Harvest Moon: A Tangled Web / Cast in Moonlight / Retribution

It not only sounded as if he was looking for someone, it sounded as if he was looking for someone who was expecting him.

And it must have been someone he had never actually seen.

So he had been looking for someone like Brunnhilde. It was a case of mistaken identity.

It would be hard to mistake Bru for anyone else, if you knew her. Even someone who had only been scrying them from a distance would have a hard time mistaking her for anyone else.

Conclusion: the man had to have been going from a description, and not a very good one, either.

And that meant another question. Man, or god?

Leo didn’t even have to think twice about that. Only a god would be so sure of his own power that he would simply appear and abduct a complete stranger without thought of consequences.

All right. Assume that it was one of the local gods. That put Leo up against a god. With all the power of a god, who could probably squash him flat without thinking twice about it….

To hell with that!

He lurched to his feet, feeling rage surge through him. So what if they were gods? They were pretty damned small gods, and he was married to a god, and he was going to get to the bottom of this and get her back no matter what it cost him!

He caught up his discarded sword and headed for the Vallahalian horses at a grim trot. Damn if he was going to bother going through an intermediary; let the natives putter about with priests. After all, he’d been presented to a goddess of the earth as her son-in-law, and faced down the All-father. In a Kingdom where the gods were real, physical beings, he might as well go straight to the top.

Or wherever he needed to get to in order to confront them directly. And he had a pretty good idea of who could get him there.

The two big bay horses—well, they weren’t just horses, after all, they could stride through the air, you never had to worry about them straying off and they always looked magnificent—were still where he and Bru had left them. They weren’t happy though; they were prancing and pawing the earth, looking every bit as agitated as he was.

And now, if ever, was the time to find out just how different they were from “horses.”

He seized the reins of the horse he had been given on either side of the bit and looked into its eyes. “Do you know where the gods of this land live?” he asked it. On the surface of things, such a question, put to a horse, might have seemed insane, but these were horses that had served the Valkyria, were bred in the pastures of Vallahalia, and he wasn’t inclined to put anything past them. One of Brunnhilde’s sister-Valkyria had given her mount to him, saying with a laugh that it made a fitting “dowry” for him, and that this way he wouldn’t have to ride pillion behind Bru. The other Valkyria had found this hilarious at the time.

Since then, his mount, named Drachen, had done literally anything he asked of it. The only “supernatural” ability it had displayed so far was the ability to fly—or rather, to run through the air. It had a doglike loyalty, was a cherub to him and Bru, and a devil to anyone else. He’d suspected it had a very a high level of intelligence, and perhaps a lot more than that, but hadn’t had a chance to ask Bru.

The horse looked at him measuringly, and then slowly bobbed its head up and down.

“Was that a god who took our lady?” he asked it fiercely.

Drachen snorted, as if it thought the answer to such a question was so obvious the question didn’t even need asking, but again bobbed its head up and down.

He didn’t ask any further questions. He threw himself into the saddle and took up the reins—but left them slack, because clearly, he was not going to be the one in charge on this ride.

“Then let us go to these gods and get her back!” he growled.

Both horses threw up their heads and trumpeted agreement. Leo’s mount reared up; its forefeet found purchase on the air through whatever magic it used to run, and they were off. Both of them plunged up toward the sky as if they were running on a hill. Powerful muscles drove them upward at a pace that far exceeded that of a flesh-and-blood horse.

Once they were well above the level of the treetops, it was pretty clear where they were heading; a cloud-capped mountain loomed in the middle distance, and looked to be exactly where one would want to set up housekeeping if one happened to be a god, at least in Leo’s mind. And as they headed upward, Brunnhilde’s horse cast a glance over its shoulder at him…and snorted.

“What?” he shouted at it. He got no direct answer. But his horse swerved a little and made a beeline for a patch of dark clouds. Before he got a chance to object, both beasts plunged in, and a moment later he found himself in the middle of a rainstorm.

When they emerged again on the other side he was spluttering and soaked. But clean.

His hide and the little one-shouldered excuse for a tunic he wore in imitation of the locals were both dry long before the slopes of the mountain and the buildings there were clearly visible. And if he hadn’t still been so angry he was quite ready to set fire to the entire mountain, he would have been enchanted by the view.

The lowest slopes, mostly forested, were dotted with flowering meadows where flocks of sheep and goats grazed, or little isolated structures of white marble rose. A little higher, as the trees began to thin, there were more substantial buildings, about the size of one of the manor houses that he was familiar with, also of white marble. Halfway up the slope, a line of clouds formed an unmoving ring around the mountain; so far as Leo could tell, this ring would make it impossible for anyone on the ground to see what he saw from his vantage in the air.

With its base rooted in the top of the clouds, a massive wall stretched around the mountain itself, not at all unlike the wall around Vallahalia, and probably erected for the same reason. The gods were not inclined to permit just any old mortal to come walking up the front path. There was a gate in this wall, and it was closed; not that this mattered in the least to Leo.

Behind the wall, and crowding up to the summit, were more of the white-marble manors, surrounded by terraced gardens. As Leo’s mount galloped above the wall and these buildings passed beneath him, he saw the occasional person in the gardens or on a terrace gaping up at him. All the buildings had a kind of inner glow, like light shining through translucent porcelain.

He ignored the people below him. The gods were like anyone else; the most important personage lived at the top, and that was where he was heading, to a single enormous, colonnaded structure ornamented by heroic statues of men and women.

The horses seemed to take on fire and life as they neared this building; and rather than feeling intimidated, Leo experienced a surge of energy and strength, as if he had opened up some sort of heroic spring inside himself that he had never known was there. His anger stopped being all-consuming, and became focused; Brunnhilde had been taken, and there was nothing on this earth, above it, or below it, that was going to keep him from getting to her.

Beneath him, his horse began to shine with an unearthly, golden glow, just as the buildings here glowed, but brighter. He took heart from that; these beasts were the mounts of gods themselves, and if they felt he was worthy of being carried up here, then who were these upstarts in their draped sheets to stand between him and his mate?

The horses trumpeted a challenge as they landed in the forecourt of the chief building; their hooves rang on the pavement as they touched down, now blazing with golden light. Leo jumped out of the saddle without even thinking about it, pulling his sword from the sheath at the saddlebow. He was barely aware of half a dozen people in robes and tunics staring at him dumbfounded; he had eyes only for one. That one sat on what looked like a throne at the center of the forecourt; a man with the physique of a fighter, long, curling black hair and beard, and some of that same golden glow about him. Like the others, he wore one of those draped garments, but at least this man imparted the ridiculous swath of cloth with a sense of dignity.

Even with his mouth hanging open.

Leo stamped toward him. Evidently these gods were so convinced of their own power and invulnerability that they had nothing whatsoever like guards. But—anger didn’t kill caution; Leo stopped a good twenty feet away. Just in case.

While the man still stared at him, Leo pointed at him with the sword he still held in his hand.

“You!” he roared, his own voice echoing at such a volume that he himself was startled, though he took care not to show it. He swept the sword point around in an arc. “All of you! What have you done with my wife?”

Demeter examined one of the trees in her orchard with a critical eye; like all the trees, it had buds, blossoms, green and ripening fruit on it all at the same time. She wondered if perhaps she should have some of the insects eat a few of the blooms so as not to overburden the tree unduly. While there were the strange cycles known as “seasons” outside Olympia, here there were no such things as set times to blossom and ripen or lie fallow; there was planting and harvest, of course, but no particular time for either. That was because of her; beneath her care, every plot and field in Olympia flourished, and year-beginning to year-end marked not so much a cycle as a progression.

Care had to be taken, though, to make sure the soil stayed fertile, the trees and bushes were not stressed. Demeter spent a great deal of time among the mortals, speaking through her priestesses, schooling them in husbandry, and spent almost as much time in her own fields and orchards, seeing to it that what she tended personally served as an example of perfection rather than neglect.

She directed a beetle to snip off a particular bud and drop it into a swarm of waiting ants, when she felt a tremor pass through her—and a sensation as if something had just been cut off from her as that bud had been cut from the tree.

Bud? she thought, and then, in something like Panic fear—Kore!

She whirled and ran as she had not run since she was a child herself, in that long-ago time when she played in the fields with the sheep tended by her shepherdess mother—ran back to her villa, and stopped, panting for breath, hand pressed against her aching side, in the door to the weaving room.

The loom was unattended except for a kitten playing with a ball of yarn and a faun curled around a basket of sleeping hedgehog babies, poking at them with a curious finger to see them stir.

“Where is Kore?” she demanded of the hooved child, who looked up at her with startled eyes, his mouth forming a little o.

“M-m-meadow?” he stammered.

Demeter ran to the meadow where Kore was used to playing. There was nothing there, nothing but a scatter of blossoms.

Nothing at all.

Gingerly, Hades approached the squirming bag. The very fabric looked angry. “What did you do, Thanatos?” he demanded.

“I did what you asked me to do,” Thanatos replied, looking indignant and sullen at the same time. “I looked for an immortal maiden with yellow hair in a meadow. I found lots of maidens in meadows, not many with yellow hair, and only one immortal. So I took her. You said she wouldn’t fight me, that she was expecting to be abducted, but she fought like five she-goats! I’m bruised all over!”

“You’re a god, Thanatos, heal yourself,” snapped Hades. “Who did you rape?”