The Way Between the Worlds by Alys Clare Page A

short, stumpy pillar. The hole in the ground where you tried to hide was the ordeal pit.’
    I looked at him. ‘Have you been there?’ I whispered. He must have; it was the only explanation.
    His expression was enigmatic. ‘I have seen the place,’ he said.
    ‘It is surely a long way to travel,’ I persisted. ‘Did you—’
    He held up a hand. ‘Enough, child,’ he said, mildly but firmly. ‘It is not for you to enquire.’
    For a moment I felt the very edge of something  . . . some great force that existed within him but that usually was kept well concealed behind the genial facade. It frightened me. I wrapped the blanket more closely around me and seemed to feel myself shrink.
    When he spoke, his voice was as friendly and cheerful as ever. ‘I wonder,’ he mused, ‘why you should be sent this image so insistently.’ He looked at me, his face creased in a frown. ‘Is it possible that one of your kin lives there in the north?’
    ‘No,’ I said, without hesitation. I knew the full tally of my kinsmen and women – it was part of my job as the family’s bard to memorize not only the past generations, right back to our first occupation of the fen lands, but also the details of the living.
    ‘Could anyone be visiting the region?’
    ‘No. None has any reason to be so far from home.’
    As I spoke my mind was distracted. A suspicion was beginning to grow, at first no more than the first tiny patch of cloud that will later bring a storm. Nerving myself, I stared at him and said, ‘What is there up there, where you say this Mithraeum is? What sort of a place is it?’
    ‘It is border country, a place where two kings fight for possession,’ he replied. ‘Both men wish to reinforce it to protect their own land.’
    My small cloud was waxing steadily. ‘Is there danger there?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’ He looked grim. ‘I fear that there is.’
    ‘Could – might a man be hurt there? Could he be injured, if there was fighting?’
    ‘Yes, child.’
    Such a wounded man, far from home and friendless, might need a place to hide. A place deep in the earth where, like a wounded animal, he could lie and lick his wounds. Call out, perhaps, to someone he loved. Dream of her; send his essence to appear in her dreams  . . .
    I knew then who I had seen lying in that pit. I knew who had called out to me, who had said, again and again, come to me , and then, where are you? I need you!
    Half of me wanted to sing and shout with joy because he had not forgotten me. In need, perhaps in pain, it was I to whom he had called out in his despair.
    The other half was plunged into an abyss of dread because he was hurt.

SEVEN
    H e had been in the north country for twelve long months, and he longed with all his heart and soul to leave.
    He longed for her, too. For that slender but tough girl with the watchful, wise eyes who had flashed so briefly into and out of his life and yet left such an enduring impression in her wake. The total amount of time they had spent together might have been brief, but what had happened to them on the island of Ely seemed to him to have linked them in some way.1 He hoped – he was almost sure – it was the same for her.
    Even before the terrible thing had happened, he thought of her constantly, and he felt that he carried her with him, inside himself. Once he had seen her in a flash of waking vision. He had been jubilant, full of the thrill of battle, the blood lust still on him. He thought he heard her call out to him, and then he saw her. She was pale, her face tense, and the scar on her cheek that she had won when she fought side by side with him had stood out livid white. She was in danger – he knew that, although he had no idea how he knew – but in the same instant that he felt the stab of fear for her, he understood that she was stronger than her opponent and would not die.
    He lay in his secret place, the pain from his wound so severe that he knew he would not sleep. He understood that he