Give me your name, Beloved,
Your true name, and no other.”
In the moment before he answered, Kevin Laine had time to remember a great many things, some with sorrow and some with love. He drew himself up before her; there was a power in him, an upsurge of desire; he too could make the echoes ring in Dun Maura.
“Liadon!” he cried, and in the resounding of it, the burgeoning strength within himself, he felt a breath, a touch, as of wind across his face.
Slowly the crone lowered the needle.
“It is so,” she whispered. “Pass.”
He did not move. His heart was beating rapidly now, though not with fear any more. “There is a wishing in me,” he said.
“There always is,” the crone replied.
Kevin said, “Bright my hair and bright my blood. I offered blood once, in Paras Derval, but that was far from here, and not tonight.”
He waited and for the first time saw a change in her eyes. They seemed to clear, to move back toward their lost blue; it may have been a trick of the orange light on the stone seat, but he thought he saw her straighten where she sat.
With the same needle she pointed, inward, to the chamber. Not far away, almost on the threshold still, Kevin saw the elements of offering. No brightly polished dagger here, no exquisitely crafted bowl to catch the falling gift. This was the oldest place, the hearth. There was a rock rising up, a little past the height of his chest, from the cave floor, and it came to no level, rounded peak, but to a long jagged crest. Beside the rock was a stone bowl, little more than a cup. It had had two handles once, but one had broken off. There was no design on it, no potter’s glaze; it was rough, barely functional, and Kevin could not even hazard a guess how old it was.
“Pass,” the crone repeated.
He went to the rock and picked up the bowl, carefully. It was very heavy to his hand. Again he paused, and again a great many things came back to him from far away, like lights on a distance shore, or lights of a town seen at night from a winter hill.
He was very sure. With a smooth, unhurried motion, he bent over the rock and laid his cheek open on the jagged crest. Even as he felt the pain and caught the welling blood, he heard an ululating wail from behind him, a wild sound of joy and grief in one rising and falling cry as he came into his power.
He turned. The crone had risen. Her eyes were very blue, her gown was white, her hair was white as snow, her fingers long and slender. Her teeth were white, her lips were red, and a red flush was in her cheeks, as well, and he knew it for desire.
He said, “There is a wish in my heart.”
She laughed. A gentle laugh, indulgent, tender, a mother’s laugh over the cradle of her child.
“Beloved,” she said. “Oh, be welcome again, Liadon. Beloved Son. . . . Maidaladan. She will love you, she will.” And the Guardian of the Threshold, old still but no longer a crone, laid a finger on his still flowing wound, and he felt the skin close to her touch and the bleeding stop.
She rose up on her toes and kissed him full on the lips. Desire broke over him like a wave in a high wind. She said, ”Twelve hundred years have passed since I claimed my due from a sacrifice come freely.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“Go now,” she said. “Midnight is upon us, Liadon. You know where to go; you remember. Pour the bowl and the wish of your heart, Beloved. She will be there. For you she will come as swiftly as she did when the first boar marked the first of all her lovers.” With her long fingers she was disrobing him even as she spoke.
Desire, power, crest of the wave. He was the force behind the wave and the foam where it broke. Wordlessly, he turned, remembering the way, and crossing the wide chamber, bearing his blood in a stone bowl, he came to its farthest point. To the very brink of the chasm.