No. For they were not living trees. They were dead trunks decorated with tin and copper foliage. Wind brushed a tinkling whisper through the metal leaves.

Beside a bricked-in hearth, a man sat on a stool. A huge bronze cauldron hung over the fire. Its polished surface glimmered in the twisting light of the flames. The face of a horned man shone in the curve of the cauldron, and it watched me as with living eyes.

The man at the fire turned. He heard me, although I could sneak as quietly as any mouse. He saw me, although I concealed myself within the shadows. I knew at once who he was. I resembled him in some ways more than I did my mother, for he was darker than his children. There was mage House blood in him.

I did not know what language he spoke, yet I understood him perfectly.

“Beast, we have not invited you to enter. Trouble us no longer, you who come to haunt us wearing my dead daughter’s face. Begone. I banish you.”

“I’m not a spirit! I’m Tara Bell’s child. You are my grandfather.”

“Tara is no longer my daughter. Her home and her family she gave up to follow the Roman goddess Bellona, the lady of war. All men she foreswore except the captain who took her oath to serve him, Captain Leon. She marched south into his service. Her child you cannot be, because the Amazon soldiers bear no children.”

“She did bear a child, because I am hers and in your heart you know I am hers!”

He raised his hands as if warding off an attack. “If you speak, the god will be hearing you!”

“Who will hear who does not already know?” I cried. Would my own grandfather reject me?

“The anger of Bold Carnonos fell upon this village. The magisters of Crescent House made offering of their magic to build an empire. So the god destroyed them.”

“He’s not a god! You just call him that because you fear his power.”

He raised the knife of sacrifice. “We do not want your poison here to call his anger back on us. Begone. Begone. Begone.”

Down the avenue of oak trees, lamps flickered and began to go out one by one. Vai appeared in a nimbus of cold fire, leading the pack horse.