“Shouldn’t we come with you?” asked Keri.
But Caewen shook her head. “What point would there be in that? One person, or three or a hundred will not make any difference, surely. Not against a dragon.”
“Perhaps not.” Though even as Keri conceded the point, she still had a look in her eyes that made it clear she was not happy about this. “There must be something we can do?”
“If things go badly with the dragon… with me… that is, if I don’t come back–and if Aslaug turns rampant–just promise me you’ll get away. And, if you can, find out what is happening in the north. Find out the truth of the rumours.”
“This winter king, whoever, or whatever he is?”
“That, yes.” She nodded. “What is his purpose? Does he prepare for war? And why, and why, and why?”
It was Pel who spoke then, from the shadows of the tent doorway. “Some need no more reason than a desire to rule and gain power over others. You look for hidden depths, where there may only be sharp rocks and shallows.”
Caewen shrugged. “That may well be. But if so, it is best to know it for the truth, too. We must understand what we are facing.” She turned then, and looked out into the night, at the glow in the air near the tent of gifts. If she remembered correctly, the festival of flames for the living started after the final gifts were given. Then, later tonight, the festival of the… what was it, the embers for the dead? And what did that entail? There wasn’t time to ask, much less to wonder.
“If the matter with the dragon goes badly, we will hunt your questions on your behalf,” said Keri at last. “If you don’t come back.” She leaned in and gave Caewen a brief hug.
Her brother, Keru, seemed to be more shy about offering a hug, but smiled and said, “But you will come back, won’t you?”
“I will do my best.” She looked at Dapplegrim. “We both will.”
With that, she pulled herself up onto Dapple’s back and he took a few steps into the darkness. Keri and Keru watched them go, standing together, outside of Samarkarantha’s tent. Pel remained farther back, in the shadow-and-gold lamplight of the tent entrance, also watching, but more withdrawn, more inscrutable in her thoughts.
Dapplegrim soon picked his pace up to a canter, and then a high sprint. They moved as quick and as silent as a shadow cast by a fleeting cloud, sweeping past tents, then just as quick, vanishing down long trackways too fast to take in the detail of anything around them. The wind, cold, hard and forceful, snapped at Caewen’s hair and made her eyes water and sting. She had to squint and blink into the oncoming night air just to see at all.
When they passed the last of the straggling few tents at the fringes of the moot, Dapplegrim slowed to a more measured trot. He stopped entirely, paused, and sniffed the air. “Hurm. We are not too late, but the dragon is closing now. Has he it sensed that his little piece of loot has moved?” Another noisy snuffle at the air. “I think so. Yes. He has changed course.” He inhaled a few more sharp intakes, then grumbled to himself, wordlessly, and started off at a renewed pace, heading directly away from the moot. Two low hills rose up before them. They were black and shapeless lumps, small foothill heaps of dirt at the hem of the great towering tor, but still hills in their own rights. At first Caewen thought they were covered with the stumps of trees, but as they drew nearer she could see that the jumbled, tousled objects were of all manner of sizes, shapes and materials. Closer again, and she saw that the hill on the left was covered with objects decorated with elaborate moon and star shapes, wrought in silver, punched out in glassy black chunks, dyed in the deepest blues. On the right, sunbursts and rays of light were carved into and painted upon just as many diverse objects.
“What–” said Caewen, but Dapplegrim anticipated her.
“The Hills of Offerings. At the close of the moot, the devout leave offerings here, for Old Night and Chaos, or for the Dawnbringer.” He slowed again now, and they moved much more slowly though the gap between the hills. “No one comes here during the moot. It is a sacred place. Hur. Hur. Hurmm. I think folks are a little afraid of it.” A long and drawn pause. “As they should be, perhaps. The things that nearly happened here do not bear thinking–“
Caewen did discover in herself an odd feeling, and a shivered ran down her shoulders as she looked left and right. Her muscles felt strangely taut. “I understand why. There’s something here. A tension? A sense that the two goddesses are somehow still here, standing on their two hills, looking across at each other? I can’t put it more clearly than that.” After a hesitation, she asked, “Is this where they made peace and signed their pact? Is this where the great war was ended?”
“Yes.” Dapplegrim’s voice was much more muted than usual. “Though few alive today remember it.”
“Were you–that is–were you there? When it happened?”
“A lot of folks were here. Thousands upon thousands. All the minor gods and goddesses. Vast armies of demons, spirits and monsters. Mortal soldiers too, in rank upon rank, turned out and lined in their ordered masses, just in case, just in case. Hurm. If the peace had not been struck, this would have been the battlefield at the end of the world. This would have been the place where the world was broken. This was the battlefield chosen for the armageddon, the cataclysm, the apocalypse, the end of all things.” He looked around, and flattened his ears. “Luckily for you and me, the end of the world was averted that day. But it came so close. You can’t guess how close we came to the one great last battle.”
He was silent then, for a time, and Caewen realised only after he had finished talking that Dapplegrim had not actually answered her question. Not directly, anyway.