The talking around him fell away into silence. He saw faces turned in his direction, and nearly dropped a note as he recognised some that he had hoped to see, but had not found before. There they were, keeping quietly in the background; Farmer Dawson, Old George, John Smith and his wife, the Old Ones ready again to make their circle if need be. Near by was the rest of the Dawson family, Will's father standing with them.

'The world is round, so travellers tell,

And straight though reach the track,

Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,

The way will guide one back.'

From the corner of one eye he saw, with a shock, the figure of the Walker; with a blanket wrapped round him like a cloak, the old man was standing in the doorway of the little sickroom, listening. For an instant Will saw his face, and was astonished. All guile and terror were gone from that lined triangle; there was only sadness on it, and hopeless longing. There was even a glint of tears in the eyes. It was the face of a man shown something immensely precious that he had lost.

For a second, Will felt that with his music he could draw the Walker into the Light. He gazed at him as he sang, making the plaintive notes an appeal, and the Walker stood limp and unhappy, looking back.

'But ere the circle homeward hies

Far, far must it remove;

White in the moon the long road lies

That leads me from my love.'

The room had stilled dramatically as he sang, and the boy's clear soprano that always seemed to belong to a stranger soared high and remote through the air. Now there was a small silence, the only part of performing that really meant anything to him, and afterwards quite a lot of clapping. Will heard it from a long way away. Miss Greythorne called to them all, 'We thought, to pass the time, that anyone who feels inclined might do a little entertainin'. To drown out the storm. Who'd like to join in?'

There was a cheerful buzz of voices, and Paul began to play the old Manor flute, very soft and low. Its gentle sweetness filled the room, and Will stood more confidently as he listened and thought of the Light. But in the next moment the music could no longer bring him strength. He could not hear it at all. His hair prickled, his bones ached; he knew that something, somebody was coming near, wishing ill to the Manor and all inside it, and most of all himself.

The wind rose. It whipped screeching at the window. There was a tremendous thump of a knock at the door. Across the room, the Walker jumped up, his face twisted again, tight with waiting. Paul played, unhearing. The crashing knock came again. None of them could hear, Will realised suddenly; though the wind was near to deafening him, it was not for their ears, nor would they know what was happening now. The crash came a third time, and he knew that he was bound to answer. He walked along through unheeding people to the door, took hold of the big iron circle that was the handle, muttered some words under his breath in the Old Speech, and flung open the door.

Snow spat in at him, sleet slashed his face, winds whistled through the hall. Out in the darkness, the great black horse reared up high over Will's head, hooves flailing, eyes rolling white, the foam flying from bared teeth. And above it gleamed the blue eyes of the Rider and the flaring red of his hair. In spite of himself Will cried out, and threw up one arm instinctively in self-defence.

And the black stallion screamed and fell back with the Rider into the Dark; and the door swung shut, and there was all at once nothing in Will's ears except the sweet lilt of the old flute as Paul played on. People sat and sprawled tranquilly about just as they had before. Slowly Will brought down his arm, still crooked defensively up over his head, and as he did so he noticed something that he had totally forgotten. On the underside of the forearm, which had been facing the Black Rider when he threw up his arm, was the burned-in scar of the Sign of Iron. In that other great hall, the first time, he had burned himself on the Sign when the Dark was making its first attempt on him. The Lady had healed the burn. Will had forgotten it was there. 'One sign of fire you have with you already ...'

So that was what she had meant.

One sign of fire had kept the Dark at bay; driven it out of its strongest attack, perhaps. Will leaned limply against the wall, and tried to breathe more slowly. But as he looked across the tranquil crowd listening to their music, he saw again a figure that sent all his confidence crashing into nothing, and the quick instinct of Gramarye told him that he had been tricked. He had thought he was out-facing a challenge, and so he was. But in doing it, he had opened the door between the Dark and the Walker, and thus in some way so strengthened the Walker that the old man had gained a power he had been waiting for.

For the Walker was standing tall now, his eyes bright, his head flung up, and his back straight. He held one arm high, and called out in a strong clear voice: 'Come wolf, come hound, come cat, come rat, come Held, come Holda, I call you in! Come Ura, come Tann, come Coll, come Quert, come Morra, come Master, I bring you in!'

The summons went on, a long list of names, all familiar to Will from the Book of Gramarye. In Miss Greythorne's hall, no one could see or hear; all went on as before, and through the ending of Paul's music, and the loud determined beginning of old Mr Dewhurst's monologue, no eyes that glanced in Will's direction seemed to see him. He wondered whether his father, still standing talking to the Dawsons, would shortly notice that his youngest son was not to be seen.

But very soon as the ringing summons from the Walker went on and on, he ceased to wonder, for under his senses the hall began subtly to change; the old hall of the Lady came back into his consciousness and absorbed more and more of the appearance of the present. Friends and family faded; only the Walker remained clear as before, standing now at the far end of the great hall away from the fire. And while Will still stared at the group in which his father stood, even while it faded he saw take place the doubling by which the Old Ones were able to move themselves in and out of Time. He saw one form of Frank Dawson step easily out of the first, leaving his other self to fade as part of the present; the second form grew clearer and clearer as it came towards him, and after it in the same way came Old George, Young John, and the blue-eyed woman, and Will knew this had been the manner of his own arrival too.

Soon the four were grouped round him in the centre of the Lady's hall, each facing outward, four corners of a square. And as the Walker called his long summons of the Dark, the hall itself began again to change. Strange lights and flames flickered along the walls, obscuring the windows and hangings. Here and there at the sound of a particular name, blue fire would dart up into the air, hiss, and die down again. On each of the three walls facing the hearth, three great sinister flames shot up which did not afterwards die down, but remained dancing and curving in ominous brilliance, filling the hall with cold light.

Before the hearth, in the big carved chair he had occupied from the beginning, Merriman sat motionless. There was a terrible restrained strength in his sitting; Will looked at the broad shoulders with foreboding, as he would have looked at a gigantic spring that might at any moment snap loose. The Walker chanted louder: 'Come Uath, come Truith, come Eriu, come Loth! Come Heurgo, come Celmis, I bring you in. . .'

Merriman stood up, a great black white-plumed pillar. His cloak was wrapped round him. Only his carved-stone face was clear, with the light blazing in his mass of white hair. The Walker looked at him and faltered. Thick round the hall, the fires and flames of the Dark hissed and danced, all white and blue and black, with no gold or red or warm yellow in any. The nine tallest flames stood up like menacing trees.

But the Walker seemed to have lost his voice again. He looked once more at Merriman and shrank back a little. And through the mixture of longing and fear in the bright eyes, suddenly Will knew him.

'Hawkin,' Merriman said softly, 'there is still time to come home.'

Part Three: The Testing

The Hawk in the Dark

The Walker said in a whisper, 'No.'

'Hawkin,' Merriman said again, gently, 'every man has a last choice after the first, a chance of forgiveness. It is not too late. Turn. Come to the Light.'

The voice was scarcely audible, a mere husking breath. 'No.'

The flames hung still and stately round the great hall. No one moved.

'Hawkin,' Merriman said, and there was no command in the tone but only warmth and entreaty. 'Hawkin, liege man, turn away from the Dark. Try to remember. There was love and trust between us, once.'

The Walker stared at him like a doomed man, and now in the pointed, lined face Will could see clearly the traces of the small, bright man Hawkin, who had been brought forward out of his time for the retrieving of the Book of Gramarye, and had through the shock of facing death betrayed the Old Ones to the Dark. He remembered the pain that had been in Merriman's eyes as they watched that betrayal begin, and the terrible certainty with which he had contemplated Hawkin's doom.

The Walker still stared at Merriman, but his eyes did not see. They looked back through time, as the old man re-discovered all that he had forgotten, or pushed out of his mind. He said slowly, with mounting reproach, 'You made me risk my life for a book. For a book. Then because I looked at kinder masters, you sent me back to my own time, but not as I had been before. You gave me then the doom of bearing the Sign.' His voice grew stronger with pain and resentment as he remembered. 'The Sign of Bronze, through the centuries. You changed me from a man into a creature always running, always searching, always hunted. You stopped me from growing decently old in my own time, as all men after their lives grow old and tired and sink to sleep in death. You took away my right to death. You set me in my own century with the Sign, long, long ago, and you made me carry it through six hundred years until this age.'

His eyes flickered towards Will, and flashed with hatred. 'Until the last of the Old Ones should be born, to take the Sign from me. You, boy, it is all through you. This turning in time, that took away my good life as a man, it was all on your account. Before you were born, and after. For your damned gift of Gramarye, I lost everything I had ever loved.'

'I tell you,' Merriman cried out, 'you may come home, Hawkin! Now! It is the last chance, and you may turn to the Light and be as you were.' His proud, towering figure leaned forward, beseeching, and Will felt pain for him, knowing that he felt it was his own misjudgement that had brought his servant Hawkin into betrayal and the life of the wretched Walker, a whining shell committed to the Dark.

Merriman said huskily: 'I pray you, my son.'

'No,' the Walker said. 'I found better masters than you.' The nine flames of the Dark round the walls sprang cold and high and burned with a blue light, quivering. He clutched closer at the dark blanket wrapped round him, and stared wildly about the hall. Shrilly defiant, he shouted, 'Masters of the Dark, I bring you in!'

And the nine flames moved in closer from the walls to the centre of the room, approaching Will and the four outward-facing Old Ones. Will was blinded by their blue-white brilliance; he could no longer see the Walker. Somewhere beyond the great lights, the shrill voice shrieked on, high and mad with bitterness. 'You risked my life for the Book! You made me carry the Sign! You let the Dark hound me through the centuries, but never let me die! Now it is your turn!'

'Your turn! Your turn!' echoed the scream round the walls. The nine tall flames moved slowly closer, and the Old Ones stood in the centre of the floor and watched them approach. Beside the hearth Merriman turned slowly towards the centre of the room. Will saw that his face was impassive again, the deep eyes dark and empty and the lines drawn firm, and he knew that no one would see any strong self-revealing emotion on that face for a very long time. The Walker's chance to turn back to the mind and heart of Hawkin had come and been rejected, and now it was gone forever. Merriman raised both his arms, and the cloak fell from them like wings. His deep voice whipped into the crackling silence- 'Stop!'

The nine flames paused, and hung.,

'In the name of the Circle of Signs,' Merriman said, clear and firm, 'I command you to leave this house.'

The cold light of the Dark that was all around the hall behind the great standing flames flickered and crackled like laughter. And out of the blackness beyond, the voice of the Black Rider came.

'Your circle is not complete and has not that force,' he called mockingly. 'And your liege man has called us into this house, as he did before, and can again. Our liege man, my lord. The hawk is in the Dark . . . You can drive us from here no longer. Not with flame, nor force, nor conjoined power. We shall break your sign of Fire before it can be released, and your Circle will never be joined. It will break in the cold, my lord, in the Dark and the cold . . .'

Will shivered. It was growing cold indeed in the hall, very cold. The air was like a current of chill water, coming at them from all sides. The fire in the great hearth gave out no warmth now, no warmth that was not sucked in by the cold blue flames of the Dark all around. The nine flames quivered again, and as he looked at them, he could have sworn that they were not flames but gigantic icicles, blue-white as before but solid, menacing, great pillars ready to topple inward and crush them all with weight and cold.

'... cold ...' said the Black Rider softly from the shadows, '. . . cold . . .'

Will looked at Merriman in alarm. He knew that each of them, every Old One in the room, had been thrusting against the Dark with every power he possessed since the Rider's voice began, and he knew that none of it had had any effect. Merriman said softly, 'Hawkin lets them in, as he did in his first betrayal, and we cannot prevent that. He had my trust once, and it gives him still that power even though the trust is gone. Our only hope is what it was in the beginning: that Hawkin is no more than a man ... When the spells of the deep cold are made, there is little that can be done against them.'

He stood frowning as the ring of blue-white fire flickered and danced; even he looked cold, with a dark pinched look round the bones of his face. 'They bring in the deep cold,' he said, half to himself. 'The cold of the void, of black space . . .'

And the cold grew more and more intense, cutting through the body to the mind. Yet the flames of the Dark seemed at the same time to grow dim, and Will realised that his own century was again fading in around them, and that they were back in Miss Greythorne's manor.

And the cold was there too. Everything was changing now; the murmur of voices had dropped from a cheerful buzz to an anxious mutter, and the tall room was only dimly lit, by candles set in candlesticks and cups and plates, wherever there was space. All the bright electric lamps were dark, and the long metal radiators that warmed most of the room gave off no heat.

Merriman swooped bafflingly up near him with the speed of one returned from a brisk errand; his cloak was subtly different, changed to the sweeping overcoat he had worn earlier that day. He said to Miss Greythorne, 'There's not much we can do down there, ma'am. The furnace is out, of course. All the electric power lines are quite dead. So is the telephone. I have had all the house blankets and quilts brought out, and Miss Hampton is making quantities of soup and hot drinks.'

Miss Greythorne nodded in brisk approval. 'Good thing we kept the old gas stoves. They wanted me to change, y'know, Lyon, when we had the central heating done. I wouldn't, though. Electricity, bah - always knew the old house didn't approve.'

'I am having as much wood as possible brought in to keep the fire up,' Merriman said, but in the same instant, as if in mockery, a great hissing and steaming came from the broad fireplace, and those nearest it jerked away, choking and spluttering. Through the sudden inblown cloud of smoke Will could see Frank Dawson and Old George working to clear something out of the fire.

But the fire had gone out.

'Snow down the chimney!' Farmer Dawson called, coughing. 'We'll need buckets, Merry quickly. There's a right mess here.'

'I'll go,' Will shouted, and bolted for the kitchen, glad of the chance to move. But before he could get to the door through the huddled groups of chilled, frightened people, a figure rose up before him to block his way, and two hands caught his arms in a grip so tight that he gasped in sudden pain. Bright eyes bored into his, glittering with wild triumph, and the Walker's high, thin voice was screeching in his ear.

'Old One, Old One, last of the Old Ones, you know what's going to happen to you? The cold is coming in, and the Dark will freeze you. Cold and stiff and all of you helpless. No one to protect the little Signs on your belt.'

'Let go!' Will twisted angrily, but the old man's hold on his wrist was the clasp of madness.

'And you know who will take the little Signs, Old One? I shall. The poor Walker, I shall wear them. They are promised to me in reward for my services - no lords of the Light ever offered me such reward. Or any other ... I shall be the Sign- Seeker, I shall, and all that would have been yours at the last shall come to me . . .'

He grabbed for Will's belt, his face twisted with triumph, spittle ringing his mouth like foam, and Will yelled for help. In an instant John Smith was at his side with Dr Armstrong close behind, and the big smith had pinned the Walker's clutching hands behind his back. The old man cursed and shrieked, his eyes burning with hatred at Will, and both men had to struggle to hold him back. At length they had him trapped and harmless, and Dr Armstrong drew back with an exasperated sigh.

'This chap must be the only warm object in the country,' he said. 'Of all times to run berserk - pulse or no pulse I'm going to put him to sleep for a while. He's a danger to the community and to himself.'

Will thought rubbing his sore wrist: if you only knew quite what sort of danger he is ... Then suddenly he began to see what Merriman had meant. Our only hope is what is was in the beginning: that Hawkin is no more than a man ...

'Keep him there, John, while I get my bag.' The doctor disappeared. John Smith, one big fist grasping the Walker's shoulder and the other both his wrists, winked encouragingly at Will and jerked his head to the kitchen; Will suddenly remembered his original errand, and ran. When he came tearing back with two empty buckets swinging from each hand, there was a fresh commotion at the fireplace; a new hissing had begun, smoke spewed out, and Frank Dawson came staggering backwards.

'Hopeless!' he said furiously. 'Hopeless! You get the hearth clear for a moment and more snow comes pouring down. And the cold - ' He looked despairingly about him. 'Look at them, Will.'

The room was misery and chaos: small babies wailing, parents huddling their bodies round their children to keep them warm enough to breathe. Will rubbed his chill hands together, and tried to feel his feet and his face through the numbness of cold. The room was becoming colder and colder, and from the freezing world outside there was no sound even of the wind. The sense of being within two levels of Time at once still hovered in his mind, though all that he could feel now of the ancient manor was the awareness, ominous and persistent, of the nine great ice-candles glimmering round three sides of the room. They had-been ghost-like, scarcely visible, when first he found himself brought back by the new cold to his own time, but as the cold grew more intense, so they were growing clearer. Will stared at them. He knew that somehow they embodied the power of the Dark at its Midwinter peak; yet he knew too that they were part of an independent magic harnessed by the Dark, which like so much else in their long battle could be taken away by the Light if only the right thing were done at the right time. How? How?

Dr Armstrong was coming back towards the sickroom with his black bag. Perhaps there might after all be one way, just one, of stopping the Dark before the cold could reach the point of destruction. One man, unwitting, giving help to another: this might be the one small event to turn aside all the supernatural force of the Dark ... Will waited, suddenly taut with excitement. The doctor moved towards the Walker, who still cursed incoherently in John the Smith's grip, and he had slipped a needle deftly in and out of his arm before the old man knew what he was doing. 'There,' he said soothingly. 'That'll help you. Have a sleep.'

Instinctively Will moved forward in case there was need of help, and saw as he did so that Merriman and Farmer Dawson and Old George were drifting closer too. Doctor and patient were closed in by a ring of Old Ones, all round, protecting against interference.

The Walker caught sight of Will and snarled like a dog, showing broken, yellowing teeth. 'Freeze, you'll freeze,' he spat out at him, 'and the Signs will be mine, whatever . .. you try ... whatever ...' But he faltered and blinked, his voice dropping as the drug began to spread its drowsiness over him, and even as suspicion began to show in his eyes, the eyelids drooped. Each of the Old Ones took a step or two forward, tightening the circle. The old man blinked again, showing the whites of his eyes in a horrid flash, and then he was unconscious.

And with the mind of the Walker closed, the Dark's way into the house was closed too.

Instantly there was a difference in the room, a slackening of tension. The cold was less fierce, the unhappiness and alarm all round them like a fog began to lessen. Dr Arm- strong straightened up, a questing, puzzled expression in his eyes; the eyes grew wider as he saw the circle of intent faces ringing him round. He began indignantly, 'What do- ?'

But the rest of the words were lost to Will, for all at once Merriman was calling them out of the crowd, urgently, silently, in the speech of the mind that men could not hear. 'The candles! The candles of the winter! Take them, before they fade!'

The four Old Ones scattered hastily into the hall, where the strange blue-white cylinders still hung ghostly round the three walls, burning with their dead cold flames. Going swiftly to the candles, they grasped them, one in each hand; Will, smaller, leapt hastily on a chair to seize the last. It was cold and smooth and heavy to his touch, like ice that did not melt. In the moment that he touched it he was giddy; his head whirled ...

... and he was back in the great hall of that earlier time with the other four, and beside the hearth the Lady was sitting in her high-backed chair again, with the smith's blue-eyed wife sitting at her feet. It was clear what was to be done. Bearing the candles of the Dark, they advanced towards the great iron mandala-ring of holders on the massive table, and one by one fitted the candles into the nine sockets that still stood empty in the central cross-piece. Each candle changed subtly as it was put in place; its flame rose thinner and higher, taking on a golden-white tinge instead of the cold, threatening blue. Will, with his one candle, came last. He reached through to fit it into the last holder in the very centre of the pattern, and as he did so the flames of all the candles shot upwards in a triumphant circle of fire.

The old lady said, in her frail voice, 'There is the power seized from the Dark, Will Stanton. By cold magic they called up the candles of winter for destruction. But now that we have seized them for better purposes, the candles become stronger, able to bring you the Sign of Fire. See.'

They drew back, watching, and the last central candle that Will had put in place began to grow. When its flame stood high above the rest it took on colour, becoming yellow, orange, vermilion-red; as it still grew, it changed and became a strange flower on a strange stem. A curved, many-petalled blossom blazed there, each petal a different shade of the colours of flame; slowly and gracefully each petal opened and fell, floating away, melting into the air. And in the end, at the tip of the long curved stem of the flame-red plant, a glowing round seedpod was left, waving gently for a moment and then in a quick, silent burst breaking open, its five sides unfolding all at once like stiffer petals. Inside was a golden-red circle of a shape they all knew.

The Lady said: 'Take it, Will.'

Will took two wondering paces towards the table, and the great slender stalk bent over towards him; as he put out his hand, the golden circle fell into it. Instantly a surge of invisible power struck him, an echo of what he had felt at the destruction of the Book of Gramarye - and as he staggered and balanced himself again, he saw that the table was empty. In a flash of time, everything that was on it had vanished: the strange flower and the nine great blazing candles and the Sign-shaped iron holder that had contained them all. Gone. All gone: all except the Sign of Fire.

It was in his palm, warm to the touch, one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. Gold of several different colours had been beaten together with great craftsmanship to make its crossed-circle shape, and on all sides it was set with tiny gems, rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds, in strange runic patterns that looked oddly familiar to Will. It glittered and gleamed in his hand like all kinds of fire that ever were. Looking closer, he saw some words written very small around the outer edge:

LIHT MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN

Merriman said softly: 'The Light ordered that I should be made.'

They had all but one of the Signs now. Jubilantly Will flung up his arm into the air, holding the Sign high for the others to see; and from every light in the hall the circle of worked gold caught brilliance, flickering as if it were made of flame. From somewhere outside the hall, there came a great crashing roar with a long wail of anger through it. The sound rumbled and growled and came crashing out again . . .

...and as it beat in his ears, suddenly Will was back again in Miss Greythorne's hall, with all around him the familiar village faces turned wondering to the roof, and to the grumbling roar beyond.

'Thunder?' someone said, puzzled.

Blue light flickered in all the windows, and the thunder slammed so earsplittingly close that everyone flinched. Again the light came, again the thudding roar, and somewhere a child began to weep, thin and high. But as all the crowded room waited for the next crash, there was nothing. No flash came, no thunder, not so much as a distant murmur. Instead, after a short breathless silence filled only by the hissing of the ashes in the hearth, there came a soft pattering sound outside, growing gently, gradually louder into an unmistakable slurred staccato against windows and doors and roof.

The same anonymous voice cried out joyfully, 'Rain!'

Voices broke out all round in excitement, grim faces beamed; figures rushed to peer out of the dark windows, beckoning to others in delight. An old man Will never recalled seeing in his life before turned to him with a toothless grin. 'Rain'll melt thic snow!' he piped. 'Melt 'n in no time at all!'

Robin appeared out of the crowd. 'Ah, there you are. Am I going loopy, or does this perishing room suddenly feel warm?'

'It's warmer,' said Will, pulling down his sweater. Beneath it, the Sign of Fire was now looped on his belt secure with the rest.

'Funny. It was so hideously cold for a while. I suppose they've got the central heating going again ...'

'Let's see the rain!' A pair of boys dashed past them to the main door. But while they still fumbled with the handle, a series of quick, loud knocks came from outside; and there on the step, when the door opened, his hair flattened to his head by the soft, pouring rain, stood Max.

He was out of breath; they could see him urgently gulp air to make the words. 'Miss Greythorne there? My father?'

Will felt a hand on his shoulder and saw Merriman beside him, and knew from the concern in his eyes that in some way this was the next attack of the Dark. Max caught sight of him and came forward, rain running down his face; he shook himself like a dog.

'Get Dad, Will,' he said. 'And the doctor if he can be spared. Mum's had an accident, she fell downstairs. She's still unconscious, and we think she's got a broken leg.'

Mr Stanton had already heard; he dashed for the doctor's room. Will stared unhappily at Max. He called silently to Merriman, frightened, 'Did they do that? Did they? The Lady said - '

'It's possible,' said the answering voice in his mind. 'They cannot harm you, true, and they cannot destroy men. But they can encourage men's own instincts to do them harm. Or bring an unexpected clap of thunder, when someone is standing at the top of a flight of stairs ...'

Will heard no more than that. He was out of the door with his father and brothers and Dr Armstrong, following Max home.

Part Three: The Testing

The King of Fire and Water

James still looked pale and distressed, even when the doctor was safely arrived and examining Mrs Stanton in the livingroom. He drew aside his nearest brothers, who happened to be Paul and Will, and moved them out of earshot of the rest. He said unhappily, 'Mary's disappeared.'

'Disappeared?'

'Honestly. I told her not to go. I didn't think she would, I thought she'd be too scared.' Worry had sent stoical James close to tears.

'Go where?' said Paul sharply.

'Out to the Manor. It was after Max went to get you. Gwennie and Bar were in the living-room with Mum. Mary and I were in the kitchen making some tea, and she got all upset and said Max had been gone far too long and we ought to go and check whether anything had happened to him. I told her not to be so daft, of course we shouldn't go, but just then Gwen called me to go and make up the fire in there, and when I came back, Mary was gone. And so were her coat and boots.' He sniffed. 'I couldn't see any sign of where she'd gone, outside - the rain had started, and there weren't any footprints. I was just going to go out after her without saying anything, because the girls had enough to worry about, but then you came, and I thought she'd be with you. Only she wasn't. Oh, dear,' said James woefully. 'She is a silly ass.'

'Never mind,' Paul said. 'She can't have gone far. Just go and wait for a good moment to explain to Dad, and tell him I've gone out to pick her up. I'll take Will, we're both still dressed for it.'

'Good,' said Will, who had hastily been trying to think of arguments for his going.

When they were out in the rain again, the snow already beginning to squelch grey-white underfoot, Paul said, 'Don't you think it's time you told me what all this is about?'

'What?' said Will, astounded.

'What are you mixed up in?' Paul said, his pale blue eyes peering severely through the heavy spectacles.

'Nothing.'

'Look. If Mary's going off might have something to do with it, you've absolutely got to explain.'

'Oh dear,' Will said. He looked at Paul's threatening determination, and wondered how you explained to an elder brother that an eleven-year-old was no longer quite an eleven- year-old, but a creature subtly different from the human race, fighting for its survival . . . You didn't, of course.

He said, 'It's these, I think.' Glancing cautiously about him, he tugged his jacket and sweater clear of his belt and showed Paul the Signs. 'They're antiques. Just buckle things that Mr Dawson gave me for my birthday, but they must be really valuable because two or three weird people keep on turning up trying to get hold of them. One man chased me in Huntercombe Lane once . .. and that old tramp was mixed up with them somehow. That was why I didn't want to bring him home, that day we found him in the snow.'

He thought how very improbable it all sounded.

'Mmm,' Paul said. 'And that fellow at the Manor, the new butler? Lyon, isn't it? Is he mixed up with these clowns?'

'Oh, no,' Will said hastily. 'He's a friend of mine.'

Paul looked at him for a moment, expressionless. Will thought of his patient understanding that night in the attic, at the beginning, and of the way he played the old flute and knew that if there were any one of his brothers that he could confide in, it would be Paul. But that was out of the question.

Paul said, 'Obviously you haven't told me the half of it, but that'll have to do. I take it you think these antique-chasers might have nobbled Mary as some sort of hostage?'

They had reached the end of the driveway. The rain beat down on them, hard yet not vicious; it ran down the snowbanks, poured from the trees, turned the road into the be- ginning of a rapidly moving stream. They looked up and down in vain. Will said, 'They must have. I mean, she'd have gone straight towards the Manor, so why didn't we see her on our way home?'

'We'll go that way anyway, to check.' Paul tilted his head suddenly and glared at the sky. 'This rain! It's ridiculous! Just suddenly, out of all that snow - and it's so much warmer too. Makes no sense.' He splashed off up the running stream that was Huntercombe Lane and glanced at Will with a baffled half-grin. 'But then a lot of things aren't making much sense to me at the moment.'

'Ah,' Will said. 'Um. No.' He splashed away noisily to cover his remorse, and peered through the sheets of rain for some sign of his sister. The noise round them was astonishing now: an ocean noise of spattering foam and washing shingle and breaking waves, as the wind brought the rain sluicing rhythmically through the trees. A most ancient noise, as if they stood on the edge of some great ocean before men or their ancestors were ever born. Up the road they went, peering and doggedly calling, anxious now; everything they saw became strange all over again, as the rain carved the snow into new lanes and hillocks. But when they came to one corner, Will knew suddenly very well where they were. He saw Paul duck defensively behind one raised arm; heard the harsh, raucous croaking abruptly loud and then gone; saw, even through the flying rain, the flurry of black feathers as the gaggle of rooks swooped low past their heads.

Paul straightened slowly, staring. 'What on earth - ?'

'Get over the other side of the road,' Will said, pushing him firmly sideways. 'The rooks go sort of crazy sometimes. I've seen it before.'

Another shrieking swoop of birds came at Paul from behind, driving him forward, while the first dived again to force Will against the snowbank along the edge of the drift-buried wood. Again they came, and again. Will wondered, dodging, whether his brother had realised that they were being herded like sheep, driven where the rooks wanted them to go. But even as he wondered, he knew that he was too late. The grey sheet of rain had separated them entirely; he had no idea where Paul had gone.

He yelled in panic, 'Paul? Paul!'

But as the Old One in him took control, calming the fear he cut off the shout. This was not a matter for ordinary human beings, even of his own family; he should be glad to be alone. He knew now that Mary must be caught, somewhere, held by the Dark. Only he had any chance of getting her back. He stood in the driving rain, staring about him. The light was dying rapidly. Will unbuckled his belt and strapped it round his right wrist; then he said a word in the Old Speech and held up his arm, and from the Signs a steady pathway of light beamed out as from a torch. It shone on ruffled brown water, where the road was becoming a river, deeper and flowing fast.

He remembered that Merriman had said, long before, that the most dangerous peak of the Dark's power would come at Twelfth Night. Was that time now come? He had lost his place in the days, they ran into one another in his mind. Water washed at the edge of his boot as he stood wondering; he jumped hastily backwards to the snowbank edging the wood, and a brown wave in the road-river took a large bite out of the snow-wall on which he had been standing. In the light from the Signs, Will saw that now other chunks of dirty snow and ice bobbed in the water; as it flowed past, it was gradually undercutting the hard-packed banks left on either side by the snowplough, and carrying away broken pieces like miniature icebergs.

Other things were there in the water too. He saw a bucket bob past him, and a tufted object that looked like a sack of hay. The water must be rising high enough to carry things away from people's gardens - perhaps his own among them. How could it rise so fast? As if in answer, the rain hammered at his back, and more snow broke beneath his foot, and he remembered that the ground underneath him must still be frozen bone-hard by the great cold that had paralysed the land before the rain came. Nowhere would this rain be able to soak into the soil. The thawing of the land would take far longer than the melting of the snow - and in the meantime the snow-water had nowhere to go, no alternative but to run over the surface of the frozen countryside looking for a river to join. The floods will be dreadful, Will thought: worse than they've ever been before. Worse even than the cold ...

But a voice broke in on him, a shout through the rushing water and roaring rain. He stumbled up over the slush-edged mounds of snow to peer through the murk. The shout came again. 'Will! Over here!'

'Paul?' Will called hopefully, but he knew it was not Paul's voice.

'Here! Over here!'

The shout came from the river-road itself, out in the dark. Will held up the Signs; their light beamed out over the churning water and showed him what he took at first for clouds of steam. Then he saw that the curling steam was the puffing of breath: great deep breaths, from a gigantic horse standing four-square in the water, small wild waves foaming past its knees. Will saw the broad head, the long chestnut mane plastered wet to the neck, and he knew that this was either Castor or Pollux, one of the two great shire horses from Dawsons' Farm.

The light from the Signs flicked higher; he saw Old George, muffled in black oilskins, perched high on the back of the massive horse.

'Over here, Will. Through the water, before it rises too fast. We have work to do. Come on!'

He had never heard Old George sound demanding before; this was the Old One, not the amiable old farm-hand. Leaning against the horse's neck, the old man urged it closer through the water. 'Come up, Polly, come by, Sir Pollux.' And big Pollux snorted puffs of steam through his broad nostrils and took a few solid paces forward so that Will was able to stumble out into the river-road and grasp at his tree-like leg. The water came almost to his thighs, but he was so wet from the rain already that it made little difference. There was no saddle on the great horse, only a sodden blanket; but with astonishing strength Old George leaned down and heaved at his hand, and with much struggling he was up. The light from the Signs strapped to his wrist did not waver through all the turning and twisting, but remained directed firmly forwards at the way they should go.

Will slipped and slithered on the broad back, too wide for his straddling. George tugged him to sit in front, astride the great curving neck. 'Polly's shoulders have taken greater weight than you,' he shouted in Will's ear. Then they were swaying forward as the stolid cart-horse lurched off again, splashing through the growing stream, away from the rooks' wood, away from the Stantons' house.

'Where are we going?' Will yelled, staring fearfully out at the darkness; he could see nothing anywhere, only the swirling water in the light of the Signs.

'We go to raise the Hunt,' the cracked old voice said close to his ear.

'The Hunt? What Hunt? George, I must find Mary, they've got Mary, somewhere. And I lost sight of Paul.'

'We go to raise the Hunt,' the voice at his back said steadily. 'I have seen Paul, he is safe on his way home by now. Mary you will find in due course. It is time for the Hunter, Will, the white horse must come to the Hunter, and you must take her there. This is the ordering of things, you have forgotten. The river is coming to the valley, and the white horse must come to the Hunter. And then we shall see what we shall see. We have work to do, Will.'

And the rain beat down on them harder, and somewhere distant thunder rumbled in the early night, as the huge shire horse Pollux splashed patiently on through the rising brown river that had once been Huntercombe Lane.

It was impossible to tell where they were. A wind was rising, and Will could hear the sounds of swaying trees above the steady churning of Pollux's feet. Scarcely a light showed in the village; he supposed that the electric power must still be cut off, either by accident or by agent of the Dark. In any case, most of the people of this part of the village were still at the Manor. 'Where's Merriman?' he called through the loud rain.

'At the Manor,' George shouted in his ear. 'With Farmer. Beset.'

'You mean they're trapped?' Will's voice turned shrill with alarm.

Old George said, hissing close, hard to hear, 'They hold attention, so we may work. And floods make them busy too. Look down, boy.'

In the churning water the light from the Signs showed a scatter of unlikely objects bobbing past: a wicker basket, several disintegrating cardboard boxes, a bright red candle, some tangled strands of ribbon. Suddenly Will recognised one piece of ribbon, a lurid purple and yellow check, as a wrapping he had seen Mary carefully pull off a parcel and roll up on Christmas Day. She was a great hoarder, like a squirrel; this had gone into her hoard.

'Those things are from our house, George!'

'Floods there too,' the old man said. 'Land's low. No danger though, be easy. Just water. And mud.'

Will knew he was right, but again he longed to see for himself. Rushing about, they would all be; moving furniture and rugs, clearing books and everything movable. These first floating objects must have escaped before anyone noticed the water was actually carrying things off . . .

Pollux stumbled for the first time, and Will clutched at the wet chestnut mane; for a moment he had almost slipped and been carried of himself. George made soothing noises, and the big horse sighed and snuffled through his nose. Will could see a few dim lights now that must come from the bigger houses on high ground at the end of the village; that meant they must be nearing the Common. If it was still the Common, and not a lake.

Something was changing. He blinked. The water seemed further away, harder to see. Then he realised that the light from the Signs linked on his wrist was growing dim, fading away to nothing; in a moment they were in darkness. As soon as all the light had died, Old George said softly: 'Whoa, Polly,' and the great shire horse splashed to a halt and stood there with the water rippling past his legs.

George said, 'This is where I have to leave you, Will.'

'Oh,' Will said, forlorn.

'There is the one instruction,' Old George said. 'That you are to take the white horse to the Hunter. That will happen, if you fall into no trouble. And there are two bits of advice to keep you from trouble, just from me to you. The first is that you will find enough light to see by if you stand for a count of a hundred after I am gone. The second is to remember what you know already, that moving water is free of magic.'

He patted Will comfortingly on the shoulder. 'Put the Signs round your waist again now,' he said, 'and get down.'

It was a wet business getting down, worse than getting up; Pollux was so high from the ground that Will splashed into the water like a falling brick. Yet he felt no cold; though the rain beat at him still, it was gentle, and in some curious way it seemed to keep him from being chilled.

Old George said again, 'I go to gather the Hunt,' and with no other word of farewell he set Pollux splashing off again towards the Common, and was gone.

Will clambered up the snowbank beside the river-road, found space to stand without toppling, and began counting up to one hundred. Before he had reached seventy, he began to see what Old George had meant. Gradually, the dark world was taking on a glimmer of light from within itself. The rushing water, the pitted snow, the gaunt trees; he could see them all, in a grey dead light like dawn. And while he looked round, puzzling, something floating past him on the quick stream brought him such astonishment that he almost fell into the water again.

He saw the antlers first, turning lazily from side to side, as if the great head were nodding to itself. Then the colours showed, the bright blues and yellows and reds, just as he had first seen them on Christmas morning. He could not see the details of the strange face, the bird-like eyes, the pricked ears of the wolf. But it was his carnival head without a doubt, the inexplicable present that the old Jamaican had given Stephen to give to him, his most precious possession in the world. Will let out a noise like a sob, and leapt forward desperately to seize it before the water carried it out of reach; but he slipped as he jumped, and by the time he had recovered his balance the bright grotesque head was bobbing out of sight. Will began to run along the bank; it was a thing of the Old Ones, and from Stephen, and he had lost it; he must at all costs get it back. But memory caught him in mid-stride, and he paused. 'The second thing,' Old George had said, 'is to remember that moving water is free of magic.' The head was in moving water, only too clearly. So long as it remained there, no one could harm it or use it for the wrong ends.

Reluctantly, Will put it out of his mind. The great open Common stretched before him, lit by a strange glimmer of its own. Nothing moved. Even the cattle that normally grazed there year round, looming up out of nowhere on misty days like solid ghosts, were away under cover now on the farms, driven off by the snow. Will moved on, carefully. Then the noise of the water that had been in his ears for so long began to change, growing louder, and before him the torrent filling Huntercombe Lane turned aside, joining a tiny local stream that had swollen now into a foaming river rushing over the Common and away. The road that had been the river-road wound on, unhindered, solid and gleaming; Old George, Will sensed, had gone that way. He would have liked to take the road too, but he felt that he was to stay with the river; through the extra sense of the Old Ones, he knew that it would show him how to take the white horse to the Hunter.

But who was the Hunter, and where was the white horse?

Will went gingerly forward, along the lumpy snowbank edging the new-swollen stream. Willows lined it, squat and pollarded. Then suddenly, out of the dark line of trees on the far side of the stream a white shape leapt. There was a glimmer of silver, in the darkness that was not quite dark, and in a spray of wet snow the great white mare of the Light was standing before Will, her breath clouding round the streaks of rain. She was tall as a tree, her mane blown wild by the wind.

Will touched her, gently. 'Will you carry me?' he said, in the Old Speech. 'As you did before?'

The wind spurted as he spoke, and bright lightning flashed jagged round the edge of the sky, closer than it had been. The white horse shuddered, her head jerking up. But she relaxed again almost at once, and Will too felt instinctively that this brewing thunderstorm was not a storm of the Dark. It was expected. It was part of what was to come. The Light was rising, before the Dark could rise.

He made sure the Signs were secure on his belt, and then as once before he reached up to wind his fingers in the long coarse hair of the white mane. Instantly his head spun in giddiness, and clear but far-off he heard his same music, bell-like and haunting, the same heart-catching phrase - till with a great jolt the world turned, the music vanished, and he was up on the back of the white mare, high among the willow trees.

Lightning was flickering all round the growling sky now.

Muscles bunched in the tremendous back beneath Will, and he gripped the long mane as the horse leapt out across the Common, out over the hillocks and ravines of snow, its hooves grazing the surface to leave a wake of icy spray. Through the rush of the wind he thought, as he clung close to the mare's arched neck, that he could hear a strange, high yelping in the wind, like the sound of migrating geese flying high. The sound seemed to curve around them, and then to go on ahead, dying out of range.

The white horse leapt high; Will clung tighter as they rose over hedges, roads, walls, all emerging from the melting snow. Then a new noise louder than the wind or the thunder was in his ears, and he saw glinting ruffled black glass ahead of them and knew that they had come to the Thames.

The river was far wider than he had ever seen it here. For more than a week it had been shut tight and narrow by icy walls of overhanging snow; now it had broken loose, foaming and roaring, with great chunks of snow and ice tossing like icebergs. This was not a river, it was a fury of water. It hissed and howled, it was not reasonable. As he looked, Will was frightened as he had never been by the Thames; it was as wild as a thing of the Dark could be, out of his knowledge or control. Yet he knew it was not of the Dark, but beyond either Light or Dark, one of the ancient things from the beginning of Time. The ancient things: fire, water, stone ... wood ... and then, after the beginning of men, bronze, and iron ... The river was loose, and would go according to its own will. 'The river will come to the valley ...' Merriman had said.

The white mare paused irresolute on the edge of the wild cold water, then surged forward and leapt. It was only as they rose over the churning river that Will saw the island, an island where none had been before in this swollen torrent, divided by strange glinting channels. He thought, as the white horse jolted him to earth again among bare dark trees: it's a hill really, a piece of high ground cut off by the water.

And suddenly he knew very clearly that he would meet great danger here. This was his place of testing, this island that was not an island. Once more he looked up into the sky and silently, desperately called for Merriman; but Merriman did not come, and no word or sign from him came into Will's mind.

The storm was not breaking yet, and the wind had dropped a little; the noise of the river was louder than all else. The white mare bent her long neck and Will scrambled awkwardly down.

Through the mounded snow, sometimes ice-hard and sometimes soft enough to drop him thigh-deep, he set out to explore his strange island. He had thought it a circle, but it was shaped like an egg, its highest point at the end where the white mare stood. Trees grew round the foot; above them was an open, snowy slope; above that a cap of rough scrub dominated by a single gnarled, ancient beech tree. Out of the snow at the foot of this great tree, most perplexingly, four streams ran down over the hill-island, dividing it into four quarters. The white horse stood motionless. Thunder rumbled out of the flickering sky. Will climbed to the old beech tree, and stood watching the nearest spring foam out from beneath a huge snow-mounded root. And the singing began.

It was wordless; it came in the wind; it was a thin, high, cold whine with no definable tune or pattern. It came from a long way off, and it was not pleasant to hear. But it held him transfixed, turning his thoughts away from their proper direction, turning them away from everything except contemplation of whatever happened to be closest at hand. Will felt he was growing roots, like the tree above him. As he listened to the singing, he saw a twig on a low branch of the beech close to his head that seemed for no reason so totally enthralling that he could do nothing but gaze at it, as if it contained the whole world. He stared for so long, his eyes moving very gradually along the tiny twig and back again, that he felt as if several months had passed, while the high, strange singing went on and on in the sky from its distant beginnings. And then suddenly it stopped, and he was left standing dazed with his nose almost touching a very ordinary beech twig.

He knew then that the Dark had its own way of putting even an Old One outside Time for a space, if they needed a space for their own magic. For before him, next to the trunk of the great beech, stood Hawkin.

He was more recognisably Hawkin now, though still the Walker in age. Will felt that he was looking at two men in one. Hawkin was dressed still in his green velvet coat; it seemed still fresh, with the touch of white lace at the neck. But the figure within the coat was no longer neat and lithe, it was smaller, bent and shrunk by age. And the face was lined and battered beneath long, wisping grey hair; the centuries that had beaten at Hawkin had left only his sharp bright eyes unchanged. Those eyes looked at Will now with cold hostility, across the mounded snow.

'Your sister is here,' Hawkin said.

Will could not stop himself from glancing quickly round the island. But it was empty as before.

He said coldly: 'She is not here. You're not going to catch me with a silly trick like that.'

The eyes narrowed. 'You are arrogant,' Hawkin hissed. 'You do not see all that is to be known in the world, Old One with the gift, and nor do your masters. Your sister Mary is here, in this place, though she is not to be seen by you. This is a meeting for the only bargain that my lord the Rider will make. Your sister for the Signs. You scarcely have much choice. You people are good at risking the lives of others' - the bitter old mouth curved up in a sneer - 'but I do not think Will Stanton would enjoy watching his sister die.'

Will said, 'I can't see her. I still don't believe she's here.'

Staring at him, Hawkin said to the empty air, 'Master?' And at once the high, wordless singing began again, catching Will back into the slow contemplation that was warm and relaxing as the summer sun, but at the same time horrible in its soft clutch of the mind. It changed him, while he was listening; made him forget the tension of fighting for the Light; submerged him, this time, in watching the way the shadows and hollows made patterns on a patch of snow near his feet. He stood there loose and relaxed, gazing at a point of white ice here, a hollow of darkness there, and the singing whined in his ears like the wind through chinks in a crumbling house.

And then again it stopped, and there was nothing, and Will saw with a shock like sudden cold that he was staring not at a pattern of mere shadows on snow, but at the lines and curves of his sister Mary's face. There she lay on the snow, in the clothes she had worn when he last saw her; alive and unharmed, but gazing blankly up at him without any sign that she recognised him or knew where she was. Indeed, Will thought unhappily, he did not know where she was either, for although he was being shown the appearance of her, it was most unlikely that she was really there lying on the snow. He moved to touch her, and as he expected she vanished completely away, and only the shadows lay on the snow as before.

'You see,' said Hawkin, unmoving beside the beech tree. 'There are some things that the Dark can do, many things, over which you and your masters have no control at all.'

'That's pretty obvious,' Will said. 'Otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as the Dark, would there? We could just tell it to go away.'

Hawkin smiled, unruffled. He said softly, 'But it will never go away. Once it comes, it breaks all resistance into nothing. And the Dark will always come, my young friend, and always win. As you see, we have your sister. Now you will give me the Signs.'

'Give them to you?' Will said with scorn. 'To a worm who crawled to the other side? Never!'

He saw the fists clench briefly at the cuffs of the green velvet jacket. But this was an old, old Hawkin, not to be drawn; he had himself under control now that he was no longer the wandering Walker but part of the Dark. There was only a small catch of fury in the voice. 'You would do well to deal with the messenger of the Dark, boy. If you will not, you may call up more than you will wish to see.'

The sky flickered and rumbled, bringing a brief, bright light to the dark roaring water all round, the great tree peaking the tiny island, the bowed green-jacketed figure beside its trunk. Will said, 'You are a creature of the Dark. You chose betrayal. You are nothing. I will not deal with you.'

Hawkin's face twisted as he stared venomously at him; then he looked towards the dark empty Common and called: 'Master!' Then again, an angry shriek this time: 'Master!'  Will stood, tranquil, waiting. On the edge of the island he saw the white mare of the Light, almost invisible against the snow, raise her head and sniff the air, snorting softly. She looked once towards Will as if in communication; then wheeled round in the direction from which they had come, and galloped away.

Within seconds, something came. There was no sound, still, but the rushing river and the grumbling, looming storm. The thing that came was utterly silent. It was huge, a column of black mist like a tornado, whirling at enormous speed upright between the land and the sky. At either end it seemed broad and solid, but the centre wavered, grew slender and then thicker again; it wove to and fro as it came, in a kind of macabre dance. It was a hole in the world, this whirling black spectre; a piece of the eternal emptiness of the Dark made visible. As it came closer and closer to the island, bending and weaving, Will could not help backing away; every part of him shouted silently in alarm.

The black pillar swayed before him, covering the whole island. Its whirling, silent mist did not change, but parted, and standing within it was the Black Rider. He stood with the mist wreathing round his hands and head, and smiled at Will: a cold, mirthless smile, with the heavy bars of eyebrows furrowed and ominous above. He was all in black again, but the clothes were unexpectedly modern; he wore a heavy black donkey-jacket and rough, dark denim trousers. Without a flicker in the chill smile he moved aside a little, and out of the snaking black mist of the column came his horse, the great black beast with fiery eyes, and on its back sat Mary.

'Hallo, Will,' Mary said cheerfully.

Will looked at her. 'Hallo.'

'I suppose you were looking for me,' Mary said. 'I hope nobody got worried. I only went for a little ride, just for a minute or two. I mean, when I went looking for Max, and then I met Mr Mitothin and found Dad had sent him to look for me, well, obviously it was all right. I had a lovely ride. It's a super horse . . . and such a lovely day now . . .'

The thunder rumbled, behind the massing grey-black cloud. Will shifted unhappily. The Rider, watching him, said loudly, 'Here's some sugar for the horse, Mary. I think he deserves it, don't you?' And he held out his hand, empty.

The King of Fire and Water 231 'Oh, thank you,' Mary said eagerly. She leaned forward over the horse's neck and took the imaginary sugar from the Rider's hand. Then she reached down beside the stallion's mouth, and the animal licked briefly at her palm. Mary beamed. 'There,' she said. 'Is that good?'

The Black Rider still gazed at Will, his smile widening a little. He opened his palm in mockery of Mary, and lying in it Will saw a small white box, made of an icy translucent glass, with lines of runic symbols engraved on the lid.

'Here I have her, Old One,' said the Rider, his nasal, accented voice softly triumphant. 'Caught by the marks of the Old Spell of Lir, that was written long ago on a certain ring and then lost. You should have looked more closely at your mother's ring, you and that simple craftsman your father, and Lyon your careless master. Careless . . . Under that spell I have your sister bound by totem magic, and yourself bound too, powerless to rescue her. See!'.

He flicked the little box open, and Will saw lying in it a round, delicately-carved piece of wood, wound about with a fragile gold thread. With dismay he remembered the only ornament that had been missing from the Christmas collection carved by Farmer Dawson for the Stanton family, and the golden hair that Mr Mitothin, his father's visitor, had with casual courtesy flicked away from Mary's sleeve.

'A birth-sign and a hair of the head are excellent totems,' the Rider said. 'In the old days when we were all less sophisticated, you could, of course, work the magic even through the ground a man's foot had trod.'

'Or where his shadow had passed,' Will said.

'But the Dark casts no shadow,' the Rider said softly.

'And an Old One has no birth-sign,' said Will.

He saw uncertainty flicker over the intent white face. The Rider shut the white box and slipped it into his pocket. 'Nonsense,' he said curtly..

Will looked at him thoughtfully. He said, 'The masters of the Light do nothing without reason, Rider. Even though the reason may not be known for years and years. Eleven years ago Farmer Dawson of the Light carved a certain sign for me at my birth - and if he had made the sign with the letter of my name, as the tradition was, then perhaps you could have used it to trap me into your power. But he made it in the sign of the Light, a circle cut by a cross. And as you know well, the Dark can use nothing of that shape for its own purpose. It is forbidden.'

He looked up at the Rider. He said, 'I think you are trying to bluff me again, Mr Mitothin. Mr Mithothin, Black Rider of the black horse.'

The Rider scowled. 'Yet still you are powerless,' he said. 'For I have your sister. And you cannot save her except by giving me the Signs.' Malignance glittered again in his eyes. Your great and noble Book may have told you that I cannot harm those who are of the same blood as an Old One - but look at her. She will do anything that I suggest she should do. Even jump into this swollen Thames. There are parts of the craft that you people neglect, you know. It is so simple to persuade folk into situations where they bring accidents upon themselves. Like your mother, for instance, so clumsy.'

He smiled again at Will. Will stared back, hating him; then he looked at Mary's happy sleeping-waking face and ached that she should be in such a place. He thought: and all because she's my sister. All because of me.

But a silent voice said into his mind: 'Not because of you. Because of the Light. Because of all that must always happen, to keep the Dark from rising.' And with a surge of joy Will knew that he was no longer alone; that because the Rider was abroad, Merriman was near by again too, free to give help if need be.

The Rider put out his hand. 'This is the time for your bargain, Will Stanton. Give me the Signs.'

Will took the deepest breath of his life, and let it out slowly. He said, 'No.'

Astonishment was an emotion that the Black Rider had forgotten long ago. The piercing blue eyes stared at Will in total disbelief. 'But you know what I shall do?'

'Yes,' Will said. 'I know. But I will not give you the Signs.'

For a long moment the Rider looked at him, out of the vast black pillar of swirling mist in which he stood; in his face incredulity and rage were mingled with a kind of evil respect.  Then he swung round to the black horse and to Mary and called aloud some words in a language that Will guessed, from the chill they put into his bones, must be the spell-speech of the Dark, seldom used aloud. The great horse tossed his head, white teeth flashing, and bounded forward, with happy witless Mary clutching his mane and gurgling with laughter. He came to the overhanging snowbank that bordered the river, and paused.

Will clenched the Signs on his belt, agonised by the risk he was taking, and with all his might summoned the power of the Light to come to his aid.

The black horse gave a shrill, shrieking whinny and leapt high into the air over the Thames. Half-way through his leap he twisted strangely, bucking in the air, and Mary screamed in terror, grabbing wildly at his neck. But her balance was gone, and she fell. Will thought he would faint as she turned through the air, his risk bursting into disaster; but instead of splashing into the river, she fell into the soft wet snow at its brink. The Black Rider cursed savagely, lunging forward. He never reached her. Before he was in mid-stride, a great arrow of lightning came from the storm amassed now almost over- head, and a gigantic crack of thunder, and out of the flash and the roar a blazing white streak rushed over the island towards Mary, catching her up so that in an instant she was gone, seized away, safe. Will hardly managed to get a glimpse of Merriman's lean form, cloaked and hooded, on the white mare of the Light, with Mary's blonde hair flying where he held her. Then the storm broke, and the whole world whirled flaming round his head.

The earth rocked. He saw for an instant Windsor Castle outlined black against a white sky. Lightning seared his eyes, thunder beat at his head. Then through the singing in his dazed ears he heard a strange creaking and crackling close by. He swung round. Behind him, the great beech tree was cleft down the middle, blazing with great flames, and he realised with amazement that the eager current of the island's four streams was growing less and less, dwindling down to nothing. He looked up fearfully for the black column of the Dark, but it was nowhere to be seen in the raging storm, and the strangeness of all else that was happening drove the thought of it out of Will's head.

For it was not only the tree that had been split and broken. The island itself was changing, breaking open, sinking towards the river. Will stared speechless, standing now on an edge of snow-mounded land left by the vanished streams, while around him snow and land slid and crumpled into the roaring Thames. Above him, he saw the strangest thing of all. Something was emerging out of the island, as the land and snow fell away. There came first, from what had been the taller end of the island, the roughly shaped head of a stag, antlers held high. It was golden, glinting even in that dim light. More came into sight; Will could see the whole stag now, a beautiful golden image, prancing. Then came a curious curved pedestal on which it stood, as if to leap away; then behind this a long, long horizontal shape, as long as the island, rising again at the other end to another high, gold-glinting point, tipped this time by a kind of scroll. And suddenly Will realised that he was looking at a ship. The pedestal was its high curving prow, and the stag its figurehead.

Astounded, he moved towards it, and imperceptibly the river moved after him, until there was nothing left of the island but the long-ship on a last circle of land, with a last rearing snowdrift all around it. Will stood staring. He had never seen such a ship. The long timbers of which it was built overlapped one another like the boards of a fence, heavy and broad; they looked like oak. He could see no mast. Instead there were places for row upon row of oarsmen, up and down the whole length of the vessel. In the centre was a kind of deckhouse that made the ship look almost like a Noah's Ark. It was not a closed structure; its sides seemed to have been cut away, leaving the corner beams and roof like a canopy. And inside, beneath the canopy, a king lay.

Will drew back a little at the sight of him. The mailed figure lay very still, with sword and shield at his side, and treasure piled round him in glittering mounds. He wore no crown. Instead a great engraved helmet covered the head and most of the face, crested by a heavy silver image of a long-snouted animal that Will thought must be a wild boar. But even without a crown this was clearly the body of a king. No lesser man could have merited the silver dishes and jewelled purses, the great shield of bronze and iron, the ornate scabbard, the gold-rimmed drinking-horns, and the heaps of ornaments. On an impulse Will knelt down in the snow and bowed his head in respect. As he looked up again, rising, he saw over the gunwale of the ship something he had not noticed before.

The king was holding something in his hands, where they lay tranquilly folded on his breast. It was another ornament, small and glittering. And as Will saw it more closely, he stood still as stone, gripping the high, oaken edge of the ship. The ornament in the quiet hands of the long-ship king was shaped as a circle, quartered by a cross. It was wrought of iridescent glass, engraved with serpents and eels and fishes, waves and clouds and things of the sea. It called silently to Will. It was without any question the Sign of Water; the last of the Six Great Signs.

Will scrambled over the side of the great ship and approached the king. He had to take care where his feet moved, or he would have crushed fine work of engraved leather and woven robes, and jewellery of enamels and cloisonnè and filigree gold. He stood looking down for a moment at the white face half-hidden by the ornate helmet, and then he reached reverently across to take the Sign. But first he had to touch the hand of the dead king, and it was colder than any stone. Will flinched and drew back, hesitating.

Merriman's voice said softly, from close by, 'Do not fear him.'

Will swallowed. 'But - he's dead.'

'He has lain here in his burial-ground for fifteen hundred years, waiting. On any other night of the year he would not be here at all, he would be dust. Yes, Will, this appearance of him is dead. The rest of him has gone out beyond Time, long since.'

'But it's wrong to take tribute away from the dead.'

'It is the Sign. If it had not been the Sign, and destined for you the Sign-Seeker, he would not be here to give it to you. Take it.'

So Will leaned across the bier and took the Sign of Water from the loose grip of the dead cold hands, and from somewhere far off a murmur of his music whispered in his ears and then was gone. He turned to the side of the ship. There beside it was Merriman, sitting on the white mare; he was cloaked in dark blue, with his wild white hair uncovered; the hollows of his bony face were dark with strain, but delight gleamed in his eyes.

'It was well done, Will,' he said.

Will was gazing at the Sign in his hands. The sheen over it was the iridescence of all mother-of-pearl, all rainbows; the light danced on it as it danced on water. 'It's beautiful,' he said. Rather reluctantly he loosened the end of the belt and slipped the Sign of Water on, to lie next to the glimmering Sign of Fire.

'It is one of the oldest,' Merriman said. 'And the most powerful. Now that you have it, they lose their power over Mary forever - that spell is dead. Come, we must go.'

Concern sharpened his voice; he had seen Will grasp hastily at a beam as the long ship, suddenly, unexpectedly lurched to one side. It rose upright, swayed a little, then tipped in the opposite direction. Will saw, scrambling for the side, that the Thames had risen still further while he was not watching. Water lapped round the great ship, and had it almost afloat. Not for long now would the dead king rest on the land that had once been an island.

The mare wheeled towards him, snuffling a greeting, and in the same enchanted, music-haunted moment as before Will was up on the white horse of the Light, sitting in front of Merriman. The ship tilted and swung, fully afloat now and the white horse wheeled out of its way to stand near by, watching, the river-water foaming round its sturdy legs. Creaking and rattling, the long ship gave itself to the rush of the swollen Thames. It was too large a vessel to be over-whelmed; its weight kept it steady even on that swirling water, once it had found a balance. So the mysterious dead king lay in dignity still, among his weapons and gleaming tribute, and Will had a last glimpse of the mask-like white face as the great ship moved away downstream.

He said over his shoulder, 'Who was he?'

There was grave respect on Merriman's face as he watched the long-ship go. 'An English king, of the Dark Ages. I think we will not use his name. The Dark Ages were rightly named, a shadowy time for the world, when the Black Riders rode unhindered over all our land. Only the Old Ones and a few noble brave men like this one kept the Light alive.'

'And he was buried in a ship, like the Vikings.' Will was watching the light glimmer on the golden stag of the prow.

'He was part Viking himself,' Merriman said. 'There were three great ship-burials near this Thames of yours, in days past. One was dug up in the last century near Taplow, and destroyed in the process. One was this ship of the Light, not destined ever to be found by men. And one was the greatest ship, of the greatest king of all, and this they have not found and perhaps never will. It lies in peace.' He stopped abruptly, and at a movement of his hand the white horse turned, ready to leap away from the river to the south.

But Will was still straining to watch the long-ship, and something of his tension seemed to infect both horse and master. They paused. In that moment, an extraordinary streak of blue light came hurtling out of the east, not from the thundering sky but from somewhere across the Common. It struck the ship. A great silent rush of flame burst there, over the broad river and its craggy white banks, and from prow to stern the king's ship was outlined by leaping fire. Will gave a choking wordless cry, and the white horse stirred uneasily, pawing at the snow.

Behind Will, Merriman's strong deep voice said, 'They vent their spite, because they know they are too late. Very easy it is, now and again, to predict what the Dark will do.'

Will said, 'But the king, and all his beautiful things - '

'If the Rider paused for thought, Will, he would have known that his outburst of malice has done no more than create a right and proper ending for this great ship. When this king's father died, he was laid in a ship in the same way, with all his most splendid possessions round him, but the ship was not buried. That was not the way. The king's men set fire to it and sent it off burning alone over the sea, a tremendous sailing pyre. And that, look, is what our King of the Last Sign is doing now: sailing in fire and water to his long rest, down the greatest river of England, towards the sea.'

'And good rest to him,' Will said softly, turning his eyes at last from the leaping flames. But for a long time afterwards, wherever they went, they could see the glow from the blazing long-ship whitening a part of the storm-dark sky.

Part Three: The Testing

The Hunt Rides

'Come,' Merriman said, 'we must lose no more time!' And the white mare wheeled them round away from the river and rose into the air, skimming the foaming water, crossing the Thames to the side that is the end of Buckinghamshire, the beginning of Berkshire. She leapt with desperate speed, yet still Merriman urged her on. Will knew why. He had glimpsed, through the flowing folds of Merriman's blue cloak, the great black tornado-column of the Dark gathered again even larger than before, bridging earth and sky, whirling silently in the glow of the burning ship. It was following them, and it was moving very fast.

A wind came up out of the east and lashed at them; the cloak blew forward round Will, enfolding him, as if he and Merriman were shut in a great blue tent.

'This is the peak of it all,' Merriman shouted into his ear, shouting his loudest, but still scarcely to be heard over the rising howl of the wind. 'You have the Six Signs, but they are not yet joined. If the Dark can take you now, they take all that they need to rise to power. Now they will try hardest of all.'

On they galloped, past houses and shops and unwitting people fighting the floods; past roofs and chimneys, over hedges, across fields, through trees, never far from the ground. The great black column pursued them, rushing on the wind, and in it and through it rode the Black Rider on his fire-jawed black horse, spurring after them, with the Lords of the Dark riding at his shoulder like a spinning dark cloud themselves.

The white mare rose again, and Will looked down. Trees were everywhere below them now; great single spreading oaks and beeches in open fields, and then tight-growing woods split by long straight avenues. Surely they were galloping down one such avenue now, past brooding snow-weighed fir trees, and out again into open land .. . Lightning flashed at his left side, leaping in the depths of a huge cloud, and in its light he saw the dark mass of Windsor Castle looming high and close. He thought: if that's the castle, we must be in the Great Park.

He began to feel, too, that they were no longer alone. Twice already he had heard again that strange, high yelping in the sky, but now there was more. Beings of his own kind were about here, somewhere, in the tree-thronged Park. And he felt, too, that the grey-massed sky was no longer empty of life, but peopled with creatures neither of the Dark nor of the Light, moving to and fro, clustering and separating, holding great power ... The white mare was down in the snow again now, the hooves pounding over drift and slush and icy paths, more deliberately than before. All at once Will realised that she was not responding to Merriman, as he had thought, but following some profound impulse of her own.

Lightning flickered again round them, and the sky roared. Merriman said beside his ear: 'Do you know Herne's Oak?'

'Yes, of course,' Will said at once. He had known the local legend all his life. 'Is that where we are? The big oak tree in the Great Park where - '

He swallowed. How could he not have thought of it? Why had Gramarye taught him everything but this? He went on, slowly, ' - where Herne the Hunter is supposed to ride on the eve of Twelfth Night?' Then he looked round fearfully at Merriman. 'Herne?'

'I go to gather the Hunt,' Old George had said. Merriman said, 'Of course. Tonight the Hunt rides. And because you have played your part well, tonight for the first time in more than a thousand years the Hunt will have a quarry.'

The white mare slowed, sniffing the air. Winds were breaking the sky apart; a half-moon sailed high through the clouds, then vanished again. Lightning danced in six places at once, the clouds roared and growled. The black pillar of the Dark came hurtling towards them, then paused, spinning and undulating, hovering between land and sky. Merriman said, 'An Old Way rings the Great Park, the way through Hunter's Combe. They will take a little while to find their path past that.'

Will was straining to see ahead through the murk. In the intermittent light he could make out the shape of a solitary oak tree, spreading great arms from its short tremendous trunk. Unlike most other trees in sight, it bore not the smallest remnant of snow; and a shadow stood beside its trunk, the size of a man.

The white mare saw the shadow at the same time. She blew hard through her nose, and pawed the ground.

Will said to himself, very softly, 'The white horse must go to the Hunter...'

Merriman touched him on the shoulder, and with swift enchanted ease they slid down to the ground. The mare bent her head to them, and Will laid his hand on the tough-smooth white neck. 'Go, my friend,' Merriman said, and the horse swung about and trotted eagerly towards the huge, solitary oak tree and the mysterious shadow motionless be- neath. The creature who owned that shadow was of immense power; Will flinched before the sense of it. The moon went behind the clouds again; for a while there was no lightning; in the gloom they could see nothing move beneath the tree. One sound came through the darkness: a whinny of greeting from the white mare.

As if in counterpoint, a deeper, snuffling whinny came out of the trees beside them; as Will swung round, the moon sailed clear of cloud again, and he saw the huge silhouette of Pollux, the shire horse from Dawsons' Farm, with Old George high on his back.

'Your sister is at home, boy,' Old George said. 'She got lost, you know, and fell asleep in an old barn, and had such a curious dream that she is already forgetting ...'

Will nodded gratefully and smiled; but he was gazing at a curious rounded shape, muffled by wrapping, that George held before him. 'What's that?' His neck was tingling even from being close to it, whatever it was.

Old George did not answer; he leant down to Merriman. 'Is all well?'

'All goes well,' Merriman said. He shivered, and drew his long cloak round him. 'Give it to the boy.'

He looked hard at Will out of his inscrutable deep set eyes, and Will, wondering, went towards the cart-horse and stood at George's knee, looking up. With a quick mirthless grin that seemed to mask great strain, the old man lowered the shadowed burden towards him. It was half as large as Will himself, though not heavy; it was wrapped in sacking. As he laid hands on it, Will knew instantly what it was. It can't be, he thought incredulously; what would be the point? Thunder rumbled again, all around.

Merriman's voice said, deep in the shadows behind him, 'But of course it is. The water brought it, in safety. Then the Old Ones took it from the water at the proper time.'

'And now,' Old George said, from his place high on patient Pollux, 'you must take it to the hunter, young Old One.'

Will swallowed nervously. An Old One had nothing in the world to fear, nothing. Yet there had been something so strange and awesome about that shadowy figure beneath the giant oak, something that made one feel unnecessary, insignificant, small...

He straightened. Unnecessary was the wrong word, at any rate; he had a task to perform. Raising his burden like a standard, he pulled away its covering, and the bright, eerie carnival head that was half-man, half-beast emerged as smooth and gay as if it had just arrived from its distant island. The antlers stood up proudly; he saw that they were exactly the shape of those on the golden stag, the figurehead to the dead king's ship. Holding the mask before him, he walked firmly towards the deep shadow of the broad-spreading oak. At its edge, he paused. He could see a glimmer of white from the mare, moving gently in recognition; he could see that the mare had a rider. But that was all.

The figure on the horse bent down towards him. He did not see the face, but only felt the mask lifted from his hands - and his hands fell back as if they had been relieved of a great weight, even though the head had from the beginning seemed so light. He backed away. The moon came sailing suddenly out from behind a cloud, and for a moment his eyes dazzled as he looked full into its cold white light; then it was gone again, and the white horse was moving out of the shadow, with the figure on its back changed in outline against the dim-lit sky. The rider had a head now that was bigger than the head of a man and horned with the antlers of a stag. And the white mare, bearing this monstrous stag-man, was moving inexorably towards Will.

He stood, waiting, until the great horse came close; its nose gently touched his shoulder, once, for the last time. The figure of the Hunter towered over him. The moonlight now glimmered clear on his head, and Will found himself gazing up into strange tawny eyes, yellow-gold, unfathomable, like the eyes of some huge bird. He gazed into the Hunter's eyes, and he heard in the sky that strange high yelping begin again; with the difficulty of escaping an enchantment, he dragged his gaze aside to look properly at the head, the great horned mask that he had given the Hunter to put on.

But the head was real.

The golden eyes blinked, feather-fringed and round, with the deliberate blink of an owl's strong eyelids; the man's face in which they were set was turned full on Will, and the firm-carved mouth above the soft beard parted in a quick smile. That mouth troubled Will; it was not the mouth of an Old One. It could smile in friendship, but there were other lines round it as well. Where Merriman's face was marked with lines of sadness and anger, the Hunter's told instead of cruelty, and a pitiless impulse to revenge. Indeed he was half-beast. The dark branches of Herne's antlers curved up over Will, the moonlight glinting on their velvety sheen, and the Hunter laughed softly. He looked down at Will out of his yellow eyes, in the face that was no longer a mask but living, and he spoke in a voice like a tenor bell. 'The Signs, Old One,' he said. 'Show me the Signs.'

Without taking his eyes from the towering figure, Will fumbled with his buckle and held the six quartered circles high in the moonlight. The Hunter looked at them and bent his head. When he raised it again, slowly, the soft voice was half-singing, half-chanting words that Will had heard before.

'When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back;

Three from the circle, three from the track;

Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;

Five will return, and one go alone.

Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;

Wood from the burning, stone out of song;

Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw;

Six Signs the circle, and the grail gone before.'

But he too did not end where Will expected him to; he went

'Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold

Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old;

Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea;

All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.'

The yellow eyes looked at Will again, but they did not see him now; they had grown cold, abstracted, a chill fire mounting in them that brought the cruel lines back to the face. But Will saw the cruelty now as the fierce inevitability of nature. It was not from malice that the Light and the servants of the Light would ever hound the Dark, but from the nature of things.

Herne the Hunter wheeled round on the great white horse, away from Will and the single oak tree, until his fearsome silhouette was in the open, under the moon and the still-lowering storm clouds. He raised his head, and he made to the sky a call that was like the halloo blown by a huntsman on the horn to call up hounds. The hunting horn of his voice seemed to grow and grow, and to fill the sky and come from a thousand throats at once.

And Will saw that this it did, for from every point of the Park, behind every shadow or tree and out of every cloud, leaping round the ground and through the air, came an endless pack of hounds, sounding, belling as hunting dogs do when they are starting after a scent. They were huge white animals, ghostly in the half-light, loping and jostling and bounding together; they paid not the least attention to the Old Ones or to anything but Herne on his white horse. Their ears were red, their eyes were red; they were ugly creatures. Will drew back involuntarily as they passed, and one great silvery dog broke stride to glance at him with as casual a curiosity as if he had been a fallen branch. The red eyes in the white head were like flames, and the red ears stood taut up-right with a dreadful eagerness, so that Will tried not to imagine what it would be like to be hunted by such dogs.

Round Herne and the white mare they bayed and belled, a heaving sea of red-flecked foam; then all at once the antlered man stiffened, his great horns pointing as a hunting dog points, and he called the hounds together with the rapid urgent collecting-call, the menèe, that sends a pack after blood. A bedlam of yelping urgency rose from the milling white dogs, filling the sky, and at the same moment the full strength of the thunderstorm erupted. Clouds split roaring into bright, jagged lightning as Herne and the white horse leapt exultantly up into the arena of the sky, with the red-eyed hounds pouring up into the stormy air after them in a great white flood.

But then a sudden terrible silence like suffocation came, blotting out all sound of the storm. In the moment of its last desperate chance, breaking across the barrier that had been holding it at bay, the Dark came for Will. Shutting out the sky and the earth, the deadly spinning pillar came at him, dreadful in its furious whirling energy and utter quiet. There was no time for fear. Will stood alone. And the towering black column rushed to engulf him with all the monstrous forces of the Dark arrayed in its writhing mist, and at its centre the great foam-mouthed black stallion reared up with the Black Rider, his eyes two brilliant points of blue fire. Will called vainly on every spell of defence at his command, yet knew that his hands were powerless to move to the Signs for help. He stood where he was, despairing, and closed his eyes.

But into the dead, world-muffling silence enwrapping him, one small sound came. It was the same strange high whickering far up in the sky, like the passing of many migrant geese on an autumn night, that he had heard three times that day. Nearer, louder it grew, opening his eyes. And he saw then a scene like nothing he had ever seen before, nor ever saw again. Half the sky was thick and dreadful with the silent raging of the Dark and its whirling tornado power; but now riding down towards it, out of the west with the speed of dropping stones, came Herne and the Wild Hunt. At the peak of their power now, in full cry, they came roaring out of the great dark thundercloud, through streaking lightning and grey-purple clouds, riding on the storm. The yellow-eyed antlered man rode laughing dreadfully, crying out the avaunt that rallies hounds on the full chase, and his brilliant, white-gold horse flung forward with mane and tail flying.

And around them and endlessly behind them like a broad white river poured the Yell Hounds, the Yelpers, the Hounds of Doom, their red eyes burning with a thousand warning flames. The sky was white with them; they filled the western horizon; and still they came, unending. At the sound of their bell-like, thousand-tongued yelping, the magnificence of the Dark flinched and swayed and seemed to tremble. Will caught sight of the Black Rider once more, high in the dark mist; his face was twisted in fury and dread and frozen malevolence, and behind these the awareness of defeat. He spun his horse so fiercely round that the lithe black stallion tottered and almost fell. As he jerked at the rein, the Rider seemed to cast something impatiently from his saddle, a small dark object that fell limp and loose to the ground, and lay there like a discarded cloak.

Then the storm and the rushing Wild Hunt were upon the Rider. He rode up into his whirling black refuge. The fantastic tornado-pillar of the Dark curved and twisted, lashed like a snake in agony, until finally there was a great shriek in the heavens, and it began rushing at furious speed northward. Over the Park and the Common and Hunter's Combe it fled, and after it went Herne and the Hunt in full cry, a long white crest on the surge of the storm.

The yelping of the hounds died with distance, fading last of all the sounds of the chase, and above Herne's Oak the silver half-moon was left floating in a sky flecked with small ragged remnants of cloud.

Will drew a long breath, and looked round. Merriman stood exactly as he had last seen him, tall and straight, hooded, a dark featureless statue. Old George had drawn Pollux back into the trees, for no normal animal could have faced the Hunt so close and survived.

Will said, 'Is it over?'

'More or less,' Merriman said, faceless under the hood.

'The Dark - is - ' He dared not bring out the words.

'The Dark is vanquished, at last, in this encounter. Nothing may outface the Wild Hunt. And Herne and his hounds hunt their quarry as far as they may, to the very ends of the earth. So at the ends of the earth the Lords of the Dark must skulk now, awaiting their next time of chance. But for the next time, we are this much stronger, by the completed Circle and the Six Signs and the Gift of Gramarye. We are made stronger by your completed quest, Will Stanton, and closer to gaining the last victory, at the very end.' He pushed back his broad hood, the wild white hair glinting in the moonlight, and for a moment the shadowed eyes looked into Will's with a communication of pride that made Will's face warm with pleasure. Then Merriman looked out across the dappled, snow-mounded grassland of the Great Park. 'There is left only the joining of the Signs,' he said. 'But before that, one - small - thing.'

A curious jerkiness caught at his voice. Will followed, puzzled, as he strode forward close to Herne's Oak. Then he saw on the snow, at the edge of the tree's shadow, the crumpled cloak that the Black Rider had let fall as he turned to flee. Merriman stooped, then knelt down beside it in the snow. Still wondering, Will peered closer, and saw with a shock that the dark heap was not a cloak, but a man. The figure lay face upward, twisted at a terrible angle. It was the Walker; it was Hawkin.

Merriman said, his voice deep and expressionless. 'Those who ride high with the Lord of the Dark must expect to fall. And men do not fall easily from such heights. I think his back is broken.'

It occurred to Will, looking at the small still face, that this time he had forgotten that Hawkin was no more than an ordinary man. Not ordinary perhaps - that was not the word

for a man who had been used by both Light and Dark, and sent many ways through Time, to become at the last the Walker battered by wandering through six hundred years. But a man nonetheless, and mortal. The white face flickered, and the eyes opened. Pain came into them, and the shadow of a different, remembered pain.

'He threw me down,' Hawkin said.

Merriman looked at him, but said nothing.

'Yes,' Hawkin whispered bitterly. 'You knew it would happen.' He gasped with pain as he tried to move his head; then panic came into his eyes. 'Only my head . . . I feel my head, because of the pain. But my arms, my legs, they are ... not there ...'

There was a dreadful, desolate hopelessness in the lined face now. Hawkin looked full at Merriman. 'I am lost,' he said. 'I know it. Will you make me live on, with the worst suffering of all now come? The last right of a man is to die. You prevented it all this time; you made me live on through the centuries when often I longed for death. And all for a betrayal that I fell into because I had not the wit of an Old One ...' The grief and longing in his voice were intolerable; Will turned his head away.

But Merriman said, 'You were Hawkin, my foster-son and liege man, who betrayed your lord and the Light. So you became the Walker, to walk the earth for as long as the Light required it. And so you lived on, indeed. But we have not kept you since then, my friend. Once the Walker's task was done, you were free, and you could have had rest forever. Instead you chose to listen to the promises of the Dark and to betray the Light a second time . . . I gave you the freedom to choose, Hawkin, and I did not take it away. I may not. It is still yours. No power of the Dark or of the Light can make a man more than a man, once any supernatural role he may have had to play comes to an end. But no power of the Dark or the Light may take away his rights as a man, either. If the Black Rider told you so, he lied.'

The twisted face gazed up at him in agonised near-belief. 'I may have rest? There can be an end, and rest, if I choose?'

'All your choices have been your own,' said Merriman sadly.

Hawkin nodded his head; a spasm of pain flashed across his face and was gone. But the eyes that looked up at them then were the bright, lively eyes of the beginning, of the small, neat man in the green velvet coat. They turned to Will. Hawkin said softly, 'Use the gift well, Old One.'

Then he looked back at Merriman, a long unfathomable private look, and he said almost inaudibly: 'Master ...'

Then the light went out behind the bright eyes, and there was no longer anyone there.

Part Three: The Testing

The Joining of the Signs

In the low-roofed smithy Will stood with his back to the entrance, staring into the fire. Orange and red and fierce yellow-white it burned, as John Smith pushed at the long bellows-arm; the warmth made Will feel comfortable for the first time that day. There was no great harm in an Old One being fish-wet in an icy river, but he was glad to feel warm in his bones again. And the fire lit his spirits, as it lit the whole room.

Yet it did not properly light the room, for nothing that Will could see appeared solid. There was a quivering in the air. Only the fire seemed real; the rest might have been a mirage.

He saw Merriman watching him with a half-smile. 'It's that half-world feeling again,' Will said, baffled. 'The same as that day in the Manor when we were in two kinds of Time at once.'

'It is. Just the same. And so we are.'

'But we're in the time of the smithy,' Will said. 'We went through the Doors.'

So they had; he and Merriman, Old George, and the huge horse Pollux. Out on the wet, dark Common, when the Wild Hunt had driven the Dark away over the sky, they had gone through the Doors into the time six centuries earlier from which Hawkin had once come, and into which Will had walked on the still, snowy morning of his birthday. They had brought Hawkin back to his century for the last time, borne on Pollux's broad back; when they were all come through the Doors, Old George had taken the horse away, bearing Hawkin's body in the direction of the church. And Will knew that in his own time, somewhere in the village churchyard, covered either by more recent burials or by a stone crumbling into illegibility now, there would be the grave of a man named Hawkin, who had died some time in the thirteenth century and lain there in peace ever since.

Merriman drew him to the front of the smithy, where it faced the narrow hard-earth track through Hunter's Combe, the Old Way. 'Listen,' he said.

Will looked at the bumpy track, the dense trees on the other side, the cold grey strip of almost-morning sky, 'I can hear the river!' he said, puzzled.

'Ah,' Merriman said.

'But the river's miles away, the other side of the Common.'

Merriman cocked his head to the rushing, rippling sound of water. It had the sound of a river that is full but not in flood, a river running after much rain. 'What we are hearing,' he said, 'is not the Thames, but the sound of the twentieth century. You see, Will, the Signs must be joined by John Wayland Smith in this smithy, in this time - for not long after this the smithy was destroyed. Yet the Signs were not brought together until your quest, which has been within your own time. So the joining must be done in a bubble of Time between the two, from which the eyes and ears of an Old One may perceive both. That's not a real river we hear. It is the water running in your time down Huntercombe Lane, from the melting of the snow.'

Will thought of the snow and of his family beset by floods, and suddenly he was a small boy wanting very much to be at home. Merriman's dark eyes looked at him compassionately. 'Not long,' he said.

A hammering sound came from behind them; they turned. John Smith had finished pumping the bellows at his red-white fire; he was working at the anvil instead, while the long tongs waited ready before the fire's glow. He was not using his usual heavy hammer, but another that looked ridiculously small in his broad fist; a delicate tool more like those Will saw his father use for jewellery. But then, the object on which he was working was far more delicate than horseshoes; a golden chain, broad-linked, from which the Six Signs would hang. The links lay in a row beside John's hand.

He looked up, his face flushed red by the fire. 'I am almost ready.'

'Very well, then.' Merriman left them and stalked out to the road. He stood there alone, tall and imposing in the long blue cloak, the hood pushed back so that his thick white hair glinted like snow. But there was no snow here, and even through the sound of the water that Will could still hear rushing, no water either . . .

Then the change began. Merriman seemed not to have moved. He stood there with his back to them, his hands loose at his sides, very still, without the least movement. But all around him, the world was beginning to move. The air shivered and quaked, the outlines of trees and earth and sky trembled, blurred, and all things visible seemed to swim and intermingle. Will stood looking at this wavering world, feeling a little giddy, and gradually he began to hear over the sound of the unseen, rushing river-road the murmur of many voices. Like a place seen through a shimmering haze of heat, the trembling world began to resolve itself into outlines of visible things, and he saw that a great indistinct throng of people filled the road and the spaces between all the trees and all the open yard before the smithy. They seemed not quite real, not quite firm; they had a ghostly quality as if they might disappear when touched. They smiled at Merriman, greeting him where he stood, his face turned away still from Will. Thronging round him, they gazed eagerly ahead at the smithy like an audience about to watch a play, but as yet none of them seemed to see Will and the smith.

There was an endless variety of faces - gay, sombre, old, young, paper-white, jet-black, and every shade and gradation of pink and brown between, vaguely recognisable, or totally strange. Will thought he recognised faces from the party at Miss Greythorne's manor, the party in a nineteenth-century Christmas that had led Hawkin to disaster and himself to the Book of Gramarye - and then he knew. All these people, this endless throng that Merriman had somehow summoned, were the Old Ones. From every land, from every part of the world, here they were, to witness the joining of the Signs. Will was all at once terrified, longing to sink into the ground and escape the gaze of this his great new enchanted world.

He thought: these are my people. This is my family, in the same way as my real family. The Old Ones. Every one of us is linked, for the greatest purpose in the world. Then he saw a stir in the crowd, running like a ripple along the road, and some began to shift and move as if to make way. And he heard the music: the piping, thrumming sound, almost comical in its simplicity, of the fifes and drums he had heard in his dream that might not have been a dream. He stood stiffly with his hands clenched, waiting, and Merriman swung round and strode to stand beside him, as out of the crowd towards them came the little procession just as it had been before.

Through the thronging figures, and curiously seeming more solid than any, came the little procession of boys: the same boys in their rough, unfamiliar tunics and leggings, shoulder-length hair, and strange bunched caps. Again those at the front carried sticks and bundles of birch twigs, while those at the back played their single repeated melancholy tune, on pipes and drums. Again between these two groups came six boys carrying on their shoulders a bier woven of branches and reeds with a bunch of holly at each corner.

Merriman said, very softly, 'First on St Stephen's Day, the day after Christmas. Then on Twelfth Night. Twice in the year, if it is a particular year, comes the Hunting of the Wren.'

But now Will could see the bier plainly, and even at the beginning, this time, there was no wren. Instead, that other delicate form lay there, the old lady, robed in blue, with a great rose-coloured ring on one hand. And the boys marched up to the smithy and very gently laid the bier down on the ground. Merriman bent over it, holding out his hand, and the Lady opened her eyes and smiled. He helped her to her feet. Moving forward towards Will, she took both his hands in hers. 'Well done, Will Stanton,' she said, and through all the crowd of Old Ones thronging the track, a murmur of approval went up like the wind singing in the trees.

The Lady turned to face the smithy, where John stood waiting. She said, 'On oak and on iron, let the Signs be joined.'

'Come, Will,' said John Smith. Together they moved to the anvil. Will laid down the belt that had borne the Signs through all their seeking. 'On oak and on iron?' he whispered.

'Iron for the anvil,' said the smith softly. 'Oak for its foot. This big wooden base of the anvil is always oak - the root of an oak, strongest part of the tree. Have I not heard someone telling you the nature of the wood a while ago?' His blue eyes twinkled at Will, and then he turned to his work. One by one he took the Signs and joined them with rings of gold. In the centre he set the Signs of Fire and Water; on one side of them the Signs of Iron and Bronze, and on the other, the Signs of Wood and Stone. At each end he fastened a length of the sturdy gold chain. He worked swiftly and delicately, while Will gazed. Outside, the great crowd of Old Ones was still as growing grass. Behind the tapping of the smith's hammer and the occasional hiss of the bellows, there was no sound anywhere but the running water of the invisible river-road, centuries away in the future and yet close at hand.

'It is done,' said John at last.

Ceremonially he handed Will the glittering chain of linked Signs, and Will gasped at the beauty of them. Holding the Signs now, he felt from them suddenly a strange fierce sensation like an electric shock: a strong, arrogant reassurance of power. Will was puzzled: danger was past, the Dark was fled, what purpose had this? He walked to the Lady, still wondering, put the Signs into her hands, and knelt down before her.

She said, 'But it's for the future, Will, don't you see? That is what the Signs are for. They are the second of the four Things of Power, that have slept these many centuries, and they are a great part of our strength. Each of the Things of Power was made at a different point in Time by a different craftsman of the Light, to await the day when it would be needed. There is a golden chalice, called a grail; there is the Circle of Signs; there is a sword of crystal, and a harp of gold. The grail, like the Signs, is safely found. The other two we must yet achieve, other quests for other times. But once we have added those to these, then when the Dark comes rising for its final and most dreadful attempt on the world, we shall have hope and assurance that we can overcome.'

She raised her head, looking out over the unnumbered ghostly crowd of the Old Ones. 'When the Dark comes rising,' she said, expressionless, and the many voices answered her in a soft, ominous rumble 'six shall drive it back.' Then she looked down again at Will, the lines around her ageless eyes creasing in affection. 'Sign-Seeker,' she said, 'by your birth and your birthday you came into your own, and the circle of the Old Ones was complete, for now and forever. And by your good use of the Gift of Gramarye, you achieved a great quest and proved yourself stronger than the testing.

Until we meet again, as meet we shall, we remember you with pride.'

The far-stretching crowd murmured again, a different, warm response, and with her thin small hands, the great rose ring glimmering, the Lady bent down and set the chain of the linked Signs around Will's neck. Then she kissed him lightly on the forehead, the gentle brushing-by of a bird's wing. 'Farewell, Will Stanton,' she said.

The murmur of the voices rose, and the world spun round Will in a flurry of trees and flame, and rising over it all was the bell-like haunting phrase of his music, louder and more joyful now than ever before. It chimed and rang in his head, filling him with such delight that he closed his eyes and floated in its beauty; it was, he knew for a crack of a second, the spirit and essence of the Light, this music. But then it began gradually to fade, to grow distant and beckoning and a little melancholy, as it always had been before, fading into nothing, fading, fading, with the sound of running water rising to take its place. Will cried out in sorrow, and opened his eyes.

And he was kneeling on the cold beaten snow in the grey dead light of early morning, in a place he did not recognise beside Huntercombe Lane. Bare trees rose out of pitted, wet snow on the other side of the road. Though the Lane itself was once more a clear paved road, water ran furiously in each of its gutters with a sound like a stream, or even a river ... The road was empty; no one was anywhere to be seen among the trees. Will could have wept with the sense of loss; all that warm crowd of friends, the brightness and light and celebration, and the Lady: all gone, all fled, leaving him alone.

He put his hand to his neck. The Signs were still there.

Behind him, Merriman's deep voice said, 'Time to go home, Will.'

'Oh,' Will said unhappily, without turning round. 'I'm glad you're still there.'

'You sound most glad,' Merriman said dryly. 'Restrain your ecstasy, I pray you.'

Sitting back on his heels, Will looked at him over his shoulder. Merriman gazed down at him with immense solemnity, his dark eyes owlish, and suddenly the emotions that were drawn into a tight, unbearable knot inside Will cracked and broke, and he dissolved into laughter. Merriman's mouth twitched slightly. He put out his hand, and Will scrambled to his feet, still spluttering.

'It was just - ' Will said, and stopped, not quite sure yet whether he was laughing or crying.

'It was - an alteration,' Merriman said gently. 'Can you walk now?'

'Of course I can walk,' said Will indignantly. He stared about him. Where the smithy had been, there was a battered brick building like a garage, and around it he could see traces of cold-frames and vegetable beds through the melting snow. He looked quickly up and saw the outline of a familiar house. 'It's the Manor! he said.

'The back entrance,' Merriman said. 'Near the village. Used mainly by tradesmen - and butlers.' He smiled at Will.

'This really is where the old smithy used to be?'

'In the plans of the old house it is called Smith's Gate,' Merriman said. 'Buckinghamshire historians writing about Huntercombe are very fond of speculating on the reason. They're always wrong.'

Will stared through the trees at the manor's tall Tudor chimneys and gabled roofs. 'Is Miss Greythorne there?'

'Yes, she is, now. But didn't you see her in the crowd?'

'The crowd?' Will became aware that his mouth was foolishly gaping, and shut it. Conflicting images chased one another through his head. 'You mean she is one of the Old Ones?'

Merriman raised an eyebrow. 'Come now, Will, your senses told you that long ago.'

'Well . . . yes, they did. But I never knew quite which Miss Greythorne it was who belonged to us, the one from today or from the Christmas party. Well. Well, yes, I suppose I knew that too.' He looked up tentatively at Merriman. 'They're the same, aren't they?'

'That's better,' Merriman said. 'And Miss Greythorne gave me, while you and Wayland Smith were intent on your work, two gifts for Twelfth Night. One is for your brother Paul, and one is for you.' He showed Will two shapeless, small packages wrapped in what looked like silk; then drew them again under his cloak. 'Paul's is a normal present, I think. More or less. Yours is something to be used only in the future, at some point when your judgement tells you you may need it.'

'Twelfth Night,' Will said. 'Is that tonight?' He looked up at the grey early-morning sky. 'Merriman, how have you stopped my family wondering where I've been? Is my mother truly all right?'

'Of course she is,' Merriman said. 'And you have spent the night at the Manor, asleep ... Come now, these are small things. I know all the questions. You will have all the answers, when you are once at home, and in any case really you know them already.' He turned his head down towards Will, and the deep dark eyes stared compelling as a basilisk. 'Come, Old One,' he said softly, 'remember yourself. You are no longer a small boy.'

'No,' said Will. 'I know.'

Merriman said, 'But sometimes, you feel how very much more agreeable life would be if you were.'

'Sometimes,' Will said. He grinned. 'But not always.'

They turned and strode over the little edge-stream of the road to walk together towards the Stantons' house along Huntercombe Lane.

The day grew brighter, and light began to infuse the edge of the sky before them, where the sun would soon come up. A thin mist hung over the snow on both sides of the road, wreathing round the bare trees and the little streams. It was a morning full of promise, with a hazy, cloudless sky tinged faintly with blue, the kind of sky that Huntercombe had not seen for many days. They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication. Their footsteps rang out on the bare wet road, making the only sound anywhere in the village except the song of a blackbird and, somewhere further off, the sound of someone shovelling. Trees loomed black and leafless over the road on one side, and Will saw that they were at the corner that passed Rooks' Wood. He stared upwards. Not a sound came out of the trees, or the untidy great nests high up there in the misted branches.

'The rooks are very quiet,' he said.

Merriman said, 'They are not there.'

'Not there? Why not? Where are they?'

Merriman smiled, a small grim smile. 'When the Yell Hounds are hunting across the sky, no animal or bird may stay within sight of them and not be driven wild by terror. All through this kingdom, along the path of Herne and the Hunt, masters will not be able to find any creature that was loose last night. It was better known in older days. Country- men everywhere used to lock up their animals on Twelfth Night Eve, in case the Hunt should ride.'

'But what happens? Are they killed?' Will found that in spite of all the rooks had done for the Dark, he did not want to think of them all destroyed.

'Oh, no,' Merriman said. 'Scattered. Driven willy-nilly across the sky for as long as the nearest hound chooses to drive them. The Hounds of Doom are not of a species that kills living creatures or eats flesh ... The rooks will come back eventually. One by one, bedraggled, weary, sorry for themselves. Wiser birds who had no dealings with the Dark would have hidden themselves away last night, beneath branches or house-eaves, out of sight. Those who did are still here, unharmed. But it will take a while for our friends the rooks to recover themselves. I think you will have no trouble with them again, Will, though I would never quite trust one if I were you.'

'Look,' Will said, pointing ahead. 'There are two to trust.'

Pride came thick into his voice, as down the road towards them came rushing and bounding the two Stanton dogs, Raq and Ci. They leapt at him, barking and whining with delight, licking his hands in a greeting as gigantic as if he had been gone for a month. Will stooped to speak to them and was enveloped in waving tails and warm panting heads and large wet feet. 'Get off, you idiots,' he said happily.

Merriman said, very softly: 'Gently, now.' Instantly the dogs calmed and were still, only their tails enthusiastically waving; both turned to Merriman and looked up at him for a moment, and then they were trotting amiably in silence at Will's side. Then the Stanton driveway was ahead, and the noise of shovels grew loud, and round the corner they found Paul and Mr Stanton, wrapped against the cold, clearing wet snow and leaves and twigs away from a drain.

'Well, well,' said Mr Stanton, and stood leaning on his shovel.

'Hallo, Dad,' said Will cheerfully, and ran and hugged him.

Merriman said: 'Good morning.'

'Old George said you'd be about early,' said Mr Stanton, 'but I didn't think he meant quite this early. However did you manage to wake him up?'

'I woke myself up,' Will said. 'Yah. I turned over a new leaf for the New Year. What are you doing?'

'Turning over old leaves,' Paul said.

'Ho, ho, ho.'

'We are, though. The thaw came so suddenly that the ground was still frozen, and nothing would drain away. And now that the drains are beginning to thaw as well, the flood's got everything jammed up with washed-away rubbish. Like this.' He lifted a dripping bundle.

Will said, 'I'll get another spade, and help.'

'Wouldn't you like some breakfast first?' Paul said. 'Mary's getting us some, believe it or not. There's a lot of leaf-turning going on here, while the year's still new.'

Will suddenly realised that it was a long time since he had last eaten, and felt a gigantic hunger. 'Mmmm,' he said.

'Come on in and have some breakfast or a cup of tea or something,' said Mr Stanton to Merriman. 'It's a chilly walk from the Manor this time of the morning. I really am extremely grateful to you for delivering him, not to mention looking after him last night.'

'Merriman shook his head, smiling, and pulled up the collar of what Will saw had now again subtly changed from a cloak to a heavy twentieth-century overcoat. 'Thank you. But I'll be getting back.'

'Will!' a voice shrilled, and Mary came flying up the drive. Will went to meet her, and she skidded into him and punched him in the stomach. 'Was it fun at the Manor? Did you sleep in a four-poster?'

'Not exactly,' Will said. 'Are you all right?'

'Well, of course. I had a super ride on Old George's horse, it was one of Mr Dawson's huge ones, the show horses. He picked me up in the Lane, quite soon after I'd gone out. Seems ages ago, not last night.' She looked at Will rather sheepishly. 'I suppose I shouldn't have gone out after Max like that, but everything was happening so quickly, and I was worried about Mum not having help - '

'Is she really all right?'

'She'll be fine, the doctor says. It was a sprain, not a broken leg. She did knock herself out, though, so she has to rest for a week or two. But she's as cheerful as can be, you'll see.'

Will looked up the drive. Paul, Merriman, and his father were talking and laughing together. He thought perhaps his father had decided that Lyon the butler was a good chap after all, not merely a manorial prop.

Mary said, 'Sorry about you getting lost in the wood. It was all my fault. You and Paul must have been very close behind me actually. Good job Old George ended up knowing where everyone was. Poor Paul, worrying about both of us being lost, instead of just me.' She giggled, then tried to look penitent, without great effort.

'Will!' Paul swung away from the group, excited, running towards them. 'Just look! Miss Greythorne calls it a permanent loan, bless her - look!' His face was flushed with pleasure. He held out the bundle Merriman had been carrying, now open, and Will saw lying on it the old flute from the Manor.

Feeling his face break into a long, slow smile, he looked up at Merriman. The dark eyes looked down at him gravely, and Merriman held out the second package. 'This, the Lady of the Manor sent for you.'

Will opened it. Inside lay a small hunting horn, gleaming, thin with age. His gaze flicked more briefly to Merriman, and down again.

Mary hopped about, giggling. 'Go on, Will, blow it. You could make a noise all the way to Windsor. Go on!'

'Later,' Will said. 'I have to learn how. Will you thank her for me very much?' he said to Merriman.

Merriman inclined his head. 'Now I must go,' he said.

Roger Stanton said, 'I can't tell you how grateful we've been for all your help. With everything, through this mad weather - and the children - you really have been most tremendously - ' he lost his words, but thrust out his arm and pumped Merriman's hand up and down with such warmth that Will thought he would never stop.

The craggy, fierce-carved face softened; Merriman looked pleased and a little surprised. He smiled and nodded, but said nothing. Paul shook hands with him, and Mary. Then Will's hand was in the strong grasp, and there was a quick pressure and a brief intent look from the deep, dark eyes. Merriman said, 'Au revoir, Will.'

He raised his hand to them all and strode off down the Lane. Will drifted after him. Mary said, skipping at his side, 'Did you hear the wild geese last night?'

'Geese?' Will said gruffly. He was not really listening. 'Geese? In all that storm?'

'What storm?' said Mary, and went on before he could blink. 'Wild geese, there must have been thousands of them. Migrating, I suppose. We didn't see them - there was just this gorgeous noise, first of all a lot of cackling from those daft rooks in the wood, and then a long, long sort of yelping noise across the sky, very high up. It was thrilling.'

'Yes,' said Will. 'Yes, it must have been.'

'I don't think you're more than half awake,' Mary said in disgust, and she went hopping ahead to the end of the driveway. Then she stopped suddenly and stood very still. 'My goodness! Will! Look!'

She was peering at something behind a tree, hidden by the remnants of a snowbank. Will came to look, and saw, lying among the wet undergrowth, the great carnival head with the eyes of an owl, the face of a man, the antlers of a deer. He stared and stared without a word in his throat. The head was crisp and bright and dry, as it had always been and always would be. It looked like the outline of Herne the Hunter that he had seen against the sky, and yet not like.

Still he stared, and said nothing.

'Well, I never,' said Mary brightly. 'Aren't you lucky it got stuck there? Mum will be pleased. She was awake by then, it was when the floods came up all of a sudden. You weren't there of course; the water came in all over the ground floor and quite a lot of things got washed out of the living-room before we realised. That head was one of them - Mum was all upset because she knew you'd be. Well, look at that, fancy that - '

She peered closer at the head, still prattling gaily, but Will was no longer listening. The head lay very close to the garden wall, which was still buried in snow but beginning to break through the drifts at either side. And on the drift at the outer edge, covering the verge of the road and overhanging the running stream in the gutter, there were a number of marks. They were hoof prints, made by a horse stopping and pivoting and leaping away over the snow. But none of them was in the shape of a horseshoe. They were circles quartered by a cross: the prints of the shoes that John Wayland Smith, once at the beginning, had put on the white mare of the Light.

Will looked at the prints, and at the carnival head, and swallowed hard. He walked a few paces to the end of the driveway and looked down Huntercombe Lane; he could see Merriman's back still, as the tall, dark-clad figure strode away. And then his hair prickled and his pulses stood still, for from behind him came a sound sweeter than seemed possible in the raw air of the cold grey morning. It was the soft, beautiful yearning tone of the old flute from the Manor; Paul, irresistibly drawn, must have put the instrument together to try it out. He was playing 'Greensleeves' once more. The eerie, enchanted lilt floated out through the morning on the still air; Will saw Merriman raise his wild white head as he heard it, though he did not break his stride.

As he looked down the road still, with the music singing in his ears, Will saw that out beyond Merriman the trees and the mist and the stretch of the road were shaking, shivering, in a way that he knew well. And then gradually, out there, he saw the great Doors take shape. There they stood, as he had seen them on the open hillside and in the Manor: the tall carved doors that led out of Time, standing alone and upright in the Old Way that was known now as Huntercombe Lane. Very slowly, they began to open. Somewhere behind Will the music of 'Greensleeves' broke off, with a laugh and some muffled words from Paul; but there was no break in the music that was in Will's head, for now it had changed into that haunting, bell-like phrase that came always with the opening of the Doors or any great change that might alter the lives of the Old Ones. Will clenched his fists as he listened, yearning towards the sweet beckoning sound that was the space between waking and dreaming, yesterday and tomorrow, memory and imagining. It floated lovingly in his mind, then gradually grew distant, fading, as out on the Old Way Merriman's tall figure, swirled round again now by a blue cloak, passed through the open Doors. Behind him, the towering slabs of heavy carved oak swung slowly together, together, until silently they shut. Then as the last echo of the enchanted music died, they disappeared.

And in a great blaze of yellow-white light, the sun rose over Hunter's Combe and the valley of the Thames.

Here ends THE DARK IS RISING, second book of the sequence by the same name. The first book was called OVER SEA, UNDER STONE. The third book will be called GREENWITCH. There will be five books.

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"Dark is Rising" series by Susan Cooper

Book 1       Over Sea, Under Stone

Book 2       The Dark is Rising

Book 3       Greenwitch

Book 4       The Grey King

Book 5       Silver on the Tree