Fires of Delight by Vanessa Royall Page B

met—”
    “God,” Royce said simply, and nodded. “It was my time, in the spring. The sun was falling that day, and I was readied in the usual manner. First I was stripped naked and my body was greased from crown to sole with bear oil, for symbolic strength and to protect me from the cold. We were in our hunting lodgenear Loch Nan Clar, and the torches were lighted. I will remember forever the way my shadow loomed against the stone walls, and when I saw the shadow, the way the light had thrown my image upon the stone, I knew there would never be need of fear in my life. Selena, it was an exultation I cannot describe. I knew, at that very instant, that nothing could touch me. Not then, that night, nor ever.
    “After the oiling, I was girded in the tanned hides of wolves, strong with the scent of the wolf, and dressed in boots and gloves and a hat of fur. I took up a dagger and sheathed it at my side, and I was given whiskey to take with me against the cold. Then I left the lodge and set out upon my quest.”
    “Were you afraid?” Selena had asked, pressing herself against his long body as they lay in the hammock.
    “No. Excited. Overjoyed might be a better way to describe the feeling in my soul that night. Because, you see, my time had come. The time to be a man and to claim what was mine in the world. But first I had to succeed in the ritual. Midnight came and fled as I skirted the northern shore of the loch and began the climb toward the caves of Ben Kilbreck Mountain. I stopped for a time and had a bit of the whiskey, listening for the wolves.”
    “You were hunting wolves? How old were you?”
    “Six,” he answered casually, as Selena gasped. “You see, at that time of the year, the female whelps. She remains in the den with the cubs while the male brings prey for food. I found a cave, a den, and struck.”
    “You killed the father wolf?”
    “No. Not then. I entered the den when the father was gone, dressed in the skins of a wolf, smelling like an animal. You see, my first task was to suckle from the she-wolf, then to kill her, then to skin her and remove the dugs, to take them home with me as proof of my suckling.”
    Hearing this, Selena had almost cried out. A boy with a dagger, crawling upon hands and knees into the reeking stench of the den. That boy had become the man beside her, whom she loved as much as all the earth.
    “You might have been killed!”
    “No, I knew that I would not be. I knew it from the time I saw my giant shadow wavering against the stone wall of our hunting lodge. The she-wolf came at me, but I caught her beneath thethroat with my dagger, and drank her bitter milk while the blood poured out. Her litter of pups squealed in panic, and in moments I could hear their father scrambling over the rocks outside the cave. But I was ready when I saw him, a dark, howling shape at the mouth of the cave, illuminated by a crescent of rising sun. The puppies, emboldened by his presence, were yapping and nipping at me now. I threw them off as the father charged. There is nothing to match the rage of an animal whose young are threatened, save perhaps the rage of women who want the same man, and I saw my death in the eyes of that attacking wolf.”
    “But why did they make you do that?”
    “No one made me. I wanted to. It is the way things are, because we Campbells believe that the only thing one must fear is God—”
    “And you said that you met—”
    “—and that God exists only at the instant when man is poised upon the thin line between life and death—”
    “—God, and he was—”
    “—for me, that father wolf, charging, fangs bared, out of the dawn, with his whelps gnawing at me too. But I dropped him with a dagger to the heart. He died with his teeth at my throat. Then I cut his throat where the skin is soft. And on that dawn I drank the blood of God…”
    Selena had reached out hesitantly then to touch his skin, as if afraid that some alien force would be transmitted from