Even in the bright warm sunlight of a summer morning there was something disquieting about the face of the Lady of the Doves. At first glance a welcoming beauty as of a woman grown, a mother and lover, but underneath it a childlike wonder, and behind them all a sternness—something not evil or wicked, but as implacable as a winter storm or a glacier grinding its way down a mountaintop. And the face of the God was clear and bright as the sun-rays above it, but in the eyes was a darkness and a mystery, something that you could meet alone in a nighted wood.

“Man, but the fellah who carved that knew somethin’ about his business,” Virginia said soberly. “I like the Mackenzies well enough, but they’re sorta spooky sometimes. You think you’ve got ’em pegged . . . and then you don’t.”

“I know what you mean,” Fred said, touching the Valknut around his neck.

“Now, that was spooky, too,” Virginia said. “OK, the Old Man likes you. But him showin’ up and saying so, that was just a mite scary, you ask me. Methodists don’t have that problem and I like it that way.”

Fred nodded. He’d acquired the sign of Odin in Norrheim, when the seidhkona sat on the Chair of Magic in the hall of Bjarni Eriksson and the spirit of the High One had possessed her.

Before then, I was looking for a faith. That’s when I really found it. Not the most reassuring one, but . . .

Then he grinned. “Remember what Father Ignatius went through? So Methodists don’t have that problem . . . not yet.”

Virginia laughed too, and then suddenly her face went serious. “Well, dang, that would be funnier if it was funny, you know?”

They crossed the bridge beyond the gate, where the Sutter river curled around two-thirds of the town named for it, in a natural moat. Rudi Mackenzie and his guard were waiting for him at the edge of the tented encampment east of town; a dozen had sprung up around the little city as the Clan’s levies mustered and moved northward, amid the orchards and reaped fields. Most of the High King’s Archers were with him, their racked bicycles behind them, leaning on their unstrung bows or against the trunks of the cherry trees.

Their commander Edain was playing a long side-blown wooden flute bound with silver bands, what the Mackenzies called a Patten, a slow wild smoky sound. His wife Asgerd and Mathilda were standing as Rudi sang to the tune, looking halfway between abashed and laughing-happy:

“From far away I’m coveting
Your white violet skin
And missing the fall of your hair
Worlds away I’m courting your everything
And giving you all that I dare
The wild foxes danced
When you laughed in your cradle
The magpies fell silent
When you learned to sing
Imagine my luck
To be part of your fable
Where you hold my heart
Like the fruit in your hand . . .”