PROLOGUE

A hammer, an anvil, hot iron beaten between. The noise invaded her dying.

Nemain was close, a vague god-presence hazed in moonlight, felt but not seen. She said, “Your brother makes you a serpent-spear. He believes it will hold you more strongly to life.”

Valerius; the lost brother of her childhood, returned to her changed beyond all measure. The sound carried his presence: a wild mix of despair and compassion together. There was more, but she was not able to read it. Even so, she did not want any gift that would hold her to life.

Breaca said, “Am I not yet dead?” She spoke in her head, where only gods and the ghosts of the dead might hear her. The voice that might have reached the living had long since burned away in the fires of her fever.

The god was her mother, and then Airmid and then Graine. Their care encompassed her. It did not ease the pain of her body or her soul. As all three, the god said, “You could be if you wished. Have you no reason to live?”

She wanted to say “No,” and could not. A single name sealed her lips, over and over.

Graine. Graine, Graine.

The anvil spoke it in the triple rhythm of making: a reason, the first and the best; the mark by which all else was measured. It came as a gift from her brother. She drifted on the sound, and on memory, and the understanding of failure.

Nemain said, “Your daughter’s wounding is not your fault or your failure.”

“But can she be healed?”

“Perhaps. Nothing is certain. Would that be worth living for?”

“If you could promise it.”

She felt the light touch of a smile, and a kiss and the vagueness of presence, departing. The god’s voice remained, hidden in the tap of the anvil. “Nothing is certain except death, and the peace that it offers. War is coming, with the hope of victory. Is that alone not reason for life?”

Airmid came later, lover and dreamer, not god. She stood in a stippling of too-bright sunlight, bringing scents of rosemary and seaweed and lanolin and the touch of cool water and cooler hands that made the fever seem less.

She spoke to someone else, as if Breaca were asleep. Her voice carried over a quiet, where the ring of the anvil had ceased. “If the flesh can’t be made to cover the bone, then she will never wield a weapon again.” She was tired, and had been weeping, and was hiding both.

“Just now, I think we have more difficult things to worry about than weapons and their wielding.” Valerius spoke from the other side of the bed and it could have been another country and another language and another kind of grief. “The legions flog men to punish, not to maim. This was done more savagely. It will take her longer to heal.”

“But she will heal?”

“I think so,” Valerius said. “If she wants to badly enough.”

They left her soon after, these two who held her to life. The rhythm of the anvil began again. A hound remained, to lie by the bedside, and became two hounds that lay one on each side of the line between living and dying, so that she would have company whichever path she chose.