Their riders, too. The horses thundered up to him, the two riders leaping off, almost before stopping, with the unconscious, inbred ease of the Dalrei. And Dave stood facing the men who’d become his brothers on a night in Pendaran Wood.
There was joy, and relief, and all three showed it in their own ways, but they did not embrace.
“Ivor?” Dave asked. Only the name.
“He is all right,” Levon said quietly. “Some wounds, none serious.” Levon himself, Dave saw, had a short deep scar on his temple, running up into the line of his yellow hair.
“We found your axe,” Levon explained. “By the riverbank. But no one had seen you after . . . after you blew the horn, Davor.”
“And this morning,” Tore continued, “all the dead were gone, and we could not find you. . . .” He left the thought unfinished.
Dave drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Ceinwen?” he said. “Did you hear her voice?”
The two Dalrei nodded, without speaking.
“She stopped the Hunt,” Dave said, “and then she . . . took me away. When I awoke she was with me, and she said that she had . . . gathered the dead.” He said nothing more. The rest was his own, not for the telling.
He saw Levon, quick as ever, glance past him at the mound, and then Tore did the same. There was a long silence. Dave could feel the freshness of the morning breeze, could see it moving the tall grass of the Plain. Then, with a twist of his heart he saw that Tore, always so self-contained, was weeping soundlessly as he gazed at the mound of the dead.
“So many,” Tore murmured. “They killed so many of us, of the lios. . . .”
“Mabon of Rhoden took a bad shoulder wound,” Levon said. “One of the swans came down on him.”
Mabon, Dave remembered, had saved his life only two days before, when Avaia herself had descended in a blur of death from a clear sky. He swallowed and said, with difficulty, “Tore, I saw Barth and Navon, both of them. They were—”
Tore nodded stiffly. “I know. I saw it too. Both of them.”
The babies in the wood, Dave was thinking. Barth and Navon, barely fourteen when they died, had been the ones that he and Tore had guarded in Faelinn Grove on Dave’s first night in Fionavar. Guarded and saved from an urgach, only to have them . . .
“It was the urgach in white,” Dave said, bitterness like gall in his mouth. “The really big one. He killed them both. With the same stroke.”
“Uathach.” Levon almost spat the name. “I heard the others calling him. I tried to go after him, but I couldn’t get—”
“No! Not that one, Levon,” Tore interrupted, his voice fiercely intense. “Not alone. We will defeat them because we must, but promise me now that you will not go after him alone, ever. He is more than an urgach.”
Levon was silent.
“Promise me!” Tore repeated, turning to stand squarely before the Aven’s son, disregarded tears still bright in his eyes. “He is too big, Levon, and too quick, and something more than both of those. Promise me!”
Another moment passed before Levon spoke. “Only to the two of you would I say this. Understand that. But you have my word.” His yellow hair was very bright in the sun. He tossed it back with a stiff twist of his head and spun sharply to return to the horses. Over his shoulder, not breaking stride, he snapped, “Come. There is a Council of the tribes in Celidon this morning.” Without waiting for them, he mounted and rode.
Dave and Tore exchanged a glance, then mounted up themselves, double, on the grey, and set out after him. Halfway to the standing stones they caught up, because Levon had stopped and was waiting. They halted beside him.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I am a fool and a fool and a fool.”
“At least two of those,” Tore agreed gravely.
Dave laughed. After a moment, so did Levon. Ivor’s son held out his hand. Tore clasped it. They looked at Dave. Wordlessly, he placed his own right hand over both of theirs.