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mead jar on her hip, he dodged away before she saw him, for he knew that she would have seen and heard all that had happened, and he was desperately afraid that if she caught him she might try to comfort him, and he could not have borne to be comforted, just then. He took the hurt away with him as though it were a sore that he was afraid of anyone touching, and found Bran, the wisest of all his father’s hounds, and squatted down beside him in a dark corner between two huts. He put his arms round the dog’s warm neck, and Bran licked his face from ear to ear.
    There in the dark corner they remained for a long time, while out on the moon-silvered, fire-gilded space before them the Men’s Side kept up the stamping whirl and the rhythmic shouting of the warrior dances; and the weapons clashed and the sparks flew up from the swirling torches.
    All was well now—of course it was. He was going to train with the other boys, and wear the warrior scarlet by and by. These were his people, his own people. But it was the first time that he had ever told himself so, for it was the first time that he had ever needed to. The glory was gone from the night; and the heavy coldness was still in his stomach where there should have been only a pleasant sensation of much boar meat.
    But by next morning he had almost forgotten the coldness in his stomach. That day the people from the outlying villages started home, and there was a great turmoil of barking dogs, restive ponies, and missing babies that went on almost all day. And on the morning after that, when he woke in the living-hut where he slept with his father and mother and two small brothers and many dogs, he remembered only that it was the day on which he was to begin his warrior training.
    His mother gave him an extra lump of wild honeycomb with his barley cake and milk that morning; and Arthmail, who was six, and Arthgal, who was only four, watched him with round, worshipful eyes while he ate it; and his father let him
choose one for himself from among his light throwing-spears. And Beric tightened the strap of deerskin round his middle that kept up his kilt, and took his chosen javelin, and set out.
    Down between the huts he trotted: stone-built huts, squatting low under their turf roofs, with nothing to tell which was house-place and which stable or byre or store-shed, save the blue woodsmoke that rose like so many jays’ feathers from the roofs of the living-huts into the morning air as he trotted by. He went out through the gateway in the high, thorn-crested bank, and down into the upland valley where the little field-strips clung for shelter to the lee slopes of the land. Here, on the edge of the forest of wind-stunted oak and thorn that swept up like a dark sea from farther inland, was a strip of rough grass running down to the stream, which had been the training ground for the village ever since there had been a village at all. Here the practice posts were set up for Charioteers in the making, and for twenty years and more old Pridfirth had taught the first handling of spear and javelin to the boys of the village.
    Several boys were there already when Beric arrived, tumbling over each other like puppies, while Pridfirth sat on a fallen tree-trunk and ignored them; and the rest came hard on his heels to the training ground. There were only a handful of them, and none were very old, for after about their second year the boys passed out of Pridfirth’s hands into the hands of hunters who were younger and had not so many wolf-bites to make them stiff.
    It was Pridfirth’s custom, after trying them out, to tell the new-comers that they were not what their fathers had been. And this morning he followed his custom, first making each of them in turn throw their javelins at a rough straw target, and then telling them what he thought of them, more in sorrow than in anger, sitting on his tree-trunk while they stood before him, and the boys who had been through it last year gathered