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rider towered over him like a dark cloud, blotting out both snow and sun.
    And then dimly he heard new sounds, and the rearing black shapes seemed to fall to one side, swept away by a blazing golden light, brilliant with fierce patterns of white-hot circles, suns, stars — Will blinked, and saw suddenly that it was the white mare from the smithy, rearing over him in turn. He grabbed frantically at the waving mane, and just as before he found himself jerked up onto the broad back, bent low over the mare’s neck, clutching for his life. The great white horse let out a shrieking cry and leapt for the track through the trees, passing the shapeless black cloud that hung motionless in the clearing like smoke; passing everything in a rising gallop, until they came at last to the road, Huntercombe Lane, the road through Hunter’s Combe.
    The movement of the great horse changed to a slow-rising, powerful lope, and Will heard the beating of his own heart in his ears as the world flashed by in a white blur. Then all at once greyness came around them, and the sun was blacked out. The wind wrenched into Will’s collar and sleeves and boot-tops, ripping at his hair. Great clouds rushed towards them out of the north, closing in, huge grey-black thunderheads; the sky rumbled and growled. One white-misted gap remained, with a faint hint of blue behind it still, but ittoo was closing, closing. The white horse leapt at it desperately. Over his shoulder Will saw swooping towards them a darker shape even than the giant clouds: the Rider, towering, immense, his eyes two dreadful points of blue-white fire. Lightning flashed, thunder split the sky, and the mare leapt at the crashing clouds as the last gap closed.
    And they were safe. The sky was blue before and above them; the sun blazing, warming Will’s skin. He saw that they had left his Thames Valley behind. Now they were among the curving slopes of the Chiltern Hills, capped with great trees, beech and oak and ash. And running like threads through the snow along the lines of the hills were the hedges that were the marks of ancient fields — very ancient, as Will had always known; more ancient than anything in his world except the hills themselves, and the trees. Then on one white hill, he saw a different mark. The shape was cut through snow and turf into the chalk beneath the soil; it would have been hard to make out if it had not been familiar. But Will knew it. The mark was a circle, quartered by a cross.
    Then his hands were jerked away from their tight clutch on the thick mane, and the white mare gave a long shrill whinnying cry that was loud in his ears and then strangely died away into a far distance. And Will was falling, falling; yet he knew no shock of a fall, but knew only that he was lying face down on cold snow. He stumbled to his feet, shaking himself. The white horse was gone. The sky was clear, and the sunshine warm on the back of his neck. He stood on a snow-mounded hill, with a copse of tall trees capping it far beyond, and two black birds drifting tiny to and fro above the trees.
    And before him, standing alone and tall on the white slope, leading to nowhere, were two great carved wooden doors.

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The Sign-Seeker
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    Will thrust his cold hands into his pockets, and stood staring up at the carved panels of the two closed doors towering before him. They told him nothing. He could find no meaning in the zigzag symbols repeated over and over, in endless variation, on every panel. The wood of the doors was like no wood he had ever seen; it was cracked and pitted and yet polished by age, so that you could scarcely tell it was wood at all except by a rounding here and there, where someone had not quite been able to avoid leaving the trace of a knot-hole. If it had not been for signs like those, Will would have taken the doors to be stone.
    His eyes slid beyond their outline as he looked, and he saw that all around them was a quivering of things, a