Dreaming the Hound by Manda Scott Page A

the gods had returned alive from Rome when her father had been left behind. Dubornos had been talking of hunting Romans but hares were not so different.
    Graine lay on the damp turf, waiting. Nemain, the moon, sank lower until the hare that lived on her surface could no longer clearly be seen. The whispers of the half-light changed and became those of day. Graine would have preferred an endless night; in the darkness the grandmothers spoke to her from the lands beyond life and she felt she understood the world. In daylight, she had to rely on the unreliable words of the adults around her and they were too confusing.
    It was not that they lied, simply that they did not have the same view of the world as the grandmothers did, so that it was hard to know what would please them. Her mother, Breaca, was especially difficult to read and it was her mother whom Graine most wanted to please - if she were alive. That question had ruled the morning and all the time before it since the dark evening with Airmid when both of them had seen things in the river that they did not wish to see.
    The grandmothers had not helped with that vision, nor explained it since. With nothing more solid than pain seen and felt, Graine had decided to behave as if her mother still lived and would return soon, counting the Roman dead and, perhaps, quietly impressed by the actions of the daughter she had left behind.
    On the mountainside, watched by the hound called Stone, one of the bucks, bolder than its siblings, moved away seeking greener grass. When you get one alone … At a certain moment, when the sun showed her the shine of the hare’s eye and the blue hound ceased to quiver against her side and became instead entirely still, Graine lifted her hand.
    The first few strides of the chase froze the child’s breath in her throat. She had seen hounds course a hare often enough but never before had her hound hunted down her chosen hare, her twisting, turning tawny pelt and flash of cream underbelly with its pulsing life and floating run and round black eyes, perfect as polished jet. For a dozen heartbeats, Graine lay still feeling herself a true hunter at last, already illuminated in the glow of her mother’s pride.
    This was the heart of her plan: her uncle Ban, the traitor, had been named Harehunter when he was still a boy and a friend to the tribes. It seemed to Graine that her mother grieved for her lost brother as much as she did for Caradoc who had been the fountain of her soul. If Graine could not replace her father - and the years of his absence had shown quite clearly that she could not then she could perhaps become another hare-hunter, fit to assuage the grief of Ban’s loss.
    It would not change the reality of Breaca’s wounding, or the confrontation with the serpent-dreamer, but it might at the very
    least make her smile. Graine Harehunter. It had a good ring to it. She could hear it spoken by Airmid and see how the Boudica, surrounded by the elders, would accept it and be happy.
    So close. Hunter to hunted, hunted from hunter. So close.
    Stone was past his prime but fit after a long summer at war. As he ran, he stretched long and flat like a hawk and the distance from hunter to hunted closed until he could strike and almost kill - but not quite.
    The hare was well grown and had lived through its own summer of danger. It knew enough of the hunt to save itself from the first strike. White teeth cracked shut in the air where its chest had been but the beast was already gone. Desperate for respite, it jinked and turned on its axis so that, for the first time, it faced Graine who had risen to her feet and stood knee deep in heather. Far away as it was, the hare raised its head and looked her full in the eyes, pleading. Her hare, seeking her help, pleading for the freedom simply to live.
    It was not at all what she had planned. Fear cracked over Graine, drowningly. Not her own fear, but the hare’s, the hammering, heart-stopping terror of the