“How are you here?” she said.

That, at least, he should have been ready for. But it was difficult to form thoughts that made sense. Stammering, he said, “You…you said sacrifice. At Entremont. Not just killing.”

Amusement, the eyebrows arched. She was barefoot on the cold stone, he saw. Wearing a long, white cotton skirt and a blue blouse over it. Her hair was down, along her back, framing her face.

“I did,” she agreed, still studying him. “You were there?”

He nodded.

“Unwise. You might have died, had they known it.”

He nodded. Phelan had known it. He didn’t say that.

“There are many places of sacrifice,” she said.

They’d figured that out, too. He said, “My mother got the sacrifice part, when we told her. And…a boar gave me a clue.”

He didn’t tell about Melanie, the story she’d told him of the battle below. The sacrifice of the chieftains here. He was going to need to speak of Melanie, he had no idea how.

Her expression changed. “Your mother gave you that?” She was pointing at the bracelet. The stone was bright.

He shook his head. “My aunt. Her sister.” He hesitated. It wasn’t his, but, “Would you like it?”

She smiled, pleased, but shook her head, looking at him.

A long, still moment, quiet in the cave, the wind blowing outside, the sun going down. The living world so far from where they were.

Then Ysabel smiled again, but differently.

“Now I see,” she said, and the tone had altered as well, changes in her voice and face, like ripples in water. Ned wasn’t sure—he wasn’t sure of anything—but he thought he heard sadness, and maybe something else.

“What is there to see?”

She didn’t answer. She turned away—he felt it as a wound—then she lifted a hand, stilling him.

He heard it too, and was looking towards the entrance through which he’d come himself when Cadell jumped down and in.

He landed, noted Ned’s presence. Then he turned to Ysabel.

He didn’t speak, and the woman said nothing either, absorbing, accepting what was inescapable in his face. There was nothing hidden in him, nothing held back. Watching the two of them Ned felt like the intruder he was: excluded, inappropriate, trivial. If he was right, if he understood this at all, Cadell had died more than two thousand years ago, in the chasm below this cave.

“You have a wound,” she said, speaking first.

“A knife. It is inconsequential.”

“Indeed. What would be of consequence?”

Ned remembered that ironic tone from Beltaine, after the fires and the bull. He realized his hands were shaking again.

Cadell’s deep voice carried a note that could only be called joy. He said, “Coming here to find the Roman before me. That would shatter this heart as much as would the sky falling at the end of days.”

“Ah,” she said, “the poet returns?”

“He never left you. You know that, love.”

“I know very little,” she said, in that voice that made a lie of the words.

“You know that I am here, and before your three nights have turned. I remember this place.”

“But of course you do,” said another voice, from behind Ned and below.

They all wheeled. But even as he did, Ned saw Ysabel’s face, and he realized she was unsurprised.

They watched as Phelan pulled himself up from the slanting plateau below the opening to the south.

He stood, unhurried, brushing dust from his knees and the torn jacket, using his right hand only. Then he, in turn, looked at the woman.

“A wound?” said Ysabel.

“Inconsequential.” Ned saw the bald head, the scar, the grey, cool eyes and then—with surprise—a smile.

“You heard that?” She was smiling, too.

“It is my proof of being present, love. I need to have heard that or you might not believe me.”

“You would lie to me?”

He shook his head. “Never in any life. But you have disbelieved before.”

“With cause?”

Phelan looked at her. Then shook his head again. “With a right to do so, but not with cause.”

The brief smile had gone. There was hunger in his face, and longing, so fierce they were a kind of light.

“You were below,” said Cadell flatly.

“A harder climb, yes, but I was south and had to come that way.”

“It doesn’t matter. You were not here.”

Phelan shrugged. “No? Tell me, what did she ask the boy, about his bracelet?”

Ned felt the weight of three gazes upon him. He wanted to be invisible, absent, gone.

Then he heard her laughter. “I see. You will say that you did hear, and so came to me first?”

Phelan was looking at the other man, his eyes cold as wilderness, waiting. The light in his face was gone. There was no reply from the Celt. Phelan said, precisely, “She asked him if his mother gave the bracelet to him. Shall I tell now his reply that you also did not hear?”

Wolf on a mountain peak.

Cadell’s blue gaze, returning, was as hard, though, unyielding. It never had yielded, Ned knew.

“It makes no matter how and where you climbed or what you heard below. You were not here to find her first.”

A silence in that high place. It felt like the last silence of the world, Ned Marriner thought.

Ysabel ended it. Ended more than stillness.

“He was not. It is true,” she murmured. “But neither were you, my golden one. Alas, that I am unloved, but neither were you.”

And as she stopped, as that voice fell away, the three of them turned to Ned again.

It might have been the hardest thing he’d yet done, to stand straight, not draw back. Face them, breathing hard, but controlling it. He looked from one man to the other, and ended with Ysabel. The long travel of her gaze, how far it seemed to go, to reach him.

“He is not part of this,” Cadell said.

“Untrue,” she said, still softly. “Did he not lead you here? Will you say he did not? That you found me yourself?”

“The boar guided him,” Phelan said. “The druid’s.”

No fire or ice now. A sudden, intense gravity that was, in its own way, more frightening. As if the stakes, with what she’d said, had become too high for fury or flame.

“It isn’t the druid’s boar,” said Cadell. “Brys served it, not the other way around.”

“I didn’t know that,” Phelan said. “I thought—”

“I know what you thought. The beast is older than any of us.”

Phelan’s thin smile. “Even us?”

Cadell nodded. The light from the south caught his golden hair.

The woman remained silent, letting them speak across her, to each other.

“And so it was the boar…caused this?”

Cadell shook his head. “It made this possible, at best. The boy could have died at Entremont, in Alyscamps, by the round tower. I could have killed him in Glanum where I killed you, once.” His turn to smile, lips closed. “You could have killed him many times. Is it not so?”

Phelan nodded. “I suppose. I saw no reason to have him die. I helped them get away, when the needfires were lit.”

“Perhaps a mistake.” The deep voice.

The other man shrugged. “I have made others.” He looked at Ysabel, and then at Ned again, his brow furrowed now.

Cadell said, “We could have been here ahead of him. I saw him fall, twice. The boar made this harder for him, showing us where he was going.”

“And your meaning is?”

Cadell’s teeth flashed this time. “My thinking is too hard for you? Really? You said the boar caused this. It isn’t so.”

And still the woman did not speak.

She stood as if barely attending to them, withdrawing even as she remained. Ned thought of the sculpture again, sunlit in the sheltered cloister. It was cold here now, so far above the world.

Phelan said, “There is another way to see it, if you are right—the animal bringing us both.”

“Yes. I also have that thought.”

“I killed you once here, did I not? With some others.”

“You know you did. They were lost in the chasm.”

“Not you.”

“They were lost,” Cadell repeated quietly.