“‘Go away from my door, Cousin,’” speaks Khors. “‘You ride unasked in the Moon’s Land, on the sovereign road of Everfrost. You have no rights here. This is not vasty Xandos, citadel of the gods.’

“‘I have the right of a father,’” bellows Perin, ‘and you have stolen that right from me when you stole my daughter! Set her here before me, then never cross into my lands again, and I will let you live.’”

At the top of the rise Briony could make out only a deer track or old streambed at the base of the hill on the far side, a snaking line of reddish mud. It was nothing like a road, but at least it was a direction and she would not be pulling berry brambles from her feet at each step. She made her way down toward it with cautious speed, aware for the first time in some hours that if she stumbled or slipped and broke her leg she would certainly die here. When she reached the stripe of rust-colored mud she raised her voice again in a note of ragged triumph, a hymn to her newfound path.

When you are this badly beaten, she thought distractedly, climbing over a huge, damp trunk, terrified that it might start rolling downward while she was on it—when you are this badly beaten, you must take any victory you can find.

“No one orders me on my own lands,” Khors cries, “and least of all a braggart like you, Lord Storm-Cloud, heavy with thunder like a tempest that blows and blows but does nothing more. She belongs to me now. The dove is mine.

“Thief! Liar!” shouts Perin. “Now you shall learn for yourself whether this storm is all wind, like the stables of Strivos, full of his godlike stallions of the blowing gale, or whether it brings lightning, too!”

She reached the bottom of the hill at last, muddy and panting until her lungs ached in her chest, but she had a clear track for walking now and she wanted to go as far as she could before the light failed.

And then what? a silent voice asked her—her own voice, the sensible part she thought she had lost somewhere on the road outside the forest. Then what? You cannot even make a fire, and in any case the wood is all wet. Will you sit on a damp rock all night and try to keep the wolves at bay with your knife? And the next night? And the next…?

No. Quiet! What else can I do? Go forward. Go forward. She raised her voice again, just as Allfather Perin raised high his weapon against his daughter’s kidnapper. Run, wolves! Run, all you enemies!

“And with that he lifts his mighty hammer Oak Tree and rides at Khors and the world shakes at the sounds of his golden car, the very mountains swaying to the drumbeat of his horses’ hooves.

“Khors is fearful, but rides out himself on his white horse, brandishing Silverbeam his potent blade, swinging the great net his father Sveros had given him, in which once the old god had captured the stars of the sky.”