A long ahhhhhhh went through the watchers as she raised torch and staff. The throb of Power was like wine in her veins, like pleasure so extreme that it trembled on the brink of unbearable pain, like an enormous love chiseled out of terror.

"Corn King!" she called.

"Corn King!" her four companions echoed.

"It is Your flesh that we cut with the grain and eat with the good bread. It is Your blood and seed we will sow in the Mother's earth. All hail to the King of the Ripened Grain, who dies for the Mother's children!"

"Hail the King!"

The crowd cried hail with a thousandfold voice, stronger than the drums for a moment as she touched the flame to the wheat-straw. It took with a swift crackling roar, reaching for the sky and driving back a circle of the darkness; she tossed the stump of the torch on it and picked up the tool that lay ready for her-a bronze sickle, its blade shaped like the waning moon.

As the cheer ended a man sprang out of the crowd. He was naked, save for the vermillion paint on his face and streaking his sweat-slick muscled limbs and torso; stalks of wheat were wound in his shaggy white-gold hair.

"I am Her lover, since first I wed the Maiden," he called, his voice a bugling challenge, hoarse and male and powerful like a bull elk; in his right hand was a flint knife, its pressure-flaked surface glittering in the light with an almost metallic luster. "Surely the Mother shall aid Me, as I fight for My throne!"

"I am become the Crone, and the Crone carries Harvest's Child," Juniper called, her voice as impersonal as bronze. "So must it be. So mote it be."

She crossed her wrists and turned the point of the sickle towards him; the High Priestesses raised their staffs. Another man stepped forward. He was a little older but in his full strength, slender and wiry. His hair was dark and bound with holly, red berries glistening among the spiny dark green leaves; black paint covered his face save for a rim around his eyes. The knife he held was obsidian, sharp enough to cut a dream.