Away in the depths of the wood branches crackled. Gwyndoc heard a vixen crying, and once an owl hooted from above his head in the blackness of the thick foliage. And later, when the moon shone out full along the avenue in which they lay, he saw Morag leaning on his elbow and looking at him with wide staring eyes, like a wolf too tired to take his prey.
Gwyndoc shut his own eyes then and tried to forget the battle and the heaped bodies and the long sad ride that stretched ahead of them towards nowhere and nothing, and he tried to believe that he was just sleeping out in the wood for fun and that a few miles away, in the valley, everything was as it had always been—sunshine and mead, hunting and the strong kingdom of Cunobelin, and, above all, Ygerne. Ygerne, the tall girl with the blue eye
