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coiling around the fires, I could feel it sweeping by me.
    â€œRae,” said a soft, taut voice at my ear, “be ready.”
    It was Arlen. I mustered myself and slowly opened my eyes. Lonn hung before me, limp and bloody but still breathing—I did not look at him but a little to one side of him, seeing him as a red man, no more. The smoke stung my eyes, bringing tears, and I watched the dance, a blur. Faster and faster Arlen led it in the heady smoke, the youths spinning and leaping behind him, the Gwyneda circling and shuffling—tears had made tracks in the chalk on their faces, and smoke had begrimed it, and their white robes were disheveled, but they did not care; I could hear them panting. The look on their faces was not cruel, as I had expected, but merely entranced. Frenzy was building. Faster, faster, the dance, as the king hung on the tree.…
    With a great shout Arlen leaped and turned and sent his spear flying. Swift and true it flew, transfixing Lonn to the oak, cutting off his life in one moment. The shrewd blow had been struck, and the youths loosed their arrows and darts, and the white-robes closed in on Lonn like so many hounds, wild for the taste of his young limbs. But Arlen ran around the fire and came to me, and we walked swiftly away. Straight through the ring of lords and ladies we walked, and none of them tried to stop us or so much as looked at us, so spellbound were they with what was happening at the oak.
    Once beyond the crowd Arlen touched my arm, and we sprang forward and ran for the stable. I saw that tears streaked his face—from the smoke or from sorrow? There was no time to ask or comfort. We reached the horse; already saddled and bridled it awaited us, a comely dapple gray, Lonn’s charger. The mane shimmered eerily on its deeply curved crest, and on its flanks the dapples glowed darkly, nearly purple, the color of storm clouds. Winterking glory.… Arlen mounted and helped me up behind him. He made no sound, but I felt him shaking, felt his broad chest heave; it was sorrow.
    â€œDo not weep,” I told him softly.
    â€œHow am I to help it? I loved him as a brother, and I did not somehow find a way to save him. I am a coward—”
    â€œA harsh thing to say of the one for whom Lonn gave his life,” I reproved him.
    A distant roar went up, the blood-shout from hundreds of throats, and Arlen sent the horse springing forward. Down to the shoreline it sped, through the willows, and out onto the black water it leaped, and straight across the surface of the Naga it galloped, sending up crownforms with its hooves. Once I looked back over my shoulder. The Sacred Isle was a nothingness, lost in winter mist; it might as well have never been. And already day had turned to dusk.
    We came to the shore of the Secular Lands amidst a crowd of pavilions, and I realized that Arlen was riding at random, scarcely knowing what he was doing, or he would have taken us farther downriver, away from the lords’ encampment. It did not matter. The lords and ladies were all on the Isle being sprinkled with blood, and the few servant folk who were about merely stared at us. I recognized my father’s pavilion close at hand, its pointed top emblazoned with his sevenfold tower emblem.
    â€œWait,” I said to Arlen, “stop,” and he did not question me, only brought the horse to a halt. “Wait but a moment,” I told him, and I slid down and ran into the pavilion. My things were there, packed up in a chest as if to be sold; I never would have seen them again. I snatched up a pair of fur boots—slippers, really—and put them on my bare feet. I found my mantle—not the grand sable one I had worn to the Sacred Isle, but my everyday one of brown wool—and fastened it on. I gathered up some blankets. My father’s manservant had come in and stood watching me with his mouth agape. “If you say so much as a word about this to