”We’ll go with the first,” Kevin said. "But it's a good thing you don’t like me much, because if you did, you would have hit that pig with a real tackle instead of faking it. In which case—"

"Hey!" Dave exclaimed. "Hey! That's not… That isn't…" He stopped because everyone was laughing. He would remember the line, though, for later. Kevin had a way of doing that to him.

“Speaking of pigs,” Levon said, helping Dave out, "We're roasting that boar for dinner tonight. You should be able to smell it."

After a moment and some trial sniffs, Kevin could. “That,” he said from the heart, "is one big pig."

Diarmuid was grinning. "If you can make it to dinner," he said, "we've already arranged to save the best part for you.

"No!” Kevin moaned, knowing what was coming.

“Yes indeed I thought you might like from the boar what it almost had from you."

There was a great deal of encouragement and loud laughter, fueled as much, Kevin realized belatedly, by inner excitement as much as by anything else. It was Maidaladan, Midummer's Eve, and it showed in every other man in the room. He got up, aware that there was a certain kind of miracle in his doing so. He was bandaged, but he could move and so, it seemed, could Dave. In the big man Kevin read the same scarcely controlled excitement that flared in all the others. Everyone but him. But now there was something nagging at him from somewhere very deep, and it seemed to be important. Not a memory something else…

There was a lot of laughter and a rough, boisterous humor all around. He went with it, enjoying the camaraderie. When they entered the Movran meeting house—a dining hall for the night—spontaneous applause burst forth from the companies of Brennan and Cathal, and he realized they were cheering for him and Dave.

They sat with Diarmuid’s men and the two young Dalrei. Before dinner formally began, Dairmuid, true to his word, rose from his seat at the high table, bearing a platter ceremoniously before him, and came to Kevin's side.

Amid the gathering hilarity and to the rhythm of five hundred hungry men banging their fists on the long wooden tables, Kevin reminded himself that such things were said to be a delicacy. With a full glass of wine to hand, he stood up, bowed to Diarmuid, and ate the testicles of the boar that had almost killed him.

Not bad, actually, all things considered.

“Any more?” he asked loudly and got his laugh for the night. Even from Dave Martyniuk, which took some doing.

Aileron made a short speech and so did Shalhassan, both of them too wise to try to say much, given the mood in the hall. Besides, Kevin thought, the Kings must be feeling it too. The serving girls—daughters of the villagers, he gathered—were giggling and dodging already. They didn’t seem to mind, though. He wondered what Maidaladan did to the women: to Jaelle and Sharra, even to that battleship Audiart, up at the high table. It was going to be wild later, when the priestesses came out.

There were windows high on all four sides. Amid the pandemonium, Kevin watched it growing dark outside. There was too much noise, too much febrile excitement, for anyone to mark his unwonted quiet.

He was the only one in the hall to see the moon when it first shone through the eastern windows. It was full and this was Midsummer’s Eve, and the thing at the edge of his mind was pushing harder now, straining toward a shape. Quietly he rose and went out, not the first to leave. Even in the cold, there were couples clinched heedlessly close outside the banquet hall.

He moved past them, his wound aching a little now, and stood in the middle of the icy street looking up and east at the moon. And in that moment awareness stirred within him, at last, and took a shape. Not desire, but whatever the thing was that lay behind desire.

“It isn’t a night to be alone,” a voice from just behind him said. He turned to look at Liane. There was a shyness in her eyes.

“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t see you at the banquet.”

“I didn’t come. I was sitting with Gereint.”

“How is he?” He began to walk, and she fell in stride beside him on the wide street. Other couples, laughing, running to warmth, passed them on all sides. It was very bright, with the moonlight on the snow.

“Well enough. He isn’t happy, though, not the way the others are.”

He glanced over at her and then, because it seemed right, took her hand. She wasn’t wearing gloves either, and her fingers were cold.

“Why isn’t he happy?” A random burst of laughter came from a window nearby, and a candle went out.

“He doesn’t think we can do it.”

“Do what?”

“Stop the winter. It seems they found out that Metran is making it—I didn’t understand how—from the spiraling place, Cader Sedat, out at sea.”

A quiet stretch of road. Inside himself Kevin felt a deeper quiet gathering, and suddenly he was afraid. “They can’t go there,” he said softly.

Her dark eyes were somber. “Not in winter. They can’t sail. They can’t end the winter while the winter lasts.”

It seemed to Kevin, then, that he had a vision of his past, of chasing an elusive dream, waking or asleep, down all the nights of his life. The pieces were falling into place. There was a stillness in his soul. He said, “You told me, the time we were together, that I carried Dun Maura within me.”

She stopped abruptly in the road and turned to him.

“I remember,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “there’s something strange happening. I’m not feeling anything of what’s hitting everyone else tonight. I’m feeling something else.”

Her eyes were very wide in the moonlight. “The boar,” she whispered. “You were marked by the boar.”

That too. Slowly he nodded. It was coming together. The boar. The moon. Midsummer. The winter they could not end. It had, in fact, come together. From within the quiet, Kevin finally understood.

“You had better leave me,” he said, as gently as he could.

It took a moment before he realized that she was crying. He hadn’t expected that.

”Liadon?” she asked. Which was the name.

“Yes,” he said. “It looks as if. You had better leave me.”

She was very young, and he thought she might refuse. He underestimated her, though. With the back of her hand she wiped away her tears. Then, rising on tiptoe, she kissed him on the lips and walked away in the direction from which they had come, toward the lights.

He watched her go. Then he turned and went to the place where the stables were. He found his horse. As he was saddling it, he heard bells ring from the Temple and his movements slowed for a moment. The priestesses of Dana would be coming out.

He finished with the saddle and mounted up. He walked the horse quietly up the lane and stopped in the shadows where it joined the road from Morvran to the Temple. Looking north, he could see them coming, and a moment later he watched the priestesses go by. Some were running and some walked. They all wore long grey cloaks against the cold and they all had their hair unbound and loose down their backs, and all the women seemed to shine a little in the full moonlight. They went past and, turning his head to the left, he saw the men coming out to meet them from the town, and the moon was very bright and it shone on the snow and ice, and on all the men and women in the road as they came together.

In a very little while the street was empty again and then the bells were silent. There were cries and laughter not very far away, but he carried his own deep quiet now, and he set his horse toward the east and began to ride.

Kim woke late in the afternoon. She was in the room they had given her, and Jaelle was sitting quietly beside the bed.

Kim sat up a little and stretched her arms. “Did I sleep all day?” she asked.

Jaelle smiled, which was unexpected. “You were entitled.”