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she’d known that something unusual was going to happen, felt with an inexplicable certainty that her life had reached a crossroads. How right she’d been! First the caravan went west to the land of the Elcyion Lacar, the elves, a people who were supposed to exist only in fairy tale and myth. Then, with some of the elves in tow, they’d returned to Eldidd and ridden right into the middle of a dweomer war.
    Just in time for her to save Rhodry’s life by killing a man who, or so the dweomer seemed to declare, was invincible—Lord Corbyn will never die by any
man’s
hand, or so a prophecy declared. Like all dweomer-riddles, this one had two sharp sides, and a lass’s hand had slain him sure enough. As she thought about it, it all seemed entirely too neat, too clever, as if the gods shaped a person’s Wyrd the way a Bardek craftsman shapes a puzzle box with its precise little workings that mean absolutely nothing in the long run. And then she remembered the elves, who were not men in any true sense, and Rhodry himself, who was only half of one. She saw then that Rhodry might have slain his enemy himself, if only he’d believed he could, and that her coming, while convenient, need not be foreordained anymorethan a snowstorm that appears in winter could be said to be a mighty act of dweomer.
    Yet dweomer had brought her to him; that she was sure of, if not to save his life, then for some obscure purpose. Although she shuddered at the thought, she also found herself wondering why dweomer should frighten her so badly, why she was sure that following the dweomer road would lead to her death. Suddenly she saw it: she was afraid that if ever she tampered with dweomer, it would bring not only her death, but Rhodry’s. Even though she told herself that the idea was stupid, the irrational fear seemed to hang round her like smoke, acrid and choking. For a moment, in fact, she thought she could see gray tendrils, curling through the room. When she leaped up, ready to shout fire, the smoke disappeared—a dweomer-vision.
    She had no way of knowing that the smoke of her vision came from a fire that burned some three hundred years in the past, when she and Rhodry both had lived another life, as all souls have many lives, as many as the moon, cycling from light into darkness and back to the light yet once again.

DEVERRY, 733

    All men have seen the two smiling faces of the Goddess, She who gives good harvests and She who brings love to men’s hearts. Some have seen Her stern face, the Mother who at times must chastise her erring children. But how many have ever seen the fourth face of the Goddess, which is hidden even to most women who walk the earth?
    —
The Discourses of the Priestess, Camylla

     

The rider was dying. He slid off his horse to the cobbles, staggered once, and fell to his knees. Gweniver flung herself down and grabbed him by the shoulders before he fell on his face. Warm blood oozed through his shirt onto her hands.
    “Lost, my lady,” he gasped. “Your brother’s dead.”
    Blood welled into his mouth and broke in a bubble of death. When she laid him down, his foundered horse tossed its head once, then merely trembled, dripping gray sweat. She got to her feet just as a stable lad came running.
    “Do what you can for that horse,” she said. “Then tell all the servants to pack up and flee. You’ve got to get out of here or you won’t live the night.”
    Wiping her hands on her dress, Gweniver ran across the ward to the tall broch of the Wolf clan, which would burn that night beyond her power to save it. Inside the great hall, huddled by the honor hearth, were her mother, Dolyan, her younger sister, Macla, and Mab, their aged serving woman.
    “The Boar’s men have caught our warband on the road,” Gweniver said. “Avoic’s dead, and there’s an end to the feud.”
    Dolyan threw back her head and keened out a wail forher husband and three sons. Macla burst into moist sobs and clung to Mab.
    “Oh, hold