The leaves were still a mantle of old birch gold and maple crimson, lit at their tops with the last light, but mixed with pines here where the valley floor rose in rolling hills, their needles a dark dense green turning black with the coming of night. Glancing behind, she could see the lights of the Sheriff?s manor glinting like flickering stars across rail-fenced fields, and then the pale twisting ribbon of the river. Both dropped out of sight as she followed the trail, hoping it would loop around rather than make her retrace her steps. Now and then she stopped, once when a pair of early-rising raccoons stared at her with an insolence that made her chuckle before they waddled along about their nocturnal day.
Then she heard something, not the normal creak and click and buzz of the woods, but faint and far. The cloak fell free as she went to one knee behind a thicket of blackberry canes with her hand on the hilt of her longsword. She ghosted forward, silent now with long-trained caution and skill. Through a narrow cleft where rock broke through pine duff, then a hollow dell where faded straw-colored grass stood shaggy amid tall white oaks and hickories and white ash and younger rowans that looked planted. A broad open space held a fireset, a heap of timber laid crisscross twice a tall man?s height amid a circle of earth that had been beaten bare by feet. An altar stood there, rough-hewn from a great boulder, with instruments laid upon it, chalice and blade and book, salt and water.
Her eyes went wide in alarm. And the sound was stronger, sending a prickle down her spine as she sank again behind a clump of hornbeam. She knew that music. The eerie chill of panpipes; a harp playing on the strings of the listener?s mind like mist drifting across forested hills in the purple dusk of an autumn gloaming; drums throbbing until it seemed like the pulse of your own blood in temples and throat and between the thighs.
How could she not recognize it, when she had spent so much of every year in her youth among the clansfolk who followed the Old Religion?
The Hymn to Herne the Wild Hunter, she thought. It?s time for it-the pagans think he rules the cold season, and grants luck in the hunt.
But when she was staying at Dun Juniper she?d been able to keep to her own room and pray before her prie-dieu when she heard that sound trickle through the night-haunted woods. Now she couldn?t, nor even leave without the risk of someone spotting the movement; and these wouldn?t be the friends of her childhood, ready to make allowances. Mathilda turned her eyes away. Then, inch by inch, they crept back. She watched half against her will, half with a tightness in her throat that made breath come hard.
The bonfire waited, in the clearing beyond the tattered oaks, beneath the moon and great soft stars. The night was turning crisp, but the two figures that came dancing with torches that made meteor strokes through the darkness were as comfortable in their bare skins as if woodland animals themselves. She recognized Mary and Ritva with a shock of surprise that she knew was foolish-this was their faith, and what matter if they?d found unexpected company for it?
The twins? high clear voices rang: ?Blazing blood on a moonlit night
Firelight glinting, burning bright
We dance and chant and sing delight
Flames, flames, let the Light inspire Nothing tames our Sabbat fire!?
One wore only a garland of flowers white and scarlet about her long wheat-blond hair. The other had a delicately beautiful doe-mask over her face, painted leather and twin slender golden spikes over her brows; around her waist and loins were a belt and strap that held a spray of silver bells on either side that dangled against the smooth hard curve of her hips, and a flaunting white deer?s tail behind. ?Swirling sparks in a fiery flare
Call to each one of us by name
Igniting passion, staking claims
Couples pair, and it?s all fair game
Flames, flames reaching ever higher
Roaring, panting, hissing fire!?
They spiraled inward and then threw the torches high with a last shout, pinwheeling against the sky in a spray of yellow and red sparks.
The dry stacked wood of the fireset was woven with even more flammable straw and pine needles full of resin; it caught with a roar, a tall pillar of hot gold and molten copper that erupted skyward in a shower of flaming glory. Even at this distance the dry clean scent of it cut through the dew-heavy evening smell of the woods, and the light formed a circle that made darkness more absolute beyond; Mathilda blinked against the dazzle.
Out of those cave-dense shadows came the coven and its guests, in a file of men and another of women, barefaced or masked as wolf and badger and bear, raven and coyote and cougar and more. A woman led them, fair-haired, heavy of breast and hip, comely with a full woman?s beauty; a headband carrying the Triple Moon was around her brows, and a belt around her waist with the Pentagram hanging from a chain to lie below her navel. She recognized the Vogelers? housekeeper, and wondered distantly if they knew what else she was.
The coven sang as they came, in voices that held merriment and awe and a husky wildness: ?Hunter who tracks outside of time
Guardian Lord of ancient rhyme
Brother Stag in the musky glen
Consort of the Goddess in this woodland den! ?Blessed are we children of the-?
All of them put their clenched fists to their brows for an instant to mark where their God?s horns sprouted, and shouted: ?Horned One!
Blessed are we children of the Horned One!?
The High Priestess stopped before the altar, made reverence and turned. Arms raised, feet spread in the Stance of Power, she let her palms face the ground, then rise to cup the moonlight. Her voice cried in a high chant that called: ?Song and rite, Herne-ours but Thine, Herne!
Bid us dance; let flesh and bone
Wheel around the sacred Stone Hieee! Hieee! Herne! Herne! Herne!?
The witches lining the edge of the firelight swayed together, faces in-humanly rapt or blankly hidden by the masks; their voices answered as the swaying turned to a spiraling dance, stately and slow at first but growing faster as she watched to match the beat of the cry: ?Heerrrnnne! Heerrrrrnnne!?
The call went on, and on; she realized that the voices were taking it up in relays. The sustained rise and fall of the sound had a savagery to it, an elemental need, and somehow it spread -until it began to ring from the stones beneath her and the sky above and the hills to either side, until her own bones and organs buzzed with it. Her skin tightened until she felt she must burst, as if her very life depended on ripping her clothes away and running to join the celebrants; unconsciously her fingers dug into the thin earth and her body ground against it.
Silence, sudden, jarring, leaving her as breathless-winded as a punch in the gut. The High Priestess spread her arms in welcome, and the coven-folk bent the knee, inclining heads bare but for flowers or grotesquely masked. Then a great voice sang the next verse of the hymn from the circling woods-not far from her. A voice she recognized, but altered as if speaking from some deep well of time, growing as it approached: ?Chant the prayers and work your rite
Burn scented sacred candles day and night
You may leap till dawn to the pounding drums
But you best be ready-?
For a moment the song turned to a huge shout from every one of the worshippers, drowning even the crackle of the need-fire: ?-when the Horned God comes!?
It was Rudi who came, naked save for the great stag mask and spreading antlers, the firelight shining upon the long-limbed grace of his body; in his hand was a tall spear tipped by a flame-shaped bronze head. Mathilda shuddered and bit her lip until the pain cut through the haze that seemed to cloud her eyes and fill her brain. Bending, leaping, strutting in rampant maleness, the figure of Herne turned amid the laughter and the dance, feinting with the spear. Its blade touched some of the revelers in the whirling snakelike chains, metal delicate as a kiss. ?You can wake to the sound of the hunting horn