The broad-shouldered figure spoke then, for the first time. Ned remembered that voice from two nights ago, rich and musical, deep as a drum. He said half a dozen words—Ned couldn’t understand them—and when he paused, those around him, fifty of them at least, gave a response.

The man spoke, and then they did. The wind blew. Smoke streamed from torches held and those embedded in the ground.

The bull, eerily white in the moonlight, stood placidly, as if entranced by the chanting voices. It might be that, Ned thought. Or else they’d given it some drug.

The voices stopped.

“I can’t watch,” Kate whispered suddenly, and she turned her face against Ned’s shoulder.

The man with the axe lifted it so that the weapon, too, glinted under that moon. And then, with a shout of joy, he brought it sweeping, scything, crashing down to strike the bull, overwhelmingly, between the great horns.

Ned felt Kate crying (only now, for the first time, for the animal). He forced himself to keep watching as the stricken, bludgeoned creature collapsed to its forelegs, and blood—strangely hued in the moon-silver night—burst forth, soaking all those close to it.

Barbaric, Ned wanted to say, think, feel, but something stopped him.

The man in the white robe stepped quickly forward holding a bowl to the spurting wound, filling it with blood. With both hands he extended it towards the one with the axe, the man Ned had last seen in the shape of an owl flying from a different ruined tower.

The big man let fall his bloodied axe. He claimed the bowl with two hands. Ned felt his pulse racing furiously, as if he were sprinting flat out towards some cliff he couldn’t see.

The man raised the bowl in front of him, the way he’d lifted the axe a moment before. As he spoke, words of incantation, the white bull toppled to one side at his feet like some great structure falling, blood still flowing, soaking into the dusty ground. No one answered the words this time.

Beside the tree in front of Ned and Kate, a lean, scarred man stood up. He said something under his breath. It might have been a prayer.

In front of the sanctuary, the raised bowl was lowered by the golden man. He drank the blood.

“Oh, my!” said Kate Wenger suddenly, too loudly.

She lifted her head.

“I can’t…I…What’s happening?”

Her voice was really strange. She jerked her hand from Ned’s, shifted away from him.

Ned stared at her. The man by the tree had heard. He looked back at them. Kate got to her knees, made as if to stand. Terrified, Ned pulled her back down.

“Kate!” he hissed. “What are you doing?”

She tried to pull away. “Don’t! I need…I have to…”

“No,” he heard the man just ahead of them breathe. “Not this one! She is too young. This should not be—”

Kate Wenger was writhing and twisting beside Ned, fighting to get away. She kicked him. Breathing in shallow gasps, she scratched his arm, then hit him in the chest with both fists.

And just then, in that same, precise moment, up on the plateau of Entremont under a full moon in a darkness that belonged only to this time between times when the walls were down, another voice was heard from the entrance to the site, beyond the paired torches burning beside the path.

“Ned? Ned? Are you here? Come on, I’ve brought the van!”

With his heart aching, and the first horrified glimmer of understanding coming to him, Ned saw Melanie—small and clever and fearless, with the green streak in her hair—take a hesitant step forward between the smoking torches, the way the bull had.

In that instant, Kate Wenger went limp beside him.

She collapsed as if released from a puppet-string, from a force that had been pulling, drawing, demanding her.

Several things happened at once.

The scarred man looked at the two of them a last time, then turned back to the ruins. As if he, too, was being pulled that way. And of course he was, Ned later realized: pulled by centuries.

And by love.

Ned saw him take a step himself and then another, up the small slope, and there he stopped, still unobserved, watching Melanie. Staring at her. He was completely exposed now, up on the plateau. He would have been spotted if any one of those gathered by the sanctuary had looked his way.

They didn’t. The big man with the fair hair handed the bowl back to the one in white without even glancing at him. He stood very still, head high, hands empty at his sides, facing Melanie where she stood on the north-south path. They were all watching her, Ned saw.

She began to come forward, slowly, between fires.

Ned shifted to his knees so he could see better. He kept one hand on Kate’s shoulder where she lay, face to the dark grass. But his eyes were on Melanie, along with everyone else’s.

So he saw when she began to stop being Melanie.

She came along the straight roadway, past the low, ruined walls of ancient houses, towards the sanctuary and the figures waiting there, walking between nine pairs of torches. Ned counted them as she went. Each time she disappeared and reappeared through the smoke, she had changed.

The first time, Ned actually rubbed his eyes, like a child. After that, he didn’t do it again, he just watched. With his unnaturally keen sight here, he saw when her hair began to change in that moonlight towards red, and then when it was red, and falling so much longer than before. And he thought, for the first time, how inadequate the words for colours could sometimes be.

Her clothing began to alter. Halfway down the row she was wearing sandals, not boots, and a calf-length, one-piece garment, with a heavy gold belt. He saw her come through another pair of flames with golden bracelets on her arms, and rings on several fingers. She was tall by then.

He watched her walk between the final torches.

The man who had summoned her—with the power of Beltaine and the white bull and the bull’s blood—knelt in the roadway. So did all the others, as if they had been waiting for his sign, as if Melanie were a queen, or a goddess.

Ned could see, even from where he was, that the big man’s face was alight with joy. And with need, or something beyond need, deeper. Whatever you thought of him, you couldn’t see that look and not respond to it.

Melanie, who was not Melanie any more, stopped in front of him.

She was in profile for Ned, lit by the moon and the carried torches. She was more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen, or ever imagined seeing.

He found it difficult to breathe. He saw her look up at the moon for a moment and then back down again, at the man kneeling before her.

He said something, in that language Ned couldn’t understand. Melanie reached down then, slowly. She touched his yellow hair with the fingers of one hand. It was very bright where they were, as if they were on a stage, acting out motions from long ago, but also here now, in front of him.

Wherever now was.

Then the woman spoke for the first time, and Ned heard her say, in exquisite French, formal, very clear, “Change your words. Returned in this new time, shall we not speak in the tongue they use? We will have to, will we not, as the dance begins?”

“As you wish, my lady.”

He was still kneeling. He lowered his head. It was difficult to see his face now, with the long hair falling.

“It is as I wish.”

Her voice was harder to read, but it sure wasn’t Melanie’s. She looked around slowly. Grave, unsmiling, taking in those nearby, the risen, moon-touched tower.

“Only one of you?” she said softly.

“Only one of us,” the kneeling figure said. “Alas.”

He lifted his face again. Ned saw that he was smiling. He didn’t sound distressed at all.

“Two of us,” the scarred man said, from the edge of the plateau.

No more than that, and quietly, but everything altered with the words. Entremont and the night turned. They took on, they accepted, a weight of centuries, their place in a long story.