Chapter 93: The Horn in Her Hand

The note hung in the frost-bitten air, thin as a spider's thread and twice as strong, and every rider in the column heard it. Horses shied. Men crossed themselves or spat or reached for iron. Cynfael felt the sound travel up through his spine and lodge behind his eyes, where the seed stirred and turned, as a sleeper turns toward a familiar voice.

"Is it her?" Arthur asked. He had reined in alongside them, his breath clouding, his eyes fixed on Gwladys's closed fist.

Gwladys did not answer at once. She sat behind Cynfael with her arms still about his waist, and he felt her shudder—not from cold. Her hand opened slowly, and there in the cup of her palm lay the thing she had carried since Badon: no larger than a hazelnut, the color of old ivory, and now, unmistakably, trembling.

"It heard," she whispered. "Whatever is beneath us blew that horn, and this answered. I did not mean it to."

"Nothing beneath us blows anything," said a rider from Gwynedd, his voice too loud. "That was wind in a hollow hill. My grandfather told of such—"

The ground beneath the horses made a sound like a man clearing his throat. The rider stopped speaking. The horses stopped moving. Even the wind, which had harried them since the fire died, fell away as though it had been called to heel.

Myrddin rode forward from the rear of the column, his scarred face half-lost in the dark, his single seeing eye fixed not on Gwladys but on the frozen turf. Since his return he had spoken little, and what he said had the quality of things said from the far side of a wall.

"You have heard the horn beneath the horn," he said. "That is the older voice. The land does not summon with trumpets, lord. It summons with what it has. It has a door that breathes, a cradle that knocks, and now a horn in a woman's hand. Three instruments. One player."

"Then who plays?" Arthur said.

Myrddin looked up at last, and Cynfael saw something move behind the man's eye—something patient, and old, and not entirely Myrddin. "You will know him when he stops pretending," he said. "He has worn many faces. He wore mine. He would wear yours if it fit."

Arthur's hand did not move toward his spear, but his knuckles went white on the rein. "You told us the shadow seeks Aelle. Now I hear it has already taken you once. Which of you am I speaking to, Myrddin?"

"A man who chose the wrong door and came back through it," Myrddin said. "Ask better questions of better men. Ask the woman what her hand holds."

All eyes turned to Gwladys. She closed her fingers over the small pale thing and drew it to her breast, and Cynfael felt the warmth of it press through his cloak like a coal wrapped in cloth.

"I do not know its name," she said. "I know only that it is not a stone and not a seed and not a heart, though it has been all three. It remembers a heartbeat. That is what it is—a memory of a beat that stopped, waiting to be beaten again."

"The third heartbeat," Cynfael said. The words came out of him before he knew he meant to speak them, and as they left his mouth the seed in his chest flared hot enough to make him gasp. "At the cradle. A third heartbeat stopped, and you screamed, Gwladys. I heard you across the dark. But I never learned whose it was."

Gwladys was silent. The frost creaked under the horses. Then she said, very quietly, "It was mine."

Cynfael turned in the saddle to look at her, and what he saw in her face was not fear. It was the calm of a woman who has already paid a price and is waiting to see what was bought.

"I did not die," she said. "Something else did. Something that had been keeping a door open for a very long time, and when it stopped, the door came loose from its frame. That is what I carry. Not my heartbeat. The door's. It wants to be given back."

"To whom?" Arthur said.

"To the thing that stopped beating," she said. "Or to the thing that made it stop. I have not decided which."

Myrddin made a sound that might have been a laugh, if a laugh could be carved from stone. "You see, lord? She understands. The land does not want a sacrifice. It wants a return. It has been holding its breath since the Romans left, and every one of us who has died on this island since has been one more hand pressed against a door that will not stay shut."

Cynfael slid down from his horse, and his boots struck the frozen ground, and the ground answered him—not with a voice this time, but with a feeling, a slow deep pull like a current under still water. He put his palm flat against the earth. The seed leaned toward it the way a flower leans toward the sun.

"There is a hollow beneath us," he said. "Not the cradle. Something older. A passage. It runs north under the hills, and it is full of the dead who never got their songs." He looked up at Arthur. "We can ride for Aelle on the surface, and the shadow will be waiting at the ford, and we will fight it where it has chosen to fight. Or we can go down, and come up behind it, and take from it the thing it stole."

"The thing it stole," Arthur said. "You mean Myrddin."

"I mean the shadow wears a man's face and has forgotten it is not a man," Cynfael said. "Every face it wears, it loses a little of itself. It has worn Aelle's voice. It has worn Myrddin's eye. It is spreading thin, Arthur. It needs the cradle to thicken again. If we reach the cradle first—" He stopped. The horn sounded again, low and long, and this time it came from Gwladys's fist, and she cried out and dropped the pale thing into the frost.

It did not fall. It hovered a hand's breadth above the ground, spinning slowly, and the light in it was the green of new shoots in spring.

"Is that north?" Gwladys whispered.

It was. The small pale thing turned on its invisible axis until one end pointed unerringly toward the black line of hills on the horizon, and then it began, very slowly, to drift that way—a compass with a will of its own.

Arthur watched it for a long moment. Then he turned his horse's head from the road and toward the hills, and his voice carried down the column like a spear thrown.

"We go under," he said. "If the land wants a door, it will have one. But it will have it on our terms, and it will have it shut behind us."

They rode toward the hollow, and the small green light drifted ahead of them like a lantern carried by no hand, and behind them the frost closed over their tracks as though the earth were erasing them from its memory. Cynfael walked at the head of the column with his palm still tingling from the touch of the ground, and the seed inside him whispered the words it had whispered before, but now they were not a riddle. They were a warning.

*You have planted me. Now reap.*

And far ahead, where the hills met the sky, a single green shoot on the crown of a distant tor bent toward them, hearing the horn, and answered it.