The rising north wind whipped the flames, but the firemen drowned them at last. The crowd of neighbors who had gotten out of bed to watch headed home around 3:00 a.m, as the Volunteer Fire Department rolled up its hoses and stowed its gear. By four everybody was gone, and the old barn and sheds, saved only out of principle, stared at the place where the house had been like friends at a surprise wake.
Their rememberings were disturbed after a half an hour, by an intruder.
He was a tall, bearded man dressed in a long black cloak and a wide black hat. He carried a heavy staff.
He walked to the ruins, poked the ash with the staff.
"A good burning," he whispered, not in English.
He gave a short whistle, and the country silence, which is no silence at all, became truly still. He whistled again, a tune now a minor melody with evergreens and women's eyes in it.
Rabbits, one, two, three, came hesitating from the cover of the trees. They hopped and paused, doubtful. But they came.
They crouched, trembling violently, ears back, in a circle around the intruder. Laying his staff aside he knelt and passed a long hand down the back of the largest buck.
Swiftly he caught it up and wrung its head off. As it jerked in his hands, the other rabbits loped away.
He took up a charred board, drew a knife from somewhere, and made a few carvings in the wood. He dipped a finger in the rabbit's blood and stained where he had carved. He set the board down in front of him.
Then he began to sing in deep, rolling tones, turning to the four points of the compass, the dead rabbit held high in both hands. His voice grew louder, but no one who might have heard would have understood the words.
The wind freshened.
He tossed the rabbit into the center of the ruins. It landed in the wet ashes with a slap.
"Come now," he whispered.
And Leslie Prill was there, naked and ashamed among the cinders.
"What's happened?" she cried. "Who are you?"
"You are dead, and I am your master."
"Dead? No. I can't I was I was talking to someone and and "
"And they burned you, witch, as you feared."
"No! No, I don't remember anything "
"That is your final good fortune. You must go soon the way you chose long since. But first you will answer me."
"Answer what?"
"Tell me what shall be! You have the gift. You had it always, in a weak and distracted way; now the distractions are gone. You see plainly. Tell me what you see!"
"It was you! It was you I saw coming! Death and violence and burning, they come with you, like the Wild Hunt, and the wolves and the wind. You've come to meet the comet!"
"Tell me something I don't already know!"
"The comet is the Great Circle the worm that devours its tail. It passes and returns, and what was may be again."
"Yes! Yes!"
"The Sword is nearby. Even now it is being forged."
"I must have the Sword, but to say it is here tells me nothing. I knew it must be. It's the Spear I must know about! Tell me how I'll get the Spear!"
"Three times you've tried to use the Sword, and three times you have failed. It does not show itself yet, and it can be bent. But if it were easily bent, it would not be the Sword."
"There is no man in the world so true as a sword;
"And no sword is wholly true."
"What words are those?"
"The words of Sigfod Oski, the poet. I can bend the Sword."
"Bend it, and you will have the Spear. If you cannot, the Spear will have you."
"What more?"
"Nothing more. What I see I've told."
"I know little more than before I called you up!"
"Be grateful you don't know less. I must go."
"Stay, witch! Will I win? Tell me where the road leads!"
"It leads a hundred ways. It leads nowhere. I haven't time to tell the combinations. But this I see: the Wolf waits at the end. Whatever way you take, it leads at last to the Wolf."
"I knew that as well," the intruder rumbled, but the dead woman was gone, on her own journey a flight as high as she could rise on her own lifting.