Dreaming the Serpent Spear Read Online Free PDF Page A

might be easier to wade through.” That much was easy to imagine; the stream was not deep.
    “No. I want to jump it, to know that I can.” Graine was already shifting her weight from one foot to the other, as if the distance from one bank to the other were three times as wide. “I’ll go on my own,” she said, and did so, unprettily, landing in a sprawl on the far side.
    Breaca followed, having no choice. Breathing carefully, she crouched by her daughter. Graine was pale and her fists clenched tight. Breaca said, “Are you hurting?”
    “No.” The lie was not to be challenged. Frowning, Graine looked up through the trees to where the full moon made sharp silhouettes of the branches. She said, “We should go quickly. The clouds will cover the moon by midnight.”
    “You should lead, then. You can remember what Valerius said better than I can.”
    The woods were quiet, as if their presence were unusual, and something to be watched. They walked a while along the water’s edge and then cut inward, following a track through the thickening jumble of undergrowth to another, far older, clearing where ancient trees hung with scabs of lichen formed the margins. Here, the stream spread to become a small pool and a hazel grew up from the bank, dipping branches downwards to trail long-twigged fingers across the water.
    Breaca caught hold of Graine’s hand and skirted the pool to stand in the moon shadow of the hazel. The stream ran in slowly, filtered through sphagnum moss. The surface of the water was a languid mirror reflecting the tree and the night sky. The moon made an unbroken circle with the hareon its surface so complete as to be alive: creature of Nemain, made real on the water that was her domain.
    Coming new to such a place, Breaca dared to hope; a dreamer could see the breath of the gods in a pool such as this, or a violated child, perhaps, who had lost her dreaming.
    Because she knew her daughter very well, she felt the moment when exactly that thought occurred also to Graine. She felt the same hope, sharper and less curtailed, course through the small frame, and then the desperate, damaging disappointment at the recoil just after. She opened her mouth to speak and found no words and looked down at the child’s blank mask of a face and was glad she had kept silent.
    Graine found her own way out. The small, sweaty hand tightened in Breaca’s, drawing her away from the water’s edge. She said, “The flat stone Valerius spoke of is nine paces west of the gods’ tree. You’ll have to make the strides. Mine are not long enough.”
    “Come with me. You can count as we go.”
    Counting aloud, they paced away from the pool towards the trees at the far edge of the clearing. Halfway between water and wood, they stopped. Dead leaves lay in flurries at their feet. Breaca knelt and swept them aside with the edge of her hand. Underneath, a flat plate of green-grey moss, longer than a man’s arm and half as wide, showed where a stone lay flush with turf.
    A winter’s leaving of silt bound the edges to the earth on all sides. Valerius had said that he used his sword blade to lift it. Lacking a sword, Breaca slid her belt knife all the way round. Iron grated on stone but the gap was still not enough to hook in her fingers. She looked around for something else to act as a lever.
    Graine, squatting beside her, picked at a corner of the moss. “There’s a carving on the stone’s face,” she said.
    “Is there?” A hawthorn branch lay nearby, split from the parent tree by winter storms and still green enough to be strong. Breaca hefted it and set her blade to sharpen the wider end. “Can you clear the moss and see what it looks like?”
    She whittled at the end of the stake until the density of her daughter’s silence drew her back. Lifting her head, she said, “Beloved, what have you found?”
    “It’s an altar, an old one, from the time of the ancestors.”
    She should have known. Around them, a wood lay silent