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"Ground and center," she said, laying down the bronze and passing her hand over the pool. "Ground and center. Be at one with each other and the world beyond."
They knelt around the still surface of the spring-fed pond. After moments that might have been hours or only minutes the focus lifted. Then each drew the wand of blessed rowan-wood from their girdles and touched the surface of the water. Signe sprinkled it with mugwort, picked at the full of the moon.
"We ask aid of You," Juniper said. "Lugh of the many skills, God whose vision dispels ignorance; Brigid, Goddess of high places and the knowledge that carries the self beyond the self. From the longing of our hearts, we ask that You gift us in this holy place with the dara sealladh, the sight which pierces to the hidden truth."
"Show me my child. Show me Edain," Melissa asked, and closed her eyes.
"Show me my daughters," Signe said, and did likewise. "Show me Mary and Ritva."
"I ask as Your priestess, and as a mother to the Mother," Juniper said. "Show me my son. Show me Rudi." She hesitated, and then used his Craft name: "Show me Artos."
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER ONE
High was the Mackenzie hearth
Dun Juniper, Gods-favored hall
And goodly its treasures
Song and feast, harp and verse
Rang often there and well
But far and wild were the wanderings
That Artos must endure
Hard-handed hero, well companioned From: The Song of Bear and Raven
Attributed to Fiorbhi
"We'd be a lot farther east if we'd gone the southern route," Edain Aylward Mackenzie grumbled quietly. "If we're going to this Nantucket place for the Sword, I'd prefer we just go."
The first three fingers of his right hand moved lightly on the waxed linen string of his yew longbow as he knelt behind the boulder of coarse dark gray volcanic rock, and he spoke without turning his eyes. A bodkin-pointed shaft was ready on the rest that cut through the riser-grip, and the stocky thick-armed body was ready to bend and loose the weapon with a snapping flick.
"Yes, but then Martin Thurston would have gotten away with it, sure," Rudi Mackenzie pointed out reasonably, sca
The long flatlands to the south were dark as the sun sank westward. Until a few days ago the area had been the borderlands between the United States-the United States of Boise, to everyone except its inhabitants-and New Deseret. Now it was probably the borderland between the US of Boise and the Church Universal and Triumphant, and its Prophet.
"You mean he hasn't gotten away with it, then, Chief?" Edain enquired sourly. "And we aren't doing just that?"
Ah, and it's a rare comfort you are, my friend, Rudi thought.
Not just the rock-steady readiness; the bantering grumble kept a distance between his mind and the fact that three of their friends were in the hands of an enemy who were no more likely to show mercy than they were to drift upward and migrate south like hummingbirds.
"Ah, well, and they do need fighting, to be sure." Edain's lips tightened. "I saw what they did to those refugees. They'll have to account to the Guardians about that… and I'm not sorry to send more of them through the Western Gate to do it."
"It was probably fated that we get mixed up with this," Rudi said. "The Powers didn't have a nice straightforward trip East for us in their minds, so."
"And they have our friends," Edain said.
Well, Rudi thought. Odard's a friend… more or less. Ingolf's a comrade, and Matti is… well, I'm not sure, except that I care for her as much as for anyone living who's not my mother. It's not just that we're anamchara, either.
He and she had sworn the oath of soul-bonding when they were ten, during the War of the Eye… He smiled a little at the memory of their seriousness, and their determination not to let their friendship be broken by the quarrels of their elders. Not that being young made the ritual any less binding…
And all of us on this trip are young, he thought, not for the first time. Changelings, or nearly so. For good or ill, the world is passing into our hands.
The two young Mackenzies fell silent, waiting patiently behind their low ridge of sage-grown rock. Rudi raised his head slightly and looked again through the roots of the bush ahead of him-always much safer than looking over it. At this angle there was no risk of a flash from the lenses of his field glasses.
He'd tied back his red-gold hair and wrapped a dark bandana about it, and dabbed his face with dust and soot; his gray-green eyes shone the brighter in the dusk. A few hours of sleep snatched during the sunlight hours had repaired most of the damage of days of fighting and hard riding; he'd recovered with the resilience of youth. He'd turned twenty-two just this last Yule, in fact; a broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, long-limbed man two inches over six feet, and even stronger than he looked.
Few works of humankind showed, besides the fireless war-camp of the Prophet's men two miles away. This stretch of the Snake River plain had depended on power-driven pumps before the Change. People had fled or died when the machines failed, and the fields had gone back to sagebrush with thicker lines of scrub and the bleached skeletons of dead trees to mark the sites of homesteads. Crumbled snags of wall still here and there, and the rusted, canted remains of a great circular pivot-irrigation machine, but like most of his generation Rudi usually ignored the ruins of the pre-Change world so thoroughly that he didn't really see them, unless there was some immediate practical reason to give them thought.
The air smelled dry, of dust and sage, and hot even though the temperature was falling as quickly as the sun. The first few stars glimmered through the purple eastward. Rudi pulled a Mackenzie-style traveler's cake out of his sporran, broke it in half and handed the other part to Edain; they both munched stolidly, though the pressed mass of rolled oats and honey and nuts and bits of dried fruit tasted of nothing but a vague sweetness now. They might need the energy soon. Edain threw some of his to the big shaggy half-mastiff bitch that lay near him; Garbh's jaws clamped down on it with a wet clomp, followed by smacking and slurping as she struggled to get at bits that stuck to her great yellow fangs.
Then they waited through to full dark, now and then tensing muscle against muscle to keep themselves supple without the need to get up and stretch; both young men had learned the trick of it and much else from Edain's father… and Aylward the Archer had been First Armsman of Clan Mackenzie for nearly two decades, and a sergeant in the Special Air Service Regiment before the Change.
There was a three-quarter moon, and the stars were very bright in the clear dry air. An owl hooted, and a jackrabbit scuttered through the ground-cover. Garbh raised her barrel-shaped head from her paws, black nose wrinkling at something she sensed but couldn't place. The same something brought Rudi's head up, and he put his hand on the wire-and-leather wound grip of his longsword. Edain began to draw his bow, his gray eyes darting about for a target.
"We're coming in," someone said quietly out in the dimness; a woman's voice.
Rudi relaxed, and let the sword slide back the finger-span he'd drawn, with a slight snick of metal on metal as the guard kissed the scabbard-mouth.
"The farmer's child breathes so loud we could have shot him in the dark," she went on, still speaking softly but not whispering-whispers carried.