"This sword," Juniper said. She met his eyes and held them with her own. "It was a longsword, double-edged, with a guard like a crescent moon, and a pommel of moon-opal held in antlers. Is that it?"
Rudi's breath caught. She had shared that vision with him, but as far as he knew with no other. A great re laxation came to Ingolf's face, as if some tension were unwound at last.
"Christ, I'm not crazy, then?"
"No, my poor Ingolf, you're not. It's far worse than that."
Just then Aunt Judy walked into the hall. She gave an angry hiss as she saw Ingolf's face, came up and took his pulse. Then she examined his eyes; he moved his face obediently to her prodding, passive as a child.
"Juney, are you trying to kill my patient? I said he could talk, not be wrung out like a dishrag!"
"I'm sorry, Judy," Juniper said meekly. "We can stop now."
"We certainly can! I want this man in bed, now. I'll get some green oat milk in wine to calm him."
"I want-" Ingolf began.
"You want a good night's sleep, so you can tell us the rest tomorrow," Juniper said. "We've a guest room ready for you here in the hall. And Judy's word is final on matters of health!"
Unprompted, Rudi came forward and helped the other man rise, then took an arm around his shoul der. When they'd put Ingolf to bed he stopped in the corridor outside the guest room and looked at his mother.
"Who's the sword for?" he asked bluntly.
Juniper looked at him, and he was shocked to see that the leaf-green eyes were full of tears.
"Oh, my son," she whispered. "You know as well as I. What did they call Mike, your blood father?"
The Bear Lord.
"And what did the Powers speak through me, when I held you over the altar in the nemed?"
He didn't need to speak that, either. That was when she'd named him Artos, in the Craft. And… to himself, he whispered what she'd said:
Sad winter's child, in this leafless shaw Yet be Son, and Lover, and Horned Lord!
Guardian of my sacred Wood, and Law His people's strength-and the Lady's Sword!
"I don't want to go," he said softly. "I thought… not yet." His eyes went out past the walls of his home. "I'm not a boy anymore, Mother."
They both knew what he meant; that he was old enough to know how easily and quickly a man could die. Ingolf's tale had rammed that home anew. He went on: "And I don't want to leave you and Father and Maude and Fior bhinn," he said. "Or the Clan, and home. Someday, yes, but. .. not yet."
Love and sorrow warred in Juniper's eyes. "I don't want you to go either, my darling. I just don't think you've much choice."
Rudi's temper flared for a moment: "I thought we were the Lord and Lady's children, not their slaves!"
Her palm reached up to cup his cheek. She was a full nine inches shorter than he, but he felt like a child again at the gesture. Then she tweaked his ear sharply and he jumped.
"Yes, we are Their children," she said. "So are cock roaches… and crocodiles… and crocuses. We are not the sum whole of the scheme of things! So don't be thinking that They'll necessarily favor you, any more than I'd put you before your sisters."
"Sorry, Mom," he said after a moment. A grin. "I've been hanging around with Christians too much, sure and I have. Nice people, a lot of them, but they've got a strange way of looking at things."
"Oh, my dearest one," she said.
Her voice choked a little. Suddenly he noticed how many gray threads there were in the mane that had always been so fiery fox-red.
When did that happen? he asked himself, and put an arm around her shoulders. She turned into it and rested her forehead on his chest.
Her quiet voice went slowly on: "And They can be as harsh as sleet and iron, as the wolf in winter and Death itself. They have given you so many of Their gifts for a reason. And a man who refuses a duty They lay on him is… not punished… but… forsaken. And he will never know love or honor or happiness again."
He shivered at the look in those infinitely familiar green eyes; they were looking beyond.
Then they squeezed shut, and tears leaked out, sparkling in the lamplight; she grabbed him by the plaid.
"But how I wish you didn't have to go to that dread ful place! I am so frightened for you, and it will only get worse!"
"There, and I was just grousing," he said, holding her close and remembering her rocking his troubles away. "I'll come back with a shining sword and fine tale, since the Powers would have it so. It's just that I would have them be a bit more open about the reasons for it all!"
Rudi Mackenzie dreamed. The air was sweet and mildly warm, smelling of earth and growing things; some crop that grew in leafy blue-green clumps stretched to the edge of sight in neat rows separated by dark, damp turned earth. A well-made road ran through it, neatly cambered with crushed rock, and a milepost stood nearby. It was granite, hard and smooth, and the rayed sun on it was cut deeply, but time had still worn it down until the shape was visible only because of the slanting rays of the real sun setting in the west.
A crack and a wretched gobbling sound came from behind him. He turned, or at least his disembodied view point did. A score of… creatures… were working their way down the rows of the crop.
They look like men, he thought absently.
A little; they stood on two legs, and their hands held tools, digging sticks of polished wood set with blades of smooth stone. But their legs were too short and the arms that hung from their broad flat shoulders too long, and the heads sloped backward above their eyes. Those eyes were big and round, on either side of a blob of nose and set above big chinless thin-lipped mouths; it made them look like children, somehow, and the more horrible for that. The naked bodies were brown, sparsely covered in hair.
A nondescript-looking man with a loose headcloth covering half his face rode a horse behind them, a long coiled whip in his hand. He swung it again, seemingly to relieve his boredom; the creatures were working steadily and well, jabbing the sticks downward in unison every time they took a step forward. Another worker jerked and moaned as the lash laid a line across his shoulders, then turned his too big eyes down and drove the stone-headed tool into the earth again.
No. They're not men, but their ancestors were, Rudi's bodiless presence thought.
Then he woke. Shudders ran through him, and he could feel sweat running off him to soak the coarse brown linen of the sheets. That turned chilly quickly in the damp cold air of winter. The girl who was sharing his bed had awoken too; she snapped a lighter on the bedside table and touched it to the candle in its holder.
"What a dream." He gasped, clutching at the blanket as if it would help him keep the shattered, fragmented images clear. "My oath, what a dream!"
"It must have been, Rudi!" Niamh said.
Her blue eyes were wide as she tossed back tousled straw-blond hair. Like half the people in Dun Juniper she was an apprentice from somewhere else, in her case studying under Judy Barstow. They'd been friends and not-very serious occasional lovers for years; she didn't want anyone long term here, since she planned to go back home to Dun Laurel when she was consecrated as a healer.
"You clouted me a bit, thrashing around the now, and I couldn't wake you."
"Sorry, Niamh," he said contritely, shaking head and shoulders and letting the dream go. "Maybe it was just a sending from the fae."
Who weren't all kindly, he knew, particularly those from the wildwood. Looking around grounded him; he'd slept in this room ever since he stopped using a pallet in his mother's. It had a cluttered look and a lot of souvenirs; there was his baseball bat and glove-he'd been first baseman for the Dun Juniper Ravens Little League team as a kid-and the images of the Lord and Lady over the hearth he'd carved when he wasn't much older.
A shelf was stuffed with his books and ones he had out from the dun's library. A stand in the corner held his armor and weapons.