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dreamer and brother to the Boudica — and you saved his life. He owes you everything and you are all he has ever wanted to be. How can he not hate you? Hating you, how could he follow you as leader?”
    Valerius looked up. The irony and the humour were gone. “Breaca?”
    She took time to slide her blade back to its sheath and wrap the belt loops round it. “I had forgotten that. I’m sorry. It seems I have forgotten a great many things that matter.” Her hands and the sword’s hilt were greasy with sweat. She wiped the serpent-spear with the sleeve of her tunic, so that the metal returned to the dull matt her father had made.
    After a while, when no-one had spoken to fill the silence, Valerius rose and went to kneel by the altar stone,and the hole that was under it. He leaned in as Graine had done, so that the upper half of his body was hidden, but delved deeper, digging his fingers through the earth in the floor of the pit that Graine had found.
    He emerged some time later and sat still with his head bowed over the slim wrapping of birch and bull’s hide that he had brought out. His hound was visible by his side then, and remained so afterwards through all that followed; the dream-hound that had been Hail and was still Hail, but no longer living.
    “Could you come with me closer to the pool?” he said. “I would have Nemain also bear witness to this.”
    Breaca was still lost in the memories of Cunomar and his ambition. Even as she sat down and Valerius began to unwrap the thongs of the bull, sacred to Mithras and the birch, sacred to Nemain, she still had no idea what it was that he held.
    Then he smoothed the linen flat and sat back and a new, quite different blade lay in the moonlight: her father’s. Not the fast, light cavalry blade that he had made for her, but Eburovic’s own sword, the great war blade of their ancestors, which had come to him down the lineage of warriors, passed from father to daughter and mother to son since the Eceni first came into being.
    It was longer than her own sword by a hand’s length, and broader at the hilt, and the balance was different: not an easy blade to use, but lethal in the right hands. The shape on the pommel was the feeding she-bear that had been Eburovic’s dream long before Ardacos of the Caledonii brought the cult of the bear from the cold north to the eastern lands of the Eceni.
    Breaca stared at it, empty. She wanted to feel something and could not, only thought that she had heard nothing to warn her, neither the song of the blade nor her father’s voice, and both should have been there.
    She said, “Valerius? How did you come by this? It was hidden beyond any man’s reach.”
    “Eburovic led me to it. That is, his ghost did, and I had not time to ask … when did he die, Breaca? In the invasion wars, with Macha?”
    “He was killed in the battle in which you were taken from us.”
    She had forgotten that he would not know, that so much of his own history was missing from his life. She watched him take this fact, and fit it into the pattern of his loss.
    More gently, she said, “Has he given the war blade of the ancestors to you? That would be fitting. He raised you as his son, and felt for you as if you were. With that blade, you could lead the war host and be honoured for it.”
    “Thank you, but no. The blade and the leadership that goes with it are, I think, for another.”
    He stared out a moment at the moon’s disc on the pond, and pressed the knuckle of his thumb to his breast bone. Quite close, an owlet screeched for its parents, and was answered.
    Valerius said, “The spirit of your father — of our father — gave the blade into my keeping only until such time as he should ask me to relinquish it. He has given no sign yet of whose it should be, but we’re moving towards war which will take us away from Eceni lands. If we leave it buried here, we may never come back. I think it’s time it had a new owner, who knows how to use it, and has