Page 96 of Forbidden

“Wait!” Amber called. “He can’t see the way!”

“What are you talking about?” Duncan shouted. “There’s enough room between these stones to run five abreast!”

“Aye, but he can’t see it!”

Cowl awry, hair disheveled, Amber ran to the outer ring. There she took the horse’s bridle and spoke soothingly to it. When the animal was calmer, Amber put one hand on the horse’s muzzle and the other on the rein.

A gentle tug, a low word of encouragement, and the horse stepped forward. The mincing wariness of its gait told how little the animal liked the place. Ears flicked nervously in all directions until the inner ring was reached. Then the animal snorted and let down its guard, visibly at ease again.

Duncan looked around, wondering what the horse sensed that told it safety lay here.

“What did you mean that my horse couldn’t see the way?” Duncan asked.

“Your mount has never been into the Stone Ring before,” Amber explained.

“Why should that matter?”

“In order to enter sacred sites, Whitefoot had to learn to trust my guidance rather than her eyes in certain places.”

“Such as the way to Ghost Glen?” Duncan asked.

Amber nodded. “But your horse hasn’t learned to trust you in the same way. Nor has it ever been inside Stone Ring before, so it couldn’t find the way by itself.”

Thoughtfully, Duncan looked around the ancient ring. Like the horse’s, Duncan’s senses told him there was more to the place than his eyes could see.

And like the horse’s, Duncan’s inner sense of danger no longer stirred. Rather, it slept, as though certain of safety.

“Remarkable,” Duncan said. “The place is enchanted.”

“Nay. It is simply different. There is peace here, for those who can see through the stones.”

“Learned.”

“Once I would have said aye. But now…” Amber shrugged.

“What made you change your mind?”

“You.”

“Maybe I was Learned in the time I don’t remember,” Duncan said.

Amber’s smile was bittersweet. She knew that the Scots Hammer wasn’t Learned.

“Maybe,” she said quietly, “you are simply a man with an unused gift for Learning.”

Duncan smiled slightly and began reconnoitering the haven that lay within Stone Ring while a wild storm broke over the trail they had just ridden.

The central mound of the Ring was fully thirty strides in length and half that in height. The mound itself had once been completely surfaced with a paving of stones. Time, storm, and sunshine had changed all that. Now the mound grew a veritable garden of plants both common and rare between widening cracks in the stone paving.

Other than the mound, the circle was much too open to suit Duncan. There was no place to hide, much less a place suited to defense. Though there was forest just a few yards away from the outer stones, the interior of the circle was like a meadow. Only one tree grew inside, and that tree was hardly sturdy enough to provide shelter from a storm.

Despite that, Duncan’s eyes kept coming back to the tree. Graceful, elegant, the rowan stood like a dancer at the highest part of the mound.

“What is it?” Amber asked, seeing Duncan’s stillness.

“That tree. I feel that I…know it.”

“You may. Erik found you beneath the rowan.”