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HAPTER T HREE
    A t dusk of that same day, Genvissa walked a path through the marshlands and water reeds to the northern bank of the Llan.
    Behind her, keeping their distance, walked Aerne and Loth, their faces reflecting resignation and obstinacy respectively.
    Several paces behind them came a young girl of some ten or eleven years, Genvissa’s middle daughter, wearing nothing but a brief hip wrap and a drum hung on a leather band that wound over one shoulder and between her small, virgin breasts. On this drum the girl beat out a soft, relentless rhythm that sent the blood coursing through the two men.
    Genvissa halted at the water’s edge. She was naked, her dark, curly hair with its strange russet streak left to flow unbound over her shoulders and back. Unlike her daughter, who had as yet borne no children and thus had the thin, unbecoming body of the yet-to-be mother, Genvissa’s body was shapely and seductive: her breasts were well muscled and moulded by the years she’d spent breastfeeding her daughters; her hips flared invitingly; her waist was narrow between the two sensuous extremes of breast and hip; her legs were long and smooth and graceful. In many ways the MagaLlan’s body was like the land itself, deep and inviting, mysterious and strong, secreting within itselfthat magical spark that, at the touch of a man’s body or the caress of the village plough, seeded new life both in womb and in field.
    Genvissa was an extraordinarily powerful woman, but her power encompassed far more than the Mag power she held within her womb. She was of a line of five foremothers, singular women all, the first of whom, Ariadne, had brought to this land an exotic dark sorcery.
    Ariadne had escaped from Naxos aboard a merchant’s vessel six days before Thera exploded, nurturing both her revenge and her newly won darkcraft. She found a home in Llangarlia, which accepted her (and more importantly, added to her power), and she settled, waiting. Waiting for the right moment, the moment when Asterion, now wandering the earth reborn, was distant enough that Ariadne could risk working the final part of her revenge.
    That moment had not come in Ariadne’s lifetime, and such was the strength of her hatred and ambition, she had not truly minded. The time would eventually be right: Asterion would be far enough away and, hopefully, weak enough that he could not interfere, and one among her daughter-heirs would be the one.
    So Ariadne had nurtured her darkcraft, and then handed it down to her daughter-heir, who nurtured and fed it in her own right before handing it, in turn, to her daughter-heir. For well over a hundred years the women had passed it down their line, mother to daughter, each adding to the store of the power which, by the time Genvissa’s mother, Herron, came into her full malevolence, had grown into a dark, twisting thing indeed.
    It was Herron who laid the foundations for the final part of Ariadne’s plan: the eventual reactivation of the Game far, far from the Aegean world and its gods. First, she had engineered the splitting of Aerne’s Ogpower so that Og, and through him, Mag, would be too weak to interfere. Well might the Gormagog despise himself for his weakness in losing half of his power to his newly conceived son, and thus crippling Og (and, by association, Mag), but in reality he’d been the victim of Herron’s spell-weaving rather than his own unwitting error. Aerne and Loth blamed the pitiful Blangan for the catastrophic event—they still lusted for her blood—but Blangan had simply been a means, a vessel to be used.
    Blangan had been Herron’s eldest daughter, and thus expendable in a world where it was the youngest daughter who inherited.
    Then, in a final act of darkcraft so powerful it had ended her life, Herron had caused Asterion—at that moment moving from one life to the next—to be reborn into a body calamitously weak and so far distant that he, like Og and Mag, would be able to do nothing to