“I don’t know,” Levon replied. “I know we have been given Owein’s Horn. Why else if not to use?” This was reasonable enough on its own terms to silence his father. It happened, however, to be quite wrong.

“What exactly are we talking about?” the Prince asked.

“Owein,” Levon said tensely. There was a brightness in his face. “I want to wake the Sleepers and set free the Wild Hunt!”

It held them, if only for a moment.

“What fun!” said Diarmuid, but Dave could see a gleam in his eye, answering Levon’s.

Only Gereint laughed, a low, unsettling sound. “What fun,” the shaman repeated, chuckling to himself as he rocked back and forth.

It was just afterward that they noticed that Tabor had fainted.

He’d revived by morning and come out, pale but cheerful, to bid them good-bye. Dave would have stayed with the Dalrei if he could, but they needed him for the horn, it seemed, and Levon and Tore were coming with them, so it was all right. And they’d be meeting again soon in Gwen Ystrat. Morvran was the place Gereint had named.

He was thinking about Gereint’s laughter as they set off south again to meet the road to Paras Derval where it began to the west of Lake Leinan. In any normal weather, Levon said, they would have cut across the grazing lands of north Brennin, but not with the ice and snow of this unnatural season.

Kevin was riding, uncharacteristically subdued, with a couple of Diarmuid’s men, including the one he’d so asininely jumped the night before. That was fine by Dave; he wanted nothing to do with the other man. If people wanted to call it jealousy, let them. He didn’t care enough to explain. He wasn’t about to confide in anyone that he’d renounced the girl himself—to Green Ceinwen in the wood. Nor was he about to recount what the goddess had replied.

She’s Tore’s, he’d said.

Has she no other choice? Ceinwen had answered, and laughed before she disappeared.

That part was Dave’s own business.

For now, though, he had catching up to do with the men he called his brothers, ever since a ritual in Pendaran Wood. Eventually the catching up took them to the moment in the muddy fields around Stonehenge where Kevin had been explaining to the guards in French and mangled English what he and Jennifer were doing necking in forbidden territory. It had been a remarkably effective performance, and it had lasted precisely until the moment when the four of them had felt the sudden shock of power gathering them together and hurling them into the cold, dark crossing between worlds.

CHAPTER 6

It was, Jennifer realized, as the now-familiar cold of the crossing receded, the same room as the first time. Not the same as her second crossing, though, when she and Paul had come through so hard they had both fallen to their knees in the snow-drifted streets of the town.

It had been there, while Paul, still dazed, had struggled to his feet under the swinging sign of the Black Boar, that she had felt the first pangs of premature labor. And with these, as she grasped where he had somehow taken them, she had had a sudden memory of a woman crying in the shop doorway by the green, and her way had seemed very clear.