Slowly, with uttermost deference, Kevin bowed to her, guardian of the threshold in this place. She was laughing still when he rose. Spittle rolled down her chin.

“It is Maidaladan tonight,” he said.

Gradually she quieted, looking up at him from the low stone seat, her back so bent she had to twist her neck sideways to do so. “It is,” she said. “The Night of the Beloved Son. It is seven hundred years now since last a man came calling on Midsummer’s Eve.” She pointed with one of her needles, and Kevin looked on the ground beside her to see crumbled bones and a skull.

“I did not let him pass,” the crone whispered, and laughed.

He swallowed and fought back fear. “How long,” he stammered, “how long have you been here?”

“Fool!” she cried, so loudly he jumped. Foolfoolfoolfool reverberated in the chamber, and high above he heard the bats. “Do you think I am alive?”

Alive alive alive alive, he heard, and then heard only his own breathing. He watched the crone lay her knitting down beside the bones at her feet. When she looked up at him again she held only one needle only, long and sharp and dark, and it was trained on his heart. She chanted, clearly but soft, so there was no echo:

“Bright your hair and bright your blood,
Yellow and red for the Mother.
Give me your name, Beloved,
Your true name, and no other.”

In the moment before he answered, Kevin Laine had time to remember a great many things, some with sorrow and some with love. He drew himself up before her; there was a power in him, an upsurge of desire; he too could make the echoes ring in Dun Maura.

“Liadon!” he cried, and in the resounding of it, the burgeoning strength within himself, he felt a breath, a touch, as of wind across his face.

Slowly the crone lowered the needle.

“It is so,” she whispered. “Pass.”

He did not move. His heart was beating rapidly now, though not with fear any more. “There is a wishing in me,” he said.

“There always is,” the crone replied.

Kevin said, “Bright my hair and bright my blood. I offered blood once, in Paras Derval, but that was far from here, and not tonight.”

He waited and for the first time saw a change in her eyes. They seemed to clear, to move back toward their lost blue; it may have been a trick of the orange light on the stone seat, but he thought he saw her straighten where she sat.