“We would have died by Adein without it,” Dave said quietly. “Does that not make it a true finding?”
She smiled again, inscrutable, capricious. She said, “You have grown clever since last we met. I may be sorry to see you go.”
There was nothing he could say to that. He extended the horn a little toward her, and she took it from his hand. Her fingers touched his palm, and he did tremble then, with awe and memory. She laughed, deep in her throat. Dave could feel himself flushing. But there was something he had to ask, even if she laughed. After a moment, he said, “Would you be as sorry to see me stay? I have been trying for a long time now to decide. I think I’m ready to go home, but another part of me despairs at the thought of leaving.” He spoke as carefully as he could, with more dignity than he’d thought he possessed.
She did not laugh. The goddess looked upon him, and there was a strangeness in her eyes, half cold, half sorrowing. She shook her head. “Dave Martyniuk,” she said, “you have grown wiser since that night in Faelinn Grove. I had thought you knew the answer to that question without my telling it. You cannot stay, and you should have known you cannot.”
Something jogged in Dave’s mind: an image, another memory. Just before she spoke again, in the half second before she told him why, he understood.
“What did I say to you that night by the pool?” she asked, her voice cool and soft like woven silk.
He knew. It had been hidden somewhere in his mind all along, he supposed. No man of Fionavar may see Ceinwen hunt.
That was what she’d said. He had seen her hunt, though. He had seen her kill a stag by the moonlit pool and had seen the stag rise from its own death and bow its head to the Huntress and move away into the trees.
No man of Fionavar. . . . Dave knew the answer to his dilemma now: there was, had only ever been, one answer.
He was going home. The goddess willed it so. Only by leaving Fionavar could be preserve his life, only by leaving could he allow her not to kill him for what he had seen.
Within his heart he felt one stern pang of grief, and then it passed away, leaving behind a sorrow he would always carry, but leaving also a deep certitude that this was how it was because it was the only way it could ever have been.
Had he not been from another world, Ceinwen could not have let him live; she could never have given him the horn. In her own way, Dave saw, in a flash of illumination, the goddess too was trapped by her nature, by what she had decreed.
And so he would go. There was nothing left to decide. It had been decided long ago, and that truth had been within him all the time. He drew another breath, deep and slow. It was very quiet in the woods. No birds were singing now.
He remembered something else then, and he said it. “I swore to you that night, that first time, that I would pay whatever price was necessary. If you will see it is as such, then perhaps my leaving may be that price.”
Again she smiled, and this time it was kind. “I will see it as such,” the goddess said. “There will be no other price exacted. Remember me.”
There was a shining in her face. He opened his mouth but found he could not speak. It had come home to him with his words and hers: he was leaving. It would all be put behind him now. It had to be. Memory would be all he had to carry back with him and forward through his days.
For the last time he knelt before Ceinwen of the Bow. She was motionless as a statue, looking down upon him.
He rose up and turned to go from among the shadows and dappled light between the trees. “Hold!” the goddess said.