She tore the hobbles from the steed and vaulted onto it, hauling me up behind her, riding bareback and astraddle with her skirt flying around her knees as the charger sprang into a pounding gallop. I clung to her waist and she swayed over the horse’s mane as we thundered through the Forest Perilous with the trees whipping and tearing at both of us in the darkness. I cried out, but no one heard me, for in that moment the night rang with the belling of hounds, many hounds, and the wind rose to a roar, and the trees creaked and groaned and lashed all around us as if they were no mightier than grass. The whirlwind tore the clouds, the moonlight flooded through, and I saw a great white stag leaping, leaping between the trees, its antlers shining like a golden crown. The horse stopped, or Nyneve halted it somehow by the power of her hand, and the stag surged past us, so close that I saw the flash of its wild eye white with terror. Just behind it swept a pack of black hounds like a storm cloud scudding across the ground. The stag leaped white into the black hemlocks and I saw it no more.

The hounds plunged after it, gone in the night. All the Forest Perilous seemed as still as the moonlight now, with no sound but the baying of the hounds dying away.

“I want you to remember what you have just seen,” said Nyneve.

I was shaking, not only with cold. “Why?” I whispered. It was the first time I had dared to question her.

But without answering me she turned the horse and sent it walking through the night.

The dark song of the hounds sounded faintly across the wilderness, seeming to come from everywhere.

Nyneve and I rode gently in the moonlight. She had said I was a prince, but I sounded not at all like a prince as I said to her, “I want to go home.” My voice quavered.

She said nothing, but reached forward and stroked the horse’s mane, and under her hand the coarse hair plaited itself into a hundred fine braids, and from the tip of each braid sprang a golden bell. Then she reached back and touched her own green baldric, and it hung fringed with golden bells. As the destrier strode on, the bells spoke like angels singing, so that we rode in an enchantment made of their ringing. I could no longer hear the black hounds. Though the chill of the forest lay on my bare legs, I no longer shivered.

But amid the ringing of Nyneve’s bells I seemed also to hear the ringing of the bluebells clustered around the great heavy-mossed boles of the trees. And the ringing of bluebells is an omen.