bitch was quiet too, but without Elixir's unnatural control. There was a trembling in the white hound's haunches and hocks. Ceridwen slid her gaze back to Elixir. Would whatever held them hold them long enough for her to grab her pack and break through the locked hatch?

Not even breath appeared to move through the black levrier. They were waiting, the both of them, but waiting for what?

Then she heard it, a far distant singing coming from beneath the floor. A single phrase floated in the air, silvery and clear, rising and falling with the melody of wind over water. The voice grew closer and the notes quickened, swirling around each other with an added phrase. No man sang the fantasia, but a woman, making her way up the tunnel leading to the alchemy chamber. 'Twas enchantment pure and simple transfixing the dogs, enchantment rich with memories and emotion. Rhiannon had made similar magic with music, long ago upon the cliffs overlooking the Irish Sea. Her daughter remembered it well.

The sweet sound of harp strings came to her often in her sleep, suffusing her deepest dreams.

"O Rhayne anna bellammenaseri Conladrian, Conladrian ges Be strong! Be strong! Come to me!

Rhayne, Conladrian, come to Quicken-tree!"

The voice broke into a rhymed song, echoing off the tunnel walls, and the dogs began to whine.

Ceridwen gave them a shrewd glance. Rhayne? Conladrian? Dain was not their master after all, but another, a woman of the Quicken-tree. She wondered if he knew.

"Abban euil a' ritharmian Nov galliot As besteri Be strong! Be strong! Come to me!

Rhayne, Conladrian, come to Quicken-tree!"

Three more verses, each slightly different from the one before, but all having the same last two lines,brought the woman directly below her. The song trilled off into silence on the other side of the oak planks. Ceridwen scooted away from the hatch and waited. Quickly enough, she heard the bolt slide free.

Only a moment's hesitation stayed her hand before she helped raise the hatch door, her trust being in the dogs to know the difference between friend and foe. To Dain's command, she gave not a thought. He had trapped her inside the tower, and she was being set free.

A small hand showed first on the floor, then a dark head peeked up. Twigs and leaves were stuck this way and that in the woman's ebony braids-or rather, almost-woman.

"Llynya!" Ceridwen cried, reaching for the sprite. The dogs danced around them, no longer whimpering, but yapping. Even Elixir-Conladrian?-had shed his aloofness to jump and prance with Numa.

The sprite's presence brought cheer and hope into the gloom of the Hart. Ceridwen hugged the Quicken-tree girl close, wrapping her arms around the sprite's strong, slender shoulders. Within her embrace, Llynya felt as promising as a sapling, both imps by another name, both bursting with the freshness of life.

"Sweet child, you have come to save me."

"Oh, aye." Llynya grinned and kissed her on one cheek, then the other. "Come to save you true. We'll be off and away into the woods quickety-split, for the day is running short. Hurry now. Let's gather your things."

Ceridwen wasted no time. She had prepared a pack with the Quicken-tree cloth and tied it closed with the ribands from her plaits, filling it with only the barest necessities: the unguent, a gourd ofaqua ardens, a pouch ofrihadin, the red book with Mychael's letters, the runic mirror, and Brochan's Great Charm.

She'd kept Madron's pouch for her elf shot and wore it as an amulet.

"Can you show me the way to Strata Florida, once we are free of Wydehaw?" she asked Llynya, angling the pack across her back. The blanket roll was held in place by a rope of riband crossing her chest from her left shoulder to her right hip. They would be traveling in Wroneu at night, on May Eve, and she would not lose her precious supplies to either stray branches or quick fingers.

The sprite looked up from where she played with the dogs. "You would go to the hooded men in the mountains?" The hounds licked her face and nipped at her fingers, growling in tones far sweeter than Ceridwen could have imagined coming from either of them.

"To my brother." She sheathed the Damascene in the belt at her waist.

"Brother?" Llynya's eyes widened. Elixir barked, and she shushed him with a strange command, calling him by his Quicken-tree name. "Behamey, Conladrian.Behamey."

"My twin, Mychael," Ceridwen said. The dogs played about the sprite more like pups than the menace Dain had set to guard her. They tumbled and rolled, crushing strewing herbs and releasing the orange scent of hyssop into the air.

"Ah." The girl's voice softened. "So there is a brace of you. He must be very beautiful, your brother."

"I last saw him as a child of five and mostly remember his troublesome goodness. He was always good,which made me appear always troublesome." Ceridwen smiled at the memory, then set about adjusting the pack to a higher position on her back, working the cinch she'd contrived on the riband. "From his letters, he seems to have gotten only more thoughtful and in no ways less troublesomely good. He will probably be sainted."

"And this makes you sad?"

Her gaze lifted at Llynya's question. She hadn't meant to reveal her feelings about Mychael-in truth, she was surprised the girl had discerned them-for mixed in with her sadness was a shame she would rather keep hidden.

But the truth would out with the green-eyed maid. " 'Tis not his goodness that makes me sad," she confessed, "but that I must use it to save myself. I am in desperate need of a saint."

"Dain would not suffice?" the sprite asked with naught but the utmost innocence.

"Dain?" Ceridwen's eyebrows arched, and her hands stilled. Did Llynya not know that even now Dain Lavrans stalked her woods as the Demon? He was no saint in any way, shape, form, thought, or deed.

"Aye. Do you not find his goodness also troublesome?" The girl brushed aside a twig that had slipped partway free from her hair to dangle over her eyes. The success of the action was short-lived, with the tiny stick falling back into her face.

"Goodness? What goodness?" Ceridwen exclaimed.

"Why, the goodness that keeps him chaste."

Ceridwen colored. Had she no secrets left anywhere in the whole of Wales?

Llynya worked the twig free and stuck it back in her hair higher up.

"Why not drop it into the rushes and be done with it?" Ceridwen asked, grateful to change the subject.

" 'Tis rowan from the Deri grove. Wearing it helps the other trees recognize me."

Of course. Fanciful child.

Sure that Llynya would have another fanciful answer, Ceridwen didn't bother to ask what blessings the rest of the twigs in her hair granted, or the leaves, arboreal badges that none of the other Quicken-tree seemed to require. Instead, she hurried to provision herself with a cloth sack of bread and cheese.

"What do you think, Ceri?" the sprite asked, rising to her feet. "Are the dogs prepared to leave with me?"

Prepared? "I don't think they like being trapped here any more than I." She gave her honest opinion, while wondering what possible preparations a couple of dogs would need to make.

"So you think they're ready?" Llynya still sounded in need of reassurance. She was petting the dogs and scratching their ears and ingratiating herself with cooing noises. How could the hounds not want to leave with her? "Are they not yours?" Ceridwen asked, becoming a little perplexed.

"Rhayne? Mine? Oh, no." Llynya laughed. "And Conladrian? They say he belongs to no one, but answers to Rhuddlan out of respect. 'Tis Rhuddlan who calls them home now. I am merely the messenger."

"Then I say they adore the messenger and would follow you to the ends of the earth," Ceridwen said, settling the matter. The quicker they left Wydehaw, the better.

" 'Tis not so far that they must go." Llynya grinned. "Only into the woods, then north in the morning.

Come then, let us be off and see if what you say is true."

North. Mychael and Strata Florida lay to the north.

"O Rhayne, Conladrian ges," the sprite began to sing, swinging into an easy march down the stairs. Sure enough, the dogs followed behind. "Anna bellammenaseri-i-i-i..."

Ceridwen looked once around the Hart, checking to see that she had forgotten nothing, and giving one last glance to where Dain had sat at the table and turned himself from sorcerer to demon. Even as the demon-beast, a part of her had wanted him. His pull on her was beyond venial sin, tempting her into damnation with lures so sweet she knew even now she would abandon her faith for one more kiss.

"Christ save me," she murmured. For the sake of her soul, her escape was coming not a moment too soon.

Chapter 18.

In the heart of Wroneu, a half league north of Deri on the southern flank ofWycheElmPass , a fern-covered opening on the side of a hill led into the cavern of the Quicken-tree. Deep inside the dark, airy space, where limestone walls gave way to feldspar and quartz, was a grotto, and 'twas from there that Dain felt darkness complete its hold on the land above. The quietness of birds roosting and animals bedding down for the night permeated the rock and spoke to him of the rising moon; the subtle scent of a cooling forest clarified the air. It had been such with him all through the day, with hour after hour of messages from the natural world stealing upon him with the softest of treads. The earth was heavy with spring, and naught could hold back all she had to say and give.

He sat with the men of Quicken-tree in a circle around a dying pyre, chanting in an ancient tongue, entranced as much by exhaustion and hunger as by the low steadiness of voices filling the air around him.

Trig and Wei, two of the Liosalfar, were on either side of him. All the men were drinking from a shared bowl, passing it from one to the other. If 'twas consecrated wine or magic elixir, Dain had never been able to tell. The scent of grape was in it, but so were many other things he could not identify. An unusual sludge of leaves and whatnot had settled into the bottom of the mazer, and the faraway looks in the men's eyes proved the libation to be more potent than in years past. For himself, he abstained. He knew too well the destination arrived at by ingesting sacred potions. Jalal had introduced him to a number of such simples, though without the accompanying spiritual rites, and few were as benign as Catholic wafers andwine.

There were plants and herbs that could give a man visions of the future and help him recall the past, even the far distant past. There were concoctions that could take a man to an unimagined heaven and concoctions that could take him to his most horribly imagined hell. Ofttimes they were one and the same, with a little bit of the ecstasy of heaven granted for an eternity in hell.

The wooden bowl came around again, smelling of bitter fruit and oddments, and Dain passed it to Trig.

The Liosalfar bowman was older than the other men in the grotto, younger only than Rhuddlan. His face was hard set among the fair people, his body marked with woad tattoos and the scars of battle. He lifted the mazer to his mouth and drank, and for an instant Dain saw the bowman's eyes mist over and turn a milky green. Though naught else visibly happened to Trig, Dain classified the occurrence as a warning.