They all three took up their loaves of bread and began to eat them. Harran reassured himself that there was not too much honey in the bread. In fact, it had risen rather nicely. In the great silence left after he had eaten the little cake, he noticed abruptly how very silent it was getting-
“And likewise behold ye this wine of my age, burning under the sun in the grape as my blood has burned in lifelight in my veins all my days of this world, and turned to wine of its own virtue as the blood and thought of mortalkind tumeth to the divine of its virtue and in its time. Now do I drink and make it so part of me, and myself part of it, both alike immortal…”
Harran drank the lovely old vintage, reassured, feeling it slide down his throat like velvet fire as the spell took, made it more than wine, in token of his and the others being more than merely mortal. Across the circle, Siveni made a face at the taste of wine only nine months old; Harran was hard put not to grin and spill his own. The silence was thick. At the sides of the great room, frozen eyes shone dulled in the spell-light that was rising about them. Harran’s heart grew fierce inside him. It was going to work. Those bright fields that he had glimpsed, that long peace, that eternity to love in, to work in, to be more than mortal in-his, theirs, at last-
“… and these tokens offered up, these rites enacted,” Siveni said, her voice becoming temfyingly clear though she had not raised it a whit, “as last sign of my intent I offer up my blood, come of gods in the olden time, returned to them at last; wherein godhead resides past time or loss, and wherein it may be regained…”