Cursing, all five of them did. Rudi managed to grab his right shoulder just as the left arm drove a dagger into his own throat; the body kicked and died. The young Mackenzie forced down an impulse to stand pant ing and bewildered amid the bodies and the blood that filled the corridor with its copper iron stink beneath the sickly smell of pierced body cavities.

Instead he and Odard moved as if they'd rehearsed for days; they set their swords point-down in the floor, put their backs against the wall of the corridor across from the wedged door, jumped up and lashed out with their feet.

The planks hit his soles with a hard drumming thump that shocked up through his whole body, leaving him feeling as if he'd been folded too far at the hips. There was a tearing, crunching sound as the upper hinge came half-free of the wood. Both young men dropped crouch ing to the blood-slick flooring, sprang upward as if driven by springs, and struck again. This time the upper hinge came completely free and the lower twisted three quarters out. The door fell inward, resting on a body there. Rudi snatched up his sword and jumped through.

The inside was darker than the corridor. It took an instant for his eyes to make sense of what he saw. Two dead men. One half-under the door, with an arm joint bent back in a way not suited to the nature or construction of elbows, a jaw smashed so completely it dangled free within a sack of cloth, and his head back between his shoulder blades. Another was hacked and slashed around the neck and face as if by a bear in a frenzy.

On the bed a woman's body, naked but looking like a glistening black statue with the blood. It couldn't all be hers, but a lot of it was; a long curved knife had been driven into her stomach just above the pubic bone and ripped upwards.

The stranger was trying to hold the obscene wound closed, despite the steady flow of blood from his own gash; his shoulders shook with the harsh sobbing of a man unaccustomed to tears. Astonishingly, the woman still breathed a little. As Rudi watched she seemed to speak-he thought he heard Raen in the echoing silence-and went limp. Seconds later the man who held her collapsed.

"Sweet Mother-of-All," Rudi whispered, darting forward.

Saba was beyond help, but the stranger wasn't. And if he lived, he could talk.

Raven House, Sutterdown,

Willamette Valley, Oregon

Samhain Eve, CY22/2020 A.D.

Nigel Loring looked around the great hall of Raven House and arched a wry white brow as Rudi and his friends trooped out to head for the Sheaf and Sickle; people were setting up tables in a long rectangle, leaving a broad patch clear in the center.

"I think my stepson knew more about those visiting diplomats than he said. Otherwise, why dodge dinner here, after a cold day's hunting?"

"Oh, it'll be Saba Brannigan he's thinking of hunting the now," Juniper Mackenzie said. "That she might be out of mourning, you see, and more inclined to look fa vorably on him now that he's handsome and full-grown. Not that the poor boy has a prayer of getting between her knees; she'll always remember him as the spotty lustful sweaty-palmed fourteen year-old she looked down on from the lofty height of seventeen. It's a woman's mystery and I know."

They shared a chuckle. Children do make life more interesting, he thought.

Juniper had borne a daughter named Eilir long ago, when she was a teenager herself, before the Change. Rudi Mackenzie had been conceived in the first Change Year; and now she had two daughters with Nigel as well, the fruit of their middle-aged marriage. His own son Alleyne Loring had accompanied him to Oregon twelve years ago, and had supplied three grandchildren since with Astrid…

Juniper sighed, looking around. "Though I can't blame the boy for not wanting to sit through a formal dinner at Raven House, when he could be carousing with friends his own age. I have doubts about this place myself, sure and I do."

In theory Raven House was for the use of the local Raven sept's ceremonies. In practice the house was part of Sutterdown's generation-long campaign to get the Chief to spend more time there; they were convinced they could eventually wear her down and/or tempt her enough to get her out of Dun Juniper and into what they considered the Mackenzies' natural capital. Whatever else the Change had wrought in Sutterdown, it hadn't put an end to small town boosterism.

"I swear, they've gone and made it fancier still," Juniper murmured.

It had been a rich man's house once, a timber baron who'd wrung his wealth out of the Cascade forests around the end of the nineteenth century. The townsfolk had added stables to the rear, and built closed passages to the houses on either hand, and cleared out most of the ground and first floors in the central block to make a single great rectangular room, with galleries overlook ing it on two sides. One end held a low dais, with a pair of tall chairs whose backs were worked like the wings of ravens, with the heads looking down as hoods.

Behind it the wall was paneled in lustrous black walnut, polished until it shone with a dark gloss; inlaid in pale birchwood was the Triple Moon, waxing and full and waning, a circle flanked by outward-pointing cres cents, the sign of the Threefold Goddess-the Maiden, the Mother and the Hag. If you looked closer you saw what was subtly drawn behind that, barely a suggestion in slivers of rosewood and yew, pear and rowan, a face that might be young or old or ageless.

…

Down at the other end was the big fireplace where they stood now, crackling with six-foot fir logs and sweet-smelling incense cedar. Above the hearth was another great image inlaid into the wall and towering up to the high ceiling, this time in copper and gold and silver. It showed a wild bearded face with curving horns springing from its brow, forever looking towards the Ever-Changing One.

"I can't really resent it, though," Juniper said, shaking her head. "It's all done from love; and They never turn that away."

"And Sutterdown does have some splendid artists now," Nigel said meditatively, taking a sip from a glass of red wine. "As good as any at home in Dun Juniper. As good as any I've ever seen all my life long."

The image of the Horned God stared down at him, golden locks surrounding it like the rayed Sun, the full sensual lips slightly parted over white teeth. The eyes swallowed the flames until they were like windows into a moonlit forest at night, infinitely deep with rustling mystery, glinting with silvery flickers. Here in the warm well-lit room, within the strong-walled town bowered among tilled fields tamed by the hands of humankind… here they still brought the breath of the wildwood, and the lonely sound of pipes heard over hills by moonlight.

"That too." Juniper sighed.

He looked up at the image and murmured a quota tion. " 'The face of Power that says: O man, make peace with your mortality-for this, too, is God.' "

Her mouth quirked; she knew he wasn't easily impressed. "Skilled indeed! And who'd have thought we'd breed so many fine makers, with only as many folk as one small city in the old days?"

"Perhaps it's because they don't have great cities full of professionals and critics and academics telling them what to like, or television and books to bring it to them. It's like music, in these latter days; if you want it, you have to make your own. Athens itself in its time of greatness was a small place, after all."

"But it all makes me feel guilty, " Juniper said, looking around. "We're doing well the now, but not so well that we can afford to make all this for an occasional visit by a middle-aged couple and their children."

She gestured helplessly at the rest of the room. It had been done with some cunning and by people who knew Juniper fairly well; the lower parts of the walls held books and pictures and musical instruments on shelves of wood delicately carved with running vines and flow ers; above were the brackets that held four great multi branched lamps at the Quarters, and weavings showing the ancient tales-Niall of the Nine Hostages and the Lady of Tara, Ishtar's descent into the Underworld to free her lover, Odin grasping the runes of wisdom below the branches of the World Tree.