She went on. “Call it a quest. Pretend you are gallant, honourable men, unstained by any sins. Who finds me first will prove his worth by doing so. I will be hiding and not easily found. Trust me in this. I do not choose to be easily found, or idly claimed.” She paused. “You have three days.”

“And if…we do not succeed?” Phelan’s voice was low.

“Then do whatever you wish to each other, it will matter not. You will have failed me, both of you. I will have been shown to be unimportant to you.”

She stopped, looked from one to the other, then added, in yet another tone, “I would prefer to be found.”

First uncertainty in her voice, Ned thought. There was a silence up where the torches were burning.

“This is…you offer a child’s game, my lady. I need to kill him.” Cadell’s voice was anguished.

“You like children’s games, I thought.” The hint of vulnerability gone, as soon as it had come. “And you are forbidden to kill now. It is my will. But there is this: who finds me first may sacrifice the one who fails. With my consent. And by my desire.”

Dear God, Ned thought. By my desire.

“Swear to this, to all of this, then I am gone.”

“You have only now come,” Phelan said, barely loud enough for them to hear. “Am I to lose you so soon?”

“Find me,” she said coldly, “and so keep me, if it matters so very much. Or wander off to make another carving. Stone instead of flesh, as you choose. But swear now, both of you. Three days. Find me. The loser is a sacrifice, for his failure.”

She turned back to Cadell. “Will you call it a game?”

She was so hard, Ned thought. She was tall, and crimson as a fire, and terrifyingly cold. He felt small, inadequate; a child, listening. And he was all those things, in almost all the ways that mattered.

He heard the two men swear to her, one and then the other.

“Ned, we have to go,” Kate whispered. “Before she leaves and they start looking around.”

It was true.

I will never see her again, he was thinking.

“I need to get her back,” was what he whispered, repeating himself, feeling stupid again even as he formed the words. I need to. What were his needs in this?

“Melanie? We’ll try. We’ll think how. But not here. Come on, Ned!”

Her hand was still in his; she tugged and he followed and they went from that place. From the woman whose name was in his head now, singing itself in that elusive, changing voice, never to leave. He knew it, even then, first night. That it would never leave.

It wasn’t very hard to get away, in the event, slipping back north through the meadow past the wall. Phelan had been right.

When they were outside the site, on the gravel path again, the sky began to grow lighter as they ran. By the time they reached the iron gate and passed through it was late-spring daylight again, bright and fair.

Windy, the sun in the west, ahead of them, as if it had been waiting. The van was in the lot, the only car there. Ned stared at it. It seemed an alien, unreasonable object.

He walked over. Melanie’s tote lay on the front passenger seat. It was difficult, confusing, seeing that. They had just been looking at swords and a sacrificial axe, a bull lying in the pool of its own blood after passing between sacred fires.

How did a Renault van come to exist in the world? How could Melanie not be here? He felt very shaky, thinking about that. And afraid.

Neither of them could drive and the van was locked; they’d have to walk. Ned heard traffic below, a strident car horn sounding. That, too, so impossibly strange. Kate tugged again and they started down.

It was difficult, his steps seemed to drag, even as she pulled him by the hand. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to go back into the lost moonlight behind them. Find me, she had said.

Ysabel.

PART TWO

CHAPTER X

He began to cry walking back to Aix. Amid the traffic noise and chaos as they approached the city came a delayed, after-the-nightmare feeling of horror. It was difficult to keep moving. He just wanted to stop somewhere by the side of the road; a bench, anything. He couldn’t stop thinking about Melanie, the idea that she was gone. Like that. Taken over. And what was he going to say to his father and the others? How did you tell something like this?

Kate said nothing, which was a blessing.

Out of the corner of his eye, as they came to the ring road, Ned saw that she was biting her lip again, staring straight ahead. He thought about her, and what had so nearly taken place. Kate had been a heartbeat away—hardly more than that—from what had happened to Melanie. She had been leaving him, going up into the ruins. She would have walked between those Beltaine fires.

She is too young, the man they knew—Phelan—had said.

It would have made no difference. And fifteen wasn’t that young in the days when this story seemed to have begun. You could be married by fifteen, have children. People had grown up faster once.

If he’d had Greg’s phone number in his auto-dial, Ned thought, if Melanie hadn’t come with the van instead, then Kate Wenger wouldn’t be beside him now.

It didn’t help anything, to think about that.

Above them, the sky was still bright with the late-day light. The mistral had died down, the sun was low. Traffic buzzed and rasped, mopeds whining through it.

Ned checked his watch. A quarter after seven. It had been night up at Entremont. How did you deal with that?

They crossed the ring road at a light and then stopped and looked at each other. Kate’s eyes were puffy.

“What do we do?” she asked. People were all around them on the sidewalk, walking to wherever they had to go, wherever their lives required them to be.

She didn’t call him babe. She wasn’t going to do that any more, he knew. He also knew why she’d done it before: how Beltaine, like a tide, had been rising within her. She’d already been shifting towards becoming someone else when they’d met outside Cézanne’s studio. Before that, even.

Then Melanie had come. And then Ysabel.

A car horn blared, and another in angry response. There was a traffic jam where they’d just crossed, Ned saw; the ring road was clogged, lanes blurred by cars undecided which one was quickest. Three buses were stacked in a row in the bus-and-taxi lane. The scooters darted dangerously in and out. Life in the twenty-first century.

“I don’t know what we do,” he said to Kate. “But I have to tell my dad.”

She nodded. “I figured. I’ll come with you. If you want? I mean, he may…he should believe it more, with two of us, right?”

Ned had had the same thought.

“You sure? It’s okay? I’d appreciate…”

She shook her head. “Nothing’s okay at all, but I’m not walking out on you. Two’s easier for this.”

It was. But that made him think of something.

“Three’s better,” he said, and took out his phone.

He turned it on, tabbed to the memory screen, scrolled, and had the cell dial automatically.

One ring only. “Ned? What’s happened?”

She’d know there was something. He wouldn’t have called, otherwise.

He cleared his throat. “Something bad,” he said. It was tricky, controlling his voice. “I need…You think you can come up to the villa? I have no idea what to do.”

Aunt Kim had the most reassuring voice. “Of course I can. Are you there now?”

“In Aix. Walking home. With Kate, the girl I met.”

“Walking from where?”

“Entremont.”

There was a silence. “Oh, Ned,” she said. “All right, I’m west of the city, but not far, it won’t take me long.”

“Thanks. Really.”

“Get yourselves home. It’s the last house on that road? Where I dropped you?”

“Uh-huh. Villa Sans Souci. Melanie put…there are these Canadian flags. On the little signs.”