I. The Horn Over the Pines
On Samhain night, when the feast was eaten and the offerings were laid at the crossroads and the candles had burned down to stubs, the hall at the edge of the pines went to bed. All but two of its people.
The Sound-Weaver lay awake, as he often does on the great nights of the Wheel, listening. And Gweeny did not lie down at all.
He had been restless since sundown. Through the silent supper he had sat beside the empty chair set out for the dead, his nose working and his great ears turning toward things no one else could hear. Now, in the dark, the Sound-Weaver heard him pacing: the click of his nails across the floor of the hall, a pause at the door, the click back again. Then a long silence, and then a sound the little dog almost never made, a thin, high whine pressed out through his nose, as though something in him were pulling on a lead.
A little before midnight, the Sound-Weaver heard why.
It came from very far off at first, so faint it might have been the wind in the needles. A horn, older than any hunter's brass, a hollow ox-horn note that rose and bent and fell away. Then the baying started, dozens of hounds, deep-chested and ragged and wild, rolling toward the hall across the sky the way thunder rolls across the hills before a summer storm. Under it came the sound of hooves on nothing at all, and over it the wind, rising.
The Wild Hunt was riding. The Horned One was out with his pack, as he is every Samhain, sweeping the roads between the worlds.
The Sound-Weaver got up and went to the door, and Gweeny was already there. He could feel the little dog trembling against his shins the way a string trembles when another one rings beside it. Long ago, before he came to the Star-Reader's door, Gweeny had been one of Hecate's hounds, the smallest of them, too short in the leg ever to keep up when the pack rode out with the Hunt. Earlier that night, during the silent supper, the Hunt had passed over the hall, and one of the great hounds had answered his song. Now it had come back for him.
The Sound-Weaver knelt and put both hands on him, one on the long warm back and one cupping the narrow fox-face. "Go on, then," he said. "But you come home before the sun does."
He opened the door. The cold came in smelling of frost and woodsmoke and something else, something sharp like the air after lightning. Gweeny went out onto the step, stopped, and looked back at him. Then he went down the path, stopped, and looked back again. Twice, as he always does.
Then the wind took him, and he was gone up into the noise.
II. What the Hunt Is For
People who have only heard of the Wild Hunt think it is a thing of terror, and in part they are right. The great hounds of the Horned One are black as the gap between stars, with eyes like coals and voices that carry three valleys over. When the Hunt passes low over a house, the people inside wake with their hearts pounding and do not know why.
But the old tellings know that the Hunt gathers as well as chases.
Every year there are souls who cross over and lose their way. Some go too quickly to understand what has happened. Some are so used to holding on that they have forgotten how to let go. Some are simply tired, and sit down by the side of the road between the worlds, and do not get up again. On Samhain night, when the veil is thin, the Hunt rides out and finds them, so that no one is left out in the cold for another year.
The trouble is that the great hounds are very good at finding and very bad at everything after. They come baying out of the dark, enormous and fierce, and the lost ones they find are often more frightened than they were before.
That is why, that night, the Horned One came back for a small black dog.
Hecate had told Gweeny long ago that he would never run with the Wild Hunt, and she was right. His legs were far too short. So he did not run. He rode, sitting up very straight on the bow of the Horned One's saddle with his ears streaming back in the wind like two black banners, while the great hounds poured along beneath him. He had no thunder in his voice. He could not have frightened anyone if he tried, and he never tried. When the big hounds found someone and drew back, baying, it was Gweeny who hopped down from the saddle, trotted up, unhurried, and did what he does.
III. The Lost Ones
The first they found that night was a woman standing at a crossroads in the hills, turning round and round.
She had a ring of keys in her hand, a great jangling bunch of them, and she was trying each one in turn on a door that was not there. She had gone in a hurry, and some part of her was still certain she had left something unlocked: the back door, the shed, the car, she could not remember which. When the hounds came down around her she screamed and clutched the keys to her chest.
Gweeny walked up to her through the ring of great black bodies. He sniffed the hem of her coat. He sniffed the keys. Then he pushed his cold nose into her free hand and went over each finger in turn, the way he does, and licked her thumb, once, firmly.
She stopped screaming. She looked down at him, and then at the keys, as though she had only just noticed how heavy they were. Gweeny sat down in front of her and waited. After a while she bent and laid the whole ring on the ground at the crossroads, gently, the way you set down something you have carried a long time. Hecate keeps the keys of every crossroads. She would see to them.
The woman straightened up with both hands empty, and laughed, a little shakily, and followed the small black dog down the road.
The second was harder to find, because he did not want to be found.
He was an old dog, a big rangy farm dog with a grey muzzle and one ear that had never stood up right, and he was lying under a bridge with his chin on his paws, waiting. He had been waiting a long time. His people had gone over before him, years ago, one and then the other, and when his own time came he had not known which way they went. So he had done the only thing a good dog knows how to do when his people are missing. He had stayed exactly where he was, so they would know where to find him.
The great hounds bayed at him, and he only flattened his good ear and did not move. He had been waiting too long to be frightened off now.
Gweeny went down the bank under the bridge alone. He did not lick this one's thumb, since dogs do not have thumbs worth mentioning. He touched noses with him instead, very gently, and the two of them stood like that for a long moment, breathing each other in. Whatever passed between them, it was in a language older than the Hunt.
Then Gweeny turned and climbed back up the bank, and looked back over his shoulder, and the old farm dog got slowly to his feet and followed. And somewhere far up the road, past the edge of the night, two voices began to call a name, and the old dog's tail began to wag, slowly at first and then so hard his whole back end swung with it, and he broke into a run, and was gone.
There were others after that. A young man who had not finished saying something and kept starting the sentence over. A grandmother still humming the lullaby she had been singing at the end. A sailor who had been listening for the shore so long he had forgotten he was already on it. One by one the great hounds found them, and one by one the smallest hound of the Hunt walked up, sniffed a hand, licked a thumb, and showed them the way.
IV. The Horned One
In the last hour of the night, when the stars were turning pale at the eastern edge of the sky and the pack had swept the roads clean, the Hunt came to rest on a high bare hill, and the Horned One got down from his horse.
He was very tall, and he smelled of moss and rain and old leaves, and when he moved, the great antlers on his head creaked like oak boughs in a wind. The big hounds threw themselves down in the frosted grass, panting, steam rising off their backs. Gweeny sat a little apart from them, as he always had, his ears up.
The Horned One crouched down in front of him. Even crouched, he was enormous.
"You have done well tonight, little one," he said, and his voice was the sound of a forest at night, deep and patient. "Hecate said you would." He held out one great hand, palm up. "There is a place for you on my saddle, if you want it. You could ride with us every night of the year, not only this one."
Gweeny looked at the hand. He looked at the great hounds sprawled in the grass, his old packmates, who had never once in all the ages been able to do what he did tonight.
Then he turned his head and looked back, away down the hill, across the dark land, toward a hall at the edge of the longleaf pines where a candle was still burning in the window and a man who walks the world by sound was lying awake, listening for him.
He looked back once. And then, as he always does, a second time.
The Horned One laughed, and the sound rolled down the hill like a wave going out. "Ah," he said. "So that's how it is." He rubbed one of Gweeny's enormous ears between his finger and thumb. "Go on, then. Go home. But I will call you again next Samhain, and the one after that. The pack has plenty of voices that can shake a mountain. It has only ever had one that can bring the frightened ones home. Don't let anyone tell you the loud ones matter more."
Then he rose, and mounted, and the horn sounded once more, and the Hunt poured off the hill into the last of the dark and was gone.
V. Before the Sun
A little before dawn, the Sound-Weaver heard the front door ease open.
He had not slept. He had lain in the dark all night listening to the Hunt pass back and forth over the pines, sometimes near, sometimes so far off it was only a rumour in the wind, and every time it faded he had waited for the door. Now it opened, and closed, and he heard the sound he had been listening for.
The click of nails on the floor. Slow ones, tired ones.
Gweeny came into the room on legs stiff from a night spent riding between the worlds. The Sound-Weaver felt the soft thump of him jumping up onto the bed, and the shift of the blankets as he picked his way over them, and the turning, three times round, and the settling. Then a long, deep sigh, the kind a dog only gives when he is exactly where he means to be.
The Sound-Weaver put out his hand in the dark and found him. His coat was cold and damp and smelled of frost, and moss, and rain, and something very old and very far away that the Sound-Weaver had no name for. Under it, already, was the warm ordinary smell of Gweeny, coming back.
"Welcome home," the Sound-Weaver whispered. Gweeny thumped his tail twice against the blanket, and was asleep before the second thump had finished.
He slept until nearly noon. No one woke him. When the Star-Reader finally drew back the blanket, she went very still and then laughed softly, and put something into the Sound-Weaver's hand. It was a single hair, long and coarse and stiff as wire, far too long to have come from any chiweeny. She told him it was black. Black as the gap between stars.
He kept it. It is on the altar now, beside the iron key for Hecate and the antler tip for the Horned One. Next Samhain, when the horn sounds over the pines and a small black dog starts pacing by the door, the Sound-Weaver will open it for him without being asked, and leave the latch off until he comes home.
Blessed be.