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guess, and some of the andain, but the goddesses would know.
    The sun rose. Dave stood up and looked around him under a brightening sky. No clouds. It was a beautiful morning. About a mile north of him the Adein sparkled, and there were men and horses stirring along its bank. East, somewhat farther off, he could make out the standing stones that surrounded and defined Celidon, the mid-Plain, home of the first tribe of the Dalrei and gathering place of all the tribes. There were signs of motion, of life, there as well.
    Who, though, and how many?
    Not all need die
, Ceinwen had said to him a year ago, and again last night. Not all, perhaps, but the battle had been brutal, and very bad, and a great many
had
died.
    He had been changed by the events of the evening and night before, but in most ways Dave was exactly what he had always been, and so there was a sick knot of fear in his stomach as he strode off the mound and began walking swiftly towards the activity by the riverbank.
    Who? And how many? There had been such chaos, suchmuddy, blood-bespattered confusion: the wolves, the lios arriving, Avaia’s brood in the darkening sky, and then, after he’d blown the horn, something else in the sky, something wild. Owein and the kings. And the child. Carrying death, manifesting it. He quickened his pace almost to a run.
Who?
    Then he had part of an answer, and he stopped abruptly, a little weak with relief. From the cluster of men by the Adein two horses, one dark grey, the other brown, almost golden, had suddenly wheeled free, racing towards him, and he recognized them both.
    Their riders, too. The horses thundered up to him, the two riders leaping off, almost before stopping, with the unconscious, inbred ease of the Dalrei. And Dave stood facing the men who’d become his brothers on a night in Pendaran Wood.
    There was joy, and relief, and all three showed it in their own ways, but they did not embrace.
    “Ivor?” Dave asked. Only the name.
    “He is all right,” Levon said quietly. “Some wounds, none serious.” Levon himself, Dave saw, had a short deep scar on his temple, running up into the line of his yellow hair.
    “We found your axe,” Levon explained. “By the river bank. But no one had seen you after … after you blew the horn, Davor.”
    “And this morning,” Torc continued, “all the dead were gone, and we could not find you….” He left the thought unfinished.
    Dave drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Ceinwen?” he said. “Did you hear her voice?”
    The two Dalrei nodded, without speaking.
    “She stopped the Hunt,” Dave said, “and then she … took meaway. When I awoke she was with me, and she said that she had … gathered the dead.” He said nothing more. The rest was his own, not for the telling.
    He saw Levon, quick as ever, glance past him at the mound, and then Torc did the same. There was a long silence. Dave could feel the freshness of the morning breeze, could see it moving the tall grass of the Plain. Then, with a twist of his heart he saw that Torc, always so self-contained, was weeping soundlessly as he gazed at the mound of the dead.
    “So many,” Torc murmured. “They killed so many of us, of the lios….”
    “Mabon of Rhoden took a bad shoulder wound,” Levon said. “One of the swans came down on him.”
    Mabon, Dave remembered, had saved his life only two days before, when Avaia herself had descended in a blur of death from a clear sky. He swallowed and said, with difficulty, “Torc, I saw Barth and Navon, both of them. They were—”
    Torc nodded stiffly. “I know. I saw it, too. Both of them.”
    The babies in the wood, Dave was thinking. Barth and Navon, barely fourteen when they died, had been the ones that he and Torc had guarded in Faelinn Grove on Dave’s first night in Fionavar. Guarded and saved from an urgach, only to have them …
    “It was the urgach in white,” Dave said, bitterness like gall in his mouth. “The really big one. He killed them both.