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their hands brushing one another’s thighs.
    Arrhiza turned toward Phyla. “Spring comes late,” she sighed, her breath caressing Phyla’s budlike ear.
    Phyla rolled away from her, pouting. “You make Spring Greeting sound like a complaint. It is the same every year.” She sat up with her back to Arrhiza and stretched her arms. Her hands were outlined against the evening sky, the second and third fingers slotted together like a leaf. Then she turned slowly toward Arrhiza, her woods-green eyes unfocused. In the soft, filtered light her body gleamed whitely, and the darker patches were mottled beauty marks on her breasts and sides. She was up to her feet in a single fluid movement and into the Dance.
    Arrhiza watched, still full length on the ground, as one after another the dryads and meliades rose and stepped into position, circling, touching, embracing, moving apart. The cleft of their legs flashed pale signals around the glade.
    Rooted to their trees, the hamadryads could only lean out into the Dance. They swayed to the lascivious pipings of spring. Their silver-green hair, thick as vines, eddied around their bodies like water.
    Arrhiza watched it all but still did not move. How long she had waited for this moment, the whole of the deep winter, and yet she did not move. What she wanted was more than this, this entering into the Dance on command. She wanted to touch, to walk, to run, even to dance when she alone desired it. But then her blood was singing, her body pulsating; her limbs stretched upward answering the call. She was drawn toward the others and, even without willing it, Arrhiza was into the Dance.
    Silver and green, green and gold, the grove was a smear of color and wind as she whirled around and around with her sisters. Who was touched and who the toucher; whose arm, whose thigh was pressed in the Dance—it did not matter. The Dance was all. Drops of perspiration, sticky as sap, bedewed their backs and ran in slow rivulets to the ground. The Dance was the glade, was the grove. There was no stopping, no starting, for a circle has no beginning or end.
    Then suddenly a hunter’s horn knifed across the meadow. It was both discordant and sweet, sharp and caressing at once. The Dance did not stop, but it dissolved. The Huntress was coming. The Huntress was here.
    And then She was in the middle of them all, straddling a moonbeam, the red hem of Her saffron hunting tunic pulled up to expose muscled thighs. Seven hounds lay growling at Her feet. She reached up to Her hair and in one swift, savage movement, pulled at the golden cords that bound it up. Her hair cascaded like silver and gold leaves onto Her shoulders and crept in tendrils across Her small, perfect breasts. Her heart-shaped face, with its crescent smile, was both innocent and corrupt; Her eyes as dark blue as a storm-coming sky. She dismounted the moon shaft and turned around slowly, as if displaying Herself to them all, but She was the Huntress, and She was doing the hunting. She looked into their faces one at a time, and the younger ones looked back, both eager and afraid.
    Arrhiza was neither eager nor afraid. Twice already she had been the chosen one, torn laughing and screaming from the glade, brought for a night to the moon’s dark side. The pattern of the Huntress’s mouth was burned into her throat’s hollow, Her mark. And Her words were still in Arrhiza’s ears. “You are mine. Forever. If you leave me, I will kill you, so fierce is my love.” It had been spoken each time with a kind of passion, in between kisses, but the words, like the kisses, were as cold and distant and pitiless as the moon.
    The Huntress walked around the circle once again, pausing longest before a young meliade, Pyrena of the apple blossoms. Under that gaze Pyrena seemed both to wither and to bloom. But the Huntress shook Her head and Her mouth formed the slightest moue of disdain. Her tongue flicked out and was caught