Then she spoke formally: “Let all here act with truth, with honor and with duty, that justice, safety and protection all be served for this our Clan, and may Ogma of the Honey Tongue lend us His eloquence in pursuit of Truth,” she said. “This Óenach Mór is begun! By what we decide, we are bound, each soul and our people together.”

A tension went out of the air in a long sigh. She put aside something of the ritual voice and went on: “I yield to my son, Rudi Mackenzie, called Artos in the craft, and tanist of this Clan.”

She stepped back. Rudi stood tall for a moment, his arms crossed over his plaid and the tall raven feathers in the clasp of his bonnet flickering slightly, like a wing of shadow. When he spoke it seemed almost quiet, yet rolled out through the sough of night wind and the slight tearing ripple of flame: “My people, what were the words spoken by my mother over the altar at my Wiccaning? That day in the first year of the Change, in the depths of the winter when the Sun turned towards the light once more?”

A long moment of rustling silence, and then many thousand voices took it up, Juniper’s among them. It was almost as if that voice spoke through her again, as the babe stirred in her arms and reached out one chubby hand to grasp the ritual sword in the nemed, the sacred wood above her home. But this time it was not through her alone; through many and many, as if some great rough beast spoke as its moment came at last:

“Sad Winter’s child in this leafless shaw—
Yet be Son, and Lover, and Hornéd Lord!
Guardian of My sacred Wood, and Law—”

His people’s strength—and the Lady’s sword!

Rudi was silent again when the voices died away. Then he put his left hand to the hilt of the Sword and drew it slowly, raising it above his head.

There was a gasp. Juniper felt the same slight involuntary huh! escape her own lips. She wasn’t sure that she saw anything at all, save a gleam of starlight and moonlight and firelight, but it seemed to blaze until all her eyes were filled with it.

“Artos!” someone called; and that name had been given him by her on the same day.

Then the name over and over again, until he suddenly sheathed the Sword. That cut it off, as he had swung that supernal edge against the sound.

“My people,” he said into the silence. “A Mackenzie I was born, and among the very first begotten and born in this new time after the Change. A Mackenzie I shall be until I die. But Chief of the Clan, the Mackenzie Himself, I can never be.”

Another roar, this one of protest. Rudi waited it out.

“I am the Lady’s sword!”