• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I would take you,” she said, “though you were naked on a hilltop, bereft even of your wits. Even if you could not help us—yes, I would love you.”

“Why?” he said. That tongue of his had a life of its own.

“Because you are yourself,” she said. “I watched you long and long before I came to you. I saw what a fool you are, and how silly you can be, but also the goodness of your heart. You will help us, if you can convince yourself that it’s worth doing.”

“Yes,” he said, “I will. But not because you bribed me. Because—because I think you’re worth saving. Prove to me that you are, and I’ll do it. Not that I don’t think you are beautiful and perfect and absolutely tempting, but they say the Devil can be dreadfully like you. Why should I turn against Christian doctrine and save the lives of a pack of pagan gods?”

“Why indeed?” she said. She seemed in no way discouraged. “You love beauty, yes? You love the old things, the true things.”

“Magic is all sleights and lies,” he said.

“Is it? Do you know so much about it,William Thorne?”

“I know enough,” he said. “Prayer is true. God is true.”

“And did not God make us, too? We are Her first children. She gave us magic, for beauty and for delight. Yes, it could turn to darkness and terror, but that is true of anything in this world.” She held out her hand. “Come. Come and see.”

The hermit knew that he should not. He had read the stories, heard the warnings. He could go under the hill and come out a hundred years later, and none of this would matter at all.

And yet, in spite of all he knew or thought he knew, in his heart he trusted this woman. He thought he could sense the truth in her, and the lack of deceit, which ran against all the stories, but there it was. Stories were stories. She was there in front of him. He did believe in what he could see, however preposterous he might once have thought it.

He took a deep breath and crossed himself, at which she did not even flinch. He set his hand in hers. She was solid and warm. He had half expected her to be as cold and frail as mist, but that was real flesh against his fingers and palm, and real bone under it. Only the faint tingle of what must be magic betrayed that she was not a human woman.

Her fingers closed about his. “Are you ready?” she asked.

He had no time to reply. The mists were already rising, and the world melting away. He tasted blood where he had bitten his tongue. Wherever he was going, that taste of iron and sweetness would remind him that he, like it, was mortal; that magic was not his heritage.

FATHER TIMOTHY’S ARMY had swelled to a hundred strong.Man and woman alike, they had armed themselves with axes and a fire of holy zeal. They gathered in front of the church in the morning, singing hymns to keep themselves occupied until he was done with the morning office. He had not known so many of them knew Latin, or that these unmistakably secular people could chant as sonorously as an abbey of monks. The long ominous roll of the Dies irae escorted him out into the watery sunlight.

He paused on the church steps, giving a last tug to his vestments and firming his grip on the processional cross. For this he had judged it appropriate to appear in full uniform as it were.At the sight of him, the gathering raised a deep-throated roar.

It was a little frightening to see how dedicated they were. Frightening and exhilarating. They were his army—his soldiers of the Lord. He marshaled them with a word and led them out of the churchyard toward the field of battle.

The tree stood in a field beyond the water mill. The Druid wood came up close to it, but the tree stood alone. It was an oak, with a trunk so thick that half a dozen children could barely reach around it with their arms outstretched. Legend had it that a golden sickle was buried deep inside it, grown into the bark since some ancient Druid had left it there.What his reasons were or what had become of him, even legend did not say.

What the legend did say was