PROLOGUE

Had laybyd hw loygwn eyl

Nhag Heybeywr, ayg nhoygwr niwoyd.

The Forest speaks with many tongues Listen well but never answer.

'Nhuwd nhy Whad proverb, given as a warning to young children I HEAR A noise,' Martyn murmured, reining in his dappled gray stallion. 'It is an unnatural sound.' The monk's predatory blue eyes strained, as if trying to burn through the huge-girthed ironoaks and rocky slopes of the King's Forest.

Ehawk could see by the set of the man's shoulders beneath his bloodred robe that every muscle in his body was tensed.

'No doubt,' Sir Oneu replied jovially. 'This forest chatters like a woman who is half-mad with love.'

But despite his tone, Sir Oneu's black eyes were serious when he turned to speak to Ehawk. As always, Ehawk was surprised by the older man's face'soft and tapered it was, the corners of his eyes crinkled by fifty years of laughter. The knight hardly seemed to fit his reputation as a fierce warrior.

'What do you say, m' lad?' Oneu asked.

'From what I've seen,' Ehawk began, 'Brother Martyn can hear a snake breathe over the next hill. I haven't such ears, and at this moment hear little. But sir, that's strange of itself. There ought to be more birds singing.'

'Saint Rooster's balls,' Oneu scoffed, 'what do y'mean? There's one warbling right now, so loud I can scarce hear myself.'

'Yes, sir,' Ehawk replied. 'But that 'un is an etechakichuk, and they''

'In the king's tongue, boy, or in Almannish,' snapped a dour, sallow-faced man.

He wore robes of the same color as Martyn's. 'Don't gabble at us in your heathen language.'

That was Gavrel, another of the five monks traveling with the party. His face looked as if it had been cut into an apple and left to dry.

Ehawk didn't like Gavrel much.

'Mind your own tongue, Brother Gavrel,' Sir Oneu said mildly. 'I'm the one speaking to our young guide, not you.'

Gavrel glared at the reprimand, but he did not challenge the knight.

'You were saying, m' lad Ehawk?'

'I believe you call 'em crow-woodpeckers,' Ehawk replied.

'Nothing frightens them.'

'Ah.' Oneu frowned. 'Than let's have quiet, while Brother Martyn listens more closely.'

Ehawk did as he was told, straining his own ears to the limits, feeling an unaccustomed chill as the hush of the forest sank in. It was strange.

But these were strange days. Only a fortnight before, the crescent moon had risen purple, a dire portent indeed, and a weird horn had sounded on the wind, heard not just in Ehawk's village but everywhere. The old oracle-women muttered prophecies of doom, and tales of awful beasts roaming and slaying in the King's Forest grew more

common each day.

And then these men had come from the west, a knight of the