Chapter 88: The Cry That Split the Stone

The scream did not end. It went on and on, not as sound but as a seam splitting through the dark, a hairline crack racing across the face of everything Cynfael had believed solid. He felt it in the seed, that warm kernel nested beneath his ribs, and the seed answered not with heat but with a wrenching, as though roots that had only begun to thread his bones were being torn loose all at once.

He ran. He did not know toward what. The dark beneath the hill had no direction, only the pressure of the voice and the pull of that scream, and he followed it the way a man follows the smell of smoke through a strange house, hands out, feet unsteady, the earth sliding past him like water under a boat.

*Cradle,* whispered the voice, and now it was not patient. It was hungry. *Cradle. Cradle. Cradle.*

The cloaked figure did not chase him. It did not need to. When Cynfael looked back, it stood exactly where it had stood before, Myrddin's face tilted, Myrddin's scar pale as a worm in the gloom, and the smile on it was the smile of something that had worn many faces and found them all comfortable.

"You will come back," it said, in the shadow's voice. "They always come back. The cradle is almost ready. You are almost ready. Only one more thing."

The third heartbeat. The thread of light. Gone.

Cynfael ran until the ground beneath him changed, until the packed dark gave way to something looser, something that crumbled and shifted and smelled of rain and old leaves. He did not remember climbing. He only remembered the sudden shock of cold air on his face, the shock of a sky, and then he was on his knees in wet grass at the edge of a wood, and the world above the hill was grey with a dawn that had not yet decided whether to commit itself.

Gwladys was there.

She was not screaming now. She knelt a few paces off, her hands pressed flat against the earth, her dark hair hanging loose and tangled with bits of leaf and root, and her face was the face of someone who had been pulled back from a great distance and had not yet arrived. Beside her, the antlered figure stood motionless among the trees, its ruined spear still broken, its smile gone entirely. For the first time Cynfael had ever seen, it looked not patient but *afraid*.

"Cynfael," Gwladys said. Her voice was raw. "You are bleeding."

He looked down. There was blood on his hands, on his tunic, a thin trickle running from his nose, and when he pressed his palm to his chest he felt the seed there, still warm, still whole, but changed. It had a rhythm now. Not his heart. Something slower, deeper, a drumbeat that did not belong to any living man.

"What did it take?" he asked. "The third heartbeat. What did it take?"

Gwladys did not answer at once. She lifted one hand from the earth, and in her palm lay something small and pale: a shard of bone, curved like a piece of a cradle's rim, worn smooth as if by years of handling. It had not been there before. Cynfael was certain of that.

"It was waiting for me," she said quietly. "Under the hill. I heard you call, and I went down, and it was waiting. It said the cradle needed a mother's hand to close." She looked at the bone shard. "I told it no."

"You told it no," Cynfael repeated.

"I told it no." Her jaw was set, but her eyes were bright with something that was not quite tears. "And it laughed. It said the hand that refuses is the hand that is chosen. And then it gave me this."

The antlered figure stirred at the edge of the wood. It did not speak. It only turned its head, slowly, and looked north, and then it walked away into the trees, and the sound of its going was the sound of a great stag moving through undergrowth, unhurried, deliberate, and utterly silent where it should have made noise.

"Where is Myrddin?" Cynfael asked.

"Gone. The one that wore him." Gwladys rose, unsteady, and tucked the bone shard into the folds of her cloak. "The real Myrddin walked out of the hill behind me. He is half-dead. He said the shadow has already left for Aelle's camp. He said we have three days, perhaps four, before it finds a willing host."

"Then we ride," Cynfael said.

He tried to stand and could not. The seed pulled at him, a hook sunk deep, and for a moment the earth beneath his knees felt less like ground and more like a mouth, opening, patient, waiting to be fed. He thought of the voice. *Cradle. Cradle.* He thought of the third heartbeat stopping, and of what it meant that the shadow had wanted him to hear it.

*It wanted me to run,* he thought. *It wanted me to leave the hill. It wanted me above the ground, where the seed can grow.*

"Cynfael." Gwladys was beside him now, her hand on his shoulder, and her touch was warm and ordinary and real. "What did you see down there?"

"A cradle," he said. "And a hand. And Myrddin's face on something that was not Myrddin." He looked up at her. "Gwladys. The scream. Was it yours?"

She hesitated. It was only a heartbeat's hesitation, but it was enough.

"It was mine," she said. "And it was not." She opened her palm again, and the bone shard caught the first true light of morning. "I heard it before I made it. I heard it from the other side of the door. And Cynfael—there was a voice in it. A child's voice. Saying a name."

"What name?"

Gwladys closed her hand around the shard. Somewhere to the north, beyond the trees, beyond the hills, a horn sounded once, low and long, and then fell silent. It was not a British horn. It was not a Saxon horn. It was older than either, and it came from no camp Cynfael knew.

"I do not know yet," she said. "But it knew yours."

Cynfael looked north, toward the sound, toward Aelle's camp and the shadow that rode toward it, and he felt the seed turn over inside him like a sleeper shifting in a dream. The earth beneath his feet was quiet. Too quiet. Listening.

"We ride for Aelle," he said. "Before the shadow wears him. Before the cradle closes."

Gwladys helped him to his feet. Behind them, at the mouth of the wood, the hill from which they had emerged stood silent in the grey light, and on its crown, where no tree had grown in living memory, a single green shoot had pushed up through the stone. It was already waist-high. It had not been there the night before.

Neither of them saw it move. But when they turned their backs, it bent, very slightly, toward the north, as if it, too, had heard the horn.